A Judgement on a Life

by Stephen Baddeley

  I told Karlsberg that I knew what he’d done, and that I knew about the forgery and about having Tommy accused of fraud, and that if he didn’t do what I wanted him to do, I would see him exposed and shamed in front of the world’s art fraternity. But I never thought he’d go off and hang himself. I suppose I should have felt bad about him doing that, but I didn’t much. I knew I’d saved Tommy and that was the most important thing. All the bad people could get whatever it was that they were due, and I didn’t see too much need to feel bad about the sleazy, serial wife-beating Karlsberg topping himself.

  Then all the bad things happened to me, then Tommy saved me and you know the rest and how we were now a happy, if somewhat unusual, family. That was until I saw the Esmeralda slide into English Harbour. It was then that I knew this wasn’t over and that there would be more bad times to come.

  I suppose my depression started about then. I’d taken all of our endless happiness for granted and just the sight of the Esmeralda did away with that. Then, with Ambrosia and Tommy trying for a baby, and my feeling of being sidelined in their affections, it just got worse. Depression feeds on itself and, for me, it spiralled down into the same sadness I felt when the first lot of bad times happened and Tommy told me he hated me.

  So, when Peter sat down in my office and gave me his look of dispassionate disinterest, I knew there were even more bad things coming back into my life, and not just into my life this time, but into all of our lives.

  He started by talking about the girls and how much we must love them, and me especially love them, because of the expectation I’d had, for most of my life, that I would never have children of my own. He spoke about all the hopes we must have for their futures and how lucky they were to have parents who loved them, wanted the best for them, and had the means of providing the best for them. Then he spoke, in a general way, about the uncertainties of life and of all the bad things that can happen to any of us, just by chance. Then he spoke, in a general way, of all the bad things that could happen, not by chance, but by the intervention of malign forces. Then he spoke, in a very specific way, about what he wanted and about what would happen, what he would make happen, to the girls and to Tommy, if he didn’t get what he wanted. And what he wanted was me.

  I understood, then, why Karlsberg hanged himself.

  Over the next few months, as our lives lurched from disaster to disaster and mine into ‘the Slough of Despond’, I thought more than once about taking up the Karlsberg option and I don’t know why I didn’t. Then, when he used me and used the courts, to take the girls away from Tommy, and to take the three of us back to London, I thought they might be safe and that I could have them with me and that I could care for them, but that wasn’t Peter’s plan and I should have known, from prior experience, that it wouldn’t be. They were taken away from me too, and kept hidden away as guarantors of my good behaviour. It was the worst time of my life and I suppose of all of our lives, but I could only think of myself at that time and thoughts of what Tommy must be going through rarely broke through into the consciousness of my dark, involuted life.

  I could feel my life sliding into some sort of endless torment, and, because of that, I could feel my mind going into some sort of protective limbo, onto some grey, flat and featureless plain, where the reality of what my life had become didn’t exist for me anymore.

  Five

  So, I saw her getting out of the car. It was in front of the house in Eaton Square. I was delivering Peter’s new Sickert. It was a drab piece, but with the je ne sais pas of real life about it, like a lot of Sickerts. A crumpled nude on a crumpled bed.

  I knew it was her, because of the way she got out of the car. She had a way of moving that was all her own. It had something to do with her height, but that wasn’t all of it. There was a sinuous almost snakelike way she moved that was all her own.

  But that was all I recognised.

  It was the emptiness. There was always something about Annie that filled the space around her, that left no unpainted corners, no unsung songs. There was always something about Annie that glowed from an inner furnace. A thing that gave her an indefinable something that was special to her. The thing everyone saw when they came close to her. The thing that lit her and made her so easy to like and to love, and the thing that distorted the world around her, and made things seem not quite real. That special thing was gone.

  It wasn’t just the loss of weight. It wasn’t the loss of weight you come to notice slowly, and not the loss of weight you associate with taking exercise and getting fit. It was the loss of weight that confronts you, and you associate with old newsreels of concentration camps in Poland, and photos of cancer wards. She looked terrible.

  She was with the Major, a goddam freak of a man, a man I’d never liked, and now disliked more than any person I’d ever disliked before. I disliked him because he was a goddam freak with crazy eyes and the stench of evil about him. He was the sort of guy, you knew, who would stop at nothing to get Peter what Peter wanted. He was Peter’s mace, his unsheathed sword. No one could ever, ever like the Major.

  He was holding the door open as Annie slid out, but it wasn’t the act of a servant, it was the act of a jailer.

  So, I knew something bad had happened, and that whatever it was, was something real bad.

  She stood on the sidewalk while the Major closed the car door and it drove away. She waited on the sidewalk like a prisoner to be led, passive and defeated, to her cell.

  She turned to look at me as I walked up to her and there was recognition in her eyes. Recognition, but nothing else. No warmth, no pleasure, no happy recollection of the times we’d shared. There was sad emptiness and nothing else, just recognition and sad emptiness.

  She was a two dimensional cut-out of the deep and luscious woman I once knew. So, I knew something real bad had happened.

  She turned away and followed the Major broken and docile into the house.

  I sensed there was someone watching me. It was a thing I knew without knowing how I knew it. We all get that feeling from time to time. I even think it’s got a name. So I stood on the sidewalk and looked around. There were a few people in the street, and none of them was looking at me, so I thought I must be wrong. But I knew I wasn’t wrong. I didn’t know who it was who was making me not wrong about that. I didn’t know until later, and when I did know, I wasn’t surprised.

  Peter was ‘unavailable’ so I delivered the Sickert to his secretary and left. As I left the house, I could tell, again, that I was being watched. I walked down the street and then around the corner to the Star Tavern. It was where I stopped, sometimes, for a drink on my way home from the more exacting fist and gauntlet meetings with Peter.

  I ordered a double Jack Daniel’s and sat by the window, so I could watch back up the street. The sight of her, what was left of her, had upset me more than I expected. She was the woman I’d always cared for, and now knew I loved. But only loved in that ‘lost love’ sad sort of way people can have of loving someone who loves someone else. I came to know that, as I sipped Jack, and looked back up the street.

  When I first met my wife, I fell in love, or thought I did. Now I’m not so sure I ever did. Now I’m goddam sure I didn’t. When you think you’re in love for the first time, it’s hard to be sure. You’ve got zip to compare it with. So how do you know whether what you’re feeling is love or just something else? Liking or lusting maybe? Now, sitting there sipping Jack, I knew what I’d ever felt for my wife was something less, and something that, for sure, wasn’t love. I knew it, because I knew what real love was, because I knew I was in love with Annie, and had been for years, years without really knowing it.

  I sat by the window and looked back up the street. People were passing by. In London, people were always passing by. They were well-dressed people, mostly. It was Belgravia, and Belgravia is the London home of well-dressed people. But even Belgravia needs ordinary people, people to del
iver things, people to keep things clean, people to make things run, people in blue jeans and high-viz shirts, people who went ’ome to ’ackney and ’ammersmiff. Those people the London ‘suits’ and their wives didn’t see, because they didn’t want to see them.

  I knew I was being watched, but I didn’t know who by. I knew I wasn’t being watched from outside, because from where I was sitting no one could see in from outside. So, I knew I was being watched from inside. It wasn’t a hard thing to work out.

  But I didn’t know who by, and even after I’d looked around the bar I still didn’t know who by. I knew it had to be someone who’d come in after me. It wasn’t a hard thing to work out. I suppose it was an easy thing to work out, but sometimes easy things to work out aren’t always right. I knew someone was watching me, but I couldn’t work out who it was. It was a strange feeling. I couldn’t work it out.

  We slept in different rooms, had done for years. She said I snored, but I knew I didn’t. She said it kept her awake and moved me to another room. She would never have moved herself. I was happy to sleep in a different room. When she wanted sex, with me, she came into my room and the times she wanted sex, with me, were getting less. They were usually when she was drunk, or when an affair had ended bad. I think they all ended bad and I doubt any of them ended well.

  It’s not a good thing, making love to a drunk woman, especially a drunk woman you don’t love. It isn’t great to make love to a woman you’d probably never loved, and who’d just finished an affair. Making love to my wife wasn’t a good thing to do anymore and I avoided it as much as I could.

  When I got home that evening, I lay on my bed and thought. My wife came in and said she was taking our daughter to the opera. I told them to have fun. It was Turandot so they probably wouldn’t. Why did Puccini have it in for his heroines?

  I lay on my bed and thought. I knew I had to do something, but I didn’t know what that ‘something’ should be. I knew I had to do the right thing, and if the thing I did was the wrong thing, I could make things a whole heap worse for her. I didn’t want to do that, that was for sure. Annie was special to me and the thought of maybe making things worse for her was not a good thought to be thinking.

  So I lay on my bed and thought about the thing I had to do, and in doing that, I thought about Tom Lodge. Where was he, what had happened to him, and what was he up to? I knew there was no possibility that he and Annie were no longer in love, and I knew that what he must be feeling must be something complicated and something real bad.

  So I thought about what the best thing to do should be. I thought ‘the best thing to do’, should be ‘the first thing to do’, and that should be to find out where Tom was, and to find out what he was doing about what I saw in Eaton Square. I knew he would be doing something and, if I could help him, it would be a good thing for me to do. So, I set about contacting him, because, for goddam sure, it seemed the right goddam thing to do.

  Six

  I was empty. I was finished. Not finished finished. Just as finished as I was never finished before. All I ever wanted was gone. Annie was gone. The girls were gone. Ambrosia was shot. Our son was dead. I was empty. I was finished. I was beaten. I lost the game, I lost all the games. There was no point in playing anymore. I was a loser.

  Then I visited the Darwin Hospital. Then I talked to that wise black woman. Then I decided I wasn’t finished, wasn’t beaten, wasn’t a loser. I decided not to be finished, not to be beaten, not to lose. The decision I made, to not be any of those things, was the best decision I made in all of my life. My life so far. Thank ‘God’ for that wise black woman. Thank ‘God’ for all wise black women.

  I decided I wasn’t finished, or any of the other things, because deciding that I was any of those things, would be the worst decision I could make. Because of that, I didn’t make it.

  So I decided that, deciding not to be finished, was a good thing to decide not to be. Deciding that I wasn’t finished, was the start of the rest of my life.

  I decided not to be finished and, in deciding that, I decided to begin again. To begin all over again from the time my life began.

  My life, so far, began on the twenty-ninth of April 1989, the day before my twenty-third birthday. The day Annie sat by my beach gate wrapped in her towel. The day I showed her around my house. The day the towel hit the floor. The day I fell in love.

  So what to do?

  I knew what to do. Not how to do it. I was a child in a grown-up world. A child where other people weren’t. I was a child when the towel hit the floor. I was a child in a world, where other people knew how things worked, how the world worked, how the minds of the other people worked. I knew nothing of those things, and then, the only thing I learned about was love, well, that’s not true, I learned about sex too, and learning about that came before I knew I was in love. The poets tell me I shouldn’t get those two confused. That’s hard sometimes, when you’re having sex with someone you love. It was only after we frolicked all day that I realised how much I loved her and later, how much she loved me too. The learning of those things and the knowledge of those things, were all I thought I needed. Then the almost terrible things happened, and then, when the almost terrible things were over, things were good, better than good. But then, the really terrible things happened, and they’re the really terrible things I’m writing about now.

  So what to do?

  Mr Munroe was gone. That was bad. Iain wasn’t gone. That was good. Could Iain be my saviour, just like his father was? I didn’t know. And if he could be my saviour, could he save the others too? I didn’t know. (I was about to write, ‘I didn’t know. I’ve never known’, but that wouldn’t be right, because later I did know, and that’s what this story is about, and why I didn’t write it.)

  Iain had brothers. We met in Sydney, all of us met. We talked for a day. We thought for a day. We met for another day. We decided things. The decisions were good. We saw that they were good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

  I flew back to Darwin. The dogs were pleased to see me.

  Ambrosia was shot. Shot in the back. There would be consequences.

  We flew her to Sydney. Her doctor was famous. He operated on her spine. She would live. She would never walk. That’s what he said.

  We lost our son. Our son was dead. Our son was murdered. There would be consequences.

  She was all I had. I cherished her because she was all I had. I loved her and I cherished her. She was all I had. My other loves were gone.

  There would be consequences. Not sudden, epic or memorable consequences. Just consequences.

  So, what to do next?

  What to do next was a thing of delicacy. A thing of finesse. Before we knew what to do next, we needed to know many things. We needed to know what it was that was.

  We needed to know what was real. We needed to know what was a lie. We needed to know how the things that happened happened. Why the things that happened happened. Who made who do what. How did who do what. If who did what, why did who do what. I knew the answers to some of those questions.

  We knew a lot. Not all we needed to. Some of what we needed to know was hidden in other men’s minds.

  Where was my wife? Where were my daughters?

  Seven

  So, I called Darwin and spoke to some guy called ‘Mr B’. He said he couldn’t tell me where Tom was. I didn’t know whether that meant he didn’t know where Tom was, or whether he knew where Tom was, but wasn’t gonna damn well tell me. I could remember meeting the guy when I was staying at the big house, at the time of the wedding. I could remember him being introduced as the gardener, and I could remember thinking he was more than the goddam gardener. Everything about him said he was ‘more than the goddam gardener’. One day, we would all be happy he was ‘more than the goddam gardener’. That was all a long time away in the future.

  So Tom didn’t want me to know where
he was, or perhaps anyone to know where he was. That was a good thing I guess. Well, I thought that was a good thing, probably a good thing. He was doing things and didn’t want anyone to know what those thing were, or where he was doing them. I thought that was a good thing.

  I wanted him to know what I knew. I wanted him to know I knew where she was. I wanted him to know there were watchers I couldn’t see. I wanted him to know I wanted to help and anything he wanted me to do, I would do. I wanted him to know I worked in Eaton Square, and could find out things he didn’t know, and help, maybe, with things he needed to know.

  I wanted him to know that I was in love with Annie too, but not in the same way he was in love with her. I knew his love was different to mine, that it was a love that needed her, and that without her, he could never be whole and never be happy. I wanted him to know that my love was different, and what I needed, was for her to be happy, and I knew, for her to be happy, she needed to be with him, to be by his side, making him happy, and in making him happy, be happy too.