She put out her hand. ‘I want to rescue you.’
‘From what?’
‘From the past. From pain.’
‘The past is only a way of talking.’
‘Then from pain.’
‘I don’t want a wipe-clean life.’
‘Don’t be so prickly.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What do you want? Tell me.’
‘No compromises.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’
‘Are you a fanatic or an idealist?’
‘Why do you need to label me?’
‘I need to understand.’
‘No, you want to explain me to yourself. You’re not sure, so you need a label. But I’m not a piece of furniture with the price on the back.’
‘This is a heavy way to get some sex.’
The waitress cleared the plates and brought us some brown and yellow banded ice cream, the same colour as the ceilings and walls. It even had the varnishy look of the 1930s. The cherries round the edges were like Garbo kisses. You speared one and fed it to me.
‘Come to bed with me.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes now. It’s all I can offer. It’s all I can ask.’
‘No difficulties, no complications?’
‘None.’
‘Except that someone will be waiting for you in Room 29.’
‘He’ll be drunk and fast asleep.’
‘And someone will be waiting for me.’
‘Someone special?’
‘Just a friend.’
‘Well then …’
‘Good manners?’
‘I’ll leave a message at the night desk.’
She got up and fiddled with some change for the phone.
‘Wait …’
She didn’t answer. There she was, at the phone, her face turned away from me.
We went to a small hotel that used to be a spa.
The bathrooms still have steam vents and needle showers, and if you turn the wrong knob while you’re cleaning your teeth the whole bedroom will fill up with steam like the set of a Hitchcock movie. From somewhere out of the steam the phone will ring. There will be a footstep on the landing, voices. Meanwhile you’ll be stumbling for the window, naked, blinded, with only a toothbrush between yourself and Paris.
The room we took at the Hotel Tonic was on the top floor. It had three beds with candlewick counterpanes and a view over the rooftops of the street. Opposite us, cut into the frame of the window, was a boy dancing alone to a Tina Turner record. We leaned out against the metal safety bars, watching him, watching the cars pull away. You put your hand on the small of my back under my shirt.
This is how we made love.
You kissed my throat.
The boy was dancing.
You kissed my collarbone.
Two taxi drivers were arguing in the street.
You put your tongue into the channel of my breasts.
A door slammed underneath us.
I opened your legs onto my hip.
Two pigeons were asleep under the red wings of the roof.
You began to move with me—hands, tongue, body.
Game-show laughter from the television next door.
You took my breasts in both hands and I slid you out of your jeans.
Rattle of bottles on a tray.
You don’t wear knickers.
A door opened. The tray was set down.
You keep your breasts in a black mesh cage.
Car headlights reflected in the dressing-table mirror.
Lie down with me.
Get on top of me.
Ease yourself, just there, just there …
Harry speaks French, he’ll pick up the beer.
Push.
Stella or Bud?
Harder.
Do you want nuts?
Make me come. Make me.
Ring her after midnight your time, she said.
Just fuck me.
Got the number?
Fuck me.
The next morning I woke late and turned over to kiss her.
She had gone. The sheet was still warm but she had gone. I lay there, my growing agitation of mind beginning to fight with the gentle heaviness of my body. I had no idea what to do, so I did the obvious—got dressed and ran round the corner to our other hotel.
At the Relais de Louvre my own room was empty. Not surprising. There were my clothes and travel bag, and one ticket home. Well, I had given up any right to company.
I went down the corridor to Room 29. The door was open. The maid was cleaning up.
‘Où est la Mademoiselle?’
The maid shrugged and switched on her Hoover. Paris is full of mademoiselles.
I rang the front desk.
Rien.
Room 29 had checked out and there was no forwarding address.
I walked to a little café on the river and ordered some coffee and croissants. No difficulties. No complications. Not even goodbye. So that’s the end of it then.
I felt as if I had blundered into someone else’s life by chance, discovered I wanted to stay, then blundered back into my own, without a clue, a hint, or a way of finishing the story.
Who was I last night? Who was she?
virtual road
Night.
I logged on to the Net. There were no e-mails for me. You had run out on the story. Run out on me. Vanished.
I typed in your address.
Nothing.
I set one of the search engines to find you.
Nothing.
Here I am like a penitent in a confessional. I want to tell you how I feel, but there’s nobody on the other side of the screen.
What did I expect?
This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself. Daily, new landmasses form and then submerge. New continents of thought break off from the mainland. Some benefit from a trade wind, some sink without trace. Others are like Atlantis—fabulous, talked about, but never found.
Found objects wash up on the shores of my computer. Tin cans and old tyres mix with the pirate’s stuff. The buried treasure is really there, but caulked and outlandish. Hard to spot because unfamiliar, and few of us can see what has never been named.
I’m looking for something, it’s true.
I’m looking for the meaning inside the data.
That’s why I trawl my screen like a beach-comber—looking for you, looking for me, trying to see through the disguise. I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life.
SEARCH
It began with a promise:
‘While I am living I shall rescue you.’
That dark night I took a ladder and propped it against the window where I knew you slept. You would not be sleeping.
The window was barred with iron, and you were like an anchorite behind your grille, and I was more like a penitent than a knight, as I whispered to you and touched your fingers. You said you would rather have me with you that night than see the sun rise on another day.
You were sun and moon to me.
I took the iron bars in my hands and tore them out of the stone, and though I cut my hand through to the bone I never felt it, but came to you and lay with you in the darkness, in the silence, your body as white and soft as moonlight.
In the morning, when I had long since gone, and you slept late, your servant drew back the bed curtains and saw the sheets and pillows soaked in blood. It was soon known that someone must have been with you in your room and the hissing started.
You were faithless. You were treacherous. You would be burnt.
Many times has your lord and my King, with a heavy heart, committed you to burning. Many times have I rescued you, through combat with your accuser, for the King, who is judge of all, cannot fight for his own wife.
My name is Lancelot.
‘Lancelot du Lac,’ you said, rowing your body over me.
I was the place w
here you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.
That you were married to someone else meant nothing to me. Which is more important—a dead marriage or a living love? You never chose private happiness over public duty, you asked only that happiness be there—a view from the window, a crack in the casing—that sometimes you could ease yourself out, unclothe yourself, swim in me.
There was never a time when he called you and you did not answer. You asked—without asking—that when he did not call you, there would be no need to answer.
Then you called for me, and no hawk was swifter to the wrist.
I saved you from the fire, but the fire I could not put out was burning at our feet. Many times have you and I turned away from each other, our faces proud, our hearts seeming cold, and only our feet, which smouldered the clean stone where they trod, betrayed us.
My feet, bare and clean on the cold floor of my penance, left charcoal marks where I walked. The flagstones of your heart have become hearthstones. Wherever we stood, there was a fire at our feet.
‘One day this will destroy us,’ you said, your lips like tongs, moving the burning parts of me.
But I wondered how it could destroy us when it was us? We had become this love. We were not lovers. We were love.
Your marrow is in my bones. My blood is in your veins. Your cock is in my cunt. My breasts weigh under your dress. My fighting arm is sinew’d to your shoulder. Your tiny feet stand my ground. In full armour I am wearing nothing but your shift, and when you plait your hair you wind it round my head. Your eyes are green. Mine are brown. When I see through your green eyes, I see the meadows bright with grass. When you creep behind my retina, you see the flick of trout in the reeds of the lake.
I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips. Last night, angry, you split my lip with your fists, then wept over a scar from a boar.
I am not wounded unless you wound me.
I am not strong unless you are my strength.
Her name is Guinevere.
The rumours increased. There was a plot. Mordred and Agravaine warned the King against us and set to trap me in your room. I killed all twelve of those cowards who lusted after our bravery, and it is brave to love, for love is the mortal enemy of death. Love is death’s twin, born in the same moment, each fighting for mastery, and if death takes all, love would do the same. Yet it is easier to die than to love.
Death will shatter me, but in love’s service I have been shattered many times.
There was a day, I remember, when I rode after you in full armour and made my horse swim the Thames to find you. At the other side my horse was shot down.
I followed on foot, but my armour was so heavy that I made little progress, and I would have gladly torn off helmet and plates, and thrown my shield away, except that a man cannot even unbuckle his armour by himself.
Exhausted and weary, a man in iron clothes, I came at last to where you were, and killed your captors and set you free.
Then I stretched out my arms like a little child and begged you to uncouple my harness and unlace my metal gloves. I knelt down and you lifted up my visor and kissed me.
My armour off, it lay like an effigy of myself on the floor. I was naked with you, carapace of hero put aside. I was not Lancelot. I was your lover.
Why then fear death, which cannot enter the body further than you have entered mine?
Why then fear death, which cannot dissolve me more than I dissolve in you, this day, this night, always?
Death will not separate us. Love is as strong as death.
Your death was commanded for the next day.
As the soldiers were tying your hands and packing the dry straw under your bare feet, I rode up on my white mare, and I cared nothing for anyone who fell under my sword. I took you up behind me and carried you to my own castle, and begged you to come with me to France, to my lands, to my heart, for ever.
You would not break your marriage vow.
And then the wars began. The wars that ruined us all.
Most blamed you, some blamed me, but underneath the blaming of our love, hid many other wraths, restless to be vented. What began as good reason became good excuse. The war was pursued long after any advantage for either side.
I was riding through the burnt fields and bloodied streams, looking for you. My horse picked her way with delicate hooves over the bodies of the dead.
I had been told you had entered a nunnery, and I found you there at last. Dismounting from my horse, I walked to the walled garden and looked through the little grille.
You were unaware of me. You were sitting on a low stone bench with your hands in front of you, palms up, as though you were a book you were straining to read. Though you were all in black and I could not see your face, the arch of your back, your shoulders, your neck, made a curve I knew from loving you.
I looked at my own hands that had touched you everywhere, and I took hold of the grille, as I had done before, and I would have torn it out of the wall to get to you, but suddenly you looked up. You saw me. You fainted.
I ran to the Abbess and begged her to allow me into the garden. Reluctantly she did so, for you are still the Queen, and I am still Lancelot, though the meaning of those names has become a noise.
In the garden you had recovered yourself. You were tall, upright, stern. As I approached, you held up your hand, and I would gladly have plucked my heart out of my body to make you hold it as you once held it—the core of me in your hands.
‘This love has destroyed us,’ you said.
‘Not love, but others’ envy of it.’
‘I had no right to love you,’ you said.
‘But you did love me and you love me now.’
I took a step forward. She shook her head.
‘You will never see me again while I am alive.’
‘Let me kiss you.’
She shook her head.
I rode away and my tears made a lake of me, and for seven nights I rode continuously, not knowing where, under desolate cliffs and through exhausted valleys, until I came to a chapel and a hermitage.
I took the robe of hermit on me and did penance there for seven years, and in the seventh year I had a dream three times in one night.
The dream told me to take a funeral bier to Almsbury, where I should find the Queen dead. I was to walk beside her body to Glastonbury and bury her beside her lord and my King.
The next morning I set out and after two days came to my destination. The Queen had died half an hour before, saying to her women that she prayed her eyes would never have the power to see me again while she was alive.
I walked beside her, and it seemed to me that the years had sprung back and it was May again. The Maytime when I was sent through the forest to bring Guinevere to marry King Arthur.
All that long journey we had talked and sung together, and eaten privately in a jewelled tent. I fell in love with her then, and I have never been able to stop loving her, or to stop my body leaping at the sight of her.
There is no penance that can calm love and no regret that can make it bitter.
You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.
Death can change the body but not the heart.
great and ruinous lovers
The great and ruinous lovers.
Lancelot and Guinevere.
Tristan and Isolde.
Siegfried and Brünnhilde.
Romeo and Juliet.
Cathy and Heathcliffe.
Vita and Violet.
Oscar and Bosie.
Burton and Taylor.
Abelard and Heloïse.
Paolo and Francesca.
There are many more. This is a list you can write yourself. Some are greater than others. Some more ruinous. Some tales have been told ma
ny times, others privately and by letter. Love’s script has no end of beginnings. The characters and the scenery change. There are three possible endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.
I do not know whether or not science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plain texts of our hearts. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our finger a marvellous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do.
My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.
Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp, and tell stories until late at night of those great loves lost and won.
The wilderness is not tamed. It waits—beautiful and terrible—beyond the reach of the camp-fire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man’s pocket.