Metroland (13 page)

‘I don’t. I just learn silently. You learn melodramatically, by instruction not observation. And you like to be told you’re learning.’

‘Why are you so unbearably assured?’

‘Because you think I am.’

‘Why do I think you are?’

‘Because I never ask questions. “In life, there are only two real characters, the questioner and the answerer”.’

‘Who said that?’

‘He asked. Guess.’

‘No.’

‘All right. Oscar Wilde – in translation, of course? Victor Hugo? D’Alembert?’

‘I don’t really want to know.’

‘Yes you do. Everyone always does.’

‘Anyway, I think it’s a crappy quote. I bet you made it up yourself.’

‘Of course I did.’

‘I thought so.’

We stared at each other, excited a little by our first wrangle. Annick pushed her hair back off her right cheek, opened her mouth, and, in a parody of cinematic sensuality, ran the tip of her tongue across her top lip. She said gently,

‘Vauvenargues.’

‘Vauvenargues! Christ, I’ve never read him. I’ve only just heard of him.’ Annick licked her bottom lip as well.

‘You bitch! I bet that’s the only line of Vauvenargues you know. I bet you got it out of Bédier-Hazard.’

‘ “Il faut tout attendre et tout craindre du temps et des hommes”
.’

‘Et des femmes.’

‘ “Il vaut mieux … ” ’

‘OK, OK, I surrender. I don’t want to hear any more. You’re a genius, you’re the Bib Nat!’

Defeat once used to make me cry; now it made me grumpy and aggressive. I looked at her and thought, I could easily dislike you.

Her hair had fallen down over her face again. She pushed it away, and parted her lips once more. It may still have been parody, but if it was, you could still take it straight. I took it straight.

When we had finished making love, she rolled away from me, over on to her left side. I squinted across at her small frame and gently heaving back, and felt weeks older. How strange that Time did these sudden rabbit-hops; at this rate I’d soon have matured all the way up to my real age. I watched a patch of freckles rise and fall and remembered the quaint, despairing fantasies Toni and I had elaborated. Now, the
likelihood of castration by Nazi X-ray seemed really very remote, the theory of SST arid and academic. Pre-marital sex – a triple-épat, a double-écras at school – suddenly didn’t feel as if it had anything to do with the bourgeoisie. And what about structuring of the decades? If it were true, I’d only have one more year of Sex before plunging into thirty years of alternating War and Austerity. There didn’t seem much probability of that.

Beside me, Annick was dreaming; a sigh of puzzled pain escaped from her. This is what it’s all about, I thought: an argument over Rimbaud (which I’d won – well, more or less), sex
in the afternoon
, a girl asleep, and me here – awake, on watch, observing. I crept out of bed, found my sketch pad, and made a painstaking drawing of Annick. Then I signed and dated it.

3 • Redon, Oxford

I went to Paris determined to immerse myself in the culture, the language, the street-life, and – I would doubtless have added, with hesitant casualness – the women. At first, I deliberately avoided English people, papers and books; my tongue refused anglicisms as it did whisky or Coca-Cola. I began to gesture: just as the tongue and lips are given more work by the precise placing of French vowels, so the hands are expected to go new places too. I brushed the side of my jaw with the backs of my fingers to indicate boredom. I learned to shrug up my shoulders while turning down my mouth. I linked my fingers in front of my stomach, palms turned inwards, then sprang both thumbs out while making a plopping noise with my lips. This last gesture – meaning roughly ‘Search me’– would have been ridiculed at school. I did it rather well.

Yet the better I got at talking, gesturing and immersion, the more inner resistance built up to the whole process. Years later, I read about a Californian experiment on Japanese-born GI brides. There was a large colony of such women, who still spoke Japanese as regularly as English: Japanese in the shops and amongst themselves, English at home. The women were interviewed about their lives twice, the first time in Japanese, the second in English. The results showed that in Japanese, the women were submissive, supportive creatures, aware of the value of tight social cohesion; in English, they were independent, frank, and much more outward-looking.

I’m not saying anything quite as bisecting as this happened to me. But after a while I definitely became aware, if not of saying things I didn’t believe, at least of saying things I didn’t know I’d thought in ways I hadn’t previously considered. I found myself more prone to generalisation, to labelling and ticketing and docketing and sectioning and explaining and to lucidity – God, yes, to lucidity. I felt a kind of internal stirring; it wasn’t loneliness (I had Annick), it wasn’t homesickness, it was something to do with being English. I felt, too, as if one part of me was being faintly disloyal to another part.

One afternoon, when querulously conscious of this resented metamorphosis, I went to visit the Musée Gustave Moreau. It’s an unwelcoming place near the Gare Saint-Lazare which closes for an extra rogue day in the middle of the week (as well as for the whole of August) and so has even fewer visitors than you might expect; you tend to hear about it on your third visit and get around to going on your fourth. Stacked to the ceiling with pictures and drawings, it was left to the State by Moreau when he died, and has been grudgingly kept up ever since. It was one of my favourite haunts.

I offered the blue-uniformed
gardien
my student card, as I’d already done several times that spring. He never recognised me, and went through the same ritual every time. He would be sitting at his desk, a cigarette in his right hand held below the level of the top, and a
Série Noire
pressed down in front of him by his left hand. Such is the hierarchy of bureaucratic offences. He’d look up, see a customer, pull open his top drawer with the last two fingers of his right hand, deposit the loose, wet, oval fag on an ash-tray, close the drawer, turn over the
Série Noire
on to its stomach, press it down even flatter, reach for his roll of tickets, murmur ‘No reduction’, tear off a ticket, push it in front of me, take my three francs, shove across fifty centimes change, pick my ticket up again, tear it in half, drop one part of it in his waste-paper basket and return the other to me. By the time I had a foot on the stairs the smoke would be rising again and the book turned over.

Upstairs was a huge, high barn of a studio, inadequately
heated by a chunky black central stove which must have been inadequately heating it ever since Moreau’s time. Around the walls hung finished and half-finished paintings, many of them enormous and all complex, involving that odd mixture of private and public symbolism which at the time I found so beguiling. Large wooden chests with thin drawers, like massive butterfly cabinets, contained scores of preliminary drawings. You pulled out the drawers and squinted through your own reflection in the covering glass at faint pencilled swoops and dips, studded here and there with details that would later be transformed into golds and silvers, flashing head-dresses, breastplates, bejewelled girdles, encrusted swords, and all worked into a new and burnished version of the antique or the scriptural: laced with eroticism, tinged with necessary violence, coloured with a palette of controlled excess.

‘Wanker’s art, isn’t it?’ An English voice, blatantly unhushed, shot across the bare boards from the other side of the studio. I went back to studying a pen-and-ink drawing for ‘The Suitors’; then another, in sepia, heightened with white.

‘It’s weird. It’s really surreal. What a taste in women. Amazons.’ This was a different voice, again a man’s, but slower, deeper, more ready to admire. I looked into a few more butterfly cabinets, but my attention wasn’t wholly on the drawings. I could hear the philistines – their pockets still bulging with duty-free – creaking their way slowly round the other side of the studio.

‘But it’s whack-off art, isn’t it?’ (first voice again) ‘It’s all just wrist stuff.’

‘Well, dunno,’ (second voice) ‘I mean, he’s got lots to say, hasn’t he? That arm there’s rather good.’

‘None of your aesthetic rubbish here, Dave.’

‘It is a bit self-indulgent,’ (third voice, a girl’s, quiet but high in pitch) ‘but we’re coming to it a bit cold, aren’t we? There’s a lot of context we ought to know about, I expect. Do you think that’s Salomé?’

‘Dunno.’ (second voice) ‘Why’s she got his head on a zither? I thought she carried it round on a tray.’

‘Poetic licence?’ (girl)

‘Could be.’ (second voice – ‘Dave’ – again) ‘Doesn’t look like Egypt in the background, though, does it? And who are those poofy shepherds?’

That was enough. I turned round and gave them a blast – in French of course. With all the abstract nouns it sounded quite heightened and professional. Wanking, as far as I knew, was
la masturbation
, and there’s a lot of vowel richness in the word, which always helps when you’re trying to inject contempt. I took them apart over Salomé, who was of course a Thracian woman with the head of Orpheus. I threw in Mallarmé, and Chassériau, to whom Moreau was apprenticed, and Redon, whose vapid, washy maunderings are called symbolist by some, but who is as far from Moreau as Burne-Jones is from Holman Hunt.

There was a pause. The three of them, no older than me, stood there looking puzzled. The first voice, a sort of tough-looking runt in a brown leather jacket and frayed jeans, turned to the second, taller but weaker-looking, with conventional English clothes (tweed jacket, V-neck pullover, tie), and said,

‘Get any of that, Dave?’

‘All Greek to me.’ Then, belying his apparent mildness, he looked at me, said loudly, ‘Verdun’, and drew his forefinger across his throat.

‘Get any of it, Marion?’ She was about the same height as leatherjacket, with one of those pinkish, freckled and faintly furry English complexions; her manner, though quiet, seemed direct.

‘Some of it,’ she said. ‘But I think it was all an act anyway.’

‘Whaffor?’

‘I think he’s probably English.’

I pretended not to understand. Leatherjacket and Dave prowled round me like pygmies with a television explorer. I felt my clothes being looked over, then my hair, then the book in my hand. It was Jean Giono’s
Colline
, so I felt OK; when they saw that I had seen them looking, I held it up to them. Leatherjacket studied it.

‘Pardong, Mossoo, but are you actuellement a Brit?’

I waved the book at him again, for fear I might laugh. I was nervily puritanical about clothes at that time. Any departure from a neat conventional style of dressing indicated, as far as I was concerned, parallel departures from reason, lucidity, trustworthiness and emotional stability. I rarely stayed around long enough to question my prejudices; still, here was a man in fraying, faded jeans nearly making me laugh. What an odd trio: this fellow, a girl who didn’t have any make-up on at all as far as I could see, and ‘Dave’, who looked, well, almost as if he could have been a friend of mine.

‘Je suis practically sure que c’est un Brit.’ Dave this time. Leatherjacket fingered my lapel.

‘
Pouvez-vous
…’ and Dave seized him suddenly, and swung him off into a clumping, camping waltz. The girl looked at me in an entirely pleasant fashion. No, she didn’t have any makeup; but on the other hand, she looked OK without it. How curious.

‘What are you doing over here?’ she asked.

‘Oh, this and that. Bit of research, bit of writing, bit of having a change from having to do things. And you?’

‘Holiday for a few weeks.’

‘And them?’

‘Dave works over here in a bank. Mickey’s doing research at the Courtauld; that’s why we’re here.’

‘Oh really?’ (Oh Christ) ‘What into?’

‘Moreau, actually.’ She smiled.

‘Oh Christ. And I suppose his French is pretty good …’

‘His mother was French.’

Oh well, you lose some, you lose some, as we would have said at school. Dave and Mickey came clockworking back, humming the Blue Danube.

‘Well, Marion?’

‘He is French after all,’ she replied, smiling again, ‘but his English is jolly good.’

‘Eep eep ourah,’ shouted Dave, ‘Tott-en’am ’Ot-spure. Mi-chel Ja-zy. Bobb-ee Moiré. I kees you both sheek.’

He didn’t, fortunately. The
gardien
had got to the top of the stairs,
Série Noire
still in his left hand. He threw us out.

We went to a bar and had a drink. Gradually we ironed out who was French and who English, despite Dave’s curious method of conversation, which consisted largely of proper names pronounced in a heavy French (or Franche, as he would say) accent, accompanied by a semi-hysterical gesture. Marion offered no behavioural mannerisms one could grab hold of – whatever was said, she remained quiet, direct, open, bright. Mickey was the hardest to master, though. Ego, charm, competitiveness, and a certain cunning, which made him pretend to know less than he did until he’d found out roughly how much you knew. The sort of character who makes me react by being academic, diffident, wry if possible, but basically straight.

‘You’re, um, working on Moreau, I gather?’ was my first halting, peace-making move.

‘More like he’s working on me. Cross-buttock and body-slam, and when you’ve got that weight on top of you, you submit.’

Dave looked ready to come up with an impression, but couldn’t think of which bit of a wrestler to do.

‘But why don’t you like him?’

‘It’s all academic wanking, isn’t it, as I seem to have said before? I mean, the idea of academic symbolism, it’s fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?’

‘It’s an oxymoron.’

‘I’ll buy the last part. But he’s so earthbound. He’s clever, and can paint, and odd, I’ll give you that. But he’s frozen – it’s like his colours, they look as if they’re bright and weird, but in fact they’re actually rather dull if you look at them.’