He picked up his guitar and played the opening chords of songs he intended to stand in for conversation. He looked at her, nodded his head to give her a cue, and she found herself obeying, singing to his order. He chose songs belonging to his generation: the Beatles, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Bossa Nova. She pointed this out. He laughed. Because she thought it showed his age. He thought it showed hers. So he sang her another song from the same era, one by Brassens, that she didn’t know. She followed the lyrics, reading the shapes of the French made by his mouth, more like fruit than sounds. From what she could make out, an old man, Corneille, was trying to convince a young woman, Marquise, to go to bed with him: after all, one day she would be as old as him. That was the main part. Then he stopped and taught her the last verse to sing back to him. She repeated it a few times to learn the words and found herself singing Marquise’s retort to Corneille: he may be right, but until she is that old, he can piss off. “Et je t’emmerde en attendant”. When she sang that line, he laughed, too loudly. It annoyed her. They both knew what was going on. She had chosen this role for herself. Who was he to make her play it for him, and then laugh like that? She glared at him at the end of the song. That only made him laugh even more, wiping his eyes.

A rabbit ran out and zigzagged across the road, its white scut bright in the headlights. He touched the brakes and swerved slightly to avoid it. She stiffened and clutched the sides of the seat, the belt jammed against her neck. He glanced across at her. “T’aimes çça, la ceinture?” he asked, grinning. She looked up defensively. “It doesn’t bother me”, she answered, trying to be nonchalant, then eyeing his lack of belt and adding reprovingly, “better than being killed”. He changed gear and guffawed gently to himself. She flushed and looked out of the window. She just didn’t seem able to impose her autonomy on him. She had never met a man who engulfed her as completely as he did. Her attraction to him radiated out of every molecule in her body, as if she were simply an element in a classroom experiment whose reaction was governed by some ineluctable law of physics. Every iron filing of her was drawn into his magnetic field. But there was no movement in her direction. His role was to attract, hers to be attracted. His lips. When they were closed, they pressed together like the seam of a bud. They were painfully inviting. She needed to slide her lower lip between his two and push her way in, to take possession, and hold him there, out of time. Then all the awkwardness would stop. He wouldn’t be older and she wouldn’t be younger. And she wouldn’t have to go back to England in three days time.

RAIN

Although there was nothing to stop us, We hadn’t wanted to go out that morning Into the angry September, So briefly sun-pacified.

We didn’t believe in the sunshine, In its improbable message: That the village and the outlying country Were to be spared a second deluge.

So we made hot chocolate and waited, Letting the day make its case, Stayed unbending for hours, window-watchers, Observing the stillness take place.

At last we were proved right, superbly: The rain wasn’t rain, but an ocean Held at an unnatural angle, So that it seemed to be falling, while

The fools who hadn’t attended To the Englishness of the weather Ran past our window – blown figures Beyond an absolute glass.

You said, “Perhaps we should help them, Offer one or two of them shelter”, And before I said, “No. Let them have it”, My mind settled, magpie-delighted,

On the hen-pen at the end of the garden: Their needlepoint eyes, rust-encrusted, And precise, impeccable toes, Their expression of blind delectation

As they settled their beaks to the earth.

Ben Morgan

She pulled herself back from the thought of his mouth and looked ahead into the darkness being swept away by the headlights, beyond the windscreen. On the shelf above the dashboard was a bunch of dried yellow flowers with small

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 33