A Life Eternal

by Richard Ayre

  Nearly twenty years later I did find out, but right then I had to assume he’d used his connections to find me. Things like that happen in life.

  ‘How did we get here?’ I asked her, trying to forget about that crazy Professor.

  ‘Our hire car was wrecked, so I put you into this one and drove north. We’re in Scotland. I didn’t know where else to go.’

  I wondered what would happen about the house and the crash and the dead bodies, then I forgot about it. Whatever would happen would happen. Our real names were not in any registers either in France or Britain so we should be safe enough.

  Madeleine made me comfortable with more of her cleaned silk-stocking bandages, then we began to drive south.

  We both just wanted to go home.

  XVIII

  That was the last I ever heard about Herbert Pfumpf, apart from a rather poignant episode in 1977 which explained a lot.

  I assumed that, whoever the gunmen had worked for, they were adept enough to cover their, and thankfully our, traces: for there was never any news about burned-out cottages or bullet-riddled bodies being found in the Northumberland countryside. But even though he was gone, Pfumpf still haunted my dreams at times. He still occasionally does now.

  I did hear the news that Grace and her husband parted ways, though. They went through a messy public divorce, full of incriminations and acrimony. Grace Wheland, nee Yeo, then thankfully disappeared from my life. There were the rumours she ended up with nothing, but a woman like Grace would always get on. I’m sure there were plenty of other fools willing to believe her golden lies.

  Madeleine and I eventually returned to our cottage near Bordeaux. On that first night of my recovery, she drove us to a hotel in York where I spent half a week getting better. The bullets pushed themselves from my body within a couple of days and my skin knitted itself back together. Then we went home.

  The following years were the best I have ever lived. And they were the best because of Madeleine. As she grew older, she only got more beautiful to me. She went back to work at the hospital, eventually becoming a Matron there. Even before we had left for Britain I had already taken on another identity, as William Taylor was getting old now. My French was so good I could easily pass as a native, so I changed my name to Guy Besson. Although Madeleine and I never formally married, I took her name and bought her a ring. I had to keep out of the way of her friends at the hospital of course, and she lived a lonely life because of me.

  As time went by, she could no longer introduce me as her rather young husband and so, if anyone asked, she said I was her son. She was the love of my life and she gave up everything for me. No children, no friends, no family. It was a lonely existence in that French cottage, and yet we very rarely argued, very rarely fell out. I never tired of her company and I like to think she never tired of mine.

  I had been teaching myself carpentry for some years now, something I used to enjoy as a child, and eventually I became good enough to be able to sell some of my pieces in the shops around the area. Madeleine got older, her hair got greyer, and I stayed exactly the same.

  I hated my curse, but in those years it was nullified by Madeleine’s love. If it had been the other way around, I don’t know if I could have stood it as she did. To watch yourself growing inevitably older, whilst your partner stays exactly the same? That is a very real horror, and I saw the fear in her eyes at times, although she never said anything about it. We lived a good life together, Madeleine and I, as short as it was.

  Because of course, one day it would have to end. And that day came around far too soon.

  *

  October 1962. We were in the kitchen. I was cooking dinner—Madeleine had taught me to become a passable enough chef—and we were listening to the radio.

  Over in Cuba, there was a tense stand-off between America and the USSR. Kennedy had set up his blockade and it looked like the Soviet ships were going to ignore it. If that happened, God only knew what might become of the world.

  Trying not to think too much about the situation abroad, I was bent over the stove, and I asked Madeleine to pass me something. I forget what it was now.

  ‘Maddy?’ I asked, still with my back to her.

  I turned to find her staring at me, totally immobile. The pupil of one of her eyes was hugely dilated. It looked black.

  I grabbed her arms in alarm.

  ‘Maddy? What’s wrong? Maddy?’

  Slowly, slowly, her eyes seemed to re-focus and she looked at me in alarm. She frowned, touching a hand to her head.

  ‘Do you mind if I lie down for a minute?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a terrible headache.’

  I led her to the bedroom where she slept for the next fourteen hours. I stood over her the whole time, worried out of my mind.

  When she woke, she seemed fine. Nothing else happened for a while. We both tried to forget about the strange occurrence and went back to our lives as normal. But over the next year or two, there were the odd things that only made me worry about her more.

  Her memory wasn’t as sharp as it had been. In November 1963, we were listening to the news about the assassination of Kennedy and, out of the blue, Madeleine asked who he was.

  I frowned.

  ‘The President of the USA?’ I said, and she thought for a second or two before nodding. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, distractedly.

  It went on. She grew clumsy; I would find jars of food smashed on the kitchen floor where she had just left them. I would clean the mess up and say nothing. She forgot to bathe until I reminded her. Over those few, short years her condition worsened.

  Eventually, despite her protestations that she was fine, I drove her to the hospital. They did their tests and only a couple of weeks later we were back in the doctor’s office. The expression on his face revealed to me a shadow of despair so deep I could barely comprehend it.

  ‘Your mother has a tumour, Monsieur Besson,’ he said. ‘Deep inside her brain.’ He turned to Madeleine. ‘I’m sorry. It’s completely inoperable.’

  The silence that followed was awful. I had flashes of my past: people I had known, things I had seen. God only knows what went through Madeleine’s disintegrating mind, but she turned and took my hand and squeezed it tightly. She smiled at me and comforted me as I broke down completely. Madeleine had always been the strongest of us.

  We went home and lay face-to-face together on the settee, not talking. I stroked her greying hair and she held me and we just stared at each other. She was still not yet even sixty, yet she was being taken away from me, piece by beautiful piece.

  I still see Madeleine when I close my eyes now. Hers is the first face I remember in the morning, and the last thing I think of at night. People say you often forget loved ones’ features when they are gone, but I remember everything about her. The lines on her face, the colour of her eyes, her scent. I remember it all.

  By the following year, Madeleine was no longer the woman I had known. She lay in the hospital bed, her hair now snow-white because of her disease, her ravaged face thin and wasted. Her memory had gone completely in the end. She forgot about me, forgot about us. She raved and raged. She became demented and, finally, she become catatonic. It was only then that I took her into the hospital.

  And on a dark and rainy November evening, six years to the day that Kennedy had been assassinated, Madeleine left me.

  As the nurses went about their business with her cold body, I sat outside the room in a numb world of disbelief. Nothing seemed to make sense. The day-to-day sounds of the hospital—a typewriter clacking, a trolley rattling past—blurred into a soundscape I couldn’t understand. I sat there for hours, I think.

  Eventually, they came and asked me whether I wanted to see her one last time. I went into the room and gazed down upon the woman I had loved eternally. We had been given only twenty-five years together. Twenty-five years of happiness and dedication. Twenty-five years of perfection. And now she was gone. She was gone.

  It was only then that the tears came.
I sat next to her, cradling her, weeping silently. She had given me everything and I had consigned her to a life alone. I hated myself. I wished with all my heart that I had never met her so she could have spent her days with someone worthy of her love and devotion in the short time she had been allocated on this planet. I told her I was sorry for what I was, but it made no difference.

  She was gone.

  Finally, as the night drew in outside, I kissed her sweet face and said goodbye to her. I was alone again.

  I walked the corridors of that hospital endlessly. For some reason I didn’t want to step outside, because that would mean I had accepted the fact that she was gone. I would have accepted she was dead, and I just couldn’t. Maybe if I stayed within the confines of the hospital, I would return to her room to find her smiling at me. Asking me where I’d been. Holding me tight.

  I went from ward to ward, wandering aimlessly, my eyes red-rimmed and unfocussed, my mind in a vacuum. I came to a large sitting area and took a seat. There was a TV playing and someone was reporting about the Apollo 12 mission that had recently returned to Earth. I stared at the smiling face of the NASA man who was talking, but I didn’t take in anything of what he said.

  I was numb. I was no longer capable of emotion. I had cried myself out at Madeleine’s side. I just felt empty, used-up. Once again I felt like a husk of a man, with no reason and no purpose. I didn’t want to go on without her, but I didn’t have a choice. I tried to suppress the old anger for her sake, but I could feel it once more bubbling like molten lava inside me. It was already beginning to consume me again, now that she was no longer there to stop it.

  I turned away from the TV and looked at a far wall. It was covered in photographs and I went and stared at them, simply for something to do.

  It was the very first one I saw. It showed a middle-aged man with thinning, greying hair, wearing a white doctor’s coat. He smiled out of the photo. He had a dark face, a bent nose where it had been broken at some time in the past and a scar on his right cheek. His eyes were as black as night.

  And so it was that on the night the only true love of my long life died, I found the Medic.

  *

  Or so I thought.

  After Madeleine’s funeral, after I had drunk myself into a stupor, after I had lain on the floor of the cottage and wept helplessly, clinging to a picture of her, once her scent began to disappear from my life, I returned again to the hospital and stared again at the photo of the Medic.

  The name underneath said, ‘Doctor Franz Liebnicht: Consultant Surgeon, 1931-1936’.

  It was now late 1969. The Medic had been at this hospital thirty-three years ago. Would there be any records of his movements? I began to investigate.

  I honestly think I became interested again because Madeleine was gone. I believe that if she had still been alive and I had seen his picture, I would have ignored it. It was because I was so inconsolable that I went after him again. I had nothing else to do.

  I became a regular patron of the hospital’s library. I spoke to older members of staff who may have been around at the time, and I found out everything there was to know about Dr Franz Liebnicht.

  He was apparently born in Austria in 1888 and had fought in the last two years of World War One. After the war, he returned to medical training, getting his doctorate in 1920. He had worked in Austria and had then moved to France in 1930, taking up his position at the hospital. In 1936, however, he had returned to Austria.

  One of the old Matrons, who had been a young trainee nurse at the time, told me she remembered he had said he had family problems. Someone had died and he was returning to help out. She was a bit vague on details. I couldn’t find out anything more about the reasons, but I did find out that Franz Liebnicht was a Jew. There were no records of him after 1936. The Matron said she believed he must have perished in one of the Nazis’ death camps. She believed he must have died during the war. But why would a Jew have returned to the anti-Semitic Austria of 1936?

  I searched frantically for the best part of half a year. I sold the cottage—the memories were too hurtful, and it was nothing without Madeleine anyway—and I went to Austria, where I combed the records there. My German was almost as good as my French after my time in Berlin and, although a little rusty, it soon came back to me enough to get me through.

  But I found nothing. Franz Liebnicht seemed to have disappeared off the face of the Earth in August 1936. I was once again left with nothing.

  I eventually gave up on him again. I told myself it didn’t matter; I told myself he was dead. The photograph at the hospital showed a man twenty years older than the face I remembered from my death bed in St Theresa’s.

  Whatever—or whoever—he was, he wasn’t like me because he was getting older. Pfumpf’s words came back to me: ‘You’re not the only one’. But he was wrong. I was the only one. If not, how could the photograph show a man who was obviously ageing?

  I was alone again. I had no one: no family, no friends, no acquaintances, and my future roared ahead of me like a road that would never end.

  I remember standing at a crossroads, just outside Vienna, in March 1970. I had been alive for almost seventy-four years and there was a terrible, horrible chance that I would go on living forever.

  I stood at that crossroads and looked each way. Whichever road I took, I didn’t think it would make one iota of difference. I closed my eyes and turned around three times. When I opened them, one of the roads stretched before me.

  I tightened the straps of my backpack around me and started walking.

  Part Two

  XIX

  Over the intervening years I learned to limit my experiences. There was always something new to learn, somewhere new to see, but I knew that if I let myself I would have eventually done it all and seen it all. I rationed myself.

  The road in Austria eventually led to Switzerland. I could only really move around Western Europe. In 1961, Khrushchev had built his wall through Berlin and the Iron Curtain cut me off from a lot of places I wanted to see. That would have to come later.

  So I stayed in Zurich for a while, setting myself up as—of all things—a toy maker. Using the carpentry skills I had taught myself, I made little wooden cars and tractors and puppets and sold them at markets around the area. I took my time with each trinket I made, making sure every angle, every joint, every dowel was perfect before assembling the finished product. I rented a small apartment on the outskirts of Zurich and, when I wasn’t making toys, I wandered around the city, becoming familiar with all the streets and alleyways.

  I kept away from making any connections with the people of Zurich. I was still grieving for Madeleine and would often wake in the night having dreamed of her. The echo of my greeting to her mocked me, and on those nights I would wipe my eyes, rise, and sit by the window, smoking endless cigarettes, watching blindly as the sun rose over the mountains in the distance.

  At first, life without her was a nonsense. I survived rather than lived and, even though the horrible pain slowly began to recede, it never left me. I missed her. I missed her so much, and I still do. Without her, I saw no point in life. A blackness seemed to cling to my soul and other people sensed it. I couldn’t have got close to anyone even if I had wanted to. I believe I frightened people.

  I stayed in Zurich until 1971 and then, feeling unsettled again, I moved on.

  I left in the high summer of that year and went south, into Italy, walking all the way. I had decided on this mode of transport as it was the cheapest and would take the longest. I eked out every minute of every day, trying to find something to interest my broken soul. I visited Bologna, Florence, and Rome. I went to the museums and stared at the Renaissance glories and the paintings and statues and they all meant nothing to me.

  I found that my disinterest in everything grew. Everything bored me. I had moved from a world of steam to a world of nuclear weapons. When I was a boy a trip to the nearest market was an exciting prospect. Now man had walked on the moon, TVs
were everywhere, cars clogged the streets, new technologies were being created every day, and it all passed me by with a monstrous indifference.

  Everything seemed like a complete waste of time. Nothing interested me; nothing kept me in one place more than a few months. But again, I made sure I stayed at least a moderate amount of time in each town or city to fully understand it, to find its hidden secrets. I believe I walked every alleyway and every street, from Venice to Naples and back again.

  I wondered again and again how I could be the way I was. Why was I like this? Why did I continue, exactly the same, when my love had withered and died? What was the point?

  I decided that, if nothing else, I should use my unique existence to try and better myself. I would force myself to learn new things, even if everything left me cold. That was what Madeleine would have wanted me to do, I was sure. She would want me to use the immensity of time that belonged to me to absorb, to know, to understand. I started doing it for her, but I found that it took the memories of her off my mind for short periods of time, so I began to pursue new talents with a rising vigour. Anything to stop the hurt from the loss of her from tearing me apart.

  I picked up conversational Italian. From some buskers in Milan I learned how to play the guitar, and when I left the city I walked with it on my back. Another busker showed me how to play a reed flute and I practised every day.

  I divided my time into segments of two hours. Two hours of day carving wooden toys, two practising the guitar, two working on the flute, two learning a new language. I made myself concentrate only on those two hours before moving on to the next thing. I tried not to think about tomorrow, or the next week or month or year, or decade. Or the next century.

  I let my beard grow again, and my hair got long as was the fashion of the day. I met a few women along my wandering, endless route and I stayed with them for a while before moving on once more. They were brief, carnal pleasures only. Some of those women I still remember, most of them I don’t. I got close to none of them. I knew I couldn’t, even if I had wanted to. None of them could ever live up to what Madeleine had meant to me. Whatever the purpose or the point of my existence was, I knew by then that relationships were not allowed.