Jerusalem the Golden (10 page)

She walked for ten minutes, and then she sat down, in front of one of the less dicey looking cafés, and ordered herself a Coca-Cola. She wanted to order herself a drink, but she did not dare. Her courage had its limits. She watched the other people, and wondered how many years of observation it would take her to learn to distinguish the tarts from the students, for there were clearly some of each within her range. She opened her copy of Baudelaire, which she had brought with her, and started to look at it, and shortly after she heard a voice say, ‘Mademoiselle, je peux?’ and saw a man looking at her.

She nodded, because for shame she could do nothing but nod, and he sat down at her table. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. He was young, and not at all bad-looking; she thought that it could well have happened in a much worse way. He asked her, in French, if she were German; she said no, she was English.

‘Ah, ah, Anglaise,’ he said, nodding his head knowledgeably, as though the word conveyed a wealth of information. She could tell, instantly, that he was stupid. He had to think for several seconds before he came out with, ‘Moi, je suis Italien.’

‘Ah, oui,’ she said, politely, giving him time, ‘Italien.’

He thought hard, and then said, ‘Vous êtes étudiante?’

‘Oui,’ she replied indulgently.

‘Vous venez de Londres?’ he then asked, anxiously, solicitously.

‘Non, non, du nord de l’Angleterre,’ she replied. The sense of effort in his conversation staggered her, and she watched him with pity, for he laboured as though he were to try to write a sonnet, and all the while the conversation was predestined, unnecessary, a mere coin of payment.

‘C’est très grand, Londres,’ he continued, unable to adapt to her last remark.

‘Oui, très grand,’ she agreed, and then asked him, politely, ‘Et vous, d’où venez-vous?’

‘Da Milano,’ he said, and added helpfully, ‘Milan, c’est au nord de l’Italie. C’est amusant, moi je viens du nord de l’Italie, et vous venez du nord de l’Angleterre. C’est amusant.’

‘Oui,’ said Clara, and smiled benignly, while he laughed.

‘Le nord de l’Angleterre, c’est l’Écosse,’ said the man, flashing his even teeth at her, showing them as though to compensate for the deficiences of his wit.

‘Oui,’ said Clara, thinking it not worth her while to draw the distinction.

‘Une écossaise, alors,’ he said, grinning. She did not correct him.

‘Et vous, vous n’êtes pas étudiant,’ she said, thinking that she might learn the difference between tarts and students sooner than she had imagined.

‘Non, non, je travaille ici,’ he said. She did not like to ask him the nature of his work, thinking that if he were something incommunicable, the effort of inventing a lie might crack him up completely. He did not look resourceful. On the other hand, she did not know what else to say, so she said nothing. He too had come to the end of his small talk. He sat there for quite a while, grinning at her, then looking away, then looking back and grinning at her again. Such behaviour, which always unnerved her when displayed by such as Higginbotham, did not unnerve her at all. The isolation of the moment, and its total disconnection from all other moments, gave her a sensation of quite unfamiliar ease. Her hands, clasped on the iron table, grew limp.

After a while he offered her a cigarette. She took it, and he lit it for her. Her smoking experiences, hitherto, had been confined to a few borrowed puffs from Walter Ash’s cigarettes, and some experimental moments, at the age of twelve, in the school bicycle shed. This cigarette tasted different; it was a Gauloise, and it tasted of France, as pungent, as unacceptably alien as that knotty sausage. She smoked it with delight.

‘Comment tu t’appelles?’ he asked, after a few minutes.

‘Je m’appelle Isabel,’ said Clara.

‘Isabel. C’est joli,’ he said.

‘Tu trouves?’ she said. She did not ask him his name, for she did not wish to know it.

‘Qu’est-ce que tu fais ce soir?’ he said eventually.

‘Rien, rien du tout,’ said Clara.

‘Tu veux m’accompagner au cinéma?’ he said. And Clara, overcome
by the wonderful, felicitous acceptability of his offer, an offer so familiar to her, so marvellously manageable, trembled only most slightly as she said, staring down at the limp arrangement of her hands, ‘Oui, sûrement.’ She had been afraid that his suggestion, when it came, would have been too fraught with the unknown – his room, perhaps, or else, God knows, a naked nightclub – but as for the cinema, she could cope with that.

And so they went to the cinema. He took her arm, and held it firmly by its crooked elbow, propelling her so that she did not collide with the crowds of people, and she liked to have it held. They went to the nearest cinema: it was an American film, dubbed, from one of Hemingway’s short stories. It was half way through, and she could not understand a word of the dialogue, and was surprised and rather indignant that she could not understand, for she had genuinely looked forward, with half of herself, to seeing a picture: as it was, she found herself obliged to concentrate on the other aspects of the affair. It was clear that he understood less of the film than she did, and cared less. She was glad that it was connected, however dimly, with Hemingway, for she knew about Hemingway, and she liked shockingly the sense of an operating corner in her inviolable mind.

After ten minutes, he took her hand. She allowed it to be taken, and it grew warm in his grasp. Their two hands lay warmly together upon her lap. Then he released it, and took a hold of her knee. She was used to this, and did not flinch. Her eyes firmly glued to the screen, she sat, and she endured and enjoyed. After a while, he withdrew his hand, put his arm round her shoulders, and pulled her towards him, and kissed her. She did not much like his way of kissing, for it was hot and suffocating, and she was glad when he stopped, and released her, and reverted to his grip upon her knee. He was more interested in her knees, and so was she. As the film progressed, he gradually began to hitch her skirt up, so that his hand was resting not upon skirt but upon stocking, and then his hand began to creep up the stocking. She had never had this happen to her before, and she was not expert, in this area, in the art of procrastination, and in no time at all he had managed to slip his hand inside the stocking top of her offside leg. He was breathing heavily, and she was not herself
unmoved. And she had to admit to herself that she was also faintly, dimly, desirably worried, for she could not tell when or if he would stop. She glanced, covertly, at her watch, and saw to her relief that the feature film had only ten minutes to run; she thought she could last ten minutes.

And she just about managed it. As his hand started once more to ascend the bare slope of her thigh, she tightened, immeasurably, her knees, and his hand halted. The film was nearing its climax: despite herself, and despite her incomprehension, her attention had been caught, and she was at last following it. Two assassins were cornered in a shabby hotel bedroom, awaiting inevitable retribution. And then, suddenly, one of them spoke a sentence which she understood. One of them said, grimly, sparingly, desperate, to the other:

‘Il n’y a plus rien à faire,’ and Clara, in the exquisite delight of understanding, relaxed the grip of her knees, and his hand, obedient, stirred itself once more. The assassins were shot, and Clara wrenched herself away, and the man murmured to her desperately, ‘Laschemi fare, laschemi fare,’ and Clara equally stricken, could not let him, and the credits came up, and the lights came up, and he let her go, and she straightened her coat and pulled her skirt tightly down over her knees, and that was that.

They walked out together, and stood there in the street, and Clara looked once more at her watch. ‘I have to go,’ she said, in English. ‘Il faut que je m’en aille.’

‘Oh, non non non,’ he said anxiously. ‘Viens. Viens boire quelqu’chose, viens avec moi. J’ai une chambre tout près, une chambre à moi …’

‘Non, je ne peux pas,’ said Clara, realizing miserably that he did not believe that she would not go. She liked him, for all his heavy breathing; she did not like misunderstanding. And she had somehow thought that he would have known that she could not go.

‘Tu peux, tu peux,’ he repeated.

‘Mais non, je ne peux pas, je dois partir. Tout de suite. Le Lycée se ferme à onze heures.’

He had taken it, now, that she was not going; she expected to see resentment blossom, but he did not resent it. Hopeful, he said:

‘Demain, alors?’

And she said no, she could not make tomorrow, she was going back to England tomorrow, which was not true, but true enough. It was a pity, she said. And he agreed that it was a pity.

‘Je dois aller,’ said Clara, losing grammar in urgency, beginning to be afraid that she might be late. ‘Merci beaucoup pour le cinéma.’

‘C’est moi qui te remercie,’ he said simply. And then he shook her hand, and turned and walked away. Clara, as she ran for the Métro, was full of the greatest joy of her life, for she felt herself to be, at last, living; the thick complexity of what had happened satisfied something in her that had never before had satisfaction. She had dared, and she had not been struck dead for it; she had exposed herself, and she had not been raped, assaulted, or even insulted. Such contact had for her possessed beauty, and he had shaken hands with her upon it; he had not yelled at her for what she had not given. He had smiled at her, and shaken her hand. The bizarre absurdity of his action filled her with amazement and wonder, for it seemed to disprove so many meannesses and preconceptions. She would not have minded if he had yelled at her, for he would have had the right to. But she too had the right to leave.

She got back to the Lycée at five past eleven; the doors were not yet shut, and she crept in safely, under the protection of a large party returned from the Opéra. She went up to the dormitory, where she found her school friends, anxious and exulting over her delay, grieved and relieved that her sortie had escaped detection; they gathered round her, perched on the bed, drawing cosily round themselves the striped dusty coarse hooped curtains on their brass poles, and they listened to her story. Some of it they did not believe; some of it she did not report. But they were impressed, and she too was impressed by her own adventure. They whispered, and talked, and compared notes, and then Rosie, sitting cross-legged on the hard sausage of a pillow, said:

‘Why didn’t you go with him, when he asked you, why didn’t you go to his room? You should have gone to see what it was like.’

‘I would have done,’ said Clara, ‘but they shut the doors at eleven.’ And they said no more, because Rosie had been teasing, merely; it had not crossed her head that Clara might truly have stayed out.

But later that night, lying awake in bed, Clara found herself trembling, partly from fright, and partly from the knowledge that perhaps she ought to have gone. For there was no divine or moral key which turned the lock of the Lycée at eleven o’clock. She might have stayed out, and nobody would have known. And if they had known, what could they have done? They could not have raped her, or murdered her, or beaten her. They could not even have made her fail her examinations. And they would not have expelled her; they wanted her, and they could not afford to expel her. She might have stayed, and the truth was that the possibility of staying had not occurred to her. She sat for the evening with a strange man’s hand inside her stocking, and yet it had not occurred to her that the laws of a disorganized school trip were not the laws of nature or of justice. She was ashamed of herself. She lay there, and her knees were trembling, but whether it was from running from the Métro, from past terror, or from shame, she could not tell.

On the last night of the trip there was a dance. Some of the girls had been looking forward to this as to the highlight of the trip, but Clara had been dreading it, and for a classic reason, which was that she had nothing nice to wear. Since her social life in Northam did not exist outside school, she had no evening clothes, and had had nothing resembling a party dress since the age of six, when she had possessed a fetching little garment of pink satin. All the other girls had at least a best dress, and some of them were burningly anxious to display clothes bought by extravagant parents especially for the occasion. Clara had had the sense not to try to ask her mother about a possible purchase, as she could only too clearly imagine the responses to which such a request would expose her, and the abuse which would be cast upon those girls fortunate enough to have a use for party dresses. Her mother tended to see all expenses as a sign of innate vulgarity, and had tried to instil into her children the view that the truly refined can manage without toys, clothes and entertainments. Nevertheless, Clara had been obliged to raise the subject of a best dress, because the brochure about the school trip had clearly stated that it would be expected. Her mother had reacted to the subject in a predictable way, and had expatiated at some length
about the absurdity of taking a dress all the way to Paris and back for the sake of one evening’s amusement, but in the end she had consented to do something about it. What she did was to go through her cupboards, where she discovered a dress which had once belonged to Clara’s cousin, and which had been enclosed years before in a charitable parcel of hand-ons. She came downstairs with this garment, triumphant, not unwilling to please with pleasure so cheaply bought. And at the sight of it, Clara’s spirits faintly rose, because the colour – a blue-green – was one which, at that age, she rather fancied. But once she had tried it on, her spirits sank once more to unprecedented depths.

For the dress was quite impossible. Or worse – not quite impossible, but just about, just gently verging upon the impossible. It was not so ridiculously bizarre that it was unwearable, but it was bad enough. For one thing, the material was patterned, and Clara was going through a stage at which the uncertainty of her taste made her prefer the strictly plain to the figured. And the shape was all wrong. It fitted her in as much as it had ever fitted anyone, but the bodice hung droopily over her breasts, and the neckline gaped softly round her throat, and the hem dipped at the back, with a scarcely perceptible, ineradicable dip. And the material was shiny. Clara had a horror of the shiny. In vain did her mother insist that the material was expensive, and that anyone, looking at it, would know that it was expensive, for Clara knew in her heart of hearts that it looked cheap. As it happened, Clara was wrong, but she was not to know she was wrong, and she suffered as much as though she had been right. She stood in front of the mirror and in front of her mother, and she suffered, because she knew that there was no escape; the reasons why the dress would not do were reasons which could never be communicated.