They said they would let him know tomorrow, when they had talked to their sweet girlfriends.
Since she had lost her job and had no chance of finding work before September, Nicole said yes immediately. Sahra, too, could think of nothing she would rather do: there was never much work in the summer.
‘It’s a unanimous yes,’ Luke told Lazare the next day. ‘We’ll do it.’
‘That’s good. When d’you want to leave?’
‘The week after next?’
‘That’s good too because I was going to have to get rid of you then anyway.’
Both couples advertised their apartments in fusac and were immediately inundated with calls from eager sub-letters. They boxed up their belongings and arranged to set off the following Monday: a year to the day, Luke realized, since he had first arrived in the city — just as everyone else was leaving for the summer. Now, by leaving, by joining the exodus that had rendered his first weeks so desolate, he felt he was demonstrating how completely he had come to belong in the city, to feel at home in it.
In the biography of Luke’s time in Paris, the area around his old apartment, the Tuileries especially, constituted his childhood. A few days before leaving he took Nicole there on a valedictory tour. They rode the 29 to the Opéra (the nearest Luke had ever come to taking it with a purpose, in order to get somewhere). Nicole’s hair blew across her face as they leaned on the balcony rail, looking back, watching life recede. A roller-blader clung dangerously to the back of the bus as it snaked along the narrow streets by the Musée Picasso. Waiting on lights, a couple squabbled furiously in the front of their car. An old woman’s shopping bag split, spilling oranges on to the pavement and into the road. Nicole spotted Alex and Sahra, arm in arm, walking along rue des Archives, laughing. She called out, too late. A wild-looking African berated a traffic warden for the ticket she had just written. The balcony filled up and thinned out. Louis XIV and his horse were framed, briefly, against a whirl of blue as the bus nipped around the Place Des Victoires. Something had set off a car alarm; a thin man conducted the noise serenely. When the bus was held up in traffic two workmen crossed the road carrying a large mirror which flashed back the image of Luke and Nicole in the balcony of the 29.
‘You see what an inconsequential film it will be?’ said Luke when they got out at Opéra. Nicole laughed. She was wearing a white dress, plimsolls, Luke’s sunglasses (the ones she had mislaid), a single bracelet. It was hot. There were a few scars of cloud; otherwise the sky was empty blue. On rue de la Paix Luke went into an alimentation and came out with two plastic bottles of fresh orange, one of which he threw to Nicole. She caught it, just. Luke was wearing a linen shirt, jeans. She watched him unscrew the bottle of orange and gulp it down as if he were pouring sun down his throat.
The park was packed with tourists. Litter bins were overflowing with Coke cans, buzzing with wasps. The grass had not yet been scorched by the summer heat, there were not too many cigarette butts in evidence. A group of boys were playing football. The ball bounced over to Nicole and she toe-poked it back. Sun dazzled the statues. To Luke’s surprise and disappointment the centaur was no longer there. It too had left the city for the summer: for restoration, a plaque explained.
Since seeing Luke that afternoon in London, and while writing this account of the period when our lives overlapped, I have thought constantly about what happened to him, have come up against that ‘big why’ again and again.
I think now that certain destinies are the opposite of manifest: ingrown, let’s say. Hidden, rarely revealing themselves, probably not even felt as a force, they work like the process or instinct that urges a seed in the soil in the direction of the light: as strong, silent and invisible — as imperceptible — as that. In Luke’s case, something took him away from the light, from what he most wanted and loved. As if the seed’s impulse towards the light becomes warped or damaged so that it takes itself deeper and deeper into the soil. As it buries itself deeper so it redoubles its efforts to attain the light. But in doing so, like the deer we saw exhausting itself by struggling in a trap, it succeeds only in burying itself still further. Eventually the urge towards the light withers because, as if through the workings of some last-ditch, built-in fail-safe, only by ceasing to struggle can it hope to survive. At some very late stage it senses that it is its longings which have condemned it. And so it remains where it is, a faint pulse of life in the darkness, directionless, not moving.
I think Luke could feel something tugging him, exerting not an attraction but a pull that was very faint and yet so insistent that he began to wonder if, by giving in to it, he might have found a way of being faithful to his destiny. Maybe some truth would be revealed to him that was denied to happier, more contented people. Even as he thought this he must have suspected that such a truth would be distorted, rendered false, because it would, inevitably, be encrusted by bitterness. We all want to believe that truth is incompatible with bitterness but this is wishful thinking. Perhaps truth is bitter, mean, miserly. The hankering to make of truth something ennobling and pure is itself a falsification. Perhaps it is actually the truth itself that twists you, that is twisted.
Obviously things could have turned out differently for Luke, could have worked out better. But by letting things occur as they did he believed he was penetrating more deeply into himself, getting closer to his core. Luke fell short of what he was capable of. He could have been many things, could have achieved more than he did. To all outward appearances he failed: he failed to keep the woman he loved, to pursue a career, to raise a family, to be happy. All of the things he associated with happiness came to be lodged absolutely in his past. But there was a sense, I think, in which he did fulfil his destiny. There are people who are destined to have lives like this and, in some way, his falling short was a kind of triumph; he was being faithful to some part of himself, to his destiny.
There are all sorts of propensities in people; we tend to look only at the positive side — their potential for success, for happiness — but there are other kinds of negative potentiaclass="underline" the potential for wasting the talents we are given, for blighting our prospects of happiness.
So, as he sits there, staring at the TV that has been on all day, waiting for time to pass, as he looks at the bed where he has slept every night, or at the crumbs of bread scattered over the kitchen table, as he postpones for a little while longer the first drink of the day, or decides that he has waited long enough and opens the first bottle — perhaps he feels that at some level he has achieved his destiny, that he has been true to some part of himself, has touched some possibility which had been latent in him from his earliest beginnings. Perhaps he feels at home in himself.
I can imagine him sitting there, his mouth numbed by beer, knowing that he has ruined his whole life, that nothing will remain of him when he dies — no book, no children — and wanting nothing to be any different, accepting it. I can even imagine him almost happy.
Alex and Luke had a meeting with Lazare who gave them a list of things he wanted done to the house, how he wanted them done. There was no phone, he said, but they should call whenever they got a chance, to let him know they weren’t ruining the place.