By then I was seeing very little of him. He was too out of it too often. We’d begun to want different things. It was inevitable, I suppose: we had wanted the same thing for too long. There had been a couple of quarrels between us, nothing serious, ostensibly repaired — ‘Forget it,’ he’d said, quoting Nicole, ‘life is too long’ — but by then it didn’t really make much difference either way. We were growing apart. Whenever we were together we were aware of how many things we no longer shared. Instead of great nights out we settled for those non-evenings that pass without incident because they were better than evenings that ended in argument, animosity or embarrassment. Sahra saw Nicole more often than I saw Luke but, according to Sahra, their meetings began to have the feel of diplomatic initiatives. She was worried about Nicole and had begun, almost, to despise Luke for her sake.
Not that he would have cared. He had changed, hardened. His idea of happiness became petrified. He was grabbing happiness, snatching at it. The feelings of euphoria and empathy which had marked our relationship from the beginning — and which had then been chemically intensified — had begun to turn into their opposites. Luke’s happiness had begun to have a desperate edge to it. He was still aching after a possible future, some yet-to-be-achieved ideal, some crowning moment of happiness; then he realized — and this, I think, is what was so hard for him — that, far from being an intimation of the future, such a moment, a moment that had lasted for more than a year, was actually a part of his past, was already a memory.
He left Paris. He wrote from time to time, usually a postcard: a few lines, just about legible. We heard from him when he was living in America, and, later, in Mexico. Eventually he ended up back in London, which is where he was living the one time we met after he left Paris.
I was in England for the funeral of a relative. I had an address for him but did not want to turn up without calling. Directory Enquiries had no record of a Luke Barnes at the address I gave them. Feeling sure that it was pointless, that he would no longer be living there, I decided to go to the address anyway. I took a cab but asked the driver to stop a few streets away, by an Allied Carpets warehouse. I walked past a row of shops: a newsagent, a takeaway kebab place, an off-licence, the Taj Mahal Curry House, a small supermarket, a betting shop, a minicab office that had the look of a place under siege. The sky was full of dead light.
The address I had was for a block of flats. I pressed 5 on the entryphone and recognized the voice as soon as he answered. Just one suspicious word: ‘Yeah?’
‘Luke, it’s Alex. Alex Warren.’ I could hear the clunk of the phone being moved and that weird electronic hum that makes it seem as if an intercom has some kind of intermittent existence of its own. The pause went on long enough for me to try another question: ‘How are you?’
‘I’m OK. It’s a surprise.’
‘For me too actually. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was in London. If I’d had a number I’d have called.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. I just thought I’d see if I could see you.’
‘D’you want to come up?’
‘Sure,’ I said quickly, as if it had not been a question but an invitation. There was another pause.
‘Third floor,’ he said, and the door was buzzed open.
He was waiting in the doorway, not smiling. I was shocked by how he looked: not because he had changed dramatically or terribly — or no more dramatically than most people we haven’t seen for close on eight years. ‘You look great,’ we say in such circumstances and we say it because it is almost never true. We say it to buy time, to try to adjust to the way they look so bad. In Luke’s case it was the subtlety of the change that affected me. His hair had greyed, but he was still thin. He was wearing a cardigan and dull trousers. His skin was stretched tight, his face looked sore from shaving. What was shocking was the resignation in his face. Anyone who passed him in the street could see it immediately, in his eyes, his mouth. His face had that unsupple look of someone who gets few opportunities for talk and laughter.
We shook hands: his handshake had not changed but, since it had never developed into the handshake he hoped it would, it had changed, totally.
‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Eight years,’ he said, standing aside to let me in. The flat was at least as dismal as the apartment he had moved into — and out of — on rue de la Sourdière. As soon as I stepped inside I could feel the loneliness, could smell the life he led: how he wore the same clothes for many days, how his body never got a chance to breathe. There was no variety in his life. Every day was the same as every other. It was too warm in the flat. The TV was on. Rugby. I asked him the score.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m only watching it because it moves.’ We sat and watched the rugby, a game neither of us was interested in. Eventually he offered me ‘a drink, or tea if you prefer’.
‘I’ll have a beer,’ I said. I would have preferred tea but the atmosphere in the apartment was so unyielding that it seemed essential to try to do something to change it, to soften it. He went to the kitchen. I looked around the walls which were bare except for the photograph of the demonstration in Bucharest. I heard the fridge door gasp open and slam shut.
‘Nice place,’ I said when he came back.
‘Sure,’ he said, sitting down. I poured my drink carelessly: it was all froth. We held our beers and looked at the game. After a while, without taking his eyes off the screen he said, ‘Are you still with Sahra?’
‘Yes.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’s great.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘One.’
‘Do you have a photo?’
‘Of the kid?’ I said, reaching for my wallet. ‘If you want to see it, sure.’
‘Actually I don’t. I hate pictures of children.’
The froth of my beer had subsided enough to drink. I said, ‘So what about you Luke?’
‘What about me?’
‘How do you pass your time?’
‘It’s like Sahra said that day, at the coast. There is no more time.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Nothing. Actually that’s not true. I wait.’
‘For what?’
‘For it all to come round again,’ he said. We watched the game in silence. A fight started between two players and in seconds half a dozen of their team-mates were piling into each other. That was when I asked if he remembered the time we had beaten the guy up, on our way home from football. It was the only thing I said that afternoon that made him smile. We fell silent again. Then he asked the question I knew he would be unable to stop himself asking.
‘Have you heard from Nicole?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is she — in Paris?’
‘Yes.’
‘And does she have a child also?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then she’s no longer beautiful. No longer a woman in fact. Once women have children they stop being women. They become mothers.’
I could have said something. I didn’t. I was too. . what? Not angry, something milder, indifferent almost: to the bitterness, to the hate I felt in him. To the hate he felt for himself.
There is an extreme form of meditation — I forget the name — which requires that you concentrate on your dead body, in its grave, rotting, crawling with worms, turning to earth, becoming nothing. I had read also of an American writer who, while doing something as ordinary as drying the dishes, found himself thinking of his dead mother, lying in her grave. Death appeared to him ‘a force of loneliness, only hinted at by the most ravening loneliness we know in life; the soul does not leave the body but lingers with it through every stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat and cold and the long nights’. Both ideas are shocking but are they any more disturbing, really, than one we take almost for granted: that the soul rots, or wears out, like cartilage, before the body dies?