Give Them All My Love

by Gillian Tindall

Is there a meaning to events after all?

  Whether I would ever have taken the matter further if another piece of information had not precipitately intervened, I hardly now know. I like to think that I would.

  Of course I would. The information, and its source, were merely another of those chances, like the coincidence of location in the Marais, which are not really chances at all but the working through of a sequence of links. By one route or another, these links were likely to bring me, sooner or later, to the same point. It was all, simply, a matter of time.

  On our last evening in Paris we talked of what Hermione, with an abrupt vestige of her native speech, referred to as the ‘gussying up’ of parts of Paris such as the Marais. Ann responded eagerly with the wharves in Boston, round which her cousins had escorted us in the summer. We all spoke inconclusively of Camden Lock in London, and of fashionable nostalgia. I could tell that the subject had no particular fascination for Paul or Hermione any more than it had for me – partly because, once stated, it is a boring subject anyway, but also no doubt because the outdated objects tended to look, to the three of us, merely ordinary, part of our own past lives. But by this stage in the visit, we were beginning to run out of topics that could rewardingly be discussed by all four together. The Marais seemed safe, at least.

  However the conversation progressed to the commercial exploitation of tradition in general and hence to regional arts and crafts now self-consciously mass-produced. Hermione described a shop behind the Madeleine, in central Paris, currently selling for thousands of francs a-piece small items of wooden furniture decorated with ‘peasant’ paintings.

  ‘Like Maryk’s chests?’ I couldn’t resist saying. Ann would not know what I meant, and anyway I suddenly wanted quite badly to know that Maryk’s chests were still in the mill-house for me to find again if – when … No doubt one of them still contained the more innocuous of Jacquou’s Resistance papers, stacked at random as when I had last seen them. Paul and Hermione would not have done any clearing.

  ‘Yes, just like that!’ Paul agreed. Worth a fortune now, probably, those chests. And that reminded him – he and Hermione’d gone looking for old Maryk, he’d meant to tell me.

  Hermione gave him a slightly anxious glance but, seeing that he and I were both careless with an excess of food and wine and that Ann too looked quite cheerful, she let us be. Paul’s rapid English was good, but it was of the kind which is like a tightrope off which the very slightly drunk performer must not fall. He launched unstoppably into his story – one of those set-pieces in which, according to him, he had been forced by Hermione into an unwanted or grotesque excursion. Since Hermione knew that, in marrying Paul, she had willingly subordinated her future, career, identity and even nationality to his, she always listened placidly to these dependent diatribes.

  ‘– She took it into her head that she’d like to find out if he was still alive, this implausible Pole or whoever. Said you’d taken her to visit his workshop once, long ago, and that she was sure that it and he would still be there. ‘‘Time passes, my girl,’’ I told her. ‘‘Time passes. Your Maryk has probably gone now to some Slav heaven full of valuable old gold ikons where everyone is peacefully drunk on schnapps all the time.’’ But would Madame have it? Hell, no.

  ‘She said it was just in the next village but one. But we drove miles. I think she got lost and we went round in rings. We kept on crossing and re-crossing small bits of the Creuse. ‘‘So much for you knowing this part like your native land,’’ I said. And then when we finally got there, to this damned Holy Sepulchre, it wasn’t the famous Maryk any more at all.’

  ‘So he is dead?’ I said. I felt a brief, sad emptiness inside me.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Hermione equably. ‘They didn’t say so. I got the impression he was just out for the day. Or putting his old feet up.’

  ‘Most of the paintings were by someone else,’ Paul forged on. ‘His successor, it seemed. As soon as we got there and took one look my heart ran out into my boots – I’d known it all along. Phoney. To the core. They almost always are, now, these so-called local artists. De la grande bogue …’ (‘Bogue’ is not in fact a French word, but the phrase was part of Paul’s complex joke Franglais, like the way he and Hermione used to describe things as being ‘un peu beaucoup’).

  ‘Anyway he wasn’t a local man either,’ said Hermione. ‘Like Maryk, he’d settled in the area.’

  ‘So much the worse! They always are – the worst, those types. Anyway, as soon as we located the place and got to the door we were sucked in – yes, really – by two female acolytes of very certain age, who treated us as if we were the Three Wise Men who’d actually found our way to the stable. We were supposed to Admire. And Adore. Le Grand Maître. Let us worship at the shrine of creativity. Oh dear, oh dear –’ A pantomine of head shaking …

  ‘Rustic nostalgia turned out by the metre. The kind of Naïvism that is compromised at source by its own consciousness of being naïve. Des paysages de folklore. In sweet – nice – pretty colours!’ Paul gave these classically English words a particularly venomous emphasis.

  ‘God knows what Maryk thinks of his successor,’ said Hermione dryly. ‘You can only hope that, being such a one-off artist himself, he just hasn’t much perception of other people’s talent, or the lack of it. Real, genuine naïvety, you might say … Now what was the name of this imposter? Not a French name either. I’m trying to remember it.’

  ‘It was one of those names that are deliberately constructed to be unpronounceable in France,’ said Paul promptly. ‘Like an English Prime Minister. You know – Heath – or Thatcher – or perhaps with a g-h in the middle … Th-th – fff –’

  ‘I don’t think it was an English name, though,’ said Hermione. ‘We saw it on a poster. It was very odd.’

  ‘Dahrvid Euze,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ Paul really had not quite heard.

  ‘David Hughes, in English. But spelt the Welsh way. Ffs and u-us. Was that it? I – I vaguely remember it. From before.’

  I expected the skies to fall, I think. But they did not, not really. It is only afterwards that you know that they have irretrievably fallen.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Paul readily. ‘Quite right.’

  Hermione wasn’t sure. Or she wouldn’t commit herself. I could see she thought Paul, his story told, was talking at random now. She got up to make some coffee.

  Neither of them asked me any questions about my knowledge of the name. Why should they? It wasn’t important to them. And I might have been mistaken anyway – it didn’t matter. By the time Hermione returned from the kitchen with the fragrant enamel pot, the talk had moved on.

  Part Five

  Before going away at the end of the year I had sent a card and a letter to Piotr Mihailovitch. These contained carefully anodyne and non-religious wishes for the season, in the weak but always viable hope that they would, through frontiers and censors, reach him. For people to have given you up, for lack of a sign, when you were still alive and in more need of them than ever, would, I thought, be the worst thing of all.

  Then, one evening in January, I had a telephone call.

  ‘Tom? … It’s Amanda here.’ She must have felt me hesitate, for she added rather sharply: ‘Amanda Goring. We met in Geneva.’

  I should at once have realized she might have some news from Russia. But at the sound of her name my other preoccupation sprang to the fore – my Idea, now became a theory, which had, since Paul’s revelation, developed coherent form and substance. Had Amanda another piece of confirmation for me?

  ‘It’s Malenko,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. He died in Perm camp of a kidney complaint, at the beginning of the year. That’s what they say, anyway. We’ve just heard in the office, through eastern Germany.’

  Malenko, Piotr Mihailovitch. So, after all, my efforts to reach him had been like Aunt Madge’s, useless messages sent to someone beyond receiving them.

  Amanda and I had an unsatisfac
tory conversation, during which I tried to express my regrets in words that turned to clichés in my mouth, and she responded monosyllabically. I had the feeling that she expected something more of me, some effort of imagination or will or intuition, but I did not know what. What was there to say? The dead man in Russia, reduced by hunger and cold and neglect to a mere flake, a shell of a man, whom I would now never meet, lay across our conversation and across my inner life like a shadow. But it was a shadow that did not express anything beyond itself. The sense of a link with myself, some sort of parallel however distant, was severed. I could not dream of avenging Piotr Mihailovitch. I could do nothing further for him, and perhaps never had. The very fact that he had been allowed to die seemed to indicate that I had not made anyone in power care enough about him. My efforts had therefore been in vain.

  But he, I now found, had done something for me. Now, in the following weeks, as his wasted, featherlight absence gradually gathered weight, and a few indignant mentions of his case, some of them engineered by me, appeared in the serious newspapers, I found that with his going, my shadow-twin, something else had gone as well. I had lost a model of endurance, a personal guardian of Christian concepts for which, through the years, I had retained an unreflecting, agnostic respect-in-spite-of-myself – a moral brake, perhaps. Moral brakes are out of fashion today, but I do not know how else to express it.

  ‘But he may not have felt he died in vain,’ said Lewis, when I spoke to him of Piotr Mihailovitch. ‘He was a practising Christian, wasn’t he? And hasn’t Christianity a long tradition of martyrs? Gold medallist stuff, with people getting extra points for being flayed or grilled? Such a cruel religion, it’s always seemed to me.’

  ‘Christians don’t think so,’ I said argumentatively, though I at once felt him to be right. ‘Look at your Old Testament and your ‘‘I the Lord thy God am a jealous God’’. The God of the New Testament, with the Christian ethic of love and forgiveness, is much kinder.’

  ‘But the Old Testament doesn’t have a tortured man as its central symbol. I tell you, the first time I ever went in a church I was disgusted – appalled. I was a kid, evacuated to Somerset, and I remember it to this day. That poor, poor man. I cried about him afterwards in bed, and the woman we were boarded with got annoyed with me – not that I blame her exactly. When I wasn’t crying I was wetting the bed or throwing fits of temper and wanting to walk home to East Ham. And then, later, when she took me to a service to try to convince me it was nice, it was all so dreary and sad and no one greeting each other when they came in. Quite unlike a synagogue. To be honest, I think Christianity is a repellent faith. Can’t understand why it’s done such good business for the last two thousand years.’

  ‘Oh well … ‘‘A thousand ages in Thy sight are but an evening gone’’ etc. A mere flash in the pan, you might say. A passing vogue, now rapidly nearing its end, you’ll be glad to hear.’

  ‘Think so? Oh good, you reassure me. Always did say our lot would do better in the end. More realistic, see.’

  But under the jokes, with which we hastily forestalled any deeper involvement in the subject, I knew that meanings had hovered between Lewis and me.

  ‘God is Love,’ we were taught in childhood: even I was taught it, in a tentative, non-denominational way, as a sop to the feelings of older relations and as an insurance policy – in case the modified Socialist millennium for which my good, decent parents confidently hoped, did not arrive soon enough? But the Love of God has no convincing logo and precious little evidence to support it. The more direct message of the ubiquitous figure on the cross is that sadism is a central impulse in both God and man. Very clever of the Christians, I thought now with a sudden surge of anger, to have dressed up this unpleasant truth in the doctrine of Redemption, thus allowing themselves to contemplate their tortured man and regard his suffering as being necessary while yet paying lip-service to the idea of their own ‘guilt’. Sadistic and masochistic tastes catered for together. What a potent mixture. No wonder Christianity had been so successful.

  This, of course, was the way I sometimes talked to Simone, who infuriated and eluded me by refusing (rightly) to talk back at this level on the subject. I suppose I had learnt the tone from my own father who, while not jettisoning quite everything, had emancipated himself far enough from his Methodist upbringing to be roundly contemptuous of phrases like ‘miserable sinners’ and ‘the Blood of the Lamb’ – phrases that spoke to him of yellow gaslight in ugly chapels, of tight blue suits and cold brawn suppers and aching, pleasureless Sundays. He was not, I think, interested in the exact nature of the dogma, merely in emphasizing to me its ‘Victorian’ unattractiveness. Taking my cue from him, I had not made much distinction in my mind between the distasteful idea of being Saved, and the God of the Old Testament with His threats of something worse. It only now occurred to me, at my advanced age, that the Christian doctrine of the Redemption was a way of trying to sidestep a more basic human need – the demand for justice to be seen to be done. Avenging hosts. Wrath visited even down the generations, because the past must not be forgotten. People getting what they deserve, reaping as they have sown – the pattern of meaning working itself out inexorably over the years. A true moral constancy.

  Psychoanalysts, I thought, might do well to take a harder look at the human need for retribution. So should the horde of teachers, social workers, therapists, counsellors and all the other ‘caring’ professionals who are, today, so imbued with the diluted essences of Christianity and Freudianism that they are complacently unaware of the provenance of their own convictions, taking them for inalienable fact. By this vast, soft establishment, guilt and love are persistently over-emphasized, whereas the primary instinct towards revenge is hardly examined, treated as ‘pathological’ or ‘a neurosis’. They attempt to belittle it, perhaps, because they are afraid of it. They sense its power, and look away.

  I tried to say something of this to Ann, but the conversation became unfortunately and confusedly side-tracked into a further attack on Melvyn Baines from me (or rather, on ‘people like him’) and a further hurt defensiveness from Ann.

  All my fault as usual, and I apologized. But how could I explain? Too much was going on in my head these days that I could not possibly impart.

  My theory was continuing its secret life. In fact it was no longer an intellectual theory; it was solidifying into a plan. My dark pearl, taking shape inside me.

  Some people, I realize now when it is all over, might have seen what was forming within me in a different guise. They might have diagnosed it as something to be cast out, an otiose construction, a monstrous growth. A delusion, even. But I prized it. I nurtured it, with much thought and with exercises of the imagination. In the years since Marigold’s death I had felt – empty. Like an empty shell. There is really no better way to describe it. Now I felt as if something new, however different, had come to occupy that space.

  There were days, a good many of them still, when this presence seemed to me an absorbing conjecture but as yet no more. Like a story being worked out in a writer’s mind before he gives it substance in words. Or like the preoccupation of a lover before he takes steps to make his dream come true. Or of a man or woman wishing a child into life before it is yet conceived. In other words, a fantasy. Intricate, life-transforming – but as yet only potential. Not totally real.

  Then there were other days, an increasing number of them, in which I knew with a heavy clarity which I did not even relish that my conjecture had acquired such significance that I now had no alternative but to go on pursuing it. I think that at this point the campaign of enquiry had become necessary to me. Still, for the moment, I did not take an irrevocable decision.

  Once, some years ago, there was an odd murder in rural France. A British father and son had been camping on holiday in a wood; I think it was somewhere in the south. The father was murdered. The son maintained that he had simply found the body. He told the French police that his father had been in Intelligence during the
war, had Resistance contacts in France, and that the murder might be the paying-off of an old score. The French authorities, however, took the view that the war was too long over (it was the 1970s, I believe) for such a tale to be likely, and that they were dealing, rather, with a commonplace patricide.

  Since there was no firm evidence either way, I rather think that the police let the son get away to England and then demanded his extradition – to which imperious Gallic request, of course, the Home Office did not accede. There, in an atmosphere of mutual, self-righteous recrimination, the matter was allowed to rest. It remains, as far as I know, unresolved in the annals of justice, a small monument to an incompatibility of assumptions and fantasies on different sides of the Channel.

  Its only relevance here is that, after Lewis had told me that Marigold’s killer appeared to have been an Englishman, this other case came sporadically to my mind. When both the protagonists are English no wonder, as I remarked bleakly to Lewis, the French don’t exert themselves much to find out what really happened.

  The notion of a Resistance reprisal had also struck a chord in me. Not in direct relation to Marigold: that would have been too far-fetched even in my current state of theory-construction. But I had long surmised that Jacquou, during the years after the war when, as he told me, ‘wounds were opening again’, had had a lurking anxiety for his own safety and Simone’s. What, after all, of the family of the man he had himself shot in the river meadow, or of that boy from a tobacconist’s in Argenton? Or indeed that other, whom he had sought out after the war to persuade to make a confession to the authorities about the death of an SOE man?

  In the event, nothing more had happened. Time had passed and Jacquou had ended his life in peace many years afterwards. But the image of a figure coming out of the past – any past – exacting a revenge for things gone by, had settled, it seems, into the tissue of my imagination.