Lie Down with Lions (1985)

CHAPTER THREE

Jane spread a patched white cloth on Ellis’s tiny table and laid two places with an assortment of battered cutlery. She found a bottle of Fleurie in the cupboard under the sink, and opened it. She was tempted to taste it, then decided to wait for Ellis. She put out glasses, salt and pepper, mustard and paper napkins. She wondered whether to start cooking. No, it was better to leave it to him.

She did not like Ellis’s room. It was bare, cramped and impersonal. She had been quite shocked when she first saw it. She had been dating this warm, relaxed, mature man, and she had expected him to live in a place that expressed his personality, an attractive, comfortable apartment containing mementos of a past rich in experience. But you would never guess that the man who lived here had been married, had fought in a war, had taken LSD, had captained his school football team. The cold white walls were decorated with a few hastily chosen posters. The china came from junk shops and the cooking pots were cheap tinware. There were no inscriptions in the paperback volumes of poetry on the bookshelf. He kept his jeans and sweaters in a plastic suitcase under the creaky bed. Where were his old school reports, the photographs of his nephews and nieces, his treasured copy of Heartbreak Hotel, his souvenir penknife from Boulogne or Niagara Falls, the teak salad bowl everybody gets from their parents sooner or later? The room contained nothing really important, none of those things one keeps not for what they are but for what they represent, no part of his soul.

It was the room of a withdrawn man, a secretive man, a man who would never share his innermost thoughts with anyone. Gradually, and with terrible sadness, Jane had come to realize that Ellis was like that, like his room, cold and secretive.

It was incredible. He was such a self-confident man. He walked with his head high, as if he had never been afraid of anyone in his life. In bed he was utterly uninhibited, totally at ease with his sexuality. He would do anything and say anything, without anxiety or hesitation or shame. Jane had never known a man like this. But there had been too many times—in bed, or in restaurants, or just walking on the street—when she had been laughing with him, or listening to him talk, or watching the skin around his eyes crinkle as he thought hard, or hugging his warm body, only to find that he had suddenly turned off. In those switched-off moods he was no longer loving, no longer amusing, no longer thoughtful or considerate or gentlemanly or compassionate. He made her feel excluded, a stranger, an intruder into his private world. It was like the sun going behind a cloud.

She knew she was going to have to leave him. She loved him to distraction, but it seemed he could not love her the same way. He was thirty-three years old, and if he had not learned the art of intimacy by now, he never would.

She sat on the sofa and began to read The Observer, which she had bought from an international newsstand on the Boulevard Raspail on her way over. There was a report from Afghanistan on the front page. It sounded like a good place to go to forget Ellis.

The idea had appealed to her immediately. Although she loved Paris, and her job was at least varied, she wanted more: experience, adventure, and a chance to strike a blow for freedom. She was not afraid. Jean-Pierre said the doctors were considered too valuable to be sent into the combat zone. There was a risk of being hit by a stray bomb or caught in a skirmish, but it was probably no worse than the danger of being run down by a Parisian motorist. She was intensely curious about the lifestyle of the Afghan rebels. “What do they eat there?” she had asked Jean-Pierre. “What do they wear? Do they live in tents? Do they have toilets?”

“No toilets,” he had replied. “No electricity. No roads. No wine. No cars. No central heating. No dentists. No postmen. No phones. No restaurants. No advertisements. No Coca-Cola. No weather forecasts, no stock market reports, no decorators, no social workers, no lipstick, no Tampax, no fashions, no dinner parties, no taxi ranks, no bus queues—”

“Stop!” she had interrupted him: he could go on like that for hours. “They must have buses and taxis.”

“Not in the countryside. I’m going to a region called Five Lions Valley, a rebel stronghold in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was primitive even before the Russians bombed it.”

Jane was quite sure she could live happily without plumbing or lipstick or weather forecasts. She suspected he was underestimating the danger, even outside the combat zone; but somehow that did not deter her. Her mother would have hysterics, of course. Her father, if he were still alive, would have said: “Good luck, Janey.” He had understood the importance of doing something worthwhile with one’s life. Although he had been a good doctor, he had never made any money, because wherever they lived—Nassau, Cairo, Singapore, but mostly Rhodesia—he would always treat poor people free, so they had come to him in crowds, and had driven away the fee-paying customers.

Her reverie was disturbed by a footfall on the stairs. She had not read more than a few lines of the newspaper, she realized. She cocked her head, listening. It did not sound like Ellis’s step. Nevertheless, there was a tap at the door.

Jane put down her paper and opened the door. There stood Jean-Pierre. He was almost as surprised as she was.

They stared at one another in silence for a moment. Jane said: “You look guilty. Do I?”

“Yes,” he said, and he grinned.

“I was just thinking about you. Come in.”

He stepped inside and glanced around. “Ellis not here?”

“I’m expecting him soon. Have a seat.”

Jean-Pierre lowered his long body onto the sofa. Jane thought, not for the first time, that he was probably the most beautiful man she had ever met. His face was perfectly regular in shape, with a high forehead, a strong, rather aristocratic nose, liquid brown eyes, and a sensual mouth partly hidden by a full, dark brown beard with stray flashes of auburn in the mustache. His clothes were cheap but carefully chosen, and he wore them with a nonchalant elegance that Jane herself envied.

She liked him a lot. His great fault was that he thought too well of himself; but in this he was so naive as to be disarming, like a boastful child. She liked his idealism and his dedication to medicine. He had enormous charm. He also had a manic imagination which could sometimes be very funny: sparked by some absurdity, perhaps just a slip of the tongue, he would launch into a fanciful monologue which could go on for ten or fifteen minutes. When someone had quoted a remark made by Jean-Paul Sartre about soccer, Jean-Pierre had spontaneously given a commentary on a football match as it might have been described by an existentialist philosopher. Jane had laughed until it hurt. People said that his gaiety had its reverse side, in moods of black depression, but Jane had never seen any evidence of that.

“Have some of Ellis’s wine,” she said, picking up the bottle from the table.

“No, thanks.”

“Are you rehearsing for life in a Muslim country?”

“Not especially.” He was looking very solemn.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I need to have a serious talk with you,” he said.

“We had it, three days ago—don’t you remember?” she said flippantly. “You asked me to leave my boyfriend and go to Afghanistan with you—an offer few girls could resist.”

“Be serious.”

“All right. I still haven’t made up my mind.”

“Jane. I’ve discovered something terrible about Ellis.”

She looked at him speculatively. What was coming? Would he invent a story, tell a lie, in order to persuade her to go with him? She thought not. “Okay, what?”

“He’s not what he pretends to be,” said Jean-Pierre.

He was being terribly melodramatic. “There’s no need to speak in a voice like an undertaker. What do you mean?”

“He’s not a penniless poet. He works for the American government.”

Jane frowned. “For the American government?” Her first thought was that Jean-Pierre had got the wrong end of the stick. “He gives English lessons to some French people who work for the U.S. government—”

“I don’t mean that. He spies on radical groups. He’s an agent. He works for the CIA.”

Jane burst out laughing. “You’re absurd! Did you think you could make me leave him by telling me that?”

“It’s true, Jane.”