more nice

A month or so ago the phone rang quite late one night and I heard the soft German accent of Reiner. We hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years but I knew it was him instantly. He was over here for a conference at the LSE and we worked out that he had just enough time to come up here for the night before heading back home. We exchanged mobile numbers and arranged trains. I told him how much I was looking forward to seeing him but that was only partly true. Sometimes these reunion things can be a little weird. It’s not always a good idea to go back.

We never argued – stuff just happened. I was half-hiding away here for a long time, pretending the intermittent, friendly emails never reached me. He was on secondment to the World Bank in Washington for five years, busy with his young family, working around various countries in Africa.

In the end it wasn’t too bad. He’d lost the beard, but otherwise he didn’t look very different. We sat in a little pub and the awkward silences I’d been dreading never happened. We talked about all the people we’d lived with in Nice. I’d lost touch with them even further back than him – my fault again. At first Karen had sent me letters – dauntingly long ones – pages and pages of them – they were exhausting to read – great long lists of all the brilliant things she’d done, all the interesting places she’d been.

The last one I’d replied to had been the shortest of them all – the only one with no joy in it, just a stark description of how Charly had hanged himself in a bleak remand cell, waiting for his trial verdict. She said she thought he just hadn’t been able to bear the idea of another prison sentence.

He’d already spent quite a bit of time in prison, even before I’d met him. I remembered sitting on the balcony at our villa, drinking pastis, listening to him and Marco laughing at the things they’d done to avoid their national service.

I can see it now, in my head – him showing me how you had to cut a potato in half, then bandage it very tightly, flat side down, to the topmost inside part of your arm where no-one would see what you’d done. For it to work properly, you had to leave it there for a couple of weeks. Then you took off the bandage and its contents, and went to the army doctor. You got about a month back home for that. In the end, he hadn’t had to bother with any other complicated ruses – they’d found out about the heroin and just put him in prison for the rest of his two years.

When we got home after the pub, Reiner showed me the emails Karen sent him now and they were just the same as the letters had been. We laughed about how we both hated people who write those round robin emails to their fifty closest friends – how deadly it was when you realised you’d been added to that list, and how to escape without offending. We weren’t really laughing at Karen – we knew she had a good heart - she was always so happy and simply wanted to share the happiness with everyone else. Just the same as she’d been in Nice.

She’d spent a year or two in Australia where some of the others live now, and they’d had a reunion. Reiner showed me the photos. That was so weird – to go from my memories of them in their early twenties straight to forty something with nothing in between to soften the ageing process. Strangest of all, he told me they were all still swapping that little story I’d written about us towards the end of our time together. It was so odd to think of it drifting around the world like that.

I still have it somewhere, but I think it is lost in the loft. Karen had sent me a gift when I was back in London. She’d copied the story out longhand, in a little book, and she’d interspersed the words with some of her many photographs. On the final page she’d stuck a picture of herself, smiling and holding a large bouquet of flowers at an airport somewhere. Underneath she’d written: “ j’attends ton arrivee chez-moi!!!”

I can’t remember why now, but years before I’d taken the photos out of the book – I knew where they were – I’d seen them only a few weeks before Reiner came. After he left I fetched them down – they were still in the old, very battered dressing case I’d taken to Nice with me.

There were two matching cases and they are still so beautiful. They were my grandmother’s – pre-war – buff-coloured skin of some kind, with edges of darker brown. So heavy even when empty, they were made only for people who used porters, and trains, and ocean liners. As you open them now, the clasps are rusty and stiff, little flakes of leather come away from the handles, and the shell-pink satin lining is stained with god knows what. They have seen a lot of life.

I found the thin grey envelope – an old letter from Reiner. I took out the photos and went through them slowly. I emailed him – please send the story – and in an hour or two there it was, in my inbox. Photographs are always good – they capture a single moment in time. With the best ones, you can step right back into yourself as you were then.

The story made me cringe. It was so pompous - I sounded like I’d swallowed a whole handful of marbles. I’d thought it was funny at the time. Now I thought; “Jesus I was so up my own arse”. It was useful though – not only for what it said, but also for what it skipped over. Reading the glib breezy words took me back to how it often wasn't quite so funny there - the sad things behind those photos of orange trees, the blue skies, the sparkling sea and the smiling faces.