Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  Sonia sighed. ‘I know. For years I worried about him. I thought that his irresponsible side would surface and get us all into trouble. I remember he told me once how he had smuggled Daisy out from the asylum one night. It was a terrible thing to do. He risked his professional life – to say nothing of the consequences for her. Then when he was travelling round Europe with those rich families – he claimed he was learning languages, and indeed he was, but somehow I felt . . .’

  ‘You felt he must be enjoying the Italian Riviera,’ said Kitty.

  ‘Exactly. I am sure he did. But once we arrived in Carinthia, I saw the depth of his seriousness. He became admirably disciplined. The hours that he and Franz would work in that wretched cellar. I never dreamed he had it in him. It quite ruined his eyesight. About the time you met him, he had become . . . So admirable. A man so committed to his destiny.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘He was sublime.’

  ‘I suppose he was. He was so kind. I think of the hours he spent with Olivier. The patience with which he listened and searched for clues from a man who was clearly beyond help. The gentleness he showed towards him. It makes you want to weep.’

  Kitty coughed. ‘I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life – a month, a year – when we are most fully what we are meant to be.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonia. ‘I believe so. Mine is with Daniel.’

  ‘Of course. But now. Poor Thomas. He is frustrated. He is disappointed. If only he were ten years older, he could retire in the knowledge that he had done everything a man could do. But I fear he will find it hard to fill the time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonia. ‘He may revert to his old ways. His old mischief.’

  ‘Out of boredom.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And Jacques,’ said Kitty. ‘Has he changed much?’

  Sonia sighed. ‘Well, of course. I am so unhappy that he cannot end this absurd feud with Thomas.’

  ‘I know. It is heartbreaking. Thomas was appalled at first. He tried everything to apologise and explain. But now I fear that his heart is hardening. He feels he has done all he can to make the peace.’

  ‘It is too sad. When you think how much they loved each other.’

  ‘Don’t despair, Sonia. I can to some extent make Thomas do what I want. I will not allow him to neglect his duty to Jacques.’

  ‘But Jacques has changed,’ said Sonia. ‘That’s the trouble. The years wear you down. It is like erosion. It is slow and invisible, but eventually the cliff will take on a new shape. Jacques was diffident when I first knew him. He told me he felt “provisional” and dishonest in some way. But he was also very romantic, Kitty.’

  ‘I can believe it. He still is. I see the way the young female patients and the nurses look at him.’

  ‘I know. He became very confident. Suddenly. When we were in Paris. It was not just that he had faith in his own abilities, like Thomas. He believed his greatness was imminent. Any day! He was so happy. And then . . . And then it failed to happen. It was very difficult for him to settle just for being another “nerve specialist”, as he sarcastically puts it.’

  ‘But you have reassured him.’

  ‘Of course. He became a very impressive man. His fluency in English and German, his appetite for work. The number of books he read. He, too, had a golden period and I have tried to tell him that all that work is not wasted, that he is a wonderful doctor.’

  ‘Does he believe you?’

  ‘It is hard to say. He does not appreciate the success of the sanatorium. He sees such success as vulgar, merely “fashionable”. The trouble is that I fear he has become dismissive of the thoughts and feelings of others.’

  ‘Don’t be upset, Sonia. We will make them friends again.’

  ‘Oh, Kitty, if you only knew. When you have been as unhappy as he was in his childhood, you may never be whole. He made a wonderful life through the effort of his mind and will. But I know that in some way he still thinks the first experience he had of life is the true one – the one to which he is fated to return. Motherless, loveless, his brother mad, in a dark, dark world. I worry that in some way he must feel that that is what life is really like, and that all the years in between have been an illusion.’

  Kitty laid her hand on Sonia’s arm. ‘We will make sure he is all right. We will do what we have to do to make certain that that view does not prevail.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sonia, sniffing, ‘there is also this awful question of inheritance.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Olivier’s disease. It is possible that Daniel may develop it.’

  ‘Surely the chances are against it, even if it is in the family.’

  ‘Yes, they are. I expect that Daniel will be all right. But do you know what haunts Jacques, what makes him lie awake at night?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He thinks that perhaps his mother also suffered from it. That is why no one ever talked about her after she died. The only words he ever heard used to describe her were “strange” and “difficult”.’

  ‘I am so sorry, Sonia. But we will never know, will we? And is it not better that way?’

  ‘No, I think he would love to know. He cannot be at peace until he does.’

  A week after the ‘Modern World Colloquium’, Jacques and Sonia received an invitation to dine at the Drobesches’. Jacques had not seen Roya since he reeled from her bedroom, and it was with trepidation that he pulled the bell handle on the large town house. He had never lied and never been an actor in his life; he expected to stumble and be unmasked; he did not see how it could be otherwise.

  They were, as usual, shown upstairs, to the large drawing room, where a dozen notables were standing round the fireplace listening to Drobesch. Roya stepped out of the circle to come and greet them; as she approached, the light from the candles in the chandelier caught the purple print flowers in her long skirt. Jacques shrivelled as he watched Sonia’s guilelessly polite greeting.

  At dinner, the men, by Drobesch custom, were required to rotate two places clockwise after the soup, to avoid what the host referred to as the ‘municipal tram theory’ of entertaining – a reference to the improbability of finding oneself entertained by being stuck between two strangers. The second rotation came with the dessert, and brought Jacques, by an inevitable arithmetic, next to Roya. The candlelight was reflected in the silver bracelet at the cuff of her ruched cream blouse.

  Across the table was a man who did something important in a Viennese bank, though no one had been able to establish quite what, since his modesty was so grandly self-effacing that it conveyed no information at all. Jacques glanced up the table, where Sonia was listening attentively to an opposition politician expounding hotly on the Balkan issue.

  As the banker turned aside, Jacques turned to his hostess.

  ‘And how are you, Frau Drobesch?’

  ‘Very well, Doctor.’

  ‘How elegant you look.’

  ‘Thank you. I have never worn this skirt in town before. It is more of an informal, country garment.’

  ‘But it is very charming. It complements the blouse.’ Jacques could not believe the serpentine duplicity with which he heard himself speak.

  ‘Thank you. It is so warm at the moment that I thought a little informality would—’

  ‘Indeed. Very warm.’

  ‘And how is your work progressing? Do you find yourself often in town?’

  The banker had now returned his attention to them, and Jacques made some stiff reply about the local hospital. All the time he was thinking of Roya’s bedroom, of her turning round naked in the afternoon sun, a vision that occupied his waking and his sleeping thoughts. Although he was intoxicated by desire, he was aware of the danger of what he was doing and repelled by its dishonesty.

  He could not stop himself, however. He admired Roya’s calm mendacity; he was drawn, whether he liked it or not, into a conspiracy of two, and since the happy continuance of his life depended on the success of the
ir deception, he was bound to feel more and more warmly towards his fellow-conspirator. In a way, he admired her; and like Adam and Eve exiled from the Garden, they were nothing if not a pair. He found that he had quite properly received and accepted an offer to call in for tea the following Thursday after his clinic. He did not ask, because he already knew, whether Drobesch would be there or absent in Vienna.

  He was relieved to be outside again after dinner, back in the normal night-time street beneath the gas lamp; to be with Sonia again in the trap going back to the station for the last train to the cable-car. He held her hand in the back, beneath a rug, and felt the sin of his betrayal.

  Yet all Thursday morning at the hospital he was in a state of anguished excitement. A scientific part of him was curious that a man of his age could be so febrile; he would have thought such passionate feelings belonged to youth. At no point in his five hours at the hospital did his desire slacken; he saw outpatients, visited inpatients, dictated notes, had a meeting with resident physicians and at no moment was his mind free of an image of Roya; at any time he would have been ready to make love to her. He ached for her all morning.

  Such ardour is exhausting, he thought, as he finally left the hospital and began the walk across town. As a young man he had experienced lust as an inconvenience. Some Paris students had little girlfriends who would sleep with them in return for having their rent paid and being taken dancing once a week, but although some of the girls were charming, some of the boys fell in love and the arrangement could be carried off with dignity, it was essentially a kind of prostitution that his Breton soul could not approve. When he himself had erotic feelings towards some girl, he merely sat up longer, read more, and arrived earlier at the dissecting room; he extirpated the impulses. Although there was a sweetness about such longings, a joyous urge selected by nature, he had come to hate them because they could never be satisfied, they must always be denied. The rich lady whose lower abdomen he palpated, running his hands over her soft skin, beneath her silk drawers, once feeling the curl of fine hair snag beneath his fingernails as his touch moved from the inguinal crease . . . He had thought of cadavers on the slab to distract himself; after all, that was how he had learned anatomy. One such lady even took his hand and rubbed his fingers through the hot, parted flesh, but he hated her for it. And other women, a nurse called Isabelle at the Salpêtrière, such a kind girl with dark brown eyes and a friendly manner who clearly liked him . . . But he must not kindle hope or desire in her, because he would never love her, could not marry her and his feelings for her were merely base. He was vigorous and alive, but circumstances had conspired to exclude him from this natural activity, which seemed reserved to other people – to married men, to those who visited whores or those who somehow could find a moral code in themselves and in their lovers that permitted it. Lust for him was frustration: they were coterminous.

  Everything had changed with Sonia, when his desires were licensed by marriage, but above all by the respect he felt towards her and his sense that his instincts were pure and honourable. When he sometimes felt desire for other women, he had little difficulty in stifling it, because it seemed trivial. But in the long years of their marriage, he supposed, his amorous feelings had become respectable, bound up with childbirth and family, had turned into a token of his respectful affection; somehow they had moved over in his mind, and left vacant a plot where the old weeds of lust had taken root.

  What he felt as he rang Roya’s doorbell was the dark and furtive desire of the very young man he had once been; it was the lust of fantasies too shameful to name, which now appeared to be on the verge, at this late stage in his life, of being enacted.

  So it proved, when Roya herself answered the door and within moments had let him know that there was no one else in the house. She took him to the drawing room where the guests had gathered before dinner and put her lips to his before she even had closed the door. He felt her fingers on the front of his trousers, then found his own hands beneath her skirt and in a few moments of undignified fumbling and tearing of clothes she was bending over the arm of the sofa and he had raised her long skirt as she reached her hand back between her legs and he gave himself to her, leaning back on his heels so he could see the detail of the junction where their flesh met. He dreaded that it would be done too soon, before he had seen her face, so pulled back to allow her to stand up. He then laid her gently down on the sofa and moved on top of her; he talked to her as he made love, telling her in the language of the peasant what he was doing, saying the words into her ear so she must hear them.

  When they were finished, his shame at what he had done and said was mitigated by the fact that she could look him in the eye and tell him, as she did, that she loved him. His remorse became their shared secret, so that instead of bringing him back to normality, as he felt it should have done, it served only to bind him more tightly to her in their conspiracy.

  For weeks they continued to meet at her house, and Jacques wondered if there was no act he could devise that she would not willingly indulge. She said that she had never done such things, in such a way, and he believed her. Nor had he. He was fascinated by her body, by its folds and textures, its colours and shapes. It was as though he had never examined the female form before, never anatomised, dissected or palpated. Each time he lifted her dress or parted her underclothes it was a revelation and he could sense how much she loved the effect she had on him, the way she could make him lose control.

  ‘It is not me,’ she said again, still mystified. ‘It is some other girl who does these things.’

  ‘But it is you who enjoys them.’

  ‘I think it must be.’

  Her eyes grew narrow when she wanted him again and her lips, filling with blood, grew into a stiff pout. When they had finished making love and he lay tightly against her, there was sometimes a catch in her exhalation which told him that a small knot of desire was still not unravelled; he liked it best when her breath came clear, untroubled, and he knew that for the time being she was complete.

  ‘You are so beautiful,’ he said. ‘Every little bit of you. And this part especially.’

  ‘I had never thought of it as possibly being—’

  ‘Yes, it is. It is the colour. It is like the colour inside a shell. It is coral. I have never seen anything like it.’

  ‘You are absurd.’

  ‘I may be,’ he said. ‘But that is what I think.’

  Sometimes on a Thursday morning in the clinic, as his excitement mounted, Jacques wondered if he should not be feeling something more elevated, something more like ‘love’; but what he felt was too complex to be given a single name, and the vocabulary for emotion seemed to him in any case ridiculously small. It was like trying to describe the taste of asparagus or egg using only the words sweet or bitter. Perhaps ‘love’ was part of the distinctively flavoured compound of a thousand feelings that made up his sense of Roya; perhaps not. He did not care. So long as he could see her again, feel himself rigid and bursting inside her, it did not seem to matter.

  For three years they met weekly, and the indulgence of his habit only caused the desire to grow. Jacques remembered a sermon Abbé Henri had once given, in which he had warned his parishioners how the revisiting of a vice does not satisfy the craving but intensifies it. Perhaps he had been thinking of avarice or financial dishonesty in his flock, but the principle seemed to hold good for Jacques’s sin too.

  One day, without telling Sonia, he cancelled his clinic so that he could spend the whole day at Roya’s house. By the time he left in the evening he had lost count of the number of times he made love to her. Between each one, she changed clothes into outfits he had seen her wear in public on occasions when they had had to maintain a distance and had been left frustrated. He liked to re-enact the occasion, only this time with the fantasy that at the theatre or at the dinner where she had worn this dress he had found a chance, surprisingly, to . . . He avenged himself on all the days of frustrated longing – not just those oc
casions in the time that he had known Roya, but for all his life in which, as he tried to explain to her, frustration was the condition of being a man. And she insisted that he take her in every room of the house except the marital bedroom – where he had in any case no desire to go, the thought of Drobesch’s long face and steepled fingers being the only thing he had discovered in three years that was sure to cool his passion; but in the bathroom and the music room, the drawing room and even, since the cook had been given the day off, in the kitchen she took him into herself again and again. Jacques was surprised that he could manage at her merest suggestion to be ready. It was not an area of physiology that he had studied, but folk wisdom had it that after the age of thirty a man needed longer to recover. It was as though each act, exciting as it was, had failed to kill the urge. A brash part of him was secretly proud of his vigour, but he wondered if there was something wrong in their ideas of one another that so much lovemaking seemed not to satisfy them.

  On the final occasion, he did feel tired; they were both naked in the spare bedroom, sweat-streaked and without shame. He protested that he was done at last, but she would not let him be; she coaxed precarious life from him until to his astonishment he found that once more he was on top of her and from the depths of him she was somehow hauling up one last dying spasm of his great desire. And when she had squeezed it from him, when it was finally over, he lay across the foot of the bed, naked, in a slight warm breeze that came in through the open window from the garden, and he felt at last, for the first and only time in his life, that he was no longer frustrated by the eyes and looks and skin of women, but was drowned, dead and empty. He felt his jaw fall and his arms flop down, like the dead sailor on the raft of Géricault’s Medusa.