Only once in my life has anyone tried to kill me. Literally. Method: pushing me from a fastmoving car. Motive: revenge arising from jealousy. Outcome: I lived.
The man I was working for at the time, let's call him G, took me off to Deauville for the weekend, where we were to stay with a woman I had already met in Paris, and who I assumed was G's ladyfriend. She had two daughters, aged, I guessed, about 17 and 12. After our meal at the lady's house, she stayed home while G and I took the two girls for a walk along the beach. I then made a different assumption, namely, that G was interested in the 17 year old, so being a good gooseberry, I occupied myself with the youngster, leaving G free to chat up the older one.
When we got back, there was a blazing row between mother and G, in such rapid screeching French that I could barely make out the cause. Anyway, G stormed back to his car, I following on, and he set off, driving crazily, back to Paris. It was late by now, a scary time. Then he started to rant at me, leant across, opened the passenger door and tried to push me out.
You are ahead of me as usual. Yes, it turned out that I had thwarted him because he was in fact interested in the 12 year old. I was only 21 at the time, and unaware that some grown men (G was pushing 40) lusted after little girls. Anyway, he finally realised that I had acted innocently, and calmed down. We stopped at a relais on the way back for a coffee, and sat watching a film crew shooting a scene on location, a street scene at night with actors playing out their fictions. It seemed fitting somehow.
3 comments:
Some Russian guy wrote a novel with a plot sort of like that.
Thank you, Charles, you started a train of thought! Nabokov's novel, Lolita, was first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris. The event I described occurred in the summer of 1958. I can only assume that G had read Lolita and got all inflamed as a result. As for me, as far as I can recall, I was unaware of Nabokov's novel until sometime in the mid-sixties.
It is my firm belief that life does indeed imitate art.
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