‘We’re going to stop being against the war and start being for it. We’re going to hope for total success and the best possible outcome. For Joe and Tommy and also of course for Kasim.’
‘And Fetnab. Okay,’ she said, now straightening up and searching for the tickets in her bag. ‘Agreed. You don’t want a disaster just to win an argument.’
‘Exactly…I still can’t see why Hitch is so keen. After all, it is a war, and war is hell. Oh, and guess what he told me on the phone. He said Hans Blix was on the take! Now how could Hitch swallow that. Imagine it. Saddam says to this venerable Swede, We’re rolling in WMDs, but you keep your mouth shut and here’s ten million quid.’
‘We’ll have to hurry.’
‘So will they, Elena. So will they. They’re calling it the Race for Baghdad.’
Love songs in age and youth
On the slow, crowded, and companionably talkative train to Paris (full of all the people they’d met in St-Malo), he put aside his holiday reading (a book about Verdun and the battle that lasted for the entirety of 1916), and tried to be sociable; but then a headline on the cover of one of Elena’s magazines took his fancy, and he was at once helplessly engrossed. The long article didn’t squarely concern itself with mass death, though the days of its dramatis personae were obviouly numbered. No: it was about the lovelife fitfully enjoyed by the occupants of sunset homes.
There used to be a time, in sunset homes, when the old men and the old women were vigilantly kept apart (especially after dinner). Now that approach was considered old-fashioned. Why, these days, in sunset homes in Denmark, there were porno screenings every Saturday night, and assignations were cautiously encouraged. ‘With many frail elderly,’ the reporter allowed (echoing doctors’ concerns), there was ‘the risk of serious injury’; and ‘questions of consent’ could be complicated when one or both parties happened to be senile.
So far as Martin could tell, there was absolutely nothing to be said for lovelives in sunset homes; but lovelives in sunset homes there were, and they looked like the future. His future, too. He now had a vision of himself in the nodding, swaying, mumbling, drooling recreation room; there he sat, next to his latest girlfriend, as they watched the jolting tattoos of an adult video. A wattled cheek was pressed against his boneless jowl, and a crablike hand trembled on his wasted thigh; and he would be full of wonder. Wondering about serious physical injury; wondering where on earth he’d put his horn pills; and wondering whether she meant it when she said yes, and whether he meant it when he asked her to.
The train came to rest in a siding just before Chartres. A delay of fifteen minutes was announced, and at least half the passengers clambered out for a smoke (they were good little smokers, the French – another bohemian bond). When he was once more at Elena’s side he said,
‘My smirk novel – it’s taking shape. I’ll need your help with the title, El. I fancy a Rousseauesque intonation. How about Confessions of a Sexually Irresistible Genius? Bit of a mouthful, I agree. Or Seer and Stud: His Confessions…I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’ll make everyone hate me.’
‘They hate you already.’
‘Mm.’ In the autumn of that year he would find out how true this was, when he published his eleventh work of fiction (which wasn’t remotely a smirk novel). ‘But that’s the unavoidable consequence of smirk novels. How about something simpler. More direct and man-to-man. Like I Fucked Them All.’
She said patiently, ‘Where’s the genius element in I Fucked Them All?’
‘Good point. We could partly fix it by having my name in really gigantic letters. But you’re right. The title needs more work.’
‘…You haven’t really started it, have you.’
‘Yes I have. At the moment I’m tackling the dedication. Which is going to run for about twenty pages. Girls’ names in alphabetical order. Look. Aadita, Aara, Aba, Abba. The real fun starts with the Abigails. There’ll be dozens of them. See? Abi, Abie, Aby, Abbi, Abbie, Abby. I’ll round it off with a few Zuzis and Zuzannahs, then a Zyra, then an italicised note saying And all the rest. Or possibly And all the others, God bless them.’
‘Christ,’ said Elena. ‘Read your book.’
He read his book. After a night of rain the ground at Verdun looked like the clammy skin of a monstrous toad. Then the battle resumed, the sky a thunderhead of iron and steel, the Mort Homme (as they called this eminence) a volcano of blood and fire, the smell of death thicker than the mustard gas, and the scarce water rations fouled by rotting flesh, the trench rats bloated like war profiteers, and everywhere the flies, huge, black, and silent. The Battle of Verdun was fought over a strip of land a little larger than the combined Royal Parks of London (and, once taken, opened up grave strategic risks). But the battle, l’ogre, seemed to shake off all human direction. Europe is mad. The world is mad. Man is mad. A bullet was nothing. What you feared was the pulping of your entire body: during bombardments, your leg was afraid, your back was afraid, your blood was afraid.
And where were the suicides? Where were they?
City of Light
‘Monsieur, s’il vous plaît. Donnez moi’, I said, holding up finger and thumb, ‘uh, trois centimetres de vodka, avec uh, deux de Campari, et…un de Vermouth rouge.’
‘Mm,’ said the waiter as he swivelled. ‘Very esspensive drink.’
‘And very fattening,’ subtended Elena. ‘And very damaging in every way.’
‘Come now, Pulc. Here we are in the City of Man. Your prize. This spree. It’s a special occasion.’
‘Yes. And your funeral will be a special occasion.’
In Paris they’d changed stations. The capital was having one of its crimp-lipped strikes (because French unions were strong – a mere memory in
