The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

  ‘On the box,’ he apologised. ‘You’ve seen me on the box.’

  ‘Merlin’s a television correspondent,’ explained Leila. Her eyes tore themselves away from the freak lighting effect on the opposite bank and shifted from Merlin’s face to Jay’s. ‘You’ve probably seen him reporting some happy event like the Gulf War.’

  ‘Of course. I remember now.’

  ‘Seriously …’ Merlin’s eyes held Jay’s. ‘It’s a problem in my business. People recognise me but can’t place me. They don’t expect to meet a media personality in a shop or walking along the street, so I’m always meeting total strangers who launch into a personal conversation and get angry because I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.’

  ‘Big-time reporters like Merlin live in the best hotels and restaurants all the time on expenses,’ said Leila. ‘He’ll buy us both a slap-up dinner tonight, won’t you, Merl?’

  ‘Correction.’ Merlin had still not taken his eyes off Jay’s face. ‘For the first time in years I’m not on expenses. I’m here on a sabbatical trip.’

  ‘Doing what?’ asked Jay.

  A shadow crossed his face, quickly erased by the professional smile. ‘It’s a long story. But it will give me great pleasure to take you two beautiful ladies to dinner and give you the abridged version. I have the name of a good place in St Emilion.’

  Leila was amused at the effect Merlin was having on Jay, whose usually pale cheeks were flushed, but not from the exertion of running. She waved to the opposite bank where a cluster of rain-sodden multicoloured parasols advertised Cinzano. ‘We don’t need to go that far, Merlin. We’re standing a hundred feet away from one of France’s great restaurants.’

  He looked surprised.

  ‘You won’t find it in any book,’ she continued. ‘It’s called Chez Dominique and its run by an ex-Foreign Legion paratrooper who will cook the best meal you’ve ever eaten. Just don’t get into a fight with him, that’s all. Any trouble and Dom will roll the three of us as flat as one of his delicious crêpes. How about seven-thirty at my place for a pre-dinner drink, Jay?’

  Jay licked her lips. ‘Fine by me.’

  Merlin spoke slowly as Jay turned away. ‘I also have a funny feeling we’ve met before, but we can’t have done, so there it is.’

  ‘A tout à l’heure,’ Leila called.

  ‘A tout à l’heure,’ Jay echoed.

  She followed the tow-path, walking the long way round to get back to her car, aware of Merlin’s eyes on her all the way.

  Chapter 4

  Leila’s house was a mess. Like its owner, it was a chaos of colours. Red-print final demands were stuffed into jam jars bristling with paint brushes. One wall was part green and part yellow, as though Leila had run out of paint halfway. Sketches were tacked up on doors and window frames with drawing pins. Clothes and half finished canvases and empty frames covered the furniture and littered the terracotta tiles, making it necessary for Jay to pick her way across the room as though walking across a river on stepping stones.

  The creator of all this chaos was ‘running late as usual, darling.’ Her voice came from the shower cubicle in one corner of the converted cottage which was one vast studio where Leila worked, ate and slept.

  ‘Help yourself to a drink,’ she called. ‘There’s some Cinzano in the satchel hanging on the big easel, I can’t remember why. Oh, and there may be ice in the fridge, if it’s working. Have a look, anyway. If the fridge isn’t making a funny humming noise, hit it on the right side and it may go again.’

  Jay lifted the pick-up which was scratching round and round the centre scrolling of a record on the turntable and switched off the hi-fi. She pushed the mound of dirty dishes in the sink aside and turned on the hot tap. The water ran tepid. There was a scream from the shower: ‘For Chrissake, don’t run the hot tap! It’s turned to ice in here.’

  The washing-up liquid container was empty. Jay rinsed a couple of glasses in cold water after emptying them of cigarette ends. Then she set out to hunt for Leila’s satchel, which was not hanging on the easel. In a long mirror pinned to the half painted wall by four nails, she caught sight of herself. She had changed twice before setting out and wondered if her black woollen dress was overdoing it for a dinner in St Denis. Perhaps a blouse or sweater and trousers would have been more appropriate, and trainers rather than heels?

  In the shower Leila was singing one of Edith Piaf’s songs, ‘Mon Légionnaire’. She sang off key and rather loudly, making Jay wince. From time to time the performance was interrupted with items of local gossip hurled at random over the screen. Jay cleared a chair and sat down. The mess in which Leila lived was the opposite of her own well-ordered apartment. In every way the two women were as different as their looks, which was a large part of the reason why they had been friends for so long.

  As the voice from the shower kept up a stream of non sequiturs, Jay thought how wonderful it must be for Leila to be free to choose when to go to bed or get up in the morning, when to work or even not to work, if she felt so inclined. It was the antithesis of her own ordered life as a musician in which every hour of the day was pre-planned, sometimes years ahead. After reading the latest threatening letter from France Telecom, she picked up the paint-stained telephone. The line was dead. Half-listening to Leila’s exuberant chatter, she wondered what it was like not to care if the phone was cut off. The thought brought another twinge of unease that she had temporarily excommunicated herself.

  Then Leila emerged from the shower swathed in a large orange beach towel and grabbed her glass of Cinzano. ‘Isn’t this the most amazing drink in the world, Jay? I sold a picture to a wine merchant and he paid me in vermouth. A dozen bottles. So have another one and another.’

  Her infectious enthusiasm for the pleasures of the moment – a shower, a drink, a man – always began by making Jay regret being such a serious person herself. Then, after a while, she caught a mild form of Leilitis herself and stopped thinking about work and dates and schedules and the thousand pressures of her working life.

  ‘He’s a dish, isn’t he?’ Leila, in bra and pants, was choosing a dress from her wardrobe, a metal pipe hung on wire from a beam. Each one she pulled out to examine was more screamingly colourful than the last. ‘Orange and green? You like this one, Jay? No, I can see you don’t, so I’ll wear it. Merlin, I mean. I saw the effect he had on you. Not that you’re the first. If that man knew what he did to women …’

  She changed tack abruptly, finishing the drink in one gulp. ‘We’re late. Come on. Let’s go.’

  ‘Merlin isn’t staying here with you?’ Jay asked.

  ‘He’s got a room above the restaurant.’ Leila laughed her low throaty laugh. ‘I’ve no doubt Merl would like to spend the night here, darling, but Dom – you remember him? Well, he is a very jealous man and very violent. So, since Merlin always turns me on, I thought it would be better if he spent the night where Dom can keep an eye on him. Then no one gets tempted in the wee small hours.’

  ‘I thought that sort of thing didn’t bother you?’ Jay queried.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Leila agreed. ‘It’s the men who get uptight, haven’t you noticed? By the way, have you got wheels?’

  ‘D’you want to go in my car?’

  ‘My faithful deux chevaux…’ Leila posed theatrically in the doorway, her orange and green kaftan screaming above a pair of vivid blue shoes, six inch metal earrings jangling in her hair as she moved, ‘… is having a hysterectomy, darling. It suffered a fallen engine because I forgot to put oil in. That’s just like machines, isn’t it? You let ‘em guzzle all the gasolene they want and they let you down because of some other damned thing.’

  Jay laughed and finished her drink. ‘Nobody else could wear that dress,’ she decided. ‘But on you it would make Barbra Streisand green with envy.’

  She embraced her friend. ‘Coming into your house is like breathing neat oxygen. You’ve got no phone, no car and no money by the look of it. But nothing bothers
you.’

  Leila’s eyes swept round the mess in which she lived. ‘I used to pretend to care,’ she said, serious for a moment. ‘I pretended to be what other people call normal, Jay. Oh, I really did, so don’t laugh at me. My God, if you knew how many times I wept, trying to be a dutiful daughter, a conscientious art teacher and even a good wife and mother. Then one day I woke up and realised that I was only fooling myself. Everyone else knew I was a fake, even my own child. So I renounced the world and stopped pretending.’ She paused and swept an arm to encompass all the mess. ‘This is me.’

  Merlin kept them waiting five minutes and arrived at the reserved table in a dinner jacket with the excuse that he had had to wait for a call to New York to come through. Jay thought she had caught a glimpse of him in a roll-neck sweater looking out of the restaurant window as she was parking the car. She wondered if he had gone back to his room to change in her honour.

  The meal was a masterpiece, as Leila had promised. Her lover – the patron et chef de cuisine – was showing Merlin, a potential rival, just how good a cook he was, and insisted on serving their table himself.

  The conversation flowed easily, a mixture of Leila’s scandalous revelations and anecdotes from Merlin’s limitless fund of stories about famous people whom he had interviewed. Jay laughed at Leila’s scandal and Merlin’s jokes as they enjoyed the superb food and a sublime locally bottled wine. She gazed out of the window at the moonlit river flowing past only a few feet away and thought, as she always did, how beautiful France was. With each breath she could feel the tension of months drain away.

  As the meal progressed, she found it harder and harder to keep her eyes off Merlin’s face. Whatever chemistry was going on seemed to be affecting him equally. Their hands brushed repeatedly as they reached for a glass or the condiments.

  Leila watched with amusement the reaction they were having on each other. After the dessert, she excused herself to go to the washroom and returned with: ‘I’ve just got myself a lift home. Dom says, as we’re the last diners, he’ll be delighted to drive me back. He says to help yourselves to drinks.’

  She stood looking down at Jay and Merlin. ‘Well, one of you could say: Don’t go, Leila. We’ll miss you.’

  They both said it together and laughed.

  Leila kissed them goodnight. ‘The way you two are looking at each other, I’ll be in the way very shortly. No, don’t protest – not that you are. I actually feel like death, because I can’t shake off this ’flu bug. So bonne nuit, mes enfants. Have fun. Ciao.’ She left in a final whirl of colour.

  Merlin went to the bar and poured himself a generous measure of 1937 Armagnac and another coffee for Jay. She nodded thanks and started with surprise when he said softly, ‘We haven’t spoken for three whole minutes.’

  Since Leila had gone, Jay had been acutely aware of being alone with him. She stopped toying with the coffee cup and observed, ‘After two hours with Leila, silence can be fun.’

  ‘Depends who you’re with,’ he said.

  There was another pause, both of them listening to the music coming from the bar where a local folk singer was entertaining a small crowd of regulars.

  Merlin shifted in his chair. ‘Silences can be hard to handle if you’re with the wrong person, and very comfortable with the right one.’

  ‘It’s the same in music. Without dynamics, it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Dynamics?’

  ‘The loud and soft.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve just realised that I know nothing about music. I never thought about it before meeting you today. And now it seems a terrible thing to have missed out on.’

  Jay looked at him, trying again to remember where they had met. It was not possible that she would remember so strongly a face she had seen only a few times on television. And the soft-brown voice that matched his eyes tugged at her memory too. It reminded her of a line in a poem by Lamartine she had learned for ‘A’ level French. Something about les voix chères qui se sont tues – the beloved voices that we hear no more. She started. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, tell me what it’s like to be a musician at the top. Tough, I guess.’

  She laughed, ‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’

  ‘Don’t be modest,’ he warned. ‘I’ve done some research on you and put in a couple of calls before dinner to friends in London. They told me you’re pretty famous on the recital circuit, that you pull good audiences wherever you play and that your meteoric showbiz career has been more like that of an opera singer than a flute player.’

  Jay was amused and flattered that he had taken the trouble. ‘Do you do that with every girl you meet, Mr Freeman? Make enquiries before you take her to dinner?’

  ‘No, Miss French,’ he apologised with a grin. ‘But then you don’t exactly come across as Miss Average Dinner Date, if you’ll pardon my saying so. My friends tell me you were a prodigy. What’s that like? I’ve always wondered.’

  He was an easy man to talk to. Once started, the story of her life flowed. Merlin hardly spoke. Chewing a tooth-pick, he watched her face and listened fascinated as Jay told him about the rigid, monastic discipline of the Mozart School, the dedication of being a prodigy and the relentless competition that had never let up since her first professional performance when she was fourteen.

  ‘Not so very unlike my scene,’ he commented at last. ‘A correspondent is only ever as good as his last despatch.’ He paused. ‘But now something’s gone wrong,’ he prompted.

  Jay was on her guard. ‘Did your reporter friends in London tell you that?’

  Merlin replied with a question. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  The hair on his scalp tingled as Jay recounted what had happened in Canterbury Cathedral. From his own experience years before in Lebanon, he knew that some things happen for which there is no rational explanation.

  Somebody switched out most of the lights in the restaurant. They were the only clients left. Merlin leaned forward. He was playing with a book of matches to avoid disturbing Jay by looking directly at her. As she finished talking, he looked up and asked, ‘You say this wasn’t what musicians call "losing your nerve". So what’s the difference?’

  ‘I’ve had friends who lost their nerve.’ Jay hesitated; it was a difficult thing to explain to someone who lacked the vocabulary of a musician. ‘At the time, they looked normal. They weren’t giddy or anything like that. It’s just that they couldn’t play the notes without a sort of wobble. They couldn’t control the sound they were making. The whole orchestra breaks out in a sweat when it happens.’

  ‘I’ve got the picture,’ said Merlin. ‘Now tell me again what happened to you in Canterbury Cathedral, so I can compare.’

  Jay took a long drink of water. She shut her eyes to concentrate. ‘I walked onto the platform …’

  ‘No butterflies in the tummy?’

  ‘I’ve never had nerves in my life,’ she said shortly. ‘Everything was normal until I blew the first note and heard this noise and the voice …’

  By osmosis his professional ability to manipulate words put the right image into her head: ‘Then I felt someone’s hands pulling my fingers away from the keys.’

  Merlin studied her hands on the table close to his, taking in the long sensitive fingers, the nails trimmed short for playing.

  Jay was wishing she had been able to tell her father what it had felt like. ‘This illusion,’ she continued, ‘only lasted for a second or two. But … you have to understand that playing professionally is like being an Olympic athlete. Every muscle and nerve is tuned to top performance. So when my fingers refused to do what my brain was telling them, my brain flipped, like blowing a fuse.’ The memory hurt. She gripped Merlin’s clasped hands tightly, willing him to understand. ‘I’ve performed the Blessed Spirits in public maybe a hundred times, Merlin, and suddenly I couldn’t play a note. I nearly dropped the flute. I was giddy. I thought I was going to fall and staggered off the platform, unable to see properly or hear any
thing except that echo. I was trembling from top to toe. I thought I was going mad.’

  The memory made her feel sick. At that moment she could have collapsed against his chest as she had instinctively sought physical reassurance from Carl when it happened. With the next breath came the fighting response to her own panic.

  Merlin returned the pressure of her hand. ‘You say there was a noise?’ he prompted gently.

  ‘Like someone slamming a door.’ Jay thought of telling him about the voice that had shouted, ‘Damn Becket,’ but it seemed over-dramatic.

  Merlin was trying to find a rational explanation. ‘Perhaps there really was a noise that put you off your stride? A sudden noise at the wrong moment, just when the audience had hushed for the music to start? That must happen sometimes.’

  Jay had asked her father the same question.

  ‘There was no noise, Merlin – except inside my head. And this voice … Oh, damn!’ She pulled her hand away from his. ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’

  ‘You didn’t lose your nerve,’ he said.

  ‘How would you know?’ Jay was angry with him for spoiling the evening by making her recall the trauma. The magic that had been building was all gone now. ‘You just said you didn’t know a thing about music.’

  The restaurant was silent, except for a distant noise of washing up in the kitchens. In the bar the singing had stopped. There were sounds of someone locking up.

  He stood up. ‘I think they’re trying to get rid of us.’ He pulled back Jay’s chair for her and said softly, ‘I apologise for being so intrusive. I have a social disease: I can’t stop myself asking questions.’

  ‘My fault,’ said Jay briskly. ‘I didn’t have to answer, did I?’

  They looked at each other for a long moment, each regretting the change of mood, but unable to take the one step forward that might have bridged the gap. If Jay’s moment of weakness had won over her performer’s toughness, she would have let Merlin take her in his arms, but she had fought it and been strong without him, so he had no role except to offer politely: ‘Can I drive you home?’