“You must be excited,” my friend said to me over the morning tea.
“Of course,” I replied, going on to enthuse about all the things we had planned. Perhaps I was too sleep sodden to feel properly excited, but really the feeling was more anticipatory than excited. I suppose “excited” might cover a range of emotions from mere anticipation to an adrenaline thrill such as I got the other night when a lorry swung wide into our path on a narrow rain-wet country road. But as far as a girlish, bounce up and down, we’re going to the circus sort of excitement went, there was none of that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly melancholy as I sit here in my hotel room, once again looking out the window at the busy streets of Paris. My friend was certainly envious, asking us all the way to the Bath train station if we’d had fun in England. She was terribly anxious about whether she had been a good hostess. Clearly, she felt there was no way a week in Glastonbury could measure up with Paris. I had to explain that a calm week in the country interspersed with long rambles over hill and dale was exactly what I wanted. Evenings at brasseries and concerts we’d have a plenty in Paris. That answer seemed to satisfy her, at least in the sense that she felt she’d done her duty as hostess.
The train buries itself between forested hills and I return to my book. One thing that often strikes me about English writing is the use of the foreign as a metaphor for escape from the mundane. Bernard of “The Waves” speaks of his longing to see India, but instead falls asleep with his ticket to Waterloo clenched in his hand. I hold such a ticket, not clenched, but safely tucked away in my purse. But from there, we shall hop the Underground to the Eurostar to Le Metro. The foreign is very close to England, really. But then again, I am a foreigner myself with my broad American accent and my rather brusque manners I am all too aware of. Yet somehow, as unexciting as it is to the natives, I can think of no cozier, more comfortable place than England. For all the complaints of the Bernards of the world, they haven’t had to live with superhighways and a perpetual rush of life, completely hemmed in by a constant commercialism with ads screaming at you non-stop. Perhaps a few years of that would make them run back to their misty hills. Or perhaps not. The ex-pats Limeys I know seem content enough in the sunshine of California.
But today, I rush towards Paris. “The Waves” reaches its inevitable conclusion just before the Eurostar breaches its way into the blue skies of Calais. A few hours later, we’re saying “Bon Soir” to the hotel staff and trying desperately to speak French with travel-fatigued tongues. I’m happy and I’m excited. Contentment, now that’s a long range project.
Je suis arrive, mais ou, je ne sais pas,
V
