LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

he had bought tickets for a concert and then, due to a catalogue of mishaps, had failed to get there. He was still miles away when the concert was due to begin. When he realized he would not make it he had thought, calmly, that it didn’t really matter because in two hours the concert would be over and everything would be the same anyway, whether he had been there or not. Ultimately, it was futile, self-defeating, this logic of negative consolation, but it was difficult to be depressed while walking. He passed another Métro station and found, to his surprise, that this line was still running. Within seconds the last train arrived. As soon as it left the station the train pulled above ground. Suddenly the train was passing over the Seine and there was a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower, its reflection lying on the water like a pier. Everyone in the train was looking across at the Tower and Luke felt his relief turning to elation.

      It had been years since he had felt as wretched as he had at the party, as he had on afternoons in the Tuileries. He could not remember a time when he had felt so lonely, lost, but that isolation had now been redeemed by a simple Métro journey. The two sensations, the two states, were linked, dependent. You could not experience one without the other. He looked at the lighted windows, hoping to see a woman undressing or combing her hair in front of a dresser. He saw nothing like this but he was happy. No day was uniformly terrible. Even the worst days had moments of relative happiness. And if there were not these moments of happiness then there was always something to look forward to in the coming day. There may not be anything to get up for but there was always this urge to wake up. Like this, life went on, tolerable and intolerable, bearable and unbearable, slipping between these extremes. It was not a question of hope, it was part of the rhythm of the day, of the body. And it was part of this rhythm that tomorrow he would wake up with desolation lying over him like a thin blanket, would try to remain asleep a little longer, wanting to put off the claims of the day, to prolong the comforting sense of not yet being quite alive. But there might be a letter in the mail box and that would be enough to get him out of bed . . .

      As he got off the train and stepped up into the street he was already looking forward to checking his mail, to buying a paper and ordering coffee, to sitting in the same chair he always sat in, the chair he was heading for now, where he would have one drink before going back to the sad apartment, where he would undress, splash water on his face, and climb in his bed to sleep.

      The body has its own economy. Faced with extreme sexual recession Luke’s lust gradually diminished until, by the time of his birthday on 20 August, it had all but vanished. By then he had become sufficiently accustomed to loneliness that an absolute lack of birthday cards did not seem particularly demoralising. He spent the morning checking his mail box; in the afternoon he walked over to Invalides where football matches – kick-arounds, really – allegedly took place on Saturdays. The Esplanade was occupied by the usual assortment of sitters, readers and sleepers and it seemed unlikely that any kind of game ever took place on these traffic-surrounded squares of grass. He returned home, checked his mail and took a nap.

      In the evening he went to see Brief Encounter. It was a tradition: on his birthday he always saw Brief Encounter in one form or another. Usually he had to settle for video; seeing it on the big screen – albeit a tiny big screen – was enough of a treat to compensate for the fact that he was spending his birthday alone. He loved everything about the film: Milford Junction, the boring hubby with his crossword in the Times and The Oxford Book of English Verse, the woman with ‘the refined voice’ who works at the station buffet, the irritating Dolly who gabbles away and blights Laura and Alec’s final moments together. He loved it because it was a film in which people went to the cinema, and because it was a film about trains. Most of all he loved Celia Johnson, her hats, her face, her cracked porcelain voice: ‘This can’t last. This misery can’t last. Nothing lasts really, neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts long . . . There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this any more . . .’ What Luke loved more than anything, though, was Trevor Howard’s final ‘Goodbye’: the way he managed to strangle his whole life into that farewell (‘no one could have guessed what he was really feeling’), to make that last syllable weep tears of blood.

      After the film he walked across the Pont des Arts where four friends – two men, two women, French-speaking, younger than Luke – had prepared a lavish candle-lit dinner on one of the picnic tables. A lemon-segment moon hung in the blue-dark sky, glowed faintly in the river. The young people at the table were drinking wine from glasses, laughing, and when Luke had passed by he heard them singing: ‘Bon anniversaire, bon anniversaire . . .’

      Luke drank a beer over the zinc at a café. A sign behind the bar read ‘Ernest Hemingway did not drink here’. Then he went to the Hollywood Canteen, a burger place where you could sit at the bar and not feel – as you did in restaurants – like you were eating conspicuously alone. The burgers were named after Hollywood stars. Luke ordered a Gary Cooper, fries and a beer. The burger, when it arrived, tasted weird, not like beef at all. He mentioned it to the guy serving.

      ‘Mais c’est pas du boeuf, monsieur. C’est de la dinde.’

      ‘Dinde? Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ said Luke falteringly.

      ‘Turkey,’ said the grinning barman. ‘Turkey.’

      And in this way, Luke’s first summer out of England – and his twenty-seventh birthday – passed.

      It is impossible, obviously, to believe that anyone’s life is predestined – but who knows what is programmed into an individual’s chromosomes, into their DNA? Perhaps each of us, irrespective of class and other variables, is born with a propensity towards a certain kind of living. Each of us has a code which, in the right conditions, will be able to make itself utterly apparent; if an individual’s circumstances are far removed or totally at odds with that initial biological programming, it may hardly be able to make itself felt circumstantially – but all life long that individual will feel the undertow, the tug of a destiny rooted in biology, urging him, only slightly perhaps, away from the life he has. The dissatisfaction and pointlessness that a rich and successful man feels on contemplating all that he has achieved in life is perhaps the faint echo of an initial code that he has thwarted, evaded, but can never quite silence. But a certain way of life will enable you to get closer to that initial blurred blueprint. Perhaps this is what it means to live in truth, even a disappointed truth.

      In September the city began coming back to life. Traffic and noise increased. Delivery trucks blocked the streets. Tanned women hurried to work. Restaurants opened. Office workers returned to their favourite bistros and Luke returned to Invalides where a couple of games of six- or seven-a-side were in progress. He sat behind one of the goals and watched, gauging the standard of play, checking to see he wasn’t going to be helplessly out of his depth. He asked the young Algerian who was keeping goal if he could join in. After some discussion among the older players Luke was granted permission to play on the opposing side. Many of the players were extremely skilful and apart from an ongoing skirmish between a couple of Senegalese the game was played in just the right spirit: competitive without being aggressive. The fact that the ball bounced into traffic every five minutes – and threatened, on each occasion, to cause a three- or four-car pile-up – was an added attraction. Luke concentrated on not making mistakes and learning the names of his team-mates. A few called out his name but most settled for ‘Monsieur, monsieur!’ or ‘Monsieur l’anglais!’ It didn’t matter. Once he had made a couple of tackles, headed the ball and, crucially, hit the ball into the path of a passing BMW, Luke felt quite at home. After only half an hour, unfortunately, the police came and brought the game to an end.

      ‘C’est chaque semaine la même merde,’ Said, the little goal-keeper, explained. ‘On joue ici et puis les keufs se pointent et nous embarquent, ces bâtards!’

      Luke said goodbye to his team-mates, some of whom waved back or shook hands or smiled and called out ‘À la prochaine.’ He walked home happier than he had been at any moment since arriving in Paris: for the duration of the game and the brief interlude after it had ended, as they gathered up their belongings and pulled on jeans and changed shoes, he’d had friends – from Algeria, Africa, Poland and France.

      Back home he got a call from an English friend, Miles, who

Скачать книгу