“During the war,” I said, “I was happy.”
“Happy?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that before. I knew what I was doing. There was no chance of being lonely, because you weren’t really an individual; you were all part of the same body. He died; you were wounded; he was fine. The next day it would be the other way round. It didn’t matter. It made no difference. We just had this sense of … purpose. Nothing else came into it.”
She gave me a quizzical look.
“My best friend was a man called Donald Sidwell. We were like brothers. We met at university. He was enthusiastic about so many things: cars, music, horse racing, France. Then he came to join the same regiment as me, and we ended up in the same places: France, North Africa, Italy.”
“What happened?”
“He was wounded at Anzio. So was I. We all were. It was an awful place. I’m not sure we should ever have been there.”
“But he survived.”
“Yes. He was killed the next autumn … in the mountains north of Florence. It was a different kind of fighting, at close quarters, in the woods. We had to keep a road open through the mountains going north. We attacked in midafternoon for some reason. Then it got dark. Donald was very nearsighted. I don’t know quite what happened, but we had a lot of casualties that day.”
“That was it?”
“That was it. Like so many. He never got home, never had a life.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“Not in that way. Not ‘in’ love. But I did love him.”
We were sitting on the bed. It was friendly; there was no strain. For a long time neither of us moved. I could hear the clock on the mantelpiece ticking.
Then Anna coughed. Very quietly, she said, “I knew you were a doctor. I could tell by the way you touched me.”
For some reason this seemed funny to me. I lay back on the bed and laughed. Anna looked suspicious, but when she saw that there was no malice, she began to giggle—at me, to begin with, I suppose; then at what she had said; and then at the absurdity of the whole thing. Everything.
I felt pleased to have made her laugh after ten weeks and sorry when we had to get up and go out again into the cold streets.
* * *
BY NOW I could see that I was nearing the end of the book. I was able to draw up a plan of what remained on a single sheet of paper.
In one of the foreign-language bookshops that Anna had pointed out, I came across a student volume of Tennyson, presumably left by some English hitchhiker wanting to lighten his load. I’d never been attracted by the twilight gardens of Victorian poetry, but I needed something different to read and it only cost the equivalent of a shilling. The editor pointed out in his commentary that “In Memoriam” was an elegy not just for a friend but for a way of seeing the world. The publication of Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell in the 1830s had shown that the earth was not a few thousand years old, as Christians had until then believed, but hundreds of millions of years. This gave enough time for Darwin’s snail-slow process of natural selection to be feasible, but it killed a tradition of life and thinking. That lost certainty, wrote the editor, was mourned as keenly by Tennyson in “In Memoriam” as by Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach.”
When I read it, sitting on the sleigh bed in my rented room, the poem touched me. I saw now that this was one reason I had wanted to write my book in a particular city: I was looking for somewhere that could house me in a more innocent time. Not in my case before the discovery of how old the earth was, but a time before 1914 when it was still possible to believe that human beings—for all the barbarities of the Romans, the Goths, the Mongols, and for all the extremes of empire and slavery—were essentially becoming, with whatever setbacks, more civilized, more humane, and more enlightened creatures. A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale than all others in its genus or family.
An innocent age indeed, but it was one of which I’d found a version in my nameless city and which for all my solitude I had appreciated while I wrote The Chosen Few. The title referred to the one in a hundred of the human population who is mad: those whose genome is a perverse expression of the weird “advantages” enjoyed by the other 99 percent, those poor few who bear the cost of our access to the sublime but not the responsibility for our embrace of the unforgivable.
I smacked the last full stop and saw the tiny blurring at the edges as the ink was absorbed like the misty rings of Saturn. I had paid my tribute to these lost souls and shown that their experiences were worth listening to more closely, that each individual life was holy, that it was demeaned by the clumsiness of disease classification. On the other hand, I was worried that people would think I had been sentimental, and to forestall this criticism I had admitted that some such patients were not merely difficult, that they were not really “nice” people. But what worried me most was that I had simply fallen short, that neither my analytical nor descriptive powers had been up to the task. I would never have the time or energy to tackle such a subject again, and I had wasted my opportunity.
Before the end, I had started to suspect that a factual or scientific book was not the best medium for my convictions about the nature of our mad century; they needed more latitude, a more yielding form in which to resonate without being forced to a literal end. It didn’t stop me, though. I pressed on till I could press no more; then I packed the pages carefully together, tied them with string, and put them in a cardboard box.
That Friday, I met Anna for the last time. After we had seen the properties on her list, I took her to dinner in a small restaurant she had twice pointed out to me. We drank two bottles of wine and ate a plate of cured raw fish, then a hot pie with chicken and wild mushrooms.
Afterwards we stood on the pavement outside. Our ways home lay in opposite directions, but I felt reluctant to say goodbye.
“Shall I come and see where you live?” I said.
She shook her head. “There’s no point.”
“Would you like me to write to you?”
“Why? You’ll never come back. And I’ll never come to England.”
I looked at my feet. “Shall I at least send you a copy of the book I’ve written here? If it gets published?”
“Yes, you can do that.”
“I’ll need your address.”
“No, you can send it to the tourist office.”
I was loath to leave in such a way because it would underline how empty all such passing friendships are. But the alternatives were false: to write letters to someone who was getting older, distantly, changing, who would in some way not be the same person if I wasn’t there …
Breathing in, I told myself that being able to say goodbye was a marker of sanity—or at least a preserver of it. I would detach; I would successfully disengage. After all, I hadn’t seen Mary Miller for twenty-five years and presumably she had survived, albeit in an altered shape, a different woman.
Once, in Birmingham, I had had a patient, a manic-depressive, who told me that a six-month slump had been triggered by his being unable to face saying goodbye to a railway porter who had been unusually kind to him. It made everything in life seem pointless, he said. I understood what he meant, but there was no virtue in following a feeling to its conclusion if that end was mania.
So I opened my arms, hugged Anna tightly, and said, “Thank you. Thank you for everything. I hope you’ll be happy.”
There was nothing else to say.
She said, “And I hope the same for you.”
In this world, it was all quite impossible. But I had the sense as I turned to walk back on the cobbles by the dark canal that it was not in this world but in another one that such things might be brought to a conclusion.
* * *
IN ENGLAND, I spoke to the magazine editor who’d published my last article and asked where I should submit
the book. He gave me a couple of names, one a medical specialist, one a general publisher, and I decided to send it to the second on the grounds that they might reach more readers.
A few weeks later, back in my lodgings in Redland, Mrs. Devaney brought me a letter from someone called Neville de Freitas, Editorial Director, asking me to join him in London for lunch. This took place in Rugantino, a narrow restaurant in Romilly Street, where Italian waiters brought trolleys of hors d’oeuvres and powerful red wines, most of which de Freitas poured into his own glass. He had ginger sideburns, a waistcoat with brass buttons, and gray hair that covered his ears; apart from the cigarette he kept burning throughout lunch, he looked like an illustration from an Edwardian children’s book: Old Mr. Badger the Builder or some such.
“It’s the sort of thing we’ve been looking for,” he told me. “It’s outspoken, it’s countercultural. It’s interdisciplinary in all the right ways. We’ll want to make a few cuts, if that’s all right. I’ll put you on to Alison, my desk editor. Then we’ll get you to knock out some jacket copy. If it goes well in hardcover it could be one of the launch titles in the paperback list we’re launching next year.”
I didn’t follow all he said, but it seemed he was offering to publish my work. My understanding of the process was that it normally took years of rejection, so I tried to make him spell it out in case I’d misunderstood.
The waiter brought fegato alla veneziana, the liver charred beneath the lattice of thin, soft onions. I had a sudden memory of lunch in Naples with Luisa and the moment the women from the asylum had come in; I wished they would push open the door from Romilly Street right now so I could give them some of the food on Rugantino’s laden trolleys.
It became clear that I was not mistaken after all.
“We can offer you an advance against royalties of six hundred pounds,” said de Freitas, helping himself to fried potatoes. “I’m sorry I can’t do more, but remember that’s just an advance. Once you’ve earned out, you’ll receive royalties in the usual way. Would you like some more wine?”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
TWELVE
As I prepared to return to Pereira’s island, I ran over everything I knew about him. He had been born near Paris in 1887 to an Anglo-Hispanic-French family. He had worked in England and France, first as a psychiatrist but chiefly as a neurologist, specializing in old people and their afflictions. Memory was his big topic. He had fought in the same infantry unit as my father during the First World War, having for some reason been unable to join the French army. In 1940 he had been working at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris when France fell to the Germans. He had given me a droll account of his attempt to join nonexistent resistance movements in the Loire before he decided that, as a former officer, the simpler way to serve the cause was to rejoin the British army. Fit, decorated and keen, he was accepted into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1941. His work was supposed to be administrative, but a shortage of qualified doctors saw him on a troopship sailing for North Africa in 1943. It gave me a jolt when he told me this, as I calculated he was only a few days behind my own battalion, which had disembarked at the Algerian port of Bône (now, I believe, known by its precolonial name of Annaba) just in time for the monsoons. It was almost as though he was following me.
He had been married for thirty years but had had no children, and his wife was dead. His career in neurology had taken a late detour back into psychiatry, and the whole thing had come to a somewhat abrupt end about thirty years ago.
And that was all I knew. If I were to take on the task of being his literary executor I clearly needed to have read some if not all of his books and articles and to have a fuller sense of his career than I had been able to get in the course of my first visit, which he had—presumably for reasons of assessing my character and suitability—turned into an extended (though not as complete as he might have thought) confessional on my part. I also needed to know what on earth he had done with the great glasshouse attached to the side of the main building. I thought it was time I did a little research of my own.
During a conference in Paris in the seventies, I had been introduced to the American Library in rue du Général Camou. Although most of the books were in English, they had a good French reference section and a bilingual staff. Rather than fly to Marseille, therefore, I thought I would take the train to Paris, see what I could find about Pereira, and continue south a day later.
In the American Library I asked the librarian if there was a French equivalent of Who’s Who.
“Yes,” she said in an American accent. “You need Le Bottin Mondain. Though there’s also Who’s Who en France.”
“It’s not called Qui est Qui?”
“No.”
“They’ll never cease to surprise one, will they, the French?”
“I guess not. That’s why I like it here.”
After this brisk little exchange, I took both books to a table in an alcove, flicked through to the letter P and there I found him. Everything seemed in order. “Né le 9 mars 1887 à Paris 12e … Fils de: Antonio Maria Pereira, diplomate, et Elizabeth Georgina Waters … Études:… Dipl:… Carrière:… Salpêtrière … Royal Manchester Infirmary … consultant senior … École de Neurologie … professeur de chaire…”
It was all just as he had told me, even if it looked rather diminished in summary. The final section held a list of published medical papers, though it also mentioned the nonacademic Alphonse Estève: The Man Who Forgot Himself (London, 1959).
My eye went speedily though all this stuff until it snagged on one entry: La Conspiration de la Serre (roman, Éditions du Seuil, 1964) … A roman—a novel, for heaven’s sake … Serre, as far as I knew, was a town near the Somme battlefields in northern France, but the “la” made it look as though this serre was something else, so I returned to my young American friend on the desk.
“Do you know what the word serre means in French?”
“Sure do. It’s a glasshouse.”
“Thank you. Or maybe ‘greenhouse,’ The Greenhouse Conspiracy. Rather a good name for a novel, don’t you think?”
“I think I prefer The Glasshouse Conspiracy. ‘Greenhouse’ makes me think of a house painted green.”
“Yes, quite possibly. Anyway, who would have thought it … a novelist too.”
She smiled again and pushed her glasses on top of her thick brown hair. I considered asking her to join me for lunch but thought better of it. If I stopped finding her attractive after a few minutes, it would be a waste of time; and if I didn’t, what was I supposed to do? Persuade her to ditch her afternoon library shift and take her to a hotel? Stay on in Paris and lay siege with flowers and dinners only to find she had a boyfriend back in Delaware? I felt myself gaze into the abyss of meaningless connection that I had felt with Anna; so I quickly left the library, went up to the windy Avenue Rapp, and started walking towards the river.
While the life-by-formula in Paris can be irksome, it has the virtue of making certain things reliable. The red awning over the pavement, the circular tables and cane-backed chairs, the menu du jour written in white on the window … You know what’s in store. The important thing is not to order a badly cooked côte de followed by a shop-bought tarte aux, which is the formule they most want to foist on you. Egg mayonnaise, then a sandwich camembert with a half pitcher of red and a pungent café double is the order I respond with, and it invariably makes the world seem better.
Elated, I strode towards the convex span of the Pont de l’Alma. My next stop would be the Bibliothèque nationale to see if I could get hold of a copy of La Conspiration de la Serre. My recollection from a previous visit was that the library was ill-served by the Métro, but I wasn’t much concerned since I didn’t like the new Vincennes-Neuilly cars with their pneumatic doors; I preferred the old rolling stock on the Clignancourt-Orléans line, whose rattling carriages were haunted by the ghosts of Verdun—the limbless war-wounded with their begging bowls. I could afford a tax
i—if ever I could work out which vehicle was for hire. Simon Nash told me that one of the three tiny roof lights meant I’m going to see my mistress, and both the others meant fuck off.
I found an obliging Moroccan with no difficulty, as it happened, and enjoyed the drive along the Left Bank. I was intrigued to see what Pereira’s book would be like. Many people froze when they tried to write properly; it was as though they had put on a white shirt and tie. My guess was that Pereira would have been too cute for that, though I was anxious about the word conspiration—conspiracy. Like many people, he might have made the mistake of thinking that writing a novel would be a relaxation from real work; he might in that spirit have attempted a thriller.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. I couldn’t use the Bibliothèque without registering; for this I needed a passport and a guarantor. From my hotel, I telephoned the London Library. I waited for a few minutes before they confirmed they had a copy of the book; I asked them to send it to me at Pereira’s house. If I paid extra, it could be there within forty-eight hours; it might even arrive before me.
* * *
FROM THE MOMENT I was back in Pereira’s house I wished I hadn’t come. Up in my room, the painting of the saint with the faraway look no longer charmed me, and the gore that dripped from the crown of thorns on the crucifix above the bed seemed to embody the most fatuous and cruel aspects of religion.
When I went down to dinner, Paulette said, “There’s a package for you.”
I had never met anyone who could convey disapproval so economically.
Dinner was a blanquette de veau with rosemary-fried potatoes and a green salad, in the course of which I told Pereira about my visit to Richard Varian.
Afterwards, in the library, he showed me another group photograph taken somewhere near Messines Ridge in 1917. He was fairly certain that the blurred character second from the left was my father. He showed me a shell casing that had been engraved with the outlines of wildflowers; he thought that my father, who, being a tailor, was unusually dexterous, had done this. There was also an ashtray made from a piece of tin to which he could find no personal connection. This was all reasonably interesting, I thought, but barely worth dwelling on; so after a single brandy I told him I would like to go to bed.
Where My Heart Used to Beat Page 24
