17

The following August, my parents having bought a place in East Finchley, Johnny and I took a furnished flat in Camden Town. “That’s nice,” said my mother. “Two good Jewish boys setting up house together. Don’t forget on Friday nights to light the Sabbath candle! Have a mezuzah at your front door!” In Amersham, neither before the war, during it or afterwards, had we ever lit a Sabbath candle, set foot inside a synagogue, or had a mezuzah at our front door. Therefore, she was being humorous. But her humour had been ironic, as well as heavy-handed. In truth, she had been a little miffed by my decision to leave home.

And after we’d been there only a few days—in fact it was our first Sunday and we were sitting, pyjama-clad, over a celebratory brunch of fruit juice, scrambled egg, hot rolls and coffee, with the newspapers spread out beside our plates and overflowing onto our laps—Johnny suddenly said, “Let’s go to Paris for the New Year!” He was looking at an article about Versailles.

By the New Year he would have completed his first six months at Air France—he worked in their reservations department in New Bond Street—and would then qualify for fantastically reduced travel (if only on a stand-by basis) which someone flying with him could also enjoy.

“Great! I’d love it! But how can you be certain you won’t be working at the New Year? Doesn’t everybody fight tooth and nail to get it off?”

But this was just small talk, what I sometimes thought of as keeping up appearances. I knew damned well he would be free—even if I hadn’t expected mention of it for a further week or so. Memory plays tricks. I could have sworn it had happened in the Old Bull and Bush, up in Hampstead.

Johnny was fair-haired and of medium height and had the air of a serious-minded student—especially when he wore his glasses—not of someone who had frittered away the past six years in a series of dead-end jobs in Amersham. Indeed, I’d done my best to nag him into staying at school and going to university, reading for a degree in science or in music. But he’d been keen to be out in the world and his parents had backed him. Yet when I remembered such things as the crystal set, far more his accomplishment than it had ever been mine, I kept being cross at his shortsightedness and the thought of all that he was missing.

However, it mightn’t be too late. I’d spoken, ad nauseam, about the fun of my own undergraduate days—the balls and the picnics and the punting, the all-night discussions fuelled by wine and chocolate biscuits, the playing of the drums and saxophone at dawn in misty meadows near the river bank—until at last he’d asked me, please, for the love of Mike, just to put a sock in it. I wasn’t sure this was altogether a bad sign.

“Well, if we’re really off to France,” I said, “tomorrow I’ll inquire about evening classes in French.”

“But we’re only going for a couple of days! And in Paris, you’ll find, you don’t even need French.”

“Oh, it’s all right for you. You get practice at work. But for me, when I actually scraped through my ‘O’ level, old Horwood nearly fainted from the shock of it.”

No, that had been the last time—again I’d got muddled—this time my pass was more respectable. But Johnny probably thought I was simply being modest. And he knew that modern languages had never been my forte. Even having a French wife hadn’t helped me much, for both Ginette and her parents spoke excellent English and by the time Ginette had lived in Britain for twenty years most people were surprised to learn she wasn’t British.

Previously I’d been content not to have to make the effort. Now things would be different.

“I think you’re a nut,” said Johnny. “Just two days!” he repeated.

“This won’t be the only time I’ll go to France.”

“Maybe not, but on that principle you might as well take evening classes in Italian too—throw in Spanish, Greek, German and Serbo-Croat—people are getting better-travelled all the time.”

It was through Johnny I had met Ginette. She had become a colleague of his at Air France, some five years hence. Ginette had stayed a year; Johnny had stayed for nearly two decades. But he hadn’t risen very high—too many people chasing after too few openings—and finally he’d handed in his notice in a fit of pique, before finding any other employment. From then on his life had further deteriorated. In fact, our destinies had been disturbingly alike: two reasonably bright boys who’d messed around and never fulfilled one tenth of their potential. Yet we hadn’t even remained close. I didn’t much like his wife but it wasn’t until he’d walked out on her in the late seventies—as well as on his job—that I lost touch with him completely and had a letter returned to me, ‘Moved away, address unknown’. This had been a year or so before Philip died, when Ginette and I had still had…I am tempted to say a good marriage but it couldn’t have been that, a good marriage would have better absorbed the stress, would have survived as something other than a travesty. Ironically, I think my own domestic happiness had been hard for Johnny to accept; and perhaps, as well, his seeing me so often could only remind him of his youth and the dreams he’d had of fame as a composer—although, damn it, I don’t know how he’d thought he was ever going to achieve that, without the proper grounding. Despite his frequent references to songwriters who couldn’t read a note!

In any case it was essential to get him away from Air France before he’d been there very long. His marriage had been childless—Sandra hadn’t wanted children—and she’d been terrified of flying too, so after the first half-dozen years he hadn’t even travelled much. She had joined the company a month or two before Ginette.

Furthermore, it wasn’t enough to get him away from Air France. He also needed to be pushed towards university and/or a fulfilling career.

Does this sound manipulative? High-handed? It certainly sounds like, “Please do as I say, not as I do,” for my own future was still far from finalized. At present I had a job as a porter at the Royal Free, although for some time I’d been making inquiries about careers as diverse as those in the charity field and the London fire brigade and bomb disposal work; inquiries, even, about a career in the Church of England, regardless of those clear denials, perfectly sincere when made, to anyone who had previously questioned my choice of Divinity. Nor did I feel the need to mention to my parents (yet) that earlier in the year, at Cambridge, I had been both baptized and confirmed. I regarded Christianity not as a new faith but as a logical extension to my old, an extension which I had long been heading towards; during my past life almost as much as during this present one. I meant to be as certain as I could—this time—that I got things right.

Yet in the meanwhile, because I intended to be thorough, there was the question of my learning French; and also, because I intended to be thorough, there was the question of my marrying Ginette.

The order, obviously, is wrong.

But to put it bluntly—even coldly—I needed Ginette if I wanted Philip.

Philip wasn’t due to be conceived until 1966 but it would be wonderful for him to have siblings—as well as wonderful for us, of course; and some of those siblings could be older just as easily as younger.

To put it less coldly: I remembered Ginette as she was at the time of our meeting and during the first fifteen years of our marriage; and I knew she would never have grown bitter if, firstly, Philip hadn’t died (and Philip wasn’t going to die) and—secondly—if I had been a better husband (and I was going to be a better husband). And just as when my mother had succumbed in her middle seventies, lined and strained and petulant, it hadn’t taken me long to cast off the image of her old age and envisage her again as she had been in her heyday…so my renewed youth caused me to think of Ginette in the same fashion: laughing and vivacious and full of devilment. In the end I felt there was nothing cold at all about my decision to woo back my wife.

Previously, as I say, I’d met her in London, but of course I had often visited her parents’ home in the Boulevard Beaumarchais, near la Place de la Bastille.

Now, however, I met her on the eve not simply of a new year but of a new decade. It seemed appropriate.

I’d taken Johnny to a nightclub in the Latin Quarter called Les Enfants du Paradis. I had been there with Ginette on another New Year’s Eve and knew it was by no means the first on which she’d celebrated beneath its imitation theatre boxes, gilt cherubs and maroon rococo plushness—its seasonal balloons and streamers. The chances of her coming here tonight seemed roughly even. But I reckoned that if I didn’t see her I could just hang about her apartment block the following day, even though this would present the problem of what to do with Johnny, and also of what to tell him.

That might be something I should need to sleep on.

We had both brought evening clothes. Me, I’d done remarkably well at a secondhand store just around the corner from where we lived, while Johnny, being about the same build as my father, had borrowed one of Dad’s suits and shirts. As with most men, dinner jackets became us. We turned up at the nightclub feeling debonair and elegant and British. We had each drunk a couple of Pernods back at the hotel.

I’d reserved us a table by telephone from London. In return for the airfare, I had determined to give Johnny a really memorable New Year’s Eve. My having planned it so far in advance, moreover, had provided a further incentive to work hard at my French. I’d set myself a four-month goal and as well as the evening classes had attended conversation circles, bought records and spent an average of three hours a night on study. It had paid off. When it came to our break I could speak the language with competence, which boosted my morale hugely. Whether Ginette was there or not we were going to have a good time.

But she was there—although, incredibly, for the first moment I didn’t even recognize her. I saw this young woman in a strawberry-coloured dress and for the fraction of a second was prepared to be deflected by a stranger. The impact tonight was as strong, every bit as stunning, as it had been fifty years ago.

“My God!” I said.

Johnny followed the direction of my gaze.

I told him, recklessly: “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

“Oh, right. Not bad. For myself, I’ve lined up Audrey Hepburn.”

“Just look at her! Isn’t she everything you ever dreamt of?”

“I suppose you haven’t noticed that big blond fellow next to her? From her present expression I’d say he might be everything she ever dreamt of.”

“Only because he’s just made her laugh at something. In any case,” I smiled, “irrelevant. How do I get to talk to her?”

“Don’t they have a Gentleman’s Excuse-Me, then, in France? Or what about a nice Paul Jones?”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m being serious.”

“Then why not simply go across and ask her to dance? You’re looking sufficiently fetching. Once on the floor you can tell her of your marriage plans.”

“Good idea,” I said. I stood up.

“Great Scott! Can it really be the lad’s not bluffing?” He pushed my wineglass towards me. “Dutch courage.”

“I don’t need it.” But halfway across the floor I decided that I did. I returned to Johnny.

“Her parents are also at the table. I didn’t see that.”

“But why does that affect things? Besides, they could be his. And at least it will provide him with people to chat with, while you’re proposing to his girlfriend. Or maybe his fiancée.”

Yet my knowledge of the outcome was no longer enough, suddenly, to furnish the requisite bravado. The eventual outcome, I reminded myself. Perhaps, after all, I would have to wait until she joined Air France at the start of her projected year in London.

I sat down again.

“Funk!” he said.

I took a sip of wine, several sips of wine. “Hold on. I’ve got to work this out.”

I crossed my arms and stared down at my pumps. If in the long run I was going to marry her, I had nothing to lose in the short run by possibly making a fool of myself. Five years from now, in London, either she wouldn’t recognize me or if she did we would laugh about the incident—by then it might even have acquired an aura of romance. By the same token, although I had nothing to lose, I clearly had much to gain: at the very least, several years’ worth of consummated love—and companionship—and support—and freedom from impatience; but more than that, the possibility of other lives, the lives of our children, who, if I failed to act, then lost their chance for ever. So. It was my unknown children I heard crying out to me; and saw reflected in the glossy surface of my new pumps.

And, in that case, when would there ever be a better moment than this one? For if I waited in the Boulevard Beaumarchais tomorrow—and she came out of the block of flats alone—and if I caught her up and said, “Excuse me but didn’t I see you at the Enfants du Paradis last night…on the strength of which may I invite you to a cup of coffee?”—in short, if everything went as swimmingly as I could possibly have hoped for, there would still be the problem of what to say to Johnny. I could hardly acquaint him with the truth. And I wasn’t prepared to lie, not even in a fairly trivial way: “Such a coincidence, you’re never going to believe this!”—while a refusal to tell him anything at all might have set a severe strain upon our friendship and certainly blighted a thoroughly happy New Year.

So it had to be tonight.

“Well, this is it!” I said. Up on my feet again.

“Really? You’re fantastic! If you do carry it through I’ll never cease to speak of you with solemn, awestruck reverence.”

“Will you apply to university?”

“What?”

The words had come to me unbidden. They seemed like a message of confirmation. This was the path which I was meant to follow.

I repeated my question.

“Hey! You’ve got a hope! What? In exchange for your making sheep’s eyes at some dolly bird you fancy?”

“Yet supposing I get her to dance with me? How about that?”

“You really think I can be bought so cheap?”

“No, but I’ll let you off needing to speak of me with solemn, awestruck reverence. Don’t forget it’s a lifelong commitment that you’ve taken on.”

“Nah! I’ll just never mention you again.”

“Oh, come on, Johnny. Be a sport. I could be losing my nerve; bribe me in some way! Say at least you’ll think about your ‘A’ levels if I do get her to dance.”

I was so much in earnest that almost unknowingly I’d resumed my seat. Maybe he did perceive this as a second wavering of my courage.

“Tell you what,” he compromised. “If you get her not just to dance with you but also to marry you I’ll go for my ‘A’ levels, apply to university and speak of you with solemn, awestruck reverence.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Even if she turns me down tonight I can redeem that pledge on the day she eventually marries me?”

He contemplated my outstretched hand for a moment. “Oh, why not? I’ve decided to be big about this.”

We shook on it.

It immediately occurred to me that Zack would speak of the Grand National syndrome, tell me good intentions didn’t alter things. On the other hand, his advice on how to explain away his overcoat had also been dishonest. (In fact, I’d told my parents the exact truth: that I’d given my mack away but that somebody I’d met on the train had considered I looked cold and so replaced it.) Whilst bearing this in mind I silently passed on to Zack what Mr Dallas had always told us in relation to English grammar. When at last we knew the rules, he’d said—supposing that far-off day should ever arrive, he’d said—we might then, very occasionally and if we absolutely had to, he’d said—be permitted to break them.

And suddenly I wondered. Could that have been the reason, or at least a part of the reason, why Zack had given me his overcoat? Along with such an evidently unnecessary lie? As mute endorsement of Teddy’s grudging dispensation?

Or was I rationalizing?

In any case, I grinned. “All’s fair in love and war!” I said. And naturally Johnny thought my defiance was directed either towards him or towards the French contingent sitting across the room. All four of them.

It was now half-past-ten. One of the cabaret spots began. From my own point of view this at first seemed like bad timing, since it gave my nerves more of a chance to exasperate my bladder. And although it was performed with talent—a lengthy (far too lengthy!) apache dance—I couldn’t find it enthralling. But at least it supplied an opportunity to pray. I felt there was a lot riding on what might happen in the very near future.

The performers were applauded and bowed their way out of the spotlight. Ginette came onto the dance floor with her blond boyfriend; there was no denying his attractiveness and—stupidly—I felt jealous. Johnny didn’t help.

“You know, it isn’t going to be that easy. She looks quite cosy in his arms.” After the quick violence of the apache dance the band had started up again with something smoochy.

“Stop it!” I said.

He looked at me in some surprise.

“I mean…,” I amended, sheepishly.

“You mean…stop it?”

I managed to smile. “That just about conveys it.”

The waltz came to an end. Ginette’s parents had also been on the floor, and now there was a change of partners between the two couples. The music continued slow.

“Wish me luck.”

Then I walked over and tapped Monsieur Tavernier on the shoulder. “Would you permit me, sir, to dance with your daughter? I do have a special reason.” Obviously I spoke in French. The couple came to a standstill.

“And what is your special reason?” asked my former (future) father-in-law: so familiar in his discreet smell of expensive cigars and cologne, his compact dynamism, his five-o’clock shadow and his small humorous eyes. I had always got on well with him.

“Next April,” I said, impressively, “it will be the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Entente Cordiale—the fifty-sixth, monsieur!”

“My word! I really didn’t know! Next April, you say?”

I looked at Ginette and gave a grin. My nerves had settled, I felt immediately at home. “She’s also the prettiest woman in the room but what has that to do with anything?”

Ginette lowered her eyes, demurely. And deceptively. “You have an unfair advantage, monsieur: your being alone in a strange country on New Year’s Eve. I should be very hardhearted to refuse. Don’t you say so, Papa?”

“I suppose I do, my child. And another thing I would point out. There will be practically nothing left of this dance if we continue to deliberate.”

Saying which, he gave me a nod and turned away. The orchestra was playing ‘Volare’. Ginette had always made of me a fairly graceful dancer. (My mother might now have been surprised.) For a moment I simply enjoyed the sensation of having her once again in my arms and of rediscovering her favourite perfume, Shalimar. But it was potent stuff—the feel of her, I mean, rather than merely the scent. I began to get a hard-on.

I said, a bit abruptly: “My name is Ethan Hart.”

She laughed. There seemed no reason for this unless she’d guessed at the cause of my abruptness and of my swiftly loosened hold.

“And mine is Geneviève Tavernier.”

Ginette was her second name. I had always called her that because it was less of a mouthful than Geneviève and she didn’t like abbreviations. Besides, its anglicized pronunciation inevitably reminded people of that veteran car out of the British film comedy. “Ethan, I am not an old crock,” she had pouted, “and I will not be named after one!” I decided on the instant that this time I would call her Geneviève, with the French pronunciation and with no attempt at shortening. It would mark a little difference, another pleasingly unsuspected departure from the past. A further symbol that could have meant nothing to anybody except me.

“You speak French very well, monsieur.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle. But something tells me you speak English every bit as well. And probably better.”

She looked surprised. “No—no—I keep meaning to make a proper study of it. But I don’t suppose I’ve spoken more than a dozen words since the bac. My mother is quite fluent, though. Maybe I should fix you up with her?”

“You’re very kind. Yet I ought to say that although I let you think I was alone tonight it isn’t quite true. I’m with a friend. But my friend is a man and it might attract attention if I were to dance with him. So to that extent you were certainly right to take pity on me.”

“I think I took pity on you because you were English and away from home.” She laughed. “Or possibly because you were English, period. Oh, no, I’m sorry, that was a mean and silly joke—but I suddenly thought of you boiling all your meat and then eating jam on it! I am so sorry to make fun of you.”

“But that is not true!” I said. “It is a lie! It is a—it is a—” I couldn’t find the word for myth. “Like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,” I explained. “What do you call that sort of story in French?”

“Légende.”

“Yes, like a legend, a kind of legend, but… Oh, very well. What you’ve accused us of is a lie and a legend.”

She laughed again. “The Legend of the Boiled Meat and Black Cherry Jam! It has not quite the same ring of romance to it. I mean, not to a French person. No doubt the English could get to feel properly romantic over it.”

Then, unhappily, the dance ended.

“Please. Another one. I haven’t asked you yet to marry me.”

But all the dancers were now beginning to leave the floor. I turned towards the bandleader and asked him pleadingly for just one more—tout de suite!—clasping my hands to him rather like Nesbitt had once done to Hawk-Genn; but though he smiled he shook his head and shrugged as if his musicians were to blame. “Typically French!” I said to Ginette—to Geneviève. “So practical. So unpoetic. Thinking of nothing but the next Gauloise.”

“But even if you’re right,” she answered, reasonably, “my boyfriend might not like it: your asking me to marry you.”

“Dog in the…something,” I said.

We had another spot of bother over that, a little more understandably. (Il fait l’empêcheur de tourner en rond as opposed to the word for myth—which happened to be mythe.) “You see,” I explained, “your boyfriend is never going to ask you to marry him. Take my word for it.”

“But he already has,” she said. “Several times.”

And then I did the unforgivable. It was shocked out of me. I’d suddenly remembered; or suddenly made the connection. I wasn’t on my guard.

“My God! That’s not Jean-Paul?”

She had often told me that Jean-Paul was the most persistent of her suitors, would never take no for a final answer. Sometimes she had said she ought to have accepted him; and less and less had there been any air of jokiness about the manner of her saying it. Jean-Paul had not only been handsome but he had become rich and had acquired the reputation of being an excellent father to his six children.

Now she had taken a couple of paces backward and was gazing practically openmouthed.

“How do you know about Jean-Paul?”

“I…”

“How do you know?”

“You see, we’ve met before—you and I—in a previous incarnation.”

“No,” she said, “seriously.”

“And we got married and you were always throwing Jean-Paul in my face. You told me how he was forever asking you to marry him and how you should have done so because he was very handsome and became rich and, besides all that, was a wonderful father to his six children. It was a sort of family joke—well, not really such a joke, to be honest. You used to taunt me with it, rather. You see, we weren’t very happy.”

I spoke quickly but she was still staring—although now, to my inexpressible relief, she was starting to laugh again. “Oh, what a fool you are! Do many of the English behave like this? I always understood the English to be stuffy. No sense of humour.”

“It’s all that jam they have to spread on their boiled meat. Could you do that and retain your sense of humour?”

“No, probably not. But, monsieur, I am intrigued. If we’ve been married before—and yet weren’t very happy—and I was beastly to you—then why do you want to marry me again?”

“Oh, because this time it will be different. Enormously different. I shall cherish you. You’ll never experience a single moment of regret.”

“Ah, my! That’s very comforting! I may have to accept.”

“And you were only beastly to me because I was beastly to you. In fact, I’m sure I was the beastlier.”

“You have an unusual way of putting yourself across.”

“I can afford to tell the truth. You see, I’m a reformed character. And in future I shall make you a fine husband.”

“I don’t believe you can ever have been that beastly.” Fleetingly she touched my sleeve. “How many children did we have?”

“Only one. That was a sadness. I don’t know why we didn’t have a dozen. This time, however, we’ll make up for it.”

The dance floor was deserted; had been, maybe, for some minutes. Abruptly becoming aware of this and abruptly becoming aware that I should take her back to her table and so risk losing her for the present I said something that must have seemed a little out of tune.

“My Geneviève—but we shall be so very happy!”

I immediately tried to give it a lighter touch, yet it had come out sounding like what it was: a cri de coeur: and for the moment she was disconcerted.

I said: “Don’t worry. That wasn’t me. That was David Garrick, impersonating me. An instant of deathless drama but I’m afraid I forgot to warn you.”

“Ah, then, were we married in the time of David Garrick, too?”

I shrugged. “Oh, as to that…well, who can say with any certainty?” It seemed all right again.

But the next second it wasn’t so all right. We had been joined by Jean-Paul and Jean-Paul wasn’t happy. His fair skin was suffused by a flush of—at best—impatience. “Ah, chéri,” said Geneviève. “Meet the gentleman from England. Monsieur Gérald, Monsieur Hart. Monsieur Hart claims to be my long-lost husband.”

He shook my hand and muttered a conventional greeting, yet he didn’t respond to this statement with the slightest air of interest, let alone amusement.

“There is some evidence in support of it,” Geneviève persisted, wide-eyed and meaning to impress. “He knew your name, Jean-Paul! So how do you account for that?”

“No doubt he overheard someone using it as we were making our way to the table.”

This was an explanation which happened to suit me, even if it did carry certain undertones. To wit, I was a spy. A grubby opportunist.

“Oh, Jean-Paul,” she said, “how prosaic you are! Even on New Year’s Eve. How unpoetic! How practical! How typically French!”

“Geneviève, you are wanted back at the table. Besides, it seems odd, your continuing to stand here in this way. You are drawing attention to yourself.”

Geneviève gave me her hand. “But we can’t help that, can we, Monsieur Hart? Not if while standing here we make such a very handsome couple?” She was obviously annoyed with Jean-Paul, a little unfairly, on account of his failure to enter into the spirit of her game. “Ah, well, monsieur. It has been nice. I shall remember this encounter.”

I kept hold of her hand for several seconds longer than was needed—or even proper—and looked her in the eye as I did so. “Au revoir, Geneviève. Bonne année! A la prochaine.”

Jean-Paul gave a little tst of irritation. He took Geneviève’s arm and firmly led her away. I myself returned to Johnny.

“Well done,” he said. “I watched you both. It looked as though you were really…I don’t know…getting through to her. Smarmy devil.”

He had risen, expressly to shake my hand and clap me on the back.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

“I know her address. Tomorrow I go and sing ‘On the street where you live’ on the street where she lives.”

“You do, do you? So I have to play the abandoned tourist?”

“Johnny, it’s for your own good. Remember that. But let’s not think about tomorrow. Right now I’m going to order some champagne. This is an occasion which I feel demands it.”

“In a place like this, champagne is going to knock you back a bob or two.”

“So much the better,” I said. And actually I meant it. One of my constant small battles was against meanness. When for fifty years or more you’ve been a little tight with your money, the defect isn’t one you can easily eradicate, just because you want to.

“Hope you won’t regret it when you see your bill! Hope you won’t regret it in the morning!”

He obviously didn’t intend it but his tone was faintly taunting. This implicit reminder that the crest of the wave descends into the trough was no doubt timely yet I could have done without it. For some reason it made me think of the last New Year’s Eve on which I’d seen Ginette; and suddenly a chill passed through me. It was impossible to imagine Geneviève as the same woman. Impossible—and yet only too possible as well—to imagine me as the same man. We hadn’t even stayed up until midnight. We’d had a glass or two of sherry, yes, watched some television, spoken as little as we usually did, gone upstairs about eleven—upstairs and to our separate rooms. But it wasn’t as if we hadn’t started out, then too, as lively, decent, well-intentioned people, both of us. It wasn’t even as if, fundamentally, we hadn’t each remained decent and well-intentioned, although certainly not lively.

No wonder that I shuddered.