I married her for that. Fifty years of marriage based on the vagaries of capillary activity. It is astonishing how simply and inconsequentially a die is cast. On that very afternoon, at that very moment, I made up my mind. I would have it all — the swan neck, the blue blood, the sherry, the monogrammed napkin rings, the crystal salt-cellars with miniature silver spoons, the children born into thoughtless ease with it all.
If Jason knew, if Emily knew, the cost of their comfortable sarcasm. I gave them that. I gave them the right to be disdainful about propriety, the vantage point from which it is safe to spurn silverware and wedlock and nineteenth-century poetry. If they knew the cost.
I am told that Victoria sometimes throws tantrums, demanding elegance. That she has hurled aluminium salt and pepper shakers across the cafeteria, that the nurses have indulged her with cut-glass ashtrays of salt, providing Q-tips for artful tapping against the finger. This is an obscene parody, typical of the reparations always demanded of me.
Nevertheless. When Adam comes …
If Emily does not bring Adam, this is what I will do: they will have carried me downstairs. (I will not permit Jason; they will have to get the neighbour’s son.) When they are all absorbed in the stupid rituals of celebration, I will cross the grounds. Yes, it will be possible with both my canes and the rod of my will. I will stand in the gazebo, I will embrace its spindles and finials and its soft uprights smelling so sweetly of rot and honeysuckle. With a last explosion of the heart, I will pull it down upon my life in a climax vehement as Samson’s.
Ever the village schoolteacher, the public performer, the self-dramatist. Watch me, watch me. When I look at myself through Jason’s eyes I am embarrassed. I despise my antics.
Reject melodrama then. Edit a little.
Act V, scene v, retake: The old man staggers through the grounds in solitary pain and sits gasping on the bench, leaning back against the honeysuckle. Around him the indifferent revels proceed, a swirling carousel of inanities. At last he is missed, searched for, keened for. When they find him he is stiff with terminal dignity, his hand clutching his breast, his face contorted in a brave denial of pain. A suitable tragedy, observing the decorums.
I did not even know, that day of the interview in Ashville, what such structures were called. I knew only that it was the equivalent of the blue vein in Bessie’s neck, the next rung in my climb.
“There is one of those things in the grounds,” I told her, back in Boston. My voice trembled under the strain of its flippant indifference. It was like discussing a woman, a secret mistress, with an interviewing school board official — the irresistible pleasure of the name on one’s tongue, the delicious risk. “Like an empty bandstand. Silly things. I don’t know what you call them.”
I drew a sketch for her.
“Oh,” she shrugged, amused. “A gazebo.”
I married her for that too: for her amused shrugs and exotic vocabulary, things as unattainable for me as a silver christening mug.
She was not impressed by the gazebo. She saw the whole move as an affliction. I expected her at least to be grateful for clean rural air for the child — Victoria was four at the time and had not yet shown any sign of turning strange — but I should have known better.
Do not expect sensitivity from those who take status for granted. Blessed are they in the land of opportunity who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but woe unto those observed doing it. They journey from contempt to contempt within a lifetime, from the polite amusement of in-laws to the embarrassed sarcasm of offspring.
Bessie was never sensitive to my needs, but then she was not, I suppose, particularly aware of her own either. I had seen, I believe, her essence in that arrested moment at the piano. She has spent most of her life outside it, elsewhere. She never showed gratitude though it was certainly due me. (To be fair, she never considered that she had married beneath herself, never flung that at me, though her relatives did. Not in so many words, of course, but by a lift of the eyebrow, an infinitesimal grimace at the corners of lips.) It was due me, her gratitude, because of what I saved her from — the life of a genteel Radcliffe-educated New England spinster. (I am not referring to her age — she was only twenty when we married — but to that air of over-intelligent quaintness.) You can see them any day in Copley Square, their family monies eaten up by inflation and taxes, their teaching pensions woefully inadequate, their sharp intelligent faces and sparrow-hawk eyes daring you to snicker as they spread newsprint with fastidious care on the steps of Trinity Church and bring forth their picnic lunch of one orange and one styrofoam cupful of soup. You can see them any day on Beacon Street and Marlborough Street, hobbling along with their canes and their tattered pride, muttering to themselves about A. N. Whitehead — all the brilliant Bessies who did not get married to gauchely aspiring young men; the Bessies whose beauty was ambiguous and was easily mistaken for homeliness when they were not animated by the discussion of an idea.
“Ashville,” she had said, as though I had mentioned some disease. “It’s so isolated, Edward.”
She meant: How will I sustain the loss of Boston?
It was typically inappropriate that she should think of it in that small self-preoccupied way at a time when war was tearing through Europe like a shredding machine. Who knew what was going to happen in the next few years? Those of us with a sense of history saw apocalypse around die corner. Bessie’s people, the people of die afternoon teas and grand pianos, saw inconvenience.
It was 1940. I remember waking one morning and asking myself suddenly: Will I die in the country of my birth? I remember holding one arm up against the early light and wondering: Will I die in one piece, all my limbs still attached?
But Bessie cared only for the loss of Boston.
Victoria ran in from the garden, I recall, prattling, “Daddy Daddy,” a flawless child she still was, her black curls bouncing. (Interesting that she should have Bessie’s colouring, the dark mad strain in full bloom, I suppose. Jason and Emily are fair like me, though there the resemblance ends.) She was greedy as a puppy for affection, wanting kissing and hugging, a basic weakness in her nature even then, though we did not realise it. My impulse was to take her in my arms and kiss her ravenously — the delicious peaches of her cheeks, the little cushions of her buttocks in my hands. But I have never indulged myself in that way.
I gave her a pat on the head, restraining her, holding her away a little with my hands. They need to be taught that.
Bessie, however, fondled the child in a way that was quite distressing to me. She was always cavalier about propriety, being so steeped in it. For a well-bred woman, my wife several times shocked me in the early years. On our wedding night, for instance, when I discovered how misleading the discreet flutter of an aristocratic vein could be. Perhaps she thought it would please me, that vulgar energy. I never spoke of this but was pleased that in time she became a lady again, white and still and intoxicating.
Victoria was burrowing herself into the space between Bessie’s thighs.
“Don’t spoil the child,” I said angrily.
She went on stroking Tory’s cheek, caressing her hair, staring at me out of her black eyes. I would say looking back, that something happened within Bessie on that day, but she was always unreadable. From one perspective, something snapped, I suppose. From another, perhaps, she simply came to terms with reality, acknowledged me as the rightful director of our fate.
I would say she never forgave me for the move to Ashville. In another sense I would say that everything ceased to matter to her. She was docile. She began to become stupid. She lived permanently within the ambience of that abstraction I had first seen on a Sunday afternoon in a Boston living room, books and music walling in her life like fortifications. A solitary impregnable tower. And always, and still, when I see her poised in that fragile patrician fog of distraction, like a dove suspended in flight, my blood rises. And in the passive aloof way she has gone on submitting for these fifty years to my fever of posses
sion, my frenzy has been reborn over and over again. To possess the unpossess able. That is why I married her. Married into them. To ruffle their calm.
None of this is true. None of it. The medication makes me maudlin. I married a plain girl out of pity, a proud plain girl, gaunt as fencing wire, who came to me on our wedding night with a gauche vitality hoping to please. I was offered a promotion, a schoolhouse, and gracious living. Away from the city her bogus intellectual interests withered. She was bookish but withdrawn, eccentric. An ordinary uninteresting vegetating country housewife and mother.
There followed disturbances which require editing, which require a certain distance, which require dispassionate narration.
V Adam
Cobwebs of a grey June mist that was almost rain floated down on the excavated layers of Roman Britain and on the neatly turned out schoolboys spilling from a chartered bus like lava over their own past. So delightfully proper the boys looked in grey flannels and white shirts and light summer blazers, that several ritual-hungry visitors from Illinois were moved to preserve the charming sight on Polaroid film. Two by two, filing through ancient history, the boys marched down to the stone-tiered amphitheatre and into the greedy lenses and on to the rec room movie screens of middle America. As a final flourish one camera took in the little knot of chaperoning parents who huddled in weatherproof jackets at the rear. A nice touch, thought the photographer. After drinks one fall evening, he would show his neighbours in Evanston, Illinois, a spliced and fast-paced distillation of Europe. They would idle with swizzle sticks and ideas, speculating on the degree of damage which uniforms and regimentation and military drill inflicted on the schoolboy psyche. Probably substantial, they would conclude; only consider the state of Britain’s economy and the attitude of the British worker. No individual initiative, no dynamism. And yet they would feel a certain wistfulness; would ply grandchildren with flannel blazers complete with embroidered pockets (the real thing!); would rise at inconvenient hours to observe royal occasions on television; would preserve the neat crocodile of boys forever coiling their way out of Kodak microframes and into the crumbling grass-glutted amphitheatre.
“Hey, Carpenter,” murmured the fair-haired boy who was Adam’s partner in the crocodile. “I dare you to ask Price if we can have a treasure hunt for gladiator bones.”
Adam’s mind skimmed through an extensive and recently garnered repertoire of imperial trivia: the papier-mâché model of a walled city with its forum and theatre, its villas and baths; the coloured chart of gladiatorial weapons; the re-enacted conquest of 55 BC. (Adam had not been cast as Julius Caesar or any of his bare-legged mini-skirted soldiers, but as a Briton daubed in woad.)
“I dare you back, Snelby,” he said coolly. He knew how to play this battle of wits. Never flinch, and always go one better. “I’ll do it if you ask him what Roman loos were like.”
“Done!” A snicker of delight. “That’s a good one. My dad would like that.”
Adam had seen Snelby’s father on television from time to time, speaking in clipped tones on important matters. It was difficult to imagine his having an opinion on Roman loos.
“Your father an Oxford or a Cambridge man, Carpenter? Which?”
Adam looked thoughtfully at his feet for several seconds and then said carefully: “Can’t you guess?”
“Cambridge. I knew it! Was he a sporting man too?”
“He won lots of sporting awards. He’s fantastic at surfing and mountain climbing.”
“Surfing! Where does he go surfing?”
“Oh, all over. In the Pacific.”
“In the Pacific! Gosh, what is he? I mean, what does he do?”
“He’s a lawyer.” Also a weekend sheep farmer, but it might be better not to mention that.
“Is his practice in London? I mean, when does he get to the Pacific?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Adam fenced. “He’s away a lot”
“For the government?”
“Sort of.”
“I say, he’s not in the Secret Service, is he?”
Adam smiled, but said nothing.
Snelby was impressed. “Of course, you’re not allowed to tell, I know. Which college?”
“Pardon?”
“At Cambridge. Which college?”
“Ah … Can’t you tell?”
“King’s too! That means we’ll go there together! I say, can I meet your father some day?”
“Well, uh … Right now he’s in Australia.”
“That’s why you had that awful accent. You travel around with him, lucky devil! Is it very hush-hush?”
“I really don’t … Snelby, I shouldn’t be …”
“You can count on me. Absolutely. You don’t need to say another thing. I won’t breathe a word. Gosh, your mother must have to be brave.” Craning back to see where Emily was. “She’s very beautiful, your mother. Of course, I know Secret Service men always have beautiful women. Like James Bond.”
They had reached the amphitheatre into which a breeze blew the thin rain in reams of the sheerest chiffon. From the wet grass beneath his feet, Adam fancied he heard the sighing of legionnaires worn out in foreign service, their sighs stretching out across Gaul, their dreams touching, the lonely sons growing up without them in Rome. He wondered what Dave would be doing at this moment.
Rain always made him think of Dave. So did the sun; so did the beach. Because they were all so startlingly different, so absolutely unlike anything over there. After months of bleak drizzle when he had first arrived in London, a master had said to him: “I suppose you’re sick of this rain, Carpenter? After Sydney?”
“Rain?” Bewilderment. “Is this rain, sir?”
The master had laughed. “A good line, Carpenter. A good line. Not bad for a wild colonial boy.”
But Adam had been genuinely surprised, thinking of the lashing fury of thunderstorms, and of southerly busters, and of cyclones hurling themselves in off the Pacific. He had not seen or felt anything that he recognised as rain.
Australia existed for him as a series of intensely remembered but permanently lost sensations. He grieved for them as for the loss of paradise. He would be walking over the shingle at Brighton in his rubber-soled shoes to where the weary Channel lapped against the grey stones, and he would feel affronted, as though words themselves were not reliable. He would stare at this sleeve of the Atlantic with disgust and think “ocean”, and the surf below Daves Sydney house would crash over powdered golden sands and through his nerve ends and he would remember the feel of Dave’s hairy chest. His arms would be tightly around Dave’s neck and together they would brace themselves against the will of the breaker, would swoop up, up its glassy wall, ducking under the foaming crest, coasting down the gentle green valley on the far side. If the wave were particularly high, Dave would say to him, laughing: “That one came all the way from Fiji, mate.”
And once, when a wave had spun them over and over like flecks of seaweed and had dumped them gasping and spluttering on the sand, Dave had thumped him on the back to get all the sea water out of his lungs and had told him: “That one came all the way from South America, mate!”
Mate.
Dave was his best and dearest mate. A father would be a mate you could never lose.
Once, after he and Snelby had both been caned for shooting small paper pellets from an elastic band in class (one of the pellets had hit Higgins on the ear and he had yelped), Snelby whispered to him: “You talk funny, Carpenter, but I think you’re all right. You didn’t flinch a bit.”
From Snelby, who had once held Adam’s head under water for some obscure breach of school etiquette, this was high praise. Adam had asked shyly: “Will you be my mate, Snelby?”
“What’s a mate?”
Adam had not known how to reply. He could place no further trust in words.
Snelby had simply shaken his head, grinning affectionately. “Peculiar, the way you talk, Carpenter. But I like you. One of the best.”
“And here
,” Mr Price said, “are the remains of the forum where every important decision for the city would have been made. When imperial messengers arrived from Rome with proclamations from Caesar, this is where they would have been read to the people. And right here, in the centre of the forecourt, is the very sundial from which the city kept its time, still keeping the same perfect time from nature. That is to say,” he added dryly, “when there is enough sun to read it.”
The boys laughed as they crowded around the bronze dial to view the Roman numerals.
“What does it say here?” Mr Price asked, pointing to an inscription. “Dickinson?”
“Tempus fugit, sir.”
“Which means, Higgins?”
“Time flies, sir.”
“Correct. And it certainly does. Fifteen centuries have passed since the last Roman soldier read the time from this clock. And that was probably just before he leapt into his chariot and headed down the great Roman road to London and then to the port and the ships. He was needed in Gaul and in Rome itself. The Empire was falling apart.
“And yet time stands still too. That road to London still exists. We came over it in the bus today. If we were to dig up a few layers of asphalt, we’d see the very stones the Romans laid down. Their shades are all around us.
“And that’s what I want you to learn from this trip. History is a ladder. We stand on the shoulders of other men.”
He seemed to be talking at least partly to the little group of parents, several of whom were fathers who had taken the day off from law offices or government posts to accompany their sons. Adam could see that two of the fathers had been paying quite close and gallant attention to his mother. He was used to this. Men always fluttered around her like moths, they always looked at her that way.
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 5
