Peace Talks

by Tim Finch

  I should stop there. It is getting late. I am having that nightcap at the hotel bar. Another brandy. I know I shouldn’t. There is just one thing I want to add before turning in. I have another long day tomorrow.

  There is a young woman, a waitress or maid, at the complex. I don’t know why it is that I first noticed her. There are lots of staff like her, many of them young women, who work around us almost invisibly. Silently, certainly. This girl is not attractive. Or rather, she is only attractive because of her youth, which as we used to discuss is an attribute only valued by those who have lost it, are past it, who, however attractive they were in their own youth, are viewed by the young as old, and nothing more. Such are the indignities of life, I suppose, hers being the greater because she lacks the compensating sense of perspective: all she feels is unattractive. No boy her own age gives her a second glance, I’m sure. It is an observation I can make confidently, cruelly – despite never having seen her among boys her own age – as I remember being that age myself and I remember ignoring, confidently, cruelly, girls who looked like her.

  And I was a shy, sensitive boy. It was always said of me. I had no great success with girls – the ones I did fancy – because of it. It was their mothers – and what was the use of that? – who took a shine to me. It wasn’t until I met you that this changed. All through university, there was no one really. There was no sowing of wild oats with me. You were my wild oats as well as my … whatever comes next. I dunno. Muesk? Rice Krispies? Coco Pops? Please stop. I am getting the giggles. And I am trying to say something serious.

  This girl never looks up, at me or at anyone else, as she wheels in the metal trolley and goes about replacing the mineral water and the bowls of fruit and the Turkish delight. She keeps her eyes down. It is painful to see. But she must sense that I am always looking at her, hoping – though also dreading – that I will catch her eye? I am still that shy, sensitive, cruel, confident boy. I would look away – or do I mean, blank her – if she was to look in my direction. I am afraid of her. Or do I mean I hate her?

  The occasion that troubles me so much came after the most harrowing session of all of them. We had had described to us the injuries inflicted on female students during the occupation of the Women’s University. There were photographs too. Broken bottles, pieces of wood, the barrels of firearms.

  Of course, the young maid wasn’t in the room for the session. But she came in soon afterwards to clear up. She and the older woman, who is about my own age. And perhaps because of the air in the room, some chilling reverberation, the girl was shaking. Or shivering. She looked even paler and more fragile than usual. Skinny, scrawny, rather red in the face, thin blonde hair, scraped back. As I say, nothing really attractive about her at all. But I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  There, I’ve told you. What were you expecting? Nothing has happened. That would be preposterous. Yet what if those eyes, which never look in my direction, were to convey unmistakably that she wanted to? Wanted to, you know. Of course, they won’t. And if they did, I would look away. To do otherwise would be a gross abuse of power. It would be inappropriate in every conceivable way. But it remains a recurring fantasy even now, even after the afternoon of the Women’s University.

  I will drop a note thanking Jean for the evening with Josephine at some point.

  AUBADE AFTER LARKIN

  I had imagined – showing little imagination – a room in a house in Hampstead, high-ceilinged, book-lined, with busts and curios, heavy red curtains in front of double doors giving out on to a mature garden, a heavy red damask or brocade rug thrown over a low couch, piled with cushions. So little imagination, in fact, that what I am describing – you are doubtless ahead of me – is 20 Maresfield Gardens, the Freud Museum, Freud’s last house, Freud’s consulting room. Or a reconstruction of it.

  We occasionally went to talks at the museum. Indeed, more than once you were one of the speakers. These talks were always fascinating, though I couldn’t tell you the subjects of any of them now. Coming up in the next week or two – I have looked up ‘What’s on’ at the Freud Museum – is a talk called ‘On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud’ (it is also the title of a book – I have just bought it on Amazon), in which Nathan Kravis, ‘himself a practicing psychoanalyst’, will tell how the couch became ‘an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing’.

  It goes on: ‘Kravis deftly shows that, despite the ambivalence of today’s psychoanalysts – some of whom regard it as “infantilizing” – the couch continues to be the emblem of a narrative of self-discovery. Recumbent speech represents the affirmation in the presence of another of having a mind of one’s own.’

  Though surely not. That is to say, I didn’t really think ‘seeing someone’ – as my GP deftly put it – would be full-on Freud Museum, all-out analytic couch; I just didn’t have much else to go on that morning before I got there, that’s all. That and I was trying to distract myself, to think of something other than this first session with a grief counsellor, which would be starting in ten minutes or so, the taxi having dropped me off at the Therapy Centre, a no-nonsense modern building, just off the North Circular in Mill Hill. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there, that I didn’t think it would be helpful, that I didn’t think I needed this counselling, it was that I did. Me, the last person in the world anyone could imagine needing such a thing. Even in these circumstances. And I include in the incredulous, you, a great advocate of counselling, a practitioner of it, though in a rather different field or branch of the practice, I suppose.

  That the experience was so strange and unfamiliar to me was the first thing we talked about, in fact, in the light, bright room, with its lime-green fabric tub chairs, and low table with – I noted – a box of tissues placed upon it. And then that this sense of unfamiliarity was itself strange given your profession. You had a consulting room yourself presumably? But the fact was I couldn’t remember ever having been to it. Or them. Doubtless there were a number over the years in different places. You moved around a lot. Nor could I remember you ever having described any of these rooms to me. Or even saying when we were in Freud’s reconstructed consulting room: ‘It is nothing like my consulting room. Mine is …’ – which would have been an obvious thing for you to say there, would it not?

  A lot of what I said at that first appointment – and when I said, ‘we talked’, I should really have said ‘I talked’; that’s how it works, after all – revolved around my not remembering things, or being unable to recall whether or not you had ever said, or we had ever done, this or that or the other. It had been more than a year by then. Was part of it that I was losing my connection to you?

  Perhaps. As I say, the counsellor, Caroline, was not to be drawn on this or any other question. Caroline, who I have largely consigned to the past, but who surfaces now and then. She was a bland-looking woman, of indeterminate middle age, but maybe that was a trick of the trade? I was the centre of attention, while she hovered, almost disappearing. Did I ever look her in the face? I certainly didn’t ask her a single question about her own life.

  It occurred to me – something had to; otherwise there would have been silence – that it would be rather intriguing to discuss losing you with you. In a professional capacity. What would you have done to help me?

  Caroline said nothing.

  That for one thing. That more than anything, perhaps?

  Though I wanted to be there, needed to be, I couldn’t help being – what is the phrase? – passive-aggressive. I think that is what I was being? Though was I best placed to judge? More your province. Not that I am expecting you to answer. This is not unusual in the circumstances, I assume? It takes a while for clients or patients or whatever you call them to lower their guard, to open up?

  I had, I realised, not taken nearly enough trouble (and why was I suggesting it was any trouble?) to understand your work. Your life’s work. That quest
ion again. Asked of you this time. What was it that you actually did?

  Still nothing.

  Here’s a thing. The similarities with the role of a peace negotiator are striking. This thought must have occurred to me, to you, over all the years we were together, me conducting peace negotiations, you in a consulting room nothing like this one. We must have discussed it. At some point. While you were alive. Before you were dead. Murdered. Decapitated. We must have.

  We didn’t get a lot further that first time. We left it ‘there’. You and I and Caroline. The fifty minutes had neither flown by nor dragged. In keeping with all that went before, I can’t remember what I did after I left the session. It seems rather screenplay, but I think I just walked for hours and hours. In the rain. (No, that’s too much.) Went to the pub, then. (Almost certainly.) Got drunk. (It follows.) Crashed out. A happy turn, though. Or as happy as it gets. I went back the next week. And the next. I ‘opened up’, I suppose that’s what you would call it.

  It wasn’t just the fact of your death, or the shocking nature of it, but all that followed which came flooding out.

  For the aftermath was witnessed, and captured on mobile phones, by passers-by. The story went viral. Within an hour the death of Anna Dupont was headline news around the world. It was trending on social media.

  What the footage showed was the attacker being wrestled to the ground by two other young Muslim men and detained by the police. The two men went on to appear at a vigil the following night with the 57-year-old husband of the murdered woman, a senior diplomat, highly regarded for his work on international peace negotiations. The vigil was attended by thousands of people and broadcast live. The husband called for calm, for people to come together, for reconciliation between communities. He said this is what his murdered wife would have wanted. He displayed great restraint and dignity. Or so it was said. He was much lauded. By Number 10, by Parliament and in the media. Though he had little choice but to react this way. He could hardly weep hysterically and vow bloody revenge, could he?

  He briefly became a celebrity. This is also the way of things these days. Ditto: that some good must come of it. So a foundation was set up in his wife’s name that raised hundreds of thousands of pounds in its first week. Those hundreds of young women who write to me.

  The story took a twist after a couple of days. The young, heavily bearded man, of ‘Middle Eastern’ appearance, who everyone assumed was an Islamist, was identified as a member of a far-right British nationalist party. Not a convert to Islam, but a convert from it; a British citizen of mixed Algerian and English descent; Ali Hadj-Dixon had served in the British Army in Iraq and been radicalised by the experience – but in an unexpected way. The killing, which everyone had assumed to be random, now appeared to be targeted. Anna Dupont had recently been at the refugee camp in Calais as part of a delegation of distinguished doctors and lawyers. She had spoken out on the radio about conditions there and called on the British government to admit more of the asylum seekers and migrants into the UK. The far-right British nationalist party had denounced her in a video posted online, a video which featured a more lightly bearded, seemingly lighter-skinned ‘Corporal Ali Hadj-Dixon’.

  The widower of Anna Dupont and the two young Muslims attended another event, repeating the same messages of peace and reconciliation. Several mosques and Islamic centres had been attacked in the meantime. The family of the killer had been taken into police protection after threats from Muslim extremists. Public opinion was all over the place. No one knew who to blame. Everyone blamed each other. The story was out of control. #EndtheBlameGame was trending. And that was not the end of it.

  Ali Hadj-Dixon was found to be suffering from a severe mental illness, brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder. The aftercare offered by the British Army to its soldiers who had served in Iraq was questioned and criticised. It turned out Anna Dupont had met her killer. She may have been helping him in some way, though not officially. He was not one of her patients. They had met in cafés near the research institute where she was based.

  There were arrests of senior members of the far-right group. The home of the mother of one of the men arrested was firebombed. An extreme Muslim group claimed responsibility, though of course it was suggested by some that the far-right group had again carried out the attack and made it look like an Islamist action. No one was hurt, but the house was badly damaged.

  The mother was interviewed and she denounced not the firebombers, but her son and the far-right group, saying they were to blame for the community tensions. They started all this, she said, for which she was widely praised on the left and denounced on the right. She was, it turned out, a veteran Labour councillor. With links to the far left. But the conspiracy theory pinning blame on the far-right group was later exposed as baseless. The firebombing was the work of an extreme Muslim group, previously unknown and promptly banned. The senior members of the far-right party who had been arrested were released without charge after a few days. The anti-terrorist squad said they were satisfied the killer acted alone. He was a lone wolf.

  The husband of Anna Dupont gave an interview to the BBC – a longer one – in which he was asked how he felt about the killer. There was a social media storm directed at the interviewer who asked the question. ‘What sort of a question is that to a man whose wife has been murdered?’ The widower’s answer was this. Nothing. Or if anything, pity. To be honest, he didn’t know what he felt. Confused, perhaps. He laughed as he said this. Live on air. This made some people feel uneasy. They said so on Twitter and Facebook. ‘Laughing like that when his wife has been murdered like that.’

  A week later the killer hanged himself in his cell in a high-security police station.

  There was an inquest, disciplinary hearings, an internal army investigation, a select committee inquiry. At the vigil to mark the first anniversary of the death of Anna Dupont, her husband was joined in his call for reconciliation by the veteran left-wing councillor whose house was firebombed, by her son who had been in the far-right party but had since left and was working for a counter-extremism unit at the Home Office, by a sister of Ali Hadj-Dixon, and by one of the two Muslim men who had wrestled Hadj-Dixon to the ground. But the other was absent, having been charged for his alleged involvement in a sexual grooming ring, though he was later to be found not guilty.

  The story was a mess, quite frankly. Too many elements. So many twists and turns that it had become almost farcical. @Huffpost hastily withdrew its headline: THE NEWS STORY THAT KEEPS ON GIVING. But on social media, #WhatNext? kept trending. Or the variant, #WTF?

  But through it all the husband of Anna Dupont maintained the restraint and dignity that was expected of him. He ‘threw himself’, as they say, into the work of the Anna Dupont Foundation, and as a result the reputation of Anna Dupont grew and grew.

  Caroline didn’t comment on the fact that I relayed all this in the third person. In fact – you’ve guessed it – she said nothing at all.

  Just listened.

  I completed the twelve-week course. It definitely helped. To some extent. Let me put it this way: I was in a better state at the end of it than I was when I started. I took a bunch of flowers with me for that last appointment. Caroline was most touched. Few clients were so thoughtful, she said – which struck me as unlikely.

  ‘Of course, I still don’t understand what it is you actually do?’ I said. She laughed. And didn’t say anything

  Caroline. It is a while since I thought about her.

  But I am telling you all this, why? The same reason that prompted the counselling: the thoughts.

  As my GP said, and so did friends, these thoughts are entirely understandable, it would be strange if I didn’t have them, and yet, look at me, look what they were doing to me, so I had to find a way … to …

  What?

  Not think them?

  Well, not so obsessively. Put them to the back of my mind, so to speak. Look, they were destroying me.

  So I did that. Long st
ory short, of course. Partly thanks to Caroline’s counselling. Though what she actually did – this is getting repetitive – I couldn’t tell you. Doubtless there were other factors. The passage of time: that old standby. Distractions above all. Following a ball or a hare. Pascal raged against it, but I must say I swear by my faculty to be amused by diversion. By which Pascal meant more or less anything other than contemplating ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces’, of course. Though at least he had the grace to admit, God and salvation notwithstanding, that the prospect frightened him. The 78th pensée is a good one, by the way. Descartes useless and uncertain. No, shilly-shallying there. Still, never trust a Pascal man over a Montaigne one, I always say. They wouldn’t recognise themselves as such, but both sides at the talks are Pascalians plus ultra. And you see what has happened here? A step up from balls and hares, but diversion all the same.

  Sometimes, however, the thoughts hurtle from the back of my mind to the front. They stop me in my tracks, so to speak. The trigger is God knows what? It isn’t, as might be imagined, mention – or worse – of decapitation. Videos of beheadings have featured in our proceedings a number of times. I have watched them. I have forced myself to. And don’t misunderstand me, but it is a good thing, a relief, that I have found myself having to. When my appointment as chair of the talks was first mooted, much was made of whether I could possibly be expected to sit through horrors so close to home. How could I maintain the necessary degree of emotional detachment? Most importantly, would the parties to the talks ever accept me as impartial? I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I felt my career was on the line.

  I argued strongly that what had happened to you had no bearing on my ability to do my job of thirty years plus. You had been a victim of terrorism, but, remember, Hadj-Dixon was not a jihadist. He was not an Islamic extremist. He was a British nationalist, a neo-Nazi. People often seem to forget that, which upsets me because he set out to sow just this confusion. This last point swayed it, I think. Anyway, I was appointed. I trust I have repaid the faith the governments showed in me. It was a risk, I suppose. Some eyebrows were raised in the media. And there have been occasional mutterings.