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‘Really?’
‘Really.’
There was a long pause while I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t. Christian seemed lost in his memories: ‘I remember that house in the country. I remember a forest behind it where I once found a hedgehog. I caught it and stuck it in a box. I didn’t really know what to do with it though so I just left it there, in the box under my bed – for weeks maybe – until Mum started complaining about the smell. So one evening I opened the lid. Inside was this horrible greenish brown slime. Just the slime and the spines. I can still remember the smell.’
A raucous laugh broke out from a table at the other side of the pub and several of the solitary drinkers standing at the bar glanced up from their drinks.
‘Listen Christian. For Christ’s sake. You’ve got to pull yourself together.’
Christian stared at me wildly: ‘Well I can’t just pull myself together. I can’t just pull myself together. Jesus!’
I forced myself to continue: ‘Look … you need help, you need to open yourself up to help, a doctor, a counsellor, whatever …’
He cut me off: ‘You don’t know the half of it. Not the half of it.’ He sat musing and playing with the beer mat. ‘I have no means of escape. I have to confront myself at every moment. My life is a mirror I’m not allowed to look away from. If I was an alcoholic I could drink my way through it. Drink my way to the other end. I forced myself to drink tonight because I knew I was meeting you but normally I can’t do it.’
I shook my head: ‘This is getting you absolutely nowhere. I’ll get a cab down to Paddington with you. I’ll put you on a train home.’
He didn’t seem to hear me though: ‘The worst is not what you think. The worst is not even that we loved each other. It was that Susan … Susan and me …’
‘Susan was being unfaithful to you.’
Christian looked up at me, genuinely surprised: ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t know. I guessed. Is that what you got me up here to tell me?’
‘No.’ We drank in silence for a while, then Christian started rambling on about his wife: ‘She met a guy, a younger guy, your age. It was absurd. I didn’t know at first, I didn’t have a clue. Anyway Susan got careless, or maybe she wanted me to find out … I heard her talking on the phone one day when she must have known I was there. Later I looked through her things and found a letter, just lying there, not hidden or anything. I couldn’t believe it. So I confronted her with the letter and she admitted it. I still couldn’t believe it. She said she loved me but that things had got stale. She needed to get this out of her system and all that crap. She didn’t want to leave me, not at that point anyway. I should’ve left her there and then but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength.
‘Life went on. The only difference was that I knew everything now, I knew that when she wasn’t home with me she was fucking this other guy. In a way it made it much easier for Susan, everything being out in the open like that. She didn’t have to hide anything any more, she didn’t have to go through the hassle of secret rendezvous. She could even sleep over at this guy’s place now, when before she had to come home every night.
‘I should’ve left her as soon as I found out. If I’d left her then, she’d have come banging at my door. She’d have come back to me eventually and I could have made my choice. She wasn’t in love with this other guy. She thought she wanted me but when I didn’t dump her, when she saw what I was willing to put up with, she knew I was weak. Then near the end, I could see I’d lost her. Not because of the other guy, but I’d lost her anyway. She became dismissive of me. She’d grown stronger. I couldn’t contemplate her leaving me though. I couldn’t contemplate her being alive and not being with me …’
Christian was speaking in a low, robotic voice. I shook my head again: ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want to know these personal things.’ He stopped, looked quizzically up at me, then continued talking. I interrupted: ‘I said I didn’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear it!’ I was almost shouting. I was upset, I don’t know why. Christian just stared at me in amazement and there was an uneasy minute or two of silence.
Eventually I said: ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’d like to help out but I honestly can’t see what I can do.’
‘You do know what you can do.’ His stare was unnervingly direct: ‘You’re scared of me. Why are you scared of me?’
‘I’m not scared of you, for Christ’s sake.’ I looked away in irritation. ‘I’ll get a cab with you to the station.’
‘There aren’t any more trains tonight. They’re doing work on the line. The last one went at nine.’
‘To the coach station then.’
Christian put his hand to his chin and kind of slumped in his chair. In the intensity of the encounter I’d forgotten how drunk he actually was. Suddenly, whatever menace he might have posed to me seemed to vanish, to disappear so completely that I wondered just what it was that had upset me in the first place.
Outside, the drizzle had cleared and the wet city glistened in the street light. Christian seemed to have developed a stoop since I’d last seen him, or perhaps it was the drink. He kept up a wandering monologue as we walked down Camden High Street: ‘There’d been a chance maybe … we’d shared a bed but I couldn’t … I hadn’t …’
I’d changed my mind about the coach station. I remembered a hotel nearby. I’d once spent a night there with a Brazilian woman I’d met in a Soho bar, years ago. In the morning she’d packed her bags and I’d driven her to Heathrow to catch her plane to São Paulo. I could still remember her face and the nakedness of her smile, so different from an Englishwoman’s smile.
The reception area was grimly functional and deserted, except for an unshaven Indian-looking guy behind the desk, watching football on a tiny black-and-white television. I got out my wallet but Christian waved his hand: ‘Don’t be absurd.’ He went through his pockets and fished out a ten-pound note: ‘What the hell have I done with my Visa?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
I paid for the room and gave Christian some money for breakfast and to get home with in the morning. Then just as I was about to leave, he seemed to sober up a bit and suddenly came over all apologetic. He said he was really sorry for doing this to me, that he felt humiliated. It’s all right, I said, ring me when you’ve sorted things out a bit.
‘Yes, I’ll ring you. I need to talk to you. I’ll send you a cheque.’ Then when I’d already left and was on the footpath he appeared at the hotel window and shouted out again: ‘I’ll ring you! I’ll ring you!’
People were spilling out of pubs, talking loudly about where they were going next or how they were getting home. In a way I felt bad about leaving Christian in a hotel, but then on the other hand I was also relieved to be rid of him. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten yet and I was still hungry: it was getting on though, and I wondered whether restaurant kitchens would still be open. Then I had another idea. Charlotte lived just around the corner.
I found the art deco block Charlotte’s flat is in and pressed her button on the intercom: the door buzzed open before I had time to say who I was. I could see her peering down at me as I climbed the stairs, sizing me up like a club bouncer: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ She’d messily pulled a jumper over her underwear and a television blared in the background.
Charlotte let me in then disappeared into the bedroom. I poured some wine and helped myself to the cold pasta salad on the dinner table. As I ate, my mind drifted back to the meeting I’d had with the people from Renouveau National. I remembered one of the men smiling at me and saying: ‘Well you know, politics in our country is a dangerous business.’ I’d replied: ‘But what’s at issue is not the death of one man … not one man, do you see?’ It was only now that I realised I’d unconsciously used Christian’s words, from the day his wife had died.
Charlotte was talking to someone on the phone in the bedroom but I could only catch snippets of what she was saying: ‘… no, really, I’m tired tonight … I wouldn’t be any fun … yeah I’ll see you tomorrow night … you too.’ She threw open the bedroom door. She’d put on some make-up and a pretty pink shirt with a flower pattern: ‘It’s good to see you and everything but don’t ever just turn up here again unannounced. OK?’
We had some wine and a late supper and chatted idly. After a while we started kissing across the table, then we lay down on the sofa and continued talking, laughing, kissing, joking around. At the same time I was kind of playing with the buttons of her shirt, undoing them slowly, waiting for the conversation to dissolve.
We’d been talking about our jobs and at one point Charlotte said: ‘What’s your real ambition in life? What’s the one thing you want to do before you die?’
‘I’m aiming for immortality.’
‘No seriously, what’s your ambition? What do you want to do with your life?’
I stopped messing about for a moment and sat up. ‘I don’t know … an international posting … the UN, maybe Paris, maybe UNESCO … I want to move on, move up, pretty soon.’
‘So does everyone. What I mean is, isn’t there something that engrosses you, something you must achieve?’
‘I don’t have that kind of ambition.’ I thought again. ‘There are things … there’s the campaign I told you about …’
‘You mean the guy they’re going to execute?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So it’s your job after all. That’s your real interest, your job.’
‘No. I couldn’t give a damn about my job.’
We were silent for a moment. Somehow the atmosphere had changed.
Eventually I said: ‘I had this strange encounter just now,’ and then I found myself telling Charlotte about meeting up with Christian.
When I finished, Charlotte lit a cigarette and said: ‘Let me get this straight. A friend rings you up. He wants to talk to you about his wife’s death, presumably he wants a bit of emotional support. So you end up dumping him in a hotel round the corner?’
‘He’s not a friend. He’s just a colleague.’
‘So what? He’s a human being, isn’t he?’
‘I didn’t want the sordid details. I didn’t want to know about his wife screwing some other guy.’
‘Why not? Too close to home?’
I didn’t say anything for a while. Charlotte stared at me defiantly.
I said: ‘Why are you seeing me? What’s in it for you?’
‘Why am I fucking you, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it matter? I like the way you look. I like your face. I like your body.’
‘That’s all there is to it? I’m some kind of sex object?’
‘Why not?’
She looked at me with amusement as she did up the buttons I’d undone on her shirt. I got up off the couch.
‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner. Shall I give you a call sometime during the week?’
‘Why not?’
I kissed her on the forehead and she said: ‘Give my regards to Marianne.’ I could hear her switching the TV back on as I walked down the stairs to the main entrance.
I got a cab home. It was Monday night and apart from a few other cabs there was hardly any traffic on the streets. London looked shabby and beautiful in its enormous emptiness, like a vast illuminated scrubland. I thought about Charlotte then I thought about Christian and his dead hedgehog. A childhood memory returned to me of a summer in the country. My cousin Peter had constructed a crossbow and we’d gone to the nearby woods and killed a rabbit – I can still recall its jerky, struggling death. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for a long time. I had the sensation it was something that had in fact happened to someone else, and not to me at all.
The bedroom door was shut but the light was still on. I didn’t go in immediately, though. Instead I went to the little room we use as an office, on the other side of the house. We’ve got a filing cabinet in there, for documents to do with the house, tax returns, birth certificates, that kind of stuff. There are also files full of Marianne’s personal stuff, although I’d never looked at them before. That’s what I wanted to look at now. Seeing Christian had given me stupid ideas.
Everything was arranged tidily: a file for old letters, a file for exhibition programmes, a file for this, a file for that. There were essays she’d written as a student in that typically rounded French handwriting. There were notebooks too, clearly labelled 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. They looked like diaries. I’d never known she’d kept a diary, never seen one about the house. I flicked through the one for last year. Some of the entries were in French, some in English, some a mix of the two. I read a few at random. Mostly they were about her work: ‘Big canvas. Thought I might move on to love but no it seems I’m stuck with this fear.’ There were notes about Jessica’s development: ‘Her linguistic skills different in French and English. English vocabulary wider but grasp of grammatical structure not as good as in French.’ I skimmed through to find any mention of me but in vain. I noticed that she’d marked every third or fourth entry with an asterisk. I wondered what that meant.
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