Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘That is where he lives. In the past. And you, Doctor. What is the matter with you?’

  ‘The matter?’ He was surprised by the assured way this girl spoke.

  ‘Yes. You have an attitude of great weariness and frustration. As though you are fighting some long battle.’

  Jacques looked down into the darkness below their feet. In the canyon above Rubio Hotel, hundreds of Japanese lanterns were sparkling, like fireflies.

  ‘I am suffering from the limits of my mind,’ he said. ‘There is a simple enough problem that I have set out to solve. How our minds work. How sickness enters in. Why the limits of what we can understand seem so narrow. As humans, we have a gift of self-awareness, but it seems to lead us to no explanation. Of what use is consciousness if all that one is conscious of is ignorance?’

  Roya laughed lightly. ‘Sometimes one does see through the veil of that unknowing, does one not? At moments of higher awareness?’

  Jacques looked across at her, but could barely make out her features in the darkness.

  ‘In a few days,’ he said, ‘I shall take the train back to San Francisco and investigate the purchase of some wire rope and a wheel. That is all I am good for. To be a workman with a pick and shovel on a railway line.’

  ‘It is a noble ambition, Doctor. At least you will be lifting your endeavours to a higher plane.’

  She laughed, and he felt her hand lightly touch his arm in consolation.

  Jacques’s letter did reach Sonia before he returned, on account of the two weeks he spent in California, a day of which he passed with Macpherson, the engineer, and two more at the California Wire Rope Works in San Francisco. Sonia read it with fascination but a faint unease at the tone of her husband’s voice. He sounded overexcited, and although such passion was not uncharacteristic, there was something worrying about the agitation of his tone.

  She was sitting in the office between the two consulting rooms, deep in her thoughts about Jacques, when there was a knock at the door and Kitty asked if she could come in for a moment. This was unusual, as Kitty was particular about keeping out of Sonia’s way and, under instruction from Thomas, made sure never to ask about the accounts or finances of the schloss.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Sonia. ‘What is it, my dear? Are you all right? You look a little flushed.’ She had grown fond of Kitty, but – whatever the evidence to the contrary – could not stop thinking of her as an invalid.

  ‘I have wonderful news,’ said Kitty, who, in her excitement, had forgotten to take off her reading glasses, ‘and I wanted you to be the first to know. You are going to be an aunt. Thomas is going to be a father.’

  ‘Oh, my dear girl.’ Sonia stood up and embraced her. She was winded by the suddenness of the announcement. Thomas a father . . . There was something comical about it – yet apt; she wished their own father had been alive. And how much it would connect Thomas to the world, she thought: it would be the making of him.

  When they had finished tearfully exclaiming and embracing one another, Sonia said, ‘I am not sure I like the sound of “Aunt Sonia”. She sounds rather strict, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Dear Sonia. I think you will be the best aunt a child could hope for. If my children grow up half as well as Daniel, I shall be happy.’

  ‘That is enough, Kitty. You will make me cry again. Am I allowed to tell Jacques?’

  ‘Of course. It is due at the end of February. We had better ask Frau Holzer if she is free.’

  ‘I shall write to her at once.’

  The end of Pier 14 was so crowded that Jacques had to fight his way through the press of people standing, gazing at the City of NewYork, which rode like a tethered Gulliver, straining at her moorings among the tugs, barges and tenders that huffed in her shadow. On the wharf were lines of passengers waiting to embark, anxiously trying to ensure their baggage was correctly loaded, impeded by the groups of sightseers – idling ladies in bonnets with parasols, small boys in flat caps who stared up in awe to the decks above them. Tiny men were in the rigging of the three inclined black funnels with their single white stripes; far below them on the deck were cranes which lowered roped parcels on creaking pallets into the hold, and animals, some butchered, some alive in cages, were winched aboard as though for a carnivorous Ark. In all the tumult, Jacques was sure he glimpsed a familiar female face, but by the time he was on board, greeted by a smiling officer at the head of the gangway and reunited with his bags, it was too late for anything but to push his way once more through the crowd.

  He found his own cabin, after asking directions from a steward. The stipulations of the line were strict: trunks not to exceed three feet six inches in length or 15 inches in height, and it might further have laid down a limit on the size of passenger, he thought: a man any larger than he was would have found it hard to squeeze into the space between the mattress and the bulkhead; even as it was, he had to post himself in, like a packed envelope in a narrow letterbox.

  These discomforts he remembered from the outward passage, so spent most of the time in the sumptuous public rooms. On the first night, as the New York pitched bow-first into the Atlantic swell, he fortified himself with brandy before sitting down to dinner at a long table in the saloon, in a chair that was screwed to the floor. The ceiling was a glass dome, like the Crystal Palace in miniature, and somewhere hidden up there an organist, invisible like a phantom of the opera in a short story he had read, was playing melodies to soothe the travellers. The lurching waiters splashed quantities of hot consommé over their wrists as they swayed up and down between the fixed seats; when they brought out the main course, Jacques noticed one of them holding the lamb cutlets in place with a determined thumb; as they set fire to the dessert he had to look away for fear the whole ship would go up in flames. Afterwards, he went to the smoking room, which was panelled in black walnut and furnished with scarlet leather armchairs, but found that the atmosphere of cigar smoke was undoing all the good of the brandy, so took one of the ascending ‘electric chambers’ and went out on deck.

  It was late July, still light, and he breathed deeply on the sea air as he looked astern towards the receding coastline of America. He wished that he had felt wise or wistful, able to summarise what he had learned from travelling the width of the country; but he did not: he felt confused and nervous, unenlightened; he felt disorientated and subtly changed. From the short raised deck where he stood, he could see a broad surface on each side of the deckhouse stretching back to the stern, a distance roughly as far as the length of the main street at Sainte Agnès; it was crossed at intervals by passageways from port to starboard, down one of which he saw the quick movement of that same familiar figure he had glimpsed on the pier in New York. He followed quickly, and found her still wrestling with the key to a first-class suite that opened from the gangway.

  ‘Mademoiselle. Good evening. I thought I saw you at the pier. Are you enjoying the voyage?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Monsieur. It is kind of you to ask. Nadine and Madame Valade are both unwell, but I have barely noticed the movement.’

  ‘Perhaps you would care to walk about the deck a little.’

  ‘I cannot, alas,’ said Roya. ‘I must look after the invalids. Perhaps tomorrow, or when it is calmer.’

  ‘Of course. Goodnight, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Goodnight.’ She lingered for a moment, he thought, as though on the point of changing her mind; then she was gone and the door to the suite had closed. He went down to the library, where the stained-glass windows, inscribed with quotations from poems about the sea, threw a strange purple light across the dozing readers. He pulled out a volume with its title embossed in gold lettering – Quentin Durward by Walter Scott – and sat down to tackle it.

  For two more days the ocean heaved, and to find himself air, Jacques explored the ship. On the third evening, when the wind had dropped, there was a knock at his door and a steward held out a salver with a folded note on the ship’s paper. ‘We should be delighted if you would take dinne
r in our apartments. S. Valade. 7 p.m. Do not dress.’

  Do not dress, he thought, as he took out a clean shirt from his bag and struggled with the collar; although the wind had dropped, the occasional swell lifted the ship at the moment he was about to secure the stud. Do not dress . . . As though he had worn a white tie every night on the train in the backwoods of Wyoming. He brushed his hair carefully in the mirror, deciding it would be dishonest to try to conceal where it had receded from the temples: as well cover the grey above the ears with boot polish . . . His skin was clean and smooth from the razor, and, except for the odd white hair that Sonia assured him added dignity, the moustache at least had remained for the most part bravely black.

  The steward knocked at the door with brandy and water at six-thirty, and soon afterwards he took the electric chamber up to the main deck. Madame Valade’s suite of rooms was like the apartment of a wealthy widow in one of the stuffier blocks near the Place des Vosges. From its cluttered sitting room, full of velvet cushions and fixed occasional tables, a door opened into a separate bedroom where Jacques could see the outline of a large brass bed anchored to the floor.

  ‘Awful people in the saloon for dinner,’ said Madame Valade. ‘Groups of shrieking young women calling themselves “Kansas Belles” or some such thing. I have seldom seen anything less “belle” in my life. They are serving our dinner up here.’

  ‘You are absurd, Mama,’ said Nadine. ‘It is very lively in there, is it not, Roya?’

  Roya smiled. ‘Very lively.’

  ‘All those handsome young men from Yale going over to some rowing match. What was it called?’

  ‘The name was not familiar to me,’ said Roya.

  ‘Henley, I think,’ said Nadine. ‘Does that mean anything to you, Doctor?’

  Jacques shook his head. ‘The English and their games. It is a mystery to the rest of us. Though I did enjoy playing lawn-tennis once.’

  ‘What is that?’ said Roya.

  ‘Not something you will play in the Elburz Mountains, I think.’

  ‘You do not know what happens in the Elburz Mountains, Doctor.’

  Dinner was brought by a perspiring steward and accompanied, to Jacques’s delight, by French wines, which Madame Valade invited him to pour. As her guest, he felt obliged to absorb the greater part of her talk with an appearance of understanding or of interest, but she was low-spirited by comparison with the night in the Alpine Tavern and he was able to talk also to Roya and Nadine. The wine made them all nostalgic for France; they talked of Paris, Burgundy, the Auvergne; Nadine insisted that Jacques ring the bell to order more.

  Afterwards, they played whist, while Nadine poured brandy and water until her mother told her to stop. Nadine seemed incapable of following suit even at the beginning of a hand and talked loudly throughout the game. Roya looked distracted, Jacques thought, as though her mind was on St Petersburg or Persia; her movements, normally so swift and contained, had become slow. Her fingertips brushed his hand when she picked up her cards, and beneath the table he could feel the light pressure of her relaxed leg against his own. He presumed that both girls had drunk more wine than they were used to.

  When MadameValade began to yawn, he stood up, rocked for a moment in what he took to be the swell of the Atlantic and thanked his hostess for a delightful evening.

  ‘I shall come as well,’ said Roya.

  ‘I thought you . . .’ Jacques could not conceal his surprise.

  ‘No, it is just Mama and I who share this little apartment,’ said Nadine. ‘Good night, Doctor. Thank you for letting me win at cards.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mademoiselle. Madame.’

  He held the door open for Roya and bowed, partly to avoid hitting his head on the door frame, and stepped out into the gangway.

  ‘I am going to walk round the deck once,’ she said. ‘It is such a beautiful night.’

  ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  It was late, and there was no one else on the first-class deck. They leaned over the rail and watched the black sea far below them.

  It was very strange, thought Jacques. He felt like a child, as though nothing had ever really happened to him before in his life. This, he thought, must mean he was happy.

  Roya turned round, so that her back was against the rail. Her eyes had narrowed and her lips had taken on a sharper outline, as if slightly stiffened or swollen. Without speaking, she placed her hands on Jacques’s shoulders and kissed him on the mouth.

  He put his hands on her waist and held her, but was too surprised to do more.

  ‘That is what you wanted, isn’t it?’ said Roya.

  Jacques said nothing for a long time. ‘I suppose it must have been,’ he said at last.

  She smiled. ‘Good. I am tired. I am going to bed.’

  ‘I thought you were with . . . Where are your quarters?’

  By the time he had framed the question, she had already slipped from view.

  XVI

  IN OCTOBER, DANIEL had his first birthday. When the day’s work was over, a dozen adults gathered in the waiting room, where the circular table held a cake that Sonia had made for the occasion. She carried Daniel from the nursery in his best short trousers and woollen jacket; he was a compact armful, solid but not heavy, resting comfortably on her braced forearm, while her other hand gripped beneath his armpit to secure him to the front of her dress. When he was being carried by either parent, he had a habit of patting them lightly on the shoulder, as though in consolation. Sonia leant down and inhaled the smell of his washed hair and the aroma of his skin beneath: it was like warm biscuits and honey, and the loose curls brushed her cheek, fleeting, like his life’s breath.

  She set him down on the floor at the entrance to the waiting room, squeezing his ribcage one last time, reluctant to let him go.

  ‘Cake,’ he said, and set off across the room, shuttling from side to side in sudden spurts, then stopping, swaying like a sailor as he searched for balance, then plunging off again diagonally. Eventually, he made it to the table, where Jacques lifted him into his highchair and pushed it up close so that he could admire the cake as they sang to him. He held both small arms straight up above his head in amazement as his father cut the first deep slice, then settled down to eat, with his ankles crossed, as was his habit, on the footrest of the highchair.

  Sonia looked on from the doorway, happy to be apart and to observe the way in which her child was starting to acquire characteristics of his own: the crossed ankles, the precocious drunken walk, the head held to one side, the eyes wide in wonder as some everyday object was pointed out to him; the voice like a treble bell that sounded out each new word with tentative clarity as though his was the first human mouth in which it had found utterance.

  Children from the village came to the schloss to play with Daniel, and sometimes Sonia would take him back to their houses. She talked for hours with these young mothers about their children and their husbands and their lives; they were not conversations she felt she could relay to Jacques and they were not women she thought might otherwise have been her friends, but the intensity of what they shared was such that it dwarfed all differences. It was such a common human experience, thought Sonia – by definition, perhaps, the commonest of all; yet to each of them, she could see, it was a private rapture so intoxicating that they were forced sometimes to play at being blasé, to complain about the work, the sleepless nights, the loss of time alone, when she could see that all they really felt was incredulity that something so mechanically natural was in truth so sublime.

  They were changed for ever, these women – changed by the everyday transcendence they had lived through. She saw them stealing glances at their children on the grass or in the hall, rationing their gaze, hoping not to wear away the miracle by too much looking; but she did not mind that her own exultation was not unique; it reassured her to think that anyone might feel as she did – because if the commonplace was miraculous, then it was possible, after all, to take an optimistic vie
w of human life.

  In return for Jacques’s sabbatical leave in California, it had meanwhile been agreed that Thomas should also be permitted to travel or explore outside the schloss. Much though he loved it there – the geraniums in the window boxes, the playful water in the fountain, the secret passage that took him back to Kitty – he accepted the point that Jacques made on his return, that he needed to develop his own theoretical interests. While Jacques himself was in a position of retrenchment from which to leap forward better, at least he had leapt.

  Thomas was pushing forward slowly on two fronts, but there was no breakthrough. With Franz Bernthaler’s help, he had become a keen-eyed pathologist; he was adept at the post-mortem table and had, with Franz, noted abnormalities in the brains of those who had suffered from general paralysis of the insane and, less marked but still significant, in those who had had dementia praecox, or what they had formerly called Olivier’s disease. Even in their most optimistic moments, however, they could not present their findings as anything more than work in progress – a promising start on a road that would take many years to travel and one which really needed better instruments.

  The second advance was on what he called to himself the Rothenburg Front, after the town in whose church he had first been struck by the idea that hearing voices must once have been a common experience. If his work with Franz was stains and slides, biochemistry, notes and observation, the Rothenburg Front was ostensibly the opposite: speculation verging on the metaphysical.

  He was not alone in sensing that he had come to a temporary halt. Much of what he felt by intuition – and he had to confess that it was little more than that – depended on the theories of what Mr Darwin called ‘descent with modification’ (he did not seem to use the word ‘evolution’ until The Descent of Man) being more fully explained. Until someone could fill in the details of how heredity worked, then it seemed to him that there was little chance that they could understand, let alone cure, the forms of madness that had an hereditary taint. His own thinking had been influenced by what Faverill called his ‘mad-doctor’s hunch’, something he had mentioned to Sonia: the idea that if humans were the only creatures to be mad, then perhaps it was the very thing that differentiated them from the apes that predisposed them to mental illness. Thomas believed it was possible that the illness had indeed entered into mankind at the moment he evolved into Homo sapiens; it might have been the very price he paid for the acquisition of higher consciousness. But Faverill had never dreamed of trying to prove his theory; it remained for both of them a ‘hunch’; and what good were hunches in the world of factual science?