by Nigel Packer
Otto returned to the city regularly to see her, using as an excuse his connection with Pierre. He even kept on the rundown apartment in the 18th arrondissement, making it easier for them to meet whenever he was passing through the Gare du Nord on his way to somewhere else. For almost two years, Otto now conceded to himself, the betrayal of his family had been absolute.
No more excuses. You probably lapsed before Cynthia did, so face up to it.
Yet throughout the duration of the affair he had continually played odd games with himself, establishing little rules and regulations that, to him at the time, seemed to make his behaviour more acceptable. He had never once telephoned Cynthia from Sandrine’s apartment, for instance – always returning to his own in order to do so. If he knew he would be speaking to Daniel, he wouldn’t even phone home from his own apartment, associated as it was with the odd visit from Sandrine. Instead he would call up from a public booth, in the shadow of the Gare du Nord, feeding in the ten-centime coins and asking Daniel in a distracted voice about his day at school.
Strange, the games that conscience plays, he thought. Did it really make you feel any differently?
Evidently it did, because the affair came to an end only once the two worlds of Otto came into inevitable collision, some time in early 1976. Sandrine telephoned him at the house in Hampstead. He had no idea why, she had never done it before, and later he came to suspect it was her way of bringing the whole episode to a close.
If she was bored with me, he later asked himself, sexually or otherwise – then why didn’t she tell me to my face?
Perhaps she was more squeamish regarding such matters than she liked to admit.
Otto had answered the telephone that evening, and there followed a minute or two of frantic and inarticulate whispers. He couldn’t remember what was said, exactly, but Cynthia had been listening on the extension in the bedroom. As they passed in the corridor, she told him she would like a word about the conversation she had just overheard. He nodded and retired to the living room to await his sentence.
When putting Daniel to bed that evening, Cynthia was as smiling, attentive and patient with her son as ever. After tucking him in for the night and kissing him lightly on the forehead, she closed his bedroom door and descended the stairs, carefully closing two more intervening doors before passing through her study to the living room. Shutting that door, too, she walked calmly to the centre of the room where Otto sat waiting for her and let the rage explode from within her.
‘What the fuck has been going on?’ she asked, not giving him the chance to attempt a preliminary apology. ‘Who the fuck was that woman? Just how long have you been fucking her? And what the fuck is she doing calling up my husband in our fucking home?’
Her voice cracked on the final three words; the fury spilling over.
Otto was chastened into silence by her wrath. The middle-aged fantasy he had been living out for the past two years came crashing down around his ears. So it was real, there were consequences. And there they were, in front of him. Cynthia was sobbing hard in her anger, but trying all the while to stop herself. She wiped her face in a matter-of-fact way that made it all the more difficult to watch. It was years since Otto had seen her so upset – not since their early days together, when there had been some silly argument and they had separated for a few weeks. But then they had been in their twenties. Cynthia was in her forties now. Seeing her in this distressed and undignified state both shocked and nonplussed Otto.
What have you done?
His voice was quiet as he looked down at the wooden floorboards and told her the entire story, from start to finish. Her face stayed expressionless throughout. He was careful not to stint on any facts; careful, too, not to linger on the details. He wanted to get it over with as quickly and cleanly as possible. When he had finished speaking, Cynthia left the room without a word, closing the door softly behind her. After staring at the floorboards a few minutes longer, Otto slipped off his shoes, lifted his feet from the floor and raised his long body onto the couch. He lay there motionless until the next morning, curled into a foetal position, still wearing the shirt, tie and slacks from his forgotten day at work. He didn’t move all night: either to turn off the light, or to clear away from the table the two glasses of wine he had been in the process of pouring when the telephone rang.
He felt no sense of recrimination towards Sandrine; did not even think, at that stage, as to why she might have called him. There was no space for thinking at all now, and this from a man who rarely did anything else. His consciousness overflowed with guilt – with the two years of guilt that had lain buried away. It had tried to burrow its way out sometimes, and manifested itself in bizarre little rituals, such as the phone calls home, made from public booths. Maybe that guilt was evident in the sheer abandonment with which he and Sandrine used to make love. But there was no need, any more, for this guilt to disguise itself as anything else. It was out in the open, freed once more; stretching itself luxuriantly into the furthest corners of his mind, and not allowing space for anything as feeble as thought.
Cynthia’s control at breakfast the next morning amazed Otto. She spoke to him normally, joked and chatted to Daniel, and showed almost no sign of the anguish that must have been devouring her. The small, tell-tale signs were all physical: the slight puffiness of her face, a certain redness around the eyes, and the moment when she missed the glass while pouring out Daniel’s orange juice, jumping to her feet with a cry of ‘Silly me’ and sprinting to get a tissue.
Otto hid it much worse than she did. Sitting silent, sleepless and mournful before his cornflakes, he stirred them absently with a spoon, watching with a vague detachment as they spun in slow circles in the bowl. Daniel was distracted that morning by an upcoming school visit to the National Portrait Gallery. He didn’t notice anything untoward in the behaviour of his father, who could be pretty taciturn at breakfast, even on the best of days.
That lunchtime Otto left the office in Portland Place and walked to a nearby phone booth. From there he spoke to Sandrine for the final time. Both of them seemed embarrassed. The conversation was civilised and relatively painless. Sandrine apologised. She told him she had telephoned on a whim, after drinking a bottle of wine, and had not really considered the potential consequences. Otto had given her the number some time before, she reminded him, on the understanding that she would never use it.
So why exactly did I do that? he wondered. Some sublimated need to bring about its end?
Sandrine agreed that it was best to end it immediately. She further agreed that after this length of time their affair had run its course. As they prepared to say their goodbyes, Otto suddenly felt oddly sentimental. A ridiculous feeling came over him – the need to say something heartfelt, even profound to her. He ran through some options in his head. Yet everything he thought of sounded idiotic; completely out of keeping both with Sandrine herself, and with the nature of their affair, which had been physically heated, but emotionally stone cold.
What do I say to her? Thank you? That was most enjoyable? I will think of you now and again? I leave with you a small part of my soul? I almost loved you – in a bodily way?
All were absurd, and none quite true – just knee-jerk manifestations of the bourgeois sensibility that characterised Otto, and which Sandrine herself would ruthlessly mock as they lay in the afterglow, smoking their Gitanes.
So he said none of these things, just ‘Goodbye’; as did she.
Although this was the last contact Otto ever had with Sandrine, he did hear about her now and again from Pierre. Occasionally he would come across articles she had written in various academic publications. Once he even saw her picture, thirty years on, and still instantly recognisable. The strong face was holding up well, the grey hair cropped tight to the head. Sandrine enjoyed a successful academic career, becoming a highly respected figure within her field. She spent several more years at the Sorbonne, and then a period at Toulouse University, finally gaining her professorship
while in her early fifties. Otto noted from the articles he read that her political position had changed over the years, as with so many academic colleagues of her generation. She still considered herself a radical thinker, but her ideas increasingly focused on single issues: the green agenda, gay rights and feminism. She no longer appeared to believe in the political full monty. The revolution she once advocated had been neatly set aside, disappearing beneath the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
So now there’s no one left, Otto thought, with a slight hint of sadness, when reading an article by a sixty-something Sandrine about the ‘naive student politics’ of the 1970s. It’s just poor old Pierre, waving his red flag all alone …
* * *
Cynthia and Otto did not get to speak again until the following evening, when Daniel was safely in bed. Otto dreaded the exchange – he wondered if she might end the marriage altogether, but the direction of the conversation surprised him. It was a taking charge, on Cynthia’s part, but not a throwing out. She was still visibly angry, her top lip shaking, exaggerating more than ever its full redness. But this was a resigned anger, perhaps even a cold one, and she kept her message to Otto brief and unambiguous.
‘Our marriage is not ideal at the moment, and it hasn’t been for some time. You’re not the only one who has felt tempted to stray these past few years.’
He looked up at her, surprised. The questions came crowding in. But he could only manage the shortest of responses.
‘Right.’
‘Clearly we both feel the need to express ourselves elsewhere, but we have a young and beautiful son, and I won’t allow anything to jeopardise his happiness or his sense of security. Is that clear?’
Otto nodded, his eyes once more to the floorboards.
‘We don’t bring it here,’ Cynthia continued, her voice now rising a little. ‘Not into the house, Otto … not either of us, do you understand? That’s the arrangement.’
And with those words, a tacit kind of agreement was reached, a recognition that there would be others, for both of them, but that whatever else happened, they would be discreet for Daniel’s sake. It was an odd proposal, in many respects, but given the circumstances in which they now found themselves, it seemed the only way forward. The damage had been done, they knew; the bonds between them lay broken. But neither of them wished to see the marriage finish completely.
They stuck to the arrangement for the next three years, each more alienating than the last. There was one more affair for Otto, with a fellow architect in her fifties. She was married, with two grown-up children; as guilt-ridden and fractured by life as he was. They had much in common, but little that was positive. All in all it was a furtive and unhappy eighteen months.
They met in hotel rooms, in the middle of the afternoon, one eye on the clock as they fumbled at their clothing. There was little time for conversation, let alone emotional intimacy. Like Otto, she sought an escape from herself; the last thing she wanted was to bring her life into the hotel room for discussion. Especially not with someone even more miserable than she was.
‘I must get back,’ she always said to him distractedly, as he helped zip her dress, or searched for a sock beneath the bed. ‘I have a meeting.’
Or:
‘I must do the shopping.’
Or:
‘I must collect my husband from the station.’
Cynthia, Otto believed, had three affairs during their period of estrangement. There was the professor she met at a café in Highgate; the colleague with the chest hair at Unit 12; and an artist friend she had known since her days as a student.
The cumulative effect was to push Otto and Cynthia ever further apart from each other. It seemed at times a deliberate distancing: Otto didn’t see how the marriage could possibly survive. As those three years unfolded, they spoke less and less; they had separate rooms for sleeping and even reading. They grew apart, quite literally, in that time. They came to occupy different ends of the house.
* * *
Otto lifted his cane before him, as though to ward off any more approaching memories. It was enough for today. Before catching the tube back down to the Elephant and Castle, he wandered for a while around central Hampstead. Passing the Everyman cinema on Holly Bush Vale, he halted for a minute or two to look at the upcoming features. This place held memories as vivid, for him, as any of the moving images that had passed across its screens.
We used to come here all the time in happier days, he thought.
And what was it they had seen together? So many things: Satyajit Ray and Kurosawa, Godard and Tarkovsky – all the greats of world cinema. And Cynthia was always inspired by certain images, bubbling with enthusiasm as they debriefed over a pint. Apu and his sister, running through the tall grasses to see the train passing by – that was one of her favourites. Finding the beauty in everyday moments, she said: the commonplace made balletic through the lens’s eye. And the name of the film with the grasses and the train? Pather Panchali, of course.
Continuing on his way, Otto glanced in one or two shops. He did so in a neutral frame of mind, to keep old memories at bay, rather than invite them in. Yet looking in the window of an interior design store, he noticed, to his surprise, one of Cynthia’s old textiles, sitting at the back of a display cabinet. It featured a striking pattern of ochre, green and luminous blue, and was placed in a section marked Design Classics.
After the memories of the house, so changed, with its abundant garden masking the close-cropped lawn of old; after his memories of Daniel, partially captured through the lens of an old cine camera, but not rediscovered in their essence; after his memories of their family life here, more troubled and troubling than he had ever allowed himself to admit before, Otto felt oddly reassured to see Cynthia’s fabric design in the window. Some familiar part of it remained, then, the twenty years of life they had spent at that house in Hampstead. The traces had not yet been erased completely.
He paused a moment to press his fingers against the glass pane, the pattern of the fabric seeming to pass beneath his palm, before moving on to contemplate the next window in the display.
Twenty
As he was travelling back on the Underground, a fragment of melody came to Otto; inspired, somehow, by the colours of Cynthia’s fabric design in the shop window. Words, too, appeared from within the melody.
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.
(I am lost to the world.)
This sort of thing happened to him, occasionally. It was many years since Otto had used his German on a regular basis, yet it remained, perhaps, the language closest to his soul – the one through which he funnelled and shaped his innermost thoughts and feelings. Even now, many decades since he had lived in the company of German speakers, words and phrases appeared to him suddenly; flotsam from the past, cast ashore unexpectedly as he scanned the near-horizon of his thoughts. The melodious voice of his mother, the deep baritone of his father – both could bring him comfort still in moments of distress. Yet Otto’s relationship with his mother tongue would always be problematic. It remained for him a language of poetry, subtlety and precision – the language of Goethe and Schiller, of Hegel and of Kant. But it was also pregnant with other associations: symbol of a history sometimes dark and troubled.
For occasionally, during moments of quiet, Otto heard another voice from his early childhood, floating across the decades from the radio of their Viennese apartment. Astringent and rasping, half choked with fury, this voice stood out amid the lightness of the waltzes that usually poured from the radio. Its harsh tone – the accent of the countryside, not the Viennese to which Otto was accustomed – made it difficult to understand. The loudspeakers through which it was amplified, and the thunderous cheers of the crowd that accompanied every phrase, only added to Otto’s bewilderment as he sat on the living-room floor before the radio. Every time Otto heard this voice, inciting the crowd to roars of anger, he thought of the trainers at the circus, baiting the fierce lions in their cages.
‘
What’s the man saying?’ he sometimes asked his father, who was leaning forward intently in his chair, the evening paper set aside and his thin lips pale with rage. But Otto never received a reply.
On the tube journey today, however, it was a different voice from childhood that had flooded Otto’s consciousness; one evoking a sense of security and peace. He searched his memory for more fragments of the tune, his lips moving minutely as he did so.
Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel, Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet.
(I am dead to the world’s turmoil, and I rest in a calm place.)
The source of the lyrics came to him. They were from a lied by Gustav Mahler; from his setting of Rückert’s poetry. Otto’s mother would sing it to him sometimes, whenever he struggled to sleep at night in their Viennese apartment. Or else, on bright spring mornings, she would play a recording of it on the old wooden gramophone, the daylight slanting through the curtains as they listened. Phrases of the song would return to his mother’s lips throughout the day – as the two of them played quoits in the Stadtpark, for instance, or as they walked the long road to the shops, Otto clasping the handles of the huge wicker basket and studying the tram wires overhead.
But why had he remembered that song now, at this moment in time? And what was its connection with the piece of fabric he had seen in the Hampstead shop window? He thought it over once more as the tube train rattled through the tunnels.
