Then what happens? These things get forgotten over time, the details lost, merged into other moments, blurred like the charcoal edges of a smudged drawing. But it goes something like this: he lifts the bedclothes – some kind of limp eiderdown – and slides beneath. She snaps off the light so that the only illumination comes through the threadbare curtains from street lights outside. He rolls over in the bed to face her and they lie there between the sheets, a foot apart, a whole confusing concatenation of lusts and inhibitions apart. In the half-light he can make out the whites of her eyes and the secret gleam of teeth. She breathes softly.
‘Ellie,’ he says and leaves her name there in the narrow shadows between them.
‘What?’
Moving closer he touches his lips against hers. Her lips are closed, as though opening them would open a window on her soul through which all manner of things might be revealed. But she doesn’t stop his hand, which crosses the divide and touches her breast and the small nub of her nipple. Doesn’t that signify arousal? He doesn’t know. Acceptance? He doesn’t know anything, really.
Still she doesn’t move.
‘I don’t understand what you want, Ellie.’
‘Why should you?’
‘Because of what happened in the tent.’
A breath of laughter in his face. ‘Messy, in more ways than one.’
‘But we did it. And now I want to make love to you. Properly.’ He says it almost without considering, as though to surprise himself as much as her.
She looks steadily at him, her head on the pillow, mere inches away but a whole world apart. ‘You’ve been very good, you know that? Not pushy, not protesting your devotion or anything nauseating like that. You’ve not really used the L word at all, except just then – that horrible expression “making love”.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘You don’t know? And you a scientist. Haven’t you read The Naked Ape? Of course you have. Well, we’re just animals, aren’t we? We mate, promiscuously, most of us. We grunt and sweat and get all wrapped up in each other’s fluids and we call it by the same word as we use for our relationship with the eternal creator of the universe. Love. Not very convincing.’
‘So what do you want to call it? Fucking?’
‘That’s what it is, isn’t it?’
‘So, are we going to do it? I mean, if it’s just some physical function—’
‘But it’s not, is it? Not just some physical function. That wanking thing, maybe. But not fucking. Not your sticking your penis inside me.’
James has never had a conversation like this before: he has never really heard the word ‘fuck’ mouthed by such articulate and feminine lips. A part of him to do with chapels and Wesleyan Nonconformism and pure Northern prudery is profoundly shocked; while another part, to do with biology and, in particular, the organ between his legs, is profoundly excited. He wants her to be clinging to him and whispering that word in his ear.
‘I mean,’ she continues, ‘it signifies, doesn’t it? It’s not called intercourse for nothing. And it also brings with it the other things – childbearing, motherhood, procreation.’
‘I don’t think we’re quite ready for that.’
He’ll remember that laugh. He likes making her laugh. It is the principal weapon he possesses. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m on the pill, although I did miss one in Zeebrugge. But I like an element of risk.’ She pauses, as though struck by a sudden idea. ‘You’re not a virgin, are you?’
‘Of course I’m not.’
‘Of course?’
‘Did you imagine I was?’ He hopes he sounds worldly-wise, but in fact his previous experience of sex is limited to one partner, a girl called Muriel, known, because she hated the name, as Mu. Mu was a fellow pupil at his grammar school but she left before the sixth form for reasons that were never quite clear, and went to work behind the counter in Boots, selling, amongst other things, condoms to grown men and blushing boys. It was to Mu that he happily lost his virginity, although he was fairly sure that she had mislaid hers long before, and in the same careless manner with which she conducted much of her life. After his first term at university she had dumped him because she said, despite his protests, that things were no longer the same between them, were they? ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, ‘you’ve become posh.’
And here he was now, phoney posh lying in bed with proper posh in a cheap hotel somewhere in the middle of France; and she was saying fuck to him without turning a hair.
‘Anyway, you did agree that we wouldn’t have sex,’ Ellie pointed out. ‘When we talked about it, you did agree.’
‘You agreed, with yourself. I said nothing.’
‘So it’s up to me?’
‘Of course it’s up to you.’
She considers him, head on one side. ‘Well, I’ve decided that you’re quite nice and we’re quite good together and so if you like we can…’ She doesn’t say the word. He waits for her to say it but she doesn’t.
In the event, nothing much. She lies beneath him and lets him in and he feels that eloquent slide, that momentary sensation of danger and delirium that is like slithering over a cliff and discovering you can fly. But quite soon the flight comes to an abrupt end in a paltry climax and he slips out of her almost surreptitiously, vaguely aware that he should do something for her despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to want anything, having turned away from him almost immediately and composed herself for sleep.
‘Was that all right?’ he whispers over her shoulder.
‘Fine,’ she replies. ‘Fine.’
Reaching over he kisses her cheek and finds it damp with tears. ‘Are you all right?’
Her voice mutters into the crook of her arm. ‘Go to sleep. I told you, I’m fine.’
Tears. Enigmatic things. If you ever doubt the concept of mind over matter, then think of tears. The most effluent manifestation of grief, but also of nothing at all. Almost as contagious as a yawn.
So what were Eleanor Pike’s tears for?
Next morning she’s up early, too quick to allow a repeat of what had happened the evening before. She doesn’t allude to it either as they pack their things and go down to the reception desk to pay. Whatever it was might never have been.
‘I want to look round,’ she tells him as they leave the pension. ‘I want to see the city.’ She says it as though she is pitching for an argument and expects him to object. So they spend the morning like tourists, winding their way through the medieval streets of the Grand Île, peering round the ancient gloom of the cathedral, even taking a boat trip on the canals that intersect the city. They have lunch at a table on the pavement and share another pichet of Alsace wine and for most of the time Ellie seems happy, distracted by the sights, content to forget what happened the evening before and might happen again; but over lunch there is a change. ‘Let me tell you,’ she says and then leaves the telling hanging in the air.