Читать книгу Chaconne - Diana Blackwood - Страница 7

Prelude

THE WALL-EYED WEST Indian said he was a poet, and Eleanor saw no reason to doubt him. None of the white men in suits at Victoria Station, scurrying like semi-quavers into the new decade, had paused to help as she struggled with her luggage. Only this man, who told stories about Jamaica in a mellow baritone as he and Eleanor stood on the train to Dover, rocking intermittently against each other and laughing like strangers. On the ferry she bought him a sandwich. He told her he was going to the Continent to interview African intellectuals for an essay he had been commissioned to write, an essay that, with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, might become a book. She told him about the young man, her lover, who would be meeting her train in Paris. At the Gare du Nord they clasped one another’s hands in acknowledgment of a shared interval between cities. She wished him success with his Africans, and he wished her, of all the commonplace fictions, a happy life.

Even as she scanned the crowd for Julien, her hand still warm from the poet’s tropical handshake, she watched with a little tremor of regret as he made his way through the sleek and shabby turbulence of the station – a tall black man in a Burberry in search of his diaspora.

It was the fifteenth of September 1981, towards six o’clock in the evening. Eleanor stood where Julien should have been waiting, beside the orange ticket-punching machine near the entrance to the platform. Compostez vos billets avant le départ! She chose a moment when no one was approaching to close her eyes, tilt her chin upwards and listen to the seething polyphony of sound and echo.

A family man, idly waiting for the train from Lille to deliver his mistress, had been observing her. The pose she assumed was so private that he almost turned away, but blessed as he was with a Flaubertian eye, he could not bring himself to abandon such an enchanting subject. What was her name, where was she from? Was she just another young American come to suck up Paris through a noisy straw in the wake of earlier innocents? No. Too uncertain, not earnest enough, and the hand luggage didn’t match the suitcase. British? Good God, no. Neither brisk nor droopy nor horse-faced, she wore that tightly-belted trenchcoat, no doubt newly acquired from some London department store, in a way that suggested she could not be so easily contained. Irish? Unlikely. Her dark hair was silken, almost Asiatic, and her lips bloomed sweet and full in an oval face. A delectable mouth, no matter what jangle of foreign sounds it might produce. Perhaps she was from some half-civilised antipodean land, for when she opened her eyes again, they darted about uneasily and seemed to say, “I have come so far; why aren’t you here?” Pleased with his aperçu, and storing her away for future fantasies – and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for … – the père de famille moved on.

No copy of A Moveable Feast lay in Eleanor Weston’s cheaply un-American suitcase, nor did she much care in which cafés Hemingway had spiked his sentences with ands to make them truer. But what might the paterfamilias have made of these titles? Vocal Success: A Practical Guide to the Essentials of Good Singing; The Book of Survival: How to Think, Act and Stay Alive in Any Emergency; an anthology of Australian verse; and volume one of Albert Soboul’s Histoire de la Révolution française. The first book was a gift from her dearest friend. The second had been pressed on her at the airport by her mother, and on the longsome flight from Sydney to London Eleanor had read it with mild horror and amusement. It offered terse tips on surviving nuclear attack, along with such cosy assertions as “You are never lonelier than when buried alive”. She had packed the third book because the poems might prove useful in her teaching, not because she could imagine ever feeling homesick. The last had turned up in the post some months earlier, along with a birthday card from Julien and an exhortation to study Soboul. So far she had managed only the short history of the Revolution in English.

Julien, Julien … Why had he not been waiting for her as he should have been, twitching with impatience and bursting with love? It was too soon to be angry, for anything might have happened, but it was the right time to feel cheated. Eleanor stopped searching the crowd for the contours of his face and turned her gaze to the sallow stone wall on her right. High above the people and platforms was a row of half-circles of mullioned glass, obscure cousins to the grand arched windows of the façade. The Mercator grid of those severed circles called to mind Julien’s letters – not the careful paragraphs he wrote on blue airmail paper, but the rapturous lines scribbled between lectures on the paper with the tiny squares, those meridians and parallels of projected longing. Like a soldier who wants to believe that letters from home, tucked away in a pocket of his battle-jacket, possess talismanic power against bullets and bayonets, she began to recite Julien’s loving words silently to herself in a stale incantation against disappointment:

Eleanor, reine de mon coeur, ta conquête est totale. Tu domines mes jours et mes nuits, mes pensées et mes rêves. Jamais je ne m’adapterai à ton absence, car c’est une maladie, et tu en es le seul remède …

And then he was there, calmly enfolding her into the prickly Shetland wool of his pullover, saying something about the rain and the crazy traffic, lingering a little less than she would have liked over the kiss that quickened her desire.

“For you,” he said, stroking her cheek and half-smiling, “I’m missing a Party meeting.”

He picked up her suitcase and led her down the steps and out of the station, into the lights and effluvium of Paris.