‘You used to know when to keep quiet, Jonathan. It was one of the nice things about you.’
‘Sorry. Just tell me, are we finished here?’
‘Yes.’
She took my arm; her body rubbed against mine as we walked and the pattering of the rain on the umbrella was a cosy sound but there was nothing said between as we made our way back to the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Our return route from Division 92 was slightly different from the one we’d taken going there. Père Lachaise offered view after view of the shadowy grey houses and monuments of the dead gracefully framed by foreground trees and backed by shapely dark and pale recessions of yew, larch, rowan and chestnut. Fallen chestnuts lay smashed on the shining cobbles. From one of the tombs two bronze arms, as if breaking through the stone, reached up, the hands grasping each other and a wilted iris, ‘DIEU NOUS A SÉPARÉS; DIEU NOUS RÉUNIRA,’ said the chiselled words.
‘Where to now?’ said Serafina. ‘Pigalle?’
‘Right: Au Tonneau.’
The Métro is one of my favourite Paris things; it’s sleeker and shinier than the London Underground; the doors of the carriages open and shut in a snappier way; the whole system inspires confidence that things can be arrived at in an orderly manner.
Au Tonneau is just over the road from the Pigalle Métro station. I hadn’t realised, the first time I saw it, that its emptiness had been taken over by the Ciné Video which has its entrance next door. The barrel-face was even more desolate than the last time, stripped of its Harry Belafonte posters and whatever else had been pasted there. The blind barrel-face with its gaping Gothic mouth seemed a paradigm of everything — all the problems of my life and my self reduced to one simple image: an empty vessel, the wine all gone. And in front of the boarded-up doorway Mr Rinyo-Clacton, debonair in a belted mac, smiling at us from under his umbrella.
‘Look!’ I said. ‘There he is.’
‘I see him,’ said Serafina. ‘What does he want, for Christ’s sake?’
‘He wants us to see him, he’s teasing us. Wait here for me.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Just give him the attention he craves. Maybe he’ll leave us alone after that.’ I crossed the road to where he stood.
I had my knife in my pocket and I felt reasonably comfortable.
‘Bon jour, Jonny,’ he said. ‘Ca va?’
‘Can’t complain. Are you enjoying Paris?’
‘All the more for seeing you and the lovely Serafina. Are you sleeping together again or have I put her off lesser lovers?’
‘If you’re serious about being a great lover you should do something about your breath.’
‘You say that but you don’t mean it; I know what you like. My breath didn’t bother Serafina either. I tell you, that girl is really something — even in the heat of passion with her legs wrapped around you she’s somewhere inside herself that’s cool and far away. Inspired me to heroic efforts which were well and truly appreciated. Maybe we can make it a threesome tonight, eh?’
‘Maybe you can make it a onesome.’
‘Your trouble is that you don’t know how to loosen up and enjoy yourself. Actually, it’s your uptightness that makes you so sexy — if you’re not careful I’ll have your trousers down right here.’
‘It could damage your health, Thanatophile.’
‘Why? Have you picked up something since the last time?’ His mouth was laughing but his eyes were hard. ‘Jonny, Jonny, you’d like to kill me because you’re afraid of me, and you’re afraid because you recognise in me an aspect of yourself that scares you. You’ve surrendered your life to me but you’re trying to keep a tight sphincter. And of course, now that you’ve had the million you can’t help thinking how nice it would be to go on living.’
‘It’s always a pleasure to talk to you,’ I said. ‘We’ll be in touch. Bye bye.’
He mouthed a kiss as I turned and went back to Serafina. ‘What were you two talking about?’ she said.
‘He likes to wind me up, that’s all. He needs to be noticed.’
‘You shouldn’t have given him the satisfaction.’
‘He’d have had more satisfaction if I’d tried to avoid him. Now that he’s had his fix it’s even possible that he won’t turn up again until we’re home.’
We took the Métro to Bastille, bought two glasses and a corkscrew in the Rue St Antoine, acquired two bottles of Cêtes de Beaune in the Rue de Turenne, and arrived shortly at the Place des Vosges which was only sparsely peopled now. I had a couple of carrier bags in my rucksack and I put them on the wet bench for us to sit on.
‘I’m not trying to bring back the past,’ I said as I poured; what a pleasant gurgle. The wine looked full and red and juicy. ‘It’s just that this is my favourite drinking spot. Here’s looking at you, Fina.’
‘Cheers.’
The wine tasted as good as it looked. How marvellous it is, I thought, when something is what you expect it to be. Of course sometimes it isn’t marvellous. No oasis this October.
‘I was just thinking’, said Serafina, ‘of the Kris Kristofferson song where he says, “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday”. I can’t believe anyone would really say that unless he was about to be stood up against a wall and shot. Would you trade all your tomorrows for a single yesterday?’
‘No — I think we’ve still got good tomorrows up ahead, don’t you?’
‘I’ll answer that after we’ve been HIV-tested.’
I was looking past Serafina at one of the four fountains. The trees behind it were artfully massed as in a drawing by Claude Lorraine; against this golden backdrop the water cascaded from the rim of the upper bowl to fill the lower one, and from vents all round the lower bowl it spurted in silvery streams to the basin below. Like time, I thought — my minutes, hours, days and weeks falling, falling, but not recycled like the fountain water. Beyond the golden trees were dark ones, their trunks black in the grey light. Around the square the elegant houses stood and looked historic.
‘The Place des Vosges dates back to the seventeenth century,’ said Serafina. ‘I looked it up in the guidebook. It’s perfectly symmetrical.’
‘That’s a relief Our glasses were empty; I refilled them. ‘Did the visit to Victor Noir do what you wanted it to do?’
‘I don’t know that I can explain the Victor Noir thing — somebody tells you about something and you get a picture in your mind and a feeling. I’d never been to Père Lachaise and I thought of his tomb as being on a little hill away from the others. I was expecting something to come to me there — I don’t know what. And then there he was, lying on top of his tomb in a long row of tombs as if he’d just been dumped there. I thought, Jesus! he’s so dead! Somebody killed him and that was the end of him. It was strange that a statue should make death suddenly so real. It made your death terribly real, your death that you’ve sold to Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Just think — if only you’d never met him! If only you hadn’t sat down on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station!’
‘Nothing to be done about that now; “the past is action without choice”.’
‘That’s deep. Who said it?’
‘Krishnamurti; it’s the one line I remember out of the ten pages I read.’ Our glasses were empty. I divided what remained in the first bottle, then opened the second and topped up the glasses.
‘I’m glad we got two bottles,’ said Serafina. ‘This is not a one-bottle situation.’