Levels of Life by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

keep them in the first place. Had she made him false promises? None that he could pin down. Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination – the prompter’s voice at his ear – which had added the words ‘for ever’. He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.
    And now he realised that if he had asked her, she would have replied, ‘I shall love you for as long as I shall love you.’ What lover could ask for more? And the prompter’s voice would again have whispered, ‘Which means for ever.’ Such was the measure of a man’s vanity. Was their love, then, merely the construction of his fancy? That he could not, did not believe. He had loved her as much as he was able for three months, and she had done the same; it was just that her love had a timing switch built into it. Nor would it have helped to ask about her previous lovers, and how long they had lasted. Because their very failure, their impermanence, would only have seemed to promise his success: that is what every lover believes.
    No, Fred Burnaby concluded, she had been on the level. It was he who had deceived himself. But if being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.
     
    He never tried to make contact with Madame Sarah again. When she came to London he found reason to be out of town. After a while he became able to read of her latest triumph with a steady eye. Mostly, he could go back over the whole business like a rational man, to remember it as something that had happened, that was nobody’s fault, that had not involved cruelty, merely misunderstanding. But he could not always hold on to such calmness and such explanations. And then he saw himself as the stupidest of animals. He felt like that boa constrictor which had taken upon itself to start eating sofa cushions, until it had been shot dead by Madame Sarah’s own hand. Shot dead, that was how he felt.
    But he was to marry, at the advanced age of thirty-seven. She was Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitsed, daughter of an Irish baronet. Yet if he sought, or expected, a pattern, it was again denied him. After the wedding, the bride went down with consumption, and their North African honeymoon was relocated to a Swiss sanatorium. Eleven months later, Elizabeth presented Fred with a son, but was confined to the High Alps for much of her life. Captain Fred, now Major Fred, and subsequently Colonel Fred, returned to travelling and skirmishing.
    Also, to his passion for ballooning. In 1882, he took off from the Dover Gasworks, bound for France. Marooned above the Channel, he thought inevitably of Madame Sarah. He was making the flight he had always promised himself, but now it was not, as she had flirtatiously proposed, towards her. Though he had never spoken to anyone of their liaison, a few suspected it, and occasionally – after a game of cards at Pratt’s, followed by a late supper of bacon and eggs and beer – some allusion was nudgingly attempted. But he never rose to the bait. Now, suspended, he heard only her voice in his ear. Mon cher Capitaine Fred. It still cut him, after all these years. Impetuously, he lit a cigar. It was a foolish gesture, but at that moment his entire life could explode, for all he cared. His mind drifted back to the rue Fortuny, to her eyes of transparent blue, her hair like a burning bush; to her great cane bed. Then he came to his senses, tossed the half-smoked cigar into the sea, threw out some ballast and sought the higher altitudes, hoping to catch a northerly breeze.
    When he landed near the Château de Montigny, the French were as hospitable as he had always found them. They did not even mind his raillery about the superiority of the British political system. They merely fed him some more, and urged him to smoke another cigar in the far safer conditions of their