“Shapeliness. The missing element.”
“I hoped that meeting Corporal Hendricks’s son, who also happened to be the author of The Chosen Few, would help me close a circle. I’m sorry if that was wrong of me.”
“It wasn’t wrong. Self-interested, perhaps.”
Maniacally so, in fact. But he had little time left before he drowned in the blankness of dying, with all the questions of his life unsolved.
The old man stood up and crossed the room. He stared into the garden for a long time and then turned round.
“It’s also possible your father saved my life. If I’d led the men over it might have been me, not Waites, who was killed.”
“Possible,” I said. “Though by that time in the war you weren’t walking slowly out in front with a pistol and a scarlet sash to show you were the officer.”
Pereira said nothing for a while. Then he coughed and said, “Knowing how selfish my motives were, would you still consider being my literary executor?”
“Yes. I will happily read your works and see if I can give them wider circulation. I have to tell you that I doubt whether I’ll be able to persuade a broken-down health service to start injecting people with malarial blood.”
“But you might be able to resuscitate the idea at least.”
“I might. I hardly ever write for magazines these days, but I could try.”
“Thank you.”
Looking every month of his age, Pereira lowered himself into an armchair. “I’m glad you could come back,” he said. “There’s something else I wanted to give you.”
“A souvenir?” I had a vision of a cap badge or belt buckle.
“In a way. Did you read the bit in the diary about how I had to censor the mail?”
“The ammunition pouch full of letters that were never sent?”
“I kept it. It’s still in the attic. I should give them to an archive in England where people can find out about their grandfathers.”
“I’ll take them with me if you like.”
“Thank you. Once I’d decided the letters couldn’t be sent, I stuck them down again. I haven’t glanced at them since 1918. But after your first visit, I went up and looked through the names and addresses on the envelopes. There were about fifty in all. Was your mother’s name Janet?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll give you the letter before you go. As your friend, Robert, I would advise you to give yourself a little time to digest what you learned last night before you read the letter. It probably contains nothing of interest. I can’t remember why I held it back, but you should be careful.”
* * *
AND SO I was. I left the island the following afternoon, and I never saw Alexander Pereira again. He died that summer, and I had a letter from his nephew in Paris, the next of kin, who told me his uncle had left me a legacy of 100,000 francs, which was about £10,000. Several packages were delivered to my flat in London, containing not only copies of Pereira’s published works in French and English but also all his original research notes; those on the malaria treatment alone ran to a thousand pages. In a covering letter, he urged me to write another book of my own and stipulated that while ownership of his island house would pass to his nephew, I should if at all possible have use of “my” room free of charge whenever I wanted it. “In that little room, perhaps you can take the base metal of all our painful work and turn it into gold. You are my brother in arms, my heart’s brother in work, and work is life’s real dignity.”
This nephew told me Pereira had died of pneumonia, lying ill in his bed at home for some weeks, refusing to be taken to hospital. He was unable to survive the very high fever that constitutes the crisis of the illness, his temperature having risen to 106 degrees in the end. He had been delirious, according to old Paulette, who was at his bedside. I smiled as I wondered how the burning temperature had rearranged his thoughts. It was not a malicious smile; I believed death by mind-altering pyrexia was the ending this man would have chosen.
The task of being his literary executor was more demanding than I’d expected. For all his eminence in France, he was not well known in England, and much of his research was dated. Although I spoke to editors at magazines and publishing houses, it was difficult to raise enthusiasm until—in the wake of a new interest in popular anecdotal neurology—I found a paperback home for a reprint of Alphonse Estève: The Man Who Forgot Himself. About a year later, thanks to the intervention of my old friend Neville de Freitas, I was able to place a longish article about Pereira and his work in an educational supplement. The following spring I was at an international conference in Venice, where I persuaded the organizers to let me give a presentation on Pereira’s work and the possibilities of fever therapy. After that, I donated his papers to the National Archives in Paris.
* * *
THE PURCHASE OF the Old Tannery went ahead without complications. I contacted Judith Wills to see if she had any ideas about what I should do with the property other than use it as an oversized weekend retreat. Judith by this time was no longer a practicing doctor. Like almost everyone else, she had found that working in a field with so few happy outcomes eventually began to take a toll on her own joie de vivre. She had left the health service and become a professor at an institute in south London where she said the life of academic research and keeping young colleagues up to the mark was suiting her.
She came down to inspect the house one Saturday and was amused by the stories I told of my childhood. I took her outside and showed her the old outbuildings, including the doors into the darkness that I had never dared to open.
“I’ve got a torch in my car, Robert. Why don’t we use that?”
“You’re so practical, Judith.”
“Somebody had to be. And it wasn’t going to be you or Simon.”
“Aren’t you worried about what you might find by disturbing the past?”
“No. I’m not a Freudian. Here, was it this door you were scared of?”
We were in a brick-floored building that the previous owner had used as a garage for his car. A dark side room opened off it, and from that another door I had never opened.
Judith gave it a shove with her shoulder, and the warped wood grated on the floor. There was a scuttling inside, as of an animal disturbed—a rat, probably.
The beam of Judith’s torch showed planks of rotting wood piled up vertically against the side of the small chamber. There was nothing else, just a smell of damp and loss.
“I suppose this was a storage room where they kept the skins before or after tanning,” I said.
“It’s just a room, Robert. It might have been used for tools. Anything. Maybe just spades and hoes for the garden.”
“What are all these planks for?”
“It looks as though something was dismantled. Is there a floor above this?”
I took her to the other end of the building, where some wooden steps led up to an empty loft space that ran the width of the structure, about thirty feet long and fifteen across. There was no electric light, but windows to the front allowed us to see.
“This could make quite a good living space,” said Judith.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Son of the Biscuit Factory? Yes. But with more realistic ambitions.”
We went back to the main house. I had forgotten how large it was. I had lived in the kitchen and my bedroom only, because the other rooms had been too expensive to heat. But if you took the lodger’s quarters into account, there were five bedrooms as well as three sizable rooms downstairs.
“I’d want to keep my own room at the end of the corridor,” I said.
“I’m sure we can allow that. Who do you think could run it?”
“I suppose we’d advertise. You could be an honorary consultant, Judith.”
It took a year to get the planning permission and a year to make the building alterations. In the course of the work, they discovered another room upstairs. The window at the top of the fixed metal lad
der that you could see from outside did, after all, have an equivalent indoors; it was just that it overlooked a room that had been sealed behind a partition in the second bathroom. Why anyone had done this I had no idea, but, when opened up, it gave us some extra space.
By this time the national economy had improved a little and the health service had slightly more money, but thanks to Judith’s tact and experience we came to an arrangement with the regional health people. They were planning to close the old county asylum and boot the patients out (they had a better term for it); one or two of them were anxious about the lack of beds elsewhere. By using the outbuildings as well, we could offer to accommodate sixteen patients, and even that small number would be helpful. They would pay the fees for such people, but we were free to take private patients as well, and although there was a tedious number of inspections to ensure that the grounds were safe and numerous fire doors on tight springs installed at inconvenient places, the essential nature of the partnership was easy to arrange, and we managed to keep a lid on the lawyers’ fees.
A day was set for the opening in May 1983. I must say it was one of the most absurdly enjoyable occasions I’ve ever attended. Simon Nash and his glamorous second wife, a Persian (not Iranian, she insisted) furniture designer, were among the first to arrive. I hadn’t seen Simon for ten years, and although his curly hair was full of gray, he had the same dotty seriousness I had admired when we worked together. He insisted on going into the kitchen and overseeing the drinks. Judith also arrived early, having agreed to make a short speech.
I had invited anyone I could remember from the village and the town as well as a number of former colleagues from Bristol. The local newspaper, always short of things to write about, had run a long article about the new venture the previous week and sent a reporter and photographer along for the big day. The area health authority turned out in force, and there were representatives from most of the local GP surgeries. In total there were almost a hundred people. The rain held off, and the guests were able to use the lawn, where the catering company had put up some trestles. Judith suggested that we encourage people to bring their children, on the grounds that they added to the party atmosphere. A couple of youths kicked a football to and fro, and a baby was admired.
It was, as Simon’s wife said, “very English.” But perhaps it wasn’t. It needed only some balloons and an oompah band to be very German, or Austrian, or French. It was civic; it was modest yet proud. The drink that came out of the kitchen was a cloudy “summer cup,” though it seemed to have a potent effect (I suspected Nash’s hand). The food was a starchy mixture of sausage rolls, vol-au-vents, and egg-and-cress sandwiches that reminded me of the tea at the cricket ground at Chardstock in 1940, though not quite as good. I stood on a slope of the lawn and looked down, thinking of John Passmore taking six wickets with his buzzing left-arm spin, turning the ball almost square down the slope as, fielding uphill in the deep in front of the pigsties, I looked across and admired the Devon hills in the beginnings of the autumn light.
The official opening was to be performed by the local mayor, a stoutish woman who arrived in a black car. She came through the wrought-iron gate and down the paved path, wearing a hat like a pink meringue, with her husband following a couple of paces behind.
Before that, the crowd was called to order so that Professor Judith Wills could give them a little background. To the right of the front door there was a low stone bench onto which Judith clambered so people could see her. I kept no record of what she said, but I remember most of it and there was a fairly accurate account in the local paper. She talked about our plans for the Old Tannery, the appointment of an excellent manager we’d found, and the appalling lack of mental health provision in the country as a whole, but the part I remember—shamefully, I suppose—was what she said about me, which came about halfway through.
“Dr. Nash and I used to sit up sometimes after Dr. Hendricks had gone home and wonder just what would make him happy. He’d had a good education, a distinguished war record, and an original career—a successful one too, insofar as that’s possible in our line of work. Half the female patients were in love with him. I remember one poor besotted soul who used to trudge round behind him all day in the hope of a smile. Half the female staff felt the same, but it seemed to bring him no joy at all.
“One day I plucked up the courage to ask him. ‘It’s not my job to be happy, Wills,’ he said. I don’t know why he called me by my surname, but he did. ‘And what is your job?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he said, ‘but my life’s work is to discover.’
“When Dr. Nash asked him why he wasn’t married, he said he’d had a girlfriend once and didn’t want another. He showed Simon a photograph of a young Italian woman sitting on a wall by the sea. ‘And was she beautiful?’ I asked. ‘I think so,’ Dr. Nash told me, ‘but the picture was slightly out of focus. It was hard to tell.’
“Well, Robert, maybe this project is what your life’s work was. As your favorite poet T. S. Eliot put it: ‘The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’”
I didn’t think Judith had ever read Eliot, but I appreciated the time she must have spent going through dictionaries of quotations. There was another round of the powerful summer cup before the mayor was helped up onto the stone bench to declare the place open. She read from a prepared text, awkwardly, stumbling over the longer words, but it didn’t seem to matter. Everyone smiled and clapped, and a small boy did cartwheels round the apple tree.
* * *
BECAUSE I HADN’T kept in touch with the regiment after the war, I was on no mailing list and was the last to find out when former friends had died. By chance I saw a death notice for Brian Pears in the newspaper and decided to go to the funeral, a draughty affair in Bath Abbey.
Afterwards, we were invited back to a stone house with a large garden. Pears had obviously done well for himself, though whether through work or gambling—vetting or betting—I didn’t know. Perhaps he’d become adviser to the Queen’s racehorse trainer or finally landed an outrageous treble at Lingfield. Or maybe Mrs. Pears, Caroline, had brought in the cash. At any rate, there were three or four handsome daughters going round with smoked salmon sandwiches and a waitress with bottles of burgundy, red and white.
It was here that a man by the name of Connell, who claimed to remember me from Palestine, told me that Richard Varian had died a few months earlier. He had been colonel of the regiment, his abilities recognized and rewarded, and had lived to a good age, so it was no tragedy, though I found myself a little thrown by it. Richard was someone I had thought of as eternal, someone I could look up to. It meant that of the Five Just Men there were only John Passmore and I remaining. I looked round in vain for John, but when I asked Brian’s widow, she told me he had sent his apologies.
I had drunk three glasses of Fruity’s enjoyable Macôn when I fell into conversation with one of Brian’s daughters—Joanna, I think. I told her what a splendid man her father had been, which seemed the thing to do. Feeling I should give her a bit more detail, I told her of the fighting in the Medjez Plain, our first real action, in April 1943.
“And your father’s company was in reserve. But by God we needed them. We’d been at it all night on the ridge and the Germans had got in behind us. I thought Fruity was never going to come and lend a hand. Then shortly after dawn he turned up with the battalion water cart. We hadn’t had a drink for twenty-four hours, so I was pretty bloody pleased to see him. And do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘I had you at six-to-four against holding on here. I suppose I’ll have to pay up now!’”
I laughed at the end of the story, but Joanna Pears clearly hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about; she looked me in astonishment.
* * *
THE ONE DEATH I can’t bear even to record is that of my Luisa, who lived a little longer than the year she had been given but only by a few weeks. She was never well enough for me to go and vis
it. I heard about it in a letter from Tim Shorter, who had been detailed by Luisa to inform me when the time came. There was a small private funeral near La Spezia, but I didn’t go. I thought it would be awkward explaining to her children—those children who might so easily have been mine—who I was and in what circumstances I had known and loved their mother.
As for the letter from my father to my mother that Pereira had given me, I couldn’t face opening it. I left it for a year and then another year, in the course of which all the things I’ve just related happened. Sometimes I took it from the drawer in the desk in my flat in Kensal Green and turned it over in my fingers, wondering if it was really mine to open. With Pereira dead, there was no one left alive with whom I could have discussed its contents. I suspected that they would be an anticlimax: the usual requests for socks and jam and hope that everyone at home was bearing up all right. After a lifetime of not knowing him, I didn’t want my father to be a disappointment.
What finally changed my mind was a dream. Or perhaps it was a vision. Or a delusion: an imago, a chimera. On the grounds that it may not have been strictly speaking a dream, I think that for the first time in my life I can disobey my mother’s rule and say what happened in it.
I dreamed it was the last day of the twentieth century, December 31, 1999. Instead of marking the end of the benighted century, we were celebrating the turn of the millennium—a passage of time too long to mean anything.
There was a huge structure in a desolate part of London, an inverted saucer-shaped tent, filled with people in seated rows. The Queen was there, as she often is in dreams, looking unchanged, no older than in her prime. All were on their feet, but nobody knew what to do. There was music. Next to the Queen was a man I didn’t recognize—someone important, a politician perhaps, quite young, with opportunistic eyes. He appeared to want to hold Her Majesty’s hand, but she was reluctant.
Neither of them seemed to understand anything that was going on or anything that had taken place in the last hundred years. They stood next to one another, the small grandmother on her square-heeled shoes, turning up her nose beneath her squashed hat, and the wild-eyed chancer, staring out ahead of him, struggling with a ritual and a folk song that seemed foreign to them both.
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