Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  Footsteps in the corridor. Shouts. We must all have been remembering films about the last war, people being searched on trains, being thrown off, bodies hitting the dark invisible earth beside the tracks. It felt extraordinarily exciting. Something had interrupted our smooth onward progress through the night: something had happened.

  The guard put his head round the door, his cap a little askew. Perhaps he had been asleep too in his closet at the end of the carriage. “Messieurs-dames, no need to worry, there has been a disturbance, someone has pulled the cord, we will be moving again soon. Someone has to be put off at the next station. No cause for alarm.”

  Hannah whispered, “What did he say?”

  “Someone pulled the communication cord, I think.”

  The emergency communication cord, locked in its box behind glass, with its announcement of a huge fine for anyone who interfered with it—who would have dared to pull it, and why? We all crouched on our bunks, in our various stages of semi-undress: children woken in the night, our journey suddenly become dangerous, unpredictable, a train that had plunged into the unknown, and been stopped. The long nightmare scream of brakes would stay with me, although I had been half asleep. The roof of my mouth was furred and sour with wine and cigarettes. I looked at Hannah. Had we taken on more than we could manage? No, of course not. Life, as she had said, as we both believed, was an adventure. And the definition of adventure is that it is sometimes uncomfortable.

  I slid my arms into my shirt and slithered down off my bunk, swinging down the ladder. “I’m going to see.”

  “Claude, don’t.”

  “Just to see, we have to know, don’t we?”

  In the corridor, there was nobody. I looked up and down the train that had been stopped and silenced in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of France. Then there was Alexandre, the boy with the bottle and the sandwich his mother had made; beside me in his T-shirt and jeans, his hair tousled, eyes bleary but amused. “Some dick pulled the communication cord.” He used the word connard.

  “Do you know why?”

  “No idea. There’s a big fine if it was just for fun.” S’amuser. Une grosse amende. My French was coming on. I noticed his wide lips, with a kind of frill at their edge. He pursed them around another cigarette and inhaled and blew out, a perfect O. Tu veux? I took one, not because I wanted to smoke, just to be with him, part of his little cloud.

  Someone, we learned—he learned—had pulled the cord because a fight had broken out, one man had attacked another with a knife in the next carriage and a third person had broken the glass and pulled the cord that stopped the train. We would have to stop at the next station in order to get one man to the hospital and the other into the hands of the police. By this time the corridor was full of people leaning, questioning, lighting up cigarettes, shouting, asking questions. An elderly woman, her hair in a gray plait down her back, was in tears. Hannah was beside me, asking, pushing closer to Alexandre in order to find out. But it was too late. I had got there first, to stand beside him, to hear the news, to take his cigarette and have him light it for me, bending close, to get my first whiff of his body smell, mark of his maleness, the scent that was to be his all his life.

  We all went back to our bunks eventually, and there was a mass settling of bodies to sleep again, or to lie awake tense in the darkness. At the next station, which may have been Lyon, the train stopped and there was another brouhaha outside, and people were hustled off, I heard the voices, the carriage door, the brief invasion of the outside as an engine was rattled into life, and then the train door slammed again, in the next carriage from ours, and darkness overtook us again, and sleep.

  Dawn cracked the narrow line at the bottom of the blind, and when I pushed it up, there was Italy, and the light we had dreamed of. There was the future, the world; and we were going into it. I leaned across and poked Hannah. Look! She pushed her blind up an inch, then two. Light filled the compartment, spilled down on the lumps of the sleeping bodies of our night-companions, who stirred and grumbled. It was early. Outside, sleeping locked houses, far mountains, fields still hazy with the night’s dew. The sun spread long fingers slowly across the land, and cypresses raised their paintbrush tips and we stared, silenced by the beauty.

  “Italy,” said Hannah at last.

  We’d tunneled through the Alps in our sleep. We’d be in Florence by midday, dragging our suitcases full of Marks and Spencer’s clothes and the stomach medicines our mothers had made us bring, to find the bus to the youth hostel on the hill just below Fiesole. We’d be really there.

  And Alexandre? We’d exchanged nothing but wine, a sandwich, cigarettes, and a question on an indrawn breath. Who are you? When will we meet again? Alexandre, who was also getting off in Florence but who was meeting up with an Italian girlfriend who had been in his class at the École des Beaux-Arts.

  “Ciao,” he said, and left us behind.

  We next saw him gazing at Botticelli in the Uffizi, his arm around a girl, who was gazing at him. “Hannah, Claudia, this is Lucia.” It all sounded very properly Italian. Lucia, languidly disentangling, was a slim girl with dense black hair and eyebrows that very nearly met in the middle, and a seductive downward look. She wore a straight brown shift to the knee, like a linen sack really but incredibly chic and correct, and she moved like Monica Vitti stepping her way through Italian realist debris. We’d both seen all the films Antonioni had made so far, Hannah and I, so we recognized the blueprint. We stood there gaping and irritated at once, two English girls with bad complexions, in our rumpled cotton dresses and cardigans and our un-chic sandals, all wrong. We’d lost Alexandre to a better model of girl, and there was nothing we could do about it. At the youth hostel we ate spaghetti with no meat in the sauce every night because it was cheaper, and danced with other foreign boys under the moon, and went at eleven to our segregated beds. The moon stared in at us through a bare window and we lay awake, whispering, not daring to talk out loud, or dreamed our separate dreams.

  In Florence, we plodded around the Uffizi, took photographs of the David in the square, drank cappuccino in cafés, learned how to eat spaghetti, and lost weight with all our conscientious touristy striding. Alexandre—well, there he was again, right at the end of our stay, and he’d obviously not been doing anything as banal as staying in a youth hostel. He looked sleek, in a pink button-down cotton shirt and black jeans, his jacket slung across one shoulder. He looked Italian. He waved across the tracks to us. “Come to Paris!”

  “What? Can’t hear you!”

  “I said, come to Paris! I’ll be there in a few days. I’ll give you my address!”

  Then he was suddenly there beside us, having run up the stairs and across the bridge that separated the two platforms, and arrived at our sides. We all kissed, two each, bumping cheekbones in our haste. He scribbled on a bent postcard he’d pulled from his pocket, the Botticelli ladies with the shell.

  “Come in a few days! I’ll be there. That’s my phone number, call me.”

  And Lucia? “Oh, she was an old friend, nothing serious, over now, good to meet up again, but you know.”

  We didn’t know. We had no idea how French boys and Italian girls conducted their affairs, no. So, Lucia was over; he shrugged. “I have an aunt in Rome. Why don’t you come to Rome? Ah, zut, there is my train …” and he bounded away and three steps at a time up the stairs and back across the bridge, and down the other side, and we couldn’t see him as he leapt into the Rome train and then, presumably, was gone. I had his postcard in my hand, and shoved it into my shoulder bag. “What a poser,” said Hannah. I remember my surprise.

  We did call Alexandre’s number when we were back in Paris, at the end of our summer. He lived at that time in an apartment in the Marais, then a grimy district of dark stone and narrow alleyways, not the fashionable tourist neighborhood it is today.

  “Claudie, Anna! Come in. Yes, put your things there. My fl
at-mate is away, you can have his room, one bed only, you don’t mind? How glad I am to see you, you can’t imagine, Paris is so dull at this time of the year, I had to come back as I have work to do, also no money left, and you, how are you, how was your summer? Tell me everything. No, first, there is the lavabo, here your room, leave everything. Now.”

  He made us thick dark coffee in a Mokka on a small gas ring and we sat on the floor in his room and sipped, our legs tucked up under us. He had the posters on the wall that everyone had then—Che Guevara, Marilyn, James Dean. The room was full of dusty rugs and unwashed clothes and smelled of patchouli, coffee, and smoke, under the prevailing musk of himself and his clothes. We were instantly in love with it all—with his Paris, with the noises of it and the smells of it and the whole ambiance—a word we relished—of this next stage of our lives. Hannah had undone her plait for the last time in Italy and these days let her fair hair fall across her newly brown shoulders. We were both thinner, more mobile; we had broken out of the mold that we had grown up in. My hair was a wild black mop and I stretched my tanned legs out, admiring my brown toes in their dusty sandals. Everything that had been boring and inelegant, because far too English, seemed to have been burned away from us after our time in Italy; we were new, we were becoming who we wanted to be, and we had that startled confidence I now see in young women—in my students, sometimes—who are at last realizing their own power. It happens to them much earlier, now, of course. Hannah and I had been in the chrysalis of our school’s uniform and rules for far too long.

  It wasn’t then that I suspected her; it was later. But some ambiguity was set up then, there, in Alexandre’s grubby apartment, as we three sat, smoked, talked, swigged rough red wine, inventing our lives. Officially, she said, he was mine. I’d earmarked him, hadn’t I, that time in the train? Anyway, she wasn’t interested, he wasn’t her type. Far too self-centered, who did he think he was, French men were all the same. And he never washed his hair, you could tell. Was she overreacting, in order to give him to me, a reject, a cut-price secondhand sort of gift; was she pretending, criticizing him in order to hide the fact from me that she was secretly intrigued? Girls’ friendships become women’s, and a third thing intervenes: the lure of a man. It was here, during this summer of our first trip away from England, that I noticed—tried not to notice, but noticed—her possible duplicity.

  We fell into the flat-mate’s bed, she and I, late at night or in the small hours, and Alexandre stretched out on the messy divan in his own room. We’d been out to bars in the quartier, and nightclubs in cellars down by the Seine where jazz poured out and sweat poured down and we kissed anonymous boys up against damp walls till our lips were sore, and Alexandre smooched with girls behind their curtains of hair and sometimes disappeared with them—but never us, and never him. It was as if we had a pact to behave like brother and sisters, that summer. Perhaps it felt safer. Perhaps the hint of the implications of any of us ever embracing warned us in advance, in our genes, our cells, the unconscious wary places of the body. But I knew that I sniffed him up in secret, that I loved his skin and his movements and the rank smell, even, of his discarded T-shirts, and the way he smoked and threw the cigarette ends away from him, the way he tossed back his head, hair flying, to laugh. It was a secret I kept almost from myself; certainly I kept it, I thought, from Hannah.

  But she mocked me: you fancy him, Claude, you fancy him something rotten, come on, admit it. And I would not. Why, because of the safety of our threesome, that end of August in an emptied Paris, in our shared lair on rue du Temple, in our nighttime excursions, lights falling into water, trees black along the Seine, jazz clubs sweaty and dank and blaring, bodies packed together, everything about it I wanted to keep. Stasis, if you like: safety, balance, an equilibrium none of us wanted to disturb.

  Then there was a night in early September when I woke alone. I turned in the rumpled bed to find a surprising space beside me: no warm presence of Hannah, no hair spread across the pillow, no human breath. We kept our careful distance from each other in the bed, but there was no mistaking her absence. And the cooled stretch of the rather grubby sheet, which meant she had been gone some time, she hadn’t just got up to pee. I got up and peered round the door into the rest of the flat. A light was on in Alexandre’s room, I saw it under the door.

  I thought I heard voices. A low laugh. I walked forward on bare feet, curling my toes down after my heels on the dusty floor. I was in my knickers and bra; we never slept naked. And yes, voices, Hannah and Alexandre, and then a light switched off, and then silence. She came out past me, walking close and unaware as if sleepwalking, and went into our room and got into bed. I followed. In the morning, Claude you must have dreamed it, I only got up for a pee, really, what did you think we were doing? And then, leaving me there, one day she was abruptly gone.

  11.

  That time in Paris, in Alexandre’s apartment on rue du Temple, she did leave me a note. I didn’t find it for a full twenty-four hours, but there it was tucked into the frame of the cracked mirror in what had been our shared room. How had I not seen it? I was not looking for it, that was how. I’d accepted her departure without a word as if it were normal—because it was the kind of thing she did? I unfolded it.

  Chère amie, forgive me! He’s all yours now. See you in Cambridge. xox H.

  All mine? Alexandre, did she mean? And why had she chosen simply to go, leaving the two of us alone? She must have got up early, dressed without waking me, even after she’d stayed up late with Alexandre, crept out and down the stairs to the street, she must have walked across early-morning Paris to Gare Saint-Lazare, or taken the Métro or maybe even hailed a taxi, and simply got on the waiting train. I tried to imagine her journey, how it was, how it felt; as if I wanted to be her, not my confused self, left as if holding the baby. The baby who was Alexandre.

  I stayed another week, and went home on the boat train, following in her tracks as I supposed. In the meantime, Alexandre and I talked.

  “Elle est bizarre, ta copine. Your friend is weird. Why did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She does that sometimes, just gets up and goes. At parties, if she’s not enjoying herself. Anything she finds boring.”

  “She found it boring, here?”

  “No, I don’t think it was that.” He’s all yours now. But how could he be? In removing herself, she had destroyed our safe triangle, and it would be even less easy to get close to Alexandre. We were both of us, already, pulling away from each other as if in fear.

  “What did her note say?”

  “Nothing much. She said she’ll see me in Cambridge. Term starts in another couple of weeks.”

  “But you will stay, Claudie? Please stay.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  “Of course I am sure. Now. Shall we have coffee here or go to the café, have a treat? Then, I don’t know, we could walk. If you like. If you don’t want to be alone.”

  He was as unsure as I was. No, of course I did not want to be alone. What I wanted was to throw myself into his arms; but I didn’t, not yet. It would be too much to handle, I felt, to start anything with him; also, I didn’t want to do it just because Hannah had in her airy way given me permission. He handed me an untipped Gauloise from the squashed blue pack in his jeans-jacket pocket and we smoked, and looked at each other, and looked away. That was what we did then—put things off, changed the subject, moved on with the flare of a match, the crackle of tobacco, the sudden creation of a cloud of smoke. Everyone did, not just us. It was the way things were—in films, in books, in life.

  After a while I dared to ask him, “What were you talking about last night?”

  We’d got ourselves down the street and into the café on the corner, and were sitting over our tiny cups of black coffee. I preferred café au lait, really, but black seemed more sophisticated. We smoked. I drew in the dust with the toe of my sandal—we were sitting outside, our backs
to a wall, so I didn’t have to look at him.

  “Oh, life. You know. What it’s all about.”

  I didn’t know. I wanted to know. “Did she say anything specific, about, I mean, wanting to go home?”

  “She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to go to bed with me. I said no, that would not be, in my view, chic: not with you there in the next room.”

  “Oh.” I was silenced. Hannah had suggested going to bed with him, and he had said no? The world, the street reeled about me. A big garbage truck went past, very close, and the men emptying bins, clanging down lids, only feet away from us, so we couldn’t say anything that could be heard.