by Susan Moody
‘Tell him I’m free next Saturday,’ Nathalie called after me.
He watched me coming towards him. I held out my hand. ‘Bon soir, Monsieur Elias.’
‘C’est bien Alice.’ It was a statement, not question. His fingers were warm as they grasped mine. At the sound of his voice, my heart began to beat faster and harder, like a metronome. He was, of course, older than when we’d last met, but he also seemed much sadder. Perhaps I did too. There was grey in his hair, and when he moved his head, I could see a line where his shirt collar cut into his neck.
‘C’est ça.’ I lifted my shoulders and let them drop. ‘How are you?’ My voice sounded artificial, over-bright.
‘So . . .’ The green speckle in his eye glowed. I smelled again the scents of aniseed and tobacco. ‘You are living here now.’
‘Yes. I work for Sonja Eden, the cosmetics people. What about you?’
‘I’m here for the moment.’
‘How do you like Paris?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘It is a place for lovers,’ he said. He spread his hands wide and pulled a rueful Gallic face. ‘But I have no lovers.’
‘Not even one?’
‘Most especially not even one.’
I stumble hastily in another direction. ‘So where are you living . . . Sasha?’
‘At the Cité Universitaire. What about you?’
‘I’m renting a flat in the fifteenth.’
‘Do you have a lover?’
‘I’ve got a boyfriend,’ I said quickly, embarrassed. Girls like me didn’t use full-blooded words such as ‘lover’. ‘Several, actually.’
‘But nobody special.’
‘Not really.’ I jerked my head over my shoulder. ‘Look, I can’t stay. My friends . . . And the concert’s about to start.’
‘Of course.’
There were so many things I wanted to ask him. So much I wanted to say. ‘Can we . . . could we meet up sometime?’
With his index finger he touched each of my knuckles in turn. I felt the same warmth between my thighs as I used to when still a child. Then, I hadn’t known what it meant. The imperfection in his eye seemed to glow brighter. ‘Alice.’ He said my name with a kind of certainty. The word brushed across my skin like a kiss.
I pressed my cold glass against my forehead, and then against my face. ‘Gosh, it’s hot in here!’ There was perspiration under my arms and between my breasts. My forehead was damp. He leaned towards me and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me. Involuntarily, I gasped. I couldn’t think of anything to say. His eyes held mine and I wasn’t able to look away from him. Where our bodies touched, I felt the heat of him. We stood without speaking, a millimetre apart. My nerve-endings yearned towards him, like optic fibres, like glow-worms. I didn’t want to break the spell, but eventually, as the three minute bell sounded, I stirred, I sighed. ‘I think I’d better go.’
‘I’ll get in touch,’ he said.
‘Fine.’
Only after I’d rejoined Nathalie and Marie-Claire and we were back in our seats did I wonder how he would find me, since he had not asked for my address. I touched each of my knuckles. I thought: I’ve never realized what it meant before, but now I do. Un coup de foudre. Love at first sight.
Except it wasn’t first sight. I’d been waiting for him for more than ten years.
I met Allen some months later. By then I had given up any hope of hearing from Sasha, though part of me wondered if he searched the faces on the streets – as I did – cursing the fact that he had let me go without finding out how to get hold of me. Yet, I had told him where I worked; he could have found me if he really wanted to. I knew he was out there somewhere. I knew that he thought of me constantly, as I did of him. I had been dropped into love. I was coated in it, as though I were a strawberry delight or a raspberry crème being dipped into chocolate.
As the weeks went by and my feelings kept me awake at night, I grew more obsessed yet at the same time, resigned to his loss. I could think of nothing else; my work suffered. I had no wish to go out with friends or attend the theatre, even to shop for food, in case he called and I missed him.
Eventually, as so many women are, I was frightened by this consuming emotion, this grand passion. I’d let down my guard, for the first time – there’d been men in my life before, but whatever I felt about them, I kept them at a certain emotional distance. It was safer that way. If I allowed it to ignite and burn, I would be reduced to a cinder, the smoking ruins of myself, all that was left of what had once been Alice.
And as so many women do, I opted for safety.
Allen was one of the guests at a party I went to, given by some ex-pat American whose name I don’t remember if I ever knew it. Newly-arrived in the city, he seemed simple, uncomplicated. He had an apartement in Neuilly. I knew Sasha Elias was not going to contact me and that it was time I took up my life again. We did ordinary things together. Went to the cinema, walked along the Seine, ate in cheap restaurants, bought tickets to the opera, visited the Louvre, the Rodin Museum, Sacré Coeur, Montmartre, things I’d done several times before but was happy to do again. We shared a passion for Monet, Russian movies, pommes frites, walking.
Allen was always good company. He was well-read, cultured, enthusiastic. He introduced me to new experiences and different names. When he was due to return to his Michigan university, he begged me to go with him, and though I was unused to spontaneity, I agreed that as soon as we could find me a job there, I’d join him.
‘Not just join,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t go down too well, in any case. Marry me, Alice. Marry me.’ He dropped to one knee and held out his hands.
‘All right.’
Aware that passion was missing from our relationship, I was nonetheless ignorant and naïve enough to believe it wouldn’t matter. I thought that his love would be enough for both of us. I thought that this way I would not get hurt again, and at the time that seemed important.
It was some time before we both realized what we were missing. I’d spurned the magic in the blood out of cowardice; he’d fancied that in me he would find a normality he’d hitherto lacked. He wanted children, if only to disguise his own ambiguities about gender and sexuality. At the end of the fifth year of our marriage, I lost the ability to cope with the banality of our lives. America in the Sixties was curiously fettered by convention, even in the university town to which Allen took me. Young women looked and dressed like their mothers, and if there one thing I was sure of in those uncertain days, it was that I did not want to look like Fiona. There were conventions and restrictions at which I chafed. There were coffee mornings, tennis afternoons, Tupperware parties, baby showers. People had food fads that astonished me, having grown up in the deprived post-war years, and I gradually realized what little impact the war had made on most of provincial America.
I didn’t lose touch with family and home. After his appointment to Boston, Orlando visited us fairly regularly. Callum came twice on his way to or from Australia. Dougal and Krista travelled onwards to see us after attending a medical conference in New York. My parents came once. And Erin we saw often. Nonetheless, I always felt that not only was I not part of the scene, but that I never would be. Even worse, that I didn’t want to be.
Children might have disguised our slow dissolution for a while longer, but somehow they never arrived, which made it much easier when the moment came for me to realize that if I was to save myself, then I must leave without delay.
We remained the good companions we’d always been, but as the years went by in a repetitive round of parties and picnics, Christmases spent with our families on either side of the Atlantic, vacations taken in Europe or Mexico, increasingly I felt as though I was living only half a life. And then the nightmares began. Not every night, at least not at first. But increasingly I would wake and lie in the darkness, sweating with terror, while Allen breathed gently beside me. Once again I would see the red spiders on the collar of Nicola’s blouse, or the blood on her naked thighs, tho
se thin splayed legs, the feeling that if we had never found the Secret Glade with its treasure house of blackberries, I would never have had to look at her dead body. I took to calling Orlando, waking him in the early hours for the comfort of his voice, the sound of his breathing, the fact that he alone knew what I meant, what I saw in my dreams.
One day, everything simply fell apart. I got up and looking into the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth, realized that as with my mother, years before, I had almost no point of contact with the woman who looked back at me. Alice, where art thou? Where had I gone? I needed to find out more about who she was. And clear as a bell came the realization that if I was to save myself, then I must leave without delay.
Which I did. Within a week of making the decision to return to Europe, I was gone. ‘Why?’ Allen asked, over and over again, as I packed my things. ‘Why?’
I could only shake my head. I couldn’t have begun to express to him the feeling that I was wasting my life here, that somewhere out there, some brighter star waited for me to hitch my wagon to it and follow where it led me.
‘We get on so well together,’ he insisted. ‘We have so many interests in common. We’re such . . . friends.’
‘I don’t want to spend my life with a friend,’ I said.
‘If you were more mature, you’d understand how valuable that is.’
‘You’re probably right. But I want to . . .’ I was too sensitive to his feelings to say that I wanted to be in love with the man I was spending my life with. I knew that high passion can’t last, that ecstasy, by its very nature, must fade, especially in the face of everyday dullness. ‘I just don’t feel that this is all life has to offer.’
‘Of course it’s not all. But it’s the best part.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
He cried as he saw me through into the Departure Lounge. My own eyes were wet, but it was regret I felt, rather than sorrow.
He is tall, tanned, smiling. We embrace and for a mercifully brief moment I wonder whether we should get back together, before reality imposes itself once again.
‘He is not the right man for you,’ Orlando said, eight years ago, when Allen and I had come over from Paris to meet my family.
‘Who is?’
‘Me, for instance.’
I laughed.
But he was being serious. ‘You’re not in love with him, Alice.’
‘What is love, Orlando?’
‘Don’t try to be clever. It’s not fair either to you or, more importantly, to him.’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘What you’re doing is making a terrible mistake.’
A mistake, yes, I think now, but not necessarily a terrible one.
As we turn out of the station yard and walk towards the sea front, I think to myself that if Allen and I can resurrect from our marriage at least the semblance of affection, then we shall have gained something.
‘Is there somewhere I can take you for lunch?’ Allen asks, and I steer him towards the big hotel on the front. We order what is basically fish and chips, with the limp piece of lettuce-plus-tomato-slice which passes for a salad in the outposts of England. In London, cuisine has moved on unrecognizably since I was a child, but anywhere else, the art of cooking or serving fresh vegetables still seems to elude us.
‘So why are you here?’ I ask.
He pretends hurt. ‘To see you, of course, hon.’
‘And what else?’
He stares out of the window at the wooden rowboats lined up on the shingle above the high-water mark. His sandy hair is touched with white above the ears and I see in him the physical closeness to his father. ‘Thing is,’ he says softly, ‘thing is, I’ve been sort of wondering if the two of us shouldn’t—’
‘No,’ I say. We were married for nearly ten years, yet I feel such repugnance at the thought of sharing any kind of intimacy with him, that I am unnecessarily brusque.
‘Come on, Alice. At least hear me out.’
‘No!’ I shake my head violently. ‘I don’t want to. There’s nothing to discuss.’ Emotions curdle inside me: fear, disgust, something unidentifiable which I half-suspect is a deep sexual longing – but not for Allen.
‘Boy,’ he says. ‘You sure are antsy.’
‘Allen . . .’ I lay my hand lightly on his. ‘Let’s keep things the way they are, shall we? We’re friends, aren’t we? We enjoy each other’s company. Let’s leave it at that.’
For a moment he stares at me without speaking. I can see his sharp brain moving like a computer behind his eyes, configuring, assessing, weighing up. Whatever hopes he might have had from this visit have been blighted, at least for the moment, but he is wise enough to know that by keeping doors open, he has more chance of getting what he wants than if he slams them shut.
He shrugs. ‘Okay, darlin’. Let’s do it your way.’
‘So tell me about the ashram lady,’ I say. ‘Charmaine, wasn’t it?’
‘Ger, not Char.’ He sighs, makes his chipmunk face, nods ruefully. ‘What a blooper that was! She’d lived in China for some years, and brought back all sort of kooky ideas. Turned the house upside down. All the furniture at crazy angles to make the most of something called feng-shui, which involves living at peace with your environment by harnessing the life force, multiplying by two and subtracting the number you first thought of.’
He ordered another beer from the hovering waitress. ‘Honestly, I never knew from day to day what the place would look like when I came home each night.’
‘Poor baby,’ I said.
‘Plus the darned crystals she had hanging from every available space so that every time I moved I risked losing an eye. And nothing in the icebox but tofu and bean-shoots. I had to sneak out for a McDonald’s just to keep body and soul together. To be frank, she left for India only seconds before I kicked her out.’
‘Why did you take up with her in the first place?’ I am laughing, remembering what a good companion he was. Still is. ‘You must have known she wasn’t the right woman for you.’
‘I’ve made that mistake before.’
I ignore this. ‘Is there anyone else in your life at the moment?’
‘I’ve dated this woman from the English Department a couple of times.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘She’s okay.’ He waves a hand disparagingly in the air. ‘That’s unfair. She’s actually very nice. Very nice.’
‘Maybe it’ll be third time lucky.’
‘Actually, I thought it was first time lucky,’ he says lugubriously.
In the face of this unsubtle appeal for sympathy, I smile. After a while, his face assumes its customary cheerfulness. ‘So . . . what should I see in this windy old town?’
We do the tour. The North End with its picturesque knobby-kneed cottages, the fourteenth-century castle built in the shape of a Tudor rose, the other rose-shaped castle which is full of memorabilia of Waterloo and Queen Victoria. We end up walking along the pier to look back at the pastel-coloured houses lining the long Esplanade.
Eventually, we stroll back to my apartment. My home. The wind off the sea is warm; it strokes my hair like a caress. Waves shift restlessly in to shore, seagulls dive and quarrel.
I brew him some coffee and we sit on the window-seat, looking out at the sea. ‘It’s nice here, but I can’t see you staying long term,’ Allen says.
‘Why not?’
‘What’s there here for you? Cute, I’ll grant you, but not much else. Or is it the desire to get back to your roots?’
‘Could be.’ For a moment I contemplate telling him about Nicola. But the subject is too overwhelming to be casually dropped into the conversation. ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I think I’ll enjoy it.’ I turn the conversation to mutual friends. ‘By the way, how are the Staceys getting along?’
‘Fine, Tom’s got a sabbatical coming up and is thinking of spending it, of all places, in Santiago. And Nancy Landauer specially asked me to say hi . . .’
For the
rest of the afternoon we hash over memories, do-you-remembers?
Later, we walk back to the station. Before he gets onto the train he hugs me and I feel the treacherous tug of comfort and familiarity. ‘If you ever stop enjoying, call me,’ he says. ‘I’ll be happy to come pick up the pieces.’
‘I’ll do that, Allen. I mean it.’
I wave him off, a small lump in my throat. I wonder how long it’ll be before we meet again.
FOUR
Allen’s visit has triggered memories which have nothing to do with Nicola. For me, this flat is haunted by Sasha Elias. His music is here, his piano, his diary. I want to know more about him. I want to find him again.
From the pile of his papers I have retrieved from the stool, I pick another sheet at random.
Mrs Sheffield came to my door this morning with a visitor. A strong-faced woman from along the road, who wishes me to give her daughter piano-lessons. Mrs Fiona Beecham. She is very uncombed, but obviously of a good class. ‘I do feel that all children should at least be exposed to music when they are young,’ she says. ‘My sisters and I were all taught to play an instrument from an early age. In my case, it was the viola.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘that my daughter is in danger of turning into a little savage.’
‘A savage?’
‘A wild thing. She’s what we call a tomboy . . . there are so many boys around all the time, d’you see?’
‘I . . . think so,’ I said. Perhaps she is making an English joke. I cannot imagine that Mutti would refer to my sisters as little savages.
‘Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,’ she said – at least, so I believe that she said. ‘So if you can fit Alice – my daughter, that is – into your timetable, it would be a very good thing. I was hoping for lessons at least twice a week until she goes back to school.’
‘I’m sure that I can find a place for her.’
‘That’s very good.’ She asked me for my terms and seemed to find them acceptable. ‘So when could she start? As soon as possible would be best.’
