There is a sense, as always, of acting.
And then, when the performance is finished and the audience has wandered away through the twisting streets of the village, this tinge of euphoria, this punchy energy.
They are standing in front of the fromagerie.
James says, ‘Drink?’
‘I think that went well, don’t you?’ he asks her, when they are sitting on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns again.
‘Very.’
‘I think there’s at least one sale in there, with that lot,’ he says.
She asks who he thinks it might be.
‘Well, Arnaud and Marcus,’ he says. ‘I think they may well take the plunge. Thanks for saving me on the skiing, by the way.’
‘You’re very welcome,’ Paulette says.
James shakes his head, with a sort of mock exasperation that makes her laugh. ‘Fuck. That was so embarrassing, when he asked me whether I’d skied here myself.’
‘What about the Knottbars?’ she asks. The Knottbars — Mr and Mrs Pedant.
‘Them?’ James makes a face. ‘No. Don’t think so. I’m not sure how serious they are. Not very, would be my guess.’
They spend a while taking the piss out of them, the Knottbars — James at one point scampering over to the ancient lime tree, as Mr Knottbar did, and shoving his finger at the plaque.
Walking back to the table where Paulette is laughing, her index finger held in a sort of hook shape over her mouth, he decides he must be slightly drunk, to have done that. Sweating lightly with the exertion, he sits and looks at his watch. ‘Another one?’ he suggests.
She nods, and he signals to the waitress.
Seven o’clock. No one turns up. They wait until twenty past, sitting in the twilight. Then James says, ‘Well…Looks like there aren’t any takers for supper. Do you want to get something? Or do you have to head off?’
They end up in a restaurant in one of the narrow streets that wander away from the main square, narrow between tall stone houses.
—
It is only after the meal, after all that Savoyard wine and a sample of the local aquavit, that it occurs to him: ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’ he asks, as they leave.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
They are standing in the dark street. She says, ‘I don’t know.’
Leaving the question open, they start to walk towards his hotel. She is wearing his jacket over her dress — the temperature has dropped precipitously since they sat down to a meal that had turned extremely flirty.
For instance, the way he touched, at her invitation, the scar on her lip. (A spill from a moped had put it there, she told him, when she was fourteen.) The scar had started, at some point while they sat on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns, to mildly fixate him. It had distracted him throughout the early part of the meal.
He touched it lightly with his fingertip, and wondered out loud what it might be like to kiss it. And though she didn’t say, ‘Why don’t you try?’ he had had the feeling that she might have done if she’d had the nerve.
Instead she just looked at him, and he noticed how huge and earnest her hazel eyes were, and suggested they have a digestif.
That all took place in French. After the first half-litre of Mondeuse he had insisted on switching to French. And then he had had to explain why he spoke French so well — about how his father had lived in France when he was at school, and how he had spent all the school holidays there, in Paris or in the South. And she had asked him — with a sort of shining-eyed seriousness — whether he had had any homosexual experiences at boarding school in England, and he had said that no, he hadn’t. The idea that that was widespread was, he told her, a myth. And then she had volunteered a pretty vivid story about an experience of her own, once, with another woman, while he felt his mouth drying out and poured them some more wine.
What she hadn’t asked him was whether he was married or anything like that, and he had also avoided the subject.
She, it turned out, was a single mother. Her son’s father lived in Norway.
And so, after a second aquavit and a shared dessert, they found themselves outside under the stars.
Which they looked up at for a minute, standing there in the street, looking up between the dark eaves of the houses at the sky.
It did occur to him, since she was the one who had started it, that this was in fact practically an invitation to kiss her. (She was waiting there, with her face tilted upwards, shivering slightly.) And he did, with the wine and aquavit singing in his veins, sort of want to kiss her.
For a moment he felt that he was about to. And then he felt he wasn’t.
He looked at the dark street. The village was very quiet. She was still searching the sky.
He said, ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’
He saw, as soon as he had said it, that the question would sound suggestive — that it would sound as if he actively wanted her to spend the night in the village.
She lowered her face to look at him tipsily, straight at him. ‘No, of course not.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘You don’t know?’
She shook her head.
Another moment: the wine and aquavit singing in his veins.
—
Without saying anything else, they started to walk towards his hotel.
So what are you going to do?
The question was one for him as well. It seemed pretty obvious, anyway, what she had in mind.
In the oppressive light of the lobby, though, the idea seemed silly. Somehow unpalatable. There was a short pause as they stood there.
‘I suppose we’d better get you a room,’ he heard himself say.
To which, after a moment’s hesitation, she just nodded.
And then he was at the desk, making the arrangements.
And now he is in his own room, sitting on the bed.
He pulls off his socks.
He is tired, that’s true.
Still.
Might’ve been nice.
There is a melancholy sense, as he takes off his socks, of opportunity lost.
He wasn’t willing to make any effort to make it happen. It was the prospect of effort, more than anything, of even a minimal amount of effort, that had made the whole idea seem unappealing as they stood in the lobby.
His friend Freddy would have put in the necessary effort. Obviously Freddy would have. Freddy, the last time they met, had told James proudly about how he had been playing the piano in a jazz quintet in Wales and after the show two members of the audience, a man and a woman, had asked him to join them for a drink. She was alright looking, Freddy said, so he had joined them, and they had had several drinks, and some lines of speed, and then they invited him to their place, where it was soon pretty obvious what they had in mind. Freddy was to fuck her while the husband watched, wanking. Thanks to the speed it went on for ever, Freddy said. It was daylight when he left.
The story was a bit pathetic actually, James thinks, screwing up his used socks.
Freddy was forty-five years old.
Eking out an existence playing the piano at weddings, in wine bars. Sleeping on people’s sofas.
‘Don’t you worry?’ James would say to him.
‘About what?’
‘About your life.’
‘What about it?’
James took a moment to frame a more precise question. Then he said, ‘Whatever. Nothing.’