This was not a healthy way to look at another human being, I told myself in my outpatients’ clinic; you should see a naked woman with compassion or respect. For my faulty vision I blamed the love-mania that had stolen my judgment. And I had adored her. The thought that she would spend the rest of her days in a place where I could not be with her seemed to me a sin against nature. I lamented the absence of the closeness that was the opposite of solitude: to know and be known so well … It had seemed an answer, a solution to the grief of living, to the roiling nightmare of our century. Sometimes I feared the loss of it would drive me to end up in a back ward with Reggie and Diego.
Then for years what pained me most was the absence of her company—the hurrying footfall, the timbre of her voice, the life in those dark eyes. Without them I was half a man, I was nothing; I would have been better off unborn if living was to be without her.
It must have been during this same period, as I completed my training, when various practical details of our time together also started to come back. I suppose this is a normal pattern with trauma; it’s some time after the accident that the victim remembers swerving to avoid a bicyclist only to see the lorry bearing down … I remembered Luisa’s shyness at dinner that first night. Perhaps, however, it was more than shyness; perhaps she was already fighting a battle with her conscience in front of her sister. I remembered too the incompleteness I had noticed in her accounts of growing up. And of course there was the struggle that Lily Greenslade had visibly undergone when I asked if I could take Luisa to Naples as my interpreter: I saw now that it was not Luisa’s virtue that was giving Lily pause for thought. Doubtless if I were to go over it all again I would see many other hints and clues.
The years turned into decades, and I knew that Luisa wouldn’t look the same; she might even have become a different person. In some ways I hoped so; then my torment would be less, because the woman I had loved no longer existed. But that thought was too much like a death; better to live with the torment of her unchanged absence—that radiance now bestowed on others who could not appreciate it.
What stayed constant was my solitude. When I first kissed Luisa I had felt that while she was alive I could never be lost. It had not occurred to me that we would be parted. Ten years after the last time I saw her I knew that having loved Luisa I would forever afterwards be lonely.
I called Max away from an unpleasant-looking dog the size of a small pony whose owner was drinking a can of beer and headed for the gate of the Little Scrubs. I could never persuade Max to stay in the back of the car; he liked to ride with his nose against the windscreen, even if it meant he was thrown against the dashboard when I braked. I stroked his head as I started the engine, but he was already concentrating on the road. My fondness for the dog was absurd, I thought, as we pulled away: his dignity, his whiskery smile, his bottomless good humor. I dreaded the day of his death so much that it threatened to take away all the pleasure I had in his living. Such a strange creature, I thought, as we turned onto the Harrow Road: he doesn’t know he’s going to die. Only I know his fate. What cosmic joke was he a part of? None. He was at one with creation; the joke was on us, the botched animals.
* * *
THERE WAS AN elderly man, Mr. Lowe, who used to come and see me as an outpatient at Silverglades, my first place in Bristol. He was a decent old fellow, retired from a nursery garden business. His wife, his grandchildren, and an arthritic annual week on the ski slopes were his main interests. One day he’d read about a sex case in the local paper, and it had made him feel uneasy. During the First World War, when he was a young man in a West Country regiment in France, there had been a riotous evening in Albert after which he and a few others had gone off in search of girls. The distinction between professional and amateur was not always well defined, he told me. There were brothels with colored lights outside, but there were also sisters, floosies, pickups, bar girls, even mothers who were in his phrase “pretty willing.” He found himself upstairs in a farmhouse with a woman in her thirties. There was a disagreement about what he was allowed to do; he didn’t speak French, but felt that he was entitled to more than putting his hand inside her underwear. A struggle followed, in which he prematurely ended matters; there was a mess but no harm done, as he put it. He left a few more francs with her and went to rejoin his friends.
The next day he was back in the line; a week later he was going over the top at Gommecourt and saw all but one of his friends killed. He forgot about the woman. He hadn’t given her a thought for almost forty years, but since reading the newspaper report, he could think of little else. Night after night he dreamed of being arrested for some crime at which he had vaguely connived long ago but whose details he couldn’t remember. Often these involved burying someone he had accidentally killed—a vagrant or person unknown whose loss had never been reported—but at whose burial place some sniffer dog kept turning up a connection to him.
I reassured him that the chances of his being arrested almost forty years later were negligible; I told him that while no one could condone a sexual assault in war or peace, the Soviet army had raped its way through Russia, Poland, and Germany as the Moroccans had through Italy—with impunity.
His anxiety, however, was harder to uproot. He was calmer about the chances of arrest and about the likely effect of the trauma on the woman; what kept him from sleeping was the thought that there might be other events in his life that he couldn’t remember for which he might yet stand judgment.
“If you forget something, surely it must be over and gone, Doctor. Isn’t there a time limit after which you can say, ‘Well, that just didn’t happen?’ Can I be liable for things I don’t remember?”
Mr. Lowe’s neurosis eventually made him ill enough for me to refer him to my consultant.
I thought of Mr. Lowe while I was considering Pereira’s invitation to a second visit. His anxieties were a version of my own, and while I had been able to accept the true story of how I had been wounded at Anzio, I had a vague fear of other monsters being disturbed in their deep ocean sanctuary. But I am a man who, if there is some challenge to be met, will always—more from curiosity than from courage—find it irresistible. I was not afraid of Alexander Pereira, I told myself, or of being his executor, and that weekend I found myself writing to accept in principle, asking him to name a time that suited him.
* * *
AMONG THE THINGS I needed to do before going anywhere was visit the dentist, a Cypriot with consulting rooms on the Harrow Road. He was only fifteen minutes’ walk away and didn’t, like the previous one, ask questions when my mouth was full of instruments. In the waiting room I picked up a magazine that advertised houses for sale in the countryside—from Scottish mansions with acres of deer stalking to white bungalows in Surrey.
A familiar-looking tree caught my attention: a short yew trimmed to an egg shape. In a moment I saw it was my childhood house, the Old Tannery, which was for sale. There was a picture of the main façade that made it look larger than I remembered and a description of the “luxurious” interior that must have bordered on the illegal.
My mother had died in 1970, and I had sold the house to a man called Peterson, who wanted the garden for his young children. Although the interior had barely been touched since the twenties, it was a good size for a family, and there was room outside for them to play football and ride their bicycles. The Petersons cared as little as we had about the paintwork and upkeep, though I think they did install central heating. I was glad to see the garden being used.
Towards the end, my mother had borrowed against the value of the house to support her when she retired from working at the farm, but even after I’d paid off this debt there was enough left for me to buy a flat of my own in what was then a most unfashionable part of London.
Looking at the Victorian brickwork in the photograph reminded me of the last time I had seen my mother. By then eighty years old, she had been ill for some time with cancer. An operation had briefly held out some hope, but the il
lness had returned and she had accepted the inevitable. I took a taxi from the station to our village. It was a cold February day: the sun caught icy puddles on the lower slopes of Pocock’s fifty-acre field, and there were thick banks of snowdrops round the war memorial outside the church. I let myself in with the latchkey I had had since I was at school and called upstairs.
There was no reply, so I went up and knocked on the bedroom door. My mother was propped on several pillows with a tray on the bed beside her and the dog, a terrier called Plum, lying on her feet. The plug-in wireless was tuned to Radio 2 and was playing on the bedside table, a blend of old tunes and banter from a lightly accented presenter.
“Who’s looking after you?” I said, sitting down on the bed. She looked pale and hollow, the gray hair plastered to the side of her face. I pictured the diseased cells eating their way through her internal organs. I saw that the trouble with cancer is that what should be postmortem changes begin while you’re alive; it’s the dying that kills you.
“The district nurse comes once a day, and Delia from the shop looks in every evening to see if I need anything.”
“Have you got a lodger at the moment?”
“Mr. Bowman. But he’s away.”
“When did you last see the doctor?”
“Friday, I think. How are you, Robert?”
“I’m fine. Is he giving you enough pain relief?”
“He gave me these tablets.”
“I’ll have a word with him. I’m sure he can give you something stronger. Where does it hurt?”
“In my side, mostly. I feel ever so tired.”
Watching a parent die is one of the great trials of a life; the only thing to be said for it is that it is unrepeatable. The skin was puffed up under my mother’s eyes, an oddity in the plane of her face, whose skin had been pulled tight against the bone by weight loss. Her eyes still had some light in them, and, as I squeezed her hand, I tried not to think of all the things they had seen and how little those experiences now meant.
My own body felt insultingly well, in what was called “rude” health. For all the anguish, there was an element of smugness in the way I sensed the pain-free movement of my weight on the bed, the frictionless digestion and easy passage of air to the lungs—the unnoticed miracle of health that I should learn to cherish.
One thing of value that my mother’s eyes had known was my father’s face, and as I gazed into them at that moment I half hoped to see—as one can sometimes catch the lights of a window reflected in another’s iris—a small image of him smiling back at me. But there of course was no such thing, merely a mother’s glaucous goodwill. Her eyes had seen me as an infant and a child; when she died she would take with her all that I had been in those years before my mind was formed: the wicker basket at the bedside, my head limp against her chest in sleep; the first words, learning how to walk, the bleeding knees, the schoolroom door, the emergence of something like a personality from the falls and tantrums and striving—all those sensations and events which for her were daily trials but which for me were defining and all but holy … these would now be lost in the abyss of time.
In the wadis at Anzio I had seen how quickly we made light of the life that had been taken from the recently killed, as though we had known all along that theirs was an existence to be treated with a shrug, while we, the survivors, had been chosen to carry something more weighty. With my mother, I couldn’t use the consolation of that survivor’s lie: part of me was leaving with her, and there was no escape from the fact that what had seemed so precious—those preconscious days when I was growing into a self—was disposable, was junk after all.
I stayed and talked for an hour, then went and made her scrambled eggs and strong tea, a meal I knew she liked. As I stirred the eggs over the lowest flame, I was able to put aside my own loss and think of hers.
She had been born into the world of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee and somewhere had a set of coins in a velvet-lined case to show for it. Elementary school, enough to eat, a family, and a world that—little though she saw or understood of it—was moving slowly forwards, spreading what it knew of science, health, and democracy more evenly among its people … By the time she was eighteen, this cautious beneficence was what she had taken for the norm, for “life” as she would live it.
By the end of her days, she had seen it all destroyed. The captains and the kings had gone, but the tumult and the shouting had increased. Her young husband, along with a million of his countrymen, had been killed for no reason anyone could ever give her. And every decade in her life, there were fresh atrocities to try to understand: Poles, Jews, Russians, the Burma Road, Bergen-Belsen, the Stasi and the gulags; atom bombs, assassinations, and genocides … Her only child shot through the shoulder by one of his own men in a place they had no right to be.
Every private death is a surrender, an admission that the happy photographs on the mantelpiece are vain, that the moments of joy they depict weren’t “captured” but merely borrowed and then repaid in full … But for people of her generation the arc of disillusion was greater than for the rest of us; for them it was complete.
When I went upstairs, my mother was asleep. I felt then an unbearable sorrow for her, this shapeless bundle of cells whirling down into the vortex. I left the tray on the bed, carefully removed the smeared reading glasses from her face, and pushed back the hair that was stuck to her cheek. I took the dog downstairs and shut him in the kitchen. Then I went outside to the apple tree and sobbed.
* * *
WHEN I RETURNED from the dentist, I saw that the answering machine was winking its red eye at me. There was always a moment when I considered not listening to it. I couldn’t, for instance, decide if I wanted there to be a message from Annalisa or not; I craved the uncertain electricity of desire, but what I needed was the millpond of solitude. There was no word from her. There was only one message: “Hello, Dr. Hendricks, it’s Tim Shorter again. I rang some time ago, but you didn’t get back to me. Perhaps the machine wasn’t working. Anyway, I’m calling just to say I’ll be in London in the second week of January and would very much like to give you lunch. Please do get in touch if you get this message. There’s not that much time.”
ELEVEN
Simon Nash was less keen than Judith Wills to sign off on my sabbatical, but I promised that I would give the first thousand pounds of any publishing royalties to the Biscuit Factory, and this speculative offer appeared to mollify him. It seemed to me that the best way of writing a book would be to take myself to a foreign city where I knew nobody. No patients, no colleagues, no telephone; the hours stretching flat and colorless …
Paris was the obvious choice: it was close, I spoke passable French, and the exchange rate was helpful. I’d been to Paris a fair amount in the past, usually for conferences. I liked the art galleries, the Métro with its enchanting station names, the islands in the river, and the cathedral with its flying buttresses. It was a very handsome city, more so than London; but there was the smugness to deal with, the speech of grunts and shrugs; the barely concealed affection for the departed Nazi occupier; its void August, lay religiosity, and fixation with appearances; the way people listened to and admired themselves in the act of talking; the surliness of its waiters, ticket sellers, and shop assistants; the boiling little hotel rooms with their floral wallpaper; its chosen ignorance of other cultures.
None of this mattered in the course of a three-day conference, but for writing a book, which would presumably take some months, I thought it would be better to go somewhere more congenial. I had liked Rome, but perhaps too much; I might be distracted from work by the glow of the cobbled streets, which looked to me like film sets inviting me to play a part. It was also too strongly connected to my war past.
Eastern Europe, being under Soviet control, ruled itself out. I was intrigued by the idea of West Germany, but I didn’t know how I would react to living among men who had killed my friends and murdered six million others in their death camps. The fac
t that the Germans were in looks, culture, and aspiration the siblings of the British seemed to make the problem worse: if I recoiled from the collaborators of Paris, still sulking over the outcome of 1944, how might I respond on a subway carriage full of recently serving Nazis?
Really, I wanted a better, older Europe, in a city that had not been barbarized by the twentieth century. Such a place must exist, I thought, outside the long cast of nostalgia. I wanted a city where, if you had sat at a table in the main square in 1905 and said, “By the end of the century, Europe will have changed from this world of tsars and kaisers and archdukes and kings to a place of elected leaders where all men and women can vote,” the inhabitants would have said, “That sounds like a good plan. Let’s be careful how we put it into action.” And if you had then said, “In fact, that transition can only be achieved by genocide across the century, tens and tens of millions dead, pogrom upon purge, slaughter upon holocaust, throughout Europe into Russia,” the people of this city would have escorted you to their small but well-run lunatic asylum.
* * *
IN REAL TIME, in that fine autumn of 1966, I did find such a city. It wasn’t perfect, but it was old, decent, and had made its peace with modern life. You could imagine Dante or Goya or Goethe or Darwin or Debussy passing through if not necessarily living there. It still had something of innocent Europe before it was torn up, shat out, and relegated from first to last of the world’s continents.
I went to the tourist information center and asked about finding a room. The man on the desk had a moustache and a cap like a train conductor. He pulled out a list of lodgings and passed it over the counter; I needed an interpreter and he told me his colleague would be back at two o’clock.
Where My Heart Used to Beat Page 21
