The Kings of Eternity (30 page)

“But don’t you want to find someone to share everything with? You don’t crave love?”

Charles shook his head and smiled. “I recall a time at the Grange,” he said. “Didn’t I call you a romantic fool? Surely you don’t still feel the same way?”

I considered my empty glass, then filled it up. “I’m caught between wanting more than anything to find someone, and being too afraid to try. Every affair I’ve had has ended in failure - through faults of my own in many cases. I want someone to share my life - to give me a different perspective on existence. Does that sound selfish, as if the only reason I want someone is so that I might benefit from a fresh insight into things? It isn’t meant to be. I want to be less selfish: I want to share existence with someone.”

“And share the serum, too?”

I swirled my drink, and finally nodded. “Eventually yes, when I find the right person.”

Charles laughed. “But that’s impossible, man! Forget about it now! Love never lasts - you’re a fool if you think that if you do fall in love with someone you think worthy of the serum, then you would remain in love, together, for all eternity! You might as well save yourself the pain, go find some deserving stranger and bestow the gift on them!”

I shook my head. “I’ve got no illusions about remaining in love - everything ends. But if only I could find someone to trust, who I could depend on for years, even if our love did in time turn to mere friendship... I suppose that’s what I want, in time.”

“But you’ll never find anyone, Jonathon,” Vaughan said, “if you keep up this front of reserve. Take my advice and go out of your way to meet women. Embark on affairs, even if you get hurt in the process. Experience, Jonathon, is everything. You should not deny yourself the ultimate experience of intimacy or love merely because you fear hurting yourself or other people.”

That summer, ‘59, I took on a new identity. My passport claimed that I was a man in his early forties named Daniel Sellings. I decided that I needed time away from the treadmill of producing novels for publication. I wrote, but for my own enjoyment and satisfaction, journal entries and long descriptive pieces. For three years I travelled around Europe, a continent I had stayed away from until then, and attempted to take Vaughan’s advice: I frequented bars and clubs, and made myself talk to women - I even had two or three affairs.

But they failed. There was always something lacking, and I came to fear that it was some innate flaw within me. I would get to know someone for a month or two, appreciate her for who she was, but then would be unable to feel anything approaching love.

No doubt Vaughan would say that I had not tried hard or often enough, but I wondered if, because of my longevity, I was accreting a store of experience and insight that made me perceive most people as shallow and obsessed only with the materialistic. I lived in a society conditioned by the Pavlovian response to the market place, to the here-and-now cultural fashions that I was finding increasingly meaningless and banal.

Again, Vaughan would say that if I sought long enough, then I would find... and I knew he was right. But I was tired of the painful process of being rejected, and having to reject, that was inextricably bound up with the process of seeking.

Then I arrived in Tangier, on a ferry from Gibraltar, intending to stay for only two or three months.

I fell in love with the city almost immediately. I liked the contrast between the modernity of the old international zone and the age and tradition of its ancient quarter; it was different, in architecture and religion and social norms and customs, to anything I had experienced before. It was a city that lived on its own terms and did not kow-tow to the latest fashions or fads. You could be yourself in Tangier, and you were tolerated, and left alone.

Perhaps I was guilty of seeing the city through the eyes of a naïve stranger - perhaps Tangier’s tolerance was nothing more than apathy. At any rate, I felt at home there from the start, and an intended stay of three months became as many years.

One month after my arrival I rented a spacious, airy apartment in the medina and set about exploring the city.

I liked the old part of town, its narrow alleys and cobbled streets, its market with a thousand stalls selling everything from great mounds of multi-coloured spices to artificial arms and legs. I could spend hours wandering around the medina, frequently getting lost only to turn a corner and recognise where I was once again.

Paradoxically, it was not to some ancient coffee shop in the kasbah that I was drawn, however, but to a relatively modern café on the Rue du Portugal. It was called Jerry’s and run by a sixty year-old expatriate American - one of those disreputable but likeable rogues, dissolute and perhaps even immoral, who had lived for many years in Alexandria before relocating to Morocco. He could have been straight out of Durrell’s
Quartet
.

I spent my afternoons sitting at a table at the back of the café, making notes and observing the young clientele. It was the men and woman who frequented Jerry’s that were the draw for me. I say men and women, but they struck me more as boys and girls. They were the drop-outs from the strait-jacketed, bourgeois societies that Britain and America had become in the fifties and early sixties. They had had enough of the materialism of the West and were in Tangier
en passant
to all points East: Kathmandu and Delhi and Poona... I found myself identifying with their desire for freedom from capitalistic excess, but found myself at odds with their lax moral strictures: I was a child of the first decades of the century, after all, and, though I had experienced much, the concept of free love, while divine in essence, I thought potentially disastrous in practice.

I had been in Tangier six months when Vaughan called from Rome, where he now made his home. He had had word from Charles - Jasper had contacted him.

The Kings of Eternity - minus one - had met the year before in Oslo. Charles had cried off: he was living in an ashram in Calcutta, and could not interrupt his meditations. “It’s something that each of us will go through in time,” Vaughan had commented, “the need for spiritual enlightenment.”

Now Vaughan told me that Charles had relayed the latest news from Jasper: he was aboard a rebel interstitial ship, and recently had undergone several ‘prosthetic enhancements’. Apparently, life in space demanded rather a lot of the fragile human frame. In order to pull his weight aboard the rebel ship, he consented to become ‘modified’.

“But what of the fight against the Vark?” I asked of Vaughan.

According to Jasper, Vaughan reported, the fight went well. Perhaps, even, the tide had turned. The rebels were winning on many fronts. The Vark were sorely depleted, but still a tenacious foe. They had been pushed from the first quadrant, but they still controlled the third and half the second.

Vaughan reported that Kathan, the alien manikin we had saved all those years ago, was well and sent his regards.

Conversation turned to more Earthly matters. Vaughan had set up as an artist in Rome - he had even had a dalliance with an Italian woman - and he was enjoying life.

We made an arrangement to meet in Rome later that year, and rang off.

In the days that followed, I often contrasted Jasper’s extra-solar existence with my own, and wondered who might be the happier, the more fulfilled. Surely fighting evil on a galactic scale, lost in the distracting process of survival, was preferable to whiling away one’s time on a planet which was, for the most part, detestable?

Such was the course of my misanthropic thoughts following my conversation with Vaughan and the resumption of my solipsistic daily routines.

I spent more and more time at Jerry’s Café, observing the Hippie children and sometimes even finding myself caught up in their conversations.

I must have presented a sight they were unable to weigh up. I was tanned and weather-beaten, and dressed casually, and yet I had the air about me of an English gentleman. Vaughan had described me, at our last meeting, as a cross between a jaded foreign correspondent and a washed-out public schoolmaster.

A month passed without incident. I kept my daily journal, even began a novel at one point, and then set it aside. It was about the Hippies I was observing, but I felt that I did not know them well enough to presume to write a novel on the subject.

A few weeks before I was due to meet Vaughan in Rome, I was in Jerry’s Café when I noticed a young girl at a table in front of mine.

She was drawing in a big sketch book, her head bowed low. I could see, as I watched her, that the tip of her tongue showed at the corner of her mouth as she worked on the sketch with meticulous concentration.

She looked up from time to time, surreptitiously, and glanced at me: I feigned interest in my journal, obscurely excited that I was her subject.

I had seen her before in the café. She was a thin, pretty blonde girl, perhaps in her early twenties, garbed in bell-bottom jeans and a flimsy cheese-cloth top. She was always alone, which struck me as odd; the Hippies almost always went around in groups.

She glanced up again, saw me watching her and frowned.

I wondered why she was alone. The various groups that frequented Jerry’s seemed to leave her to herself, as if they knew she did not want to be disturbed, and she never joined them when she finished her work. Instead she would quickly close her book and hurry out into the busy streets.

She seemed always flighty and nervous, and very shy. When Jerry wandered over with her coffee she would murmur her thanks to him but never establish eye contact.

I stood and walked past the kitchen to the toilet in the back alley, and on my way back I paused beside her table. I looked down and saw an excellent drawing of my head and shoulders.

“That’s very good,” I said.

Her face flicked my way, but she could not bring herself to look at me. “Not finished,” she said, closed the book, gathered up her bag and hurried from the café.

She was there the following afternoon, at the same table. I concentrated on my journal. I did not make the mistake of staring at her or at the drawing in progress, but gave her time in which to finish it.

At one point she sat up straight, rubbing an ache from the small of her back, then tipped her head and regarded the sketch with the air of satisfaction.

“If it’s finished,” I said, “I’d like to buy it. If you sell your work, that is.”

She stared at me. She had an elfin look, a fragile beauty. Her eyes were too big for her small face, and the effect was almost, but not quite, ugly.

“Tell you what,” she said, and I detected a faint accent, maybe American, “buy me a meal and it’s yours, okay?”

“That sounds as though I’m getting the best of the deal,” I smiled. “Where would you like to go?” I suggested an expensive restaurant on the sea front.

“Here’s fine. I’ll have the falafel and salad, and a beer, if that’s okay?”

I gave Jerry the order and watched her eat. She was obviously hungry.

I tried to engage her in conversation, but she was having none of it. She either nodded, her mouth full, or ignored me. Smiling, I desisted, but continued watching.

She finished quickly and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse. She ripped a page from the sketch book, stood and, on the way past my table, dropped the sketch with a breezy, “Thanks,” and hurried from the café.

I did not see her for another three days. I sat at my table at my regular time, from three to five, and wrote, but the girl did not show up. I finished a short story about her, and wondered if I would ever see her again, and where she might be now. On a coach to Cairo, or a plane to Delhi, I surmised. I was disappointed. I found myself thinking about her, wanting to talk to her, wanting her to open up and tell me about her life.

On the third day she came into the café and scanned the clientele. She saw me and approached cautiously. She seemed nervous. She bumped her hip against the side of the table in an obsessive rhythmic routine that seemed a little mad.

“Say, you don’t think you could buy me a coffee, do you?”

I looked up. I have never seen such fear or desperation in a face.

“Of course. Sit down. Have you brought your sketch book today?”

She slipped into the seat opposite mine and patted her shoulder bag. “In here. Never go far without my pad.”

The coffee came and she gulped it down.

“Do you sell many drawings?” I asked.

“No one wants them,” she said, and excused herself from replying further by taking another gulp of coffee.

“American?”

She looked up. “Everyone says that. Canadian.” She finished the coffee.

“Would you like another?”

She stared at me, her alarmed eyes wide. “You can’t buy me,” she said. “I’m not that cheap.”

Something in my appalled expression must have communicated itself to her. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “It’s just that, you know, so many people... There was this guy...” She shook her head, fell silent.

The coffee came. She drank this one more slowly. I said, not wanting to frighten her away, but curious, “What brings you to Tangier?”

She looked up. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“I don’t think I do,” I said. “And anyway, aren’t questions polite? They’re an expression of interest, a legitimate part of stoking a conversation.”

She laughed prettily into her fingers, like a child. “You talk like a writer,” she said. “Are you a writer?”

“Very perceptive.”

“And you’re English, yeah?”

“Now you’re asking all the questions.”

She was silent, as if considering, and then said, “Actually, if you want to know, I left home because I dropped out of art school and got pregnant and had an abortion and I needed to get away. There, you know all about me, now.” She looked up, something challenging in her eyes. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said, and slipped from behind the table and hurried out.

She was back the next day, bumping her slim hip against the side of my table. She looked thin and ill, hugging stick arms across her flat chest, as if cold.

“Hiya, there,” she said.