The Intervention of a Good Man

10

A deluxe dinner.

Poet, poet.

A little gift that has to wend its way.

You’re calling me right when the angelus is ringing, our heroine shouts to smother the bell’s high-pitched sound. This is how he discovers just how close he is to her house. He scans the surrounding countryside but sees no bell tower. He tells her when he is leaving, suggests they have dinner together. There has been no war or battle, and yet he wants to make peace. But — even though it is half past six — her mother is already preparing a meal. She says they could meet in two hours’ time, in the usual place, for a drink.

Our hero goes back to the hotel. He has his dinner on the pub’s sunny terrace, choosing a deluxe Thai chicken curry. A dish that turns out to be a sort of chicken supreme, only more bland.

He heads back up to his room. From her desk at reception, the young Pole gives him a friendly, almost conspiratorial wave, but the elevator door closes. How strange, our hero thinks, there’s a woman I could easily fall in love with, in the space of a few hours. He can see in her a spontaneous sincerity, a sense of mischief devoid of calculation or artifice. That young woman knows who she is, he speculates, so much so that she’s bound to have the nerve to step fearlessly into someone else’s shoes. Perhaps that is the characteristic that makes great actors. If he dared (but he will not), he would lay at this girl’s feet the extravagant love he bears within him for another. The emotional equivalent of making a transfer from a bank account. But would she accept the deposit?

Our hero lies down on the bed, runs his eye along the stucco moldings and the shadows on the ceiling. He knows what he is suffering from, recognizes obsessive love. He contracts it only — and the logic is implacable — when he is with the sort of woman who refuses to let herself love him. From experience, his prognosis is for a rapid convalescence, total recovery, and no relapses. But, right now, this reassuring diagnosis does nothing to help him.

His head is spinning, he sits on the edge of the bed, gets to his feet, and picks up the car keys. He does not want to linger here, in this empty room where he had anticipated being with her.

Once again he arrives at the rendezvous well ahead of schedule. What difference does it make, given that Scotland has now been reduced to a colossal hourglass knocked on its side, and through which time refuses to sift.

While he sits in his car, he very quickly, too quickly, writes a little poem in his black notebook. Because, at times like this, our hero poetizes. He has a degree of talent for it, and compensates for his stylistic weaknesses and approximate technique with an acute sense of self-mockery and a touching simplicity. His poem begins:

There where the A32

Meets the scenic S70

which gives the number 2 the unusual role of offering up an inevitable rhyme with his beloved “you,” or something more despairing about “what to do,” or the two.

Let us summarize it briefly here: in this piece of doggerel our hero explains that (1) although hurt, he will not resign himself to the facts, and (2) he still hopes to see our heroine again in Paris. A meteorological parable concludes the poem with an “ond” rhyme that is neither “blond” nor “fond.”

Our hero writes the poem down in fine cramped letters, then tears the page out carefully and stows it in his shirt pocket without folding it.

He waits. All he gets to do in these two days is wait and invent devices to cheat the waiting process. He is an expert.

As soon as our heroine arrives, as soon as her bicycle is wedged into the Nissan Almera’s trunk, where — let’s say this again just in case this book should reach the car designer’s desk — you cannot fit a bike, our hero offers to take her wherever she would like to go. She chooses the closest tavern, that improbable pub overlooking the A32 that has already been mentioned.

Our hero could not have chosen a better place for a last meeting. As it takes a good minute to get there by car, he hands her his poem, its fifteen easy lines. She reads it, smiling, amused. This takes five seconds, and she folds it in two.