Cross Channel (23 page)

In the hallway, under the burner at the foot of the stairs, Florence said, ‘Let me see your tongue.’ Emily rather delicately
extruded a centimetre and a half. ‘Just as I thought,’ said Florence. ‘Stealing the grapes. Every year the same disobedience,
ma petite sulfureuse
.’ Emily dropped her head in mock contrition. Florence tut-tutted, and turned down the light.

T
UNNEL

T
HE ELDERLY
E
NGLISHMAN
was travelling to Paris on business. He settled himself methodically into his seat, adjusting the head-rest and leg-support; his back still ached from some light spring digging. He unfolded the table-flap, checked the ventilation nozzle and overhead light. He ignored the free magazine, audio-plugs and personal video facility with onscreen lunch menu and wine list. Not that he was against food and drink: he retained, in his late sixties, a hectic and at times guilty anticipation of the next meal. But he was allowing himself to become - or rather, to become to himself, rather than merely to others - a little old-fashioned. Perhaps it appeared an affectation to take home-made sandwiches and a half-bottle of Meursault in a cold-sleeve when lunch was provided free to business customers. But that was what he wanted, so that was what he did.

As the train eased grandly out of St Pancras he reflected, as he did every time, on the surprising banality that within his lifetime Paris had become closer than Glasgow, Brussels than Edinburgh. He could leave his house in north London and barely three hours later be heading down the mild decline of the boulevard de Magenta without even a flap of his passport. All he needed was his European identity card, and that only in case he robbed a bank or fell under the Métro. He
took out his wallet and checked the oblong of plastic: name, address, date-of-birth, social security listings, phone, fax and e-mail data, blood-group, medical history, credit rating and next-of-kin. All these items, except for the first two, were invisible, encoded in a small iridescent lozenge. He read his name – two words plus an initial, all emptied of association after so many years of familiarity – and studied his photograph. Gaunt, long-faced, wattles under the chin, high colour and a few broken veins from disregarding the medical profession’s advice on alcohol, plus the usual serial-killer’s eyes that photo-booths inflict. He didn’t think he was vain, but given his tendency to mildly disagree with most photographs of himself, admitted that he must be so.

He had first travelled to France fifty-six years previously, on a family motoring holiday to Normandy. No roll-on, roll-off ferries then, no Eurostar or Le Shuttle. They anchored your car to a wooden pallet on the Newhaven quayside and swung it into the depths of the ship as if it were a piece of merchandise. This habitual memory set off in him the catechism of departure. He had sailed from Dover, Folkestone, Newhaven, Southampton, Portsmouth. He had landed at Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Saint-Malo. He had flown from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, London City Airport; landed at Le Bourget, Orly, Roissy. Back in the Sixties he had taken an overnight sleeper from Victoria to the Gare du Nord. At about the same time, there had been the Silver Arrow: four and a quarter hours from city centre to city centre had been the boast, Waterloo to Lydd, Lydd to Le Touquet, and the Paris train waiting by the airstrip. What else? He had flown from Southampton (Eastleigh, to be precise) to Cherbourg by something called an air-bridge, his dumpy Morris Minor in the hold of a lumbering freight-plane. He
had landed at Montpellier, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nice, Perpignan, Nantes, Lille, Grenoble, Nancy, Strasbourg, Besançon. He had taken the motorail back from Narbonne, Avignon, Brive-la-Gaillarde, Fréjus and Perpignan. He had flown over that country, crossed it by train and bus, driven, hitch-hiked; he had raised broad-bean blisters walking through the Cévennes. He was the owner of several generations of yellow Michelin maps, whose slightest unfolding would stir him to vivid reverie. He still remembered his shock, forty or so years earlier, when the French had discovered the roundabout: bureaucracy meets libertarianism, that old French collision. Later they had discovered the speed-bump or sleeping policeman: the
ralentisseur
or
policier couchant
. Odd that our policemen slept and theirs merely lay down. What did that tell you?

The Eurostar broke from the last London tunnel into the April sunlight. Embankment walls of bistre brick noisy with graffiti slowly yielded to mute suburbia. It was one of those brittle-bright mornings intended to deceive: housewives pegging out their laundry were mistakenly in short sleeves, and young men would get earache from lowering their car-roofs prematurely. Xeroxed semis fled past his eye; prunus blossom hung as heavy as fruit. There was a blur of allotments, then a sportsground with a row of cricket sightscreens parked for the winter. He shifted his gaze from the window and picked at the
Times
crossword. A few years previously, he had announced his plan to ward off senility: do the crossword every day and call yourself an old fart if you catch yourself behaving like one. Though wasn’t there something senile, or pre-senile, in these very precautions?

He turned away from himself and began to speculate about his immediate neighbours. To his right were three fellows in
suits plus a chap in a striped blazer; opposite him an elderly woman. Elderly: that’s to say, about the same age as himself. He said the word again, slid it around his mouth. He’d never much cared for it - there was something slimy and ingratiating about its use - and now that he was himself what the word denoted, he liked it even less. Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life was conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this was how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life
declined
. A third sense there too: life refused, life not fully grasped. ‘I see now that I have always been afraid of life,’ Flaubert had once conceded. Was this true of all writers? And was it, in any case, a necessary truth: in order to be a writer, you needed in some sense to decline life? Or: you were a writer to the extent that you declined life?) Where was he?
Elderly
. Yes, the fake gentility of that expression should go. Young, middle-aged, old, dead, that was how it went. He despised the way people pussy-footed about age - their own age - while happily thrusting it on others. Men in their mid-seventies referring to ‘some old boy of eighty’, women of sixty-five mentioning a ‘poor old dear’ of seventy. Better to err in the opposite direction. You were young up to thirty-five, middle-aged up to sixty, old thereafter. So, the woman opposite was not elderly but old, and he was old too: had been so for exactly nine years. Thanks to the medics, there was a lot of being old to look forward to. A lot of being as he now too often found himself: anecdotic, memorialist, rambly; still confident about the local connection between things but apprehensive about the overall structure. He was fond of quoting his wife’s formulation, arrived at long ago when they had both been middle-aged: ‘As we get older, we become hardened in our least acceptable characteristics.’ That was true; though even knowing it, how could we be saved
from it? Our least acceptable characteristics were those most apparent to others, not to ourselves. And what were his? One of them was complacently asking himself unanswerable questions.

He left the men till later. The woman: silverish hair which made no claim for authenticity (the colour, that is - the hair, as far as he could tell, was real), primrose silk shirt, navy jacket with primrose handkerchief in the pocket, plaid skirt which … no, he could no longer interpret hemlines in terms of fashionability, so didn’t try. She was tallish, five eight or nine, and good-looking. (He refused that other slimy word, handsome. When applied to a woman above a certain age, it meant ‘was once good-looking’. A harsh misapprehension, since beauty was something a woman grew into, usually in her thirties, and thereafter rarely grew out of. Brash, fuck-me innocence was something different. Beauty was a function of self-knowledge, plus knowledge of the world; therefore, logically, you would not be more than fragmentarily beautiful until you were thirty or so.) Why not a Crazy Horse girl? That would fit. She had the height, the bones, the grooming. Going back for a reunion: that’s what they did, didn’t they? Madame Olive’s class of ’65 or whatever. Odd that it was still going on, that despite the coarser sex-treats available there was still an audience for these hard-working English hoofers, matched like suburban semis, who danced what was held to be the tasteful erotic and weren’t allowed to meet anyone within 200 yards of the club. He swiftly imagined her previous life for her: ballet school in Camberley, dancing on cruise-ships, an audition at the Crazy Horse; then came a spangly Latin stage-name, professional life in a family atmosphere, the club savings scheme; finally, after four or five years, back to England with the down-payment on a dress shop, gentleman
admirers, marriage, children. He checked the wedding ring, which was centrally placed between two more geological items. Yes, that was about right, returning for the fiftieth anniversary … Madame Olive long since gone, of course, but Betty from Falmouth would be there, and so would …

The blazer of the fellow diagonally across from him was a bit bogus. Of course, all striped blazers were
au fond
bogus, pretending to be Jerome K. Jerome or Henley Regatta, but the ox-blood and lime elements in this one were approaching parody. A plump middle-aged chap with greying hair, sideburns and a noisy tan, yawning over a cycling magazine. Jack the Lad off for a spot of how’s-your-father? Too clichéd. TV executive bidding for the coverage of this year’s Tour de France? No, make a sideways jump. Antique dealer on the way to the Hôtel Drouot? Better. The jaunty jacket designed to supply a bit of false character, to help catch the auctioneer’s eye yet also make rivals underestimate him when the bidding got serious.

Beyond the men in suits he saw an unstrung hop field and the half-cocked chimney of an oast-house. He pulled in his focus and tried to do the blokes justice. The one with glasses and a newspaper seemed to be examining the carriage window in some detail: all right, make him a civil engineer. The one without glasses but with a newspaper and a stripy institutional tie: third echelon of the European Commission? The other one … oh, count your prune stones: thinker, traitor, solderer, whaler … well, you couldn’t do everyone, he’d already found that out.

In the old days — even in the elderly days — they might have been talking by this stage. The best you got nowadays was a sort of wary camaraderie. Stop. Old fart. That word
nowadays
is the giveaway, always preceding or following a
statement worthy of denunciation by the absent, younger, critical self. As for the sentiment itself: you have been here before, don’t forget. When you were a boy, adults were always boring on about how ‘Everyone had
talked to one another
during the war.’ And how had you reacted, becalmed in the throbbing boredom of adolescence? By muttering to yourself that war seemed a fairly high price to pay for this apparently desirable social result.

Yes, but even so … He remembered … no, that verb, he increasingly found, was often inexact. He seemed to remember, or he retrospectively imagined, or he reconstructed, from films and books with the aid of a nostalgia as runny as old Camembert, a time when travellers crossing Europe by train would become acquaintances for the length of the journey. There would be incidents, sub-plots, exotic characters: the Lebanese businessman eating currants out of a small silver box, the mystery vamp with a sudden secret - that kind of thing. British reserve would be overcome with the help of squintily suspicious passport inspections and the tinkly bell of the white-jacketed steward; or you might thumb open your tortoiseshell cigarette case and make social disembarkation that way. Nowadays … yes, nowadays the journey was too swift across this new European
zollverein
, food was brought to you at your seats, and no one smoked. The Death of the Compartment Train and Its Effect Upon the Social Interaction of Travel.

That was another sign of Old Fartery: thinking up wanly humorous thesis titles. Still … back in the early Nineties he had found himself in Zürich boarding an austere and unwelcoming train to Munich. The reason for its shabbiness soon became apparent: the final destination was Prague, and this was old Communist rolling-stock which had been graciously allowed to sully the impeccably capitalist track. In
the window-seats were a tweeded Swiss couple, full of rugs, sandwiches and elderly suitcases (now that was all right, a suitcase could - even should - be elderly), which only a middle-aged Englishman was strong enough to heave into the rack. Opposite him sat a tall, blonde Swiss woman in scarlet jacket and black trousers, with a certain clunk of gold about her. Unreflectingly, he had gone back to his European edition of the
Guardian
. The train ambled bumpily over the first few kilometres, and each time it slowed the compartment door beside him would slide open with a bang. Then the train would pick up speed and the door hurtle itself shut with another uncushioned crack. One, two, or perhaps four silent curses were uttered every few minutes against some unknown Czech carriage designer. After a while the Swiss woman laid down her magazine, put on dark glasses and set her head back. The door banged a few more times, until the Englishman put his foot against it. He had to twist slightly to do so, and maintained this awkward, watchful posture for half an hour or so. His vigil had ended when a ticket collector rapped on the window with his metal punch (a sound he hadn’t heard for decades). She stirred, passed up her ticket, and when the official had gone, looked across and said,