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 had lived in Paris for ten years. He had been away all summer, he said, was glad to hear that Luke was in town. He invited Luke to dinner on Monday, the first such invitation he had received in almost two months.
Miles lived in the Eleventh, a part of the city Luke had never visited before. He turned up half an hour early so that he could explore a little – and decided immediately that this was where he wanted to live.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ said Miles, opening another bottle of wine (he was finishing off the first as Luke stepped through the door). Ten years ago, when he and Renée, his wife, had moved here there had been nothing. They had bought this place because they needed space for their kids and this was the only part of central Paris they could afford. It was a neglected working-class area but in the last five years it had begun to change. Following the well-established trajectory of neighbourhood-enhancement the world over, artists had moved in, a few galleries had opened, then bars, clubs, restaurants, more expensive galleries, more bars, more clubs. Rents were going up. As befitted a man who had anticipated a trend Miles explained this dismissively, contemptuously, even though these developments – for which he was partly responsible – suited him nicely. He was fifty, the father of two children. He had lived in Afghanistan and claimed to have slept with his sister even though, as far as Luke recalled, he had no sister. He lived on red wine, cigarettes, coffee. He drank beer like water, to clean out his system. Food wasn’t important to him. Mainly he ate omelettes. Luke had met him in London but had not seen him for two years. If he looked only slightly worse now that was because he had long ago achieved the look of definitive decrepitude that would last him a lifetime. Luke had assumed that Renée would be around, but there was no sign of her or the kids. Come to that, there was no sign of dinner.
‘They’re off at something at the school,’ said Miles. ‘Some loony play or other. Would you like another drink, Luke?’ It was one of those houses, Luke realized, which relied on its own internally generated chaos to function happily.
‘Are we thinking of eating something?’ said Luke.
‘How about an omelette? Would you like an omelette?’
‘Perfect.’
And what an omelette it was: an egg base with everything in the fridge thrown on top, in no particular order (the onions went in last, as an afterthought) with the flame turned permanently to maximum. Miles was a messy chef. In the process of cracking the eggs he smashed the cup he was banging them into. By the time they sat down to eat, the cooker, work surfaces and floor were awash with debris.
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking the kitchen,’ said Luke sagely. Very sagely, as it happened, for at the last moment Miles had emptied half a pot of it into the pan.
‘Quite. How’s the omelette?’
‘Great,’ said Luke. ‘Almost completely inedible.’
‘Marvellous. You know, I’m so happy you’re here. Would you like some more wine?’ Luke held out his glass. His vision was becoming somewhat slurred. Miles, meanwhile, contradicting his earlier claim, said that there would be no problem finding an apartment to rent in this neighbourhood.
‘Really?’
‘We’ll find a place tomorrow. I’ll put the word around. You can get a place easily. I’ve got two or three in mind already. People are going away the whole time on some loony expedition or other.’
‘Really? That’s great because I’ve got to move out of the dump I’m in at the moment in a couple of weeks.’
‘We’ll sort it out tomorrow.’
‘And you mentioned earlier about maybe being able to get a job at some warehouse.’
‘Oh yes we’ll do that tomorrow as well.’
‘Really?’ said Luke, conscious that his side of the conversation was coming to consist entirely of ‘reallys’.
‘Yes. Really,’ said Miles. In a moment of surging clarity Luke saw his future as fixed, settled.
In the morning it looked blurred, as unsettled as his stomach. After the omelette and more wine they had gone out to a bar and drunk a few beers. Luke had walked home, not caring about anything. Now he felt awful, hung over, certain that Miles would have forgotten about both the job and the apartment. For the first time his circumstances offered a flattering reflection of how he felt. His mouth was parched, his head ached. It was a Tuesday morning and there was nothing to get up for except to wash the smell of smoke from his hair. When he had done that he dressed, checked his mail box – empty except for a menu from a new pizza pit – and went out for breakfast.
It was drizzling or not drizzling, warm. Once he had drunk his coffee he could think of nothing else to do but go back to his apartment. On the way he bought an English newspaper, a third of the size and three times the price of the non-export version. From now on, Luke resolved (as he did most mornings), I will buy French papers.
The phone was ringing when he stepped through the door of his apartment.
‘Hello?’
‘Good morning, Luke.’
‘Hi Miles.’
‘I’m not waking you am I?’
‘No. I’m kind of hung over though.’
‘Have you ever said yes to a single joy? Then, Luke, you have said yes to
all
woe. Besides, we hardly drank anything.’
‘I think it was the omelette.’
‘Ha! Now, Luke, I’m afraid nothing has come up yet on the apartment front but I do have the number of that loony who runs the mad warehouse. His name is Lazare Garnier. You should give him a call. He lived in America. He speaks English, or American. That’s to say, he
swears
in American. Have you got a pen?’
By a fluke Lazare himself answered the phone when Luke called. He was furious because Didier had once again failed to turn up on a day when there was a massive backlog of urgent orders.
‘Ah bonjour. Miles Stephens m’a dit,’ Luke began, not very impressively. ‘Excusez-moi. Parlez-vous anglais?’
‘Sure.’
‘Ah, yes. My name is Luke Barnes and I’ve been told by Miles Stephens—’
‘Who?’
‘Miles Stephens.’
‘Who the fuck is that?’
‘He—’
‘Oh that English guy. The guy who lived in Afghanistan?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And?’
‘He said that it might – that at certain times you took on people to work, packing. I wondered if there were any—’
‘Where are you phoning from?’
‘Um, the First.’
‘What time can you get here?’
‘Today?’
‘No, next year. When the hell do you think I mean?’
‘In about an hour and a half.’
‘Make it just the half,’ said Lazare. ‘And you’ve got the job.’ With that he hung up.
We were all working flat out that day. Lazare was in a temper (that is, he was in a good mood), bawling out orders, yelling at people for not having done things he hadn’t told them needed doing. When Luke knocked on the office door Lazare was shouting at a client on the phone. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and yelled at Luke to come in. Luke didn’t hear. He waited, knocked harder.
‘Oui.’ Luke opened the door. Stood there.
‘Monsieur Garnier?’
‘
Vous attendez quoi là? Un visa? Entrez . . . Attendez. Non,’ he said into the phone, ‘Je parle avec une espèce de con qui vient d’entrer . . . Ne quittez pas.’ He cupped his hand over the phone again. ‘Asseyez-vous, asseyez-vous,’ he gestured to Luke and then turned his anger back to the phone. ‘Écoutezmoi. Si vous êtes con . . . Allo? Qu’est-ce que vous faites? Il a raccroché, ce con!’ With that he crunched the phone down and glared at Luke who had not yet sat down. ‘Et maintenant, pour nous monsieur c’est quoi?’
‘My name is Luke Barnes. We spoke on the phone this morning about my coming in to work.’ Luke advanced into the room and held out his hand. Lazare waved him away.
‘So get out there and start working. Bernard will tell you what to do.’ He swivelled round, picked up the phone and began jabbing numbers.
Bernard introduced Luke to everyone. He was tall, confidently nervous. He was wearing jeans – which he almost never wore – and the blue work shirt which, as it grew older and softer, would be reserved for evenings when no wear and tear could be expected. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. He had that brittle friendliness of the Englishman adapting to a life larger than the one he had so far encountered. He seemed too tall to carry off the manners that he had evolved to diminish his awkwardness. Perhaps I didn’t notice these things at the time. It is hard to say, difficult to preserve those first impressions because they are being changed by second – and third and fourth – impressions even as they are registering
as
impressions. Even when we recall with photographic exactness the way in which someone first presented themselves to us, that likeness is touched by every trace of emotion we have felt up to –
and
including – the moment when we are recalling the scene. He was tall, thin. He looked English – something in the set of his mouth. His face was angular, the jawline pronounced. He was handsome, attractive; as yet his circumstances had played almost no part in determining his expression. You could not yet read his history in his face; his looks were a fact of biology. The eyes were blue, full of looking, but – how else to say it? –
behind
the blue (or am I amending that first meeting in the light of what came later?) there was a remoteness, almost a refusal.