Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  As we approach my hotel, he takes my hand, “Let’s try to be simple, Claudie. So much has happened, and will happen. But you and me, you know? It’s simple, really. It’s what I love.”

  All I can say, later, is that something is missing, and something else has taken its place. Our attention is not on each other, nor on the intensely focused place in which we have always met.

  We go up in the elevator to my floor, I push the card into the slot, the door opens, the bed has been made in my absence, my suitcase is already half packed, a scatter of bottles and lotions still stands on the glass shelf in the bathroom, where he goes in to pee as soon as we are inside. I am already half here, half not. Alexander begins undressing without more ado, shedding his ironed shirt, his pressed trousers, his black socks; he faces me in his underpants, a stocky man with gray hair on his chest and a slightly swelling stomach, tanned from a trip to Nice in May. “Please, Claudie. Take off your clothes. Or do you want me to?”

  I shake my head and begin to undress. My heart is doing something strange in my chest, I am close to tears, I want him simply to take me in his arms and blot out Hannah and her plan, the anxiety of it, the intrusion: to take me back to where we were, before I knew what I know now. He sees this. He is sensitive. He pulls me close and begins to undress me to my underwear, and then he helps me out of my last remnants of what feels today like protection, and we lie down together once again. I want to forget, to go back, to find our way together, to be there in the place of total closeness that there are really no words for. But we don’t. We can’t. He knows it, as I do. He tries for the magic of touch, and fails. We are two people lying on a bed in the afternoon, the drawn curtains and closed shutters protecting us from too much light; and his skin is still his skin, he smells of himself, he touches me with all the subtlety he’s learned over the years with women including myself; but we are marooned, cast up on a dry shore, separated. Tears slide down the sides of my face and fill my ears as I lie on my back.

  “Claudie? Claudia?”

  “It’s no good. Don’t let’s go on trying.”

  “I know, I’m a useless man—but you?”

  “Don’t insult yourself, Alex.”

  “All right. You are right, we have been talking too much, too much involved in all this business with Hannah.”

  I think how she said it, “A fling with Alexandre,” and how “affaire” in French is for business rather than infidelity, and I try to smile, but the tears keep on flowing: for us, for him and me on this last bed we will share, I think; and for the passage of time.

  He props himself on one elbow, turns towards me, strokes a lock of hair back from my forehead, kisses me where the tears stain my cheeks. He can be very persuasive, and I have—oh, so many times—been lulled like this into silence and acquiescence. We’re always, literally and figuratively, speaking his language. But the body doesn’t lie.

  “Claudie? What is the matter?”

  I think: you know what is the matter. It’s not just Hannah and you in some bed together forty years ago; no, it’s that you have brought us into the real present, you and she, you have pricked the bubble, you have brought this—this—to an end.

  I say, “We can’t go on like this.”

  “I don’t agree. I think what we have, Claudie, is eternal.”

  And if I don’t say to him that I’m sick of everything being explained away like this, by invoking the eternal, the essential, the transformative power of sex, that it’s an easy way out, a cheat—it’s because I so want it to be true. Simple, he said. It has never been simple, except in the way of bodies that know what they want, and that now have let us down, or begun to tell a truth we don’t want to hear.

  He kisses me goodbye at the street corner with a warm pressure on each cheek, no more, and turns to go. I watch him walk away from me in his lawyer’s uniform, his white head bobbing as he strides into the crowds going down towards Odéon, where he’ll take the Métro back to work. If his heart is beating a little too fast or irregularly, if he’s late for a client, if after all the early afternoon love-makings and snatched rendezvous of his life, he’s feeling a little more strain than usual, if his blood pressure is high, I can’t see it or know it, any more than I can see the inside of his head, where his busy brain will be on to the next thing, the next problem, the next chapter of his complicated life. I have never felt more alone.

  So, what to do now? Being the age I am and not nineteen, or twenty-nine, or even thirty-nine, I don’t burst into tears on my street corner; I don’t go into the nearest church and light a candle; I don’t reach for the nearest drink. I examine my options. Age does at least do this for one: no more histrionics now, nor leaping into impulsive activity as a way out of self-pity. At least, this is what I tell myself on this afternoon in Paris when Alexandre has gone back to work and I am alone again and know that we may never again be lovers; we will only meet again to help Hannah die, for that is our role now.

  You can’t mix sex and death: they are two opposites. One cancels out the other, I think, always will. You have to choose which one will get your attention. You have to accept one ending—not the happy one, maybe, that will not be possible, but the one that fits.

  20.

  Antonioni’s women who walk alone, swaying on heels, along an empty street. Fellini’s dancing crowds, the linked hands, the processions. Truffaut’s close-ups: a child’s face. Godard’s car on a road that is all perspective. Bergman’s silent couples. I have staked my life on images, these images, and many more, since Hopalong Cassidy was William Boyd galloping through a canyon. The peculiar excitement of film: that you can see in, you can see through.

  Alexandre is right, I have been running the movie through my head. I see her leave, on an early train to London. A note on the kitchen table for him where a stack of old bills is skewered and he will see it as soon as he comes through that door for lunch. (There was nothing unusual about this, really; she often went to London for the day, or overnight; sometimes to stay with her friend Penny in Fulham, sometimes to see a writer who might have work for the Press, sometimes to shop; or to do all three. He wouldn’t worry. This time, it was for a long weekend in Paris, to meet a young writer who had sent them a manuscript about his family home in Brittany; but it was also time to be on her own, time to get out of the village, time—she wouldn’t admit this to him—to be invisible, out of reach.)

  It’s 1979. She’s packed a small bag, and taken her passport. She already has tickets. It’s a cold spring, light glassy across the fields as she takes a taxi to the station (not to bother him, she explained, not to take up his time by asking him to drive her). The trees are bare, still black, but if you look closely, there are buds. Unde the big oak at the corner of their garden, primroses; and the snowdrops already plentiful, and crocuses poking up their heads.

  (She had become, in the years of their marriage, the years of their living in the country, a gardener, a tiller of the earth. A planter of bulbs that hid in the dark earth till it was time to put out a green shoot. She had also become a secret-holder, if not quite a liar. How this had come about, she wasn’t sure; it had begun as a necessary withholding: he loved her too much, said so too often, held her too close with the strings of both affection and need. This trip was to be an experiment, performed in secret. It was also a quite legitimate business trip, for the Green Ivy Press. She needed something to be just hers; she needed a space, or a time, or a mixture of the two; a little slice of life, a sliver, a shred.)

  She pays the taxi and walks into the station to wait for the Cambridge train. You can see her walking a little more buoyantly, an excitement in her step, her body. You watch her move, from behind. (This journey was all hers; she trusted that she’d see nobody she knew at the local station and nobody on the platform in Cambridge, nobody on the London train. Anonymity was what she longed for now, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary; she had her alibi.) She wears black tro
users and a long warm jacket, and she has a hat pulled down over her ears, and gloves. The slow train moves through flat landscape, inland, away from the east coast, across the black slabs of fen, past the cut waterways and sedge, towards the yellow brick of town, the towers of Ely Cathedral dimly seen, like a lighthouse across the marshy distance, then Cambridge, its ugly outskirts, its yellow brick, its rather dingy station. (Here she changes trains, to get the faster train to London.)

  She’s at Heathrow, late morning, in time for her Paris flight. It’s in the last century, 1979, when she is in her early thirties. You can tell from the clothes, the scenery. (People talked about a tunnel beneath the Channel, a shortcut to France, but this seemed unlikely, if not crazy. The only short cut was flight: a brief swoop up, another brief swoop down, with hardly time for the tray tables to be set up and a drink placed on them, in between. The English Channel a wrinkled stretch, gray-blue, curling at the edges against a gray-green stretch of land that was northern France. England left behind. Girt by a silver sea, which never was exactly silver, was it? This happy land—how Shakespeare had glorified it for them, once and for all, and how happy one always was to lift up above it, and leave.)

  She looks out of her porthole window, down. Close-up, and then out. The land turns to cloud, then is mistily visible, then rushes up. A thud of wheels, a tremor like earthquake, a sudden braking, and that is it. Now there was only the journey into the center of the city; she’d get a taxi, treating herself, wanting to look out of the window and take it all in as they arrived, wanting the river and the bridges, the crowded streets, even the traffic of midday rush hour, rather than the dark underground clatter of the metro. (Of course, when they’d come here when they were young, she and her friend Claudia, they had never had money; they had arrived on the packed train at Saint-Lazare and taken the grungy smoky Métro of the time to wherever they were going, even skipping past barriers without tickets, chancing it all the way, running when they saw an official or, worse, a cop. She had money now. It was one of the good things about the settled life, the business, Phil’s and her hard work, the daily assiduousness of it all.)

  From the back seat of a cab, she watches as Paris comes to meet her, the boulevards branching like opening arms, street names, cafés she might once have been to, and at last the bridges across the river, the crossing to the Left Bank, Notre-Dame, the streets smaller and narrower, the little park, the tree-shadow, the cobbles, the dark-green water fountains and benches; life going on here as it always had, although she has been away so long.

  The bookshop: Shakespeare and Company, set back a little from the street. She pays the cab and walks over cobbles. Notre-Dame begins its long tolling bell: eleven o’clock. She waits. The young writer is late. She looks at her watch, waits outside because the shop is crammed with young Americans. Then she sees him. Alexandre? Unbelievable, it’s really you! Yes, it’s really me. But what are you doing here? She gestures towards the shop doorway, where a young man hesitantly comes forward. Can you wait? This is too extraordinary. Can we have lunch? Yes, of course. I’ll wait. Take your time. I’ll have a coffee. Hannah, I can’t believe you are here. What a coincidence. Yes, what a coincidence. We must celebrate it, don’t you think?

  He is waiting for her at the café next to the bookstore; sitting outside in spite of the cold, he is wearing a dark overcoat and jeans and a knotted scarf; traffic blurs the space between them as she comes towards him, there are the crowds of young Americans, she is saying goodbye, shaking a young man’s hand, he doesn’t move to greet her until she’s finished and is stepping towards him, carrying her bag; then he gets up almost lazily and comes towards her. (All this so far has been rapid, almost without words. You know from the images what is going on, what has to happen next.)

  She sees, we see her notice, he is not much changed. Same dark fall of hair, a new moustache in the current fashion, his face pale after the winter, and his clothes, winter clothes; it was always summer back then.

  “Anna.” The way he always leaves the H out of her name; it’s hard for him to say it. (It is the first word you hear spoken. She has been traveling towards this.)

  She shivers, approaching him. (You see it is not from cold. A cold spring. Breeding lilacs out of the cold land. She couldn’t help it, the words always came, even if she tried to ignore them; out of the books that had brought her somehow to this place, the books that had saved her when she was young. Shakespeare, Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence, they moved her still, moved inside her, made her peripheries. But you don’t see this; it is in her, it is how she is.)

  “Bonjour, Alex.” He kisses her quite formally, on both cheeks. (But you see him linger just a second.) The warmth of his cheek in the cold.

  “So, you came to meet a writer? You are a publisher now?”

  “Yes, I just met him. We made a date for tomorrow, to talk for longer.” (It was true. It was her official reason, if asked. She had something about her, subtle, like a spy.)

  “Shall we go? Do you want to drink something? Or, just have lunch?”

  He leaves a few coins beside his empty coffee cup. She shakes her head. “Lunch would be good. I left early.” He stands up to leave with her. His hand at the small of her back as if he already owned her, as if he already knew. (And all that time behind them, flowing, inscrutable like the river; in which what could have happened had not happened, or at least, not to her. But this, of course, you do not see.)

  You look the same, you’ve hardly changed, how long is it, what an extraordinary thing, I can’t believe it, all these years, I like the moustache …

  “You’re married now?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “Yes. I married another lawyer, she was in my year at the Sorbonne. It’s complicated.” (She doesn’t ask him more, as they turn the corner of the street. But you see her expression.)

  “And, do you have children?” he asks her.

  “No. We’ve tried. Nothing happened. It’s got rather boring, trying. Do you?”

  “We have a little boy. That makes it harder. But he is lovely. His name is Dominique.”

  (She thought that was a girl’s name. Perhaps it could be a boy’s too. You see her think this.)

  They have crossed two bridges. They are arriving at the Île Saint-Louis now. A musician playing, a scatter of people listening. The far-down water, its glitter on a cold day: the trees bare still, leaning. Perhaps a barge passing, serious river traffic, the emphasis that this is a working city.

  “He’s two. But already he notices, I’m sure, that his mother and I—but, I don’t want to talk about all that. Here we are, it’s a place I quite often eat at, but it’s changed hands since you were last here, you and Claudia. How is Claudia?”

  (She doesn’t say, “Surely you know? Surely you are in touch with her?”)

  “Oh, fine, I think. She has a new job, she’s working for a film director, in California.”

  “So, she is making films?”

  “Not her own, yet. But she will. She did a postgraduate degree in film, in Los Angeles.”

  “And you, Anna?”

  “I’m fine. Well, I’m okay. And the business is doing well these days.” She says nothing about her own marriage, and he doesn’t ask.

  “Hmm.” Then, “Here we are. This will do, I hope? It’s not pretentious, but neither is it expensive, and the plat du jour is usually good.”

  They go in. They sit down. The waiter comes. The menu. The carafe of water. The wine. (You have seen this all before, in how many other films?) They look at each other across a little table. They raise glasses to the extraordinary chance of their meeting.

  I’m there with them, close as the waiter, as I lean in, to listen. Every filmmaker is a kind of voyeur, after all.

  In a good film you wouldn’t have to say what they said, you could just watch the hands rise to take menus, the whole pantomime begin and end, the words exchanged across the
table indistinct and vague; a decision could be made, wordless, incontrovertible, and they would get up again maybe even without eating, leaving the wineglasses half full and the table in disarray and the waiter surprised and irritated, lifting his hands to see them go, with a “ça, alors” in his stance; and the door to the street opening again to let them out, and away. You would add in the sound afterwards: a chink of glass, a chair scraped against a bare floor, a door opening and closing.

  Then you could see them from behind, watch them walk down the street together, arm firmly in arm, to their next destination, the hotel he may already have in mind; or you could be disturbed, uprooted in your assumptions, and see them part out there on the pavement, with the traffic passing, agitated words spoken that you cannot hear, and everything to suggest the impermanence, the transience, of life. You could end it there. Cut. FIN.

  I could make this film, as I have made it in my mind, and give it the ending I choose. I could reclaim the story, take charge of it as the Anouk Aimée character does in A Man and a Woman, coming back twenty years later as a filmmaker, in charge of the action, to the same beach with the same man where she films their story. But I already know, I can’t. My directing days are past, and anyway, this is not my story, not anymore. It’s too late. Hannah’s departure to Zurich, her impending death, have taken up all the room there is; to forget this would be to turn from reality into an idle dream.

  I walk away, my vision blurred by tears, heading for the Pont Neuf and the statue of Henri IV on his horse, just to walk, just to work this sadness through my system. At Vert Galant, Hannah and I used to sit with our baguettes and Vache Qui Rit cheese in its round box and our bottle of rough red vin ordinaire, and watch the willow trail its branches in the water, and the boats and barges pass. I see us there as I.