We sat in the airport café, too early, waiting for our ’plane to be called. Ann said, with the nearest to a tone of reproach she ever uses towards me:
‘Of course she minds dying, Tom. It’s only natural.’
‘Is it? It doesn’t seem so to me.’
It was Ann’s turn to look distressed. I could see her busy equating my professed equanimity in the face of death with depression or general dissatisfaction with life, which of course was not what I had meant. Furthermore, she tends to take my state of mind as a comment on herself, and though I tried to explain to her once or twice when we were first married that I do not see marriage in those terms – that the notion of the married being responsible for ‘making each other happy’ has always seemed to me fatuous – she persists in her idea.
I made an effort, and took her small hand, with its little round nails, in mine.
‘People who’ve had a fair chunk of life,’ I said patiently, ‘shouldn’t make a song and dance about it ending. That’s greedy.’
‘Of course in theory I know what you mean … When I was a little girl, the sort of age I am now seemed quite old.’ (She was approaching forty.) ‘And when I count it up I see I have lived years and years already and done quite a lot of things and travelled and so on, and been with you … But I still feel I want to do and see a lot more – oh, masses – and I have the feeling I still shall even when I’m an old lady.’
Because I could not share this, I went on holding her hand without saying anything. It felt, irrationally, almost as if I were saying goodbye to her, as if I, not my aunt, were the one looking on the end. With Aunt Madge’s departure, my last traditional spectator would be gone: the last of that audience of elders we carry from youth, even when far removed from them, the essential ones for whom we mount our life’s performance.
After a bit Ann said: ‘Of course if we had’ – corrected herself bravely and went on – ‘if we’d had a child, I expect I might feel differently – more as if I’d had something solid to show for my life. But then I’d want to go on living anyway, to see him or her grow up and see the grandchildren …’
After a moment more she squeezed my hand hard. I did not need to look at her, I knew her eyes would be shiny with tears – for herself, for me, for the ever-unmentionable Simone? At the stage I had reached myself, both openly, so to speak, and within my heart, incapable as I was then of love, I was an appalling burden and brake on her natural happiness, poor dear girl, but I do not think that this view of our marriage ever once occurred to her.
I wanted to say something nice to her that would yet be true. At last I said:
‘I’m glad you came up here with me today.’
I was still incubating my Theory. Or did I now mean my Plan? Perhaps, by then, it had turned conclusively into a plan. Or, at least, an intention. I know that, a night or two afterwards, it came to me that, in spite of what I had said to Ann, I was now less indifferent to my own future than I had been for several years. I wanted actively to go on living for the moment, for a particular reason. I had a mission to accomplish.
I needed to get back to France. Alone.
But meanwhile, that summer, I had to make several more visits to Edinburgh, till my aunt, back in the Infirmary, faded on waves of morphine into a state in which the Other Side no longer even interested her. At the last, life becomes very tiny: a mattress, sheets, walls, a few hovering faces, a cup and spoon. Such shrinkage is perhaps rather a betrayal of all those human passions, convictions and yearnings by which we set so much store, but when it comes to us we do not see it like that.
I found that not only was I glad that I was alive, I was glad still to be in possession of my own passion and purpose.
In between these journeys north, and interwoven with them now in my memory so that they are no longer quite distinct but seem like two counterpointed dramas of dissolution, the Melvyn Baines saga continued.
During the past year life had been exciting for Melvyn. My refusal to rubber-stamp his allegations of sexual abuse and my subsequent letter to him had not perceptibly daunted him; indeed, within a few months of that occasion, his views had spread beyond the professional circles in which he moved and had attracted enthusiastic media notice. He became something of a celebrity: television producers invited him to discuss this Hidden Evil in our midst; a newspaper published a eulogistic profile of him in which the word ‘fearless’ several times occurred. I have noticed that people are only described as ‘fearless’ when they are in fact saying something that many people are currently avid to hear. My unkind one-time remark to Ann, that Melvyn had a highly developed sense of the mood of the moment, seemed to be validated.
‘The moment’ continued for the best part of a year. However the acclaim of his colleagues was less uncritical. What I had been accustomed to refer to as the Melvyn Baines Fan Club began to be paralleled by another loosely constituted body which I christened the Get-Baines Group. You might suppose that I would myself be a leading conspirator in this movement, but you would be wrong. With sufficient doctors, teachers, psychologists and social workers already muttering in corners that Dr Baines was too big for his boots and wrong-headed anyway, it was unnecessary for me (as I told Ann) to say a word more. I sat back and waited for it all to pass. I hoped, with vague malevolence, that something would occur to make Melvyn look a fool, but since life does not normally work so obligingly I did not really expect it. I was therefore on the public level ‘not surprised’, but on the private one taken aback and gratified, when something did.
In the early summer I had just returned from another visit to Edinburgh, when Ann said that there was a rumour running round her staff room: a complaint had been brought against Dr Baines himself. A mother, whose daughter was being seen at his Centre for disruptive behaviour in school, claimed that Dr Baines had cuddled this daughter and made ‘an improper suggestion’ to her.
At first I did not take this allegation seriously. That is to say, I could believe the mother had made it, but such charges are not uncommon: educational and medical authorities get a steady trickle of them, usually unsubstantiated. Melvyn, with his own over-wrought views, must have been aware of the chronic risk he ran. I suspected that he had stirred both mother and daughter up emotionally simply by being as he was, asking the questions that he did, but I did not want to say so publicly since the man was obviously now in need of protection. I assumed that the other staff of the Centre would close ranks and support him.
But it appeared that they were not doing so. At any rate, the allegation did not evaporate but hung in the air, thickening slightly. The police had a look at it, but were disinclined to bring a charge; perhaps they had no firm evidence. But the tale broke sensationally in the press all the same when a busybodying MP took advantage of Parliamentary privilege to name Melvyn at House of Commons question time. It began to look very much, I said to Ann, as if it had abruptly become Melvyn’s own turn to be the Hidden Evil in our midst. Ann said it wasn’t funny. Quite right, I said cheerfully.
Two days later I had a visit in my office from Birgit, Melvyn’s wife. Her normally pink-and-white Nordic complexion today bore a resemblance to an albino rabbit: she must have been crying much of the night. Since I had never seen any sign of emotion in her before, merely a flaccid smile as she chewed the cud at Melvyn’s side, I now warmed to her a little. After all – poor girl. I made gentlemanly efforts, sitting her down in a chair, patting her shoulder, offering coffee, telling my secretary we were not to be disturbed. I believe I even lent her my handkerchief.
Would I stand up for Melvyn publicly? Life had become awful: journalists were camping on their doorstep and photographing her and the children going in and out. The police had been round again –
Fresh burst of tears. More pattings, more nose-blowings. I fetched her a glass of water. Finally she burst out, almost accusingly:
‘He needs someone like you to speak for him. Someone with a good reputation who will be believed. People have let him down. He s
eems to have no one who is any use on his side –’
The appeal was a flattering one. I said as kindly as I could:
‘But what would you want me to say?’
‘Well, that Melvyn would never, never have done that thing, what they say he’s done.’ Her English fracturing under the strain, she stared at me as if amazed I needed to be told.
‘My dear, I can’t say that.’
‘Oh.’ She clenched my wet handkerchief to her. I expected her to shred it. ‘So you too are in league against him. I am sorry for coming! I did not know.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said tetchily, wishing after all that she would revert to her usual unresponsive manner: ‘It isn’t a matter of for or against –’ (It was, of course, but it should not have been.) ‘I mean that I can’t possibly say what you want because I’m not in a position to have any views on the matter. I don’t work with Melvyn; I’ve never worked with him. I know nothing in detail about his methods. It isn’t my field. How can I say what might or might not have gone on one morning at the Centre months ago? I mean –’ I added quickly, for she was now glaring at me, ‘how can I say what words or gestures Mrs Whatsit and her kid may or may not have misinterpreted? Do try to see it from my point of view.’
Of course I was asking too much. Why should she see it from my point of view? But she calmed down to the extent of saying wretchedly:
‘But couldn’t you just say in a general sort of way that Melvyn isn’t someone who’d ever do anything – not nice?’
Not nice. Dear God. I wondered what fuzzed echo I was hearing of some Swedish genteelism for depravity. I said sadly – I found that after all I felt sad, not triumphant or retributive:
‘You know, Birgit, one should never presume to say that about anyone. Even someone one knows really well, much better than I know Melvyn. Oh, I don’t mean I suspect him’ – I did of course, vaguely, but hastened on – ‘Don’t run away with that idea. But I just think one can’t make such a confident statement about something so complicated as – as human nature.’
I had been going to say ‘as sexual desire’ but, inhibited by the sniffing, salt-mucus-smelling rabbit in the chair, I substituted the more anodyne phrase. As it happened, I had for some reason always found Birgit herself sexually off-putting. ‘You see,’ I added, defending myself against the mute criticism coming from her, ‘very often when something like this happens – or when a man goes berserk and knifes someone, or simply disappears, leaving his family in the lurch – all his friends and relatives tell the police they’re sure there must be another explanation, that they ‘‘know’’ Joe couldn’t have done such a thing. But they’re wrong. Just wrong. We can’t know these things about other people, so we shouldn’t pretend to … I’m sorry, Birgit, I really am.’
She left, soon after, sourly resenting me. I did not blame her.
No, we can’t know what others just might or might not do. We can’t even necessarily know that about ourselves.
Everyone, I suppose, has fantasies they would feel embarrassed to share. To assume that we would all like, given the right circumstances and provocation, to act these fantasies out, has always seemed to me facile: half-baked psychiatry. Most fantasies, I suspect, can only exist where they are, in the comfort and privacy of the imagination. Exposed to reality, they would instantly wilt. But it does seem that some fantasies carry within them the potential to become real, and that one cannot tell which they are or who may be harbouring them. You cannot necessarily even know till the moment comes if your own fantasies carry this extra coding.
Nor, if you pull back at the last minute, aborting action and driving the fantasy back within its own realm, do you know afterwards, in your weak relief and confusion, whether you really were about to go ahead and transpose day-dream fully into reality or whether this too was just part of the dream.
I had dismissed Birgit’s cry about people being ‘in league’ against Melvyn as paranoia either on her part or his. However it was not far wrong after all. The following Sunday a newspaper ran a front-page story about ‘revelations’ from a retired social worker regarding ‘the Director of a Child Guidance Centre in the Greater London area’ and previous ‘irregularities known to colleagues’. In deference to the libel laws, the piece was couched in rather confusing, allusive terms and Melvyn was not named – but, thanks to the vociferous MP, his name was well-known already.
The social worker was not named either, but her identity at once became an open secret in Melvyn’s world, since she was quite happy to identify herself off the record. It was Shirley Gilchrist.
‘Hell,’ a cynical colleague remarked to me, ‘hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ Evidently the detail of Shirley’s long-term passion for Melvyn was more widely known than I had realized.
‘Do you think she’s made it all up?’ I asked. I wasn’t so much interested in what he thought of Shirley as in what further light his reply might cast on Melvyn.
‘You mean – was there really any laying on of hands? Dunno. But I wouldn’t be surprised. I always thought he was a bit of a barmy bugger under all that smooth chat. Got no common sense. If you know what I mean?’
I did know.
‘It’s typical, isn’t it?’ he said, cheerfully ruminative, ‘that this Gilchrist woman used to be all over Baines when they were working together and now she dishes the dirt on him. Spiteful, I’d say, whether it’s true or false … I think Baines’ll have a real problem on his hands now.’
‘So do I.’
Evidently the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions had been thinking too. Four days, and another insinuatory newspaper article later, Melvyn was arrested. He was charged with various offences of indecency toward juveniles. There were headlines, and his picture on the front page of the evening paper.
I was surprised when Birgit telephoned me that evening. She must have been desperate indeed if she came back to me.
When I’d finished talking to her, to Melvyn, to the police and to Melvyn’s lawyer, I came back into the room where Ann was correcting fifth-form essays on Romeo and Juliet and told her I had agreed to stand as bail surety for Melvyn.
‘How much?’ said Ann, after a pregnant pause.
‘Five thousand. He’s on bail in his own recognition for a much larger sum, as I understand. His house must be worth a bit, so I suppose that’s all right. But the Court wanted a separate surety – someone to keep an eye on him, in other words. Exert moral pressure on him to stop him doing a bunk.’
Ann said, shocked:
‘But how can you do that?’
‘Just by being there, I suppose … The police and the lawyer think that Melvyn won’t skip off to the South Sea Islands if he knows that would land me with a bill for five thousand pounds, and, who knows, they may be right? I think Melvyn does have his principles, such as they are. And, on a more cynical view, if he did that he really would have cooked his goose with everybody, and that isn’t what he wants. He thinks he’s going to prove his innocence, you see.’
‘But do you think he’s innocent?’ said Ann.
She was right, the question ought to have been the heart of the matter. But I had not really wanted to ask myself.
‘I don’t know,’ I said after a while. ‘And I’m not sure Melvyn knows any longer either.’
‘How did he sound?’ said Ann after a pause.
‘Oh – a bit manic. Odd, anyway. Over-talkative but distracted. Not surprising in the circumstances. And then, when I said OK I would put up the surety for him, desperately, embarrassingly grateful. I don’t think he’d really expected I would.’
‘Actually,’ said Ann, rather distantly, ‘why have you?’
‘Ho, hum, I thought you were the one who liked Melvyn,’ I said unfairly.
‘Well I used to think you were rather mean about him, before all this happened … But – after all, Tom. Five thousand.’
‘We won’t have to pay it. Not that it’d break us if we did.’ Between our two salaries, Ann and I are
quite comfortably off. And what is all the money for in the end anyway these days? But Ann doesn’t think like that.
‘Well I hope you’re right,’ she said. ‘But you still haven’t told me why it has to be you. Couldn’t someone else – ?’
‘Ann, that was my first thought too, and apparently there isn’t anyone else. No colleague now prepared to come forward – people have turned against him in a big way, you know, because they’re afraid his mistakes will rub off on them, and he’s made them feel foolish for being taken in by him. And no friends, apparently, or none with any money. And of course all Birgit’s family are in Sweden. But as a matter of fact I don’t get the feeling Melvyn’s ever had many friends anyway. Certainly he and Birgit now seem very much on their own. And bloody pathetic … It was really that that made me agree to do it. If someone hadn’t, you see, Melvyn would stay in custody, and that miserable wife of his would just have had to go back home tonight to their house and be there for weeks and weeks alone with the kids. She had them with her at the police station, I could hear one of them yelling in the background. No one to leave them with, I imagine. Well, in all the circumstances …’
‘You’re too good-hearted Tom,’ said Ann warmly, if still reproachfully. ‘You really are.’
Melvyn’s lawyer would soon be at the door with the bail papers for my signature. I went to make some coffee, feeling a fraud.
All right, why? Showing off, patronizing Melvyn when he’s down, playing Decent Elder Brother (a favourite rôle, since I never had the opportunity to try it in childhood), playing the system (another favourite occupation of mine), keeping faith with my own self-image, my own self-esteem – but then a lot of being ‘good-hearted’ must come into this category.
Yes. All this, no doubt, as well as the more presentable reasons I had already given to Ann. But I was confusedly aware, as I waited for the kettle to begin to whisper and then sing, of another layer in all this, a more specific one, knotted and dark. Something unadmitted that I wanted to placate? Something that was a memory but also like something that had not quite happened: a fear, a possibility, perhaps a threat. As when you surface from a troubling dream, and struggle for a few minutes with the knowledge both that it was only a dream and that it announced a truth that has previously been buried …
Give Them All My Love Page 24
