Leela,’ he said. ‘Because you just have two hours to insulate yourself against the world, and then you spend the whole day doing something completely asinine, repetitive – your brain could be turning to shit for all the world cares. That’s why it’s good you have a job like this, teaching, with time to yourself. The world doesn’t care about your mind, after college. It’s a shock in a way.’
They were getting off the subject. Leela was tense with trying to keep up. She felt an unspoken pressure to perform, and she performed badly under pressure. ‘So why Paris?’ she persisted.
‘Well, I’m doing some consultancy work, technical writing, for two of the companies I worked for last year. And I’m writing a novel.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a group of characters – it’s difficult to explain. I think I’m stuck.’
‘How much have you written?’
‘Maybe thirty thousand words.’
‘That’s about half? A bit less?’
‘Something like that. It’s a big undertaking.’
‘I’d love to read it,’ she said. She felt hopelessly threatened. Writing a novel was a thing she’d dreamt of, and she was well past the age she’d set herself. She’d planned to be a prodigy, but had already turned twenty-one, an age when everything important seemed to be over.
‘But why are you in Paris?’ He smiled, and there was real sweetness in his face.
‘I have this job, I told you,’ Leela muttered.
‘That’s not what I’m asking.’ She suspected he found her brusqueness half-charming; he knew that she liked him.
She glared.
Patrick grinned and rooted about the round table for his cigarettes. He found the packet, extracted one, looked at Leela, smiled to himself, located the matches, lit up, exhaled smoke and wellbeing. ‘Why did you decide to come here?’
We’re not really friends, she thought. I’m just some girl who likes him.
‘I’ve always wanted to live in Paris,’ she said. She thought of her first visit, walking early in the morning from the coach station towards the métro and the half-light, the cemetery, its rising wall, and Amy, enthusiastic in vest and shorts, carrying a huge rucksack, chattering unstoppably about friends at home as they passed things that Leela’s heart had sung out were quintessentially Parisian – a cast-iron lamp post, or the tree next to it that sent a spray of leaves into the yellow light – until Leela had thought I can’t bear it any more and said something, anything, to put an end to the stream.
Patrick said, ‘Leela, I know we said we’d go out to eat, but I’m not really hungry I’m afraid – I got up late, I had a terrible hangover, and then I spent the afternoon tidying. It’s the best way to deal with a sense of self-loathing. It’s still messy in here –’.
‘It’s not messy,’ she said. She looked around the flat, with its high ceiling and large windows. ‘It reminds me of your room in college,’ she said.
‘It’s nicer – but it’s a little like that. Have some wine?’
‘Thanks.’ She accepted a glass, already dimly offended. He looked the same as in college, perhaps slightly more relaxed. His features, and the way he dressed, made him look older, but he wasn’t old; he was a year older than she was.
The parts of his presence that she perceived – his height, his thinness, the mop of curly hair, his spectacles, a certain way of dressing, his wit, his oddness, his flashes of anger – these would be her stamp of the ideal for some years to come. And yet they were accidental, weren’t they?
‘Let’s go out,’ he said a little later. ‘A few of my friends are meeting round the corner, in an Irish pub. I’d like a drink, and you could meet them as well. They’re nice.’
They left the flat, and she stood on the stairs while Patrick locked the door.
Stella was attractive, if not beautiful: she was slim and tall, and her brown hair was shiny and fell past her shoulders. Her mouth was painted. She was confident, and straightforward. She made Patrick laugh; Leela looked on, agonised. There was an older man, Craig, who owned an unspecified business; he was divorced, in his forties, his clothes and body comfortably untidy. He told Leela about his children, who lived in Amsterdam with their mother. Leela made conversation. She knew how: from an early age, she and her younger sister had been brought out at dinner parties to talk to the adults.
The pub was green-painted outside and in. There was a shamrock on its sign, and the whole group – Patrick, Stella, Craig, a blonde girl called Sarah who left early to meet her boyfriend, and another man, Simon – was delighted that unlike in most of Paris, here you could get beer by the pint. Leela reverted to a teenage habit and drank Guinness, slowly, to stop being hungry. By the second pint she was euphoric and nihilistic. The pub closed.
‘We can go back to my flat, it’s just round the corner,’ Patrick said. He had wine, and a bottle of whisky. They sat at the long table, a convivial seminar group. Leela made fun of Patrick – she didn’t know what else to do – and otherwise she was silent, taciturn when a question was asked of her, for she was bad at being in the spotlight. She worried about Stella.
‘Oh, you teach at Modern? That’s near my office, actually. Or not too far. We often go out round there. You should give me your number, let’s go for a drink,’ Stella said, and pleased though suspicious, Leela did, dictating it pretentiously in French. Stella’s French was good. She was taking lessons. ‘I’m going to be here for three years, so I thought, why not? It’s not that I need it for work – most of our material comes in English – but it’s an opportunity.’
She entered Leela’s number in her mobile.
At two Craig, Simon, and Stella left. Patrick and Leela carried on chatting in the lamplight of the high-ceilinged room, its intensity and the fumes of whisky and cigarettes mimicking earlier meetings in earlier rooms. Patrick put on music.
‘Is there something you’d like to hear?’
‘Anything. Miles Davis.’ Patrick had once told her he had learnt the trumpet for a while.
He was amused, and he put on a couple of tracks, then changed the music to something quiet and electronic. After a few minutes he smiled at Leela. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll go home.’
‘All right.’ He came to open the door. ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right getting back?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. She would worry, she knew, about losing her way and being abroad in a strange city at a strange hour.
‘Thanks for coming, Leela. Let me know if you’re doing anything, and I’ll let you know if I’m doing something,’ Patrick said.
‘Goodnight, thanks.’
She made her way down the narrow steps, across the courtyard and into the street. It was too late to take the overlit boulevards. She began to walk up the winding inside streets with their old town houses, trendy boutiques, small squares; in darkness and silence, avoiding anyone she saw. The street lamps shone and all was quiet, only the occasional cat running across the road, or a man who examined her face in the light but didn’t comment. Near the school of the Arts et Métiers she felt better; she was in the third now, so it wasn’t far. How tired she was, and how stupid to be walking alone. In the lamplight ahead was a lone figure on a bicycle. It seemed to be a girl with very short hair. The cyclist went slowly, almost meanderingly, just ahead of Leela, as though showing her the way. Yet when she slowed, Leela slowed too; they didn’t meet, and the cyclist didn’t force a confrontation. Near the rue Réaumur, near enough for even Leela no longer to be able to become lost, the cyclist turned in another direction. Only when Leela