William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

But I don’t. I say it’s just a personal matter.

There is a pause in our conversation. I say to Erica, who nervously lights a cigarette, “Look, I think I should talk to him first.”

“No!” she replies instantly. “I must speak to him.” Speak to him about what? I wonder. It irritates me. Is Kramer to be hounded perpetually by these neurotic harpies? What has the man done to deserve this?

We see Kramer at the same time as he sees us. He strides over to our table. He stares angrily at me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands in tones of real astonishment.

“I’m sorry,” I say, nervousness making my voice tremble. “But I have to speak to you.” It’s like being back at school.

Erica crushes out her cigarette and jumps to her feet. I can see she is blinking back tears.

“I have news for you,” she says, fighting to keep her voice strong. “Important news.”

Kramer grips her by the elbows. “Come back,” he says softly, pleadingly.

I am impatient with whatever lovelorn drama it is that they are enacting, and also obscurely angered by this demeaning display of reliance. Raising my voice I flourish the credit card receipt. “Kramer,” I say. “I want to know about this.”

He ignores me. He does not take his eyes from Erica. “Erica, please,” he entreats.

She lowers her head and looks down at her shaking hands.

“No,” she says desperately. “I can’t. I’m marrying Jean-Louis. I said I would tell you tonight. Please let me go.” She shakes herself free of his arms and brushes past him, out into the night. I am glad to see her go.

I have never seen a man look so abject. Kramer stands with his head bowed in defeat, his jaw muscles bulging, his eyes fixed — as if he’s just witnessed some dreadful atrocity. I despise him like this, so impoverished and vulnerable, nothing like the Kramer I knew.

I lean forward. “Kramer,” I say softly, confidingly. “You can tell me now. You did it, didn’t you? You came back that night while I was away.” I spread the slip of transparent paper on the table. “You see I have the facts here.” I keep my voice low. “But don’t worry, it’s between you and me. I just need to know the truth.”

Kramer sits down unsteadily. He examines the receipt. Then he looks up at me as if I’m quite mad.

“Of course I came back,” he whispers bitterly. “I drove back that night to tell Joan I was leaving her, that I wanted Erica.” He shakes his head in grim irony. “Instead I saw everything. From the garden. I saw you sitting in your study. You had a kind of bandage round your head. It covered one eye.” He points to my right eye. “You were typing with one hand. Your left hand. You only used one hand. All the time. I saw you take the gun from the drawer with your left hand.” He paused. “I knew what you were going to do. I didn’t want to stop you.” He stands up. “You are a sick man,” he says, “with your sick worries. You can delude yourself perhaps, but nobody else.” He looks at me as if he can taste vomit in his mouth. “I stood there and listened for the shot. I went along with the game. I share the guilt. But it was you who did it.” He turns and walks out of the café.

KRAMER IS LYING. It is a lie. The sort of mad impossible fantastic lie a desperate man would dream up. I know he is lying because I know the truth. It’s locked in my brain. It is inviolate. I have my body’s authority for it.

Still, there is a problem now with this lie he’s set loose. Mendacity is a tenacious beast. If it’s not nipped in the bud it’s soon indistinguishable from the truth. I told him he didn’t need to worry. But now …

He is bound to return to this melancholy bar before long. I know the banal nostalgia of such disappointed men — haunting the sites of their defeats — and the powerful impulses of unrequited love. I will have to see Kramer again; sort things out once and for all.

I signal the waiter for my bill. As I close my book a sentence at the bottom of the page catches my eye:

Many logicians and philosophers are deeply unhappy about bizarre situations.

A curse on them all, I say.

We land in Nice. Pan Am. I go through customs without much trouble and stand around the arrivals hall wondering what to do next — if there’s a bus into town; whether I should get a taxi. I see a man — black hair, white face, blue suit — looking curiously at me. I decide to ignore him.

He comes over, though.

“Tupperware?” he asks unctuously. He pronounces it tooperwère .

“Sorry?” I say.

“Ah, English,” he says with some satisfaction, as if he’s done something clever. “Mr. Simpson.” He picks up my suitcase. It’s heavier than he expects. He has tinted spectacles and his black hair is getting thin at the front. He looks about forty.

“No,” I say. I tell him my name.

He puts my suitcase down. He looks around the arrivals hall at the few remaining passengers. I am the only one not being met.

“Merde,” he swears softly. He shrugs his shoulders. “Do you want a ride into town?”

We go outside to his car. It’s a big Citroën. The back is filled with plastic beakers, freezer boxes, salad crispers and such like. He puts my case in the boot. He shovels stacks of pamphlets off the front seat before he lets me into his car. He explains that he has been sent to meet his English opposite number from Tupperware UK. He says he assumed I was English from my clothes. In fact, he goes on to claim that he can guess any European’s nationality from the kind of clothes he or she is wearing. I ask him if he can distinguish Norwegians from Danes and for some reason he seems to find this very funny.

We drive off smartly, following the signs for Nice centre ville . I can’t think of anything to say, as my French isn’t good enough and somehow I don’t like the idea of talking to this man in English. He sits very close to the steering-wheel and whistles softly through his teeth, occasionally raising one hand in rebuke at any car that cuts in too abruptly on him. He asks me, in French, how old I am and I tell him I’m eighteen. He says I look older than that.

After a while he reaches into the glove compartment and takes out some photographs. He passes them over to me.

“You like?” he says in English.

They are pictures of him on a beach standing by some rocks. He is absolutely naked. He looks in good shape for a forty-year-old man. In one picture I see he’s squatting down and some trick of the sun and shadow makes his cock seem enormously long.

“Very nice,” I say, handing them back, “but non merci.”

He drops me in the middle of the Promenade des Anglais. We shake hands and he drives off. I stand for a while looking down on the small strip of pebble beach. It’s January and the beach is empty. The sky is packed with grey clouds and the sea looks an unpleasant blue-green. For some reason I was expecting sunshine and parasols. I let my eyes follow the gentle curve of the Baie des Anges. I start at the airport and travel along the sweep of the coast. The palm trees, the neat little Los Angeleno-style hotels with their clipped poplars and fancy wrought-ironwork, along past the first of the apartment blocks, blind and drab with their shutters firmly down, past the Negresco with its pink sugary domes, past the Palais de la Méditerranée, along over the old Port, completing the slow arc at the promontory of Cap St.-Jean, surmounted by its impossible villa. I see the ferry from Corsica steaming gamely into harbour. I stand looking for a while until I begin to feel a bit cold.

It’s Sunday so I can’t enrol for my courses at the university until the next day. I carry my case across the Promenade des Anglais, go up one street and book into the first hotel I see. It’s called the Hotel Astoria. I go down some steps into a dim foyer. An old man gives me a room.