‘Entirely. I’ve been … I’ve been so … stupid. To see what was …’
‘It’s all right.’ I noticed that the rims of his eyes had turned fiery red. ‘Now tell me what’s been going on.’
‘Aah …’ I managed to smile at last. ‘How long have we got?’
‘Quite a long time, I think.’
As the waiter took our order and carried the menus away, I began to tell Julian about my visit to Natzweiler. He asked me questions as I went along, but not in a way that broke the concentration I thought it necessary to give the story. Then I told him about the visit to the old slaughterhouses at Vaugirard.
‘How do you explain the horse smell?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. I suppose they may have changed the day of the pony rides so the ponies had been there a few minutes before.’
‘Probably.’
‘Or maybe not. Some things have both banal explanations and more interesting ones. To some extent we’re free to choose, aren’t we?’
‘Anyway,’ I said, after a pause. ‘What about you? That’s what I want to know.’
‘Nothing to report. I’m just treading water.’
‘Have you moved back to London?’
‘For the time being. But I haven’t found a tenant for the Paris flat yet. So I’m staying there for a couple of days.’
‘But why did you move?’
‘I wanted a change. Things seemed stuck.’
The waiter was a Parisian, a man of a certain age in a long white apron and a black bow tie. He’d brought a half-bottle of white wine with the first course and now uncorked some red.
‘I’m sorry I was a few minutes late,’ I said.
‘You can’t be precise with the Métro.’
‘There was a man playing the accordion in my carriage.’
‘Did he ask for money?’
‘No, but I gave him some.’
‘Do you always give money to buskers?’
‘Only to accordionists.’
‘Why?’
I felt Julian scrutinising me, not unkindly.
‘I don’t know.’ I began to relax for the first time. ‘I suppose I still cling to some old American idea of Paris. There should be accordions.’
He smiled and shook his head.
The waiter brought the main course, which was steak with a copper dish of potatoes and a lamb’s lettuce salad. I had let Julian order for us both.
I asked, looking at the plate. ‘Onglet?’
‘Français, I think.’
He poured more red wine. I was starting to feel drunk and half raised a hand to stop him, but then let it go.
‘What are your plans now?’ said Julian. ‘When you finish your chapter – and your apartment comes to an end?’
‘I’m not sure. I e-mailed a draft of the chapter and Putnam was very positive about it. The faculty has money at the moment. I think if I came up with a good research topic they’d probably let me stay.’
I could hardly believe what I was saying – I was making it up as I went along. And in any case my next career move was not the important topic between us.
Waiting to see how Julian would respond, I leaned back against the dark wood of the banquette and looked round the room. The shaded wall lights showed couples, small groups of friends, a solitary gourmet at a window table. In the loud murmuring of voices and the sound of glass and china, I could sense my anxiety starting to recede. It was going to be all right.
Meanwhile, it was difficult to look at Julian. Having so completely changed my mind about him, I felt shy. I wanted to tell him about what had happened in the Hôtel du Parc. While it remained unexplained it still frightened me and he might be able to help me understand; but more importantly, I wanted him to be a part of it. I couldn’t do it now. But there would be time, surely there would be time.
‘Did the publisher like de Musset?’
‘They were polite about it, but I think they’ll only print a few hundred copies.’
‘I finished “La nuit de décembre” the other day.’
‘That took—’
‘I’m a slow reader, Julian.’
‘And you liked it?’
‘Yes. I’ve always found French Romantic poetry a little …’
‘Lightweight?’
‘Yes. But I loved the ending of this. I didn’t see it coming.’
‘It’s very sad. “Ami, je suis la solitude.” But I think he’s earned it. The rhythms are so good.’
‘Yes. What is this autoscopy thing? Was it just a literary device?’
‘They don’t really know. It’s an actual phenomenon, though rare. It’s probably a perceptual disturbance in the brain, some sort of time lag. You know, like déjà vu, when things have just gone out of synch for a moment. You can feel it slip out, and you can almost sense it click in again.’
‘I suppose everyone’s caught themselves unaware in a mirror or a shop window,’ I said. ‘Or when you’re lost in a book and you pull back and suddenly become self-aware because your leg’s gone to sleep.’
‘Yes, you re-envisage yourself. Reimagine. And of course this intermittent self-awareness, that we can switch on and off at will, is a key human faculty.’ Julian began to laugh. ‘I remember in a strange hotel room in Rome going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and thinking, there’s some bastard in here, and getting ready to fight him. I’d forgotten the wall mirror.’
‘And was this intruder drunk too?’
‘Startled more than drunk, I’d say. Anyway, the research says that in some people it can be a pointer to a more serious illness.’
‘But not in de Musset.’
‘Not at all. I think he enjoyed it, then exaggerated it for poetic ends. But as with most things in the brain, they don’t actually know.’
After we’d had coffee, Julian said, ‘Would you like to come back to my flat for a fine à l’eau. For old times’ sake?’
‘Yes, I would. I’d like that.’
We found a taxi outside, though once we were alone in the back of it, I felt a sense of awkwardness again.
As the car turned on to the Boulevard des Capucines, I said, ‘If you’d like to, then I think you could put your hand on my knee at this point.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Ssshh.’ I silenced him by leaning over and kissing him.
He put his hand on my knee and ran it up over my thigh. ‘You have lovely skin,’ he whispered.
I looked across the back seat at him. ‘Blimey,’ I said.
Up in the apartment above the Alsatian brasserie, Julian prepared the drinks. When we were about to settle among the piled books in the ochre light of the lamps, he suddenly gripped my wrist and said, ‘Stop. Before you sit down, can I make you a proposition?’
‘What is it?’
‘Come with me.’
He led me into the hallway. ‘That’s the bedroom off to the right there. Bathroom there. Kitchen at the end. But there’s this other room here. I have no use for it, but it’s quiet, it overlooks the courtyard. It has the sun in the morning. You could use this table as a desk, you could have a sofa bed. There’s even a little shower room through there.’
‘Are you asking me to move in with you, Julian?’
‘Yes, I am. But a woman should have a room of her own as well.’
‘So long as I don’t have to sleep in it.’
‘My dear Hannah, you can sleep wherever you like.’
In the sitting room, we sat down at last on the velvet-covered couch. ‘One thing I need to tell you,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I really don’t like fine à l’eau.’
‘Try it without the eau, maybe? I just thought it would satisfy your Hemingway fantasy.’
‘I gave that one up ten years ago. Along with the Russian poet. Maybe we could have wine instead.’
‘I have a bottle I’ve been saving.’
Half an hour later, I put my hand on Julian’s chest, to keep him at arm’s length.
‘There’s something else I need to tell you,’ I said.
‘Go on.’
‘I don’t trust happy endings.’
‘Me neither.’
‘They belong to airport books where a peasant woman is violently abused in the first chapter and six hundred pages later her granddaughter opens a department store on Park Avenue.’
‘Traditionally a chain, I think,’ said Julian.
‘Anyway, the point is, that for the last hundred years or so happy endings have been considered …’
‘Vulgar?’
‘Yes. So I don’t want that.’
‘Well, Hannah, please be reassured that I’m not offering that. For a start, it’s not an ending. It’s the beginning of a new chapter, or just an interlude perhaps. There’s only a short time on the lease here. And secondly, the happiness bit. I can’t promise that either. But I think it’ll be fun. In fact, I’m sure it will be.’
‘Why are you sure?’
‘Because I love you so much. I love your earnestness, your passion, your endeavour, the way you push back your hair when you’re anxious, your clothes, your voice. I love the way you care so very much about the fate of people you never knew. It’s inspiring. It’s magnificent.’
‘You’re going to make me cry.’
‘I just can’t tell you how much I admire you and what you’ve done and what you stand for. I admire you so, so much. You have no idea.’
‘I thought I just made you laugh. And that’s why you teased me.’
‘I’m afraid the teasing was a way of showing my affection.’
‘And when did you know that you loved me?’
‘I think I always did. But to begin with it was perhaps clouded over by desire.’
‘Don’t lose it. The desire.’
‘No, no. Don’t worry. But I think it was when I became resigned to the fact that you’d never think of me that way, that I’d never be more than an extra researcher or a sort of louche uncle. That’s when I came to love you not just for your eyes and the colour of your hair. You know, with the brown and the black at the same time, but it’s not streaked. It’s both at once, it’s …’
‘I know. It’s a thing. Can’t help it.’
‘Anyway, that’s when I saw how much I loved you.’
‘When you accepted that you’d never have me?’
‘Yes. Is that perverse enough?’
‘I think so.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh dear,’ I said ‘My story’s not so well shaped. I was a dumb idiot and one day I stopped being a dumb idiot. I opened my eyes. I saw for the first time. I saw your kindness, your gentleness. I saw your goodwill. And your pale blue eyes. And I saw what a shallow, self-pitying little bitch I’d been.’
‘Nonsense. What you were was wounded. It needed time.’
‘And kindness.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And weirdly enough, a word from my lodger. He asked me questions about you and how you’d behaved towards me. I was irritated at the time. But when I thought about it …’
‘I like that boy,’ said Julian. ‘Can I tell you something?’
‘Anything you like. Always.’
‘When you first told me about your Russian, I thought there must be more to it. I thought you were keeping something back. I thought maybe you’d been pregnant, had a child, given it up for adoption or—’
‘Like Joni Mitchell.’
‘I thought there must be some further trauma. That you’d followed him to St Petersburg and been arrested. Or—’
‘I did think of doing that. Shooting his wife on the Nevsky Prospekt with a pearl-handled revolver.’
‘But I think that’s when I knew how much I cared for you. When I saw how hurt you’d been by love alone.’
I was crying now, I must admit.
‘In a way, there was a murder,’ I said. ‘I killed a girl in me. There was a more full-blooded, truthful version of myself that I killed off in the interests of a manageable life.’
‘But ten years,’ he said.
‘I may have killed the girl in me, but I couldn’t kill off the idea of him as well. And I suppose it was because I couldn’t bear to lose the hope. I chose the grief instead. To keep the hope alive.’
‘One love …’ He breathed out slowly.
‘Mathilde,’ I said.
‘Jesus.’
I think he was crying too by now.
I said: ‘It’s over.’
After a few moments, when we were both calm, Julian took my hand and said, ‘This happy ending …’
‘Yes,’ I said, sitting up straight. ‘You’ve been very reassuring. You’ve told me that it’s not an ending and that it may not be happy.’
‘What I meant was—’
‘I think what you’re offering is a sort of so-so interlude, with love and a chance of fun. Was that it?’
‘More or less. Does that still sound too vulgar?’
‘No. I can live with that.’
‘So you’ll move in?’
‘Yes. But one other thing. When I’ve borrowed a toothbrush, climbed into your bed and made love to you in a drunken way, you won’t be able call me Mrs Jellyby.’
‘I don’t want to. And when will you move your stuff in?’
‘Tomorrow, if that doesn’t look too pushy.’
‘No. In fact, tomorrow would be ideal.’
‘T’es heureux comme un Pinson?’
‘What?’
I woke with a headache in Julian’s bed a few hours later and went to the kitchen for some water. There was a new Vittel in the fridge. Unable to find a glass in the darkness, I drank direct from the bottle, the cold water pouring down my throat and splashing onto my chest.
Then I went into ‘my’ room and stood naked at the window. It was raining onto the cobbles below. I thought of Jean, the Alpine water boy who’d carried up the pails to Mathilde’s apartment at Belleville from the fountain in the courtyard. I heard a hiss of tyres from the direction of rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and imagined Richter’s black car as his driver took Juliette home to her parents’ after dinner in the Place de l’Opéra.
Somewhere over the mausoleums and the cobbled avenues of Père Lachaise the sun would be starting to come up; in Saint-Denis and Sevran the timer was counting down the minutes till the taped muezzin called …
The metal grille at the window of the Café Victor Hugo rattled in a gust of morning breeze and the Chinese women on the Boulevard de Strasbourg were going off to sleep. In the rue de la Goutte d’Or, the brushes of a road-sweeping lorry chased the butchers’ blood down the drains. A janitor rattled his keys as he began his descent from the station at Pigalle along the empty streets to the school in rue Milton. In the back of the large boulangerie, formerly the Pujo, on Avenue Kléber, the ovens were giving up their first-baked loaves, while underground in the sidings of Mairie des Lilas, the night-shift workers in their rubber boots were hosing down the Métro carriages for the day ahead.
By midday the tourist buses would be unloading on the Place de la Concorde. This way to the bateau mouche, the riverboat. Down to your left is the famous bridge with the padlocks. Please help yourself to a bottle of water at the front of the vehicle. After lunch we’re having a ride on the Grande Roue de Paris, the big wheel you see over there. Please make sure you have some sun cream to protect your skin. We meet by the ticket booth at three.
Acknowledgements
With boundless love and thanks to Veronica Faulks.
My thanks also to Rachel Cooke, Roland Philipps, Margot Speed, David Bellos, Heather Milke and Tom Holland; to my literary agents Clare Alexander, Lesley Thorne, Lisa Baker, Joaquim Fernandes and Nicola Chang; to my London publishers Jocasta Hamilton, Rachel Cugnoni, Najma Finlay, Glenn O’Neill, Tom Weldon, Gail Rebuck and David Milner.
A hefty thank you to Steve Rubin, Barbara Jones and Ruby Rose Lee at Henry Holt in New York.
In Paris, merci to Tim and Stephanie Johnston; Margaux and Romain
Roudeau chez ‘Juvéniles’ in rue de Richelieu; Charles Trueheart and Anne Swardson; Claude Bilgoraj, Daniel Jeffreys, Florence Noiville, Sylvia Whitman and Lauren Elkin.
For help on the ground I am grateful to Christopher Leach in Tangier and in Paris to the inexhaustible Mlle Jessica ‘the Terrier’ Terrier.
I came across the poems of Wisława Szymborska quoted by David Rief in his book In Praise of Forgetting. I am also indebted to The French Intifada by Andrew Hussey, subtitled ‘France’s Long War with its Arabs’; Lonely Courage by Rick Stroud, Algeria, France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans, Flames in the Field by Rita Kramer and The Novel of the Century by David Bellos, about the phenomenon of Les Misérables.
Paris in the Third Reich by David Pryce-Jones was published in 1981, but, so far as I know, has not been bettered for detail or illustration. The book referred to by Hannah in Chapter Six is the classic Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 by Robert M. Paxton (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).
S.F., 25 March, 2018
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473537170
Version 1.0
Published by Hutchinson in 2018
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 2018
Jacket photography: Katya Evdokimova / Arcangel
Sebastian Faulks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in the Great Britain in 2018 by Hutchinson
Hutchinson
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Paris Echo Page 29