Cross Channel (24 page)

‘Vous avez bloqué la porte, je crois.’

‘Oui. Avec mon pied,’ he had pedantically explained. And then, just as unnecessarily, ‘Vous dormiez.’

‘Grâce a vous.’

They were passing a lake. Which one was that? he had asked. She didn’t know. Lake Constance, perhaps. She consulted the other couple in German. ‘Der Bodensee,’ she confirmed. ‘It was here that the only Swiss submarine sank because they left the door open.’

‘When was that?’ he asked.

‘It was a joke.’

‘Ah …’

‘Je vais manger. Vous m’accompagnerez?’

‘Bien sûr.’

In the dining-car they were served by broad-hipped Czech nippies with tired faces and untreated hair. He had a Pils and a Prague omelette, she an unsightly mound of items topped off with a slice of beef, some bacon and a cruelly fried egg. His omelette seemed as delicious as this sudden situation. He had coffee, she a glass of hot water with a Winston Churchill tea-bag dangling in it. Another Pils, another tea, another coffee, a cigarette, as the soft south German countryside clattered past. They had disagreed about unhappiness. She said unhappiness came from the head, not from the heart, and was caused by the false images which arose in the head; he asserted, more pessimistically, more incurably, that unhappiness came solely from the heart. She called him
Monsieur
, and they addressed one another decorously as
vous
; he found the tension between this linguistic formality and the assumption of intimacy voluptuous. He had invited her to his lecture that night in Munich. She replied that she had been planning to return to Zürich. On the platform at Munich they had kissed on both cheeks, and he had said, ‘A ce soir, peut-être, sinon à un autre train, une autre ville …’ It had been a perfect flirtation, its perfection confirmed by the fact that she never came to his lecture.

The Shuttle terminal at Cheriton slipped by; the train manager announced that they were approaching the Channel. Fences, unsullied concrete, an inappreciable descent, then suave blackness. He closed his eyes, and in the tunnel of memory heard the echo of rhythmic shouting. It must have been fifteen, twenty years ago. Perhaps that dubious fellow
across the aisle had set it off by summoning up his analogue. People repeated themselves, as stories did.

In the private darkness of his past, he turned and saw a group of football fans approach, beer can in hand, free fist aloft. ‘Dra-gons! Dra-gons!’ Black leather jackets, rings through their noses. Spotting grey-haired, comic-blazered Lenny Fulton, the smarmy yet opinionated presenter of ‘Sportsworld UK’. Lenny Fulton, ‘the man who likes to put himself about a bit’, who earlier that season had denounced the less civil supporters of a south London club as ‘worse than pigs’ - ‘indeed’, he had gone on, ‘to call them pigs would amount to a libel on that admirable beast.’ Those accused had responded with satiric accord. You call us pigs? Very well, then pigs we shall be. In their hundreds they had turned up to the next match with brass rings clipped to their noses; the more ardent had their septums pierced and turned a fashion statement into a permanent declaration. From the terraces they had loudly oinked their support. Now they had found their condemner.

‘Fucking Lenny! Look what we’ve got here!’ There was a blur of movement, an inchoate roar, a spray of beer and a panicky squeak of ‘Hey, lads’, before Lenny Fulton was ripped from his seat and frog-marched away.

For ten minutes or so the other passengers looked around, mutually encouraging one another to do nothing. Then Fulton had reappeared with his guardians, who thrust him approximately back into his seat. He was dishevelled, red-faced, beer-haired and now wore a big brass clip-on ring through his nose.

‘Fucking lucky, eh, Lenny?
Doors
.’ One of the larger fans cuffed him across the face. ‘Wear it, right, Lenny?’

‘Right lads.’

‘All the way to fucking Paris.
And
on TV. Be watching you.’

They turned to go, nose-rings glinting. On the back of their leather jackets were dragons’ wings picked out in scarlet stitching. Lenny Fulton looked around his immediate companions and laughed self-consciously. ‘Good lads, really. Just high spirits. It’s a big match. No, good lads.’ He paused, touched his nose-ring, laughed again, and added ‘Fucking
animals
.’ He ran his hands through his damp hair, back-combing it with his fingers until it stood up in a way familiar to viewers of ‘Sportsworld UK’. ‘If the doors weren’t locked they’d have had me out. Pigs.’ Then, with visible and melodramatic thoughtfulness, he appended the necessary qualification. ‘
Pigs
is too good for them. To call them pigs would amount to a libel on that admirable beast.’

They had urged calm and normality back upon themselves with talk of sport: the match against Paris Saint-Germain, the winter cricket tour, the Five Nations Tournament. He joined in awkwardly, asking one of his favourite questions: ‘When was cricket last played at the Olympics, and who won the medals?’ Lenny Fulton looked at him with the sort of professional suspicion he obviously reserved for sports bores. ‘Trick one, by any chance?’ No one hazarded an answer. ‘1900, Los Angeles, England the gold, France the silver. No bronze as those were the only two countries competing.’ Only mild interest was expressed at this. Well, it had been more than a century ago. He didn’t bother with his second question: what was the spot prize the year the Tour de France had passed through Colombey-les-deux-Eglises? Give up? All three volumes of General de Gaulle’s memoirs.

When lunch arrived, the steward looked enquiringly at
Lenny Fulton and murmured, ‘Up the Dragons, eh, Mr Fulton?’

‘Fuck the Dragons, actually, from here to Timbuctoo. And would you refresh this with a quadruple. Single malt, none of your blended rubbish.’

‘Yes, Mr Fulton.’

Now, years later, the elderly Englishman unwrapped his sandwiches, took out his travelling corkscrew and opened the half-bottle of 2009 Meursault. He offered a glass to the Crazy Horse girl opposite. She hesitated, took the bottle, turned it to read the label, and then assented. ‘But just enough to taste.’

No one drank any more, he reflected. Or at least, no one seemed to drink as he did, just a little more than was recommended. That was the best way to drink. It was either quadruple whiskies and a softened brain, or else mimsy little ‘tastes’ such as the one he was now pouring. He imagined her back in her spangly days curling a little finger as she hoisted the
coupe de champagne
ordered by some hot-tongued admirer she had met 201 yards from the club.

But he was wrong. She wasn’t going to Paris and she had never danced except on amateur nights. She told him she was going to Rheims for a vertical tasting of Krug back to 1928. She was a Master of Wine, and after holding his Meursault against the white tablecloth and briefly rinsing her mouth she declared that for an off-vintage it had reasonable fruit, but you could taste the rain and the oaking was rather out of balance. He asked her to guess its price, and her estimate was lower than what he had paid for it.

Well, a good misapprehension; not outstanding, but useful. His favourite was still Casablanca. Changing planes there on the way to Agadir some twenty years ago; scurrying through a sultry terminal, watching the boarding-lights begin to flash
amid a loungeful of staid and stoic British travellers. Suddenly, a young woman had gone berserk and started upending her handbag all over the floor. Make-up stuff, tissues, keys, money fell out at their different speeds, and with a sort of manic defiance she continued hitting her bag long after it was empty. Then, very slowly, as if daring the plane to leave without her, she had started picking things up and putting them back. Her boyfriend remained stiffly in the queue while, furious yet unashamed, she rootled like a rag-picker.

They must have caught the plane, because they turned up at the same hotel, an oasitic place with snowy Atlas mountains rising behind sunlit tangerine groves. Walking to the bougain-villaea-draped main building on the first morning, he had noticed the girl sitting at a table with water-colour equipment strewn in front of her. His curiosity about what she might have lost at Casablanca airport was forcefully reactivated. Special factor-X sun-cream? Her list of local contacts? More than that, surely: something which had made her livid and her companion hot-cheeked. A contraceptive item whose absence would imperil the holiday? Insulin capsules? Colonic depth-charges? Henna rinse? He became retrospectively troubled on her behalf and quietly obsessed with the whole incident. He began inventing her life for her, filling the psychological distance between raging traveller and calm water-colourist. For several days his speculations became more baroque as he protracted his ignorance like a temptation. At last, his fear of losing what the girl knew - and what she doubtless failed to value at its true worth - became too much. He approached her one afternoon, banally praised her work, and then, with an awful, tense casualness, as if some chance of happiness were being wagered, asked what she had lost at Casablanca. ‘Oh,’ she had replied in a sharp, dismissive voice, ‘my boarding card.’
He had wanted to bark with pleasure, but merely stood there like some desperate, pop-eyed fiancé, uncertain which delighted him the more: the excess of his misprisions or the primness of the truth. The following day she and her companion departed, as if they had fulfilled their function - which for him at least they had.

He looked out at the French landscape, idly attending to its sparse novelties. Thin drainage ditches and sleepy canals. Hilltop water-towers, some shaped like egg-cups, others like golf tees. Pencil-sharpened church spires instead of square English towers. A First World War cemetery waving a high
tricolor
. But his mind kept pulling back. Agadir: yes, that other misprision, half a century ago, when he had taught as an
assistant
in Rennes. That year of his life was now compressed in his brain to a few anecdotes whose final narrative form had long since been arrived at. But there was something else, not really an anecdote, and therefore likely to be a truer memory. His pupils had been friendly - or at any rate had treated him with humorous curiosity - except for one particular boy. He couldn’t summon a name, a face, an expression; all that remained was the boy’s place - back row, slightly right of centre - in the small, oblong classroom. At some point, and how it came about he no longer knew, the pupil had remarked point-blank that he hated the English. Asked why, he said because they had killed his uncle. Asked when, he said in 1940. Asked how, he said that the Royal Navy had treacherously attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. You killed my uncle: you. To the young
assistant d’anglais
, the hatred and its cause had come as a complicating historical shock.

Mers-el-Kebir. Just a minute, that wasn’t anywhere near Agadir. Mers-el-Kebir was near Oran: Algeria, not Morocco. Old fool. Old fart. You made the local connection but you
missed the overall structure. Except here he hadn’t even made the local connection. Hardened in your least acceptable characteristics. He rambled, even to himself. His train of thought had jumped the points, and he hadn’t even noticed.

Someone handed him a hot towel; his face drained it to a cold damp rag. Start again. 1940: start there. Very well. 1940, he could safely say, was seventy-five years ago. His generation had been the last to have a memory of the great European wars, to have that sort of history entwined into its family. Exactly a hundred years ago his grandfather had set off for the First World War. Exactly seventy-five years ago his father had set off for the Second World War. Exactly fifty years ago, in 1965, he had begun to wonder if, for him, it would be third time lucky. And so it had proved: throughout his lifetime, his great, historical, European luck had held.

A hundred years ago, his grandfather had volunteered and been shipped out to France with his regiment. A year or two later he had come back, invalided out with trench foot. Absolutely nothing of his time there had survived. There were no letters from him, no buff field-postcards, no bar of silky ribbons snipped from his tunic; not a button, not a souvenir piece of Arras lace had been passed down. Grandma had developed into a zealous thrower-out in her later years. And this lack of the slightest souvenir was complicated by another layer of mistiness, of concealment. He knew, or thought he knew, or at least had believed for half his life, that his grandfather would talk freely about his enlistment, training, departure for France, and arrival there; but beyond this point he would not, or could not, go. His stories always stopped at the front line, leaving others to imagine frantic charges across the cloying mud towards a merciless greeting. Such taciturnity had seemed more than understandable: correct, perhaps even
glamorous. How could you put the carnage of that time into mere words? His grandfather’s silence, whether imposed by trauma or by heroic character, had been appropriate.

But one day, after both his grandparents were dead, he had asked his mother about her father’s terrible war, and she had sapped his convictions, his story. No, she had said, she didn’t know where in France he had served. No, she didn’t think he had been anywhere near the front line. No, he’d never used the phrase ‘over the top’. No, he hadn’t been traumatised by his experiences. So why, then, did he never talk about the war? His mother’s answer had come after a lengthy pause for judgment. ‘He didn’t talk about it because I don’t think he thought it was interesting.’

And there it was. Nothing to be done about it now. His grandfather had joined the Missing of the Somme. He had come back, it was true; it was just that he had lost everything later. His name might as well be chiselled on the great arch at Thiepval. No doubt there was some regimental listing of him in a
livre d’or
, documentation of that absent strip of medals. But this would not help. No act of will could recreate that putteed and perhaps mustachioed figure of 1915. He was gone beyond memory, and no plump little French cake dipped in tea would release those distant truths. They could only be sought by a different technique, the one in which this man’s grandson still specialised. He, after all, was meant to thrive on knowing and not knowing, on the fruitful misprision, the partial discovery and the resonant fragment. That was the
point de départ
of his trade.