by Sarah Winman
I sit wrapped up in a blanket on the balcony. I feel cold but cold is good because the ward is hot. Propped up on my knees is a black-and-white photograph. Me and Ellis in a bar in Saint-Raphaël in 1969, drinking pastis. We were nineteen. I remember how the photographer went around bars at night and handed out his card. You could go and look at the photographs in his studio the next day, and I did. Ellis thought it was a con so I went by myself. I saw this photograph as soon as I walked in, my sight completely drawn to where it was pinned amidst dozens of others. It’s agonizing how beautiful we are.
Tanned faces and Breton tops, we’d been in France for five days already, and felt like locals. We went to the same bar each night down on the beach. A broken-down shack that sold sandwiches during the day and dreams at night. Well, that’s what I used to say, and Ellis would squirm but he liked it really, I know he did. The bit about dreams. Who wouldn’t?
In the captured moment, we say Salut! Salut! and touch glasses, and the smell of aniseed rises sweet and inviting. Hey! a man’s voice makes us turn. FLASH! Eyes blinded momentarily, our backs against the bar. We squint. A business card is thrust into my hand. The photographer says, Demain, oui? I smile. Merci, I say. It’s a con, whispers Ellis. You’re a bloody con, I say.
The smell of grilled octopus lured us out onto the terrace, an area of hessian matting that gave way to the sand. We stood looking out over an unstirring black sea that merged seamlessly with night. Lights from fishing boats swayed elegantly on the swell, and Françoise Hardy sang in the background “Tous les garçons et les filles.” I lit a cigarette and felt as if I was in a film. The air fizzed. I remember telling all this to Annie once, and Ellis couldn’t remember a bloody thing. He’s so disappointing at times. Couldn’t remember the fishing boats, or Françoise Hardy, or how warm the evening was, and how the air fizzed—
Fizzed? he said.
Yes, I said. Fizzed with possibility or maybe excitement. I said to him that just because you can’t remember doesn’t mean the past isn’t out there. All those precious moments are still there somewhere.
I think he’s embarrassed by the word precious, said Annie.
Maybe, I said, looking at him.
* * *
• • •
I POUR OUT more wine and stand up. Look out across the cityscape and think London is so pretty. Music rises from a car below, its windows are down. David Bowie, “Starman.” The car drives off and the night fades to silence.
* * *
• • •
BACK AT THE HOSPITAL in G’s room. I hold his hand and I whisper to him, Cadmium Orange, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Violet. He stirs. I stroke his head. Oxide of Chromium, Naples Yellow Light. This is my lullaby of color to him. I sense someone standing in the doorway and I turn round.
You’re up, I say. I’m happy to see you.
Is this G? asks Chris.
You’re not seeing him at his best, I’m afraid.
What were you saying to him? asks Chris.
Names of paint. He was an artist.
You’re sweet, he says.
And you’re looking good, I say.
I have a T-cell, he says.
Shut up, I say, or everyone’ll want one.
He laughs. They think I’m doing better.
I can see you are.
I was angry with you.
I know.
But I miss talking with you.
I’m a dilemma, I say.
My friends have sent me a cake, he says. I feel like eating today.
Is this an invitation?
An olive branch, he says.
* * *
• • •
THE CAKE IS GOOD. Chocolate, not too sweet, and that awful word, moist. We eat half of it—me, most of it—and I feel bloated, and lie back in the chair and put my feet up on his bed. I’m embarrassed by my socks. Green terry toweling, the ones I wear when I clean the bathroom floor, fuck knows how they ended up in my good drawer.
Here, I say, hoping to distract him from looking at my socks. I hand him the photograph I was looking at three nights before.
This is me, I say. I’m nineteen. 1969.
He puts on his glasses and holds the photograph close.
You look so young, he says.
Ta, I say.
Who’s that? he asks.
Ellis, I say.
Were you together?
I think so, I say. We were then.
Where was it taken?
In France, in the South.
You look cool.
We do, don’t we?
Was he your first love?
Yes. Only one, probably.
Is he dead?
Oh God no. (Oh God no, not everyone dies, I want to say to him.)
Where’s he now?
In Oxford. He has a wife. Annie.
Do you still see him?
No, I say.
He looks at me. Why?
Because . . . (And I realize I don’t know how to answer this.) Because we lost contact. I lost contact.
You could get back in contact.
Yes. I could.
Don’t you want him to know about this? Are you ashamed?
No! Not that, I say. No. It’s complicated.
But it isn’t, though, is it? Life isn’t anymore, you told me that. All this makes life simple.
It’s complicated, I say again. And there is an edge to my voice that stops him pursuing it.
He picks at my sock instead.
I know, I say. Awful.
Come on. Let’s carry on with your letter, I say.
I don’t want to write it today, he says. I want to know about this, and he waves the photograph in front of my face.
Oh blimey, I say, and I take my feet off the bed and I sigh and I stretch out my back.
And he says, You look like you’re about to lift something heavy.
Ha! That is telling, I say.
* * *
• • •
FROM THE MOMENT I saw him, I wanted to kiss him. That’s my well-practiced and preferred introduction to a conversation about Ellis. I used to wonder if my desire for him came out of displacement. My need to join with someone, my readiness to love. The consequence of grieving, even for a father who was, by then, as distant to me as the southern sky.
I have an image of Ellis and me in Oxford, standing at the window in my bedroom. It is night. The summer air is clammy, our chests are bare and we’re wearing only our pajama bottoms. Our age? Fifteen, maybe. The window is open and we look out across the overgrown churchyard, and darkness has its own smell back then, and the smell is fecund and shitty, grassy and exciting, and we’re listening out for the sounds of sex that rise from the crosses because that’s where the drunks go for a moment of tenderness.
I’m nervous. And I can’t look at him. And I reach down into his pants and hold him. I’m terrified he’ll push me away but he doesn’t. He moves me into the shadows and lets me wank him off. Afterward he’s shy and thanks me and asks me if I’m all right. Never better, I say, and we laugh.
That was the start of our private world. A place where we didn’t discuss who we were or what we were, just experimented with the other’s body, and for years that was enough.
Sometimes, I wondered if his attraction to me was because I was the only one around, a release, of sorts. But when we were eighteen, he suggested a double date. We took the girls to a film, snogged them, and got them onto a bus home. Afterward, he and I came back to my room and got naked as if it was the most normal ending to an evening, like a strong coffee or an After Eight mint. Did I know I was gay? Yes, by then. But such compartmentalizing was irrelevant. We had each other and neither wanted more.
We got to France in August 1969 by sheer chance. A journalist I worked with at the Oxford
Times went down to a villa there every year, and two months before he was due to go he had to cancel. He’d hardly finished telling me the story, when I said, I’ll go! I’ll take the room, and he was so amused by my enthusiasm, he made phone calls to France that very day to confirm the booking, and told me everything I needed to know about getting the train.
I raced to the Car Plant and met Ellis after shift. What’s happened? he said. We’re going to France, I said. What? he said. France, I said. France, France, and I started to poke him and he was all reserved, all—Stop it, not here, people are looking.
But the summer couldn’t come fast enough. The weeks of waiting brought about a change between us, what I can only describe as a softening. The knowledge that what lay ahead was an opportunity for us to be different.
I remember standing on the ferry deck, as Dover receded. Our hands on the rail, my little finger touching his. The excitement of travel churning in my guts, an urge to kiss him, but of course, I couldn’t. Suddenly, his finger moved against my skin. The electricity in my body could have lit up the fucking ship.
At Calais, we boarded le train rapide a little before eight. Just being the other side of the Channel, I remember, was so incredible. We’d never traveled for so long or so far. We left our compartment and joined others to smoke out in the crowded corridor, watching the changing shape of the country as we leaned out of windows, the air upon our faces fast and thrilling. As night fell, we bunked down in our cramped sleeper. Ellis sketched and I read. And I could hear his pencil moving across the page, and I felt so excited for him and for us, and every now and then a cheese baguette and a cup of red wine yo-yoed between us, and we felt so sophisticated, we really did. At Dijon, we were joined by a rude salesman who turned out the light without consulting us. So ending our first glorious night.
I remember dozing to the rhythm of the train. Listening to nocturnal sounds of railroad life as we carved through Lyon, Avignon, Toulon, before emerging into the Saint-Raphaël morning sun, where a taxi was waiting to take us into Agay and the Villa Roche Rose, our home for the next nine days. In the car we looked out and couldn’t speak. Our mouths silenced by the intense color of the sky.
Our room was white and spacious, with two single beds that faced pale blue shutters, and the smell of a recently mopped terracotta floor, a strong hint of pine. I pulled back the shutters and sunlight streaked across the room. The red rock of the Massif de l’Esterel dominated the distance, window boxes of tuberose claimed the fore. We’d never seen anything more beautiful, I remember. And I thought of Dora in that moment, and I said, Your mum—
And he said, I know, as he always did. An instinctive closing of a door, too painful to open.
Our landlady, Madame Cournier, provided us with hand-drawn maps of the area, and we cycled straightaway into Saint-Raphaël to claim a modest space on a packed beach, our old gray towels embarrassed amidst the plethora of multicolored ones. We took up that position for days, and under a sheen of coconut oil our skin sizzled and browned, and we cooled off and healed in the weak drift of a Mediterranean tide.
I felt as if nothing else had previously existed. As if the colors and smells of this new country eradicated memory, as if every day rolled back to Day One, bringing with it the chance to experience it all again. I’d never felt more myself. Or more in tune to what I was and what I was capable of. A moment of authenticity when fate and blueprint collide and everything is not only possible, but within arm’s reach. And I fell in love. Madly, intoxicatingly so. I think he may have, too. Just for a moment. But I never really knew.
We were in our bar down on the beach, drunk on a cocktail of pastis and Françoise Hardy, and it was late, and we could hear glasses being collected behind us.
Come on, he said, and we left the terrace and felt the cool of the sand on our bare feet. We continued along the beach away from our bikes, crept over the rocks at the far side of the bay, just as the road headed out toward Frejus Plage. It was sheltered and hidden from the voices that carried along the promenade above, and we chose to settle by a large rock, equidistant between the road and the sea. He looked about and began to quickly undress. It was so unlike him, I started to laugh. He kicked off his shorts and ran naked into the sea, white arse bobbing. He swam away from shore, rolled onto his back and floated. I stripped off hurriedly and followed him in. I swam toward him, dived under and pulled him down and kissed him. There was no struggle. We surfaced, laughing, and we turned toward each other and I felt his chest on mine. Felt his leg wrap around mine, and in that moment, away from home, I could see it in his eyes. Everything was different.
Suddenly, we were stumbling through the shallows, fell on top of one another in the damp sand. The intoxicating thrill of being drunk, of being naked, of being public surged through us. And, for a while, we didn’t move because neither of us knew what the next move should be.
We crawled back into the shadow of the jutting rock, hands clasping one another’s cocks, gorging on one another’s mouths, until the proximity of the road above distracted us and made us nervous. Car lights flickered across the sand as traffic turned left, momentarily revealing our entwined legs and feet. We kept stopping to listen out for gendarmes who patrolled the beaches at night, and soon the fear of being caught overwhelmed us, and we hurriedly dressed, ran back along the beach to the Promenade where we’d left our bikes.
We didn’t stop at the bakery, didn’t buy the warm brioche that previously brought an end to our nights, we just kept on cycling, holding hands along deserted roadways, sometimes, dangerously close to the dark edge of the coast road. And sometimes, oncoming traffic suddenly appeared and swerved back into lane, unsuspecting that anyone else might be traveling in the opposite direction.
At the villa, we left our bikes at the side gate. He took out a key and we crept into the hallway. We avoided the middle stair, the creaking stair, and swiftly entered our room. The shutters were closed, and the air was still. Just us, alone, behaving like strangers. I was so nervous I could barely swallow. We were two people unsure what to do, relying solely on instinct.
I want to, I said. Me too, he said.
He locked the door. Made sure the keyhole was covered by the fall of a towel. We undressed separately, unbearably shy. I don’t know what to do, he said. Me neither, I said. I lay down and opened my legs. I pulled him on top of me and told him he had to go slow.
* * *
• • •
THE SOUNDS of breakfast rose from downstairs.
Le café est prêt! shouted Madame Cournier.
I awoke hungry. I slipped out from under the sheet and walked to the window. I opened the shutters and the warm breeze wrapped around my body. I looked back at him sleeping. I wanted to wake him. I wanted him all over again.
I moved away from the window and pulled on a pair of swimming shorts. I knelt by the bed and thought, he’ll wake up soon and he’ll wonder what happened last night. And he’ll wonder what it means he’s become. And he’ll feel shame and the creeping shadow of his father. I know this because I know him. But I won’t let him.
He stirred. He opened his eyes. He sat up disorientated and scratched the salt in his hair. And there it was—all of a sudden—the reddening, the bewilderment, the withdrawing. But I caught it before it settled. Last night was amazing, I said. Amazing, amazing, amazing. And I kissed my way down his stomach—amazing—till he filled my mouth, and we smothered one another’s coming till we could barely breathe.
The morning took us back along the coast road, past Boulouris and the red dirt cliffs dotted with bougainvillea. He slowed and dropped behind. He got off his bike and left it at the side of the road. He walked out to the tip of the promontory, overlooking the bay. I cycled back to him and left my bike next to his. Fishing boats were out, the sea was still, the glare of the sun, white. We sat down on the ledge.
What is it? I said.
What if we don’t go back home? he
said.
You serious? I said.
What if we don’t. Could we work?
Sure. We could pick grapes. Work in a hotel, a café maybe. People do. We could.
What about Mabel? he said.
Mabel would understand, I said.
I put my hand on his back and he didn’t push it away.
You could paint and I could write, I said.
He looked at me. How incredible would that be? I said. Right, Ell?
And for the four remaining days—the ninety-six remaining hours—we mapped out a future away from everything we knew. When the walls of the map were breached, we gave one another courage to build them again. And we imagined our home an old stone barn filled with junk and wine and paintings, surrounded by fields of wildflowers and bees.
I remember our final day in the villa. We were supposed to be going that evening, taking the sleeper back to England. I was on edge, a mix of nerves and excitement, looking out to see if he made the slightest move toward leaving, but he didn’t. Toiletries remained on the bathroom shelves, clothes stayed scattered across the floor. We went to the beach as usual, lay side by side in our usual spot. The heat was intense and we said little, certainly nothing of our plans to move up to Provence, to the lavender and light. To the fields of sunflowers.
I looked at my watch. We were almost there. It was happening. I kept saying to myself, he’s going to do it. I left him on the bed dozing, and went out to the shop to get water and peaches. I walked the streets as if they were my new home. Bonjour to everyone, me walking barefoot, oh so confident, free. And I imagined how we’d go out later to eat, and we’d celebrate at our bar. And I’d phone Mabel and Mabel would say, I understand.
I raced back to the villa, ran up the stairs and died.
Our rucksacks were open on the bed, our shoes already packed away inside. I watched him from the door. He was silent, his eyes red. He folded his clothes meticulously, dirty washing in separate bags. I wanted to howl. I wanted to put my arms around him, hold him there until the train had left the station.
