Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

‘Have you read Day of the Locust ?’ Henri, one of the other students, chimed in. ‘If you want to know about how Hollywood warps people, that’s your place to start. There’s a mother in there who makes Rosemary’s look like a saint.’

‘Huxley?’ asked Nadine, not our brightest.

‘No,’ said April. ‘That was After Many a Summer. Day of the Locust was Nathanael West, I think. Yes?’

Here, she looked directly at me, the professor, for the first time, turned on me the full blaze of her beauty. She knew she was right, of course, but she still deferred to me out of politeness.

‘That’s right,’ I said, smiling, feeling my heart lurch and my soul tingle inside its chains of flesh. ‘Nathanael West wrote Day of the Locust .’

And from that moment on I was smitten.

I told myself not to be a fool, that April was far too young for me, and that a beautiful woman like her couldn’t possibly be interested in a portly, forty-year-old lecturer, even if he did wear faded denim jeans, had a goatee and grew those wisps of hair that remained a little longer than some of his colleagues thought acceptable. But after that first meeting I found myself thinking about April a lot. In fact I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It wasn’t mere lust – though, Lord knows, it was that too – but I loved the sound of her voice, loved the way she twisted strands of hair around her finger as she spoke, the way she smoked her cigarette, loved the passion of her arguments, the sparkle of her laughter, the subtle jasmine of her perfume.

Love .

That night, she had left the cafe after about an hour, arm in arm with Brad – young, handsome, rich, footloose and fancy-free Brad – and I had lain awake tormented by images of their passionate love making. I had never felt like that before, never felt so consumed by desire for someone and so racked by pain at the thought of someone else having her. It was as if an alien organism had invaded my body, my very soul, and wrought such changes there that I could hardly cope with more mundane matters, such as teaching and writing, eating and sleeping.

The second time I met her it was raining. I was walking along the quai across from Notre Dame, staring distractedly at the rain pitting the river’s steely surface, thinking of her, when she suddenly ducked under my umbrella and took my arm.

I must have gasped out loud.

‘Professor Dodgson,’ she said. Not a question. She knew who I was. ‘Sorry I startled you.’

But that wasn’t why I gasped, I wanted to tell her. It was the sudden apparition of this beautiful creature I had been dreaming about for days. I looked at her. The driving rain had soaked her hair and face. Like Dick in Tender Is the Night , I wanted to drink the rain that ran from her cheeks. ‘How did you recognize me under this?’ I asked her.

She gave that little shrug that was no more than a ripple and smiled up at me. ‘Easy. You’re carrying the same old briefcase you had last week. It’s got your initials on it.’

‘How sharp of you,’ I said. ‘You should become a detective.’

‘Oh, I could never become a fascist pig.’ She said this with a completely straight face. People said things like that back then.

‘Just a joke,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere special.’

‘Coffee?’

She looked at me again, chewing on her lower lip for a moment as she weighed up my invitation. ‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I know a place.’ And her gentle pressure on my arm caused me to change direction and enter the narrow alleys that spread like veins throughout the Latin Quarter. ‘Your French is very good,’ she said as we walked. ‘Where did you learn?’

‘School, mostly. Then university. I seem to have a facility for it. We used to come here when I was a child, too, before the war. Brittany. My father fought in the first war, you see, and he developed this love for France. I think the fighting gave him a sort of stake in things.’

‘Do you, too, have this stake in France?’

‘I don’t know.’

She found the cafe she was looking for on the Rue St Séverin, and we ducked inside. ‘Can you feel what’s happening?’ she asked me, once we were warm and dry, sitting at the zinc counter with hot, strong coffees before us. She lit a Gauloise and touched my arm. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She thought something was happening between us. I could hardly disguise my joy. But I was also so tongue-tied that I couldn’t think of anything wise or witty to say. I probably sat there, my mouth opening and closing like a guppy’s before saying, ‘Yes. Yes , it is exciting.’

‘There’ll be a revolution before spring’s over, you mark my words. We’ll be rid of de Gaulle and ready to start building a new France.’

Ah, yes. The revolution . I should have known. It was the topic on everyone’s mind at the time. Except mine, that is. I tried not to show my disappointment. Not that I wasn’t interested – you couldn’t be in Paris in the spring of 1968 and not be interested in the revolution one way or another – but I had been distracted from politics by my thoughts of April. Besides, as radical as I might have appeared to some people, I was still a foreign national, and I had to do my best to keep a low political profile, difficult though it was. One false step and I’d not only be out of a job but out of the country, and far away from April, for ever. And I had answered her question honestly; I didn’t know whether I had a stake in France or not.

‘What does Brad think?’ I asked.

‘Brad?’ She seemed surprised by my question. ‘Brad is an anarchist.’

‘And you?’

She twisted her hair around her finger. ‘I’m not sure. I know I want change. I think I’m an anarchist too, though I’m not sure I’d want to be completely without any sort of government at all. But we want the same things. Peace. A new, more equal society. He is an American, but they have had many demonstrations there, too, you know. Vietnam.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember some of them.’

We passed a while talking about my experiences in California, which seemed to fascinate April, though I must admit I was far more interested in tracing the contours of her face and drinking in the beauty of her eyes and skin than I was in discussing the war in Vietnam.

In the end she looked at her watch and said she had to go to a lecture but would probably see me later at the cafe. I said I hoped so and watched her walk away.

You will have gathered that I loved April to distraction, but did she love me? I think not. She liked me well enough. I amused her, entertained her, and she was perhaps even flattered by my attentions, but ultimately brash youth wins out over suave age. It was Brad she loved. Brad, whose status in my mind quickly changed from that of a mildly entertaining, reasonably intelligent hanger-on to the bane of my existence.

He always seemed to be around, and I could never get April to myself. Whether this was deliberate – whether he was aware of my interest and made jealous by it – I do not know. All I know is that I had very few chances to be alone with her. When we were together, usually at a cafe or walking in the street, we talked – talked of what was happening in France, of the future of the university, of literature, of the Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists and Communists, talked about all these, but not, alas, of love.

Perhaps this was my fault. I never pushed myself on her, never tried to make advances, never tried to touch her, even though my cells ached to reach out and mingle with hers, and even though the most casual physical contact – a touch on the arm, for example – set me aflame with desire. After our first few meetings, she would greet me with kisses on each cheek, the way she greeted all her friends, and my cheeks would burn for hours afterwards. One day she left a silk scarf at the cafe, and I took it home and held it to my face like a lovesick schoolboy, inhaling April’s subtle jasmine perfume as I tried to sleep that night.