“Then what’s going to happen? If we’re going to travel together and it will bankrupt you, how much longer can we go on?”
She said, “We’ve got to discuss that, Richard. I’m still going to visit Niall. I can’t let him down.”
“What about me? Don’t you think that will let me down?” She shook her head, looking away. “If it’s just money, let’s go home to England tomorrow.”
“It isn’t only the money. I promised I would see him. He’s waiting for me.”
I took my hand away from hers and stared at her in exasperation. “I don’t want you to go.”
“And neither do I,” she said in a low voice. “Niall’s a bloody nuisance, of course I realize that. But I can’t just not turn up.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “We’ll see him together.”
“No, no—that would be impossible. I couldn’t stand that.”
“All right. I’ll go with you to Saint-Raphael and wait for you while you tell him. Then we’ll go straight back to England.”
“He’s expecting me to stay with him. A week, maybe two.”
“Can’t you do something?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I’ll at least pay the damned bill here.” I snapped my fingers at the waiters, and in seconds a folded bill on a plate was put in front of me. The total, service compris, came to 3600 francs, written the old way. Tentatively, I put 36 francs on the plate, and it was accepted without demur. “Merci, monsieur.” As we left the restaurant the waiters stood in an impeccable row, smiling and nodding to us, bonne nuit, a bientôt.
We hurried along the street, the storm effectively postponing any more wrangling over the problem. I was angry as much with myself as anything: only the day before I had been congratulating myself on being unpossessive toward women, and now I was feeling just the opposite. The way out was obvious—to give in, let Sue go on to see her boyfriend, and hope to run into her again in London one day. But she had already become acutely special to me. I liked her and she made me happy, and our physical lovemaking had confirmed all this and promised more.
Upstairs in the room we toweled our hair and stripped off our damp outer clothes. It was warm in the room, and we threw open the window. Thunder rumbled in the distance and traffic swished by below. I stood for a while on the balcony, getting wet again, wondering what to do. I wanted to put off the decision until the morning.
From the room, Sue said, “Will you help me?”
I went in. She had pulled back the covers from one of the beds.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Let’s put the beds together. We’ll have to move the table.”
She was standing in her bra and pants, her hair tousled and still damp. Her body was slim, slightly curved, the thin underwear barely concealing her. I helped her move the beds and table, and we began remaking the beds, interleaving the sheets to form a large double, but before the job was half finished we started kissing and touching again. We never completely made the beds that night, although they stayed pressed together.
In the morning I made no decision, realizing I would only lose her. Talking about the problem worsened it. After breakfast at a table outside the hotel we set off to explore the town. We said nothing about continuing our journey southward.
At the center of Dijon was the Place de la Libération, the ducal palace faced across a cobblestone plaza by a semicircle of seventeenth-century houses. It was on a smaller, more human scale than Nancy, but we noticed that here too the crowds and traffic stayed away. The weather had improved again and the sun was hot and brilliant. Several wide puddles lay in parts of the plaza. An area of the palace had been made over into a museum, and we wandered around admiring the grand halls and rooms as much as the exhibits. We lingered for a time before the eerie tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy, stone manikins set among gothic arches, each mounted in a grotesquely lifelike pose.
“Where is everybody else?” Sue said to me, and although she spoke softly her voice set up sibilant echoes.
“I thought France would be crowded at this time of year,” I said.
She took my arm and pressed herself against me. “I don’t like this place. Let’s go somewhere else.”
We wandered for most of the morning through the busy shopping streets, rested once or twice in cafés, then came to the river and sat down on the bank under the trees. It was good to escape temporarily from the crowds, the endless noise of traffic.
Pointing up through the trees, Sue said, “The sun’s going to go in.”
A single cloud, black and dense, was drifting across the sky in the direction of the sun. It did not look like a rain cloud, but it was large enough to blot out the sun for half an hour. I squinted up at it, thinking about Niall.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” Sue said.
“Suits me.”
We returned to the city center. In the room we discovered that the chambermaid had made the beds for us. They were where we had left them, standing together, and when we pulled back the covers we found the sheets neatly interleaved, to make a double.
IV
We traveled farther south, changing trains at Lyons to reach Grenoble, a large and modern city in the mountains. We found a hotel, this time booking a room with a double bed, then, because it was still midafternoon, went out to look at the town.
We were becoming dedicated travelers, dutifully seeing the sights in each of the towns we visited. It gave us an external purpose, an excuse to be together, something that gave us a rest from our obsession with each other.
“Shall we go up the mountain?” I said. We had come to Quai Stephane-Jay, and here was the terminal of a funicular system. From the broad concourse at the front it was possible to see the cables stretching up out of the town toward a high rocky promontory.
“Those things aren’t safe,” Sue said, gripping my arm.
“Of course they are.” I wanted to see the view from the top. “Would you rather just walk the streets for the rest of the day?”
We had yet to discover the old part of the town, and much of Grenoble was concrete high-rise with litter and wind-tunnel effect at street level. The city guide recommended that visitors tour the university, but it was out on the eastern edge.
I talked her into it, but she feigned nervousness and held on to my arm. Soon we were lifting away from the city, gaining height quickly. For a while I stared back at the city, seeing its huge spread through the valley, but then we moved to the other side of the car to watch the slopes of the mountain rising beneath us. It was an ultramodern cable system, four glassy globes moving together in convoy, steady in the sky.
As the cars slowed down at the top we had to scramble to get out, and then we walked through the noisy engine house into the cold wind of the ridge. Sue slipped her arm around me under my jacket, holding close. To be with a girl I really liked, whom I wanted to go on liking, was a unique feeling for me. To myself I was renouncing my past, never again wanting superficial sexual conquests; after many years I had found the person I wanted to be with all the time.
“We can get a drink here,” I said. A restaurant and café had been built on the farthest extremity of the promontory, with a viewing platform that overlooked the valley. We went inside, glad to be out of the wind. A waiter brought us two cognacs and we sipped them, feeling decadent because it was still daytime. Later, Sue visited the Ladies’ and I went over to the souvenir stand and bought a few postcards. I was thinking I should send some to friends, but the truth was that since meeting Sue I had lost interest in almost everything except her.