Even when they gave me the drugs, I still held out for a week. Made excuses – avoided you. Mays was getting impatient. More threats – I thought I was going crazy. They said it was only to teach you a lesson.
So I betrayed you. And I fled to Scotland like a coward, with my notes for this damned book. A book that has been paid for with your job – your career. And who knows what else? I haven’t exactly been in the best psychological state for writing – all I’ve managed to produce is a lot of rubbish. For three weeks, I’ve sat every day at the typewriter and watched the letters and words appear before me, but I feel like a mindless machine. And now that I’ve got the news from Anne – now that I know just what it is I’ve done to you, I can’t go on any longer. This is the end for me, Charles. There’s no other way.
I know how I’ll do it – plenty of time here, alone, to think these things through. It’ll all look like an accident – I know the right place for it. It’ll be dark, I’ll stop nearby – check that the road is clear. I don’t want any witnesses. Take a deep breath, then drive full speed towards the bend; the road veering sharply to the right. I steer left. Then through the barrier, down that long hill. It’ll be quick. Easier than I deserve. And everything will go flying through the air – all that there is of this book I hate so much, that’s destroyed so much. All those typewritten sheets of nonsense falling out of the car and blowing away in the wind (I hope to God they don’t find any of it). And the car will go tumbling down, bouncing. If I still know what’s going on, I’ll be happy. I’ll be thinking of you, Charles.
And that’s the last thing I want to confess; that I love you, and always have done. I wish only that the world could have been a different place – that the sort of love which I feel could be as easy and guiltless as yours, with all those women you have. I hope one day you’ll find someone you can be content with. You were my great love, Charles – the one that everyone is supposed to have once in their life. And if anyone was ever to write our story, I hope it wouldn’t be about intrigue and betrayal. I would want it to be a romance. A comedy.
I’ve no right to say any of this – especially after what I’ve done to you. But already I’m dead. Already I’m flying, floating. Take care of Anne and Duncan. Tell them nothing. I know what they both mean to you. Duncan is your own son – I’ve always known it, and it only made me love him more. Our child, yours and mine. And though I love Anne very much, I’m sure it’s better for her that I should go. She can find herself a real husband now. Who knows, perhaps you two might make things up between you. It would make me happy.
One day Duncan will want to know about me – about what happened. I can’t expect you to suffer the dishonour of defending me. But please try to forgive me. In my heart, I feel that everything I did, in the end, was out of love. I am a victim as much as you. Tell Duncan how much I loved him. I hope he grows up to be like you.
Goodbye.
Robert.
30
She was asking me (as was usual at such moments) what I was thinking about – so that I quickly had to think of some suitable reply. I told her I was thinking ‘nothing’.
And that was the night when the novel first entered my imagination. Though not this novel – for I see already that I have failed in my attempt to unravel on paper the ideas which seemed so clear when they lived only in my mind. What I have written so far is nothing more than a series of first steps which one day might lead me to rediscover the book which had its conception that night. So easy, once you start putting things down, to get led off into new stories – stories you had no intention of writing. The lines I have spun up to now do little more than orbit around the real story. My task has still barely begun.
I told Eleonora I was thinking ‘nothing’, then went to the bathroom – its floor cold beneath my bare feet – and something prompted the memory of that girl whom I had briefly met ten years earlier. I had hardly thought of her since – what could have brought her once more to mind? I stood naked on the cold floor, in the dim half-light, and I found myself thinking of two people – Duncan and Gio-vanna, meeting on a train. For the next ten years, they would continue to grow in my imagination – a secret process, which I would never dare to confess. Yet even now, now that I am alone with my sorrows and I am free to languish in my fantasies, still I find that I am unable to write their story. If only I can get it right, that first scene, then surely everything else will follow. Still I cling to this hope.
That chance meeting – sitting on a train, on my way to visit Eleonora. On my way to that Turkish rug where our bodies had first come together. Reading a book by Alfredo Galli. And then that girl came into my compartment and sat opposite me. We began a conversation – she asked what had brought me to live in Italy, and I told her how I had sought asylum and was now earning a living teaching English. So like my first meeting with Eleonora! And yet this time things were crucially altered – where before I had been fascinated by coldness, now I saw something utterly alive. And it was a life which would be forever closed to me. I told her about the home I had left in England – my mother who was now all alone, since my father had died six years earlier (and my sister hardly visited). And how callous it had been of me to leave her so. No, the girl said, you mustn’t feel like that – she even reached out her hand and placed it on my knee. But I’m sure now that by making my sudden flight into exile I hastened my mother’s death. What ever would my father have thought of such behaviour?
Just as well, that I didn’t think of him when I was standing on the cold bathroom floor. Just as well that I didn’t think then, as so often I have done, of all the many ways in which I failed him – otherwise those two characters could never have walked unannounced into my imagination. Or might it have been better if I had thought of him, and thereby barred entry to the ones whose story I seem destined forever to go on redrafting?
But as the days and weeks passed, and Duncan and Giovanna began to emerge more clearly in my mind, I found that other memories were being drawn into the strange process of accretion which was taking place, and which has borne its first fruit in the pages I have now filled. As Galli said in his final work – the Essay Against Literature – ‘If the writer is one who holds a mirror to the world, then it is necessarily a broken mirror; reflecting the points of reality, but distorting the distances which separate them.’ The story I have been trying to set down is indeed a kind of broken mirror. And now, as I think back on what I have written during my journeys each day between Cremona and Milan, I can see how things have been altered and distorted. And I ask myself whether the mirror can be made true once more. Flat and true.
She drew her hand back from my knee. Still we were sitting close opposite one another in the compartment. She asked me more about my parents – what they were like; and we talked about childhood, and its weird perspective which can cast shadows across an entire life. Surprising, how easy it can be, sometimes, to talk to a complete stranger.
I told her about my father; a proud, cool man. He was in the police. He had no education, but still he was able to rise eventually to the rank of Inspector. He often said I had inherited my talent for science from his own enquiring mind. And what a mind! While I was still a young child, his unerring ability to discover any misbehaviour which I might have committed made me think that he must have the capacity to read my thoughts. In his work, I have no doubt, he was equally efficient. If only I could have been as good at science.
I reminisced with her about the times when he would take me to watch trains near our house, and he would silently hold my hand while I waved at the passing engines. Perhaps he would use the time to mull over a difficult case. And we agreed that one’s parents are always the people one knows least in the world. Only in retrospect can we try to piece together the lives which they must have led – only by reflecting on our own fears and anxieties can we speculate about the ones which they must have felt.
Standing in the cold bathroom, the memory of the girl’s face, and the sound of her voice, ca
me back to me – still fresh – across a space of years. I went back to bed, fell asleep beside my wife, but already the act of mental infidelity was well under way. And in the weeks which followed, I began to learn more about the fictional characters who had sprung to life in my head.
An evening some time later; I went to the bathroom before going to bed (why should it always be the bathroom? Perhaps because it was only here that I could enjoy true privacy), and as I pulled up my flies, I thought of that time as a child when I got myself caught in the zip – my father had joked that if things had gone wrong I might have come out Jewish. And I remembered wondering then, with the pure clear logic of childhood, if this was the sort of error which had been committed by those boys who now wore a yellow star, and were being sent away. Such a vivid memory, no matter how many times it recurs. And standing there, I saw again in my mind the stolen notebook, and the car – white, in my imagination – and the memory of all those many ways in which I had tried to explain it. So that when I went to bed and lay silent and subdued beside Eleonora and she asked me what I was thinking, and I told her as usual ‘nothing’, in fact my mind was filled with troubling thoughts. And I could see now how the story should begin – not with two people on a train, but rather with an image; the image of a car hitting a barrier, and tumbling down a hillside.
Sitting in the compartment, the girl’s knees close to mine as we sat opposite one another. She told me about a boy she thought she was in love with, though she wasn’t sure – how can you ever be sure about a thing like love? To be sure usually means being deluded. She told me about her own childhood, and how she would secretly put on her mother’s make-up and clothes – walking around the bedroom in high-heels which were ten sizes too big for her. And I told her how I used to play at being a policeman, like my father.
Once, when I was very young, I went into his room while he was out. I opened the drawer of his desk, and saw a small notebook – his policeman’s pocket-book. Perhaps he shouldn’t have kept such a thing at home – though I now realize it wasn’t the usual regulation note-book (I have checked these things thoroughly). I saw it lying in the drawer. What impulse led me to take it out, to open it, and to study without comprehension the writing which my father had entered in it? I should have put it back – and yet I didn’t. I kept it – stole it. This little record of other people’s guilt became a symbol of my own. Secretly, I used it in my games. If I had been discovered, who knows what punishment I might have deserved?
I could only have been four or five – I can’t remember if it was before the Liberation or after. Certainly, I was too young to be able to understand anything which was written in it. I only wanted to have a prop with which to emulate my father; to have a notebook just like his. Even so, I knew that I must never be found out. I hid the book away, in a box deep in a drawer in the spare room. And I forgot about it.
I forgot about it for more than twenty years. I had grown up, left home and gone to university. Now I was doing research in theoretical physics. My father had died, and mother decided to sell the house and move to a smaller place. She asked me to come and help put things in order. It was strange, returning to the scene of my childhood – I had been back many times, of course, but now that I was going through cupboards and boxes, rediscovering the past, it brought me once more into close contact with the lost years. And in the spare room, still buried at the bottom of the drawer, I found the notebook I had hidden long ago. It had lain there all that time, dormant. I opened it again, and looked at the coloured swirls I had pencilled across its pages with my childish hand. But now, with the eye of an adult, I could read the text which my father had written – the police notes which I had stolen. Perhaps he got into a lot of trouble for losing his notebook. Or else he covered his error by simply taking a new one and making things up from memory or imagination. Perhaps my actions set a man free – and perhaps I caused another to be condemned.
I still have the book – why is it that I can never bring myself to destroy it? I still feel the ache of guilt which its theft caused in my stomach. And yet it is all I have left of him. Five years after I rediscovered it, when I was preparing to make my one-way journey to Italy, it was the only thing I took as a memento. And the notes it contains have continued to intrigue me – the barest details of a case concerning two men. Who they were, I do not know. Nor can I be certain whether the events took place during the Occupation or under the Communist regime. The book is not of the standard form used by the police during either period (though my father’s service covered both) – it seems that it may have been connected with something covert; something which lay outside the normal scope of police work. The pages I tore out during my childhood games might have supplied an answer. Or perhaps, now that the files are open, I shall find the courage to go back to England to try and learn the full story.
The briefest of notes – each man followed; sometimes they meet, sometimes it appears that one of them himself is following the other. Two suspicious souls themselves suspected. Did my theft enable them to walk free? Or was the evidence against them irrelevant? My father – although he later reached the rank of Inspector – would at that time only have been a constable. He could have been little more than an unseen player, blind to the greater meaning and implication of whatever it was he was doing. And so in those notes, there is no sense of purpose; no sense of who might be the criminal, or what the offence. There are only observations, dry and objective like the records of a scientist engaged in some experiment. Observations written in the neat, evenly sloping letters of my father; letters which form words with no meaning and yet which seem to imply a crime, or the idea of a crime. And as I stood in the house of my parents – in the house of my childhood – with the little book I had rediscovered, and I read beneath the childish spirals with which I had embellished his words followed those neatly formed letters – I was reminded of my own crime, of my own act of theft; I was reminded that this forgotten episode was itself part of my own guilt and no guilt is greater than that of a child. I felt again the lump of fear in my throat; I heard again my father’s stern voice – and I saw him watching his suspects; a different kind of figure now. Now he too was being watched, his memory was being judged, assessed. What small part might he have played in the story he was describing? And exactly whose story was it?
Two men, one or both of whom may have been involved in subversion; one or both of whom may have been a collaborator, or an informer. We see one of them, observed in a cafe, writing something - a diary perhaps. Or the other going to meet a girl – we follow the two of them through the streets, to a door which they enter. And there is a car which, my father notes, ‘will be dealt with’.
An unofficial, covert operation. Not a standard piece of police work. I have tried out many theories – a simple surveillance job for a friend who suspected his wife, or a piece of unpaid overtime by a young constable keen on promotion. Harmless possibilities. Or he may have been part of one of those secret sections within the police. He may have been involved in activities which were less than honourable. So painful for me to contemplate it, and yet these fears have lingered with me ever since I stood in my mother’s house and deciphered the words which had lain hidden for so long. Fears which stayed with me when I went to Italy a few years later – the book still in my possession (such a risk to take it!) – no hope then of finding an answer. Fears which I never dared discuss with Eleonora throughout twenty years of marriage. And yet I confessed everything to that girl whose name I never learned.
If my father’s notes were written during the Occupation, then might the suspects have been with the Resistance? In which case, my father may have crossed the boundary which branded some sections of the police as active collaborators, rather than the passive ones who were immediately pardoned and rehabilitated. My father would have committed the ultimate act of treachery. But if it was during the Communist regime, would this make things any better? The difference between being a hero or a traitor is simply a matter of being
on the right side at the right time.
Perhaps, now that the records are being opened, all will become clear. And then they will prove that my father was only doing his job, only following orders. That although he was strong, he could also be weak – and this was the side of him which I might have loved if I had ever been able to see it. And when I see how wrong I have been, I shall beg forgiveness from his memory.
I was standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. Stories were flowing together in my mind, like rivers merging; Duncan and Giovanna, and a car – a white car, crashing through a barrier. And memories of the days I spent in England doing research; memories of the things I had left behind; people I had abandoned and betrayed. And I thought of Galli’s words, at the end of his Essay Against Literature: ‘The writer can never escape from reality, no matter how hard he might try; for the flight from the world is a flight into one’s soul, and this is a land in which there can be no excuses, no justifications. To write is to be forever the slave of one’s talents, and the prisoner of one’s failings.’
I got into bed beside Eleonora’s sleek body, and though I told her I was thinking ‘nothing’, my mind was filled with troublesome thoughts. Now I had it; the story of Duncan and Giovanna, and of the car crash which killed his father – his father who was an historian, a scientist experimenting with the past; a man who was supposed to contribute to the rewriting of history but who would make a stand, and who would die because of it. And a friend who was a successful physicist – who was everything that I was not. Everything that my father might have liked me to be. And a third man, called Mays – a name which reflected the labyrinthine nature of Possibility. For ten years, their story would grow in my mind. During the day I would be able to forget about it, but it was in the nights that it would return – this secret obsession. I would follow them, these elusive figures, through the shelves of Galli’s great Library, in search of the solution which I would one day write.
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