The Intervention of a Good Man

12

Back to the future.

About the rental car.

An appropriate capitulation.

The fact that he had woken so early did have one advantage: he was really tired. A hypnotic-type sleeping pill plunged him into a dreamless sleep. He gets up at seven o’clock and, on autopilot, takes a shower and goes down for breakfast. It is a luxury hotel with a lavish buffet, and he is the only person there at this time in the morning: he has a salad of fresh grapefruit and strawberries, a yogurt, and some green tea.

Then he pays his bill. The Polish girl is not at reception. Right now he would have liked being entitled to her smile. From the receptionist on duty, he gathers what her name is. Then he quickly writes her a friendly, affectionate note, wishing her success and happiness. Leaves neither his address nor his telephone number, out of propriety. He has tact. Trusting in Google, he does however sign with his first name (and adds his family name in brackets). He tears the page from his notebook, folds it, and hands it to the receptionist, who — and she is betrayed in this by her overly detached attitude — will certainly read his message the moment he has turned on his heel.

Beneath cold, fine rain, he slings his bag in the trunk. Sets off. Drives away. He is not leaving Scotland, but fleeing it. He goes back past the crossroads between the A32 and the S70, and glances one last time at the Inchnadamph sign. He should insist they erect a statue. A concertinaed bicycle, for example. If he’d known … If he’d known, what? He would still have come, he was incapable of not coming. You never can tell. The previous day’s bitterness is fading. I need to leave, he keeps telling himself. Paris is another town, where she won’t be held hostage by anything. That is all he asks.

Our hero drives on. The windshield wipers sweep a leaf toward the hood, mercilessly. He turns on the radio, switches it off right away. He does not want company. In the rain, the journey seems longer. But he reaches the airport two hours early, and hands the car back to Avis. He puts the rear seats up, checks over the bodywork. The Nissan is untouched, not even a scratch.

The girl in a red jacket behind the counter asks him whether everything went well. He says, Yes, thank you, and this standard exchange brings a smile to his lips. It’s not all doom and gloom, he could have had a blowout and missed his flight. He adds, just out of principle, Actually the seats don’t go down flat enough to get a bike in.

So here he is at the airport. Outside it is overcast and pouring rain. From the departure lounge, he calls our heroine to confirm that he is taking off and also, he admits, to hear her voice again. She makes him promise not to contact her again in Scotland. He would not have. She agrees to his doing so as soon as she is back. He is pacified. He feels neither resentful nor bitter, he knows that he still wants to believe in this. He thinks back to what he told her: being in love is when it feels hot inside your head. It was the best he could come up with. He still feels hot enough for two. All in good time.

The lounge slowly fills with people. He drifts. Does he really need a duty-free shop? A fluffy sheep key ring attracts his attention. He smirks.

Is it because the carpets are dirty or something about the way the seating is lined up? Our hero gradually succumbs to all-encompassing melancholy and invasive anxiety. He is suddenly worried that, with her, he will never be able to take anything for granted. Afraid that, with every passing moment, she is leaving his life, abandoning him to his fate as a soon-to-be-old man, that, rather than him, she wants a life with something to look forward to. How can he hold this against her? She is the one with the world at her feet, while our hero feels he is on borrowed time. She is thirty, which is almost twenty. He fifty, which might as well be sixty. If he inverted this morbid logic they would both be the same age, but this is no time for optimism. His spine stoops beneath the absurd superstition of seeing figures in decades. When he plunges into a state of dejection and mental liquefaction like this, our hero feels so old he could make flowers wilt just by touching them.

He slumps into an uncomfortable chair. Then immediately berates himself for his resignation, which is far removed from the strong cheerful him. He keeps telling himself that he is young, that he will continue to be young as long as he refuses to give up hope of a future. He is alive enough today to move mountains, still attractive enough to register as a man. The same will still be true tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. But a terrible sentence pops into his head. He read it in The Life Before Us, and it marked him for life. He was eighteen, Ajar’s book had just come out, and no one knew he was in fact Romain Gary. Little Momo is talking about Madame Rosa, saying, “She used to be a woman and she’s still got a bit of it.” Our hero stands, paces up and down the waiting area by the departure gate, and draws some renewed strength from his energetic striding. Then sits back down and lowers his eyes.

He stares at the gray carpeting, and — as the saying goes — the scales seem to fall from his eyes. His age and that of our heroine have no part in their affair’s failure. She knows nothing of his concerns, she cannot begin to imagine what it is to be fifty. He could be twenty years younger and it would change nothing. Our heroine may not allow herself to indulge her desire for him or grant him her tenderness, and this is because what she most wants to avoid is pain, what she refuses is heartache, and what she dreads is drama. It is so easy breaking away from him now. This is what our hero finally grasps. High time too. He now needs to become a promise of happiness for her, the very image of happiness. That, he thinks, is right up his street.

And now he is afraid that if she ever did give in to him, he would owe that to his perseverance, his doggedness. If she started loving him for the energy he put into conquering her, could she then learn to love him of her own free will? How can he now rekindle the carefree atmosphere of the early days? These are the new questions gnawing at our hero, quite pointlessly, when the flight attendant calls out his row.

The plane takes off on time. Through the porthole, our hero watches the runway scud past, then shrink in the distance. The sheep, them again, grow smaller. Seeing them finally disappearing, drowned out by the altitude and his myopia, is both a relief and a torment. There is, should he want one, panini on the menu. A group of young French kids on a language trip bawl throughout the flight. He tries to remember whether, at their age, he was such an asshole. He could well have been. He is in seat 16A. The young woman in 16B tries to start a conversation. Blond, pug-nosed, an eyebrow piercing that does not succeed in making her ugly. She is from Paris, a researcher, she works for a company that specializes in transgenic products. She offers him her name. He gives her his in return.

She reminds him that they both traveled on the same outbound flight, and so were held up for hours. She thought he looked very stressed, really. She asks him whether he had a pleasant stay in Scotland.

Our hero does not lie to her. He replies:

“The weather was nice.”