Where My Heart Used to Beat

by Sebastian Faulks

  I needed a way of filling the time, the long hours of February when the iron sky presses down on London, when the day starts to fade before it has begun. On an impulse, I rang the estate agent whose name I’d seen in the dentist’s magazine. The Old Tannery was still for sale, and I made an appointment to see it under the pretext of being a buyer. The train deposited me in the early afternoon, and there was a scruffy brown taxi available to take me the five miles to the village. Just as on the day I’d last seen my mother, the snowdrops were pushing through the grass round the war memorial outside the church (what pressure per square inch those tiny shoots exert on the tonnage above; what lust for the light), which had since then acquired a new lych-gate to mark the Queen’s silver jubilee.

  The young estate agent who was waiting to show me round wore a waxed jacket and thick-welted brogues.

  “Are you new to the area, sir?” he said, shaking my hand. He used the word sir in the playful way grand people sometimes do when talking to those they think inferior.

  “I … I’m a Londoner.”

  “Ah, the Big Smoke. Are you looking for a country bolt-hole?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, this is a good size. Do you have a family?”

  We were standing at the front door while he fumbled with a key. I thought of proffering the one I still had in my pocket.

  “A family?”

  “Little ones?”

  “No. Just me.”

  “Well, you might rattle around a bit. I should also warn you: it hasn’t been touched for quite a long time. The last owner was a bit strapped for cash, and apparently the old lady who lived here before was…” He fiddled with the lock.

  “Was what?”

  “Widowed, I think. Lived alone for ages.”

  “Didn’t she have children?”

  “History does not relate, sir. Ah. There we go. Shall I lead the way?”

  He showed me through the empty rooms of my childhood, and I tried to look surprised at the view onto the garden. I exclaimed at the way a door gave on to a dark passageway—though it was one that I had long ago pretended was a tunnel beneath the city of Troy.

  “This is the kitchen,” he said, opening the door to the place where I had spent most of my waking hours until the age of eleven. “It needs a bit of a facelift, I’m afraid.”

  I was looking at the door with its ridged glass panels. I could see two small holes in the wood above them, where the bracket for the roller towel had once been screwed in. For hours while my mother ironed or cooked or churned leftover meat through the mincer clamped to the table, I used to stare at this corner of the room, at the door, the striped hanging towel, and the hot-water tank behind it. I used to spread my reading primer out on the plain deal of the table and read doggedly aloud, letter by letter, word by word, grinding my way to literacy. Horsemeat from the knacker’s was simmering on the range for Bessie the sheepdog’s dinner, its odor mingling with that of the starch in the sink where my mother plunged a shirt. At teatime there was instead a smell of toasted bread, on which she smeared beef dripping, mostly fat but with some dark jelly from the bottom of the bowl, and salt ground fine between her fingertips. Then I used to wonder if home would always be there in the steam, in the angle of that corner of the door, the towel roller, the water tank. I was panting for my life to begin but afraid of what I might lose.

  “… And you might want to knock down this wall. It’s just a partition. Listen … And then you’d have a nice dual-aspect kitchen-diner.”

  “Yes. I think I’d keep it like this, though.”

  “Of course. The house has a lot of potential. There are extensive outbuildings.”

  “The old tannery.”

  “Yes, absolutely. Shall we have a look upstairs now?”

  “Don’t let’s bother,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  * * *

  BACK IN LONDON, I made some calculations about how I could manage to buy my old home. Over the years I had put aside some royalties from The Chosen Few, and although I’d used most of the money from selling the house after my mother’s death to buy my London flat, there had been a bit left over, and it had accrued interest in a building society.

  As I was looking for the paperwork in my desk, I came across my diary, the original four-hundred-page notebook I’d taken from the stationery cupboard at the grammar school, now glued and taped over many times. The first thirty pages were in Greek script in my still-childish hand, in fountain pen. I smiled as I read back some of the references to the “incomparable Helen” (Mary Miller) and “wandering Odysseus” (my father). Their tone was very different from that of the clinical diary I had kept in my Lancashire asylum. Looking at these pages now, I could see the smoldering unease that had eventually burst into flames in The Chosen Few. The period spent researching and thinking about that project—the Biscuit Factory years of the early sixties—had a more jagged tone, the handwriting elliptical and angry.

  In the same desk drawer were the eight or nine notebooks recording my experiences in the war that I’d posted home to my mother from various places. I opened one and read again of our training in Devon and our withdrawal to Dunkirk in 1940. My mother had kept them all safe, and I had read them through only once before, in about 1947. I flipped through the two I had bought in Bône, which gave a restrained account of the fighting in Tunisia (I suppose I hadn’t wanted to alarm my mother), and then the battered Aquila Quaderno Studente (Eagle Student Notebook) I’d bought in Naples. I remembered that when I’d read it before, I had been surprised at how much candor I had risked, not in the giving away of our troop movements but in how much I’d talked about my feelings.

  I opened this notebook with some trepidation and to my amazement saw the pages were empty. They were old and yellowed, authentically Italian in the grain of the paper and the color of the feints and margins, but they had not been written on. I checked through the remaining notebooks and found what I expected of Palestine and Syria—interesting enough but not real warfare any more.

  It was all there—or as much of it as I could risk reporting at the time. But of the marsh at Anzio, the rocket attack, the night landing, the slit trenches, the wadis, the annihilation of A Company, Lily Greenslade, Master Sergeant Stark, Naples, Pozzuoli, and Luisa Neri there was not a word.

  * * *

  AT MARSEILLE AIRPORT, the bilingual car-hire man was on duty in his hut outside, and we spoke, as previously, in the other’s language.

  “Hello, sir. How are you? Would you like the Peugeot again?”

  “Oui, merci. Très bien. La bleue?”

  “Yes, the blue car is free. I just finish cleaning her. Are you here to work or holiday?”

  “Toujours travail. Mais la dernière fois.”

  “The last time? Is a pity!”

  “C’est la vie.”

  “Is in the parking. Number sixty-five. Thank you, sir.”

  “Merci à vous.”

  I left the Peugeot, ticking hot from the fast drive, in the sloping lot at the foot of the presqu’île and found the water taxi waiting in the harbor. A couple of hours later I was reinstalled in my lodger’s room, bathed, unpacked, and ready to meet my host for what felt like a showdown. It was by now six o’clock in the evening, and I was in need of a drink. I asked Paulette to bring me something strong with gin as I settled in the library to wait.

  Pereira came in a few minutes later wearing a cream linen jacket over a pale blue shirt and scarlet tie. Even with his hairless leathery scalp and hooded eyes, he looked rather fine, I thought.

  I was feeling nervous, like a schoolboy at a university interview.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Robert,” said Pereira. “How was your journey?”

  “All right, thank you. I got your letter. I’d like to see what else you have relating to my father.” I made a quick start, not wanting him to dictate the pace of the conversation.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know in due course. It’s possible that you’ll fi
nd it easier to read about how I knew him than to hear it.”

  “To read about it? Where?”

  “In my diaries. Shall we talk about it after dinner?”

  I had already lost my bid to control the exchange, and I saw Pereira register this with a smile. “And how did you pass the time since our last meeting?” he said.

  “I worked. And then I went to see an old friend. In a French ski resort.”

  “Who?”

  “Luisa Neri.”

  “And how was it, seeing her again after all these years?”

  “I don’t think I can sum it up in a few words. Maybe I’ll let you know about it when it suits me.”

  “Touché!”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’ve decided to buy the house I was brought up in. With the money I’ve saved and a loan from the bank I think I can manage it.”

  “So you want to buy back your childhood?”

  “Yes. To ransom it from the pirates of time.”

  Pereira smiled again. “I think it’s a good idea. More people should do it. You’ll feel at home there. I wish I could do the same, but it’s too late for me. The garden in Auteuil…”

  “I may not live there myself. It’s too big. I may find another use for it.”

  “But at least you’ll possess it.”

  “Yes. An odd thing happened when I got back. I was going through the papers in my desk to see if I could afford the house when I came across some old diaries. And one of them, from Italy in 1944, was empty.”

  “Was it censored?”

  “I never showed them to the censor; I just posted them home. We weren’t supposed to keep diaries at all. All the others were full. I was careful not to name names or give away positions, but I filled them with impressions and responses. I used nicknames if in doubt.”

  “And the others were all written in?”

  “They were exactly as I remembered.”

  “Are you sure you actually wrote in this one? Perhaps you were too preoccupied with what was happening. It was an emotional time for you.”

  “Yes. But I know I wrote in it. I remember sitting in my lodgings one night when I couldn’t see Luisa and writing about my feelings for her. I remember in the Officers’ Club in Rome writing descriptions of the fighting at Anzio, which was over by then.”

  “And there was nothing?”

  “The pages were blank.”

  “Then it must have been a different notebook in which you wrote.”

  “Either that, or I misremembered. Perhaps I never wrote anything. Or someone came and wiped it out. Or substituted a different, empty, notebook.”

  “Or perhaps the writing is still there, but you were unable to see it.”

  I laughed. “How deluded do you think I am?”

  Pereira didn’t smile this time. He said, “I shall tell you over dinner. Let’s go in.”

  It was not until we were well into the main course, with Paulette out of the way, that we returned to the subject.

  “One thing you and I have in common, Dr. Hendricks, is that we distrust the clumsy labels of our profession. The human brain contains more atoms than the universe, or some such figure, and they can generate in concert with each other a trillion times more than that. We’d never clamp a badly formed name on something so infinite! But I have seen some patterns in your life, in the story you have generously shared with me.”

  “Go on.”

  “One of the first things you told me was that you had to leave New York, but you didn’t say who told you to go. Then there was a message on your answering machine when you got home—an abusive female American—but when you tried to play it again, it had gone.”

  “She seemed to have bypassed my recorded greeting. I don’t remember telling you that.”

  “It was on the first day.”

  “I was just making conversation. It wasn’t meant to be significant.”

  “Indeed. And then you had a first-degree relation, your uncle, was it Billy?”

  “Bobby.”

  This bit I did remember telling him, apropos of how little I knew of my father.

  “I’m sorry,” said Pereira. “Bobby. He was in an institution. You visited him with your mother one Christmas when you were young. A hereditary illness, perhaps? You have been given to absences, fugues. Such as the time you went to take a German captive at Anzio and lost track of what you were doing. You became manic. And afterwards, during your extended leave, while you recovered from what was in the end a fairly minor pistol wound, there was talk of headaches. Clearly your superiors were worried about your mental state. And then you were moved to a staff job.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Think of your childhood. You told me about reading the Bible for hours alone in your room. Many parents must have come to you with a twenty-one-year-old whose first symptom of oddity as a teenager was exactly that.”

  “Enjoying the Bible doesn’t make you schizophrenic.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I developed nothing more. No hallucinations, no delusional system.”

  “Though you are suspicious.”

  “Suspicious is not the same as paranoid.”

  “They differ in degree. Have you ever sought professional help?”

  I felt very tired. I sat back in my chair and drank some wine. “When we were demobilized, we were given support. A double-breasted suit is what most people remember, but there was a medical interview as well. The officer who saw me suggested I’d been what was called ‘bomb-happy.’ He offered some crude therapy.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “No. I told him to fuck off. I’d read a good deal about shell-shock cases from the Great War. It was the treatment of those men that kick-started psychiatry in England. But they were seriously ill. I wasn’t. The condition has been around since men first tried to kill each other. There’s someone in Herodotus, I forget his name, who goes blind in the midst of battle without being touched and never regains his sight.”

  “The Americans had a lot in Vietnam,” said Pereira. “They called it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.’”

  “Unwieldy.”

  “And do you think that’s what you had?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And other times? Did you ever seek help?”

  “Yes. Once when I was working at the Biscuit Factory. I did hear a voice. I told Simon Nash, and he got me an appointment with an old colleague of his in London. I saw him a few times.”

  “What did he say?”

  I laughed again. “It was all so sad. He had no idea, but to protect his reputation he had to say something. He said he thought I might have something called ‘schizophreniform disorder.’ It made me laugh. His impotence.”

  “And did the symptoms carry on?”

  “No. I have heard a voice perhaps seven or eight times in my life and on each occasion at a time of great stress. I understood how the chemicals generated by that stress caused a short circuit that fired the auditory area. For an instant, then it’s gone.”

  “And it never worried you?”

  “Not in the slightest. It was part of what I was. It was part of belonging to a broken species. Of our not being a part of the rest of creation.”

  * * *

  I SLEPT WELL that night, comforted by the fact that a man of my father’s generation seemed to know me well. I was long past caring about the content of what he said—whether it was right or wrong and whether such things as right and wrong existed when it came to the human mind. It was just pleasant to know that someone intelligent had thought about me; it was almost as if he cared.

  In the morning, I had breakfast alone as the sun streamed in through the French windows, lighting up the table where Paulette deposited a plate with a poached egg and a half tomato with grilled baguette and butter.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I thought I might go and see Céline today. Do you happen to know where she is?”

  “I’ve no idea. She has two or th
ree different jobs. You could ask at the port.”

  This was as friendly as the old woman had ever been, and as she went to straighten the cushions on the window seat, I asked on impulse, “Do you know Françoise, her grandmother?”

  “Of course. It’s a small island.”

  “But she must be older than you?”

  “A little. But I knew her daughter as well. Céline’s mother, Agnès.”

  “And where is she?”

  “Agnès is in Marseille, where she’s been since she was twenty-five.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Doing nothing. She’s in the asylum.”

  “Poor woman. You knew her well?”

  “Yes. I used to look after her when she was a child. The father, Françoise’s husband, was a fisherman, and sometimes he would be away for several days. Françoise used to work at the hotel in the port, and I would take care of the little girl, Agnès.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was charming. Are you staying much longer, monsieur?”

  “No. This is the last time I shall come. So Agnès must have been young when she had Céline?”

  “She was twenty-three or -four.”

  “Céline told me she was born in Mauritius.”

  Paulette smiled. “Her father was from Mauritius. He had a romance with Agnès one summer when he visited the island on holiday. But Céline was born in the house where Françoise lives now. She’s never left the island.”

  “She’s never visited her mother?”

  “She never knew her. She was only one when Agnès left to go to hospital. Her grandmother and the neighbors brought up Céline. Would you like to see a photograph of Agnès?”

  “The link between the generations? Yes, I would.”

  “Come.”

  Paulette led the way across the hall and down a corridor where I’d never been. She scuttled along on her bowlegs beneath her widow’s black, and I had to hurry to keep up.

  She opened a door and switched on a light. It was a bed-sitting room on which the shutters were closed. There was a single bed with a crucifix above it, an easy chair, a chest of drawers, and little else. There was a rush mat on the tiled floor and the smell of damp in the air.