‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s make up for it then. Let’s make up for it.’
4
The restaurant was small and crowded — and Norman, I suppose, Au Gars Normand. There were coats of arms from the region and photographs of old Tour de France cyclists on the walls, the traditional poster of Mont St Michel, and dark, diamond-paned, leaded windows which completely drowned the light from the street.
We had come to some happy spice island moored just off a barbarous shore. The air was warm with strange savouries, something sharply burnt, thyme crushed with lemon, the perfume of many freshly opened bottles. I thought of my four years on old mutton in Durham, and of that moment several weeks before when I had struggled with McCoy in ‘E’ block, yelling at him, trying to punish him for all the lost time. Normandy had been a place of mine — a school trip to Dieppe one Easter and afterwards, when I’d worked for McCoy in Holborn, I’d slipped away there for odd weekends: the boat train pulling out of Victoria Station, through the orchards and chalk lands, wheels groaning round the pier at Newhaven: then the sudden grip in the stomach, already abroad on the French steamer, the early light-headed nonsense of traveclass="underline" the burnt tobacco, a Pernod or some other rash drink in the saloon, and later — watching a foreign spring come up from a train window vanishing southwards. All that expectation; and that at least had never disappointed. And so I had shouted at McCoy about Muscadet and lobsters like a crazed emperor, clamouring murderously for cheese, creamed chicken and sole Dieppoise. What a fool I’d been, I thought to myself afterwards, as if these things were the one saving grace in all the world, the only part of life worth regaining outside those granite walls.
Yet perhaps I’d been right: the act of eating and drinking, the agreed necessity, companionship in that shared desire — why deny these were fair ambitions, sure emblems of our humanity? It was not the food I cared so much about but the truce it brought, the peace. And I felt then that I’d been right to shout about it, to try and kill McCoy for it — for here it all was at least, at last the recompense, so that there were no more questions to be asked, no anger, no other answer needed.
We waited for a table next a small bar by the curtained doorway, almost a zinc comptoir in the old fashion, with a French girl who managed the hats and coats and moonlighting with the drinks. The whole place was such a genuine import — with a signed photograph of Georges Carpentier behind the bar — that I thought when the girl came back she might say: ‘Monsieur, vous désirez …?’ But she didn’t. She said nothing, simply looked at me with a query in her awkward smile.
‘What would you like while we wait — a Pernod or some other rash drink?’ Helen Jackson got a long thin cigarette out of her bag and fiddled with it.
‘Whisky, please.’
‘It may not go with the wine — that’s if you like wine. Grain and grape.’
‘So you have clichés too, do you?’
‘I think I’ll try a Pernod. It’s years since I’ve had one.’
‘Whisky, please — just with water. Does that make it any better?’
I lit her cigarette.
‘Fine.’
The French girl turned away to arrange things. We stood there — she at an angle to the bar, elbow on the wood; I was facing it squarely, leaning against it, both arms outstretched. The drinks came and with them a plate of black olives. I raised my glass, but the word ‘cheers’ seemed out of place. I’d denounced clichés.
‘Cheers,’ she said in an English way, with that thought-reading ability she held so lightly.
‘All right. You win.’
We drank, saying nothing. We had made a silence in the noisy place, intended and happy. Waiting. White clouds stormed slowly in my glass, the medicine of anis on my tongue. Zibib. Cairo on the hottest days when the coldest Stella beer did nothing but increase the sweat. I picked up an olive and bit into it decisively, and then into another.
‘Sorry.’ I pushed the saucer towards her and she took one without a word. The pips started to pile up on another dish. We drank. She smoked. I smoked too. It struck me suddenly that she liked smoking and drinking, as a man might — not as a necessary social attribute, to survive bores in smart drawing-rooms, but as something genuinely enjoyed, for its own sake. Over all her appropriate surfaces here was a minute crack, perhaps, a depth to possible excess willingly embarked on, a happy fault in the otherwise so carefully tended geography of her life. Of course, one might have said that she appealed to me because I shared these tastes, because she was simply a drinking man’s woman, a half-bottle girl. And perhaps there was some truth in that — sisters-under-the-skin in the thirsty kingdom. Certainly her appeal had begun. It started just then, at the bar. I know, because of all the descriptions I must make here, I feel that the small business of her just standing there, carefully chewing olives before lunch, is the most important, the most necessary.
You will have to try and see what I saw — exactly. No other woman’s face will do, or an approximation, a face and body close to hers, or some sheer invention or a shape made up from other faces. It will have to be her alone — the easy bearing, the precise falls of flesh and cloth: the particular slope of shoulder, the sunflower-coloured Donald Davies dress, the loose sleeves crushed against the counter, fingers resting on the glass. It will have to be that particular hand, fairly flat and wide with ordinary fingers. Yet the long wrist, longer than most, disappearing into the yellow tunnel of wool. And you may not have another face but this one — the one staring at me lightly now, this face that has aged without telling anybody, yet which is a curtain behind which some people have been told everything. A naïve face that immediately takes on depth when you look at it properly, the large eyes gathering knowledge, the long cut of the mouth, sometimes so formless, becoming firm with intention the whole expression grasping definition, meaning, purpose from nowhere, so that in the passage of a few seconds you have looked at two separate people.
You will have to see this warm envelope of skin, the stamp of bright colours, the lines of life all meeting eagerly on this one moment of time, a particular presence cutting deeply into present experience, giving herself to it, being carried along with it. And yet for all this happy commitment to the immediate, a mysteriously inhabited envelope as well, trailing long sheet anchors in the past — not the completely buoyant spirit but one which, as I had discovered from her letters, was as deeply linked with previous time as to any present moment of whisky and olives.
I had been surprised initially by the force of her letters to Graham — as one must be by the intense fact, the unalterable evidence of another’s passion suddenly disturbed by an outsider — and surprised again by the glimpsed countries beyond, the times and places of its being.
And now, waiting for lunch, I was able to see in Helen Jackson the two people together properly — the innocent and the old — and feel their real weight for the first time, as through a stereoscopic device where a quite ordinary photograph, a landscape of hills, say, will take on completely new values, where it ceases to be a flat representation, one truth at one time, but becomes a succession of different truths going back over many different times.
She looked at me and I at her — just as the door opened and someone outside shouted ‘Hello,’ just as the girl left us for the coats and hats, just as the waiter came and told us our table was ready … And that is the moment you must see: a look where language is well lost, where one starts to live, feel life, under the impetus of another person’s regard — after which, with such shared regard, two people must then live differently; where speech will be in a new tongue, the whole grammar of exchange made afresh.