Pulse

high-street chain, and on his death – given the liberal nature of this employer – T, who for decades had committed many illegal acts with his ‘Austrian friend’, found himself in receipt of a widow’s pension. When he told me all this, not long before his own death, two things struck me. The first was how dispassionately he narrated his own story; all his strongest emotions were aroused by the misfortunes and injustices of H’s life before the two of them had met. And the second was a phrase he used when describing the arrival of H into his life. T said he was very bewildered, ‘But sure of one thing: I was determined to marry H.’
    The other couple, D and D, were South African. D1 wasformal, shy, highly cultured; D2 more flamboyant, more obviously gay, full of teasing and double entendres. They lived in Cape Town, had a house on Santorini, and travelled widely. They had worked out how to live together down to the smallest detail: I remember them in Paris, explaining that as soon as they got to Europe they would always buy a large pannetone, on which to breakfast in their hotel room. (A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.) On one occasion D2 came to London by himself. Late in the evening, after drink had been taken, and we were talking about provincial France, he suddenly confessed, ‘I had the best fucky-fuck of my life in Carcassonne.’ It was not a line you would easily forget, particularly since he described how there had been a storm brewing, and at what the French call le moment suprême , there was an enormous roll of thunder overhead – a coup de foudre indeed. He didn’t say he had been with D1 at the time, and because he didn’t, I assumed he hadn’t. After he died, I put his words into a novel, though with some hesitation about the accompanying weather, which raised the frequent literary problem of the vrai versus the vraisemblable . Life’s astonishments are frequently literature’s clichés. A couple of years later, I was on the phone to D1 when he alluded to this line and asked where I had got it from. Worrying at my possible betrayal, I admitted that D2 had been my source. ‘Ach,’ said D1 with sudden warmth, ‘we had such a wonderful time in Carcassonne.’ I felt relief; also a kind of surrogate nostalgia about the fact that they had been together.
    For some, the sunlight catches on the telescope out there in the lagoon; for others, not. We choose, we are chosen, we are unchosen. I said to my friend who always picked nutters that maybe she should look for a nice nutter. She replied, ‘Buthow could I tell one?’ Like most people, she believed what lovers told her until there was a good reason not to. For several years she went out with a nutter who always left promptly for the office; only towards the end of the relationship did she discover that his first appointment of the day was always with his shrink. I said, ‘You’ve just had bad luck.’ She said, ‘I don’t want it to be luck. If it’s luck, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ People say that in the end you get what you deserve, but that phrase cuts both ways. People say that in modern cities there are too many terrific women and too many terrible men. The city of Carcassonne looks solid and enduring, but what we admire is mostly nineteenth-century reconstruction. Forget the hazard of ‘whether it will last’, and whether longevity is in any case a virtue, a reward, an accommodation or another piece of luck. How much do we act, and how much are we acted upon, in that moment of passionate taste?
    And we shouldn’t forget that Garibaldi had a second wife (also a third – though we may ignore her). His ten years of marriage to Anita Riberas were followed by ten years of widowhood. Then, in the summer of 1859, during his Alpine campaign, he was fighting near Varese when a message was brought to him through the Austrian lines by a seventeen-year-old girl driving alone in a gig. She was Giuseppina Raimondi, the illegitimate daughter of Count Raimondi. Garibaldi was immediately smitten, wrote her a passionate letter, declared his love on bended knee. He admitted the difficulties to any union between them: he was nearly three times her age, already had another child by a peasant woman, and feared that Giuseppina’s aristocratic background might not play well with his political image. But he