William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

Preston gestures at me, as if he can’t pronounce my name. “Annique … They’re moving in together.”

Lois squeals. She’s so pleased, she really is, she really really likes Annique.

By the time I see them onto the train Preston has calmed down and our final farewells are sincere. He looks around the modest station intently as if trying to record its essence, as if now he wished to preserve something of this city he inhabited so complacently, with such an absence of curiosity.

“God, it’s too bad,” he says with an exquisite fervor. “I know I could have liked Nice. I know . I really could.”

I back off, wordless, this is too good, this is too generous of him. This is perfect.

“Give my love to Annique,” Preston says quietly, as Lois calls loud goodbyes.

“Don’t worry,” I say, looking at Preston. “I will.”

ANNELIESE, ULRICKE AND I go into Steve’s sitting room. Steve is sitting at a table writing a letter. “Hi,” he says, not looking up. “Won’t be a second.” He scribbles his name and seals the letter in an envelope as the three of us watch him, wordlessly. He stands up and turns to face us. His long clean hair, brushed straight back from his forehead, falls to his shoulders. Perhaps it’s something to do with the dimness of the room but, against the pale ghost of his swimming trunks, his cock seems oddly pigmented — almost brown.

“Make yourselves at home,” he says. “I’ll just go put some clothes on.”

I have a girl now — Ulricke — and so everything should be all right. And it is, I suppose, except that I want Anneliese, her twin sister. I look closely at Anneliese to see her reaction to Steve’s nakedness (Steve wants Anneliese too). She and Ulricke smile at each other. They both press their lips together with a hand, their eyes thin with delighted amusement at Steve’s eccentricity. Automatically I smile too, but in fact I am covered in a hot shawl of irritation as I recall Steve’s long-stride saunter from the room, his calmness, his unconcern.

Bent comes in. He is Steve’s flat-mate, a ruddy Swede, bespectacled, with a square bulging face and unfortunate frizzy hair.

“Does he always do that?” Anneliese asks.

“I’m afraid so,” Bent says, ruefully. “He comes in — he removes his clothes.”

The girls surrender themselves to their laughter. I ask for a soft drink.

It wasn’t easy to meet Ulricke. She and Anneliese were doing a more advanced course than me at the Centre and so our classes seldom coincided. I remember being struck by rare glimpses of this rather strong-looking fashionable girl. I think it was Anneliese that I saw first, but I can’t be sure. But the fact is that the one I met was Ulricke. How was I meant to know they were twins? By the time I discovered that those glimpses were not of one and the same person it was too late.

One lunchtime I was walking up to the university restaurant by the Faculté de Droit (the restauru by the fac , as the French have it) when I heard my name called.

“Edward!” I turned.

It was Henni, a Finnish girl I knew, with Anneliese. At least I thought it was Anneliese but it turned out to be Ulricke. Until you know them both it’s very hard to spot the difference.

We had lunch together. Then Ulricke and I went for coffee to a bar called Le Pub Latin. We spoke French, I with some difficulty. There was no mention of a twin sister that first day, no Anneliese. I talked about my father; I lied modestly about my age, with more élan about my ambitions. Soon Ulricke interrupted to tell me that she spoke very good English. After that it was much easier.

Ulricke: tall, broad-shouldered, with a round, good-complexioned face — though her cheeks and nose tend to develop a shine as the day wears on — thick straight peanut-colored hair parted in the middle … She and Anneliese are not-quite-identical twins. To be candid, Anneliese is prettier, though in compensation Ulricke has the sweeter temperament, as they say. Recently, Anneliese has streaked her hair blond, which, as well as distinguishing her from her sister (too late, too late), adds, in my opinion, dramatically to her attractiveness. In Bremen, where they live (father a police inspector), they were both prizewinning gymnasts as youngsters. Ulricke told me that they ceased entering competitions “after our bosoms grew,” but the strenuous training has left them with the legacy of sturdy well-developed frames. They are thin-hipped and broad-shouldered, with abnormally powerful deltoid muscles that give their figures a tapered manly look.

Steve returns, in pale jeans, sandals and a cheesecloth smock-shirt he brought back from his last trip to Morocco. He pours wine for everyone. Steve is a New Zealander, somewhat older than the rest of us — late twenties, possibly even thirty. He is very clean, almost obsessive about his cleanliness, always showering, always attending to the edges of his body — the calluses on his toes, his teeth, his cuticles. He has a mustache, a neat blond General Custer affair that curls up at the ends. It’s a similarity — to General Custer — which is amplified by his wavy shoulder-length brown hair. He has spent several years traveling the Mediterranean — Rhodes, Turkey, Ibiza, Hammamet. It’s quite likely that he sells drugs to support himself. He’s not rich, but he’s not poor either. None of us knows where he gets his money. On his return from his last Moroccan trip he had also purchased a mid-calf, butter-colored Afghan coat that I covet. I’ve known him vaguely since I arrived in Nice, but lately, because of his interest in Anneliese, I tend to see him rather more often than I would wish. Whenever I get the chance I criticize Steve for Anneliese’s benefit, but subtly, as if my reservations were merely the result of a disinterested study of human nature. Just before we arrived at the flat I managed to get Anneliese to admit that there was something unappealingly sinister about Steve. Now, when he’s out of earshot, we exchange remarks about his nudism. I don’t believe the girls find it as offensive as I do.

“I think it’s the height of selfishness,” I say. “I didn’t ask to see his penis.”

The girls and Bent laugh.

“I think he’s strange,” Anneliese says, with a curious expression on her face. I can’t tell if she finds this alluring or not.

Ulricke and I continued to see each other. Soon I learned about the existence of Anneliese, duly met her and realized my mistake. But by then I was “associated” with Ulricke. To switch attention to Anneliese would have hurt and offended her sister, and with Ulricke hurt and offended, Anneliese would be bound to take her side. I found myself trapped; both irked and tantalized. I came to see Anneliese almost as often as I saw Ulricke. She appeared to like me — to my deep chagrin we became “friends.”

I forced myself to concentrate on Ulricke — to whom I was genuinely attracted — but she was only the shadow on the cave wall, so to speak. Of course I was discreet and tactful: Ulricke — and Anneliese at first — knew nothing of my real desires. But as the bonds between the three of us developed I came to think of other solutions. I realized I could never “possess” Anneliese in the way I did her twin; I could never colonize or settle my real affections in her person with her approval … And so I resolved to make her instead a sphere of influence — unilaterally, and without permission, to extend my stewardship and protection over her. If I couldn’t have her, then no one else should.

“When ought we to go to Cherry’s, do you think?” Bent asks in his precise grammar. We discuss the matter. Cherry is an American girl of iridescent, unreal — and therefore perfectly inert — beauty. She lives in a villa high above the coast at Villefranche which she shares with some other girl students from a college in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They stick closely and rather chastely together, these American girls, as their guileless amiability landed them in trouble when they first arrived in Nice. The Tunisian boys at the Centre would ask them back to their rooms for a cup of coffee, and the girls, being friendly, intrigued to meet foreigners and welcoming the opportunity to practice their execrable French, happily accepted. And then when the Tunisian boys tried to fuck them they were outraged. The baffled Tunisians couldn’t understand the tears, the slaps, the threats. Surely, they reasoned, if a girl agrees to have a cup of coffee in your room there is only one thing on her mind? As a result, the girls moved out of Nice to their high villa in Villefranche, where — apart from their classes at the Centre — they spent most of their time, and their French deteriorated beyond redemption. Soon they could only associate with Anglophones and all yearned to return to the USA. They were strange gloomy exiles, these girls, like passengers permanently in transit. The present moment — always the most important — held nothing for them. Their tenses were either past or future; their moods nostalgia or anticipation. And now one of their number — Cherry — was breaking out, her experiences in Nice having confirmed her in her desire to be a wife. She was returning to marry her bemused beau, and tonight was her farewell party.