Collected Stories (43 page)

At the bottom of the stairs she was breathless, but they were both glad to be outside.

He liked walking in Paris: the streets lined with galleries, and the shops full of little objects – a city of people concerned with their senses. It seemed quiet, and stifled by good taste, compared to the vulgar rush, fury and expense of London, which had once again become fashionable. The walls of the London newsagents were lined with magazines and papers, full of the profiles of new artists, playwrights, songwriters, actors, dancers, architects – spitting, cynical, unsettling and argumentative in the new British way. Restaurants opened every day, and the chefs were famous. At midnight in Soho and Covent Garden, you had to push through crowds as if you were at a carnival. It was not something Ian could take an interest in until he had a love, and was settled.

As he walked, Ian saw a smartly dressed, middle-aged man coming towards him, holding the hand of a girl about the same age as his daughter. They were talking and laughing. Ian presumed the girl was late for school, and her father was taking her; there was nothing more important for the man to do. Close, encouraging, generous, available – Ian thought of the father he had wanted to be. He knew children needed to be listened to. But these were ideas he would have to revise; he could not, now, be his own father, in another generation. There would be a distance. He imagined his daughter saying, ‘Dad walked out. He was never there.’ He would do his best, but it was not the same; he had failed without wanting to.

Ian turned away and waited for Marina to catch up. Her head was bent, as it often was, and she wore a grey woolly hat, with a bobble. Over her long black dress she had on an ankle-length fur-collared overcoat, and trainers. When she was next to him, he took her arm.

He had become accustomed to her size. For days he seemed to forget they were having a child until, at unexpected moments, the terror of how overwhelming it could be seized him, along with the fact that they couldn’t escape one another. At the beginning they had talked of an abortion; but neither of them could have lived with such a crude negation of hope. They loved one another, but could they live together? This was the ordeal of his life. If he was unable to make this work, then not only had he broken up his family for nothing, but he was left with nothing – nothing but himself.

He thought of what she had to take on: him grumbling about how awful everything was, and groaning and yelling in his sleep, as if he were inhabited by ghosts; his fears and doubts; his sudden ecstasies; his foolishness, wisdom, experience and naivety; how much he made her laugh and how infuriated she could become. How much there was of other people! If falling in love could only be a glimpse of the other, who was the passion really directed at? They were living an extended, closer look at one another.

In a café nearby, where they had been going every day, she sat down while he stood at the bar to order breakfast. He spoke English in a low voice, as Marina was annoyed that he would not try to speak French. It was almost twenty-five years since he had studied the language, and the effort and his helplessness were humiliating.

He watched as the Parisians came in, knocked their coffee back, devoured a croissant, and hurried off to work. Marina sat with her hands under her stomach. The baby must have been awake, for he – they knew it was a boy – was kicking in her. At times, so thin and stretched had her stomach become, she felt she would split, as if the boy were trying to kick his way out. There were other anxieties – that the baby would be blind or autistic – as well as new pains, flutterings and pulses in her stomach. These were ordinary fears; he had been through this before with another woman, but did not like to remind her.

‘You look even more beautiful today,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Your eyes are brighter than for a long time.’

‘I’m surprised,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s been so difficult.’

‘A little, yes,’ he said. ‘But it’ll get easier.’

‘Will it?’

Of course he was ambivalent about having another child. He recalled sitting in the flat with Jane, having returned from the hospital with their daughter. He had taken a week off work and realised then how little time he and Jane had spent together over the past five years. Once, their fears had coincided; that had been love, for a while. He saw that they had had to keep themselves apart, for fear of turning into someone they both disliked. He did not want to use her words; she did not want his opinions inside her. The girl was, and remained, particularly in her rages, the expression or reminder of their incompatibility, of a difference they were unable to bridge. He was looking forward to seeing his daughter without Jane.

‘What’s bothering you today?’ Marina said, when they were drinking their coffee. ‘You stare into the distance for ages. Then you jerk your head around urgently, like a blackbird. I wonder what sort of worm it is you’ve spotted. But it’s nothing, is it?’

‘No. Only … I’ve got to talk to Anthony this afternoon … and I haven’t decided what to say.’

‘Or what to do.’

‘That’s right.’

She said, ‘You don’t want to go back?’

‘I don’t know.’ They buttered their croissants in silence. ‘Things are certainly starting to seem a little aimless here.’ He said, ‘Anthony’s changed.’

‘In what way?’

‘You don’t want me to go on about it, do you?’

She said, ‘But I love our talks. I love the sound of your voice … even if I don’t listen to every word.’

He told her they had run the company for themselves, for fun. They had never wanted to work excessive hours, or accept projects for the money alone. In the past five years they had made three feature films, one of which had been critically successful and made its money back. They had also produced a number of television documentaries. But recently, without discussing it fully with Ian, Anthony had taken on an expensive American comedy project, to be shot in London, with a petulant and talent-less director.

Anthony had made new friends in film and TV. He flew to Manchester United’s home matches and sat in the directors’ box. He went to New Labour dinners and, Ian presumed, donated money to the Party. He boasted of a new friend who had a trout stream at the end of his garden, though Ian doubted whether Anthony would recognise a trout unless it was served to him on a plate.

In the past twenty years Ian had come to know most of the people in his profession. He was a natural son-type, who liked to listen and admire; he collected mentors. Most of these friends, the majority of whom were from ordinary backgrounds, now lived in ostentatious luxury, like the great industrialists of the nineteenth century. They were the editors of newspapers, film directors, chairmen of publishing houses, heads of TV companies, senior journalists and professors. In their spare time, of which they seemed to have a lot, they became the chairmen of various theatre, film and arts boards. The early fifties in men was a period of frivolity, self-expansion and self-indulgence.

If Ian was perplexed, it was because that generation, ten years ahead of him, had been a cussed, liberated, dissenting lot. Somehow Thatcher had helped them to power. Following her, they had moved to the right and ended up in the centre. Their left politics had ended up as social tolerance and lack of deference. Otherwise, they smoked cigars and were driven to their country houses on Friday afternoons; sitting with friends overlooking their land, while local women worked in the kitchen, they fretted about their knighthoods. They were as thrilled as teenagers when they saw themselves in the newspapers. They wanted to be prefects.

‘They’ve lost their intellectual daring,’ Ian said.

‘There’s a bit of you that sees all that as the future,’ Marina said.

‘I’m aware that one has to find new things,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know what they should be.’

He looked at her. He felt ready to bring up the subject of his wife.

‘We’ll have to go back to London eventually,’ he said. ‘Quite soon, probably, and … face everything. I want to do that and I don’t want to do it.’

‘Where will we go?’ she said. ‘I’ve got nothing, your money is in your wife’s house, and you haven’t got a job.’

‘Well –’

He believed she trusted him and imagined he might know, despite everything, what he was doing. Looking at her sweet face now, and her long fingers tearing at a croissant, he contemplated her inner dignity. If he thought she was regal, it was not because she was imperious, but because she was still. She never fidgeted; there was nothing unnecessary in anything she did.

They had stopped talking of the future and what they might do to make a life together, as if they had turned into children and wanted to be told. They drifted about Paris, according to some implicit routine, looking at their guidebooks, visiting galleries, museums and parks, going to restaurants in the evening.

If he were to love her, he had to be transformed from a man who could not do this with Jane, to a man who could do it with Marina. And the transformation had to be rapid, before he lost her. If he could not get along with this woman, he couldn’t get along with any of them and he was done for.

‘Shall we go?’ she said.

He helped her into her coat. They crossed the Seine on the wooden bridge with the benches, where they sat facing the Pont Neuf, enjoying the view. He thought, then, that this was a better moment to start to talk about his wife; but he took Marina’s arm, and they moved on.

They knew the eager queue outside the Musée d’Orsay would not take long to go down. He was amazed by the thirst of the crowds, to look at good things.

Inside, Marina was walking somewhere when, adjacent to Rodin’s
Gates of Hell
, Ian found himself standing beside the tower of white stone that was
Balzac
. Ian had seen it many times since he was a teenager, but on this occasion it made him suddenly laugh. Surely, Balzac had been a flabby and dishevelled figure, obsessed by money rather than the immortality that Rodin had him gazing towards? As far as Ian could remember, Balzac had hurried through life and received little satisfaction; his ambition had been a little ridiculous – or perhaps, narrow and unreflective. Yet this was a man: someone who had taken action, converting experience into something powerful and sensual.

Rodin had certainly made Balzac a forceful figure. Ian was reminded of how afraid his own timid mother had been of his noise and energy; she was forever telling him to ‘calm down’. His being alive at all seemed to alarm her. With Marina, too, Ian had been afraid of his own furies, of his power, and of the damage he believed that being a man might do, and how it might make her withdraw her love. What evil had marauding men caused in the twentieth century! Hadn’t he damaged his wife? And yet, looking at Rodin’s idea of Balzac now, he thought: rather a beast than a castrated angel. If the tragedy of the twentieth century had been fascism and communism, the triumph was that both had been defeated. Without guilt we lose our humanity, but if there is too much of it, nothing can be redeemed!

Leaving the Musée D’Orsay he realised how quickly he was walking, and how revived and stimulated he was. Rodin and Balzac had done him good.

As they entered a restaurant, Marina pointed out that the place looked expensive, but he hurried her in, saying, ‘Let’s just eat – and drink!’

She looked at him questioningly, but he wanted to talk, keeping the Rodin in mind like a talisman, or a reminder of some suppressed childhood ecstasy. He could push against the world, and it would survive. He had probably read too much Beckett as a young man. He would have been better off with Joyce.

‘I know you don’t want to hear about this,’ he said, ‘but my wife …’

‘Yes? What is it?’

He had alarmed her already.

‘She is in hospital. She took pills and alcohol … and passed out. I believe she did it after I told her about the baby. Our baby. You know.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘Perhaps that would seem like a relief. But no. No.’ He went on, ‘It’s a terrible thing to do, to others, to our daughter in particular. I was surprised by it, as Jane never seemed to like me. She must be deranged at the moment. She will have to realise that she can’t cling to me for ever. I don’t want to go on about it. I wanted you to know, that’s all.’

For a time she was silent.

‘I feel sorry for her,’ she said. She started to weep. ‘To have lost a love that you thought would continue for ever, and to have to recover from that. How terrible, terrible, terrible!’

‘Yes, well –’

She said, ‘How do I know you won’t do the same to me?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How do I know you won’t leave me, as you left her?’

‘As if I make a habit of … that sort of thing?’

‘You’ve done it once. Perhaps more. How do I know?’

Outrage stopped his mouth. If he spoke he would say terrible things, and they would not understand one another. But he had to keep speaking to her.

She went on, ‘I fear, constantly, that you will tire of me and go back to her.’

‘I’ll never do that, never. Why should I?’

‘You know one another.’

He said, ‘After a certain age everything happens under the sign of eternity, which is probably the best way to do things. I haven’t got time now, for vacillation.’

‘But you are feeble,’ she said. ‘You don’t fight for yourself. You let people push you around.’

‘Who?’

‘Me. Anthony. Your wife. You were always afraid of her.’

‘That is true,’ he said. ‘I cannot stop wanting to rely on the kindness of others.’

‘You can’t survive on only that.’ She was not looking at him. ‘Your weakness confuses people.’

‘I’m not a fantasy, but a wretched human with weaknesses – and some strengths – like everyone else. But I want to be with you. That I am certain of.’ He paid the bill. ‘I need to go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I want to think about what I’m going to say to Anthony. I’ll see you at the apartment later.’

She took his hand. ‘It would be a shame if your intelligence and wit … if your ideas went to waste. Now kiss me.’

He went out, leaving her with her notebook. He walked about aimlessly in the cold. Soon he was in the café where he was to meet Anthony, an hour before he was due, drinking beer and coffee.