Not Safe After Dark (22 page)

Needless to say, this affair made life very difficult both at work and at home, but I think I managed to cope well enough under the circumstances. I know I succeeded in hiding it from Evelyn,
for I surely would have felt the repercussions had I not.

We went on meeting furtively for almost a year, during which time our passion did not abate in the least. Katrina never once asked me to abandon my marriage and live with her, but I wanted to.
Oh God, how I wanted to. Only the thought of all the trouble, all the upheaval, that such a move would cause prevented me. For Evelyn wouldn’t take it lying down. So, like many others
embroiled in affairs, I simply let it run on, perhaps hoping vaguely that some
deus ex machina
would come along and solve my problems for me.

Then, one day, after an excruciatingly painful Christmas spent away from Katrina, Evelyn reminded me of a conversation we had had some time ago about getting a country cottage, and pointed out
the ideal place in an estate agent’s brochure: a rundown, isolated cottage in Oxfordshire, going for a song.

Furiously, I began to think of how such a move might prevent me from seeing Katrina as often as I needed to. We would have to sell the Dulwich house, of course, but the Oxfordshire cottage was
indeed going for such an unbelievably low price that I might be able to afford a small flat in town.

At a pinch, however, Evelyn might suggest I could commute. The thought of that was unbearable. Though Katrina and I wouldn’t be separated totally, anything other than a quick session after
work before the train home would be impossible. And neither of us wanted to live like that. A quickie in the back of a car is so sordid, and we were passionately, romantically in love.

On the other hand, I could hardly crush Evelyn’s dreams of a place in the country without thinking up a damn good explanation as to why we should simply stay put. And I couldn’t. The
price was right, and we might not have another chance for years. Even with the renovations that would need to be done, we worked out, we could still easily afford it.

And so we took the plunge and bought the cottage. To say I was a soul in torment might sound like an exaggeration, but believe me, it doesn’t even come close to describing how wretched I
really felt as I signed on the dotted line.

•

We had sent Sam Halsey, a jack-of-all-trades in the renovation business, over to Oxfordshire on a number of occasions to assess what needed doing and how it could be done to our
liking
and
to our budget. One of his complaints was that, due to its isolation and to the odd whims of its previous owners, the toilet arrangements were far from adequate.

After much deliberation, one afternoon at the house in Dulwich, Sam said, ‘Of course, you could have a septic tank put in.’

‘A what?’ I said.

‘A septic tank. Perfectly respectable. Lots of country folk have them. Of course, you’ll need some carrion.’

‘I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t follow you.’

‘Carrion. To get the whole process going. Now, some of the younger chaps in the business will tell you a bit of compost will do the job just fine, but don’t believe them. Don’t
you believe them. My old boss told me—’

Sam’s voice faded into the background as, suddenly, it hit me. I thought of my old lunchtime companion, Edward Grainger, and that guilty look that flitted across his features the time I
saw him in Waterstone’s with Joyce, the blonde.

I remembered the tragedy of his wife’s disappearance, and how, after that, I saw less and less of him.

And I remembered how the disappearance occurred around the time they were having a septic tank installed at their cottage in Hampshire. Carrion, indeed.

And then I thought of my Katrina, my beautiful, beautiful Katrina, who took my breath away with her sad eyes and her skin like warm brown silk.

And, lastly, I thought of Evelyn. Life just isn’t fair, is it? Some people don’t simply fade away quietly into the obscurity from whence they came when you want rid of them, do they?
No, they have to cause trouble, create scenes, make unreasonable demands and generally do their damnedest to ruin your hopes of a decent and happy future without them. They just
won’t go
away
. Well, as I have already explained, Evelyn is one of those people. I’m certain of it.

On the other hand, people disappear all the time, don’t they? And people change. Harriet changed into Joyce, didn’t she? Sometimes you just have to give a little kick-start to get
the process going, like the carrion in the septic tank, and then nature takes care of the rest.

‘Penny for them?’

‘What? Oh, I’m sorry, Sam. Miles away.’

‘That’s all right. I was just saying as how you’ll need some carrion for the septic tank. My old boss swore by it, he did.’

At that moment, Evelyn passed by the open French windows in his shabby beige cardigan, secateurs in hand. Wisps of grey hair blew in the March wind like spiders’ webs, and his glasses had
slipped down his nose. Yes, people disappear all the time, don’t they? And if it can happen to wives, I thought, then it can bloody well happen to husbands too.

‘Yes, Sam,’ I said slowly. ‘Yes, I suppose we will. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.’

The girl sitting
outside the cafe reminds me of April. She has the same long hennaed hair, which she winds around her index finger in the same abstracted way. She is
waiting for someone clearly – a lover perhaps – and as she waits she smokes, holding her cigarette in the same way, taking the same short, hurried puffs, that April used to do. With her
free hand, she alternates between taking sips of milky
pastis
and tapping her cigarette packet on the table. She is smoking Marlboro, as everyone in Paris seems to do these days. Back then
it was all Gitanes, Gauloises and Disque Bleus.

Still, it wasn’t smoking that killed April; it was love.

•

It is late September, and though the weather is mild, it is still too cold outside for an old man like me, with blood as thin and as lacking in nutrients as workhouse gruel.
Instead, I sit inside the little cafe on the Boulevard St Germain over a
pichet
of red wine, just watching the people come and go. The young people. I have spent most of my life surrounded
by the young, and though I grow inexorably older every year, they always seem to stay young.
Immortal youth
. Like Tithonus, I am ‘a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream’. But
unlike Tennyson’s luckless narrator, who gained eternal life but not eternal youth, I am not immortal.

Six months, perhaps less, the doctors say. Something is growing inside me; my cells are mutating. As yet I feel little pain, though my appetite has diminished and I often suffer from extreme
weariness.

Dying, I find, lends an edge to living, gives a clarity and a special, golden hue to the quotidian scenes parading before me: a swarthy man with a briefcase, glancing at his watch, speeding up,
late for an important appointment; a woman chastising her little girl at the corner, wagging her finger, the girl crying and stamping her foot; a distracted priest stumbling briefly as he walks up
the steps to the church across the boulevard.

Dying accentuates the beauty of the young, sets their energy in relief, enhances the smooth glow of their unwrinkled skin. But dying does not make me bitter. I am resigned to my fate; I have
come to the end of my threescore and ten; I have seen enough. If you wish to travel, my doctors told me, do it now while you’re still strong enough. So here I am, revisiting the scene of my
one and only great
amour
.

April
. She always pronounced it
Ap-reel
. When I think of her, I still hear Thelonious Monk playing ‘April in Paris’, hesitantly at first, feeling his way into the song,
reluctant to define the theme, then worrying away at it and, once finding it, altering it so much that the music becomes his own, only to be abandoned finally.

Of course, April didn’t give a tinker’s for Thelonious Monk. She listened to him dutifully, as they all did, for they were the heirs of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to whom Monk,
Bird, Trane, Miles and Mingus were gods, sacred and cool. But April’s generation had its own gods – the Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan – gods of words and images as well as
of music, and it was they who provided the soundtrack to which I lived during my year as a visiting lecturer in American literature at the Sorbonne in 1968.

This cafe hasn’t changed much. A lick of paint, perhaps, if that. It probably hasn’t changed much since Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to hang out around here. Even the waiters are
probably the same. It was here I first met April, of course (why else would I come here?), one fine evening towards the end of March that year, when I was still young enough to bear the slight
chill of a clear spring evening.

•

That April was beautiful almost goes without saying. I remember her high cheekbones, her smooth, olive complexion, dark, watchful eyes and rich, moist lips, down-turned at the
edges, often making her look sulky or petulant when she was far from it. I remember also how she used to move with grace and confidence when she remembered, but how the gaucheness of late
adolescence turned her movements into a country girl’s gait when she was at her most unselfconscious. She was tall, slim and long-legged, and her breasts were small, round and high. The
breasts of a Cranach nude.

We met, as I say, one late March evening in 1968 at this cafe, the Café de la Lune, where I was then sitting with the usual group: Henri, Nadine, Brad, Brigitte, Alain and Paul. This was
only days after Daniel Cohn-Bendit and seven other students had occupied the dean’s office at Nanterre to protest against the recent arrest of six members of the National Vietnam Committee,
an event that was to have cataclysmic effects on us all not long afterwards. Much of the time in those days we spoke of revolution, but that evening we were discussing, I remember quite clearly, F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night,
when in she walked, wearing a woolly jumper and close-fitting, bell-bottomed jeans with flowers embroidered around the bells. She was carrying a
bulky leather shoulder bag, looking radiant and slightly lost, glancing around for someone she knew.

It turned out that she knew Brad, an American backpacker who had attached himself to our group. People like Brad had a sort of fringe, outlaw attraction for the students. They seemed, with their
freedom to roam and their contempt for rules and authority, to embody the very principles that the students themselves, with their heavy workloads, exams and future careers, could only imagine, or
live vicariously. There were always one or two Brads around. Some dealt in drugs to make a living; Brad, though he spoke a good revolution, lived on a generous allowance wired regularly by his
wealthy Boston parents via Western Union.

April went up to Brad and kissed him on both cheeks, a formal French gesture he seemed to accept with thinly veiled amusement. In his turn, Brad introduced her to the rest of us. That done, we
resumed our discussion over another bottle of wine, the tang of Gauloises and
café noir
infusing the chill night air, and April surprised me by demonstrating that she had not only
read
Tender Is the Night
, but that she had thought about it, too, even though she was a student of history, not of literature.

‘Don’t you think those poor young girls are terribly
used
?’ she said. ‘I mean, Nicole is Dick’s
patient.
He should be healing her, not sleeping with
her. And the way Rosemary is manipulated by her mother . . . I’d go so far as to say that the mother seems to be
pimping
for her. Those films she made –’ and here April
gave her characteristic shrug, no more than a little shiver rippling across her shoulders – ‘they were no doubt made to appeal to older men.’ She didn’t look at me as she
said this, but my cheeks burned nonetheless.

‘Have you read
Day of the Locust
?’ Henri, one of the other students, chimed in. ‘If you want to know about how Hollywood warps people, that’s your place to start.
There’s a mother in there who makes Rosemary’s look like a saint.’

‘Huxley?’ asked Nadine, not our brightest.

‘No,’ said April. ‘That was
After Many a Summer. Day of the Locust
was Nathanael West, I think. Yes?’

Here, she looked directly at me, the professor, for the first time, turned on me the full blaze of her beauty. She knew she was right, of course, but she still deferred to me out of
politeness.

‘That’s right,’ I said, smiling, feeling my heart lurch and my soul tingle inside its chains of flesh. ‘Nathanael West wrote
Day of the Locust
.’

And from that moment on I was smitten.

•

I told myself not to be a fool, that April was far too young for me, and that a beautiful woman like her couldn’t possibly be interested in a portly, forty-year-old
lecturer, even if he did wear faded denim jeans, had a goatee and grew those wisps of hair that remained a little longer than some of his colleagues thought acceptable. But after that first meeting
I found myself thinking about April a lot. In fact I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It wasn’t mere lust – though, Lord knows, it was that too – but I loved the sound of
her voice, loved the way she twisted strands of hair around her finger as she spoke, the way she smoked her cigarette, loved the passion of her arguments, the sparkle of her laughter, the subtle
jasmine of her perfume.

Love
.

That night, she had left the cafe after about an hour, arm in arm with Brad – young, handsome, rich, footloose and fancy-free Brad – and I had lain awake tormented by images of their
passionate love making. I had never felt like that before, never felt so consumed by desire for someone and so racked by pain at the thought of someone else having her. It was as if an alien
organism had invaded my body, my very soul, and wrought such changes there that I could hardly cope with more mundane matters, such as teaching and writing, eating and sleeping.