Racing through Kent, Eurostar was due at the Gare du Nord at 12:23. Really, I thought, why all this speed? Things are already coming at me much too fast. There were no vents through which thoughts could escape, and I was being suffocated by mine. Probably other people’s thoughts were adding to the air pollution as well. Why couldn’t they have a red circle on the window enclosing a brain with a diagonal red line through it?
‘Have you read this?’ said Serafina, showing me her book, The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl, by Adalbert von Chamisso.
‘Yes.’ I’d have felt better if she’d brought something else for the trip.
‘That’s quite an idea,’ she said, ‘selling your shadow to the Devil for a purse that never runs out of gold.’
‘He was sorry for it later when he lost the woman he loved.’
‘Well, she wanted all of him, didn’t she. What’re you reading?’
‘Carmen — not the opera but the Prosper Mérimée story.’
‘May I have a look? I want to see the ending.’ She found it and read aloud, ‘“She fell at the second thrust, without a cry. It seems to me that I can still see her great black eyes fixed on me; then they became dimmed and closed.”’
‘She told him she couldn’t love him any more, so he killed her,’ I said.
‘That’s one way of dealing with it. Do you think he’s on this train?’
‘Don José?’
‘Don José Rinyo-C. Do you think changing the booking did any good?’
‘Yes, I think he’s probably on this train, so it follows that I don’t think changing the booking did any good. But I don’t think he’s got rape and murder on his mind at the moment — he’s just fondling my unripe death while mentally replaying his afternoon with you.’
We ate sandwiches, drank tea, and were informed by a voice, first in English then in French, that we were entering the tunnel and would be out of it in twenty minutes. ‘What worries me,’ said Serafina as Eurostar plunged through the darkness beneath the English Channel, ‘is that maybe everything is connected by tunnels: you think A is separate from B but no, below the surface things are constantly sliding around and making connections.’
Monstrous creepy-crawlies came to mind, wet and slimy. ‘The things below the surface, they’re not all necessarily bad,’ I said.
‘They’re hidden though, aren’t they. You’ve no idea what’s there till it jumps out at you.’
I thought it best to say nothing for a while. Through the tunnel and out into France we read or closed our eyes in meditation. We were going to be in Paris for one night only, returning tomorrow morning. ‘What I don’t want,’ Serafina had said, ‘is some pathetic attempt to recapture what’s gone. I’m full of pointy thoughts and sharp edges and all I’m looking for is clarity. You want to see Au Tonneau and I want to see Victor Noir and that’s it, OK?’
Our passports were checked, and after a time the voice spoke again to say that the train had attained its maximum speed of one hundred and eighty-six miles an hour. Beside me Serafina was moving a little faster than that and leaving me behind. I wanted to taste her mouth, her body, I wanted her to be my Serafina again. I wanted never to have met Mr Rinyo-Clacton.
The voice told us that we were approaching the Gare du Nord. People were getting their bags down from the racks and standing in the aisle. The terminal appeared outside the windows and we stepped out of the train, looking anxiously to right and left but seeing no Mr Rinyo-Clacton. I think it was only then that the full weirdness of my situation hit me with the realisation that Death is always waiting for any door to open at any time.
Ahead of us was a modern clock with a black face and yellow hands. The dial had yellow hour markers but no numbers. Some distance beyond it was an older clock with a white face and Roman numerals. The time was 12:28. I was thinking that clocks in railway stations are more momentous than the ones in airports but it seemed an unlucky thing to say.
‘Clocks in railway stations are more momentous than the ones in airports,’ said Serafina.
‘Yes, and here we’ve got one with a black face and one with a white face.’
‘The black face is for tunnel travellers; the white face is from a long time ago.’
I’d booked us into the Hotel Bastille Speria in the Rue de la Bastille where we’d stayed last time: one room, two beds, as specified by Serafina. We had no luggage but our rucksacks, so we took the Métro to Bastille and walked from there. The sky was grey and promising rain. We checked in, then took the Métro to Pére Lachaise.
It was raining when we came out into the street, scattered herds of umbrellas moving slowly or swiftly over the glistening pavements. We had lunch at a brasserie on the corner, then went to the florist next door where Serafina bought three long-stemmed roses and I bought a map of the cemetery. Then we made our way under our umbrella down the Boulevard de Ménilmontant to the entrance of the necropolis.
Once inside we walked steadily uphill on rain-freshened cobblestones and wet brown leaves, tombs on either side of us compounding silence and slow time and the presences of absence. Deaths of all kinds watched us pass: deaths by age and illness and violence; by accident or intention; by one’s own hand or someone else’s; in bed, on the street, on the field of honour or against a wall. Here and there we saw other hooded and umbrellaed pilgrims with maps, heading for Jim Morrison, Maria Callas, Héloïse and Abélard, and others of the many celebrities gathered here. The grey rainlight was like a bell-jar of quiet over all. There was no sign of our friend. ‘It’s so tranquil here,’ I said.
‘Well, all their troubles are behind them, aren’t they.’
Onward and upward we went, past angels and obelisks and yew trees, past the Avenue de la Chapelle and Avenue Transversale No.1. Victor Noir was in Division 92, Avenue Transversale No.2. Rowan trees diminished goldenly to vanishing points in both directions. There was a little huddle of visitors at the tomb on which were plastic-wrapped bouquets of irises and chrysanthemums, a pot of cyclamen, and one gorgeous long-stemmed pink rose emerging from the hat and lying across Victor’s burnished crotch. The huddle dispersed and we moved in for a closer view.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a freshly killed statue before,’ said Serafina.
‘It’s a startler.’ Bronze Victor looked as if he’d been alive only a moment ago, his mouth still slightly open — handsome fellow with a moustache. How am I going to look when I’m dead? I wondered.
‘Looks as if he might have been a good dancer,’ said Serafina.
‘Aren’t you going to give him the roses?’
‘In a moment.’
A slender black woman wearing a sky-blue turban hesitantly approached the tomb. Under her umbrella and the vivid blue her face looked out with a delicately melancholy air. She was carrying a bouquet of red and yellow chrysanthemums.
‘I think she wants to be alone with Victor,’ said Serafina. We moved down the line a little way and she peeped round the corner of a tomb. ‘She’s put the flowers between his legs and she’s rubbing his boots,’ she reported. ‘Now she’s leaving.’
The woman’s departing figure grew small in the rowan-lined Avenue Transversale No.2. The rain was coming down a little harder, and we moved to the tomb next to Victor Noir and sheltered under its portico. ‘What now?’ I said. ‘Are you going to give Victor a rub and make a wish?’
‘Maybe I am, and I’d rather you didn’t watch me while I do it.’
‘Right. Here’s the umbrella.’
‘No, thanks.’
I guessed that she needed both hands free to get a grip on his boots which stuck up like handles and I hoped that Victor was as good against HIV as he was for pregnancy. I turned my back and waited two or three minutes until she tapped me on the shoulder. ‘He must be pretty efficacious,’ I said, ‘if women are still giving him flowers and a rub after all these years. I wonder how many husbands, lovers and babies he’s delivered.’