The Intervention of a Good Man

9

Ridiculous business with an insect.

First separation.

Tinkerbell.

Our hero takes our heroine back. He is upset. The route from his handsome redbrick hotel to the monstrous A32 is far more painful in this direction. He keeps his eyes on the road but drives too far over to the left, and drives badly. He cannot get himself to concentrate. All of a sudden a large buzzing insect flits into the car through his open window and settles on his arm. Is it a horsefly, a hornet? It’s just a bumblebee, but our hero writhes, making the car swoop into the gutter. They stop and the bumblebee flies out almost immediately. Everything is fine, the heroine is unharmed, he does not get out to assess any possible damage. Just apologizes. And thinks to himself, Shame this trip’s not as much fun as “The Flight of the Bumblebee.”

Our hero sets off again. This incident has opened up fault lines in his cheerful facade. He is now having trouble finding his words, being amusing, even maintaining his smile. He cannot help saying he will call her when he is in Paris, that everything will be easier, then immediately regrets his words, which seem as pointless as they are irrelevant. He’s still seventeen. Hell, how long’s he going to go on being seventeen? Why can’t his heart age like his skin and his eyes? In ten years’ time, or twenty, will he still be tormented by passionate longings he can’t even hope to fulfill? Is it a sign of strength, weakness, or madness, not being able to grow old?

To date, there are no answers.

He drops her at the corner of the S70, near the sign for Inchnadamph. Some day soon he will go and destroy Inchnadamph. They extricate the bicycle from the trunk. She mounts it. Our heroine says, Call me to let me know when you’re leaving. She kisses him, he watches her pedal away.

From this line on, our hero notably forgets to smile.

He heads back to his hotel. A glance at his watch. It is not even four o’clock.

He has not yet seen his room. It is enormous with a very wide bed. You could get three people in there. Ha ha ha, our hero sneers. The bathroom too is enormous, has a bathtub and a shower and two washbasins.

Getting back to Paris the same day proves impossible. The first plane leaves from Inverness toward noon the following day. He reserves a seat. It is expensive, but when you are not loved money is no object. Only then does he call our heroine. He would like to see her one last time, he cannot imagine spending this last evening alone, in this hotel. She does not pick up. He hangs up, takes his cell phone into the bathroom — in fact he is never without it — and checks for the umpteenth time that day how much battery he has left, more concerned about its levels than a deep-sea diver about those in his oxygen tank. He runs himself a bath. Then forgets the water filling the tub and takes a shower. The degree of distress and confusion in our hero is such that the reader can but sympathize with him.

The shower soothes him, he stays under the flow of warm water for a long time. He really has lost weight, at least there’s that. He dries off, looks at himself at length in the mirror. His body has still not aged much. But the hair is receding from his forehead, wrinkles are forming and bags developing under his eyes. Skin, like tree bark, shows the years clearly. He tries to see in himself the old man already threatening to appear. When he leans his face forward, his features slump, and he shudders to think that this is the image he presented when they were making love. He steps away from the mirror, looking his reflection in the eye, as if backing away from a tiger.

He tries to think back, to understand where and when the affection he thought she felt for him died. Died? He is not prepared to accept that yet. Not out of pride or self-esteem. He has little of either. He suspects she is stifling her affection, suppressing it. He knows women can do this, and it is probably also true of some men. He still wants the right to see her again in Paris, to blow on the last embers. He is not afraid of this unimaginative metaphor.

It is still early, too early to call her again anyway. So our hero leaves his room, goes down to the pub and, not begrudging the Glen Carron Park a single penny, chooses a table facing it. He fearlessly confronts the green sign: Eilan Castle, 2.1 miles.

May I sit here? The voice is a woman’s, the language French, and our hero is startled. But it is not our heroine and, besides, it was not her voice. He nods, she sits down. She is very young with short brown hair, fine features, and clear eyes. She smiles at him, he feels happy, or let’s say reassured, to find her pretty. She adds, I’m back on duty in a while, I work at the hotel. Our hero recognizes her, she checked him in at reception. She eats a salad quickly, wiping the corners of her mouth with every bite. It is a graceful gesture, delicate. She speaks French with an almost imperceptible Slavic accent. She is Polish, this is a summer job, next year she will be in Paris for a year, acting onstage. She says, What I really want is to perform Feydeau and Beckett. She brought the two authors together spontaneously, and it makes her laugh, he finds it funny too. Then she says, Are you French? I know, I looked at your passport. She narrows her eyes, impishly. Our hero thinks she could just as easily be an ingenue as a soubrette. I noticed you live in Paris, will you come and see me in a play? Of course, he replies. Are you here for vacation? she asks next. He hesitates, stammers, admits he is going home tomorrow. Something unexpected. That is the word he uses. What a shame, she says. He agrees.

She suddenly glances at the clock. She grumbles: I’m on duty, merde! She does say merde very prettily, thinks our hero.

As she is getting up, he asks her where in Poland she is from. With a last smile she says, From Lublin, takes her plate, and disappears.

Tinkerbell, for real.

Lublin? Our hero knows it. He went there thirty years ago. He visited neither the cathedral of Saint John the Baptist nor the Royal Castle. Some miles away are the camps. Majdanek, Sobibor, and Belzec.

Whose granddaughter could this young woman be? he wonders. He counts the years and corrects himself: great-granddaughter. When, full of anger and tears, he walked through that tall grass, beneath what was left of the watchtowers and barbed wire fences at Majdanek, this young woman had not yet been born. His musing about her parentage didn’t mean much in the first place. It means nothing at all.

Now here he is alone again. His watch says only five o’clock but it has not stopped. It is with a guilty feeling of capitulation that our hero surrenders once more to love’s annihilating embrace. He does not fight the downward pull, and slips into prostration, without resistance.

He is going to do something stupid. He does it.

He gets back in his car. He drives, carefully this time, to the S70, then turns left and takes the road he has seen her come down. He goes all the way to the place where her mother lives. He has no trouble remembering the name, because it is rather like “leprechaun.” He looks at the stony paths leading down to the river, and tries to spot the mansion overlooking the loch, as she described it to him. It hurts him to think she could be so close by. But didn’t he come here precisely to feel this pain? He doesn’t like the darkness deep in his soul, constantly striving to suffer.

He is afraid he might come across her, on her bicycle. With fate pursuing him so doggedly, he could also run into her mother’s car, with her in the passenger seat. It would make a wonderful scene from a film, some sentimental comedy with achingly British humor (he can just see Hugh Grant playing his part). The title could be something like Over the Moor, or maybe Inchnadamph Crossing. But we are not in a movie theater.

He stops by the side of the road, a little way before a narrow stone bridge. He opens his cell phone and dials her number. Just then, not far away, the angelus rings.