‘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.’
He smacked his lips while Louis watched with a guilty, cowed expression. When Julian had withdrawn his hand Louis held out his in turn.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, with what was either gravity or its imitation.
They turned to leave and I was surprised to see the Chair return to the table and sit down. I said immediately that he mustn’t feel he had to stay and keep me company. If he wanted to go with the others I was quite happy to go back to the hotel.
‘No, no,’ the Chair said, in a tone that failed to clarify whether he would have preferred to go or not. ‘I’ll stay here. You were talking to Oliver for a long time,’ he added. ‘I was getting quite jealous.’
I did not reply to this remark. He asked if I had read Julian and Louis’s books. He had unbuttoned his jacket and was sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, swinging his foot back and forth. I noticed his shoe as it came towards me and receded again. It was a lace-up boot, new, with a long pointed toe and holes punctured in the brown leather. The rest of his clothes were expensive-looking too: perhaps it was the flamboyance of Julian’s attire that had prevented me from noticing the Chair’s well-cut, slim-fitting jacket, his clean dark shirt with its sharp collars, his trousers made of some soft-looking, opulent material. His face was alert and he moved his small head often, watching me.
‘What did you think?’ he said.
I said that I liked them, though their differences suggested there was more than one way of being honest, which I wasn’t sure was true. I hadn’t expected to like Julian, I added, any more than he had expected to like me.
‘Julian,’ the Chair said, ‘or his book?’
As far as I was concerned, I said, they were the same thing.
The Chair looked at me with an ambiguous glint in his button-like eyes.
‘That’s a strange thing for a writer to say,’ he said.
I asked him about his own work and he talked for a while about the publishing house where he was an editor. Next week the editor-in-chief was going away for a few days: the Chair was being left to run things on his own. It happened two or three times each year, which was enough to convince him – or rather to remind him, since he required no convincing – that responsibility was something he ought to avoid. Likewise, his sister would sometimes ask him to look after his little niece for a day or two, which gave him as big a dose of parenthood as he needed, as well as having the immense advantage that the child – who he liked a great deal – was returnable.
I asked him what he used his freedom for, since he defended it so assiduously, and he looked somewhat taken aback.