Obstacles to Young Love

by David Nobbs

  But a strange thing happens. For the first time in their lives they are pleased to see Sniffy. At least it’s an injection of something into the evening, it’s a jab at the dying embers with a poker.

  They have one more crack at the dominoes. It’s not easy. With five of them, one always has to stand down, but suddenly the game is invested with a purpose, the defeat of Steven, the humiliation of the gin and tonics man. They fail to defeat him, but that doesn’t matter. The point is in the wanting to.

  Timothy does manage another half, because he’s worried that if he refuses they may move on to a fourth pub. They don’t. Nobody even suggests it. For the first time in its history, the Pennine Piss-up takes place in only three pubs. It is indeed the end of an era.

  Notre Dame doesn’t stun you with its grandeur. It woos you with its charms. It’s a graceful, elegant, feminine cathedral. Suddenly Naomi finds that tears are running down her cheeks. She sniffs and blows her nose. Clive and Antoine look away, pretend not to have noticed anything. But the tears pour, and Naomi knows that they must have seen.

  Their days, like Gaul itself, are divided into three parts. In the mornings, Clive teaches, Antoine paints, and, when called upon, Naomi rides a bicycle across his canvases. In the afternoons, they show her corners of Paris, some famous, some obscure. Today it’s the turn of the famous. And in the evenings, they eat and drink and talk. How could they not talk, in St-Germain-des-Prés? Conversation is the area’s legacy.

  Clive and Antoine have an apartment on the top floor of a six-storey, relatively modern building in the Rue St Benoît. ‘You see. Their hands are everywhere. Even your street is named after a saint,’ Naomi had commented on arrival.

  From the apartment it’s but a short walk to Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir so famously talked and talked. And talked. Naomi has not read Sartre or de Beauvoir. She wishes she had, but she knows that wishes have no value, and so she also wishes that she didn’t wish that she had.

  Often, and especially when money was short, the three of them ate and drank at home. On other evenings they wandered to one of the cafés. Occasionally they ate in the sober, traditional, comforting Brasserie Lipp, where many intellectuals have sampled the sauerkraut and the carafes of Morgon.

  There is a plaque on the wall, almost directly below the apartment. It tells that the poet Léo Larguier (1878–1950) lived there for thirty years. Tonight, as they pass it, Naomi is deeply moved by the thought that this poet of whom she has never heard is commemorated in this way, half a century after his death. Her emotions are very close to the surface today. She fears that she may cry again before the evening is over.

  In the buzzing Café de Flore she is pleased that her French is not good. She can believe that every conversation at every table is brilliant.

  She sips her Ricard. She never drinks Ricard except in France. In her drinking habits she is a chameleon.

  She knows that ‘the boys’, as she calls them, want to talk to her about her tears in Notre Dame. She knows also that there is another subject that must be broached sooner or later. She decides that it is the safer one to broach.

  ‘I remember when the Tomlinsons were staying with us,’ she says. ‘They stayed and stayed and stayed. At last they said that they were going. We saw them off. Do you remember, Clive?’

  ‘Oh, my goodness, yes. Oh, it was dreadful. English embarrassment at its worst, Antoine.’

  Clive and Naomi smile and shudder at the same time. They are briefly transported from the Boulevard St-Germain to the Lower Cragley Road.

  ‘What happened?’

  For a moment, neither of them hears Antoine.

  ‘Oh,’ says Naomi. ‘They left, after breakfast, after what seemed like three weeks, and we all danced round the table in the dining room, well, not Dad, obviously, but Mum and me and Clive, even Julian. We danced round the table with our arms raised in the air, chanting, “They’ve gone. They’ve gone.” And they came back. Mr Tomlinson had forgotten his glasses. They came back and they saw us.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘I know, but we were too embarrassed to find it wonderful.’

  Naomi takes a tiny sip of her Ricard. She is trying to make it last.

  ‘It served them right. And perhaps you did a favour to their future hosts.’

  ‘I know. I know. And I don’t think I’d be embarrassed these days.’

  ‘Your story, of course, had a point to it, Naomi,’ says Antoine, ‘and the answer is no, no, no. No, you are not outstaying your welcome. No, we don’t want you to go. And no, when that time comes, we won’t tell you.’

  ‘Then how will I know when it comes? How do I know it hasn’t come now?’

  ‘Because you can see that our joy in your company is very, very real.’

  ‘Time to eat,’ announces Clive.

  He signals to a waiter, who comes immediately. People do, to Clive. He pays. He handles all money matters in his life with Antoine.

  They wander back past the apartment, and turn left into the Rue Jacob. Naomi loves this street, with its little galleries and antique shops and art shops.

  They are going to one of their very favourite restaurants tonight, a tiny bistro right opposite the Hotel d’Angleterre, where Hemingway stayed. How many ghosts there are in this city. It’s hard sometimes not to feel like a ghost oneself.

  Clive is in jeans and an avant-garde shirt, Antoine sober in corduroy. Naomi has tried not to look conspicuously pretty, in black trousers and a pale cream top. She has failed.

  Everyone knows them in the restaurant. Clive and Antoine have been irregular regulars for years, and Naomi has been with them now for almost three months. Her father pretends that he is sorry that she has gone, but deep down, well though they got on, he is happy, because he has his History of Ancient Greece to finish. Already, ‘the English actress’ is accepted in the restaurant almost as fully as ‘the artist and his rear-gunner’.

  The subject of Naomi’s tears hangs over the table like an invisible chandelier, but first there is ordering to be done. Naomi chooses snails and the pot au feu de canard. The waitress seems extremely pleased, almost thrilled, by her choice. Clive plumps, as they say in the restaurant reviews, for black pudding with apples and the sea bass en papillote. The waitress nods her approval. Antoine, the Frenchman, makes the most conservative choice, chestnut soup and entrecôte au poivre. The waitress shows no reaction.

  Then there is the wine to be examined, sniffed, sipped, approved.

  Now Antoine looks at Clive. He feels that he can’t raise the subject, but Clive is her brother, after all.

  ‘Naomi?’ says Clive very gently. ‘We couldn’t help noticing that you were crying in Notre Dame. Were you…? Are you…? No. Let me put it more simply. Why were you crying?’

  ‘Not because I was realising that I was wrong not to believe. Just because…I thought of the amazing faith that built all the world’s great cathedrals. You don’t have to believe to appreciate the beauty. You don’t have to believe to admire the piety and faith of people through the ages. Their faith was glorious, magnificent, awesome, like their cathedrals. I cried because I thought of all the workers who died during the building of the cathedrals. I thought of all the poor people who gave what they couldn’t afford to the Church. I thought of all those people who were terrified of hell. The fact that science seems to me to make it certain that their faith was misplaced doesn’t diminish it in my eyes at all, it actually gives it a heroic quality. I cried for all these things. I cried at the way their faith was manipulated for political and national…’

  She sees the worry that Clive can’t quite hide. Is she in danger of going over the edge again? She breaks off in mid-sentence, and smiles. ‘Sorry. I promised not to ride my hobby horse while I was with you, didn’t I?’ She meets Clive’s eyes and holds the gaze, and he suddenly has complete faith in her future. It’s an exhilarating moment for him.

  ‘I think Dad hopes that I’ll be cured w
hile I’m here,’ she says, ‘but I don’t think that my condition is a disease. Sorry. Enough said. What shall we do tomorrow?’

  But Antoine doesn’t take the opportunity to change the subject.

  ‘The awe of the atheist,’ he says. ‘I think that’s wonderful, Naomi. That was very moving to see. You don’t believe a word of it, yet you gaze devoutly.’

  The food arrives. They clink glasses with deep affection, and eat in silence for a few moments. Naomi gazes at the love posters on the walls of this intimate, secret place. They were painted by Yves Saint Laurent and presented to the mother of the present owner at Christmas and New Year. Naomi suddenly realises that ‘the boys’ have chosen this restaurant this evening for a reason. They are going to discuss her love life, or rather, its absence.

  But Clive also is not yet ready to change the subject.

  ‘The awe of the atheist,’ he says. ‘What a wonderful subject that would be for you, Antoine, if you weren’t obsessed with containing order and disorder together in every canvas. What a theme. To show, in one human face, the appreciation of the art, how the person is moved by the art, and yet how at the same time they do not believe in this art that they admire. To show God as a fiction, but a fiction that stirs the innermost heart. If only you would paint something like that, Antoine. If only you weren’t so rigid.’

  ‘And now who is riding his hobby horse?’ says Antoine.

  There is a very brief pause.

  ‘Changing the subject,’ says Clive firmly, ‘we have to discuss my sister’s life.’

  ‘Do we really? Why can’t she just live it?’

  ‘Because she isn’t living it.’

  ‘I’m happy here,’ protests Naomi.

  ‘Oh, yes. Happy. We do nice things. Of course you’re happy. Nice trips round a great city. Nice meals. Helping Antoine with his work.’

  ‘Indispensable.’

  ‘No, Antoine, I’m not indispensable. Anyone else could ride that bike.’

  ‘Not as you do. Somehow, you instinctively invest a meaning even to the random part of the picture, a form that cannot quite be described as a form but is nevertheless not entirely formless.’

  ‘Then maybe I will destroy the whole point.’

  ‘This is irrelevant,’ says Clive. ‘We have to think of the future.’

  ‘Why can’t we just live in the present?’ complains Naomi. ‘For tonight, at least. This is so lovely.’

  ‘You simply cannot remain a gooseberry with two shirt-lifters for ever.’

  ‘I don’t understand this phrase, Clive,’ says Antoine.

  ‘Really? It just means that you and I—’

  ‘I understand shirt-lifters. What is this gooseberry?’

  ‘Oh. It’s a single person who tags along with a couple.’

  ‘Why is it called a gooseberry?’

  ‘I don’t know, actually. Do you know, Naomi?’

  ‘Not a clue, I’m ashamed to say. Sometimes I wonder if I really do have an enquiring mind.’

  ‘I’ve heard of the raspberry. That’s a rude noise, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are there other berries whose significance in British culture I should know about? What, for instance, is a loganberry? A bum-boy making a rude noise in bed between two lesbians?’

  ‘Antoine, stop being silly. Why are you being so silly?’

  ‘Because if we’re sensible and force Naomi to consider what she is going to do with the rest of her life, she will realise that eventually she has to leave, and I don’t want her to leave. These last many weeks, what a delight. Those days Emily spent here, once more at peace in the love of her mother, giving and, even more difficult, accepting love. What a privilege it was to witness it.’

  Naomi feels tears pricking at her eyes again. She fights them.

  Emily had visited for a week. Naomi had told Clive and Antoine that Emily was very happy in her own company, would wander through the streets, maybe even hire a bicycle and brave the Parisian traffic. She wasn’t a loner, she did have friends, but she was a free spirit and she loved to drift with her thoughts and dreams. In the event she clung to Naomi’s side, not out of timidity, not in an irritating or regressive way, but as if she was trying to make up for all the days they had spent apart. And, in an age full of eating disorders, her appetite had been a joy to see.

  ‘We can’t be selfish, Antoine,’ rebukes Clive. Despite the way the two of them dress, it is Clive who is the realist. ‘Naomi, do you ever want to act again?’

  ‘If it was worthwhile. If I could do good things. Preferably things not written by Colin Coppinger.’

  ‘Might you try to find another agent?’

  ‘One day, perhaps.’

  ‘Do you want a new man in your life?’

  ‘What man would take me?’

  ‘Seventeen that I know of, in St-Germain-des-Prés. There’s a waiter in the Brasserie Lipp whose intensity frightens me.’

  ‘Oh, dear. How awful. No, I don’t think I do want a new man in my life. I feel so very happy like this, so serene, so safe.’

  ‘“Serene” I can accept, but “safe”! You shouldn’t even consider doing “safe”, Naomi.’

  ‘I don’t have a lot of respect for most of the men I meet.’

  ‘Ok, not a new man. How about an old man?’ asks Clive. ‘How about…Timothy, was it?’

  ‘He’ll be married. He’s the marrying kind.’

  ‘He may not be.’

  ‘He believes in God.’

  ‘He may not now.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He had it pretty bad.’

  ‘You spoke just now of your respect for faith,’ says Antoine gently. ‘Surely now that you’re almost – can you really be in your forties? – surely you’re mature enough not to let religious feelings get in the way of more personal matters? Or are you still…just a little bit obsessed, perhaps?’

  Naomi doesn’t reply at first. She seems a long way off. The reassurance that Clive felt just a few minutes ago turns out not to be proof against anxiety. Perhaps, because of what has happened, and because of his love, he will never again be free from the need for reassurance.

  Reassurance comes the moment Naomi speaks.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘I think of Timothy as if he was the great love of my life, but we only ever spent three nights together. Over twenty years ago now, but I remember every moment as if it were yesterday. Particularly the second night.’

  She catches the knowing look that Antoine and Clive exchange with each other. She feels herself blushing.

  ‘She’s blushing,’ says Antoine. ‘Is there anything prettier in this world than a pretty English girl blushing?’

  ‘Oh, do shut up!’ cries Naomi, in such a loud voice that everyone in the restaurant turns to look at her, and the waitress, who is clearing their plates, almost drops them.

  ‘He was such a child in some ways – awkward, gawky – but I think now that he was also adult beyond his years. When he played Romeo, he wasn’t terribly good but he had repose, so it sort of worked. Even when he took the applause, he wasn’t a bit embarrassed, and I’d expected that he would be.’

  Their main courses arrive.

  ‘M’m. That looks lovely,’ says Naomi of her dish. ‘Succulent, unshowy, nourishing.’ But even the pot au feu de canard doesn’t divert her from the subject of Timothy. ‘When I last saw him, after the recording of an episode of Get Stuffed, he was so passionate, so loyal to his father, at the time I was disconcerted, I thought I was in love with Colin, but, later, you know, I…well, enough said, let’s eat.’

  She takes a mouthful. Normally she has the most graceful and natural of table manners, but now she can’t even wait till she’s finished the mouthful before she speaks of Timothy again.

  ‘You’re right, Clive,’ she says through a mouthful of duck. ‘I’ll have to go and try to find him. I know where he lives.’

  Antoine sighs.

  ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you, you stupid man?’ he
asks.

  ‘Made sure that my sister tries to start living her own life again.’

  ‘Well, yes, there is that. But you’ve just lost me the best cyclist I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have.’

  Liam is very pleased to be asked to help his father with his move.

  Timothy is moving into a furnished, rented cottage, two up, two down, in a row of what were once fishermen’s cottages and are now the homes of struggling artisans or the second homes of Londoners seeking the simple, organic dream. So he isn’t taking any furniture, just the bulk of his books, his meagre record collection, his unimpressive array of clothes, which includes just one and a half suits – where did those trousers end up? – the pumice stone that reminds him of his Auntie May Treadwell, a few photographs of wild places and of friends who never quite managed to be wild, the barely usable toaster that he made in woodwork at Coningsfield Grammar, the framed front page of the programme for Romeo and Juliet, a photo of his father in a rather cheap frame, his camera and binoculars and alarm clock and batteries, his father’s masterly group of three Icelandic puffins, the English-Finnish dictionary he found on a bus – may as well take it, you never know, the reserve might be visited by a very beautiful, long-legged blonde twitcher from Helsinki, it’s a bit of a long shot but you’d be really pissed off if it happened and you’d thrown the dictionary away – and his complete collection of old medicine tins. He couldn’t remember at exactly what stage of his adolescence he had decided that as an aid to having a personality he’d collect these tins, but he had discovered very soon that he wasn’t the collector type. The larger of the tins had once contained Compound Bismuth Lozenges and was now home to his spare euro coins. The other tin announced that it contained ‘The “Allenburys” Throat Pastilles: Menthol, Rhatany and Cocaine’, which sounded a bit more exciting than the eighty euros in filthy germ-infested notes that huddled inside it now. Last, and probably least, he takes a really rather awful painting, mercifully in need of cleaning, which, had it been cleaned, would have shown a rather weedy monarch of some distinctly unprepossessing glen.