by Simon Mawer
“I mean,” she continues, “it signifies, doesn’t it? It’s not called intercourse for nothing. And it also brings with it the other things—childbearing, motherhood, procreation.”
“I don’t think we’re quite ready for that.”
He’ll remember that laugh. He likes making her laugh. It is the principal weapon he possesses. “Don’t worry about that. I’m on the pill, although I did miss one in Zeebrugge. But I like an element of risk.” She pauses, as though struck by a sudden idea. “You’re not a virgin, are you?”
“Of course I’m not.”
“Of course?”
“Did you imagine I was?” He hopes he sounds worldly-wise, but in fact his previous experience of sex is limited to one partner, a girl called Muriel, known, because she hated the name, as Mu. Mu was a fellow pupil at his grammar school but she left before the sixth form for reasons that were never quite clear, and went to work behind the counter in Boots, selling, amongst other things, condoms to grown men and blushing boys. It was to Mu that he happily lost his virginity, although he was fairly sure that she had mislaid hers long before, and in the same careless manner with which she conducted much of her life. After his first term at university she had dumped him because she said, despite his protests, that things were no longer the same between them, were they? “As far as I’m concerned,” she said, “you’ve become posh.”
And here he was now, phony posh lying in bed with proper posh in a cheap hotel somewhere in the middle of France; and she was saying fuck to him without turning a hair.
“Anyway, you did agree that we wouldn’t have sex,” Ellie pointed out. “When we talked about it, you did agree.”
“You agreed, with yourself. I said nothing.”
“So it’s up to me?”
“Of course it’s up to you.”
She considers him, head on one side. “Well, I’ve decided that you’re quite nice and we’re quite good together and so if you like we can…” She doesn’t say the word. He waits for her to say it but she doesn’t.
* * *
In the event, nothing much. She lies beneath him and lets him in and he feels that eloquent slide, that momentary sensation of danger and delirium that is like slithering over a cliff and discovering you can fly. But quite soon the flight comes to an abrupt end in a paltry climax and he slips out of her almost surreptitiously, vaguely aware that he should do something for her despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to want anything, having turned away from him almost immediately and composed herself for sleep.
“Was that all right?” he whispers over her shoulder.
“Fine,” she replies. “Fine.”
Reaching over he kisses her cheek and finds it damp with tears. “Are you all right?”
Her voice mutters into the crook of her arm. “Go to sleep. I told you, I’m fine.”
* * *
Tears. Enigmatic things. If you ever doubt the concept of mind over matter, then think of tears. The most effluent manifestation of grief, but also of nothing at all. Almost as contagious as a yawn.
So what were Eleanor Pike’s tears for?
Next morning she’s up early, too quick to allow a repeat of what had happened the evening before. She doesn’t allude to it either as they pack their things and go down to the reception desk to pay. Whatever it was might never have been.
“I want to look round,” she tells him as they leave the pension. “I want to see the city.” She says it as though she is pitching for an argument and expects him to object. So they spend the morning like tourists, winding their way through the medieval streets of the Grand Île, peering round the ancient gloom of the cathedral, even taking a boat trip on the canals that intersect the city. They have lunch at a table on the pavement and share another pichet of Alsace wine and for most of the time Ellie seems happy, distracted by the sights, content to forget what happened the evening before and might happen again; but over lunch there is a change. “Let me tell you,” she says and then leaves the telling hanging in the air.
“Tell me what?”
She looks at him with a little twisted expression then glances down. “About last night.”
“What about last night?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.” He wishes he hadn’t said it like that, the tone all wrong, making the neutral expression almost an accusation. She fiddles with things on the exiguous table, the salt cellar, her wineglass, a spoon, almost as though to distract his attention. “I wasn’t very good, was I?”
“You weren’t very good?”
“I didn’t…oh, I don’t know, react. Not as you’re meant to.”
“As you’re meant to?”
“Look, if you’re going to repeat everything I say—”
“I’m sorry, I’m trying to understand.”
“There’s nothing much to understand. I don’t enjoy it. That’s it, really. I’ve never, you know, enjoyed it. I can’t…let myself go. That’s what you’ve got to do, isn’t it? Let yourself go. Ecstasy, religious or sexual. All much the same. Both involve letting go. But I can’t. Not with Kevin, not with anyone else. And now, not with you. Whom I trust.”
Words and images stumble round his brain, bumping into each other like drunks in the dark. He feels overwhelmed by the concept of trust.
“It’s my parents. Everyone accuses them, but it’s true. My mother, really, not my father. I love my father, worship, perhaps, which can’t be healthy. But my mother…” She gives a little laugh, empty of all amusement. And then she tells him. Sitting there at the pavement café in the summer sunshine, she tells him about her mother and what she did with somebody or other. An uncle? A cousin? Both? Going off for long, belligerent, adulterous, alcoholic weekends or something, leaving her father shut away in his study, needing comfort, which Ellie, a devoted daughter, offered.
“Comfort?”
She looks at him for a moment, then away across the square at the shifting tide of anonymous tourists. “He seems a strong man, doesn’t he? But he’s not. Not weak but…” She hesitates, considering. “Vulnerable. I adore him. And he adores me.”
“What comfort?”
“There were bitter arguments when my mother came home. Rows, fights. I tried my hardest to protect him. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? A child trying to shield her own father? My brother was away at boarding school, so there was just me, crushed between the two of them. You know what happens to something when you crush it? Either it breaks up into little pieces or it becomes hard.” She laughs faintly. “I’ve done both.”
The waiter appears and asks if they want anything else. More wine, perhaps? A dessert? Perhaps that interruption is a good thing, killing the question he has tried to ask and she has avoided: what comfort?
When the man has gone, she continues, almost as though the answer has already been given. “And then she’d do the religious thing, go off to some bloody convent to confess her sins and become a holy little wife again. Until the next time. The eternal grind of sin and confession and absolution. Of course I reasoned it all away as I grew up—I could just shrug it off, break away, find another version of love and affection. Except I didn’t. Couldn’t, in fact. I couldn’t let myself go, ever. Not with Kevin, not with half a dozen other boys before him. And then you came along, and I thought, yes, why not. Maybe with him. You see”—she glances up at him for a moment—”you’re so fucking nice. That’s why I’m telling you this.”
James was suddenly aware that niceness was something one shouldn’t be. “No, I’m not.”
“But you are. You can’t help it, but you are. And I thought maybe it’d be different with you.” She looks directly at James and he recognizes the pinched, sorrowful expression that Lis wore throughout the play. “But it isn’t.”
“In the tent…” James leaves the rest unsaid. In his mind is an already confused memory—a suffusion of orange light, pale ochre limbs moving, heat, a cry, a moment of ecstasy.
She shakes her head
. “What’s that? Neurons firing, synapses activating, you ought to know. It’s just a bit of biology. But there’s no connection. Don’t you see how right Forster was?”
“Forster?”
“E. M. Forster. You know? You must know. Howard’s End.” A fractional pause to gather her thoughts. “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted and human love will be seen at its highest. That’s what I can’t do.”
The quotation gives it away: it has become one of those Oxford conversations he has learned to despise. All theory and no fact. Head in the clouds and feet at least six inches off the ground. He can’t do anything to stop her now. “It’s Forster’s metaphor,” she continues. “Well, Margaret Schlegel’s in the book, but it’s Forster himself, of course. Prose is here and now, you sitting there across the table, me here, us talking together, being friends, being happy in each other’s company. And passion is that moment of…what? Ecstasy?” She frowns, correcting herself as though it matters: “Human love will be seen at its height. Height, not highest. That’s what Margaret Schlegel thinks. You connect the two, the prose and the passion, with love. But I cannot.” She opens her hands as though to display their emptiness. “Don’t you see, I want to love. You or someone. Anyone. But I just cannot. I live in fragments, that’s the trouble, small, hard fragments.”
There is, at that summer holiday pavement bistro, with its easy indolence, its checkered tablecloths and blackboard chalked with the plats du jour, a pause. James doesn’t know what to say. As far as he’s concerned it’s all nonsense, this self-examination. It’s the nonsense of psychology and the nonsense of philosophy. All we are is animals—complex animals, of course, but animals nevertheless. And what we do is what we do and what we feel is what we feel and the important thing is just to get on with it. So it’s Ellie who steps into the pause and makes it hers. “You know why Kevin and I broke up?” She answers her own question before he has any need to guess. “The real reason, I mean. It wasn’t his politics. Compared with this, I couldn’t give a fuck about politics, and anyway he isn’t the fascist I’ve said he is. He wanted love, that was the trouble. Although he never put it in those words—he’d never read Forster in his life—he wanted me to build that bridge, and when he found I couldn’t he just got angry. Told me I was frigid. Shouted at me, called me an emotional cripple, said he wanted someone who could show love for him, real love, not some intellectualized version of it.”
Anything James might say will be wrong. He knows that. This girl who seemed so self-assured is as fragile as an eggshell. Yet there were no tears, that was his thought when he reflected on this conversation later. Such a moment of high emotion but no tears. Her expression appeared inverted, as though she was looking in on herself and finding nothing there. “I’ve never told anyone all this. Except you.”
“Does that make me special?”
She shakes her head, as though to toss the question aside. “I wanted to explain, that’s all. You seem…worth explaining it to.”
“More than Kevin?”
“Kevin would never have understood. I’m not sure that you do, but at least you’re sympathetic.”
But perhaps he is wrong—perhaps there are tears in her eyes. Not flowing down her cheeks or anything too dramatic. Just glistening. He reaches out across the table to take her hand, and for a moment they sit there, holding hands across the table like any young couple who have just become lovers. Then she withdraws and blinks and the eyes seem dry once again. “That’s the problem,” she says. “I live in fragments. I’ve tried to put them back together but I can’t. The pieces no longer fit.”
19
They leave the debris of that conversation at the bistro table and walk into the Place Kléber, where, amongst the tourists and beside an antique carousel, they examine their map and the possibilities. Another coin. Heads to Germany, Austria and the Brenner Pass, or tails to Switzerland, the St. Gotthard and Milan. Ellie laughs. The spinning coin delights her, like a child placated with a new toy. It rattles on the paving stones and lies heads up, glinting in the sunshine—”heads” in this case being a wistful woman striding across the obverse, casting seeds in her wake.
So they sling their backpacks and set off towards the river, towards another approximate border control, with Ellie apparently purged of her nightmares for the moment, talking and laughing and being once more the girl with the acute mind that he worshipped from afar and now cherishes from close to. On the German side of the river they get a lift in a van going south towards Freiburg, and from there they take the road into the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, the home of cuckoo clocks and cherry cakes and, Ellie points out, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. Afternoon turns into a gentle sunlit evening. Dark, foreboding hillsides are mitigated by the warm valley. They walk along an immaculate verge past meadows of trimmed velvet where perfectly groomed cows ruminate on a benign future of grass and cud and milk. Little traffic passes and there is scant prospect of a lift, but James doesn’t mind. This is a kind of heaven in which the word transport takes on a different meaning. Not buses and trains and soot and oil, but a transport of delight, in Ellie’s company. Yet the dark forests are still there, on either side of the valley.
“So what’s it going to be this evening?” she asks as they pause to consult the map. Ahead, in the depths of the forest, there’s a place called Titisee beside a lake. A green delta symbolizes a campsite. “Your bloody tent again?”
“Unless we can afford another luxury hotel.”
It’s strange that they should be back to their old relationship. Almost as though the events in Strasbourg have not taken place. But they have. He sees her in a different light now, the soft light of the Black Forest evening and the harsh light of her vulnerability. She is scarred; possibly scared. And yet she is still Eleanor, with her assumed self-confidence and her caustic tongue. And she has let him make love to her. The very thought of what has been and might be again almost brings his heart to a halt. Or makes it beat twice as fast. He can’t tell which.
She hoists her rucksack onto her back and walks on ahead of him. “About what I was saying at lunch,” she calls back.
“What about it?”
“Forget it, just forget it, okay? I was babbling on. Just forget it and it’ll be like it was before.”
“But it’s not like before, is it?”
She looks round, sharply. “Of course it is.”
“No, it’s not. For Christ’s sake, Ellie—”
She stops, her face tight with anger. “Look, I don’t want sympathy. Still less do I want pity. I’m not a head case, so don’t try and treat me like one. Just take me on my own terms and we’ll see what happens, OK?”
He hesitates, not knowing whether to argue back. And that is the moment when the car—a Volkswagen Beetle—clatters past them and slows to a halt.
Whatever the circumstances there is a small thrill of apprehension about a successful hitch. The vehicle—car, van, lorry—waits, anonymous and indifferent but pregnant with possibility. Where will it take you? Whom does it conceal? What secrets does it hide? It puts your own momentary circumstances into perspective.
They hurry to find out.
Inside the car there’s a disparate couple, a young man driving and a middle-aged woman in the passenger seat. The man appears tall, folded awkwardly into the seat behind the steering wheel. He’s good-looking in the rather daunting way of blond, blue-eyed Germans, while the woman is smaller, with gray hair scraped back into a bun and inquisitive, beetle-bright eyes. Perhaps she writes detective stories. Perhaps she is actually an amateur detective, a Miss Marple of Germany.
The man climbs out and asks, in English, “Are you looking for a lift?”
They are, of course they are. He holds the door open for them to climb in. “Is there room? It is a small car and there is not much room.”
But they manage, squeezing Ellie’s pack into the exiguous space behind the rear seat while James sits with his own on his lap. Ellie crowds
against him, thigh against thigh in smiling complicity.
“I hope you are not too uncomfortable,” the driver says as they set off. “Where are you going? I am afraid we are not going far.”
James takes charge of their side of the conversation, happy that, amongst other things, Ellie no longer has the language advantage. “We’re heading towards Austria. Lake Constance, somewhere like that. But we need somewhere for the night. We’ve got a tent.”
“Ah, you are looking for a camping site. There are camping sites where we are going. Titisee, you know Titisee?”
“We’ve seen it on the map.”
“It is very pretty there. A lake. There is boating. There are water sports.” It sounds as though he has learned phrases from a guidebook and polished them into a simulacrum of fluent language. His passenger half-turns to see what species of beast they have caught. Her face is serious, as though they may have committed some kind of transgression. “It says GB on your pack. Does that mean you are British?”
James wonders. Thoughts of the war come to mind. Resentment, rancor, enmities festering beneath a superficial gloss of liberal progress. His tone is almost apologetic. “Yes, it does.”
“Are you students?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Are you at university?”
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
“Oxford.”
“Which college?”
The question is a surprise. James names his, with the faint feeling that he is handing over some kind of secret code.
“Ah,” the woman says. “Do you know Professor Hubert?”
Professor Hubert. A tall, stooped figure who paces the quad with his gown billowing and his hair awry. Professor Hubert who smiles benignly on one and all. “Yes, I do. I mean, not personally. But I know who he is. Maybe I’ve said good morning to him a couple of times.”