17. Things only began to change – by which I mean get worse...

The seventeenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls two very different trips to Paris.

Things only began to change – by which I mean get worse – on a trip we made to Paris a few years later…

Living forever on the edge of an overdraft, we’d been trying to save for a holiday for some time. We agonised over possible destinations, eventually deciding that Paris was (of course) the obvious choice for two literary sophisticates like us. The Travelling Companion had long wanted to visit Père Lachaise, perambulate the Left Bank, and try the marvellous cakes at Ladurée. I was keen to sit around reading Roland Barthes in the Latin Quarter, getting drunk and fantasising about my life as a struggling poet. So, finally, that’s what we did.

It may have only been a relatively short jaunt across the Channel, but it felt as if we’d been transported to another world. Like a pair of excited children on a school trip, I remember staring at each other in disbelief, as one Parisian landmark after another passed by, so ferociously present as to render them almost unreal. That first day we walked around the city until our legs gave out. We drank too much wine, ate too much food, bought books we couldn’t really read, and made solemn promises to one another we couldn’t really keep. We told each other we were more in love than ever. But with our affirmation came the knowledge of its ephemerality, curled up like a cancer.

Looking into her eyes that afternoon, I felt the eruption of a nascent pessimism deep within my gut. It was almost as if the very words ‘I love you’ unlocked the grim fact of our finitude in my mind, a fact which would see us both burnt to cinders one day. It was a feeling I knew I’d never be able to reveal to her, because even those who love us the most, and even the most loyal, intelligent and honest of them, don’t really want their days coloured with morbidity and death.  

The following morning, with herculean hangovers, we slowly threaded our way through the sepulchral streets of Père Lachaise, taking artful photographs of one another in the shadow of angel-flanked mausoleums. I had no idea that one day I’d be walking in this same place, alone and utterly lost, searching for Proust’s grave, thinking back to the two of us that day, hand in hand and full to the brim of each other, desperately churning over in my mind the question of what had happened to our love.

This second visit, all those years later, was made worse by the torrent of memories relating to the first. Looking at the names and dates etched into the headstones, I can recall my heart growing heavy at the numbers of people taken so young, only to then feel the perverse swell that was the lamenting of a life still mine to live. By this time, thinking of her was precisely the same as thinking of death, my mind again thrown back to that first trip when our mutual mortality announced itself so forcefully. The eventual discovery of Proust’s final resting place brought with it the strangest of sensations, as if I’d turned that particular corner before (which I had), and for a few brief moments seemed to be walking ahead of myself, so that upon seeing the name ‘Marcel Proust’ inscribed in gold lettering on black marble, a kind of double recognition occurred, further reinforced by the sudden and debilitating interruption of the past upon the present: the distinctive aroma of the Travelling Companion’s perfume filling my nose, just seconds before catching sight of the grave and realising where I was.

I remained there for an hour or more, hardly able to process anything, swept up in a maelstrom of memories that had her as their object, but also in the emotion of sitting beside Proust, his parents, and his brother, like some awkward interloper at a family party. Being fully immersed in the novel as I then was, I felt dumbfounded as to how this one man could have produced such a masterful work, and so grateful that he’d had the talent and tenacity to get it finished before he was himself snatched away.

I tried to imagine the level of bloody-mindedness this must have taken. It seemed as if the Search must surely have come from somewhere else, the result of some sort of divine dictation, and yet, it was also so clearly a product of pure graft, spun out of the short and singular life of the man who’d made it. I was desperate to understand this strange magic, to somehow grasp hold of it and place it deep inside me so that it might seep into my worthless soul and show me a way toward something valuable. But the longer I sat and stared at that elegant slab of black marble in front of me, the more I realised that the answers I wanted were not locked up in the Parisian earth.

Suddenly conscious of the darkening sky, of the bright day coming to its end, a few spots of rain on my face, I decided to leave. Walking away, passing grave after grave, my overwrought mind became caught up in the idea that ‘death’ was clearly the greater truth in this universe, given that ‘life’ was so brief as to be almost ridiculous. What sense did it make? Consciousness must surely be no more than an insignificant cosmic aberration. If so, why did I have to live and therefore face the process of dying? Yes, but what was death to the dead, I countered, if not as nothing is to nothing? And what did all this matter? We’d all be in the ground and returned to our rightful state soon enough, like the once-beautiful creature I’d just left behind, who’d summed it up all so perfectly when he described death as being like an ‘over-attentive lodger’.

Such were the gloomy thoughts that occupied my mind that day; while on a parallel track I still pondered the world of my prior visit, and on yet another I was conscious of the sad animal thinking both sets of thoughts. Luckily, in still another part of my brain, the outside world was staking its claim on my attention, and so as I made my way toward the exit, I resolved to head back into the city and find somewhere to go for a drink in order to mask the mind’s maudlin multiplicities.

But it was while on that earlier trip to the City of Light that I had long suspected the first fragment of doubt concerning our relationship became wedged in the Travelling Companion’s thoughts. Much later, I wondered if this was perhaps an instinctual response to the Weltschmerz which had suddenly taken hold of my soul; that, somehow, she’d sensed a fissure opening up within me during those few days. Or maybe – and this was another theory – it was a kind of atavistic reaction to something seemingly insignificant that happened on the third night of our stay.

We were walking along the Boulevard de Clichy, vaguely intoxicated, when a man approached, turned around, and started walking beside us. He was clearly intent on entering into the kind of conversation that strange men who approach couples on the street around midnight are keen to engage in – that is, with the female of the party firmly in mind, and a dark violence in his heart. In a moment that I can now only describe as unconscious cowardice, I took a step away from the man and repositioned myself on the other side of her body, exposing her more directly to him. He blathered on in a confusing mix of French and English, neither of which we could really make out. She was stern with him. I was mute. After a few hundred yards, he got the message and walked away.

We carried on in silence, but I could tell almost immediately that we’d been joined by something else; a shameful feeling that grew as we walked back to the hotel, in which time, I was desperately trying to work out in my mind what had just happened. Was stepping away a rational response to feeling threatened? Was it a sense that we’d both be safer if I removed myself from physical proximity to him? Or was it nothing but pure poltroonery? Whatever it was, it undoubtedly gave birth to a thought in her head that went something like this: ‘I’m not sure this person can protect me. After all, he’s just a boy.’

Almost immediately, I sensed her body harden toward me, and when I tried to engage in small talk, she remained monosyllabic, in much the same way she had with him. Later, when I pointedly asked her if everything as alright, looking deep into her eyes, I swear all I could see was that thought bouncing around in the back of her brain; dim synaptic flashes spelling out her new-found suspicion regarding my inability to keep her safe. At the same time, I was also reproaching myself for entertaining thoughts clearly predicated on the kind of patriarchal assumptions men are taught to live by.

Once back at the hotel, we reverted to type: we drank more wine, we had sex, we passed out. The following morning, we woke up, we had sex, we ate croissants, then we hired bikes and cycled around the city. After lunch, we climbed the Eiffel Tower and took more photographs of one another. With the previous evening obliterated by sleep, everything seemed fine. Desperate to pretend to myself that it had never even happened, I managed to put the shame I felt to the back of my mind.

It was only a week or so later, back in Norwich, after the pictures had been developed and I was skimming through them, that I could see in those cool black eyes that stared back into the camera, the same divulgation of distrust. She’d lost faith in me. And from that moment her dubiety fed my own. Those early morning looks of longing – four eyes across a patch of pillow, fresh from sleep, the purest distillation of love – were never the same again. From then on, I could never tell whether what I was seeing in those impenetrable pupils of hers was an expression of her doubt, or simply my own reflected back at me. What if I was making it all up? Surely, there was a chance that the idea had never even crossed her mind, that she was simply tired, or a bit freaked out. And yet, I was certain that it had, which was enough to make it real.

Up until this point, I’d always been assured by her professed dislike for mannishness and apparent penchant for androgyny, which perhaps best described the cast of my body (at least back then). This preference had allowed me to overcome my lack of physical confidence, which was substantial, and had been since the school showers. In physiological terms, I suppose boys remain boys until they become men; but I felt like this had never happened to me. Nature had dictated that I remain suspended in my boyish body, caught in a cycle of secret shame and desultory shaving.

My response was to foster an apparent abhorrence of all things masculine. So to meet a woman who preferred my ‘type’ was rare and gave me some much-needed self-belief. In the years we’d been together, I’d almost forgotten about my discomfiture, but the events in Paris changed all that; suddenly there was a lie to be lived and I wasn’t up to it. And I hated this lie for what it said about us: that, in truth, she wanted the very thing she always claimed she didn’t; and that I wanted to be the thing she wanted, even though I’d always denied that I did.

With this new and uneasy knowledge for company, I soon felt the need to adopt a different strategy to allay my fears and keep her on side. I began to reveal everything to her, even many of those secret thoughts that should remain hidden. I thought that by sharing the innermost workings of my mind, she’d gain a new insight into the nature of my soul, see that it was good, and that this would somehow override the dark mechanics of her reptile brain. This was the exact opposite of the studied aloofness I’d adopted in the early days of our courtship. It was born of desperation, as I tried to offer up new and loveable facets of my personality to convince her not to abandon me.

But, as with the Narrator and Gilberte, the more I revealed, the more transparent I made myself, the more alienated from me she became. Despite perceiving this, I couldn’t stop what I was doing; it was the only plan I had left. We lived under the same roof, and so I had to say or do something. I guess much in our lives come down to proximal inevitabilities such as this. Make a reformed alcoholic sit in a room with a glass of whisky long enough, and he’ll eventually drink it.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.