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was spending his birthday alone. He loved everything about the film: Milford Junction, the boring hubby with his crossword in the Times and The Oxford Book of English Verse , the woman with ‘the refined voice’ who works at the station buffet, the irritating Dolly who gabbles away and blights Laura and Alec’s final moments together. He loved it because it was a film in which people went to the cinema, and because it was a film about trains. Most of all he loved Celia Johnson, her hats, her face, her cracked porcelain voice: ‘This can’t last. This misery can’t last. Nothing lasts really, neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts long . . . There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this any more . . .’ What Luke loved more than anything, though, was Trevor Howard’s final ‘Goodbye’: the way he managed to strangle his whole life into that farewell (‘no one could have guessed what he was really feeling’), to make that last syllable weep tears of blood.
    After the film he walked across the Pont des Arts where four friends – two men, two women, French-speaking, younger than Luke – had prepared a lavish candle-lit dinner on one of the picnic tables. A lemon-segment moon hung in the blue-dark sky, glowed faintly in the river. The young people at the table were drinking wine from glasses, laughing, and when Luke had passed by he heard them singing: ‘Bon anniversaire, bon anniversaire . . .’
    Luke drank a beer over the zinc at a café. A sign behind the bar read ‘Ernest Hemingway did not drink here’. Then he went to the Hollywood Canteen, a burger place where you could sit at the bar and not feel – as you did in restaurants – like you were eating conspicuously alone. The burgers were named after Hollywood stars. Luke ordered a Gary Cooper, fries and a beer. The burger, when it arrived, tasted weird, not like beef at all. He mentioned it to the guy serving.
    ‘Mais c’est pas du boeuf, monsieur. C’est de la dinde.’
    ‘Dinde? Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ said Luke falteringly.
    ‘Turkey,’ said the grinning barman. ‘Turkey.’
    And in this way, Luke’s first summer out of England – and his twenty-seventh birthday – passed.
    It is impossible, obviously, to believe that anyone’s life is predestined – but who knows what is programmed into an individual’s chromosomes, into their DNA? Perhaps each of us, irrespective of class and other variables, is born with a propensity towards a certain kind of living. Each of us has a code which, in the right conditions, will be able to make itself utterly apparent; if an individual’s circumstances are far removed or totally at odds with that initial biological programming, it may hardly be able to make itself felt circumstantially – but all life long that individual will feel the undertow, the tug of a destiny rooted in biology, urging him, only slightly perhaps, away from the life he has. The dissatisfaction and pointlessness that a rich and successful man feels on contemplating all that he has achieved in life is perhaps the faint echo of an initial code that he has thwarted, evaded, but can never quite silence. But a certain way of life will enable you to get closer to that initial blurred blueprint. Perhaps this is what it means to live in truth, even a disappointed truth.
    In September the city began coming back to life. Traffic and noise increased. Delivery trucks blocked the streets. Tanned women hurried to work. Restaurants opened. Office workers returned to their favourite bistros and Luke returned to Invalides where a couple of games of six- or seven-a-side were in progress. He sat behind one of the goals and watched, gauging the standard of play, checking to see he wasn’t going to be helplessly out of his depth. He asked the young Algerian who was keeping goal if he could join in. After some discussion among the older players Luke was granted permission to play on the opposing side. Many of the