Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
I wondered why he didn’t take it off. He had sat hunched in it in the Altidores’ hall for quarter of an hour whilst I changed and talked. I came downstairs patting the pockets of Luc’s best sports-jacket, the one I had sometimes envied him, fine grey tweed with a wide yellow square in it, and there Cherif stubbornly was, unattuned, unamenable, like a foreman summoned to the mill-owner’s house. In the car he said nothing, but I knew he was glancing at me as I drove, and at the little buffetings my face was taking from the feelings I was sparring with. I winced and ducked at the wheel and knocked my glasses as I knuckled away furious tears. I couldn’t take him with me on this journey, or pretend a merely tutelary interest in Luc when I was gasping already with anger and anxiety. I would have to tell him he couldn’t come. Then he said, ‘Let me out of the car.’
There was a van on my tail in the lashing rain, I couldn’t instantly stop, but he was in a passion of his own. ‘Let me out,’ he said again, with a frightening edge.
‘I can’t,’ I shouted. ‘Just fuck off a minute Cherif, Christ I’ve got enough to think about without you freaking out, you stupid cunt.’ But something had cracked in him, he was beating on my arm so it was hard to steer; I squinted in the mirror through the already misting rear window, and for a second at him, baretoothed. I indicated right and craned forward through the murk for somewhere to pull in, and Cherif, who had never driven in his life, snatched at the hand-brake – the car swerved out for a second at the rear, and the van blasted its horn and swerved too, it was going too fast; in the wing-mirror its headlights flashed as it loomed within an inch of the wing and then hurtled past, a hand like a conductor’s, brutal, damning, out of the window.
‘I was about to stop,’ I said quietly, when I’d come to a halt. ‘You could have written off Mrs Altidore’s car within two minutes of leaving her house.’ I felt in fact that I had somehow escaped from a run of bad luck. I had caught a mirror before it shattered or avoided seeing the new moon through glass. I could speak for some time in this prudential vein, in the hushed control I placed on my fright, denying the childish wound of being accused, however justly. But he was fumbling with the seat-belt, prodding and tugging at the simple catch, which at last came free. It was an old belt that didn’t retract and he flung it with a clatter against the tin and plastic of the door. He jumped out of the car and stood for a moment gazing away, as if trying to choose the perfect phrase with which to go: I waited for one of his broody poetic claims, while the rain streaked down around him and over the inside of the open door. But he merely pulled the belt of the coat free and then shrugged the heavy garment off. He bundled it loosely, tumblingly, and without looking tossed it in at me like something common and contemptible. Then he turned back down the street, leaving the door standing out like a broken wing. I leant over and pulled it to and then sat and watched him quickly dwindle in the rain-bubbled side-mirror, with an involuntary catch of pleasure at his big handsome backside – he was terribly sexy to me for a moment.
I stayed and calmed myself. I was going to the Museum, to warn Paul I was leaving town, but I couldn’t turn up like this. I groped for a handkerchief, and of course it was Luc’s, not altogether clean, with a trouser-pocket staleness, gummed up with snot which clung in the creases in hard translucent grains, like rice: I placed one on my tongue, half-expecting it to liquefy as in some miracle with a saint’s salved fluids. The jacket was a lovely one, a somewhat conventional garment, with its Scotland-Piccadilly-Brussels pedigree, for a teenage runaway – but that was just Luc’s ambiguity. It suited me more than his other things, and gave me that stamp of square-shouldered smartness I could never fully attain myself. I had seen his mother’s hesitation as I lifted it down on its hanger, like something I couldn’t afford. ‘Yes, take it,’ she said – I was only borrowing it, but I could tell it helped her to let it go, it confirmed how she was rising to the challenge. She seemed almost enthusiastic when she saw the clumsy simulacrum of her son that had assembled itself in her own house.
In the breast-pocket was a
carnet
of tram-tickets, half of them already punched with the dates and times of errands across town – remote evidence of … something; a pair of rosy ticket-stubs from the Memling Cinema that spoke of a shared two hours of darkness with … someone; and a folded strip of paper with St Alban Street 73 written on it, which was my address. I had no idea how he knew it, or why it was there; it seemed vaguely incriminating, so I tore it up, and then struggled with the question of where to put the scraps, when I was in his clothes and in his mother’s car.
On standard speed the wipers made an indolent, halting trawl of the windscreen, but on full speed they flicked from side to side so fast you felt the mechanism was about to snap. Marcel told me about the wipers on a friend’s father’s BMW, apparently adjustable to anything from lento to prestissimo at the touch of a finger, and with varying degrees of intermission. He was interested in cars, but only so far at the level of fixtures; he played determinedly with the cigarette-lighter and had quickly assessed the austere alternatives of the heating-system. We travelled in a roar of boosted warmth, peering out under misted arcs at the flowing stampede of cloud.
The idea that Luc and Sibylle were somewhere ahead of us and would wait to be found lost all sense in the midday darkness, streaked with cars’ lights, in the drowned anonymity of the road. Oh, I wanted to get to him first, to find out what story he was telling, to do a deal with him – but if he had been at the station early he could be hundreds of miles away by now. His mother thought not; she said it was another of his moody crises, which could be drastic in effect but were local in physical range. I gripped the wheel, ignobly anxious for myself but also with a larger, dimmer wish that he shouldn’t fuck up his young life.
Marcel was restless, eager, whisked away from his lessons on a quest for his beautiful and scandalous senior. He was pinkfaced at the privilege of it and chattered solemnly until my nervous silence, my curt demands for help with road-signs and turnings, affected him too, rather as a parent’s misery seeps into a child and subdues it. I heard the drag of his breathing amid the heater’s bluster, and then the breathy squawk of his inhaler. When I remembered I gave him a little side smile and saw him sigh with sudden reassurance. I knew that under all our tension and ignorance we were both excited by our own activity, and admired ourselves, swept forward through the murk by the exhilarating imperatives of a crisis.
It was a little crisis for him as well, of course. He had stood by with an ironic mime as I told his father that Luc had run away again – his gestures were still the moue and wiggle of the head of Lilli Vivier, his protecting friend, maybe even of his remembered mother. When I said that Sibylle had gone too I had quite forgotten for a second how Marcel worshipped her. I saw him caught by a real discovered feeling of his own – he stepped forward. Then Paul had calmly proposed that Marcel come with me and made the condition that we speak only in English – it was to be a lesson of a kind. Marcel hesitated – he wasn’t quite sure of the momentum of the thing; and again I saw his father rather clownishly encourage him, rather bruisingly exaggerate and publicise his blushing little
tendresse
. I put a hand on the kid’s shoulder out of generalised sympathy. It was true he was a friend of Sibylle’s: he knew far more of her than I did. I thought Sibylle herself probably didn’t know, or at least kindly overlooked, the full extent of his feelings, however vague and ideal they may have been. As I glanced across at him in the car I wondered if it was my own failure of imagination – there was no reason he shouldn’t be just as filthy-minded as I had been at sixteen. For a mad moment I thought I should tell him what Luc and I had done last night; but the moment passed and left me more wretched than before.
‘I expect they’ll have to tell the police,’ Marcel said.
‘Ooh, let’s hope we can get to them first,’ I said; though I saw he thought the police would be best, both at finding them and at somehow punishing Luc. ‘It’s a bit early for that. As a matter of fact I know Sibylle’s father wants this kept very quiet – it could be embarrassing for him, and Luc’s father too, of course.’ I’d stood by as Mrs Altidore rang both these figures, and watched her persuade them of her exciting and ridiculous plan. De Taeye had been called out of an important meeting and had evidently spoken under some constraint; he had jumped at the idea of my going to sort things out. I heard her give me an incredible reference, a summing-up not exactly of insights, but of a high regard she’d never hinted at to me in person; and Martin Altidore too had been right behind me: I picked up from his wife’s reactions his opening tone of shifty exasperation and then his relief, almost a shout when she proposed me as an envoy. As before I thought, I don’t know what I’m doing, or why these people trust me so much. Their expectations crowded on to me and became a reason in themselves.
‘Were the police involved the last time?’ I said.
He had the story all ready. ‘Yes, they brought him back to school in the first lesson.’
‘But he hadn’t actually done anything wrong?’
‘Drink. Drugs. Smoking. Theft. Trespassing. Swearing at a policeman.’
‘You’re supposed to be talking English,’ I said, to hide the shock this incident still caused me. I didn’t want him to find the words to go on about it. The imagined scene was too tender and painful, too much my own dark possession. ‘I have the idea you didn’t like Luc very much.’
He was silent, turned to gaze through his smeared side-window at the hidden farms. ‘He set fire to my hair,’ he said at last.
‘Oh my god.’
‘Altidore and Dhondt. Dhondt was worse, but Altidore always did what he said. They set fire to my cape and gave me an asthma attack.’
It was a wonder he wasn’t done for arson as well. ‘But that’s terrible,’ I said; I was cross and disappointed and very slightly excited.
‘Yes, it is. I had to go to hospital as you know. Altidore had already had his warning before he ran away.’
‘But you think it was … Dhondt who was really behind it.’ I was lost in this horrible vision of Luc as a coward and a bully. It must have been Dhondt with his dreadful gorged cudgel who had driven him on.
‘Turn left, turn left!’ shouted Marcel, as if I were stupid beyond redemption.
We came to a nondescript town – it didn’t even have a name: the sign lay in the verge beside a lorry’s water-logged tyre-ruts. Marcel announced that he was hungry, and I wished he hadn’t come with me: I saw my quest hindered by his needs and robbed of its proper comfortless urgency.
We sat in an empty café and looked out over the empty square. Marcel ate a cheeseburger greedily – he laid claim to his food as though his fat had its independent demands; but it delayed and solaced him too. I half watched him, half kept an eye on the war-memorial and the passers-by in the precipitate dusk. Then the rain ceased – there was a brief brightening, hurried glimpses of light above the housetops, yellow cloud-grottoes from which winged faces might momentarily tumble above a holy victory or a martyrdom. The pavement dazzled. I smiled at Marcel and his clown’s mouth of ketchup. The truth was I didn’t know how to talk to him – I only had the stock resources of the language lesson, the useful topics, the factitious interest. I got out my cigarettes and then thought smoke might upset him. ‘I’m just going outside,’ I said.
I strolled across the square, jittery but slow. I was trying to picture a meeting with Luc – they were hitching and ran up to the car with a grateful look, not a great car but still, Luc saw it was his mother and swerved away, while Sibylle tugged open the door and saw with horror it was me. Luc and I not knowing if we were friends or enemies, friends or lovers. Or we met at the coast, and for a long time said nothing at all. I lost my feeble advantage, I didn’t know how to talk him down off the high ledge of his decision.
The memorial was a little crag in itself, with a hundred names still sharp in the granite of the base. Up above stood a bronze soldier, handsome, downcast, with a virtuoso moustache, not quite attractive to me, but solid with pathos. He was broad and steady, and confident of effect. I took him in with a shock – the rain-shiny helmet and cape, the out-of-doors certainty of him after the arcane fictions of Orst.
I was watching the Mini for a second or two before the thump of recognition – its provoking mauve, the unforgotten number-plate. It trundled toy-like across the square, the driver’s visor down against the sun and the lights still on from the rain. I saw the mission helplessly complicated by Patrick, coming after the others to persuade and alter and exercise whatever his uncertain power was. And then it made my job more lonely and absurd. Already I was embarrassed to be seen, so quick off the mark, there ahead of him, panting after Luc, he would think. I turned away from the approaching car.
But when it came past it wasn’t Patrick but Sibylle at the wheel, frowning forward – though in the moment she was alongside her eyes flicked to me (a figure she knew, in clothes she remembered), held me and then denied me, though a little swerve of the car betrayed the effort of self-control, and I saw her in silhouette shift her head to follow me in the mirror. So Luc was here or close by, there was a twist of relief that it was almost over already …
I ran towards the café, gesturing through the window at Marcel. I’d seen which road Sibylle had taken out of the square, but by the time we were back in the car and after her there was no one to be seen ahead. The street curved and wandered for a few hundred yards, until it reached a T-junction. We both of us peered to left and right and Marcel gave a shrug and dropped his hands, as if to say he had never rated our chances. I went right, with what may have seemed like decisiveness. ‘Keep your eyes open,’ I said. Rain slapped across the windscreen, like water tipped down from an awning after a storm.
If I had chosen left it might all have been over sooner. It wasn’t till twenty minutes later that I spotted the parked car, semi-concealed in the forecourt of a building – tall, grey, pebble-dashed, metal-shuttered, a newish apartment block on the rubbishy edge of town. I left the Renault in the road, and sprinted with Luc’s jacket pulled above my ears. I thought my fate today was to be drenched over and over – I saw a succession of changes into strangers’ clothes. Beside the front door was a panel of lit buttons, and I read the names twice, first as gibberish, then slowly, as if each of them did indeed distantly ring a bell.