by Simon Mawer
“Come on, James! For Christ’s sake!”
For a moment he’s on his knees, eructating. And then he’s unsteadily on his feet once more, staggering towards the van like a soldier under fire running for the helicopter. He flings himself into the vehicle and lies prostrate, submitting himself to Ellie’s ministrations, which mainly consist of a few sips of water and rough sympathy: “It happens like that, sometimes. Just a reaction. You’ll soon get over it.”
“What’s the trouble back there?” the driver calls. They’re moving, the engine clattering, the van lurching from side to side as they breast curves.
“Something he ate.”
“Not you, I hope.”
Laughter. The voice, the laughter are American. Faces turn within the shadows of the van. Teeth and hair, lots of teeth and lots of hair; the glint of a pair of granny spectacles. There are two in the front, another two figures in the shadows of the back, where are piled loudspeakers and guitars, a keyboard, electrical gear, shapes that might be drums. And sleeping bags and cooking things, all muddled into the complex smell of food and sweat and the cloying scent of smoldering joss sticks. James feels his stomach heave once more. “Where you folks headed for?” the driver calls over his shoulder.
“Strasbourg.”
“We’ll take you to Strasbourg. You going to Strasbourg, we’ll take you to Strasbourg. Fuck it, why not? There’s a bridge across the Rhine there, isn’t there?”
“Yes, there is.”
“Sounds like a fucking war film. Bridge Over the River Rhine. We’re headed for Prague. That’s where it’s at, man. Got a gig there in a few days. But we’ll take you to fucking Strasbourg if you wanna go to fucking Strasbourg.”
They are, it transpires, a rock group called the Ides of March, on what they laughingly call their European tour. “Name’s classical, man. It’s like March fifteen in old Roman. But it’s also where we come from—March, Idaho, founded March fifteen, eighteen thirty-six by this one guy called Isaiah March. How’s that for cool? This guy, March, creates this place March, on the Ides of March.” There is incredulous laughter, as though this has only just occurred to them. “But folks just call us the Ides ‘cos it’s easier to recall.”
James sits silent, propped against the side of the van, nursing his swimming head and trying to calm his rebelling stomach. There is an exchange of names: John, Phil, Archer and Elliot. John is the driver, rhythm guitarist and leader of the group. Elliot and Phil are the guys in the back lying amongst sleeping bags, one the bass player, the other, Elliot, the lead guitarist who writes the numbers that they sing when they’re not covering the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He has long hair, a rodent face and an empty grin.
“D’you wanna hear?” John the driver asks. “Give ‘em ‘Rubicon,’ Elliot. Elliot and Ellie—hey, you two should get together!”
“Rubicon?” Ellie says, attempting to deflect the idea.
“Yeah, it’s like a river that Julius Caesar crossed, ain’t that right, Elliot? He knows stuff. He was majoring in classics before he dropped out.”
“Where was that?”
“In Italy, that right, Elliot? It’s a river in Italy that Caesar crossed. It meant he was going to become emperor or some shit.”
“Not the river. The university that he dropped out of.”
“Oh, man, got ya! Yeah, that’s real comic. You mean one thing, I understand another. UCLA. That’s right? UCLA.”
Elliot grunted some kind of acknowledgment. UCLA it was.
“So give it to them, Elliot. Come on, man. ‘Rubicon.’ “
With little enthusiasm Elliot takes up his guitar and begins to pick at it. The dead, unamplified sound is barely audible above the engine noise. His voice is rough and almost tuneless:
Let me cross your Rubicon,
Let me hold you tight,
Let me cross your Rubicon,
Girl, it’s gonna be all right.
The others sing along, adding “yeah, man” and “it’s gonna be a’right” as they think fit. Archer beats out the time on the dashboard. The second verse, encountered as one might stumble into something in the dark, is not unlike the first.
I went down to her Rubicon,
I bent to taste it fine,
I crouched beside her Rubicon,
It had the taste of wine.
Then they repeat the first verse and that seems to be it. Ellie applauds. Elliot grins at her, white teeth and white eyes gleaming from the shadows of the van. He speaks in a whisper, almost as though he has an obstruction in the back of his throat. “It’s pussy,” he murmurs. “The Rubicon. Know what I mean? Her pussy.”
“I think I’d sort of understood that.”
He reaches out and touches Ellie’s shoulder. “You wanna make out?”
“No, thank you.”
James dozes, barely noticing what is going on, his head swirling, the line Let me cross your Rubicon going round and round in the vortex. The words seem important, as though bearing a significance as great as any biblical text. It is Ellie’s Rubicon he wishes to cross, and not really cross but dive into it and splash around. Alea iactum est, he remembers.
“Alea iactum est,” he says out loud, seeing the coincidental significance of it.
“Iacta,” Ellie says, throwing the correction over her shoulder as she argues with the guitarist.
“What’s that, man?” the driver asks. “That French?”
“Latin,” James mumbles, surprised at his own knowledge. “The die is cast. It’s what Julius Caesar said when he crossed the Rubicon.” But he’s more interested in the quiet, suppressed argument that Ellie and Elliot are having. He hopes it is not her Rubicon they are discussing. “Right,” Elliot says. “Sure.” And gropes around in the bag he carries and pulls out money.
“Hey!” James exclaims. He intends a sharp interjection but the sound comes out more like a yelp of surprise.
“Cool it, man,” Elliot says. “Just let it be.”
The van slows abruptly and they begin to snake through the narrow streets of a town. Horns blare, in French. The gears of the van grate. “Son of a bitch!” John shouts from behind the wheel. “Not used to a manual shift,” he explains to his passengers. The road begins to descend into the wide flood plain of the river Rhine. Whatever has been going on between Ellie and Elliot is concluded. Elliot sags back into the sleeping bags while the rest of the Ides sing, Archer the drummer beating time on the dashboard, Elliot strumming vaguely at his empty guitar. They sing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Yellow Submarine,” “Light My Fire,” anything that comes to mind. Something called “White Light White Heat.” And, of course, “Rubicon.” Perhaps the Rhine will be their Rubicon—they have been booked to play in Prague by someone they met in Paris, a Czech who told them about the music scene in his home city. “The Czechs are, like, crossing a Rubicon, aren’t they?” John suggests. “Saying fuck you to the Soviets. Hey, maybe Elliot can write us another verse.”
Elliot grunts and ponders the proposal. “We’re gonna cross the Rubicon,” he sings:
We’re going to be free
We’re gonna cross the Rubicon
And choose democracy.
“How about that?” cries John, hammering his fist on the steering wheel. “That’ll drive the Czech kids wild.”
“Or maybe,” Elliot adds vaguely, “the other way round.”
Ellie has moved away from him and closer to James. She holds his hand in a rare demonstration of affection. “You OK?”
He shakes his head. The whole world moves.
“It’ll soon wear off.”
They come to the outskirts of Strasbourg, the supermarkets, filling stations, small factories and warehouses, a brewery, all the detritus deposited by a modern town around itself, like an animal shitting round its own nest. Then the buildings crowd in and the road dives beneath railway lines and over water and reaches the center, part timber-framed, part a local sandstone the color of bruised flesh. The timber is painted in a variety of color
s, like an old lady tarted up with eyeshadow on her eyelids, lipstick on her impoverished lips, rouge on her cheeks.
“Looks a real cool place,” John the driver decides, peering through the windscreen.
“Yeah,” agrees Archer. “Old.”
“Cute,” Ellie offers.
“Yeah, cute.”
“Look, you can put us down anywhere. Just here’ll be fine.”
They pull over at the edge of a square. A sign points towards Le Rhin, République Fédérale d’Allemagne. John turns round. “Hey, guys, you sure you don’t want to come on with us?”
“Go on, man,” says Elliot. He grins at Ellie and mouths the word Rubicon.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” she replies. “We’ll get off here. Going south, you see.”
Elliot leers and points. “Down south?”
“Italy.”
“Right, Italy.” He nods vaguely. There are plenty more Rubicons in the lives of men. Ellie slides the door open and leaps out, dragging her rucksack after her. Dutifully, a little unsteadily, James follows, pursued by cheers from inside the dark cave. Archer, the drummer, leans out of the front window and beats a paradiddle on the side door. There are whoops and yells as the van pulls away in a squeal of tires. Pedestrians stare.
James feels relief, as though some kind of danger has been overcome. “Let’s find somewhere to stay,” Ellie says. “We passed a pension a couple of streets back.”
“We can’t afford a pension.”
“We’re not going to pitch your bloody tent in the middle of the town, are we? Anyway, Elliot’s paying.”
“Elliot?”
“I sold him the grass.”
“The grass? For God’s sake, why?”
“Don’t want you turning into a pothead, that’s why.” There’s something approaching affection in her expression.
“Why should I?”
“I could see it in your eyes. My advice? Stay clear. Keep clean and simple like you were. It suits you. You don’t want to end up like that cretin.” Which is something of a relief, because, in his befuddled state, he almost fancied Ellie and Elliot as intertwined as their names, crossing and recrossing each other’s Rubicons. Now she marches on alone, slight and indomitable, down a narrow street where an ancient sign announces Pension Alsace.
* * *
The hallway of the pension is narrow and dark brown and smells of mold and vinegar. A framed print of women in traditional costume hangs on the wall nearby but the Madame in charge of the place has long ago abandoned any decorative dress in favor of what appears to be a nut-brown sack. At Ellie’s peremptory ringing of the reception bell, she emerges from somewhere in the back and regards the two new customers with a mixture of contempt and suspicion. “Oui?”
Ellie smiles. She can do that, smile warmly to disperse all doubts. She is small and sharp and able, while James feels large and clumsy and incompetent. Her language helps, the French she learned at school, polished on holidays in France and finally, James has subsequently discovered, buffed up with a six-month exchange with a family in Bordeaux. So the two ladies smile at each other and trade polite greetings and icy compliments while the visitors’ passports are examined as thoroughly as by any border policeman. The woman looks up and says something to Ellie in which the words mariés and épouse seem to feature, along with the word catholique. Ellie’s smile is like a razor cut. Bien sûr, she replies. Notre lune de miel, she insists. Étudiants, she explains. The woman ponders the matter for a while before squirreling the passports away in exchange for two forms to be filled in with enough details for a job application. “Ça va,” she agrees grudgingly once the forms are completed, and hands over a key with a brass label inscribed with 301. “Seulement une nuit.” As though more than one night might lead to moral complications she can hardly tolerate.
“What was that all about?” James asks as they climb the stairs—there is, of course, no lift. “Are we—”
“Married, yes.”
“Married? What the—?”
“If we weren’t married, there wouldn’t have been a deal at all. Madame is a very devout Catholic. At least that’s what she claims. So if we weren’t a newlywed couple she’d have insisted on separate rooms. And I wasn’t going to pay for two.”
* * *
The room is on the top floor, crouching beneath the eaves. It’s halfway between an abandoned attic and a dormitory, a twisted, asymmetrical space divided with wooden beams and posts, with a double bed at one end and two single beds halfway down. There’s a washbasin but no bathroom. The bathroom is off the landing, shared with whoever occupies the other room up there under the roof tiles.
“So here we are,” Ellie says, contemplating their little retreat. She seems awkward, as though she hasn’t really been expecting this. Somehow a shared room is more intimate than a shared tent. “I’m going to have a shower, and then we’d better get something to eat.”
Which is putting off all the awkward implications. Married, even. And a shared bed will be necessary evidence. James the scientist thinks these thoughts amongst many others as she darts off to the bathroom and comes back with hair somehow more ordered—that vivacious cloud of pale gold—and T-shirt changed (the old one washed and laid out on the tiles outside one of the dormer windows) and even—is this possible?—a dash of lipstick on those eloquent lips. They go out, taking Madame’s recommendation, to a small bistro round the corner that serves local food at a good price, where they share a pichet of Alsatian wine, and then another when the first—faintly sweet and scented—disappears with silken ease. Ellie laughs, relaxes, smokes, seems altogether different from the sharp and prickly woman she can be. Her eyes glisten. Her lips shine. Or is it the other way round? She even bums a cigarette off the men—a trio of builders—at the next table. Does she want to join them for a beer? No, she doesn’t, although it was kind of them to ask. She is with her fiancé, thank you.
He can come too, if he wants.
Actually, they are on their honeymoon. Lune de miel.
Much ribald laughter and understanding.
Back in their room—their room; the sexual thrill of that collective pronoun—she stands beside the bed, looking at him with that strange, out-of-focus look she has. The only illumination is a single bedside light—the other one doesn’t work and the ceiling light is a harsh, bare bulb that she turned off with a shriek of horror as soon as it came on—so her figure is blurred, like something sketched in charcoal, thrown into relief and shadowed with gray. “So,” she says, giving a little smile and pulling her T-shirt over her head. She has nothing on underneath. He knows that, of course. He has watched her at length, already observed the fluid shifting of things beneath the cotton, but despite the strange intimacies they have already shared, this is the first time he has seen her breasts. When she shakes her hair out they move loosely, pale in the half-light. He tries, and fails, to avert his eyes, but why should he bother? She appears heedless of his gaze, dropping her jeans round her ankles, kicking them away and slipping under the bedclothes with blithe indifference. He sits on his side of the bed to try and keep things to himself.
Then what happens? These things get forgotten over time, the details lost, merged into other moments, blurred like the charcoal edges of a smudged drawing. But it goes something like this: he lifts the bedclothes—some kind of limp eiderdown—and slides beneath. She snaps off the light so that the only illumination comes through the threadbare curtains from streetlights outside. He rolls over in the bed to face her and they lie there between the sheets, a foot apart, a whole confusing concatenation of lusts and inhibitions apart. In the half-light he can make out the whites of her eyes and the secret gleam of teeth. She breathes softly.
“Ellie,” he says and leaves her name there in the narrow shadows between them.
“What?”
Moving closer he touches his lips against hers. Her lips are closed, as though opening them would open a window on her soul through which all manner of things might be reveale
d. But she doesn’t stop his hand, which crosses the divide and touches her breast and the small nub of her nipple. Doesn’t that signify arousal? He doesn’t know. Acceptance? He doesn’t know anything, really.
Still she doesn’t move.
“I don’t understand what you want, Ellie.”
“Why should you?”
“Because of what happened in the tent.”
A breath of laughter in his face. “Messy, in more ways than one.”
“But we did it. And now I want to make love to you. Properly.” He says it almost without considering, as though to surprise himself as much as her.
She looks steadily at him, her head on the pillow, mere inches away but a whole world apart. “You’ve been very good, you know that? Not pushy, not protesting your devotion or anything nauseating like that. You’ve not really used the L word at all, except just then—that horrible expression ‘making love.’ “
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You don’t know? And you a scientist. Haven’t you read The Naked Ape? Of course you have. Well, we’re just animals, aren’t we? We mate, promiscuously, most of us. We grunt and sweat and get all wrapped up in each other’s fluids and we call it by the same word as we use for our relationship with the eternal creator of the universe. Love. Not very convincing.”
“So what do you want to call it? Fucking?”
“That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“So, are we going to do it? I mean, if it’s just some physical function—”
“But it’s not, is it? Not just some physical function. That wanking thing, maybe. But not fucking. Not your sticking your penis inside me.”
James has never had a conversation like this before: he has never really heard the word “fuck” mouthed by such articulate and feminine lips. A part of him to do with chapels and Wesleyan Nonconformism and pure Northern prudery is profoundly shocked; while another part, to do with biology and, in particular, the organ between his legs, is profoundly excited. He wants her to be clinging to him and whispering that word in his ear.
