I saw him outside a bar. There was a basketball hoop on the wall and he and a friend were shooting at it. As I passed by he threw the ball straight in.
“Nice shot!” I said, and I smiled.
Later he approached my friend and me at the bar and asked if he could sit with us. There was a soccer match on the TV set in the corner. I can’t remember why I’d gone to watch a soccer match in a bar. It’s not really my thing, but there you go. Karma. There was a crowd of us and it was very rowdy. We drank a lot and became quite flirtatious.
He was a kind of a challenge. I’d seen him around the college, brandishing his little cine-camera, absorbed in observation. He was quiet and preppy, whereas I was revolutionary in style if not in substance. I sang in a rock band back home and my image involved a lot of smoking and drinking; I had to be seen to be unhealthy. He was always surrounded by Scandinavian ice-maidens, tall, cool blondes with flawless skin, restrained and elegant. I wasn’t elegant, nor did I have the potential for elegance. I was aware that everything I wore was slightly wrong. I thought I had a certain unconventional charm, but I didn’t think he would see it.
After the match and quite a lot of beer we did our shopping in the local supermarket and he bent me over the crème fraîche and kissed me. From that day we were inseparable and our international band of friends boasted another couple. It was a happy time and we enjoyed ourselves as cheaply as we could for several months, by the end of which I was flamboyantly in love. He said he was too. We told anyone who’d care to listen that we were going to get married when we left our respective universities. In different countries. On different continents.
On day, about four months into our love affair, we took books and bottles of water to a park in the centre of town. It was a blazing sunny day and we lay shoulder to shoulder listening to the birds and the play of the fountains, reading and trying to survive our hangovers. We barely spoke. I dropped off and when I awoke, it was to the whirring of his camera.
“Smile,” he said. “I want to have a record of your waking forever.”
Later in the afternoon, when the breeze raised the hairs on our arms, we rose to go. Hand in hand we walked along the town’s main drag, looking idly around, until he pulled me to a standstill.
“Look,” he said.
I looked. The registry office was stately and solemn, heavy with ivy. A tiny fountain dribbled over mossy stone on a lawn in front of its honey-coloured pillars. The life of the citizenry was chronicled within, their births, marriages and deaths, each spidery entry in every old ledger redolent of joy and despair.
“Why don’t we go in?” he said.
“What, now?”
He nodded. “Why not?”
I looked at him. His sunglasses were pushed up over his hair and sweat had dampened his hairline turning his mousy locks glistening brown. His blue eyes looked into mine with amusement.
“No,” I said.
I watched as the amusement died away and disappointment took its place.
“No. Not now. Not yet.”
I tugged his hand. He didn’t move so I kissed him lightly, smiling encouragingly.
“Soon.” I said, “Soon. Just not yet.”
He allowed me to pull him on. We didn’t discuss it further.
He wanted to be a filmmaker, and we went to the cinema two or three times a week. He would give me his critical analysis afterwards in the bar. Whatever his views were he would express them passionately, waving his arms around maniacally. I would listen and watch like a star-struck acolyte. He read voraciously and in three languages. His mother was a writer, French and terrifying. In her twenties she’d had supporting roles in a few French films where she’d played unattainable beauties. As mother-in-law material she was a nightmare. When I’d first met her she’d dragged her perfectly manicured talons through my hair and purred at me.
“Marc! Comme elle est mignonne, la petite!”
She made me feel very small. She treated me more as Marc’s pet than as his girlfriend. His father flattered me in an unflattering way, pointing out my homely qualities as a none too subtle rebuke to his wife, to whom kitchen and supermarket were unfamiliar territory. Not that it mattered; in his capacity as diplomat, they invariably had help.
My sole claim to the domestic high ground was that when we’d gone to visit I’d been broke, so I’d baked some biscuits and presented them in a box I’d decorated for the occasion. Looking at it, I was uncertain. I could see that it resembled something that a five-year old makes for her mother’s birthday, but it was too late. Better than nothing, I thought. It’s the thought that counts, I thought. Marc said they’d love it. I realised later that he had never been able to read his parents.
“Cookies!” said Mr Larsen, “Great! Look, honey, Toni’s baked cookies!”
Mrs Larsen inclined her head in my direction and her lips split open in something resembling a smile but less friendly. She took the box between those highly burnished nails, exclaimed theatrically and dropped it casually onto a coffee table. We went out to La Coupole for supper and the biscuits weren’t seen again. We didn’t mention getting married to his parents. It didn’t seem politic.
All in all I was grateful when we left their pied-à-terre in Paris and went back to our idyll in the Midi.
When he visited my parents in Basingstoke Mum and Dad were a bit in awe of him. This was partly because he was foreign, partly because he was so obviously clever, and partly because of his glamorous, expensive looks. Mum cooked frantically for him; full English breakfast, lunch, cake for tea, supper. The four of us played Scrabble and we went out to the pub in the evenings while they settled down to the telly. There was no reproach. He liked them. They seemed more like proper parents than the living challenges who had borne and reared him. When we told them that at some time in the future we were thinking of getting married, they were enthusiastic and Dad shook his hand warmly and patted him clumsily on the back. Mum daringly suggested that they break open the Bristol Cream.
We had nine months in which we were barely ever out of each other’s sight. At parties we would separate briefly and talk to our friends, but watch each other warily. He said that he couldn’t imagine that anyone who danced with me could fail to fall in love with me. I couldn’t think that any girl at whom he smiled his lopsided smile as he bent slightly to whisper in her ear would be immune to his charms.
When we both returned home we worried constantly. We rang each other in the middle of the night, just to check. He sent me long letters full of poetry and exotic descriptions of what he was going to do to me when we saw each other again. We had short phone calls full of frustrated whines and sighs. We saved up enough money for three holidays together on neutral territory. I missed him. We were faithful for months.
Bu then one day someone tried just that little bit harder and I was led astray and we split up. When I talked to him on the phone, Marc cried. I cried too, but the separation had taken its toll. There was no prospect of seeing each other in the near future. My someone was a factor for a short while and then he too was supplanted. Marc and I saw each other only once more. He sent poetry sporadically, presumably every time he was between relationships, which was invariably when I was in the middle of one, and then without warning, utterly predictably and unnoticed, the letters stopped. But because we never had a real row, never tripped over an obvious problem apart from distance, I never really considered it over. It seemed like a very long suspension of relations. I never really stopped loving him.
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