Give Them All My Love

by Gillian Tindall

  I knew too that he was of Jewish origin but was a believing Christian: neither of these facts can have endeared him to the Soviet authorities. So I was thinking about the Treblinka story as I drove to the Greenfields that day, and while I was there I said to Lewis, ‘I wonder if Piotr Mihailovitch is living ‘‘As If’’ in Perm camp.’

  Lewis took off his new half-moon glasses and put them on again while he worked out what on earth I meant. Having apparently located my reference and understood it, he just said:

  ‘Must be, I should think, wouldn’t you? Hope so, poor sod.’

  Lewis was helping me draft a letter to a delegation in Vienna who were supposed to be looking into a number of Human Rights cases including that of Piotr Mihailovitch Malenko. I had some time ago enlisted Lewis’s support as legal adviser to the Prisoners’ Committee.

  ‘If we want to make this letter usable in itself by the delegation we have to work within Soviet Law as it stands,’ he said. ‘Like I said before, it’s no good banging on about it being scandalous that Malenko is in prison anyway, that would just be counter-productive. He’s sentenced to ten years and there it is. What I suggest we stress is his rights within that context – make the buggers feel that, at the end of the sentence, they’ve got to produce him to the world in reasonable nick. How much longer has he got to serve, by the way?’

  ‘Nearly six years still. What I’m afraid is that, as things are, he won’t live that long.’

  ‘Exactly, and that’s what we have to harp on. Ask specific questions about diet and medical treatment. Nag to know more about the kidney ailment. Embarrass the bastards.’

  We worked on the letter some more. I said: ‘Health is a matter of morale too, isn’t it? I just wish we could think of some way of letting him know people are fussing on his behalf.’

  ‘His wife knows?’

  ‘We hope she does. We’re never sure what letters get through to her.’

  ‘Any chance of her getting a message to him?’

  ‘We think the current situation is that she’s not allowed to visit. Or send presents. That’s part of the bleakness, isn’t it? I mean that there isn’t any hard news, nothing to take hold of. As if the powers that be were making him fade out of existence even before they’ve actually killed him off … You know, Lewis, yesterday for the first time when I looked at his photograph I had the sinking feeling that perhaps he isn’t alive any more – that campaigning for him is just an empty act of faith. No real point to it. Not good.’

  ‘Not good at all,’ said Lewis promptly, ‘since that’s probably just what the Soviets are hoping we’ll think. No news, nothing to go on … Emptiness. Nacht und Nebel. No, however non-existent the evidence, you must hang on to the idea that he is alive, can be helped.’

  ‘The ‘‘As If’’ situation again, in fact. Not believing specifically in God, I mean, but just believing it’s all worth it.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  I thought for a bit. Till then, I had had some cloudy feeling, to which I would not have owned in words, that by having Piotr Mihailovitch on my mantelpiece, talking to him when we were on our own, I was somehow doing what I could to keep him going. But perhaps it was rather he who was keeping me going? When I woke in the night and could not sleep again, which I had begun to do with depressing frequency the last few months, the thought of him, my shadow-twin, my semblable, surviving privations immeasurable by me, was an obscure source of strength to me. I had formed the habit of reaching for him mentally in the dark, for consolation and company, as a child will reach for its teddy or a man for a woman, real or fantasized. But if in reality he had given up, had abandoned his own more specific faith and was already dead, or dying …

  After a while I attempted to convey this to Lewis. He gave me a penetrating look – or rather, a parody of one. I could see he was wondering if I was ‘all right’, which irritated me quite a lot. Of course I was ‘all right’ fundamentally, I always am. Except just in those first few weeks after Marigold went, it never occurred to me I might give up on life, and even if it had I don’t think I would have known how to. Some people seem to be able to stage spectacular crack-ups, incontrovertible statements that they refuse to cope any longer, but that option never seemed to present itself to me. Some seemed to think this was stoicism on my part. However I had a suspicion it was a form of cowardice in me.

  Lewis said: ‘When I wake in the night – and I often do these days, it’s middle age I think, I don’t seem to need as much sleep as I used to – I read for a couple of hours. I recommend that. Doesn’t matter what – Updike, Henry James, Law Reports, detective stories, whatever. Print is sweet, in the night. I enjoy it, then, much more than I ever do now at times when I’m supposed to be awake.’

  ‘Doesn’t Myra mind? About having the light on, I mean.’ I’d tried that, but Ann had woken at once. No, she hadn’t complained, but she’d been enormously, invasively concerned about me, so I hadn’t tried it again.

  ‘Myra complained like mad at first,’ said Lewis promptly. ‘So I said in that case I’d move into the spare room, and she didn’t like the sound of that so she shut up quick. We bought one of those small tunnel spots which means I can direct a beam just down onto my own pillow, and Myra bought about six yards of tulle in different colours to bandage her eyes. Now, most nights, she does her head up in it last thing – I’m telling you, it’s like sleeping with a corpse! I warn her I’m getting a taste for necrophilia, but of course she says it’s my fault, well most things are –’

  He was trying, among other things, to make me laugh, and he did, but I was not to be deflected from what else I wanted to say. I had realized only just now, as I was trying to tell him how Piotr Mihailovitch was present to me in the night, that someone else seemed to be there also.

  Someone far more shadowy, without a face or a name, but deadeningly, pointlessly fettered to my life for ever. Several times recently when I had woken in the dark, the fact of his continuing existence, his unknown life going on and on when other lives were over, had presented itself to me like the weight of some unpleasant dream. But he was not a dream, and it was to stop my imagination dwelling specifically on him as much as anything that I had taken to summoning up Malenko. Better set one good, innocent man up as an ikon of purpose and contemplate him than brood upon his opposite, the one I can only hate: the French driver who killed Marigold.

  By and by I told Lewis this. I did not think he would be surprised, and he wasn’t. But something was bothering him. Presently he said, sounding accusing:

  ‘You said at the time that you didn’t want to know anything about the man.’

  ‘I know I did. I thought, that way, I wouldn’t think about him much. But it isn’t so. Tell me what you know, Lewis. It might help me, to know – something.’

  ‘Tom … It won’t do any good. We said that at the time.’

  ‘It won’t do any harm either. Tell me, Lewis.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘Then why are you acting as if you’re hiding something?’ There’s nothing like a wretched obsession for sharpening one’s perceptions.

  Lewis got up from his vast desk and began wandering round his study fiddling with the exhibition of exotic junk he keeps there: bits of semi-polished rock from the Negev desert, dark saints from Latin America, Buddhas from South-East Asia. I waited. He turned round and said heavily:

  ‘All right then, I will put you right on one thing. You have assumed the driver of that car was French. So did I, initially.’

  ‘It was a French car. Wasn’t it?’ I felt as if some small, hard object had shifted slightly inside my head.

  ‘Yes. But since you want to know – and I warn you, I don’t think it will be any help – I ought to tell you that the driver appears to have been British. When I was shown the police report that was stated. And his name was British too.’

  ‘What was it?’

  There is power in knowing a name. That, I suppose, is why I wanted it. But there is
also dread. In the several seconds before he answered, I suffered the fear that the name would be one already known to me. So, perhaps, does a husband dread that the name of his wife’s lover will turn out to be that of his friend. And looking into Lewis’s crumpled face, as he stared into mine through the space between his bushy eyebrows and his absurdly truncated glasses, I saw in the instant that he shared the same fear.

  ‘It was a David Hughes,’ he said at last.

  I found I had been holding my breath. I let it go.

  ‘No one she knew?’ he said very quickly.

  I shook my head. The name meant nothing to me. It was, after all, just a name, and a commonplace one at that. I felt a shaken sense of anti-climax.

  ‘I didn’t think so either,’ Lewis said. ‘The police asked me. I said I thought not, had never heard the name mentioned … It didn’t make any difference anyway.’

  It didn’t make any difference. Whether Marigold had died due to the idiotic folly of an unknown Frenchman or of an Englishman with a name, it made no difference. She was still just as dead, and would have remained so however many enquiries had been pursued. All the same, I indulged my bitterness by saying:

  ‘The police hardly exerted themselves much, did they? But of course, if there wasn’t even a French citizen involved, just two foreigners … And they weren’t our local police but the Argenton lot. No wonder they didn’t bother to bring any charges.’

  I saw from his face that he was inclined to agree with this interpretation, but then he turned away. Perhaps he was afraid I was blaming him for not pressing the police harder himself. But if I did eventually come to feel that, I do not believe I was aware of it that afternoon. The information that the driver was British was enough for me to digest for the time being. So I really was only speculating when I said flatly:

  ‘He was on holiday, I suppose, this David Hughes? But why the French car? Oh – hired, I imagine …’

  ‘No, it was his own car, or so I understood. Paris-registered. I suppose he lived there. I seem to remember his statement to the police said he’d been staying somewhere in that part of France – that he often did. That was the reason the police asked me if he and Marigold knew each other before – though he’d already told them not, I believe.’

  He looked at my face, and added quickly: ‘Oh, they were just checking up in a routine way. It didn’t amount to anything. So many accidents on French roads – I told you that at the time.’

  ‘So he lived in Paris,’ I said.

  I really did not, at that moment, mean anything by the remark. I was just processing, with painful inefficiency, what Lewis had imparted to me. But he must have thought I was trying to find out more with some purpose in mind, and he became evasive and finally stubborn.

  So, though I still accepted the idea that no good would come of vain questioning, I went home obscurely angry with him. And presently angry at myself too. For during the night that followed, the now-named man tormented me more, closer to me now that I knew him to be a compatriot but still more shadowy. Or rather, he now took many chimeric forms in relentless succession. What sort of Englishman lives in Paris? A young man? A man near my own age? (Lewis might have told me his age, but I hadn’t thought to ask.) An international businessman? A writer? A teacher of English? Someone maybe with a life’s pattern not unlike my own – perhaps even a man with a French wife and a daughter. Mon semblable, mon frère.

  I tried to think that he might have suffered from the accident himself, might have felt guilty, have grieved … He might even have wanted to write to me, to say, however inadequately, ‘Sorry. Oh God – sorry’, and been warned off any such compromising act by his own lawyer. For a time I played with this fantasy. But then suddenly it did not seem likely any more. The sort of conceited fool who picks up a pretty girl by the roadside and then, showing off his driving (or worse?), crashes the car and kills her – why should he know what grief meant?

  I lay awake for what seemed much of the night, and for once my twin far away in Russia was no help to me, nor I, I am sure, to him.

  It must have been shortly after that, and it was no doubt a sign of how on edge I was, that Ann and I quarrelled about Melvyn Baines.

  For some years I had been successfully avoiding Melvyn. I liked to think that, following one or two occasions when I had been, professionally, less than polite about his Child Guidance Centre, he had got the message and had been keeping out of my way also. Of course he, for his part, must have regarded me as misguided – ‘unenlightened’ was probably his term – but he was profoundly pleased with himself, as those who aspire to the rôle of guru tend to be, and I have noticed that such people will go to ingenious lengths to avoid encountering those who do not admire them. In that respect Melvyn was no fool. Indeed, as I had always been annoyingly ready to concede to Ann when she tried to defend him, he was a cultured, intelligent fellow with considerable charm and a number of talents – ‘Yes, Ann, he’s good at getting people to slave for him and I know he paints, and sings in a choir – yes, and reads Proust – but these aren’t, in themselves, reasons for me to like him. Sorry, but they just aren’t.’

  ‘You don’t like him because you think he’s homosexual,’ Ann said once. She can be quite sharp in that sort of way.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do think that – and so, presumably, do you, or it wouldn’t have occurred to you that I might – but that isn’t why I don’t like him, Ann; surely you know me better than that? But you could say, I suppose, that I’d like him better if he were open about it.’

  ‘Oh well – poor him,’ said Ann. ‘In his position – I do see …’

  However, we may both have been wrong, for Melvyn belatedly married: a sly, pink-complexioned Swede many years younger than himself. They had two children in quick succession, and I gathered that Proust and painting had been displaced by highly participant fatherhood. At Christmas we, and very many others, received a printed notice announcing that Birgit and Melvyn were not sending cards this year but were donating the money to a charity concerned with Natural Childbirth. The rear window of his car had for years publicized his moral commitment to CND, saving the whale and racial equality, but now it also bore a large notice proclaiming ‘Pull back – Give my Child a Chance’.

  ‘As if he thought everyone else goes around driving into the backs of cars for the hell of it,’ I grumbled neurotically to Ann. ‘Hasn’t he noticed that having children is the common lot and so is caring about them? Giving yourself special sensitive airs because you are a father really is terminally conceited.’

  ‘Oh, have it your own way.’ Ann gets tense when I talk like this. ‘But basically Melvyn has his heart in the right place, I promise you.’

  I let it go at that, I even told myself she was probably right. But then Melvyn’s concerns took a new turn. I suppose I would have heard about it sooner or later anyway, but in fact it came to my attention directly not through the education circuit but because I am a magistrate. Magistrates are sometimes sought out at home by the police to sign search warrants or arrest warrants after Court hours; our local force knew me, and quite often came to me. Now and again, though much less often, I was asked by them on behalf of the Social Services to sign a Place of Safety order for a child to be removed from its home. I think I had only signed three of them in about ten years, and I did not much like dealing with them because neither I nor the policemen who brought them to me could really know anything about the cases: the police were only going on what social workers told them, and I was just acting as a legal rubber stamp. So, when three more cases were brought to me within the space of two months, I became uneasy – though not in any focused way, since this was several years before a national scandal on these lines erupted in the north of England. The third time, I asked to see either the reports in full or, preferably, the social worker in charge of the case in person.

  The police went away with the long-suffering air of those merely doing their duty, and returned an hour later still unaccompanied bu
t with a sheaf of papers. The principal report turned out, as I expected, to be by the same social worker who had been quoted to me on the two previous occasions and, as before, the family were said to have been ‘drawn to the attention of the Social Services’ by Dr Melvyn Baines.

  I asked the police to wait and took the papers in to Ann, who was making a dress on the kitchen table.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ I said. ‘Take a look at this lot.’

  Ann removed many pins from her mouth – funny, and touching, how all women dress-make with the same gestures – and read through the papers with close attention.

  ‘Goodness,’ she said seriously when she had finished. ‘How awful … Lucky that Melvyn found this out.’

  ‘Unless,’ I said, ‘the whole thing’s a figment of his over-active imagination.’

  ‘Oh Tom.’ She looked completely taken aback. ‘You don’t mean that?’