Саймон Моуэр - Prague Spring

‘Look, if you’re going to repeat everything I say—’

‘I’m sorry, I’m trying to understand.’

‘There’s nothing much to understand. I don’t enjoy it. That’s it, really. I’ve never, you know, enjoyed it. I can’t… let myself go. That’s what you’ve got to do, isn’t it? Let yourself go. Ecstasy, religious or sexual. All much the same. Both involve letting go. But I can’t. Not with Kevin, not with anyone else. And now, not with you. Whom I trust.’

Words and images stumble round his brain, bumping into each other like drunks in the dark. He feels overwhelmed by the concept of trust.

‘It’s my parents. Everyone accuses them, but it’s true. My mother, really, not my father. I love my father, worship, perhaps, which can’t be healthy. But my mother…’ She gives a little laugh, empty of all amusement. And then she tells him. Sitting there at the pavement café in the summer sunshine, she tells him about her mother and what she did with somebody or other. An uncle? A cousin? Both? Going off for long, belligerent, adulterous, alcoholic weekends or something, leaving her father shut away in his study, needing comfort, which Ellie, a devoted daughter, offered.

‘Comfort?’

She looks at him for a moment, then away across the square at the shifting tide of anonymous tourists. ‘He seems a strong man, doesn’t he? But he’s not. Not weak but…’ She hesitates, considering. ‘Vulnerable. I adore him. And he adores me.’

‘What comfort?’

‘There were bitter arguments when my mother came home. Rows, fights. I tried my hardest to protect him. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? A child trying to shield her own father? My brother was away at boarding school, so there was just me, crushed between the two of them. You know what happens to something when you crush it? Either it breaks up into little pieces or it becomes hard.’ She laughs faintly. ‘I’ve done both.’

The waiter appears and asks if they want anything else. More wine, perhaps? A dessert? Perhaps that interruption is a good thing, killing the question he has tried to ask and she has avoided: what comfort?

When the man has gone, she continues, almost as though the answer has already been given. ‘And then she’d do the religious thing, go off to some bloody convent to confess her sins and become a holy little wife again. Until the next time. The eternal grind of sin and confession and absolution. Of course I reasoned it all away as I grew up – I could just shrug it off, break away, find another version of love and affection. Except I didn’t. Couldn’t, in fact. I couldn’t let myself go, ever. Not with Kevin, not with half a dozen other boys before him. And then you came along, and I thought, yes, why not. Maybe with him. You see’ – she glances up at him for a moment – ‘you’re so fucking nice . That’s why I’m telling you this.’

James was suddenly aware that niceness was something one shouldn’t be. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘But you are. You can’t help it, but you are. And I thought maybe it’d be different with you.’ She looks directly at James and he recognises the pinched, sorrowful expression that Lis wore throughout the play. ‘But it isn’t.’

‘In the tent…’ James leaves the rest unsaid. In his mind is an already confused memory – a suffusion of orange light, pale ochre limbs moving, heat, a cry, a moment of ecstasy.

She shakes her head. ‘What’s that? Neurones firing, synapses activating, you ought to know. It’s just a bit of biology. But there’s no connection. Don’t you see how right Forster was?’

‘Forster?’

‘E. M. Forster. You know? You must know. Howard’s End .’ A fractional pause to gather her thoughts. ‘Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted and human love will be seen at its highest. That’s what I can’t do.’

The quotation gives it away: it has become one of those Oxford conversations he has learned to despise. All theory and no fact. Head in the clouds and feet at least six inches off the ground. He can’t do anything to stop her now. ‘It’s Forster’s metaphor,’ she continues. ‘Well, Margaret Schlegel’s in the book, but it’s Forster himself, of course. Prose is here and now, you sitting there across the table, me here, us talking together, being friends, being happy in each other’s company. And passion is that moment of… what? Ecstasy?’ She frowns, correcting herself as though it matters: ‘Human love will be seen at its height . Height, not highest. That’s what Margaret Schlegel thinks. You connect the two, the prose and the passion, with love. But I cannot.’ She opens her hands as though to display their emptiness. ‘Don’t you see, I want to love. You or someone. Anyone. But I just cannot. I live in fragments, that’s the trouble, small, hard fragments.’

There is, at that summer holiday pavement bistro, with its easy indolence, its chequered tablecloths and blackboard chalked with the plats du jour , a pause. James doesn’t know what to say. As far as he’s concerned it’s all nonsense, this self-examination. It’s the nonsense of psychology and the nonsense of philosophy. All we are is animals – complex animals, of course, but animals nevertheless. And what we do is what we do and what we feel is what we feel and the important thing is just to get on with it. So it’s Ellie who steps into the pause and makes it hers. ‘You know why Kevin and I broke up?’ She answers her own question before he has any need to guess. ‘The real reason, I mean. It wasn’t his politics. Compared with this, I couldn’t give a fuck about politics, and anyway he isn’t the fascist I’ve said he is. He wanted love, that was the trouble. Although he never put it in those words – he’d never read Forster in his life – he wanted me to build that bridge, and when he found I couldn’t he just got angry. Told me I was frigid. Shouted at me, called me an emotional cripple, said he wanted someone who could show love for him, real love, not some intellectualised version of it.’

Anything James might say will be wrong. He knows that. This girl who seemed so self-assured is as fragile as an eggshell. Yet there were no tears, that was his thought when he reflected on this conversation later. Such a moment of high emotion but no tears. Her expression appeared inverted, as though she was looking in on herself and finding nothing there. ‘I’ve never told anyone all this. Except you.’

‘Does that make me special?’

She shakes her head, as though to toss the question aside. ‘I wanted to explain, that’s all. You seem… worth explaining it to.’

‘More than Kevin?’

‘Kevin would never have understood. I’m not sure that you do, but at least you’re sympathetic.’

But perhaps he is wrong – perhaps there are tears in her eyes. Not flowing down her cheeks or anything too dramatic. Just glistening. He reaches out across the table to take her hand, and for a moment they sit there, holding hands across the table like any young couple who have just become lovers. Then she withdraws and blinks and the eyes seem dry once again. ‘That’s the problem,’ she says. ‘I live in fragments. I’ve tried to put them back together but I can’t. The pieces no longer fit.’

They leave the debris of that conversation at the bistro table and walk into the Place Kléber where, amongst the tourists and beside an antique carousel, they examine their map and the possibilities. Another coin. Heads to Germany, Austria and the Brenner Pass, or tails to Switzerland, the St Gotthard and Milan. Ellie laughs. The spinning coin delights her, like a child placated with a new toy. It rattles on the paving stones and lies head up, glinting in the sunshine – ‘heads’ in this case being a wistful woman striding across the obverse, casting seeds in her wake.