Another Country

The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. An hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded

Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white.

‘Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a colour. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare?

nd for this reason they hesitated, they dawdled, they deliciously put it off. They chose to eat in an unadorned bistro because it was empty – empty when they walked in, anyway, though it was taken over after they had been there for a while, by half a dozen drunk and musical French soldiers. The noise they made might have been unbearable at any other time, but, now, it operated as a kind of protective wall between themselves and the world. It gave them something to laugh at – and they needed to laugh; the distraction the soldiers afforded the other people who had entered the bistro allowed them, briefly, to clasp hands; and this small preamble to terror steadied their hearts and minds.

heir first meal together had given them time, so to speak, to circle around one another. Eric did most of the talking; the burden of proof was on him. And Yves became less wary and less tight. Eric chattered on, delighted by Yves’ changing face, waiting for his smile, waiting for his laugh. He wanted Yves to know that he was not trying to strike with him the common, brutal, bargain; was not buying him a dinner in order to throw him into bed. And by and by this unspoken declaration caused Yves to nod gravely, as though he were turning it over in his mind. There also appeared in his face a certain fear. It was this fear which Eric sometimes despaired of conquering, in Yves, or in himself. It was the fear of making a total commitment, a vow: it was the fear of being loved.

I hope you don’t think I loved your brother in that terrible way that you describe. I think we really were very good friends, and – and it was an awful shock for me to hear that he was dead. I was in Paris when I heard.’

But, as he said this, he realised that he did not care what Richard had been doing. He was merely being polite because Richard was married to Cass. He wondered if he had always felt this way. Perhaps he had never been able to admit it to himself. Perhaps Richard had changed – but did people change? He wondered what he would think of Richard if he were meeting him for the first time.

‘Did she like to be beaten up? I mean – did something in her like it, did she like to be – debased?’