Just for a moment she tipped her head back and sneered at him, the scrolled upper lip slightly skewed to the side – Presleyesque. This porno sneer was in fact a respectful acknowledgement of his performance, half an hour earlier, in the bed where he yet sought his ease…In the porno version he would’ve been, say, a local cat burglar who, once within the hotel, is surprised in mid-theft by the elegant lady guest – but succeeds in reassuring her, to such effect that before very long…
‘Who’s paying for this?’ he said.
‘I am,’ she said. ‘They are.’
Now she dipped down and took a gulp of orange juice from the breakfast tray.
She said, ‘Are you ready? Have you got your watch?’
‘Oui. Right…Go!’
Exactly two minutes later he said, ‘Exactly two minutes.’
‘Perfect.’
‘Perfect.’
What was she doing, standing there near-naked with the typescript in her hand? She was rehearsing and timing her acceptance speech for the Prix Mirabeau (category: Non-Fiction). Her speech was in French.
And she was his wife.
And this was the life.
Yes, perfect, perfect. Still, his recurring thoughts, the recurring questions posed in his mind, even when he was half asleep, all had to do with suicide. Not his own suicide, not exactly, but suicide.
Why? What was eating Martin Amis?
Oh, he had his troubles. And on top of everything else, in a planetary beauty contest – a real-life Miss World – with approximately 1,800,000,000 bobbing hopefuls up there on the stage, his wife only came thirty-sixth. Hence, conceivably, his obscure cafard. Or was there more to it than that?
—————
So what about this couple (we ask, while they ready themselves for the outside world)? How can one possibly address them in print? They had been together for nearly a decade, and their union was blessed not only with children (those two young daughters of theirs) but also with happiness.
And happiness, in literature, is a void and a vacuum, an empty space. Happiness writes in white ink on a white page, said a certain poet, novelist, and playwright, namely Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (1895–1972). And it’s true. You can take a blank sheet of paper and cover it with fine prose; but the sheet is still blank. What can the pen do with happiness – with the invisible ink of happiness?
The struggle for coffee
‘I want my grand crème,’ she said.
He said, ‘And I want my double espresso.’
Making their intention quite plain, this enviably – indeed nauseatingly – compatible pair stepped out of Le Méridien and turned right towards the croisette and the Atlantic Ocean. She said,
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘The heat! The people!’
It was certainly a warm day, a warm day on the coast of Brittany. And there were certainly people, people, people – everywhere. Festival-goers, and writers and publishers and representatives of the media, and also families, large families, pressing coastward…
‘Yeah, we’ve had it relatively easy so far, El.’ El was short for Elena – and also for Elvis, whom she did resemble when she had her hair up in a quiff. ‘Now things could start getting really rough. And I want you to make me a promise. That you’ll watch yourself here in France.’
‘We’re getting no nearer to the sea…Why, particularly?’
‘Because it’s a sensitive time – with your tanks revving up, even now, in the deserts and marshes. You’re an American. And you a Jeeew. And you know what France is like. Promise me you won’t take any of France’s shit.’
—————
It was barely more than a party game I sometimes played with Elena: the aforementioned notion that people were like countries and countries were like people. And we have already drawn one obvious conclusion: countries are like men.
Seagoing vessels are often feminised in spoken and written English. Are boats like women? Admirers of Melville and Conrad will need no persuading that sailing ships, at least (galleons, yachts, schooners), have qualities that might be considered feminine. But what made anyone think for a moment that countries were like girls?
For instance, how clearly absurd it would be to write: ‘Prerevolutionary China considered that it was in her interests to maintain the status of women at about the level of livestock.’ Or, more relevantly, try this: ‘A year after her victorious campaign in Western Europe in 1940, Nazi Germany turned her attention to a war of annihilation in the USSR.’
Historically countries are men; they have always behaved like men.
In St-Malo I was trying to imagine France as a person, France as a bloke, in 2003…Well, contrary to popular belief, France has made substantial and still-evolving efforts to come to terms with those ‘dark years’ of his: the Occupation, from the summer of 1940 to the autumn of 1944. During this period, to quote the historian Tony Judt, France ‘played Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes’ (and he was an unusually energetic Uriah, as we know). In trying to face up to his sins and crimes, France was and is encumbered by the persistence of a certain superstition: that of anti-Semitism.*2
What immediately concerned me here was how he, France, was feeling about this venture in Mesopotamia, this thrust by the US-led Coalition of the Willing. Because the imminent Iraq War brushed up against another French neurosis: anti-Americanism…In the coming days my wife would be often in the public eye; and she was an American Jew. So how would he take to her, France?
‘Finally.’
Yes, here at last was the North Atlantic with its rollers and combers and breakers. And, yes, an abnormally, a freakishly warm day, and there were citizens, down on the sand, who
