Ulricke talks to Bent’s girlfriend, Gudrun, another Scandinavian. We are a polyglot crew at the Centre — almost every European country represented. Tonight you can hear six distinct languages … I pour myself a glass of wine from an unlabeled bottle. There is plenty to drink. I had brought a bottle of Martini & Rossi as my farewell present to Cherry but left it in my coat pocket when I saw the quantity of wine on offer.
The wine is cold and rough. Decanted no doubt from some huge barrel in the local cave. It is cheap and not very potent. We were drinking this wine the night of my audacity.
César had a party for some of his students in the Spanish Lit course. After strenuous consumption most people had managed to get very drunk. César sang Uruguayan folk songs — perhaps they were his poems, for all I know — to his own inept accompaniment on the guitar. I saw Anneliese collect some empty bottles and leave the room. Moments later I followed. The kitchen was empty. Then from the hall I saw the bathroom door ajar. I pushed it open. Anneliese was reapplying her lipstick.
“I won’t be long,” she said.
I went up behind her and put my arm around her. The gesture was friendly, fraternal. She leaned back, pursing, pouting and repursing her lips to spread the orange lipstick. We talked at our reflections.
“Good party,” I said.
“César may be a poet but he cannot sing.”
We laughed, I squeezed. It was all good fun. Then I covered her breasts with my hands. I looked at our reflection: our faces side by side, my hands claws on her chest.
“Anneliese …” I began, revealing everything in one word, watching her expression register, interpret, change.
“Hey, tipsy boy,” she laughed, clever girl, reaching around to slap my side. “I’m not Ulricke.”
We broke apart; I heeled a little, drunkenly. We grinned, friends again. But the moment lay between us, like a secret. Now she knew.
The party is breaking up. People drift away. I look at Steve, he seems to have his arm around Anneliese. Ulricke joins me.
“What’s happening?” I ask Steve.
“Cliff’s taking us down to the town. He says they may be at the café tonight.”
I confirm this with Cliff, who, improbably, is French. He’s a dull, inoffensive person who — we have discovered to our surprise — runs drug errands for the many tax-exiled rock musicians who while away their time on the Côte d’Azur. Every now and then these stars and their retinue emerge from the fastnesses of their wired-off villas and patronize a café on the harbor front at Villefranche. People sit around and gawp at the personalities and speculate about the hangers-on — the eerie thugs, the haggard, pale women, the brawling kids.
A dozen of us set off. We stroll down the sloping road as it meanders in a sequence of hairpins down the steep face of the hills to the bright town spangling below. Steve, I notice, is holding hands with Anneliese. I hate the look on his face: king leer. I feel a sudden unbearable anger. What right has he got to do this, to sidle into our lives, to take possession of Anneliesen hand in that way?
The four of us and Cliff have dropped back from the others. Cliff, in fractured English, is telling us of his last visit to the rock star’s villa. I’m barely listening — something to do with a man and a chicken … I look back. Anneliese and Steve have stopped. He removes his Afghan coat and places it capelike around Anneliese’s shoulders. He gives a mock-chivalric bow and Anneliese curtsies. These gestures, I recognize with alarm, are the early foundations of a couple’s private language — actions, words and shared memories whose meaning and significance only they can interpret and which exclude the world at large. But at the same time they tell me that nothing intimate — no kiss, no caress — has yet passed between them. I have only moments left to me.
The other members of our party have left the road and entered a narrow gap between houses which is the entrance to a thin defile of steps — some hundred yards long — that cuts down the hill directly to the town below. The steps are steep and dark with many an illogical angle and turn. From below I hear the clatter of descending feet and excited cries. Cliff goes first, Ulricke follows. I crouch to tie a shoelace. Anneliese passes. I jump up and with the slightest of tussles insinuate myself between her and Steve.
In the dark cleft of the steps there is just room for two people to pass. I put my hands on the rough iron handrails and slow my pace. Anneliese skips down behind Ulricke. Steve bumps at my back. Soon I can barely make out Anneliese’s blond hair.
“Can I get by, please?”
I ignore Steve, although he’s treading on my heels. Below me Anneliese turns a bend out of sight.
“Come on, for God’s sake.”
“Bit tricky in the dark.”
Roughly, Steve attempts to wrest my arm from the handrail. He swears. I stop dead, lock my elbows and brace myself against his shoving.
“You English fuck!” He punches me quite hard in the back. I run down the steps to a narrow landing where they make a turn. I face Steve. He is lean and slightly taller than me, but I’m not interested in physical prowess, only delay. Farther down the flights of steps the sound of footfalls grows ever fainter. I hold the bridge. Steve is panting.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he says. “Who do you think you are? Her father? You don’t own these girls, you know.”
He takes a swing at me. I duck my head and his knuckles jar painfully on my skull. Steve lets out a yip of pain. Through photomatic violet light I lunge at him as he massages blood into his numbed fist. With surprising ease I manage to throw him heavily to the ground. At once I turn and spring down the steps. I take them five at a time, my fingertips brushing the handrails like outriggers.
Ulricke and Anneliese are waiting at the bottom. The others have gone on to the harbor front. I seize their hands.
“Quickly,” I say. “This way!”
Astonished, the girls run with me, laughing and questioning. We run down back streets. Eventually we stop.
“What happened?” Anneliese asks.
“Steve attacked me,” I say. “Suddenly — tried to hit me. I don’t know why.”
Our feet crunch on the pebbles as we walk along Villefranche’s plage publique. I pass the Martini bottle to Ulricke, who stops to take a swig. We have discussed Steve and his neuroses for a pleasant hour. At the end of the bay’s curve a small green hut is set on the edge of the coast road. It juts out over the beach, where it is supported by thick wooden piles. We settle down here, sheltered by the overhang, spreading Steve’s Afghan coat on the pebbles. We huddle up for warmth, pass the bottle to and fro and decide to watch the dawn rise over Ventimiglia.
The three of us stretch out, me in the middle, on Steve’s convenient coat. Soon Ulricke falls asleep. Anneliese and I talk on quietly. I pass her the Martini. Carefully she brings it to her mouth. I notice how, like many women, she drinks awkwardly from the bottle. She fits her lips around the opening and tilts head and bottle simultaneously. When you drink from the bottle like this, some of the fluid in your mouth, as you lower your head after your gulp, runs back into the bottle.
“Ow. I think I’m drunk,” she says, handing it back.
I press my lips to the bottle’s warm snout, try to taste her lipstick, raise the bottle, try to hold that first mouthful in my throat, swilling it around my teeth and tongue …
Ulricke gives a little snore, hunches herself into my left side, pressing my right side against Anneliese. Despite what you may think I want nothing more from Anneliese than what I possess now. I look out over the Mediterranean, hear the plash and rattle of the tiny sluggish waves on the pebbles, sense an ephemeral lunar grayness — a lightening — in the air.