Evening on the terrace of a French seaside hotel, late summer. The sea was smooth as mercury and a three-quarter moon hung in a sky not yet drained of its blue. There would be stars eventually, but time had slowed. Even the gulls seemed suspended on the cooling air, and made hardly a sound. My wife and I were drinking cold beer, recovering from the heat of the day, our skin feeling full of the sun, our limbs aching from a long swim. We said little but sat content, watching the darkness gather. The candle on the table remained unlit.
I became aware of the man and woman two tables along. The woman had said something inaudible, to which the man had replied, "non, merci," but nothing else was said. The man, who was about 40, sat hunched with arms folded, as if constrained by a straitjacket. His face had a drawn, intent look. He could have been concentrating hard. From time to time his lips pursed and his right shoulder seemed to jerk forward a little. I noticed too the squirming movement of his right hand. Pressed between forearm and biceps of the left arm, it was trying to escape. A waiter appeared from nowhere offering something, but the woman waved him away. My wife had her back to the couple and couldn't see what was going on.
Somehow, the scene on the terrace brought to mind a description from a Kundera novel I had been reading. One of the characters, Agnes, is lying in bed next to her husband, Paul. Both have difficulty sleeping and Agnes drifts into a familiar fantasy about a kindly visitor from another planet. The stranger tells her that in the next life she will not be returning to earth. "And Paul?" she enquires. No, she is told, Paul won't be staying either. What the stranger needs to know is, do they want to stay together in the life to come, or never meet again? In Paul's presence, Agnes always knew she would be incapable of saying that she no longer wanted to be with him. How could she? Wouldn't that amount to saying that there had never been any love between them, that their life had been based on an illusion? For this reason, she would always capitulate. Against her wishes, she would tell the stranger that they wanted to remain together in the next life.
I put the same question to my wife. Imagine, I say, a visitor from outer space joins us at this table. He offers you another life beyond death and gives you a choice. You can make arrangements for me to join you, or you can decide that, at the end of this life, we should part company, never to meet again.
The hand escapes. It writhes from under the left forearm and pushes forward, palm facing outward to the sea. The man's expression does not change, he looks straight ahead, but I see that his knees are now pressed tight together and are edging to the left as his upper body twists to the right. The woman takes the errant hand and puts it between her palms. She guides it back towards the man's chest. I watch as she re-folds the arms, pulling them tight like a knot. The man gives no acknowledgement. She returns to her seat.
My wife, unaware of this activity, was still thinking about the question. Too long, I thought. I won't believe her now. Then, straight out, she said, "I'd go it alone. Wouldn't you?" She added that one lifetime was enough, however much you loved someone.
Two more couples came to sit at the table between us and the French couple. I had seen them on the beach that afternoon. At first I had assumed they were French, but there was a self-deprecating jokiness about one of the women as she struggled, inelegantly, to get into a wetsuit. I thought it betrayed her as English. I was right. They ordered a round of drinks and another and another. Their candle lit the reddening faces around the table and guttered in the glass of the accumulating bottles.
The French couple were away in the shadows. I could hardly see them now. But a second and third time I noticed the man's hand escape and, each time, saw the woman retrieve it. Each time he jerked and writhed as she tied the arms together. It's Huntington's disease, I thought. St Vitus's dance. Poor man. Poor woman. The involuntary, choreiform movements are only the half of it. There's the dementia, too, and perhaps the psychosis. The disease is relentless and he will dance like a puppet to his death. His fate was fixed at conception. The rogue gene, dormant for decades, has struck and the brain crumbles at its core, deep beneath the wrinkled mantle of the cortex, down in the dark interiors of the basal ganglia. This is the place where actions are deciphered from the codes of intention. Now all is confusion. There are actions and intentions but they don't coincide. Meanwhile, they will do their best, this couple, to deny the terror and defy the puppeteer. They will enjoy a summer's evening together out on the terrace.
I absorbed my wife's response, took another sip of beer. "Would you?" I asked. It was then that someone in the English group knocked an empty bottle off the table. It shattered on the ground, bursting shards in every direction and when I looked across I noticed that the French couple were gone.
"So," I said, "Just one lifetime then."
"Afraid so," she said. "Better make the most of it."
