‘What for?’ she says, which is good of her.
I sit down, so I can speak to her at a lower volume, and less suspiciously. Another teacher, a maths teacher called Stephanie, is frowning at us as she eats a plum.
‘I didn’t mean to be so weird. So rude.’
‘Well, some people can’t help it. Some people are just like that.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean to be.’
‘What we are and what we mean are different things. It’s fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.’
She just says it casually, gently. I have never been so insulted so delicately.
I try to explain without explaining. ‘I’m just . . . I have a lot of stuff going on, and I have one of those faces. Generic. I get a lot of people thinking I’m a friend of a friend. Or some actor they’ve seen on TV.’
She nods, unconvinced. ‘That’s probably it, then. Let’s say it’s that.’
I then notice the book beneath Camille’s salad. It is a novel. I wonder if it is the novel she had been reading that day I saw her in the park. A Penguin Classic.Tender Is the Nightby F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a photograph of the author on the front cover.
She must have seen me staring. ‘Oh, have you read it? What do you think?’
I find it hard to talk. The memories jam my mind, like too many open windows on a computer, or too much water in a boat.
My headache rises.
‘I . . . I . . . don’t know . . .’ Each word feels like an oar in the water. ‘Boats against the current,’ I say aloud.
‘Boats against the current?Gatsby?’
I hold my breath and I am now in a staff room in London and a bar in Paris all at once, torn between centuries, between place and time, now and then, water and air.
Paris, 1928
I was on my own, walking the long walk home from the grand hotel where I had been doing my shift, playing the piano for the rich Americans and Europeans who were enjoying tea or cocktails. I felt alone. I needed to be around people, to mask the loneliness inside myself. So I headed into the thronging buzz of Harry’s Bar, as I did on occasion. Almost everyone in there was from somewhere else, which was always the kind of crowd I liked.
I fought my way to the bar and found a place next to a glamorous couple with matching centre partings.
The man looked at me, and maybe sensed my loneliness.
‘Try the Bloody Mary,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’sthe thing. A cocktail. Zee loves it, don’t you, sweetheart?’
The woman looked at me with sad, heavy eyes. She was either drunk or ready for sleep or both. They both looked pretty drunk, now that I thought about it. She nodded. ‘It is a great ally in the war.’
‘Which war is that?’ I wondered aloud.
‘The war against boredom. It is a very real war. It is a war in which the enemy is all around us.’
I ordered the Bloody Mary. I was surprised to see it involved tomato juice. The man eyeballed the woman sternly. It was hard to tell if it was fake stern or the real deal. ‘I have to say I feel mildly insulted when you talk like that, Zee.’
‘Oh, not you, Scott . . . you haven’t been too dull. This has been one of your better evenings.’
It was then he held out his hand. ‘Scott Fitzgerald. And this is Zelda.’
The great thing about being deep into your fourth century was that you rarely got star struck, but even so it was quite something to accidentally happen upon the author of the book that was beside your bed.
