‘Well,’ he replied. Jane nodded, but as if she was not listening to him and she did not reply when he asked: ‘And you?’
Squinting at the speakers above the counter, she laughed silently to herself. ‘So I made some sort of lasting impression,’ she observed. ‘The music.’
‘I play this all the time,’ said Alexander. ‘It’s pretty well all I listen to nowadays.’
‘Can’t beat the old tunes,’ Jane agreed, with a sardonic twist of her lips that lasted no more than a second or two. The last movement of the suite was playing, and they listened to the end. As he removed the record from the turntable she noticed the book that lay on the counter, its open pages downward.
‘What are you reading?’ Jane asked, and he handed over The Great War and Modern Memory. She perused the book like a border guard with a suspect passport, then put it down in its former place. ‘Interesting?’ she asked, uninterestedly.
‘Very,’ said Alexander.
Gazing at the Blondie poster behind him, she enquired: ‘I assume you don’t live upstairs any more?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think the curtains were quite your style.’
‘He’s from Delhi. The tenant.’
‘Ah. Delhi.’
‘A medical student.’
‘Hence all the books on the windowsill.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’m leaving, Alexander,’ she said, in the same expressionless voice. ‘I’m finally leaving London, and I thought I should say goodbye.’ She lifted and dropped her shoulders, releasing a sharp, conclusive sigh, then looked at him in a way that at once demanded a response and denoted an indifference to whatever that response might be.
‘You’ve packed in that job?’
‘That would tend to follow, yes.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said, and she looked away. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Brighton.’
‘To do –?’
‘I’ve enrolled on a course. Acupuncture. Inflicting pain to a good end,’ she smiled, at which point the receptionist from the estate agent’s came in to collect a record she had ordered. Jane remained precisely where she was while Alexander served his customer, as if he were a painting that had been briefly blocked from her view. As the door closed she raised the bag again and clamped it to her chest. Resting her chin on the edge of the magazine, she looked at him inquisitively, and casually asked: ‘Alexander, do you ever think of me?’
Alexander accepted her gaze. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course I do.’
‘I think of you sometimes,’ she said. ‘But the funny thing is, when I think of you I can hardly ever see your face clearly. Which is odd, isn’t it? It’s as if you’re so beautiful you’re almost invisible. Does that seem possible?’ she asked. ‘When you think of me, do you see me?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he replied, as another customer, a man from the sorting office, came in. The man went to the country albums; Jane put her bag on the counter and turned to the racks on the opposite side of the shop.
Her hair was loose, and she kept stroking a thick lock of it as she turned the albums over. When she lifted an album sleeve and read it, the calmness of her eyes and the angle of her head and neck reminded Alexander of her appearance on the day she had first spoken to him. Her lips made the tiny pulsing movements they would sometimes make when she was considering something, or was about to kiss him. Watching her, he saw that she was as desirable now as she had been when they met, but he felt no desire for her. He felt no desire, and yet he had not, after all, ceased to love her, he told himself, because he intensely desired her to be happy; more intensely, it seemed, than he had when he had wanted her.
‘I must be going,’ she said, as soon as the man had left. She came over to the counter and held out her hand. He felt a tremor that was barely perceptible, but he could not tell whether it was in her hand or his. He opened his mouth to speak. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she ordered him. ‘Goodbye, Alexander,’ she said, detaching her hand from his after one last strong grip.
‘Good luck,’ he said.
‘Fine words.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m sorry –’
‘It doesn’t matter, Alexander,’ she said, shaking her head. She went, leaving the door open. Closing it, Alexander looked for her. She was almost running up the hill, to reach the bus stop before the bus that was approaching, he thought, but she did not get on it.
It was not until four days later that he told Megan about Jane’s visit. Coming into the kitchen, he saw that she had a pair of greeting cards on the table. One was for a colleague who was having a baby and the other was a birthday card for Esmé. He took the food out of the cupboard to prepare the evening meal, and then he told her that Jane had called and that she was going to Brighton. ‘Interesting career move. I hope it works out for her,’ said Megan as she wrote on an envelope, and that was all she said about Jane. She examined the photograph on the front of Esmé’s card. ‘Do you think this is appropriate, or is it one for the boys?’ she asked him, sliding across the table a picture of a slender blonde girl in hot pants, who was riding a bicycle through a field of high corn. ‘A teenager already,’ she murmured. She shook her head, and Alexander kissed the back of her neck.
36. Pont des Arts
They were sitting on a bench beside the river, where they had been for perhaps an hour, having spent most of the day on the islands. The late-afternoon sunlight on the pale stone piers of the Pont des Arts had a sweet and deliquescent quality, Alexander would remember. Underneath the footbridge, the arches of the Pont Neuf glowed with the same easeful tone as the piers, as did the flank of the bridge that was framed by the spans of the Pont Neuf, and the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, which rose above the foliage of a dark tree on the opposite bank. The river shone between the bridges, but where they sat the water was ruffled and its surface held all the colours of a magpie’s wing. Shadow covered the front of the buildings that overlooked the river on the Ile de la Cité. The sun put an apricot blush on the faces and hands of the people who were leaning on the railing of the bridge. Megan was drawing on the pad she had bought the day before, soon after they had checked into their hotel, from an old shop in which powdered pigments and flakes of glue were stored in jars like the jars that confectioners and chemists once used. She hunched over the pad, glancing from the paper to the bridge to the paper, moving the pencil slowly across the page, as if she were carving the bridge’s profile into wood.
Since she had begun the drawing she had not spoken a word, and neither had Alexander, who was reading the booklet they had bought that morning at the Sainte-Chapelle. An amplified shout made him look up; a boat that resembled a river-going greenhouse was approaching. Having passed under the Pont des Arts, the boat swivelled cumbrously in midstream, churning a dilute pink froth; an incomprehensible sentence boomed from its windows, and a dozen faces turned to regard the Louvre. ‘What language do you think that is?’ Alexander was about to ask, but when he glanced at Megan he saw that her hand had frozen at the apex of an arc and she had lifted her head to look at something on the bridge, something she found curious and disconcerting. Tracking the line of her gaze brought him to the figure of an elderly woman, who was standing next to one of the lamps, holding a full shopping bag in one hand and an empty bag in the other. The woman put the bags on the ground and looked back, as though seeing where she had come from might remind her of where she was going. They watched her burrow in the full bag and retrieve from it an object that resembled a shrivelled orange, which she dropped into the other bag. She shot a look over her shoulder, then walked off towards the Louvre, holding both bags with crooked arms, as if about to hand them to someone who was offering to take the load from her.
Megan watched the old woman until the trees obscured her. She directed her face again at the place where the woman had been standing, but she was no longer looking. Her expression did not change and her hand did not move.
‘What are you thinking?’ Alexander asked.
‘Daydreaming,’ she replied quietly, without turning her head. She looked down at her hand and extended the line that had been interrupted.
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s silly, Eck,’ she said. She made a mark and gave him a smile that did not erase the tension from her eyes.
‘Tell.’
For a few more seconds she examined the bridge. ‘I was only imagining,’ she began, and then she hesitated, staring at the spot where the woman had stood, and suddenly he knew what she had been thinking. ‘For some reason,’ she went on, ‘it struck me that my mother might be here. That old lady might have been my mother. I mean, any old lady in Paris might be my mother. I suppose she would have come here, sooner or later. Perhaps she stayed. If she’s alive she’s as likely to be here as anywhere else, I suppose.’ She gazed up at the featureless sky and Alexander touched her hair. ‘It’s OK, Eck. Really. A passing thought. It’s a peculiar idea, though, isn’t it? I haven’t a clue what she’d look like, and she wouldn’t have a much clearer idea of me. We could have walked past each other and neither of us would have known it,’ she said, casually, as if this were a diverting situation for a play. ‘Perhaps she’s in London. Perhaps she’s dead. Who knows?’ Holding up the pad, she compared her drawing to its subject, and seemed quite pleased with what she had done.
Alexander tried to recall the last time she had made any mention of her mother, and he could find nothing except a day when she was a girl of ten or eleven, when Mrs Beckwith told her that her mother had taken all of her photographs with her when she went away, and Megan had cried in his room and called Mrs Beckwith a liar. ‘I often wonder what happened to her,’ he said.
‘Do you?’
‘You must do, Meg. Now and then.’
‘Not often. I know I’m supposed to feel I’m not complete, but I don’t, not any more. If I ever did. I don’t have a biological craving,’ she said plainly, as if stating her blood group. ‘She’s a shadow behind my parents, that’s all. I can remember a stripy kitchen apron, and I think I remember her opening the outhouse door, but that might be someone else. And that’s about it. I don’t resent her going off the way she did. I might have done the same thing. But I don’t miss her. I hope she found someone, but I can’t say I feel anything. She’s nothing to do with me any more.’ She continued with her drawing, but a few seconds later she stopped again. ‘I wouldn’t want to meet her, not now,’ she told him. ‘Say she got in touch, out of the blue. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to see her. That’s what I was thinking. Does that sound bad?’ she asked him, and he shook his head. ‘Things would become unravelled. Do you know what I mean? This is what I want,’ she said, and her eyes surveyed the river as she kissed the back of his hand. ‘Come on, we should make the most of this weather.’
They went up the steps, crossed Place du Carrousel and walked along Rue Saint-Honoré. On Place Vendôme he took her photograph in front of a window in which a small silver lizard with emerald scales clung to a small blanched twig. Peering through the viewfinder he saw a familiar look, vivified yet clouded by anxiety, such as often came into her eyes when they had talked about Mr Beckwith, and he saw her fingers spread and contract on the stone of the wall, as if to embed its texture in the memory of her skin. In Galeries Lafayette he detected within the stew of perfumes a scent that Megan had once said she liked, and quickly bought a bottle of it for her, which he dropped into her bag as they stood on the kerb of Boulevard Haussmann. They walked the length of Avenue de l’Opéra, crossed the river by the Pont des Arts, and had a drink in a bar near Saint-Séverin, before eating at Le Procope. While he paid the bill she left the table to splash water on her face. ‘Let’s stay out a bit longer,’ she said, widening her eyes as if to stare the tiredness out of them. They called into a bar near Saint-Sulpice, where the barman poured the unlabelled wine into squat little tumblers, which they took to a small round table near the head of the stairs. In the cellar a man was singing to the accompaniment of a strummed guitar, and above their table hung a row of wrinkled photographs of young men in roll-neck jumpers, each with a guitar across his lap and an expression of irresistible sincerity on his face. Megan smiled at the pictures, at the bare wooden floor, at the haphazard array of bottles and glasses behind the bar, at the backs of the two men by the doorway, whose perfunctory and easy manner of conversing suggested that they had been meeting in this place, at this hour, for a very long time. The older of the pair, who wore a hand-knitted cardigan that was holed at the elbows, directed the tip of his beard at someone passing in the street; his companion thoughtfully drained his glass, as if to signify his understanding of the point that had been made. ‘This is bizarre,’ said Megan, cupping her hands around the tumbler. ‘You wouldn’t have thought something like this still existed. It can’t have changed in twenty years.’ They drank their wine, but when Alexander brought two more glasses back from the bar she looked at him from under her narrowed brows, to prevent him from being evasive, and said to him: ‘It wasn’t good luck finding this bar, was it? I mean, you didn’t just happen upon it.’
‘It was not,’ he replied.
‘You’ve been here before.’
‘I have.’
‘I knew it.’
Levelling a finger at Megan’s nose, he cried: ‘f’accuse.’
‘You were here with that bloody American.’
‘Harsh, Meg. But yes, I was not alone,’ he said, as if giving a witness statement. ‘I was here with Pen.’
‘At this table, I’ll bet. Listening to one of those lads,’ she said, scowling at the gallery of singers.
‘I thought you’d like it. And I was right, wasn’t I?’ he replied, clinking his glass on hers.
‘Some of its charm has rubbed off, for some reason.’ She looked at the chair on which she was sitting, as if pretending there was something on it that might stain her clothes, then gave him an uneven smile.
They had a third glass, but as soon as they left the bar she again brought up the subject of Pen. ‘Don’t think about her any more,’ he said, stopping by the portico of Saint-Sulpice.
‘I can’t help it. I don’t want to think about her. I wish I’d never heard of her. She’s the one you should never have told me about.’
‘You can’t be jealous of her, Meg. It’s fifteen years ago.’
‘I’m not jealous of her. I don’t like the sound of her. There’s a difference.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘That she doesn’t sound very nice now.’
‘What were you playing at, traipsing after that one?’ she asked.
‘I wasn’t playing at anything, and I didn’t traipse,’ Alexander replied, walking away. ‘In retrospect, it would have been better if I’d never set eyes on her, but I did, and I liked her. Now let’s drop it.’
At the road that ran past the Luxembourg gardens they turned left and walked past the front of the palace. By the Odéon theatre she moved closer to him. ‘I’ll tell you what it is about your American friend,’ she went on. ‘It’s that she doesn’t fit. I can’t account for her, and she makes me worry that I don’t really know you.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘I’m all right with Jane, because she was serious. But I wish that one had never existed.’
‘Meg, you know me better than anyone on the face of the planet. And it was fifteen years ago, for God’s sake.’
‘No, it’s not fifteen years ago. She’s here now. In your head.’
‘Like that goon Mitchell’s in yours.’
‘Hardly. And I don’t drag you to bars I went to with him.’
‘I didn’t drag you anywhere,’ said Alexander sharply. For a minute or so they did not speak, and then, as they were waiting for a gap in the traffic, Alexander asked, as if merely requesting clarification: ‘You mean you were here with Mitchell?’
‘I was,’ said Megan, allowing her attention to
be taken by a passing police car.
‘I thought you went to Paris with what’s-his-name.’
‘Mitchell too.’
‘That must have been a lot of fun. Was it?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she told him pertly, as if by this remark she was exculpated.
‘Bet he sorted the locals out,’ Alexander smiled.
‘Eck, don’t make out you’re not bothered about Mitchell. You’re as bothered by him as I am by that American tart.’
‘Tart? Tart?’ he repeated, scandalised.
‘Yes. So don’t try to act blasé.’
Resting against the door of a van, Alexander imitated Mitchell’s leer. ‘Baby, I am blasé,’ he bragged, ticking the air with a finger. Megan was deciding whether to make use of the dregs of her annoyance, but she was standing in front of a shop that had in its window a poster of a fireman who had his back to a blazing house and was wearing nothing but a set of thermal underwear. ‘Moi? Froid? Jamais?’ Alexander read aloud, and he took her hand.
They carried on up the hill to the Panthéon, where midnight struck as they were circling the church. They descended towards Boulevard Saint-Germain, and an hour later they were a couple of blocks from the hotel, looking in the window of a clothes shop, in which were hung, on two crosses of thick bamboo cane, two shirts which seemed to be black until the light of the revolving spotlight struck the fabric and changed its colour to the blue-black of new iron. It was past two o’clock when they returned to their room, and when Alexander woke up Megan was not there. In the bathroom a ribbon of toilet paper was draped over the rail of the shower, and on it was written: ‘Gone for an early draw. See you for breakfast.’ He went back to bed and was later awakened by something falling onto his face. His hand closed on a piece of thick, soft cotton, which instantly was plucked away. Smiling at him, Megan swept the shirt backwards and forwards, caressingly, across his chest. ‘Arise and greet the day, you lazy git,’ she said. She touched a tiny cold mother-of-pearl button to his lips.
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