‘What else makes you happy?’ She was standing with her back to the open fridge, naked, one arm propped on the door. Steam coiled round her.
‘Wearing my new T-shirt.’
‘That horrible one?’
‘Yes. What about you?’
‘What makes me happy?’
‘Yes.’ She put the bottle back and shut the fridge. Luke watched her cross the room and lie down again in the hot puddle of sun.
‘Knowing you. Knowing, not looking. You see the distinction?’
‘It is, so to speak, staring me in the face.’
‘I know you so well, Luke. I like that. That makes me happy. Suppose they cloned you, made another one of you, absolutely identical. I could draw up a list of a hundred or a thousand things that distinguished you from it.’
Is this what it means to love someone? To take pleasure in itemising the smallest things about them? Except the list is never definitive, never complete. Things have to be added to it constantly: things that have never been noticed before, new things that turn out to be essential things.
‘Let me qualify what I said about looking at you making me happy,’ said Luke. ‘I have X-ray eyes. It’s not just your outside that I had in mind. It’s your kidneys and liver and all those hidden bits of offal that make you work the way you do, that make you smell the way you do, that make you what you are.’
‘Is that why you’re always trying to get your fingers up my arse?’
‘Yes, that makes me happy too.’
‘It’s easy isn’t it, happiness?’
‘It’s all in the lubrication.’
‘Happiness is just the harmony between a person and the life they lead.’
‘That’s lovely. Is it you or someone else?’
‘Someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘I forget. Are you still bending and stretching your leg?’
‘No. Now I’m just chatting.’
‘I love chatting with you.’
‘Me too.’
‘Is it still all withered and feeble?’
‘My leg? Yes.’
‘Like your prick then.’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘I’d like to make love.’
‘Me too.’
‘Tie me to the bed,’ she said.
Nicole had to work late the following evening. She and Pierre had just put the finishing touches to a proposal for a competition for an extension to a museum in Provence. Everyone else had left. It was hot. Pierre had taken off his tie, his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. He went to the fridge and came back with a bottle of champagne. He opened it and poured two glasses.
‘A toast!’ he said. Nicole held her glass, waited. ‘To you. . For all your hard work.’ She smiled, held up her glass, sipped from it and then looked down into it. Pierre was sitting on the desk, one foot on the bottom drawer. He poured himself a second glass, angled the bottle towards her.
‘No thank you.’
‘Come on. We’re celebrating.’ She smiled. Took another sip. Looking behind her, through the blinds, she saw a light go off in the office opposite. She heard Pierre moving from the desk. He was standing up. He put the glass down on the desk, quietly, and reached his hand towards her, touched her shoulder.
‘Nicole,’ he said. He moved his hand to her hair, pushed it behind her ear. She looked at him. He angled his face towards her. She felt his breath and then his lips on her. She averted her face, took a step back. Pierre remained where he was, his hand in the air.
‘Nicole,’ he said. ‘The truth is, Nicole. .’ He took a breath, looked at the floor and then at her face again. ‘I am in love with you.’ His words were tender but there was a threat contained in this tenderness. He reached towards her, fingered her hair behind her ear again.
‘Please. Don’t do that.’ It had been so slight a gesture, and her reaction to it so excessive — to refuse him even this! — that Pierre felt as if he had been hit. He was embarrassed and his embarrassment made him angry. He left his hand where it was. With the other he touched her shoulder. He leaned towards her. She turned her face away. On the filing cabinet nearby was a pile of paper and the pen he had bought her.
‘I want to kiss you.’
‘No.’
‘Not even that?’
‘Let go of me.’
‘What do you think I’m going to do? Rape you?’
‘You couldn’t.’
He gripped her shoulder. She craned her head back, pushed him away. He pushed harder. She stepped back and rattled into the blinds. She reached for the pen and held it in her fist, as if she were about to plunge it into his face. His hand was still on her shoulder. For several moments they stood there like that, their faces inches from each other. Then Nicole reached up, moved his hand from her shoulder and manoeuvred past him. She put the pen on the desk and picked up her bag. Pierre had pulled out the chair from the desk and slumped into it. Ignoring him, Nicole left the room and closed the door, exactly as if she had just finished a normal day’s work.
Luke was sitting on the floor when she got home. He was wearing his ridiculous T-shirt, checking film times in Pariscope, munching his way through a bowl of cherries. Spunk was next to him, tail wagging, eyes fixed on the door, awaiting her return. She told Luke what had happened while he held her, his vision focused, for no reason, on a little area of the wall opposite where the paint had been applied too thinly. Women withheld themselves from men and then, for a while at least, they gave themselves to a man, to one man. And what a stroke of fortune it was, what a miracle, if you turned out to be that man! I am her man, Luke thought to himself. But how arbitrary it was, this privilege, and how precarious. There could come a time when he would find himself excluded as totally as Pierre from the invisible field of her consent, her desire, her trust. He held her tighter, as if this extra exertion of pressure could indefinitely forestall such an eventuality. Everything he could think of saying was inadequate. He was her man. Nothing he could do or say could do justice to this fact. He kissed her.
‘You taste of cherries,’ she said.
Nicole was out of a job and, at the warehouse a few days later, Luke and Alex became convinced that they were heading the same way. Unusually Lazare said that he wanted to see them at three o’clock: normally he simply put his head out of his office and shouted to whoever he wanted to speak with — i.e. yell at — to get in there immediately. The uncharacteristic formality seemed ominous and, sure enough, when they turned up promptly at his office everything about his manner suggested imminent redundancy. He was sitting in his chair, smoking one of his non-Cuban cigars.
‘Sit down,’ he said. Luke and Alex looked round. There was only one chair. Perhaps this was how it would be settled: whoever sat down would get the bullet: a comfortable version of Russian roulette. They remained standing.
‘How’s that ankle Luke?’
‘Great. Almost back to normal.’
‘Good. Listen, we’re coming up to a very quiet period. There won’t be enough work to go round.’ The phone rang. He picked up the receiver, hung up, and then left it sprawled on the desk: his own no-frills version of ‘No calls, please. I’m in a meeting.’ The dull dial tone could just be heard. ‘I can’t keep everybody on here. You two were the last to arrive. So it’s you who have to go.’ The dial tone turned to the higher pitch intended to alert the caller that he had taken too long to dial. ‘Which is a shame because I like you both. And the other guys like you.’ He shifted in his chair, a little embarrassed by this admission of affection. His cigar was not drawing well. He stubbed it out and picked up a pen instead. ‘But there’s something I could suggest to you that you might like anyway. I bought this house in the country. A small place, very run down. It’s very pretty. It’s been done up but there are a few things still need doing. A lot of things actually, but nothing too major. Plastering, painting, cleaning, tidying. So if you want to you can do that for me: do the place up. In return you get a nice — well, a place that will be nice when you finish working on it — home for the summer. Plus I’ll pay you something. Not much, but something. Take those sweet girlfriends of yours. By the end of the summer things will have picked up here. You can come back. So what do you say?’