by Tim Parks
Almost at once, the track shrank to a strip of stony path that seemed to follow the flat ledge of the clearing as it narrowed around the mountainside to his left. Suddenly, there was a very unpleasant smell. Cleaver stumbled and propped himself up against a tree. Could it be a dead rat, or bird? He held his breath, stretched his foot out carefully. The third section of Under His Shadow, it came to him, was a different cup of tea altogether. The gloves were off. The path was taking a downward turn, Cleaver noticed. The smell was left behind. He took one step at a time, setting his feet down carefully among the roots and stones. By this point his son’s book had become a savage satire of the father’s ideas, a ferocious denunciation of his squalid philandering, a ruthless mockery of his constant presence in the media and supposedly pathological vanity. Amanda dropped out of the picture. Likewise Caroline and Phillip and the now dead Angela. Cleaver definitely remembered that his elder son had used the word pathological somewhere. My father, he had written, was now incapable of not mentioning to every Tom, Dick and Harry who came to dinner all his successes, all the famous people he had recently met on terms of great familiarity. It was pathological.
Where does this lead? Cleaver wondered, standing in the pitch dark. A path always leads somewhere, doesn’t it? He couldn’t remember any of the routine red-and-white signs, the various finger-markers that the Tyrolese tourist board provided for enterprising ramblers. He would arrive at another Rosenkranzhof, perhaps, another gloomy, isolated Alpine hut complete with its own reclusive, geriatric occupant. Or some improbable Stube, some remote mountain hostel. You see a light through the trees and, peering in through a steamy window, you glimpse Hermann with all his friends playing cards in their blue work shirts and banging their beer mugs on the table. Or a chapel perhaps? People build remote chapels in the mountains.
Cleaver stumbled again. His foot had caught a root. He put his hands down to break the fall. No damage done. No doubt it was for this third section, he thought, that they had put the boy on the Booker list. There were no paragraph breaks, no apparent organisation, but quote after quote of Cleaver’s aphorisms mixed with detail after squalid detail, generously italicised, of his disordered life. Where had the boy got this stuff from? All very avant-garde. A fizz of fornication, gluttony and exhibitionism, he had written. Evidently, he liked the word fizz. It’s fiction, Dad, he would protest if I phoned him. Amanda was little more than a zombie at this point of the tale, a victim long since drained of blood and energy. Not true at all! It was she who had fed the boy all these apocryphal details. The younger siblings, his elder son had written, to all intents and purposes grew up as orphans, dumb beasts in an ideological slaughterhouse. That is truly horrible prose, Cleaver thought. It’s so easy to write like that, in a constant stream of overheated indignation. What the public saw, his son had written, was an eloquent, talented man, as witty as he was charmingly overweight: they could not imagine the darkness that this engaging celebrity cast around himself in his private life, like some all-embracing octopus squirting his black ink into your eyes.
Oh please! Cleaver shouted. Spare us the octopus analogy! What in God’s name does the boy have against me? I spent enough time with him, didn’t I? He wasn’t neglected. But Cleaver had been terribly agitated reading this third section. Your hands are trembling, Amanda had remarked, watching him hold the book at the breakfast table. She was curious. He was under observation. Really, I would need to look at it again, Cleaver thought. It was strange, it occurred to him now, how in reality his son had already left home for university some months before Angela died, and hence well before the period covered so aggressively in this third section. We didn’t see very much of each other at all in those years. Whereas in the book it was as if father and son were constantly together, constantly inhabiting each other’s minds in a sort of furious and exhausting wrestling match. As if the boy hadn’t left home at all. I did my best, Cleaver remembered, to get him a good start in life. What I said about the meaninglessness of the work I did, the work he aspired to do, was no more nor less than what I believed, what I am now at last acting on. The opposite of vanity, in fact. His criticisms of my sex life seem desperately immature for a man who is after all in his thirties now. Some people are born philanderers and that is that. Women understand these things. The boy was jealous no doubt.
All at once, Cleaver sensed a different quality to the darkness. There are no trees he realised. The ground is flatter. There had been a change of smell too. The air is fresh. There’s a breeze. Lifting his foot to take a step, Cleaver stopped and stared. His eyes pressed against the darkness. Then, exactly in the spot where he was about to set down his considerable weight, he saw a light. It was as if he caught the gleam of an eye gazing up from directly beneath him; an eye is looking up at you from the ground, from beneath the ground. Cleaver stepped back. I’m hallucinating. Then he understood it was a prick of light from far, far below. A thousand feet and more. He was on the edge of a precipice.
Shocked, he went down on his haunches. Why did nobody warn you of this danger? He felt dizzy. Because nobody expects a sane adult to go strolling about the mountains at night without so much as a torch. You are not a sane adult, Cleaver told himself. He must turn round and get back. This isn’t Kilburn or Wandsworth or Chelsea where you can just go out to a pub if your thoughts become unmanageable.
Still crouching, he backed a little further from the drop. Inexplicably, the path was hard to find. A faint luminosity possessed the emptiness beyond the ledge, but the wood was impenetrable. Then, to his left, apparently floating in the void, he saw a gallows. It can’t be. Yet staring hard, Cleaver felt sure that a scaffold of some kind was just perceptible in the empty air, and some distance from the brink. Not possible, he decided. These are symptoms of an advanced neurosis. My father’s death, his elder son had begun the last chapter of the third and last section of his novel, was peculiarly Dantesque in its aptness. To cut a long story short he was hoist with the petard of his irrepressible desire to occupy that limelight he always pretended to disdain.
Frightened, Cleaver concentrated on the dark wood. Don’t look into the abyss. Let your eyes get used to the dark. He dropped to his knees and moved his hands slowly from side to side over twigs and pine needles. Then he heard someone moving. Hello! he called softly. Uli! Seffa! Turning round, he again saw the scaffold looming. It’s uncanny. Seffa! He called. Hermann! At last, his arm discovered a space free of twigs and stones, a flat space of bare earth. Good.
He began to advance a few inches at a time, always placing the palm of his hand on the ground before he moved. Again he was convinced he heard footsteps. How can there be? You are the only living soul for a mile and more. Breathe deeply. Now is the moment for the victory of cool common sense over nightmare and panic. Very cautiously, Cleaver crawled forward and at once hurt his knee putting his weight on a pebble. Cool common sense would never find itself beside a precipice in the pitch dark.
My father was dining, abundantly of course, his elder son had begun the story, in the restaurant of one of London’s most celebrated and expensive hotels – the occasion was some moment of corporate self-congratulation, a collection of BBC bigwigs celebrating their share in the BAFTA awards – when all at once word spread around the sumptuous tables that on the twenty-second floor of the hotel an elderly American businessman was holding his young musician wife hostage, at gun point, in their luxury suite; it seemed he was threatening to shoot her and then himself if she didn’t change her mind about leaving him. Already aware, from a trip to the bathroom, of a camera crew setting up in reception to film the arrival of some top model or other, and seeing, as he apparently remarked to the Chairman of the Board who was sitting beside him, that here was the chance for a most extraordinary publicity coup, my father rounded up the camera troupe, Russians as it turned out, and, hurrying to get to the scene of the drama before the police arrived, took them up in the lift to the twenty-second floor, his intention being, he explained, to talk the elderly man int
o releasing the young woman at once. I know exactly what to say, my father apparently boasted, to a man in that state of mind. Been there, he laughed, done that. I have all the T-shirts.
Why on earth, Cleaver wondered, resting his back against a tree in the pitch dark, had his son shifted the register of his book so dramatically in this last chapter? Why did my death have to be a farce? Above all, why did I have to be dispatched so quickly, one moment at dinner with the BBC Board, the next in my coffin more or less, as if the boy just couldn’t wait to be rid of me? We are all glad he is dead, Hermann had said of the old Nazi. Words to that effect. Having progressed perhaps fifty yards and quite sure now that he was on the path, Cleaver felt a little safer. He was breathing evenly. The gallows would turn out to be some broken tree perched on an outcrop, he thought. Better dead, Hermann had laughed. The footsteps had been a hallucination, or the movement of some small animal, magnified by fear. My son deliberately shifted the book towards the surreal, he reflected, at the moment that was most evidently fiction: the death of a man whom readers would be seeing on TV, perhaps, the very day after finishing the book. That way, he could underline the supposed authenticity of all that had come before. How convoluted! Or did he just want to stress the symbolic content of this fictional death. My death. But what was the symbolic content?
Cleaver struggled to his feet. A few moments of inaction with his arse on the wet ground had made him stiff. His knees were bruised. I’m getting a chill on my neck again. Again he cast about for some kind of orientation. It is hard even to stand up straight in complete darkness. And then, come to think of it, it wasn’t even true that readers would be seeing him on television the night after they had read the book, since I disappeared more or less the day it was officially published. I might perfectly well have been eliminated exactly as described as far as the general public was concerned.
Fortunately, there was thick vegetation here each side of the path. Dropping to his knees again, he could feel his way with his hands, the ground to the left dropping steeply into the gorge, to the right climbing up to the Schwarzstein. Nothing, Cleaver thought, had ever wiped out the effect of four whiskies quite so fast as the realisation that he was about to plunge into an abyss. Perhaps one whisky more and I wouldn’t have noticed. I would be dead. My father, his elder son had written, at least if one is to take the word of those who ate with him that evening, had polished off at least a bottle and a half of burgundy, plus three or four large Laphroaigs before racing up to the twenty-second floor to have himself filmed saving the imprisoned musical damsel. Not that I would ever allow a small detail like blind drunkenness, he used to quip, get in the way of my better judgement.
This last part of the book, Cleaver recalled, was quite offensively facetious. Soon he should be smelling that unpleasant smell near the beginning of the path. Just rubbish someone dumped probably. I’ll say a rosary, he told himself, rather oddly, as soon as I’m out of this. He had no idea how you said a rosary. He stopped. Why had his son chosen to make the young wife of the jealous elder husband a genius musician, after having entirely eliminated from the book any reference to Angela’s music, to her genius at the keyboards? She was returning from a concert the day of the accident. Apparently it had been a triumph. The delirium that invests the older man with the much younger woman, my father told the camera crew in the lift – they spoke little English it seems but had already started filming – is the delirium and pathos of ultimate possession. He spoke as if reading from a script of one of his prize-winning documentaries. All the major channels showed the footage the following morning. This is my last romantic relationship, the older man tells himself, my father told the Russian film crew – despite the drink he seemed extremely professional – but also the only one where, by virtue of my greater power and experience, I most completely possess the object of my desire. It is as if he fuses sexual desire and fatherhood. Understand? The Russians didn’t, but their equipment was recording; my father was holding forth. They had realised he was a famous man. Tenderness is overwhelming in these relationships, my father said gravely as the lift slowed down and a bell tinkled, but so likewise is the sense of loss when – and clearly he was timing what he said to coincide with the opening of the doors – when the young woman grows up and decides to strike out on her own.
Why on earth, Cleaver wondered, did my son bother to invent this improbable story: Cleaver in the lift talking to the Russian film crew? Couldn’t he just have had Amanda, or some unhappy ex push me onto the rails in the Underground? Or a cancer or something. God knows, I’m overdue for a heart attack. The odd couple were in London, his elder son had written, for a concert that the child bride had performed the evening before to rapturous applause at the Festival Hall. How on earth did he expect me to react to this crap?
Crawling forward, reaching out to feel the ground to the right, Cleaver put his hand in something truly horrible. At the slightest pressure, what had seemed like wet pine needles gave way to putrid flesh. Was there a faint gleam of two eyes in the dark? The stench was overpowering. Why hadn’t he smelt it yards away? At once Cleaver was on his feet, blundering through the trees, shaking the slime from his hand. A corpse. It must be some kind of corpse. A branch scratched his face. He banged his shoulder. Then at last he was out in the clearing. Rosenkranzhof appeared before him. He touched the beads on the door. Hail Mary full of grace. You are ridiculous, Cleaver snapped.
The oil lamp had gone out. The wick will be burned, damn it. Was there a spare wick? The embers in the fire are just glowing. Cleaver filled the sink with icy water and squirted washing-up liquid all over his hand. You chose this place too hastily, he told himself later, sitting by the fire again with another glass of whisky. You have always chosen everything too hastily, your lifetime partner, your job, as if nothing else would ever be offered. It’s so draughty. You never reflected. Perhaps in the end it really wasn’t so surreal to imagine that I would have been distracted from a heavy dinner by the prospect of rushing up to the twenty-second floor to talk a man out of harming his young musician wife. I’m so hasty. I don’t think. On the other hand, it was one of the greatest achievements of your life, Cleaver told himself, when you finally crushed the desire for romantic love. Had his son sensed this?
The Russians’ video, his elder son had written in the last chapter of Under His Shadow, shows my father talking softly and persuasively to a closed door with a luxury, black satin finish. From inside the room the microphone is picking up a woman sobbing. There is life after such loss, my father is saying quietly, presumably to the elderly husband behind. See it as a challenge, he is telling him. You have to change, even now, when life had seemed set in its ways. You have to break out of a spell, to find some other impetus. Behind the door the man is grunting. Let her go and she will learn to laugh with you in years to come, my father is saying. He has a very seductive voice. He beckons to the Russians for the camera to come closer. She’ll love you in a different way. Beyond the door something scratches and clicks. Come closer, my father mouths to the camera crew. Perhaps a key is turning in the lock, the door is about to open. The lighting in the corridor is harsh neon over ochre carpeting. The crew haven’t had time to set up auxiliary lights. You will have other relationships, my father is telling the jealous husband. That’s life. However old we are, there is always the new meeting, you know, the new face. And she will be grateful to you, for letting go. You know? You will laugh together. At this point my father takes a step nearer to the door. Come on, why not open up now and chill out, before the police get here and you have to face unpleasant consequences. A woman screams, my father grabs the handle of the door. The camera zooms in, rather clumsily. And a shot rings out, and another and another, splintering through the door. The camera spins. You can just see blood splattering against the wall and ceiling.
What cheap cheap melodrama, Cleaver reflected, snuggling under his quilt to sleep. No harm done in the end, he decided. Bit of a wake-up call actually, nearly stepping into the void. You
live and learn. At least my feet are warm. But what on earth was the boy thinking of? Killing me off like that. If it was a provocation, how was I supposed to react? By congratulating him on finishing the book with a bang? By complaining that I would have done a much better job of talking round the old obsessive?
Cleaver gazed across the deep shadow of the bedroom to the locked door where the Stolberg family had stored the old Nazi’s stuff. God knows what decomposed beastie he had put his hand in. Amanda wanted me to fight, he decided. Perhaps that is what his son had wanted too. Some kind of determined bust-up about the past. But the boy could have had that any time just by picking up the phone and talking to me. In any event, I outwitted them, Cleaver decided, by disappearing. I beat them there, he smiled to himself, drifting surprisingly pleasantly towards sleep. It will be them having to come and find me, he congratulated himself. Not me them. The wonder was that it was taking them so long.
VIII
THERE IS NO mirror in Rosenkranzhof. Cleaver woke to find himself afflicted with the stiff neck he had expected the day before. He can barely turn his head to left or right. He lay in bed in the grey light, listening to the wind gusting against the panes. One of my father’s great gifts in life, his elder son had written, was his ability to sleep whenever and wherever he chose. Because I always have a clear conscience, he inevitably quipped when Mother complained about her insomnia. And this in a way, Cleaver thought, was true. What could I ever be guilty of? Though it surprised him sometimes that he had never been punished. There was cold air shifting about the room, he noticed. It passed across his scalp. The house is full of draughts. I will have to go around blocking them out with strips of felt or plastic, the way old people do.
Massaging his neck, he realised he hadn’t shaved for some days. What do I look like? He didn’t want to go to Trennerhof for milk and give the impression he was already becoming some kind of wild man. But there’s no mirror, he realised. His mind hunted round the house. There’s no bathroom in the proper sense of the word. For years and years, evening after evening, Cleaver had sat in front of a bright mirror at the Wood Lane studios while one of the make-up girls carefully dabbed the veins and blush out of his nose and cheeks, turned a glistening home-baked treacle pudding, as his elder son had put it, into a sort of smooth, mass-produced sponge cake. So much for the wit of the shortlisted writer. This for the consumption of an ever more homogenised public, the book observed, with its characteristic note of righteous superiority. The boy missed the potential humour, Cleaver remembered, of their plucking the hairs from my nostrils, trimming my eyebrows, creaming my baldness so it wouldn’t sweat.
