William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

On the Promenade des Anglais the shiny cars sweep by. Ulricke and I stick out our thumbs, goosing the air. We always get lifts immediately and have freely hitched, usually with Anneliese, the length of the Côte d’Azur, from Saint-Raphaël to Menton, at all hours of the day or night. One warmish evening, near Aix-en-Provence, the three of us decided spontaneously to sleep out in a wood. We huddled up in blankets and awoke at dawn to find ourselves quite soaked with dew.

A car stops. The driver — a man — is going to Monte Carlo. We ask him to take the haute corniche . Cherry’s villa is perched so high above the town that the walk up from the coast road is exhausting. Ulricke sits in the front — the sex of the driver determines our position. To our surprise we have found that very often single women will stop for the three of us. They are much more generous than the men as a rule: in our travels the women frequently buy us drinks and meals, and once we were given a hundred francs. Something about the three of us prompts this largesse. There is, I feel, something charmed about us as a trio, Ulricke, Anneliese and me. This is why — quite apart from his rebarbative personal habits — I so resent Steve. He is an interloper, an intruder: his presence, his interest in Anneliese, threatens me, us. The trio becomes a banal foursome, or — even worse — two couples.

From the small terrace at Cherry’s villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbor lights and the headlamps of cars on the coast road. The dim noise of traffic, the sonic rip of some lout’s motorbike, drift upward to the villa, competing with the thump and chords of music from inside. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — Live, The Yes Album, Hunky Dory … curious how these LPs pin and fix humdrum moments of our lives — precise as almanacs. An ars brevis for the quotidian.

The exquisite Cherry patrols her guests, enveloped in a fug of genial envy from her girlfriends. It’s not her impending marriage that prompts this emotion so much as the prospect of the “real” Coca-Cola, “real” milk and “real” meat she will be able to consume a few days hence. The girls from Ann Arbor reminisce indefatigably about American meals they have known. To them, France, Nice, is a period of abstention, a penance for which they will be rewarded in calories and carbohydrates when they return home.

I stroll back inside to check on Steve and Anneliese. My mistake was to have allowed them to travel together in Bent’s car. It conferred an implicit acknowledgment of their “coupledom” on them without Steve having to do anything about it. Indeed he seems oddly passive with regard to Anneliese, as if content to bide his time. Perhaps he is a little frightened of her? Perhaps it’s his immense vanity: time itself will impress upon her the logic and inevitability of their union …? Now I see him sitting as close to Anneliese as possible, as if adjacency alone were sufficient to possess her.

Ulricke talks to Bent’s girlfriend, Gudrun, another Scandinavian. We are a polyglot crew at the Centre — almost every European country represented. Tonight you can hear six distinct languages … I pour myself a glass of wine from an unlabeled bottle. There is plenty to drink. I had brought a bottle of Martini & Rossi as my farewell present to Cherry but left it in my coat pocket when I saw the quantity of wine on offer.

The wine is cold and rough. Decanted no doubt from some huge barrel in the local cave . It is cheap and not very potent. We were drinking this wine the night of my audacity.

César had a party for some of his students in the Spanish Lit course. After strenuous consumption most people had managed to get very drunk. César sang Uruguayan folk songs — perhaps they were his poems, for all I know — to his own inept accompaniment on the guitar. I saw Anneliese collect some empty bottles and leave the room. Moments later I followed. The kitchen was empty. Then from the hall I saw the bathroom door ajar. I pushed it open. Anneliese was reapplying her lipstick.

“I won’t be long,” she said.

I went up behind her and put my arm around her. The gesture was friendly, fraternal. She leaned back, pursing, pouting and repursing her lips to spread the orange lipstick. We talked at our reflections.

“Good party,” I said.

“César may be a poet but he cannot sing.”

We laughed, I squeezed. It was all good fun. Then I covered her breasts with my hands. I looked at our reflection: our faces side by side, my hands claws on her chest.

“Anneliese …” I began, revealing everything in one word, watching her expression register, interpret, change.

“Hey, tipsy boy,” she laughed, clever girl, reaching around to slap my side. “I’m not Ulricke.”

We broke apart; I heeled a little, drunkenly. We grinned, friends again. But the moment lay between us, like a secret. Now she knew.

The party is breaking up. People drift away. I look at Steve, he seems to have his arm around Anneliese. Ulricke joins me.

“What’s happening?” I ask Steve.

“Cliff’s taking us down to the town. He says they may be at the café tonight.”

I confirm this with Cliff, who, improbably, is French. He’s a dull, inoffensive person who — we have discovered to our surprise — runs drug errands for the many tax-exiled rock musicians who while away their time on the Côte d’Azur. Every now and then these stars and their retinue emerge from the fastnesses of their wired-off villas and patronize a café on the harbor front at Villefranche. People sit around and gawp at the personalities and speculate about the hangers-on — the eerie thugs, the haggard, pale women, the brawling kids.

A dozen of us set off. We stroll down the sloping road as it meanders in a sequence of hairpins down the steep face of the hills to the bright town spangling below. Steve, I notice, is holding hands with Anneliese. I hate the look on his face: king leer. I feel a sudden unbearable anger. What right has he got to do this, to sidle into our lives, to take possession of Anneliesen hand in that way?

The four of us and Cliff have dropped back from the others. Cliff, in fractured English, is telling us of his last visit to the rock star’s villa. I’m barely listening — something to do with a man and a chicken … I look back. Anneliese and Steve have stopped. He removes his Afghan coat and places it capelike around Anneliese’s shoulders. He gives a mock-chivalric bow and Anneliese curtsies. These gestures, I recognize with alarm, are the early foundations of a couple’s private language — actions, words and shared memories whose meaning and significance only they can interpret and which exclude the world at large. But at the same time they tell me that nothing intimate — no kiss, no caress — has yet passed between them. I have only moments left to me.

The other members of our party have left the road and entered a narrow gap between houses which is the entrance to a thin defile of steps — some hundred yards long — that cuts down the hill directly to the town below. The steps are steep and dark with many an illogical angle and turn. From below I hear the clatter of descending feet and excited cries. Cliff goes first, Ulricke follows. I crouch to tie a shoelace. Anneliese passes. I jump up and with the slightest of tussles insinuate myself between her and Steve.

In the dark cleft of the steps there is just room for two people to pass. I put my hands on the rough iron handrails and slow my pace. Anneliese skips down behind Ulricke. Steve bumps at my back. Soon I can barely make out Anneliese’s blond hair.

“Can I get by, please?”

I ignore Steve, although he’s treading on my heels. Below me Anneliese turns a bend out of sight.