“I always thought your parents were kind of sexy. They seemed to have a secret life.”
“Yes, well, imagine being a third party in that setup? I was the gooseberry, I was well aware of that. I suppose I’ve swung to the other extreme.”
She goes on, “I had a hard time living with my decision, for several years. It felt impossible to do it with Phil, he was so—I don’t know. Different from me.” She stops, and then looks at me. I catch her narrowed glance, and feel a deep apprehension.
“Claude, there’s something else. Talking of Alexandre. I have to tell you, even if it’s old history. Alex told me not to, but I have to. I couldn’t ask you to come with me, if I didn’t.”
I feel cold, looking at her. What now? What more can there possibly be? “What did he tell you not to tell me?”
So, they have talked, they have plotted without me, she and Alexandre. Where was I? Waiting for her in the south, on the Paris train? Keeping her husband company, doing what I was told? Here it is, in the room with us, what I have been dreading without knowing it. Yet, also knowing it. My dream.
“I had a fling with him, oh, long ago. More than a fling. An affair, I suppose, only it was interrupted. Phil found out. There—long story short. But it did happen, and I have to come clean with you, at least, before I jump off my perch.”
Change, and change again. Is there no end to it? I feel all the physical things, the thudding heart, the sweaty hands, the extreme discomfort, the breathlessness; we should not have to hear such things. I manage to say, “When? When was all this?”
“Ages ago. Before the twins were born. Phil and I were not long married, or only a few years.”
We know things without knowing that we know. We breathe them in, digest them, long before words are put to them. I’ve known this—just not when, or where, or how. Philip has known too.
“So it was him. Phil told me you’d had someone. But he didn’t say who it was. He said he hadn’t wanted to know. Jesus, Hannah. How could you? Why?”
“Because we could. Because you weren’t here. Because I wasn’t happy with Phil, it wasn’t working, not the way we’d imagined. Because it happened. Who knows? Why do we do these things? Is there ever just one reason?”
I’m almost unable to speak. At last I say, and it comes in a rush, “Well, to tell lies to your husband and get on a train or plane or whatever it was, and go to Paris and find Alexandre and seduce him, if that’s what you did, and have an affair with him, there must have been a reason, surely. Or are you trying to say it all just happened, without your meaning it to? Or were you drunk, or drugged, or in a dream? Come on, you made a decision, you did it, all of it. You have to take some responsibility.” That curious expression, “come clean”—as if admitting to something absolves you of all blame.
“Claude, I’m trying to. Take responsibility. I get it, that it hurts you right now. But I didn’t do it to hurt you, I promise. And I certainly didn’t set out to seduce him. We kind of—fell into it together. But it was forty or more years ago. He said it would be a big deal for you, and not to tell you. Then, and again, when I saw him yesterday. But you have to believe me I am not minimizing anything. If I was going to tell you, I was going to tell you everything. Or else lie and not tell you anything. And I’ve done enough of that.”
“Everything was forty or more years ago! Alexandre and I have been lovers ever since, did you know that? Did you even think of that? I thought you got it, how I felt about him, I thought you got it when we were in Paris that first time, when you left me that note. And all this time you’ve been lying to me.”
“Yes,” she says, “but only by not telling. And you weren’t here to tell.”
“It’s exactly what you’ve been doing to Philip for all these years, and you’re still doing it. Not telling, hiding things, running away. How do you expect anyone to love you? Damn it, how do you expect anyone even to know who you are?”
Silence. She looks down, so that I see the top of her head, gray in the blonde hair. I look at her hands, which are resting beside her, with their wrinkles and their rings; the hands that will soon stop working for her, signaling her whole body’s refusal. For some time, neither of us speaks. She looks exhausted, there on the bed. We are aging women, about to be defeated by time. We are also back to being angry young women, jealous and afraid. The time that passes between us in this room can do nothing to help us, nothing to change the situation. I want to be able to say to her, finally, “Just go to hell.”
It has been with us all along, this story, running fast like that canal that cuts through the countryside in the south, taking all the river water and rechanneling it, whisking everything along in its spate. It is my story, and Philip’s too.
“I don’t expect anything,” she says at last. “I’m just asking. I’ve told you the truth, as far as I can. You know everything about me now. And I’m deeply sorry, really, I know I’ve hurt you. But in the light of everything now, I have no choice. All I can do is ask you to forgive me. I think I’ll understand if you can’t.”
I hear her voice shake, and know that she means it. Maybe it’s too late, maybe I really can’t forgive her this time. Maybe at last she has pushed me too far. Long ago, when we were students, she tried to go to bed with Alexandre and he refused her. What happened that second time?
I get up and stand at the window of her hotel bedroom, looking out past the iron guard rail to the street, which leads down to Saint-Sulpice at one end and Saint-Germain at the other, and the home-going traffic, and the strip of summer afternoon sky, and all the lives of the hundreds of unknown people who scurry past, or stroll, or talk on their phones, or stop to kiss: all of them caught up in their own stories, all of them feeling, struggling, planning, probably lying too. I breathe in, I breathe out. I think how cities are blown up these days; bombs on street-corners, in cafés, at concerts, on buses and trains: chaos sown in a second, destruction of lives fanning out from some dire center, some implanted wish to destroy, kill, maim, stop the peaceful trivial progress of the day and the street and the city and the people in it, just like that. I think how we all do our best with our feeble tools and our unsure intentions, how we all prevaricate and betray, in our own ways, how we let each other down and then raise each other up again, and try, and forgive, and begin again, as long as we are alive. How we insist on our stories, our versions. Hannah will soon not be alive; she will have left the party, got off the train. I turn back to her where she lies still, her head turned away, uncharacteristically quiet, awaiting my verdict. It’s up to me, what I tell her. At this point in a volatile century, in which crisis can erupt out of nowhere, it does seem to matter, to be able to forgive. But, how do you go about it?
Forty years ago or more, she slept with Alexandre. And I had a dream, of standing in the street, being thrown a bunch of keys and trying one after another to find the right one. An upper room, and Hannah perhaps up there, behind him, invisible, perhaps even naked, or wrapped in a sheet.
I ask her, at last, “Were you in love with him?”
She makes an empty upward gesture with her hands. “No. Not really.”
Not really. I don’t, I can’t say anything.
“It just happened, as if it had been waiting to happen, and I don’t even know who made the first move. He wasn’t happy in his marriage, I wasn’t happy in mine. We saw each other a few more times, and then Phil found out. It was almost a relief, when he did.”
She goes on, and I wish she would not, “I think, to be honest, it was more curiosity on my part, and probably on his. It was something we hadn’t done, when we could have. You know what it was like, in those days, people were doing it all the time.”
“But you and Alexandre,” I manage to say, “were not just people. You were my friends.” Don’t start to justify yourself, Hannah, or I will leave you now, I will walk out of this room and never come back.
At last she s
ays, “I said before that I wanted to come clean. I’m not trying to justify what I did. All I can say is that we didn’t do it to hurt you.”
“You just didn’t think.”
“Yes, that’s about it.”
And yet, if someone acts without thinking, how do they know what their motives are?
“Claude, can you forgive me?” she asks me again. A small voice, her head turned away. It seems to me a childish thing to ask. You do whatever you like, do you, and then ask for forgiveness?
“I suppose I will have to. Just give me a minute, please.” It seems to cost me a great physical effort. She has rearranged all the furniture of my past, and even my present with Alexandre. He has never said, never admitted it. She has relied on his tact. French men do not kiss and tell: the whole structure of society here depends upon it. But, my complete ignorance, my trust, my belief in what I know now was an illusion: what do I do with all this? How do I deal with it? Am I even telling her the truth? If I am honest, just for a moment, just with myself, I know—partly know—that it is not so much the sex as the being excluded that hurts. And this hurt goes way back, to a time before we even knew what sex was, or how it would involve us.
Do I have to forgive her, because of the times we live in? Because she is going to die? Because I always have? No. I have to because of who I am now, the person I have become in her absence, the person I choose to be. I cross the room, go to the window, look out. The street, the roofs, the sky, home-going traffic.
She met Alexandre by chance, and because of that they had to go to bed with each other? And lie to me for decades?
I turn back to her. “I want to know everything. Just tell me.”
“Okay. Fine. It was when Phil was very busy, away a lot, setting up contracts with people and trying to get authors for the press. I went to Paris twice. The first time for a few days, as I said, we had this author there with a book coming out. That was when I bumped into him by chance, as I was waiting for the author, outside a bookshop. Shakespeare and Company, in fact, opposite Notre-Dame. Then another—oh, ten days or so. I think I said I was going to a summer school at UEA. Then Phil found out. He actually confronted me with it, for once in his life. And then, yes, things changed. I got pregnant with him, quite soon after that, and we had the twins. I’d promised never to see the man—Alexandre, only he didn’t know that—again.”
“And now you want him to come and help you die?”
I’ve come back to stand in front of her. She’s rubbing her feet with one hand, as if she has cramps in them. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because—well. I was the happiest I’ve ever been when it was just the three of us then. And maybe that’s why I just went off that day in Paris, leaving you two together. Because I thought it was going to happen, the two of you together, and I didn’t want to be there when it happened. Because it would be the end of my happiness even though it would be the beginning of yours. And nothing—being married, having children, having the press—has ever has made me as happy as I was in those days. And I just want that—I don’t know—that sort of perfection again before I depart.” She pauses. “Do you even think he’ll come?”
I imagine that the centuries-old discretion practiced here by adulterers hasn’t stretched yet to the question of assisted suicide. Sex is one thing, death still quite another. We are unfamiliar with its rules. And I am lost, between the two people I have been closest to all my life.
There is a long silence, a cloud briefly darkening the room, a plane going over, a shout from the street.
Then I begin again—I know I have to—to repair the silence. Perhaps the past can help us after all. Perhaps there is a safe place to be found. There, if not here. Then, if not now. I tell her, “When I was waiting, in my hotel, I thought about those times, those summer holidays when we sat on the seawall, in Suffolk, when your parents were at the yacht club, remember?”
She nods. Is it a relief to her too, to go back to this old story?
I say, to lighten things, “Do you remember the song we used to sing?”
“What song?”
“It was like a marching song. It was nonsense. ‘Two—blue pigeons.’”
“Yes!” She sings the first notes, and then it comes to me in a rush.
‘One was black and white—pom!’
And then we sing together, loudly, laughing, the song that probably nobody else in this world remembers: ‘Sandy he belongs to the mill, the mill belongs to Sandy still, Sandy he belongs to the mill. And the mill belongs to Sandy!’
“It was complete nonsense. ‘Two blue pigeons!’” She sings out the four notes again. We both have tears in our eyes. We skip in memory all the way up through town, girls together, all the way to the Moot Hall and back. Young, carefree. Perhaps we are saved.
‘One was black and white—pom!’ We fall across the bed, laughing. I lie beside her; we both look up to the ceiling, where a little light winks—a smoke detector? If there’s an edge of hysteria, it passes, and we turn our head sideways to look at each other.
“Your mother taught us that, after she’d had her G and T at the yacht club.”
“Did she? I’d forgotten. She must have had several if she was singing.”
Her mother, the hardworking doctor; yes, she did have a lighter side, with her gin and tonic, and her love of the cinema. I remember the back of her head, her streaked light hair, in the car, and how she turned and sang us the words. I was fascinated by Hannah’s mother. She exuded, what was it, well—sex, of course, as I’ve just told Hannah, while my mother for all her production of babies, did not. Hannah’s mother worked, and had sex with Hannah’s father, and helped people not to have babies.
“We sang songs in the back of the car, all the time. It was fun.”
Hannah says, “I feel exhausted. Do you mind if I just lie here for a bit and we don’t talk anymore? Or anything?”
I’m thinking, I could go on like this: like nailing something back into place that has begun, disastrously, to come apart. Too much is going on here; it’s as if our lives are in fast-forward, rushing towards the end that Hannah has decreed.
“And the maroons went off that night, remember, and we went down to the beach, the lifeboat went out and they saved people.”
“It was exciting, wasn’t it, going out in the middle of the night?”
“And there was one young man who was already dead, and we saw them carry him past us.”
“I don’t remember seeing anybody dead,” Hannah says.
“It was a foreign ship that went down, and the sailors who came ashore didn’t speak English. They were Norwegian. Your dad stayed, to help out. Surely you remember?”
That body on a stretcher, an arm dangling, a hand. You don’t forget the first dead body you see. She lies back with her arm across her eyes, and says nothing. Death is already in the room with us, all too present. I should not have evoked the drowned sailor; I don’t insist. Her silence tells me eloquently: no, not this, not now.
I lay a hand on her shoulder. “Okay, I’m going. Back soon.”
She opens her eyes, half sits up. “He’s down there, or should be. I told him to wait in the café, till you came.”
I told him to wait. How we still do as she wants, no matter what.
“You mean, Alexandre? Which café?”
“The Flore, of course.” As if there were no other possible café. “He’ll be upstairs, waiting for you.”
So, one more time, I do as she directs, as she pushes me back towards Alexandre. He’s all yours. Except that he wasn’t, hasn’t been, will not ever be now.
18.
I leave her stretched out on the bed, her shoes off, arms at her sides, the little light winking above her; the outside light changing the colors in the room, as clouds come and go towards evening. I go down one flight of stairs and through a glass door, out into the
small courtyard and then the street. I’ll come back, I’ve promised. I walk along rue Bonaparte towards Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I feel dizzy with all she has just told me—loaded upon me, it feels like—the request about going to Zurich “when the time comes,” the announcement of “a fling with Alexandre.” She has always had the power—have I given her the power?—to turn my life inside out. But there’s also the new meaning behind all this: her decision to die. I’ve often thought about this—dying—you don’t reach the age I am without it crossing your mind from time to time; but it’s always been in a far-off-enough future, in which I will be really old. Hannah and I are not yet really old. Yet a disease has fastened on her, made its terrifying threat, she will change, suffer, and die in its grip, and she has decided on her escape from it, her way out. She has said no. No, not like that. Calmly or not calmly, she has decided; have there been lonely nighttimes when she has sobbed and groaned about it and gone back and forth in her mind? I’m stunned by her decision and her ability to go there to set it up alone. But she has taught me: you can say no to pain, as you can say yes to pleasure. Whatever we think, or say, she has moved us roughly on to the next stage of life.
Yet we can still sing “Two Blue Pigeons” and laugh until we cry. And I will lose her. And in losing her, I will lose part of myself.
I cross the boulevard with a hundred others, Japanese tourists following a woman wearing a black hat and knee socks and carrying a flag on a stick, and walk into the café, past the waiter who stands in the doorway and lets me pass to go up the stairs. The bells of the church of Saint-Germain are ringing; is it time for mass? Is there a wedding, or a funeral? It’s as if we are all fleeing beneath the din of the bells. I go upstairs and find Alexandre sitting by himself at one of the tables in the upper room of the Café de Flore. Because it is summer, and warm, the downstairs tables and those on the sidewalk are all full; but up here it is empty, and fairly cool. He has a glass and a bottle of Perrier in front of him on the little square table; he’s sitting on the banquettes that line the room, facing outward. He gets up to kiss me on both cheeks. I let him: we could be acquaintances, or old friends; there is nothing about our meeting to suggest that he is my lover. It’s as if Hannah has changed things between us already.
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