Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  “I think it’s going to start,” Berreby said.

  “Wait, if we’re outside the frame how do we hope to accomplish anything?” Natalie asked.

  * * *

  By the time the barricades went up Berreby had already said his goodbyes. It was still relatively early, but he had an appointment in another room with limestone walls, high ceilings, and champagne on ice.

  Natalie, though, had to stay. She wandered the Latin Quarter in her high heels, still wearing Karen Wright’s red evening gown, and watched as students from the Sorbonne unearthed cobblestones.

  Christopher and Gerrard were released at nine pm. A lot had been happening while they’d been trapped under the police museum. Tens of thousands had taken to the streets demanding the release of all the prisoners from the May 3 protest, but this only made things more difficult for them as the police couldn’t be seen to back down. When they did start releasing the students, first the boys and girls who were from good families (Natalie’s dorm neighbor was among the first to go), they did so in secret. The police would come for a student in the middle of the night and lead him or her away from the cell block.

  When they came for Christopher, when the guard told him that a mild British gentleman didn’t belong in jail with ultra-leftist brats, Christopher objected.

  If they were going to let Christopher go they had to release Gerrard at the same time. Christopher said that Gerrard was mentally ill, and that it was Christopher’s job to look after him. Gerrard couldn’t take care of himself, and would surely not survive in jail on his own.

  The police, it turned out, were more than pleased to be rid of both of them. Christopher had merely confirmed a conclusion they’d reached on their own.

  Opening brown envelopes by the prison gate Chris found his pocket watch was broken and his wallet empty, but he hadn’t been robbed. His francs were in a separate plastic bag with a strange zipper along the top.

  Gerrard took a pack of cigarettes out of his envelope and held it up to the light. Natalie had given him the packet nearly two months earlier during the March 22 occupation at Nanterre. Gerrard opened the packet, slipped out a cigarette, and then offered it to Chris who nodded and took it. Christopher said he didn’t smoke. He’d tried to take up the habit during the war, but it hadn’t worked out. Still, he accepted the cigarette, leaned in when Gerrard struck a match, and then let out coughs and gasps.

  “Terrible,” Chris said.

  Gerrard took the cigarette from Chris, tried a puff himself. It was stale. He dropped the thing and stamped on it, and then put the packet back in the envelope.

  * * *

  As they approached Rue des Écoles, Gerrard recognized Natalie from behind. He recognized her shoulders and neck, her short blond hair, the way she held herself, the angle she made with her arms as she let her hands dangle below her hips. She was wearing a red dress held up by thin shoulder straps and stood facing Rue Saint-Jacques to the west. A crowd of students passed in front of her through the intersection, running from something.

  Gerrard came up close to her, looked at the hair on the back of her neck, and Christopher walked to the opposite side of the street to find out what was happening. Gerrard put his hand on Natalie’s bare shoulder and when she turned to see who it was he offered up his envelope, tipped it so that the packet of Gitanes fell into his open hand.

  Natalie didn’t seem pleased to see him at first; she didn’t smile and she kept her arms folded defensively, but then she put her hands on her hips and accepted a cigarette when Gerrard tapped one out for her. Finally she made eye contact when she leaned forward and put the tip of her cigarette into the flame from the match Gerrard was holding.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” Gerrard said.

  “I heard you were arrested,” she said.

  “We just got out, actually.”

  “We?”

  When Gerrard turned to introduce her to Christopher Robin Milne he found that the older man was gone. Chris was trying to cross Rue Saint-Jacques, but was instead being swept along with the crowd toward the Sorbonne. Impetuously Gerrard went after him. He took Natalie by the hand and dragged her with him into the crowd, but when they reached the intersection of Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Jacques the crowd folded back on itself. People were pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder as everyone was trying to turn around as they came up against a police barricade at Rue des Écoles.

  “We should stay together,” Gerrard said.

  Standing on the edge of Rue Saint-Jacques, looking over the heads of the students at Haussmann-style apartment buildings with wrought iron guardrails and neoclassical limestone façades, Gerrard realized he was standing in mud. The cream-colored limestone façades were set into soft earth, and the students had to work hard as they moved, step by step.

  They caught up with Christopher Robin behind a pile of bricks. He was behind a student barricade on Boulevard Saint-Germain, pulling cobblestones up out of the mud and directing students on where to place each brick.

  When Gerrard introduced Natalie to Christopher she offered her hand. She’d lost her shoes. She looked vulnerable standing in the mud between the upturned Renault convertibles and Peugeot sedans that formed a tricolor barrier. They were stooped behind a growing pile of bricks, behind the barricades, and she was shivering in her sleeveless red gown.

  “Your skin is going to blister from the gas. You need a jacket, or better yet, to get out of here,” Christopher said, and he offered her his trench coat. Natalie handed Gerrard her paperback as she put her arms in the sleeves.

  Gerrard wandered away from them, stepping out from behind the barricade and onto the sidewalk exactly when the police launched the next round of tear gas grenades. The police were still at a distance as the green smoke spread across the cobblestones, but Gerrard couldn’t move away fast enough in the mud.

  The air was green and Gerrard was seeing dots, splotches. He moved his finger as if to connect the dots. He doubled over coughing, and that started him gagging and then vomiting.

  It was Christopher who rescued him. He ran out into the street, caught Gerrard around the collar, and dragged him back behind the barricade.

  The police arrived in their leather rain slickers and kepis, with their nightsticks and more tear gas grenades. They came down the street in formation, running in a line and shouting in unison, but as impressive as they were they had to stop. A hail of cobblestones greeted them and they fell back a meter, and then set up a grenade launcher. They let fly their grenades, again and again, and one of the students, a boy wearing glasses with black plastic frames and a neat button-up dress shirt, fell with his hands over his head. Gerrard couldn’t tell what, if anything, had hit him, but he could see blood running down the boy’s face. The police had hurt one of them.

  They heard the police coming. They were yelling instructions, telling the students to disperse, and Natalie grabbed a paving stone. The two of them, Gerrard and Natalie, stood up so that they could see over the pile of bricks and past the overturned automobiles. A young man whose blond hair was just visible under his police helmet was very close, and Natalie took aim and moved her arm. The brick hit the young cop in the face. Gerrard heard the boy’s nose break, and watched his blood spew out.

  “That was very satisfying,” Natalie said.

  Someone handed Natalie a wet green towel for her to breathe through. She was still shivering even under Christopher’s trench coat, but she didn’t let her shivering stop her as she threw another cobblestone. The two of them heaved one stone after another, and Gerrard’s arm grew tired, but he went on throwing. Something was moving through him, through them both.

  19

  When the desk clerk appeared, bleary-eyed but able to work, Christopher asked him if there was a shoe store nearby as he’d lost a loafer in the mud around the Sorbonne. Then he paid with a traveler’s check and took a key for a room on the fifth floor. Gerrard had been right that the hotel was inexpensive, but there was little else that recommended it. />
  Christopher decided to get a drink at the bar before he went to his room. He didn’t have to worry about his luggage because he’d lost his bags when he’d been arrested.

  Chris ordered a Scotch whiskey, received it in a crystal tumbler, and listened to the conversation at the next table.

  Three bellhops were sharing fantasies about a woman on the third floor—describing how they could take turns making it with her. She was apparently asking every man on the staff for his services.

  “She’s like Brigitte Bardot on a bicycle,” said one.

  “How’s that?” asked one of the others.

  “Liberated. The strike is blowing wind in her hair,” replied the first one.

  “But she’s the one blowing.” The third bellhop got a laugh.

  Chris assumed they were on strike. He wondered why they’d come in at all. Shouldn’t they have hit the streets rather than turning up at the hotel to play chess and smoke one cigarette after another? Christopher didn’t understand what was motivating them, but sitting at the bar, watching them, he understood even less his own motivation.

  Paris wasn’t right for him. He wasn’t a radical. He wanted none of the intrigue and nothing to do with the theories and fantasies of bellhops or college students. He’d been to a single socialist meeting in his life and that had been at Cambridge. A friend of his roommate’s, a rather portly student who distinguished himself from the others by wearing a beard and, like Chris’s father, smoking a cherry wood pipe, had asked if Christopher understood what socialism was all about. Christopher had admitted that he did not. He was not exactly sure of the definitions and facts involved.

  “Why not find out? Come to a meeting. Discover it for yourself.” The roommate’s friend, perhaps his name had been John, had unfolded his arms in a gesture of expansive welcome.

  The Cambridge socialists had quite nearly put Christopher off equality, fraternity, and liberty for good. They met in a pub near Cambridge called the Hogshead where they could drink lager and tea and proclaim absurdities.

  The war in Europe was an imperialist war fought by competing imperialist powers and as an imperialist country England was fighting for British imperialism and nothing more. Real hope for the world revolution lay in India. Socialists would put it over big in India.

  Chris had asked if, after the revolution, there would still be teatime. He hadn’t liked the idea of putting things over, and especially hadn’t liked the notion of putting whatever it was over big.

  Even now Christopher felt he didn’t fit into revolution. He was conventional, and it seemed to him that no revolution would abide him. No revolution could abide a man with a bookshop and a wife. And no revolution could really compete with the pleasure to be found on a garden path.

  Christopher took a swig of whiskey and in a short while he was drunk.

  Christopher even enjoyed the irrational aspects of owning a bookstore, the tricks and trade-offs. Even the fact that he had to sell trashy books in order to make a living seemed like the best thing to him. Selling such rot insured that he wouldn’t become too pretentious or literary.

  To be less than pure is what it meant to be grown-up. How had he allowed himself to be drawn into this childish dream? He’d fought the police on the streets as if he had something to prove. Did he want action, a battle?

  He was still a bit drunk when he called Abby from a payphone in the hotel lobby. She was glad to hear his voice and wanted to know what had happened. He told her that he’d been in jail and tried to explain that he’d attacked a police officer and why, but he found that if he really wanted her to know about it he had to talk about the war instead.

  Christopher had dropped out of Cambridge to join the army after seeing how London had suffered under German bombardment. The city seemed a long way off, but seeing the destruction, the ruined office buildings and walk-up flats, in the newspaper forced Christopher to confront the reality of what was happening. He’d had to do something to protect his home after seeing the photographs. He and his father set up booby traps and roadblocks along the road to Cotchford Farm.

  The Germans never arrived there, the booby traps had been pointless, but even so it had been right to act. For while if the Germans had managed to take the Sussex coast they would have surely swept past his barbed wire and “dragon teeth” without any bother, the useless gesture had helped Christopher develop a willingness to resist. As absurd as his booby traps had been, they were part of a necessary first step.

  After he talked to Abby he stopped worrying about the demonstrations, the police, and the boy who had brought him here, and let himself enjoy the tidiness of his hotel room and his view of the Parisian streets. He lifted the heavy frame windowpane, took a breath of air, and smelled the tear gas blowing along the boulevard.

  * * *

  Natalie brought Christopher his loafer around midnight. She knocked on the door to his room, handed him the shoe when he opened the door hotel room, and then let herself in and climbed onto the windowsill. She stood with her head against the ceiling. She had a bottle of gin in one hand and her copy of Sagan’s book in the other.

  She didn’t know exactly what she wanted. On page seven of Sagan’s novel Cecile admitted that she usually preferred her father’s friends to the boys her age. The men of forty would speak to Cecile courteously and tenderly.

  Natalie wondered if Christopher was looking at her legs. She stretched and turned her attention outward, through the window.

  Paris was dark. She could see street lamps, dots of light, but the buildings and cars, the face of Paris, was occluded.

  She stood up in the window and then walked along the edge of the room, fitting her bare feet on the molding. She climbed up into Christopher’s closet, pulled herself onto a shelf above the wire clothes hangers, sat down, and then turned to look at him from above.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked.

  “I’ll have to get a cup,” Christopher said.

  Gerrard had asked her to fetch Christopher for him, to bring back the man who was famous for having once been a child. Gerrard thought he could help start a new story or dream, but Natalie was still trying to act out the second line on page seventy-one of Bonjour Tristesse:

  For the first time in my life I had known the intense pleasure of analyzing another person, manipulating that person toward my own ends. It was a new experience.…

  She wanted to figure out Christopher for herself. She was climbing around his hotel room in order to discover the boundaries around him.

  Christopher handed her a paper cup that he’d found by the sink and then handed Natalie an ashtray.

  “Gerrard says you can help change things,” she said.

  “What things?”

  Natalie watched Christopher Robin’s eyes, and then pulled the hem of her red gown up just a bit so she could cross her legs.

  “Do you believe in destiny?”

  “No,” Christopher said.

  “Do you believe in cause and effect?”

  “That’s not really a matter of belief.”

  “How can you say you don’t believe in destiny if you believe in cause and effect?” she asked.

  Natalie took a sip of gin. Christopher’s noble heritage, the values of Cambridge and the Queen, these things were right on the surface. He was wearing plastic rectangular glasses and an argyle sweater vest. Everything about the way he dressed and presented himself, even the way he sat there on the edge of the bed, communicated his class.

  “Another splash of gin?” he asked.

  “By all means,” she said.

  When she tried to catch his gaze with her own Christopher averted his eyes. He looked into her cup while he poured. When it was full she just kept holding it out toward him until he finally gave in and looked at her.

  He smiled at her and she smiled back.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “What’s a Heffalump?”

  Christopher sighed. He s
tood up from the bed and walked to the window and for a moment she thought he was going to climb up next to her on the shelf, but he didn’t. He stood there looking out.

  “Your friend Gerrard is an unbalanced person,” Christopher said.

  “You think so?”

  Christopher nodded but didn’t look away from the glass.

  “Then why are you here?” she asked.

  His hotel room was very clean, cleaner than she would have expected, and yet it was still squalid. It was a tiny room with a high ceiling in a building that was three hundred years old. There wasn’t any dust. The walls were yellow from age, the paint was cracked, but everything was arranged properly.

  “Did you tidy up your room?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did you dust?”

  “I thought it would help me sleep. I didn’t know you were coming, of course.”

  Natalie jumped down from her perch, refilled her cup with gin, and sat down on the edge of the bed. She patted the spot next to her, indicating Chris should come sit with her, but he just looked at her quizzically.

  “Why did you turn up here again?”

  “Gerrard asked me to deliver your shoe.”

  “Where is he then?” Christopher asked.

  “We’ve occupied the Sorbonne.”

  “I see.”

  Christopher approached her, sat down next to her on the bed, and then stood up again. He went to the bedside table and unscrewed the top on the gin bottle, but hesitated there. He stood by the bed considering whether to refill his cup.

  Natalie crossed her arms and waited. She wondered if she was making headway. Any number of girls could do what she was doing. Was that what free love was about, being anonymous? Her name was Natalie, but she might as well be named Cecile or Elsa or anything.

  “You didn’t answer me before,” she said.

  “What was the question?”

  “What is a Heffalump?”

  “Have you read my father’s books?” he asked.