Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  Cleaver drained his whisky. The first eighty or so pages had offered, he recalled, as if through a Vaseline-smeared lens, a sort of caricature version of the family’s myths and legends. The voice was what critics like to call fresh, ingenuous, the child marvelling innocently at the world he is discovering, while for his or her part the reader understands all kinds of things between the lines: unpleasant things, needless to say, disquieting harbingers of the inevitable disillusion, the unhappy melodrama that every narrative hungers for.

  In the first part I come over as a sort of Lord of Misrule, Cleaver told Olga. It occurred to him that perhaps after all he should have brought the book away with him and studied it a little more carefully, though without my glasses of course I can’t read anything at all. Not only have I not spoken today, Cleaver now realised, but I haven’t read anything either. Not a word. Or heard anyone else speak a word. He and Amanda were presented, in these opening chapters, as the rather comic, larger-than-life protagonists of some upmarket, metropolitan sitcom, glamorous, selfish and endearingly vain, always in need of an admiring audience of celebrity guests, entirely absorbed in the love-hate fizz of a relationship that had them constantly shouting, chucking around the crockery, slamming down the phone and muttering disruptive criticisms to their innocent children of the variety, your father is an absolute pig, that woman will drive me mad, and so on, though without ever arriving at any clarifying showdown. Actually it isn’t true I haven’t read a word, Cleaver thought. At least a dozen times, he had stared at the black Gothic lettering over the front door: Rosenkranzhof. While he was crapping, for example. The house of the rosary. There seemed no point in closing the loo door. I could hold the beads in my hands, Cleaver thought, and count off my son’s lies.

  These were the pages that dealt with family holidays, one year in Scotland, where Mother was from, the mythical Galloway, one year in Wales, where my father was from, the mythical Pembrokeshire. Two myths that seemed as incompatible, Cleaver’s elder son had written, as Hinduism and Islam, two different worlds that met in a shower of sparks along a line of barbed wire. My father hated Galloway and all the time driving up on the M6 he would take the piss in a fake Scottish accent pretending to be some drunken tartan nationalist. The funnier he was, the more he drove my mother crazy. Were we really such clowns? Cleaver wondered. In the third or fourth chapter his son had described a pact with Angela: the two of them had pricked their thumbs and mixed their blood: Twins Against Strife, they had called themselves: We were all the closer because our parents never stopped arguing.

  Cleaver leaned forward, took the bottle from the mantlepiece and refilled his glass. Was that really true? A little left of centre the stone ledge had been broken and a missing chunk replaced with some rough grey plaster. There seemed to be all kinds of these little repairs around the house: wire twisted round the hosepipe where it entered the tank, a leg of the table in a different wood, a patch darned into the upholstery of the armchair, one side of a window frame replaced. Hadn’t the twins argued all the time? Cleaver tried to remember. Like any children. Hadn’t they also thrown things at each other? He recalled a place where the wallpaper was damaged by a flying shoe. Aged ten or so, his son had been a chubby, taciturn boy with a big backside and an admirably tidy bedroom, while Angela was a wiry firecracker of irritability and chaos. The book constantly spoke of we twins, but never the fact that they were not of course identical. They were no more genetically alike than any other brother and sister.

  Still, Cleaver hadn’t minded the first section of Under His Shadow. On the contrary. It was good fun. The piss-taking over my famous masterpiece was fair enough. Daddy’s in his shed writing his masterpiece! That was how we twins would answer the phone. I can take my fair share of mockery, Cleaver thought. There was even a sort of Falstaffian dash about the father figure, an earthy merriment to his crimes. Amanda was portrayed as a good foil: dour, petulant, lovably unreasonable. There was the story of how she had emptied a washing-up bowl over a pretty young French journalist whom she had imagined was flirting with her non-husband. The dirty water came complete, his elder son had written, with slimy bacon rind and potato peelings that clung to the lady’s blonde hair and one or two items of cutlery that clattered in her lap.

  Cleaver smiled. Cutlery that clattered in her lap was good. Even the ancient hearthrug, he noticed, unlacing his boots to warm his feet, had been carefully repaired. Tell me about your family, he asked Olga. The doll, as always, was gaping over his shoulder at the stuffed bird. One of the eagle’s wings had been broken and was held up with two thin sticks, like a First War aeroplane. Were its eyes real, or beads like Olga’s? Veiled with dust, they stared across the room, searching for some unimaginable prey. Perhaps there are mice in the house, Cleaver thought. I mustn’t leave food around. The old Nazi had worked hard, he decided, to stop the rot. Why had he come to live here on his own? For fifteen years. Why hadn’t the family taken him back, when he was near the end, when he couldn’t keep the trees from the windows? When we moved to the house in Wandsworth, his elder son had written, since there wasn’t a room for my father to have a study where he could write his masterpiece, he built himself, or rather he had someone build for him, a large and rather superior shed at the bottom of the garden. It was one of those long, narrow South London gardens about five yards wide by forty long. He put a desk in, covered the walls with book-shelves, set up his stereo and dug a little trench down the side of the lawn for phone and electricity cables. The wires were hooked up to plugs in the kitchen. So there would be Mother, standing over the sink, looking directly down the garden, and my father, behind his desk in the shed, looking directly up it, forty yards apart, and us twins playing in the middle, trying to defuse their two hostile gazes. To tell my father dinner was ready, Mum just pulled the plugs on his phone and electricity. I don’t know why I can’t have my own study, she would complain to whoever the day’s guest was. My job is actually rather more remunerative than Harry’s. Isn’t it, my love? She was editing the cultural pages of the Guardian at the time. It’s because you don’t have to write a masterpiece, Mum, one of us twins would say, gravely, and everybody burst out laughing. Actually, we’re thinking of having a section of the Berlin Wall shipped over to ornament the centre of the garden, my father would remark, pouring wine into big tumblers. My father never pissed about with wine glasses. I was at Heal’s the other day, Mother would say, to see if they had a desk that folded out into a double bed. Then we could send him down his food with a cable and winch. Almost every dinner time, a different set of guests would be given an exhibitionist display of my father’s and mother’s interminable warfare. Just when everybody was convinced they really were splitting up, Caroline was born. And then Phillip.

  Rosenkranzhof is a bit more than a shed at the bottom of the garden, Cleaver reflected. The expression, piss about with wine glasses, was infelicitous to say the least. And this time no one can intimidate me by disconnecting phone and electricity. How cold my feet would get in that shed, he remembered. His son’s book had had nothing to say about that, nothing to say about the long evenings and grim weekends working at innumerable articles and scripts and programme proposals in two sweaters, an overcoat and a woolly hat. Where have I left my hat? He had always had problems of poor circulation, even back then in his thirties. Why did the old Nazi come here, Cleaver wondered, instead of moving down to Luttach, or to another town altogether? The truth is, I never risked more than so much time on a masterpiece. And what if Frau Stolberg were the man’s sister, not his wife? Has anyone actually said she was his wife? Wasn’t it curious that even at the end, they hadn’t taken him back to Trennerhof? They left him to die here. You’re inventing now, Cleaver warned himself. Quite probably the man was fit as a fiddle until his stroke or heart attack.

  No, all things considered, he had no quarrel with the first part of the book. There was a sort of generosity and indulgence to the way his own and Amanda’s lives had been caricatured in a string of grotesque anecdot
es. The reader knew there must be more to it. It was light comedy. But the births of Caroline and Phillip introduced a change of tone. The second section was characterised by a note of scandal and denunciation, even though, oddly enough, the two younger children hardly ever came in for a mention, were never described physically, given no dialogue at all. The whole book, perhaps, is the older child’s proverbial lament at being replaced in his father’s affections by the younger, Cleaver announced. Could that be true? Olga wasn’t interested. Certainly Phillip was the best looking of the children. But almost at once he was again remembering that observation: My father always understood more from any conversation than you had actually put into it, always discovered dishonourable motives you had never imagined. You set out to discuss some problem you were having, or maybe you were just looking for some intimacy, and invariably you came away feeling you were mentally ill, you were acting perversely, you needed help.

  Cleaver frowned at the fire, poured and drank off a third whisky. His damp socks have grown warm and smelly. On the other hand it would be crazy not to try to understand, wouldn’t it, not to try to get below the surface? Wasn’t there something pathological about an old man abandoning his wife to go and live only a mile or so away in the gloom of an Alpine gorge? You wanted to understand. There is a story there. You asked yourself: was it because the wife insisted on living with her ancient mother? That was banal. Amanda had made sure her own mother went into a home. And Jürgen and Seffa? Wasn’t there something pathological about a seventeen-year-old girl who sought out her grandfather’s decrepit dog to sleep with? But perhaps she wasn’t a member of the family at all. How do I know? Perhaps just a maid. You tried to understand, even when you knew that any explanation would be reductive. Isn’t that precisely what my son has done with me? He tried to understand and reduced things to a farce.

  Cleaver got to his feet and padded round the room. The anxiety is returning. His toasted toes are at once cold on the stone floor. Stupid doll. He hurried up the stairs, brought down a blanket and dropped it over Olga’s head. Looking up, he met the eagle’s predatory gaze in the yellow light of the oil lamp. How dim it is in here! The eyes gleamed. Like some candlelit chapel. The eagle was the symbol of the Third Reich of course. Cleaver picked up the doll and the blanket, carried them through to the kitchen and dumped them on the table. I must wipe the crumbs off, or I’ll have mice about. An eagle is an eagle, not a symbol. A dead bird. He noticed the photograph again. Bozen, Polizeiregiment. That was another word he had read two or three times today. If the old Nazi had served in the polizeiregiment, then he must have been at least eighteen in 1945, which meant that in September 2004 he was definitely pushing, what, eighty? Was Frau Stolberg old enough to be his sister? Phillip, Cleaver remembered, was a full twelve years younger than the twins. Frau Stolberg looked around seventyish. She could be wife or sister.

  Yes, the second section of the book – Cleaver went back into the sitting room – combined an unhappy coming-to-adolescent-consciousness with a denunciation of the cause of that unhappiness: Harold Cleaver, of course. Seduced by the comic clarity of the first section, lured into actually liking this self-regarding master of revels, the reader was now invited to witness the gruesome consequences of his ugly, disordered life and recoil in horror. The section built up through the narrator’s increasingly troubled adolescence, his problems with first sex, his many identity crises and profound disillusionment (all ascribable to the disturbingly lax and increasingly contentious atmosphere of the Cleaver-Cunningham household), to climax in the tragedy of his twin sister’s death.

  It’s a lie, Cleaver announced firmly, pouring himself a fourth and very large whisky. The other armchair seemed disturbingly empty now. Granted, any explanation is reductive, but over Angela’s death his elder son hadn’t even tried to find the truth. It is a deliberate distortion, Cleaver shouted. You can’t blame a road accident on your mother’s and father’s turbulent relationship!

  He went back into the kitchen, picked up the blanket and the doll, brought the doll back to her chair, set her down – Look at me, damn you! – then sat himself down and covered his knees with the blanket. The evening was turning colder. Olga was still not really looking at him. A doll is a doll. What if, Cleaver suddenly demanded, Rosenkranzhof were haunted by some survivor of the Bozen Polizeiregiment, some frustrated old Nazi Gebirgsgeist determined to possess the new occupant’s mind. How silly. He drained the whisky. The second section of Under His Shadow could basically be summarised as follows: My mother and my father, but above all my father, who was a special and rather subtle kind of tyrant, were chiefly responsible for my and my twin’s directionlessness and desperation, our inability to look confidently to the future.

  Cleaver felt a little dazed by the suddenness with which this unfamiliar whisky was now rising to the brain. However inadequate a story is, he thought, or simply downright mendacious, it always adheres to the mind, even the mind of the person who knows it has been made up. This is the scandal of all scandal-mongering, is it not? Even when you know that something had been made up, all the same a trace is laid down in the mind. Mud sticks. Whereas even the worst hangovers wear off in twenty-four hours. He vaguely recalled a very sad tale about incest and child abuse that he had covered for some paper in the early days. A man accused of an act of paedophilia – that was it – had confessed and committed suicide, even though, as it later emerged, he couldn’t possibly have been guilty. He had allowed himself to be persuaded by his daughter’s supposed reconstructions under hypnosis. Probably he knew the story wasn’t true, but he also knew it was true enough.

  Write a rebuttal, Amanda had told her partner. She had watched Cleaver closely in those forty-eight hours he was reading the book, the forty-eight hours before the legendary and extremely confrontational interview with the President of the United States. He had barely slept. Any self-respecting mythology, he reflected, has at least two contradictory versions of events. I didn’t realise it at the time, Cleaver thought now, but I was under close observation; Amanda was watching me as I read what my son had written, what she had told him about me, knowing that he would write it down. I was the object of an experiment. I was exhausted. Write a rebuttal, Harry. She was forceful. She wanted a confrontation. Sue the shit, if that’s how you feel. Yet only the day before she had been proud of her son and his Booker listing. The truth is, Cleaver told Olga excitedly, that while my son imagined that he was declaring his independence writing this book, assumed that he was cutting himself off from the family and cutting me down to size, in reality he was being manipulated by his mother who hoped to spark off a father-son conflict in the midst of which she would become my ally again. Do you see? How about that for a twist? You always came away, his elder son had written, with the fear that your subconscious motivation had been quite different from what you supposed. Cleaver pushed his feet into his boots, crossed the kitchen, dragged open the front door and walked out of Rosenkranzhof into the night.

  Why was it that the places I found to escape from Amanda were always so cold? And me with my poor circulation! He remembered coming out of the shed in Wandsworth, shivering, looking through pelting rain to the windows of the warm house where she would be researching some article or other while shouting at the younger children to go to bed. My feet froze in that shed. He typed with gloves cut off at the fingertips and used a laptop so Amanda wouldn’t be able to pull the plug on his work. It was my icy feet forced me back home. For as long as I can remember, his elder son had written, in the second part of his book, my mother and father slept not just in separate beds, but in separate rooms. Tonight, at six-thousand feet, the air was chill and very damp with heavy cloud cover. It was cunning of the boy to have waited until the second part to introduce this sad truth, waited until the adolescent narrator was old enough to be upset by this thought of his parents’ separateness. Later, when we had a bigger house, they even made a point of sleeping on separate floors. Though, more often than not, Cleaver remembered, having fin
ished working in the shed I would sneak through the passage round the side of the house, get in the car and drive off to some pub or other. Now, having zipped up his jacket, he touched the red beads on the door of the remote Rosenkranzhof. They were draped in a string over two rusty nails. Who had put them there? He turned and started to walk. He hasn’t brought his torch with him. There are no stars, he realised, looking up into the gloom. I need to clear my head.

  He crossed the flat space outside the house and picked up the track, but in the other direction, away from Trennerhof. You are mad to do this without a torch. As soon as he was among the trees beyond the lavatory, the night was as dark as it had been the previous evening when he was returning from the aborted phone call. The concentration will force you to calm down, Cleaver decided. Your eye will adjust, he told himself.