O

by Steven Carroll

  24.

  Riot police stand in the early morning light, the sun brightly indifferent to the revolution. These things come and go, sing the spring leaves. The barricades that were erected in the night have been torn down; the police, gas and truncheons ready, stand grim-faced among the piles of cobblestones, surveying the rubble and looking warily about, tired and edgy from a long night.

  Dominique passes through the scene virtually unnoticed. The smell of gas hangs in the still air; she feels the crunch of broken glass under her feet and notes a burnt-out car being bulldozed to the side of the street. She passes a police officer in his black coat and helmet, visor up, who doesn’t even look at her. She doesn’t matter. And, at this moment, nor does he. Not to Dominique.

  There is a battle taking place on the streets around her, but it is not her battle. Not her world. A few miles away on the other side of the battle lines, the rubble that was last night’s barricade, Jean may be awake or asleep – or happily in that in-between zone, dreamily drifting in and out of sleep. At peace or not. Lonely or sad. But in all their years together she’s rarely thought of him like that. Lesser men get lonely and sad. Not him. He is too astonished by everything. She’s always said to herself, he’ll be all right. Nothing touches him; he’s a creature above self-pity. All the same, he knows he’s dying. And as much as he might be amazed by death as he has always been by life, he must, in clear waking moments, know that his amazement will soon end and that thing that always amazed him, life, will go on without him.

  It shakes her just to think of it, as it must him. A sign, sprayed with white paint on a shop window, distracts her: IMAGINATION IS POWER. a few more steps and she passes another one: LIFE IS ELSEWHERE. Too clever, too smart? The slogans of students playing at revolution? Something’s gone, or will soon be gone. Something more fundamental to her than war or revolution – or history itself. And she is too preoccupied, preparing herself for the inevitable time when Jean, and all their days together, will become a memory. Lived time. Done days. And Dominique, the one who must go on, one day looking out some window in some house or other, with her memories, upon a world that doesn’t touch her any more.

  * * *

  At Gallimard, bright faces, even laughing ones, turn serious when they meet her in the foyer or on the stairs. They ask of Jean, but these are people who never really knew him. For whom he is a grand figure from other days. One of the immortals. Part of history, and as such must be either dead or close to death. But, all the same, they ask. And she finds herself saying he’s fine, he’s good. Except, which she doesn’t add, he’s dying. If Camus or Michel Gallimard were to ask after Jean, it would be a different conversation. But they are both gone, together, in the same car crash, the memory of which still jolts her.

  The morning of reading and editing, a welcome distraction, passes quickly. Essays and stories by this new writer and that pass under her gaze as the work goes on and pieces for Nouvelle Revue française, which she compiles, are gathered. Work, she notes from time to time, is good. The day flies, liberates her from time and herself, and without being conscious of the passing hours she is soon packing up her things, the lone bell of Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, marking her departure.

  Outside in the late afternoon, students and ordinary workers, still in their postal and railway uniforms and factory overalls, are making their way towards the Latin Quarter, their banners, their slogans, hoisted above them. The riot police await. The twain will converge; tonight will see a fresh assault on the impossible.

  The metro is running, and something that she would simply take for granted any other day is suddenly a source of unexpected pleasure. She makes good time and is at the clinic for the start of visiting hours. And as she enters his room, the same hazy blue light veiling all within, her owl is sitting up on the edge of the bed, fully clothed, eyes wide in greeting. His walking stick is resting against the bed, his feet dangling almost to the floor.

  ‘I thought we could take a walk,’ he says, a cheeky grin on his face, as if to say I’ve still got some surprises left in me.

  This catches her off guard. Happily so. For a moment that feeling of adventure returns, the feeling that all their time together has been an adventure and still is. And a sense of recovered joy that dispels all shadows overcomes her.

  He waves his arm in the general direction of the garden. The sun is low across the pathway that leads past flowering daffodils, roses and shrubs, and a partially crumbling archway, to a wide stretch of lawn and a bandstand. ‘Out there. I’ve looked at the garden long enough. Time to step into it.’

  Happy, she steps towards him.

  ‘Let me help,’ she says, as she takes his arm, bony where once there was flesh. He slides off the bed, trusting, like a child. She wonders if his legs will hold him. Once they were footballer’s legs that strolled effortlessly along the river and bounded up the winding metal stairs that took them back up to street level.

  She takes his arm and together they slowly make their way out of his room and into the harsh glare of the corridor. The afternoon nurse looks up as they pass.

  ‘Have a nice walk, you two,’ she says, looking at Jean. ‘You’re lucky to have such a caring daughter.’

  They laugh, Jean the loudest. Always fascinating, Dominique muses, how others see you. The thought had never occurred to her. But why not? He is frail. He is eighty-three: eyes young, body old. And while she is sixty-one, she is a young-looking sixty-one.

  And so depending on how you look at them and who is looking, Jean and Dominique – lover and loved, father and daughter, a latter-day Antigone and her Oedipus – make slow progress down the corridor, and eventually out the front door of the clinic, to be greeted by an orange sun pulsing on the rim of the garden wall, one of those late afternoon suns that, through a trick of light, seems to be almost within reach. Just out there beyond the daffodils. That mighty, pulsing core at the centre of everything.

  They step onto the gravel path that winds through the gardens, their shadows long across the lawn, in a kind of devotional silence. After a minute or two he stops and turns to her. ‘What news from out there?’ he asks, waving his stick at the city beyond the garden wall, like a man who has been too long in a prison cell.

  ‘Revolution,’ she says, once again noting with delight the old spark in his eyes.

  ‘Ha!’ he cries. ‘Another one?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Possibly?’ he says, a playful interrogator.

  ‘I like their slogans: Be Reasonable, Demand the Impossible!’

  He smiles. ‘Ah,’ he says, as they resume walking, ‘that’s clever.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Too clever. For all the riots, the baton charges, the gas and the blood, I still can’t help but see them as students, not so much playing at revolution as players who can’t believe that it’s actually happening. As though they called to this spectre of revolution never expecting to see it – and one day looked out over the Latin Quarter and, lo and behold, there it was. And now they don’t know quite what to do. So they sing songs, hug each other and write amusing things on walls. Life is Elsewhere!’

  He tilts his head, appreciating the poetry. ‘Revolutionaries who read Rimbaud. Perhaps one day there really will be a lyrical revolution.’ Then his gaze narrows, the old shrewdness and the old sparkle still there. ‘A lyrical age, a lyrical end. But would it really be any different? Haven’t the poet and the executioner always been natural allies? And is the hangman standing at the end of all those clever lines, as he always was?’ He draws breath, staring intently at Dominique. ‘Maybe they’re not so innocent as you think?’

  ‘Mind you,’ she says, ‘there are plenty of people out there frightened of them anyway. Grubby little men hanging onto their grubby little deals, their grubby little lurks and their grubby little shares. Perhaps it really is time to sweep them all away.’

  Jean stops again. ‘You know, in all the years we’ve known each other . . . how long is it?’

  She looks
at him, eyes bright, heart heavy. ‘Twenty, a hundred years, a thousand . . . who’s counting?’

  ‘In all those years,’ he continues, ‘that’s the first thing I’ve heard you say that comes close to a political opinion.’

  She raises her eyebrows, taking the point, as if to say these are political times.

  They continue in silence, passing under the arch in time to see the last of the afternoon sun sink behind the garden wall. And the moment it does she feels a shiver run through him, for she still has her arm entwined in his and his body is leaning against hers.

  ‘Shall we turn back?’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  They stand still, their shadows gradually dissolving into dusk.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I’d like to take a drive out into the country.’

  ‘The country?’

  ‘Yes. Can you do that?’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Of course. I can go anywhere. This is not a prison.’

  ‘Where in the country?’

  ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘a little place called Boissise-la-Bertrand.’ Then shakes his head, a secretive look in his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she says, puzzled, but happy to let the intrigue rest. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he says, looking out over the darkening garden. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

  ‘But you dislike surprises.’

  ‘Only when receiving, not giving.’

  He nods, as if to say there’s an end to that for now. And, her arm in his, he leaning against her, stick in hand, they walk slowly back to his room. His shoulders, she can’t help but notice, once broad, are somehow smaller and bowed, his posture like that of the Old Man Time tree from the hamlet just outside Avranches. And with that thought she’s wondering if the tree is still there. And Pauline Réage, who became a café game for one scandalous season, what of her?

  In his room she helps him out of his things and into his pyjamas. The lover becomes carer, and he accepts her care, if with the reluctance of the old, mindful of the dignity they gradually surrender.

  ‘Your story. Is there more?’

  For a second her eyes are blank. Of course, the story. ‘I was up all night.’

  Folding his hands, he looks ahead, waiting for the reading to begin. She plunges in, picking up where she left off. The figures in the story – O, René, Jacqueline and the Englishman, Sir Stephen – haunt the blue room, ghosts from another time. The girl narrating the story relates where they all sprang from: an old school crush, an early lover, a chance sighting of a beautiful actress in a café that came back ten years later in the middle of the night, the girl’s lamp lighting the page, her pencil in hand. Past and present, hopelessly tangled round each other like lovers’ bodies.

  ‘I miss our room,’ she says, out of the blue.

  He smiles. ‘The light globe.’

  ‘And the curtains.’

  ‘Grubby.’

  ‘Black.’

  ‘War curtains.’

  ‘And that jug of water, dusty from one day to the next. How long had it been there?’

  ‘Still is, no doubt.’

  ‘I shall always miss that room. Our room, nobody else’s; we made it ours. And I miss everything that happened there.’

  They exchange looks, his a lingering gaze full of hopeless longing, demanding the impossible: to have it all back again. And it is then, staring directly at him, her expression both wistful and playful, that Dominique draws her chair nearer to the bed as if about to confide in him some long-held secret. Instead, she raises her hand and reaches under the sheet and inside his pyjama pants. The action is neither swift nor slow but has a casual audacity about it that takes him completely by surprise. The eyes of her owl are suddenly wide as he turns to her. She almost laughs and he almost gasps. She shakes her head slowly, a gesture that says keep still; would you give our game away? Smiling, she begins to stroke him, the motion of her hand just visible in the rise and fall of the sheet. He lies back, head resting against the stacked pillows, eyes closed. And all the time she whispers in his ear the most fantastic tale of a girl in love. She spins her tale and he murmurs his pleasure, until she feels his whole body go rigid and the sought-after spasm passes through him. He gives a quiet moan as his semen trickles from him and over her fingers.

  With her free hand Dominique reaches for the towel by the bed, and withdrawing her hand from under the sheets, wipes it, then drops the towel in a linen basket behind her. Jean turns to her, eyes wide in wonder and gratitude. No god, no immortal, just a man. But, for all that, between them have they not conjured up a wild purity of spirit worthy of the old gods?

  She rises from her chair as he reaches out his hand to her. She clasps it, gripping it tightly, as though she might pour her life into him and keep him with her a little longer.

  He shakes her hand free, a gesture that says – enough. She tells him she has work to do at home, and she cannot stay in her cot tonight.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he says.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Boissise-la-Bertrand,’ he says, intrigue in his eyes.

  She leans over him, kisses each eyelid and withdraws, just as the night nurse, relinquishing her magazine, enters with pills and charts. The nurse looks at her and nods towards the door. Jean’s eyes droop and Dominique watches as he obediently accepts each pill as it is offered. Then, like some visiting spirit, after lingering in the doorway as she always does, Dominique drifts from the dreamy, blue-lit room into the harsh light of the corridor, where she assumes corporeal being.

  Outside, she notes the glow of distant fires over the Latin Quarter. And other parts of the city. They’re at it again. The old making way for the new. One age smacks up against the other. Just behind her, over the garden wall, over the lawns and daffodils, Jean’s room will be veiled in that dreamy blue light, as if having severed its earthly moorings, a capsule flying through space; the riots, the glow of the fires, the torched cars, the truncheons and gas – all of it a speck in the earthly distance.

  She disappears into the metro wondering about the significance of Boissise-la-Bertrand. What on earth is he up to?

  25.

  When she arrives at the door of Jean’s room she comes face to face with a nurse leaving, sheets bundled up in her arms. Another taking the charts down, like the scorer after a game.

  Although she knew the day would eventually come, she thought they had more time. She sways on the spot, her hand reaching for the chair she always sits in. She steadies herself, then slumps into it, looking at the empty bed. The nurse with the understanding eyes, who has been her companion through these visits, as Dominique has been hers, rests her hand on Dominique’s shoulder.

  It is a bright morning, a good day for a drive. Her car is parked in the street, ready for the journey. But this is where the journey ends. Nurses come and go, and she barely notices, except when one of them enters with a bucket and a mop.

  Then this eruption of everything that has been held in over the last few weeks while she composed herself, and composed and read her story, claims her; something so elemental she has no power over it. To the nurse glancing at her, mop in hand, they are simply tears, another outbreak of grief, a common sight in this house of tears, for that’s what the clinic is. But what is erupting from Dominique at this moment, she is convinced, is the very fire of her being. Leaving her. She doesn’t know anything any more, except that she wants to be dead too. The sun haunts the window. She stares at the garden outside, through which Jean walked at sunset only yesterday, Dominique at his arm. How can he be gone?

  Surely, she imagines, if I simply go out, turn around and walk back in again everything will be as normal. Jean will be there sitting up in his clothes, all ready; and they will take the planned drive.

  She has no idea how long she sits slumped in the chair. The nurses come and go, mopping up after death. When she finally has the presence of mind to ask about the how and the when of the matter, she lear
ns from the young nurse who sat by his side in the early hours of the morning that he was sitting up in bed, eyes wide, almost as though, she swears, he was taking one last look around. Then he drifted off. The nurse carefully removed his glasses and placed them on the table beside him. He dozed on, undisturbed. A bright full moon pressed its nose up against the window. The nurse pulled the blind down. His doze turned to a deep sleep, the breathing irregular, sometimes long gaps between breaths, and it was obvious what was happening. She held his hand, she said. Then the gaps between breaths became longer until there wasn’t another breath. Sometimes the body dies hard. Sometimes it goes quietly. No fuss. So it was with Jean. A good death. He was here, then he was gone.

  Her owl has taken flight. Back to the forest he came from, never really of this earth anyway. Gone back to being what he always was, a forest creature perched on some bough, eyes wide and bright under a full moon, alert and complete.

  The clean-up is finished. Dominique takes with her his glasses: the things he peeked through onto this world during that last look around, and the last thing he held.

  Outside, she puts the glasses in her satchel, along with her story. It doesn’t seem much to leave with, but it is all she wants. She has no desire to see the body. His family, his son and his daughter-in-law, will look after all those things that need to be done and organised. Besides, with all that astonished life gone from him, it wouldn’t be her Jean.

  She sits behind the wheel of her car, a picnic basket on the seat beside her, a vacuum flask lying on its side. What now? Today, or any day? She pulls out into the street, everything a dream, like the song her father used to sing, an English song . . . Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a . . .