A Love Like Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

in Half Moon Street.
    Walking down Piccadilly, watching the people rushing past, noses to the pavement, shoulders about their ears, I suddenly knew what was wrong, wrong with them, with me.
    How ill we were! How sick our lives were, how empty, how grey. Without the war to tell us that life was precious, what were we? Threaten to take something from us and we grasp on to it with desperate desire; give it back to us, and how soon we grow tired of it! So we are left with our flat, ruined lives; humiliated, humiliated by many things. That we are alive when our friends are not, that we struggled through the dramas of the war only to end up in a dull, broken and impoverished world, that we had felt noble in the face of the dangers of life, and now we sat in a pile of ugly rubble, knowing we had turned German cities to rubble too.
    It was confirmed to me the following day as I sat in a café in Shepherd Market. I sat by myself in a corner, feeling less alone here than I had at the theatre the night before. Even at such an early hour, shattered and deteriorated tarts loitered in doorways, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, their faces floating white bags. Behind me I heard a man reading a paper remark to the waitress, ‘The headlines are so dull, aren’t they?’
    I could almost hear him think to himself, if only one could hear the buzz of a robot bomb .
     
    And it was the same in Paris, and maybe it was doubly so for them, for they had had the enemy in their midst, had served them meals, made their beds, cleaned their clothes. Some of them had presumably slept with them, and all had wrestled daily with notions surrounding dignity and fear and survival.
    For them, there was no antidote to the ennui, and although Lucien was kind enough to accompany me out to Montmartre on my first, free, evening, and although there were people dancing, and the large clubs had reopened, I found myself longing for Major Greaves to pour me a glass of house wine and tell me to call him Edward.
     
    The next day I gave my paper.
    I was as nervous as hell, and it was a disaster. This was my first experience of the world of medical academia in conference, and after I finished speaking I was assailed by dozens of questions. We quickly became bogged down in a fruitless argument about methodologies and I grew flustered and began to sweat, despite the chill of the big salon in which the presentations were taking place. It wasn’t so much the questions themselves that bothered me; it was something underneath them, something in their delivery. I sensed resentment in everyone, as if they were jealously trying to find fault with me. Not with my paper, but with me .
     
    I left the auditorium, Lucien at my side, and when we stood on the steps of the hotel, I could see something had changed about Lucien too. He asked me if I wanted him to take me anywhere for lunch, or what else I wanted to do, but he couldn’t look me in the eyes, and I knew that, in his estimation, I had been humbled.
    When I’d arrived, I had been a shining example of what he perhaps hoped to be; now he wasn’t so sure.
    I mumbled something about taking the afternoon off. There was nothing I had to do, and I couldn’t face the glare of my colleagues, not yet.
    Lucien offered to arrange a car for me to look round the city. I began to refuse and then something slipped into my mind, and I accepted the offer.
    Half an hour later, I sat in the back of a comfortable Citroën, heading for Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
    My driver spoke no English, so we fell into silence.
    As we pulled up the hill into the town, I had a sudden urge to be alone, not be tailed all day.
    ‘ Il y a une gare ici? ’ I asked the driver.
    He said something fast that I took to mean there was at least one station, and so I had him drop me off, and sent him back into town, presumably to take the afternoon off too.
     
    Did I know what I was doing?
    Perhaps I did. I’m not sure, in all honesty, what took me there, but it was