‘I’ve seen too many girls like that in my time,’ said Jacquou sombrely, as the train diminished in the distance towards the plains of the Loire. Then he burst out laughing, and apologized for being ‘old and cynical’.
I felt I wanted to be old and cynical too. I had had enough of being young, I thought, if that meant sitting in cafés drinking too much, listening to rubbish about creativity, and being beholden to proper adults to bail me out of trouble. I was in my mid-twenties and was within a few months of finishing my dissertation, if I worked hard. Simone would soon be twenty-three. I thought it was nearly time we got married.
I was not to see Evan again for very many years.
I ran into Joyce once, on the Metro, the following winter. She looked fairly well, if rather fat. We greeted one another with mutual embarrassment, and conversed for a few minutes without mentioning Evan’s name. She said that she had a job looking after some children out at Vincennes, which is where she was going. I got off at Bastille, as Simone and I were now living in two rooms above a bakery in the Marais, among interesting whiffs of new bread and drains.
I believe it was at the end of that same summer but perhaps it was one soon after – at any rate it was long, long ago – that Simone and I, driving north, stopped at a small town on the Loire. I have always thought it was Richelieu, but I have never been back. I do not remember if we sought out a particular church, or if we were simply wandering, buying a picnic lunch and taking a stroll – it must have been that, for no one had told us what we would find in the church. Unusually, it had an upper room to one side of the main building, a light, stone-vaulted chamber like a setting for some Renaissance painting of the Last Supper. It was arranged as a chapel, with an ornate nineteenth-century altar at one end and the usual unresponsive-looking statue of the Virgin. Almost all the wall-space was covered with a patchwork of stone and marble plaques, their inscriptions variations on the eternal, wishful theme of ‘Grateful thanks, Mother of God, for favours received’.
‘It must be some specific cult,’ Simone and I said to each other. ‘They’ve probably got a grubby little relic here.’
‘I wonder what this Virgin does,’ said Simone. ‘I mean, what she cures.’
‘Must it be one particular thing?’
‘Yes, I think so. I think that’s what they –’ (she meant the Catholics, the traditional Other of Huguenot France) – ‘believe. Such-and-such a Virgin is good for infertility and that other for tuberculosis or – or liver complaints or something.’
‘How prosaic.’
‘But convenient. Like knowing which shop to go to.’ She wandered round the chapel, reading the variations of abject gratitude and conviction, personal letters to Dear Mary in stone. She seemed to like them, but I found them cumulatively claustrophobic.
‘Well whatever it is it must be quite a common complaint,’ I said, ‘and one that you can kid yourself is improved by praying … Shall we go?’
‘Do you think perhaps it’s cancer?’ she said.
That had occurred to me too, as the most likely disease for such obsessive attention, but I had not liked to say so because of Simone’s own mother.
‘Very probably,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
Down the stone stairs, in the main body of the church, we found some pamphlets. It wasn’t cancer, after all, that this Virgin was reputed to protect one from: it was fear.
‘Dead clever!’ I said. ‘Wonder who dreamed that up? The one thing no one could ever prove prayer wasn’t efficacious against. A bit of a cheat, I’d say.’
‘I don’t think it’s a cheat,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s actually more honest than most of the cults. If people believe they are conquering fear by prayer, then they are. Anyway it’s what I always wanted when I was a child … I wish I’d known then that this Virgin was here.’
‘Well I shouldn’t think your father would have been keen on you traipsing off to petition her.’ I was surprised. I was inclined to think of Simone as braver than myself, and – in most things – clear-sighted. I found the thought of her, at ten or eleven, praying to a sentimental Victorian image, vaguely offensive. ‘What were you afraid of anyway?’
‘Oh – lots of things … Yes I was, you don’t realize. Lots and lots. I used to talk to – to either of my parents about the things I was afraid of, and at first whichever one it was used to try to talk me out of that particular fear.’
‘But what sort of fears?’ I couldn’t remember being afraid of much as a child myself. Crassly secure, no doubt, I thought.
‘Oh – the dark and accidents and the river rising suddenly in the night and savage dogs and a boy in the village with a huge head and Maman or Papa dying,’ she said rapidly, and added at once: ‘But what is beside the point. Because when I was reasoned out of one fear I used to think up another one, so reasoning was no use. Eventually Papa noticed that. He said to me once when I’d been carrying on at him – oh, about some silly, unlikely thing, I can’t remember what – he said: ‘‘I think you are frightened just because you are frightened, and the only thing you really have to fear is fear itself.’’’
‘That was probably true. But did it help?’
‘Yes, eventually it did. We made a sort of joke of it after that. Any particular thing I was afraid of – the Germans coming, or whatever – Papa and Maman used to be absolutely dismissive about, but they used to accept that I was frightened, and be fairly sympathetic about my fear, as if it were a tiresome pain in the leg or something. That’s why I think that chapel full of ‘‘thank you’’ plaques is right. Often it is fear itself that is the incapacitating disease to be overcome.’
‘I am familiar with the theory,’ I said stiffly, as we left the church, ‘but there seems to me a fallacy in it.’
‘What?’
‘Well – you said that one of your fears as a child was of either of your parents dying. But your mother did.’
‘Yes. But by that time I had become braver. That’s the point.’ There was an edge of childish ‘so there’ in her voice but I, from within my carapace of reason, confusedly perceived the point she was making. Did she still pray for courage, translating her father’s secular advice into something more mystical? I had a hunch that she did.
Throughout our life together I tended to scoff at any signs of mysticism or superstition that she betrayed – taking upon myself, I suppose, her father’s rôle, copying what I took to be his steadfast rejection of illusion. But after she herself had died (unafraid, her eyes open towards a dark that seemingly held no terrors for her), I wanted to bring Marigold to this Loire town and show her the chapel in the upper room and tell her what her mother had said.
I never did. I was going to, but on one journey together we were late or I thought I must have misremembered the town, recognizing nothing, and the next year Marigold was older and travelled out on her own to join me. I think … Anyway, I never did. One conversation she and I did not have.
I never let Simone herself speak to me properly of these things either. I mean, of the balancing act of living with the dark void and not living with it, minding but not minding. I regret that we did not speak of it. Now, I find myself longing obscurely for Simone’s concealed fount of belief rather than the anodyne goodwill of the person I live with now.
Ann believes that she has no religion. Yet she operates under a great, bland load of assumption about charity, progress, and humankind being essentially good. She does not recognize this value-pack for what it is: the squashy, standard baggage of a post-Christian era that wishes to retain the comforts of religion without its dark heart. She vaguely imagines herself to be emancipated ‘from all that’. Instead, she has made a restrained ‘good Socialism’ her faith; she is one of those who vote Left from conviction rather than self-interest and innocently imagine others do as well. Similarly, she cannot grasp why the entire world is not in favour of nuclear disarmament, and indeed pacificism. She seems to suppose that war is an aberration, that blood sports are a perversion, even that
vegetarianism may be more natural to humans than meat-eating … She is intelligent, by general standards, sensitive and civilized. We have the same mother-tongue.
Yet this time it is like living with someone from a foreign country. She knows nothing. Is this why I married her? Is this the best that, weighted by grief, I could manage? God. God.
Part Three
When did the search begin in earnest?
Certainly, in the early stages, I did not know what I was seeking, and the first moves may seem in the telling, and seemed to me at the time, random. I twitched, shifted, like a drowned man, moved by currents undersea: I knew nothing myself. Or almost nothing.
It is only now, looking back from the end, that I can see that the cycle of blind exploration began earlier than I thought at the time, perhaps even as early as that afternoon when the irrelevant girl who was another Amanda stood in front of me in Court. And I drove home afterwards in the rain and told Ann, in a desultory way, about Evan and Joyce. Joyce and Evan. That was when the sea began to cast forth its dead. Not the literal dead (Marigold had been dead five years then, but was never, for one day, absent from my mind), but those who, for thirty years, had been dead to me.
Of course I did not at first realize that anything was beginning. Having dredged these bodies up, coated in the slime of my own outdated emotion – resentment, a sense of inadequacy and something other and deeper without a name – I would have been glad to cast them back again. But, once exposed, they kept returning unbidden to my thoughts. I had no idea why.
I had not (it seems to me now) much idea about anything at that time. It was indeed I who was the drowned man. I had left my job as a headmaster after Marigold was killed: or, more exactly, since I was starting my sabbatical term off then, I never returned to it. Already, in any case, there had been tentative soundings about a job change: the successful Grammar School I ran was due to go Comprehensive, and my own lack of total enthusiasm for the project was well known; I had recently published a book on the history of state education. Now, when I was asked if I would like to become an Inspector – a rôle in which the pursuit of excellence was considered less of a handicap – I accepted, not thinking very much about anything, intent only on putting one foot before the other; this was a state in which I remained for some time.
So I had been an HMI for about five years, and was married to Ann, when my search got underway. But at first the moves were so inconsequential and (it seemed) dependent on chance, that I did not recognize them for what they were.
It must have been some time after that day in Court, later in the winter, that I called on Lewis Greenfield to discuss my Russian prisoner.
Lewis it was who ‘looked after everything’ when Marigold was killed, but that was sheer kindness on his part, for these days Lewis is no family solicitor but a specialist in international legal wrangles. We have known each other since we were both at Oxford. I have a photograph still of our year, taken in the quad, and it makes me smile. I suppose I must have changed a bit, though I never feel I have changed at all in myself, and even the mirror tells me that I am merely thicker and greyer. But who would recognize in the heavy, bald, formidable, expensively-suited Lewis of today the thin, dark boy with a nervous smile and an East End accent that I remember? In the photo he stands a little apart at the end of a row of stolid, tweed-jacketed young men, as if not quite certain he ought to be there. He wears a blue suit that I remember and a row of pens in his breast pocket; his cowlick hair is greased into a quiff. ‘It was my first week of my first term,’ Lewis protested when I showed him the picture the other year, almost indignant that I still had it. ‘And you’re not to show it to Myra! I mean that.’
Actually I think Myra would find that photo as touching as I do, even though she is rather a snob these days. She is a frankly fat but still pretty woman, who manages to conceal emotionalism under a facade of serene matronhood. They have four well-brought-up children and live in a neo-Georgian house in one of those wooded suburbs where you have to take the car out to buy an evening paper or a loaf of bread: fortunately they have several cars. Their daughter, a portly little girl with Lewis’s covert sweetness of nature but without his aggression, was a pupil of Simone’s at one time; afterwards, the Greenfields used to invite Marigold and me regularly to supper or to Sunday lunch. Later again, when I came out of hospital with my barely-mended knee and no Marigold, not at home, not anywhere, ever again, I more or less lived in the Greenfields’ house for several weeks. Was it then, on a particularly bad day, that Lewis told me the Treblinka story? I think it must have been. It was, he said almost dismissively, a well-known story: I must stop him if I realized I had heard it already …
There was a group of Hassidic scholars in Treblinka Concentration Camp. They wished to mark Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the only means available to them was to hold an informal debate, a kind of vigil. So they discussed for many hours, with scholarly references and precedents, the likely existence or otherwise of God. And, through these time-honoured means, some arguments won over others and a group-consensus emerged: it was at last regretfully agreed that the balance of probability was that God did not exist – that what they had seen and what was happening around them made the existence of a powerful, caring God ipso facto unlikely. There followed a silence, while the implications of this decision were digested. Then at last the eldest scholar got shakily to his feet and said:
‘My friends, it is time to say the evening prayer.’
Of course, I could see that Lewis meant the story to be for me, in the state I was in, but I didn’t want to talk about myself. Unlike the eldest Hassid I had not quite made up my mind whether to go on living. So, for something to say, I asked:
‘Do you have a God, Lewis?’ I was fairly sure he did not.
‘Well I wouldn’t say I have Him personally, so to speak. But the older I get the more I appreciate the idea of keeping faith with my ancestors. And it’s like an old uncle of mine used to say: I believe in standing up of my own accord to be counted before someone drags me out and counts me.’
‘No one will do that to you today, in England.’
‘Very possibly not, but I don’t believe in being too sure of anything. One can get caught out nastily by counting too much on something.’
I wasn’t entirely convinced by him. Oh, I believed in the objective truth of what he said – how could I, of all people, not know now that one should never count upon anything – but I was sceptical that Lewis kept this daunting fact much in mind these days. From the depths of my grief I had been sourly envying him his secure, unbroken life. There were moments when I turned from the big, warm, expensively-furnished house, scented with Myra’s baking, a child playing a musical instrument somewhere in an upstairs room, another studying for his own Law finals by a log fire, all mess removed by the Filipino couple, plus Daddy himself arriving on cue from Zurich, Strasbourg or Hong Kong after another successful professional foray … Moments when it all seemed to me just too like, shall I say, a transatlantic commercial for some discreetly ethnic but by-adoption all-American product: Israeli claret, perhaps.
But possibly Lewis, for all his ostentatious enjoyment of what he had made of his life, really thought something like this too. For when at last I murmured my bitter feeling that he and Myra were living in a happy country from which chance events had now excluded me for ever, he said promptly: ‘Oh – me. Well, yes, of course all this is all right in its way. But a lot of the time I live As If …’
‘As what?’
‘As If there were some purpose to it all. I mean – what other feasible option is there?’ He glanced at me with a shrewd, half-amused, half-cynical expression, perhaps waiting to be asked to elaborate. He might, I thought afterwards, have had an impulse to unburden himself to me. His loss of faith in other things, besides religion … But, if so, I had been too self-absorbed to invite him to. Maybe it was just as well. Sometimes, no doubt, it is better just to say the evening prayer instead. Or to observe whatever s
ecular rituals and obligations have, for people like us, replaced prayer.
Another time, it must have been later, I forget the immediate context, he said – ‘Oh we all have a bit of free-floating agony around, don’t we? It’s a mistake to think it’s necessarily because of anything. You can torture yourself that way …’ But then, before I could agree or disagree with him, he put a hand on my arm and said: ‘I’m sorry, Tom. That was a bloody stupid thing to say to you.’
I was recalling this conversation, and the Treblinka story, on the day several years later that I went to talk to Lewis about ‘my’ Russian prisoner. He was a Ukrainian in fact, a history teacher imprisoned by Soviet Russia for his supposed Ukrainian nationalist sympathies, his tendency to teach history according to facts rather than according to accepted Party concepts, or for some other specifically Russian misdemeanour. I had heard of him through an international historical association to which I belong and which interests itself in such cases. Long ago, when I joined this association, its most eminent members specialized in the Marxist approach to history: I was then busy with my Great Work on the Left. Time, and such events as the demoting of Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution on the one hand, and the rediscovery and popularization of Marxist theory on the other, subsequently undermined many of the assumptions on which the association was originally founded. Today, its ethos is slavophile but anti-Soviet, and it has developed a sideline in campaigning in favour of imprisoned or persecuted academics.
I had never met Piotr Mihailovitch Malenko, but a photo of him looking bespectacled and cheerful, with his dog, in happier days, stood on my study mantelpiece. I used to greet him out loud when I was alone, for we were twins; on the day in 1927 that I saw the light of Birmingham he too cried for the first time in a village on the Dnieper. It was for this reason, together with less childish ones, that I had asked the Prisoners’ Committee secretary to let me have Piotr Mihailovitch as ‘my’ prisoner. As for the rest of his details, the very ordinary pleasantness of his face, the normality of his domestic record (a wife and two daughters, currently living bereft ‘somewhere in the country’) and the modest decency of his achievements (deputy-head, until his arrest, of a high school in Kiev) made me warm to him all the more. I did not want to believe him to be an exceptional person – except in so far as any man may be called exceptional who does what he believes to be right knowing that he may suffer for it. I saw him, rather, as an ordinary chap like myself, but one forced by circumstances to find within himself exceptional resources. I used to look at his picture and hope that he was finding them. The news of him, via the association and contacts in Eastern Europe, was that he had become seriously malnourished on the prison diet, that he had kidney problems and that his eyes were troubling him. I used to stand in front of him and try quite hard to imagine myself in his place. I have never had much time for the idea that contemplating another’s misfortunes makes you feel better about your own, but, for whatever reason, it did seem to help in some way to have Piotr Mihailovitch’s photo there with me.
Give Them All My Love Page 12
