Transit(25)

He remembered being on the beach in Nice one night with a big group of people he’d just met: they were all drinking and talking; someone was playing a guitar. The sea shone silently in the darkness while behind them the night-time city madly buzzed with noise and light. He had felt both atomised and on the brink of discovery; both disappointed by what the world had revealed to him and in new, faltering correspondence with some of its elements. But what he had felt most of all, that night, was the incoherence of what he was doing: everywhere he had been in Europe, he had found not the intact civilisation he had imagined but instead a ragged collection of confused people adrift in an unfamiliar place. Nothing had seemed quite real, in the sense that he had come to know reality: yet he experienced the failure as his own, for he had been brought up in a stable, prosperous home where expectations – material, cultural, social – had been high. And particularly that night in Nice, this fragmented picture, of young lost people clinging to one another for safety, of the mute beautiful sea that refused to tell its secret, of the city sealed in its own frenzy, was not one that he recognised.

It was here, he went on, in Nice, that someone had lent him a copy of Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, and its brutal aestheticism had deepened his confusion even more.

‘Have you read it?’ he said, looking at me with an expression of shocked wonderment, as though he were reading it still.

At nineteen he was still a virgin: he had never disclosed his sexuality to anyone, for the reason that he didn’t know how. He didn’t know it was possible to live as a gay man; he hadn’t realised that what was inside him could become an external reality. In Nice, as elsewhere on his travels, girls had approached him with their shy bodies and tentative fingers; when they talked, their confusion and uncertainty seemed to mirror his own, to the extent that eventually they seemed to understand that what they were looking for wasn’t in him, that he was insufficiently distinct from them to be able to resolve them, that if anything he was making their problems worse. The world of Jean Genet was a repudiation of all that, a world of unrepentant self-expression and selfish desire. It was such a violent betrayal and robbery of the feminine that he felt guilty even reading it in the company of these tentative girls, who would never, he felt certain, plunder the masculine in that way, but rather would live lives in which their unsatisfied passions tormented them, as his did him.

When he gave up his university place to stay in Paris, and told his parents the truth about what had happened, they had responded with absolute condemnation and disgust. I didn’t care, Oliver said. His thirst for love, he went on, was such that he became convinced his parents had never really loved him at all. Putting himself entirely into Marc’s hands, he effectively orphaned himself. Waking each morning in the beautiful apartment in Saint-Germain, in the sunny rooms full of paintings and objets d’art, with the sounds of Beethoven or Wagner – Marc’s favourite composers, whose music was played often – streaming through the opened windows out into the street, he often felt like a character in a book, a person who has survived ordeals to be rewarded with a happy ending. It was a complete reversal of everything he had felt that night on the beach in Nice. Yet he frequently caught himself mentally offering it up to his parents, Marc’s good taste and intelligence, his wealth, even his car, an open-topped Aston his father would have greatly admired, in which they roared together up the Champs-élysées on summer evenings. These things corresponded to his deepest sense of reality, for the reason that they were his parents’ values.

It had never even occurred to him that the relationship could end. He remembered it coming, a feeling of incipient coldness, like the first hint of winter, a bewildering sensation of wrongness, as though something had broken deep down in the engine of his life. For a long time he pretended that he couldn’t hear it, couldn’t feel it, but nonetheless his existence with Marc inexorably ground to a halt.

He paused, his face pinched and white. His bow-like mouth was downturned, like a child’s. His round eyes behind their long, dark lashes were shining.

‘I don’t know how long ago you wrote the story you read tonight,’ he said, ‘or whether you still feel those same things now, but –’ and to my astonishment he began to weep openly, there at the table – ‘but it was me you were describing, that woman was me, her pain was my pain, and I just had to come and tell you in person how much it meant to me.’

Enormous, shining tears were dripping from his eyes and rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t wipe them away. He sat there, his hands in his lap, and let the water run down his face. The others had stopped talking: Julian leaned over and put his large arm around Oliver’s puny shoulders.

‘Oh dear, it’s the waterworks again,’ he said. ‘It’s all wet, wet, wet this evening, isn’t it?’ He took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out. ‘There, there, duck. Dry your eyes for me now – we’re going dancing.’

The others were standing: Louis was zipping up his jacket. A friend was taking them to a local club, Julian said, retying his mauve cravat with a flourish; heaven knew what they might pick up there, but like he’d said, he wasn’t one to turn down an invitation.

He held out his hand to me.

‘We enjoyed having you in our sandwich,’ he said. ‘You were less chewy than I expected,’ he added, without releasing my fingers, ‘and tastier.’