Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘You haven’t drunk your soup, Mr Thomas.’

  ‘What?’ Thomas looked down in surprise. He did not remember being given soup. People expected so much of him these days.

  ‘Shall I take it away, then?’

  ‘Yes. May? It is May isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  At the end of the main course, Edgar stood up and made a brief speech of welcome. Thomas looked at him curiously, then scanned the faces of those he knew; no one seemed to think it odd that this fellow was making a speech, so Thomas said nothing about it. He had a speech of his own in his pocket which Kitty had helped him to prepare that afternoon.

  When Edgar sat down, Valade sprang to his feet. ‘Thank you, sir, for your very kind words of welcome and for the hospitality that you and your wife have shown us.’ Valade’s English was much better than Thomas had expected. ‘To welcome a foreigner, a stranger – in my language it is the same word. Is that not shameful? To welcome me, at least, is a gesture of great kindness. I have been much impressed by the beauty and intelligence of the women in your family, monsieur. The fame of the women of England had not yet reached me, but I shall waste no time in spreading word of it when I return home. As for the men in your family, I can offer you no higher compliment, monsieur, than to say that in my view you stand as the equal of your brother, a man I have known for more than thirty years. Once we sat on a mountain side in Carinthia at a strange little guesthouse where I painted the view because it was one thing and everything. We called it Art. In all the years that followed we never found that place again. But in all that time I have never seen in your brother an ungracious deed. I have loved him as though he were my own brother. Meeting you here, monsieur, here in your Englishman’s castle, has made me understand what honour I had done myself by claiming that title of “brother”. I salute you, sir, and your beautiful wife and I offer you the warmest thanks that my poor grasp of your language permits.’

  Thomas looked down the table and saw Kitty’s face earnestly looking at him. ‘Go on,’ she mouthed silently. He stood up and coughed.

  ‘I also . . . Also wanted to say something. First I should like to add my thanks to Monsieur Valade’s. We all appreciate the hospitality and kindness shown us by . . . Our hosts.’

  Kitty’s smiling face was still on him. It was all right. ‘Of course what Valade said about me was absolute piffle. Unkind acts . . . Ungracious, was it? Once in Africa I lost my temper with a man and . . . And many other times . . .’

  He looked up and forced himself to regroup. ‘Yes. Yes. I just have to say, while I am still able, a sort of goodbye, or at least an au revoir. Some weeks ago I . . . Er, I suffered a peculiar experience. I do not wish to go into it except to say that I appeared to lose my memory. I was in a police station with no recollection of how I had got there. I was not unhappy, I just did not know what was going on. I was like King Lear. “Methinks I should know you, and know this man;/ Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant/What place this is; and all the skill I have/Remembers not these garments; nor I know not/Where I did lodge last night.” Anyway, to . . . To cut a long story short, I have been to see various distinguished gentlemen at the hospital in Queen Square and it appears that I am in the early stages of some kind of senile or pre-senile dementia.

  ‘Rather interestingly, it has been named after Alois Alzheimer, with whom my colleague Franz Bernthaler once studied along with Franz Nissl, another formidable talent at the microscope. Oddly enough, Bernthaler assured me in his last letter that it was not in fact Alzheimer who first described the disease, but his mentor Emil Kraepelin. This may be the first time in medical history that a discovery has been voluntarily assigned by one scientist to another.’

  Thomas looked down the table at all the strange faces in the orange light. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘perhaps Kraepelin just forgot.’

  He consulted the notes that Kitty had made on a postcard. ‘So. Yes. I just wanted to say to all of you . . . Yes, a most interesting ailment as a matter of fact, in which the plaques among the neurons are visible under a Zeiss lens without staining, though Franz tells me you get the best results with magenta red and indigo carmine. And . . . And . . .’

  He looked back to his postcard. It said: ‘Age.’

  ‘Yes. Age. I am rather young to have this sort of thing, though perhaps sixty does not seem so young to the children at the far end of the table. The truth is that we know very little about this illness. We know very little about anything, as a matter of fact. Never mind. It is really not important. It is just that one day I may no longer know your name, and I ask you to forgive me if I pass you in the street or on the stairs and my face does not light up with love or recognition. Please forgive me. I shall no longer be myself. I am going into a dark country and I very much wanted to say goodbye to those that I have loved before I go. My dear Jacques, whose dreams of greatness I so passionately shared from the moment he embraced me on a beach somewhere in France. Sonia . . . Dear God, what a sister you have been. I remember a boat in Deauville. And my own family. What can I say?’

  He gazed once more down through the mist of faces until he saw the features of the woman he had loved – no longer young, but red and twisted with grief, shining with tears.

  ‘I have been blessed beyond what any man could hope or wish for,’ said Thomas. ‘All I ask now is somewhere safe to live. I must pull in sail and lower my sights from the horizon. I am quite content to do so because I have been so fortunate in my life. I always felt that if I had to make a speech like this I should find some Shakespearean eloquence. But it is too late and the plain words will have to do. As a doctor, I have achieved absolutely nothing. Nothing at all, though God knows I tried. But in love I have been rich. Once long ago I finished a lecture in another place by saying we should try to make our lives a hymn of thanks – or some such phrase. I do not think it was a very memorable phrase, even to someone without my difficulties. I shall do my best to follow my own advice. All I ask is for your forgiveness.’

  He looked one last time down the table of anxious faces. ‘My mind may not know you,’ he said, ‘but in my heart you are remembered.’

  The next day, after they had come back from church, Thomas went to sit in the library with Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels in South America. One of the advantages of his disease, he thought, would presumably turn out to be that you could read your favourite books again and again, and each time would be the first. Certainly, nothing of Humboldt’s story seemed familiar.

  There was a knock on the door, and Daisy put her head round it. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She perched on the edge of a low table in front of the fire, close to Thomas’s armchair. ‘I just wanted to say . . .’

  ‘Say what, Daisy?’

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘Of course I do. I shall never forget you of all people, Daisy.’

  Daisy twisted her fingers in her lap. ‘About what you said last night. You know. You said you hadn’t done anything as a doctor.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t.’

  ‘Of course you have. Think of all the people you helped.’

  ‘I doubt whether I cured a single person. The diseases of the mind have so far proved—’

  ‘Listen. Please listen to me. What you did for me and Mary was something wonderful. You took us from out that place. Do you remember it?’

  ‘Yes I do, it was—’

  ‘Good. I’m glad you remember. It was a prison. We was locked in the wards with them women moaning and messing theirselves and banging their heads against the walls. And the smell of it, the pity, the disgusting mess of it all. And we was trapped in it and locked away. And little Mary, there was nothing even wrong with her except she was blind and she had spent her whole life in this kind of place. And do you know what you did?’

  ‘I merely—’

  ‘You gave us a life. Me and Mary. It was like being born again into a better world.
Look at us now. We both do our work at the hospital, I’m a married lady with a nice husband and a house and a fine boy. If you had done nothing else in your life, then—’

  ‘Daisy, are you trying to make me cry? You will not succeed.’

  Daisy grabbed his hands in hers. ‘Oh, Tommy, Tommy. Don’t you know how we worshipped you? You were our god. You saved us. And we watched you walking in the courtyards, down that colonnade, smiling at them patients, and me and Mary we just wanted to go down on our knees and kiss the place you’d walked on. Don’t you see, you foolish, stupid man? Don’t you see how much we loved you? Don’t you see the . . . the . . . size of what you did for us?’

  ‘Listen, it is kind of you to—’

  ‘No, you listen, because it breaks my heart to hear you say you never done anything good in doctoring. If you are going to lose your memory, like you say you are, then the last thing you should know before you go is all the good you did. Maybe you didn’t cure all the lunatics, but maybe no one ever will. Maybe there are some things that men will never know. And I will not let you tell yourself that you have failed because you didn’t do what no man has ever done before or since. Do you understand me?’ She squeezed his hands harder. ‘Thomas, do you understand me?’

  ‘Dear Daisy. I do understand. And I thank you for what you have said. You can let go of my hand now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She released him and sat back on the table. ‘And I think I did make you cry a little bit.’

  ‘It was just that you squeezed my hand so hard that—’

  ‘Ssh. I wanted you to remember what I said. Will you remember? When you go into your dark place. Will you remember?’

  ‘I will try, Daisy. I promise I will try.’

  In the evening, the guests began to depart. Jacques had an appointment with a psychiatrist in London and could not linger; when Sonia had been assured by Lucy that she did not need her help, she packed her own bag to accompany him. A cab was waiting for them outside, where it had started to rain.

  It was difficult to make sincere farewells in the throng of people and luggage in the hall, but they managed to distract Lucy and Edgar’s attention long enough to thank them. Jacques had a particular word for Henry, who he always thought had been responsible, as a child, for bringing him and Sonia together, though Henry said he remembered nothing of it. Kitty and her daughters, who were staying another night, were on hand to say goodbye, though there was no sign of Thomas until they got outside. He was standing alone on the far side of the crescent of grass in front of the house, where the drive set off towards the village street. He was wearing a coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. Sonia asked the driver to stop.

  Jacques climbed down from the cab and held his arms out to Thomas, who embraced him. When Sonia had done likewise, she asked the driver to wait so that they could make sure Thomas returned safely to the house and did not wander into the village.

  ‘Kitty’s waiting for you,’ she called through the window of the cab.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, and began to walk off.

  Sonia and Jacques watched him until he reached the steps up to the front door, where he turned, raised his hat and waved it in their direction. Then he stood for a little, looking uncertain in the rainy outdoor world, till Martha came out, took him by the elbow and led him back into his father’s house.

  XXIV

  IN THE FOLLOWING months, Thomas’s condition deteriorated slowly. The Bayswater house was filled with notes reminding him of what to do and when to do it – different lists in different rooms. He had to give up work when a depressed patient complained that after five consultations Thomas began the sixth by asking his date of birth and family history before offering to examine his chest. In the drawing room, the note said: ‘Kitty returns at five. Mrs Coyle comes at nine and will make lunch. Book is in the chair by the fire. Dr P’s number next to telephone.’ In the bathroom, the note said: ‘Teeth, shave, wash. Ointment on foot. Important.’ The notes sometimes helped remind him what to do when he had come into a room, but seldom said why; and they never told him who he was.

  His last letter to Sonia in Paris had long passages of lucidity, however, and he seemed able to arrange his thoughts better on paper than in speech. He told Sonia that on the doctor’s advice, Kitty now locked him in the house when she went to work in the morning and that he preferred it that way. In June, Jacques and Thomas finally received their share of the money in the Wilhelmskogel partnership. It was enough that Kitty could stop work if she wanted and enough to buy a flat for each of the twins; for Jacques and Sonia, it was more than they needed.

  Jacques continued in private practice and helped at an outpatients’ clinic at the Salpêtrière. His quest to find a neurosurgeon who would operate on him was unsuccessful; when the fourth man he approached not only rebuffed him vigorously but threatened to report his request to the medical authorities, Jacques began to see how forlorn his hope had been.

  ‘I went a little mad,’ he said to Sonia. ‘I see that now. It was my grief, my way of feeling it.’

  Their apartment was on the first floor, and in the warm evening, the long windows were open to the street below. Despite the clank of trams and the roar of motor cars, they could still hear the birds in the plane trees by the side of the road and the cry of the waiters at the café opposite as they shouted their orders from the outside tables.

  ‘I have another thing to confess,’ said Jacques.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  They had finished dinner by the window and Jacques poured the remains of the wine into their glasses.

  ‘When we were in London I went to see a medium, a clairvoyant. To see if I could . . . You know, speak to him.’

  ‘But that is against everything you have ever believed.’

  ‘I know. I was desperate.’

  ‘You poor thing. Why did you not tell me?’

  ‘I was ashamed. And then . . . And then he was there. She found him.’

  ‘What do you mean.’

  ‘It was awful. Can you bear it?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me.’

  ‘She said there was a young man whose name began with D. He was in the mountains. There was snow. A man had thrown himself off. There was gunfire. And he said, “Forgive me, forgive me.”’

  Sonia said nothing. Jacques was trembling.

  ‘I cannot tell you how awful it was,’ he said. ‘I am sure she was a charlatan. I expect there is a simple explanation of how it was done. But I could not be sure at the time. I couldn’t know for certain. And I believe I felt him reach out to me. Little Herr Frage. I felt him calling for me. He needed me. He was alone. My heart was torn out of my body.’

  For the first time since Daniel had died, Jacques began to cry. It began with a few half-stifled sobs, then acquired a mounting rhythm. Sonia put her arms round him, but the force of his grief soon became too great for her to hold. He lay on the floor in front of the fireplace and the exhalation of the sob turned into a shout, a kind of howl. Sonia closed the windows on to the street and sat with him. He could not bring himself under control. As the noise grew louder and the shaking of his body more convulsive, Sonia wondered if she should call a doctor or administer some sort of shock. She brought him water, but he could not hold it. She splashed some in his face, then held his hand tightly. For almost half an hour the storm continued, and every time it seemed to have passed, it built again. The neighbour from the next flat rang the bell to see if everything was all right; when Sonia had reassured him and sent him on his way, Jacques staggered to the spare bedroom at the end of the corridor to muffle his noises in the pillows.

  Towards midnight he regained control of himself and came exhausted to the marital bedroom. Sonia, pale and anxious, helped him to undress and fetched him pills from the bathroom for his headache.

  When he was calm at last and sitting up in bed, she said, ‘You never understood, did you?’

  ‘Understood what? What do you mean?’

  ‘You did not need a brain surgeon or a mediu
m. You did not need to chase the dead members of your family. All you needed was here.’

  Jacques thought for a moment before answering. ‘In you?’

  ‘Yes. In me.’

  He looked at her closely. ‘But you could not be everything to me. That was too much to ask. There were other people that I needed, others to share the load . . . The load of being human.’

  ‘I think I could be everything. I think I was.’

  ‘Sonia . . .’

  ‘So far as I know, that is what it means to love someone. To bend all your powers to their happiness. All of them. To be everything.’

  ‘Everything . . .’

  ‘Who do you think left the copy of The Lancet and that French novel to make you feel at home when you first came to Torrington?’

  Jacques’s mouth opened a little, but no sound came.

  Sonia, pale but serene, stood by his side. ‘Everything,’ she said again.

  But she did not tell him quite everything she had done. She did not say how, seeing his deep unhappiness in the weeks after Roya’s final departure for St Petersburg, she had eventually decided to act; how she had gone to the post office and paid the clerk at the counter to write the message and address, then taken the unsent telegram home.

  She was tempted to tell Jacques there and then how she had paid Josef to deliver it to the hospital one night; but seeing the condition he was in, she merely sighed. She remembered how restored he had been in the days that followed the arrival of the telegram, how a certain lightness and eventually an equanimity had returned to him. Her subterfuge had worked as well as she could have hoped, and if she had desisted at the time from telling him, there seemed no reason to break her silence now.

  In the autumn, Jacques had a letter from a lawyer in Lorient concerning properties that had belonged to his father’s former employer. This man’s son had recently died. He had fallen out with his own children and had left instructions to dispose of various smallholdings. Old Rebière’s long service meant that Jacques had inherited not only his own father’s house, no longer wanted by Tante Mathilde’s family, but two other cottages and a parcel of land between.