Our first encounter took place in Covent Garden. I told him of my interesting conversation with Querell at the Gryphon Club.
“Place called Bletchley Park,” I said. “Monitoring German signals traffic.”
Oleg was inclined to be suspicious.
“And this man has offered you a job?”
“Well, hardly a job.”
I had seen right away that Oleg was not greatly impressed with me. I think the Comrades all found me a little—how shall I say?—a little uncanny. I suspect I exude a faint odour of sanctity, inherited from a long line of clerical forebears, which Oleg and his like would have mistaken for a sign of zealotry, and which would worry them, for they were practical men, and chary of ideology. They were happier with Boy’s avidity and schoolboy hunger for action, and even with Leo Rothenstein’s patrician disdain—though of course, being good Russians, they were all of them vigorously anti-Semitic. As we walked together round and round the market in the sunshine, smelling the pleasurably nauseating, greeny smells from the vegetable stalls, Oleg launched into an earnest apologia for the Nazi-Stalin pact. I listened politely, going along with my hands clasped at my back and an ear judiciously inclined to his tortured elucidations, all the while amusing myself by studying the antics of the sparrows hopping about nimbly under our feet. When he had done, I said:
“Look here, Mr. Kropotkin—”
“Hector, please; Hector is my code name.”
“Yes, well-”
“And Kropotsky is my own name.”
“Well, Mr…. Hector, I want to make something clear. I don’t at all care for your country, I’m afraid, or for your leaders. Forgive me for saying so, but it’s true. I believe in the Revolution, of course; I just wish it had happened somewhere else. Sorry.”
Oleg only nodded, smiling to himself. His head was big and round, like the globe on the pillar of a gate.
“Where do you think the Revolution should have happened?” he said. “In America?”
I laughed.
“To anticipate Brecht,” I said, “I think America and Russia are both whores—but my whore is pregnant.”
He stopped, and stood, a finger and thumb palping his babyish lower lip, and gave a kind of burbling snort, which it took me a moment to identify as laughter.
“John, you are right. Russia is an old whore.”
Two sparrows were fighting under a barrowload of cabbages, going at each other like a pair of amputated, feathery claws. Oleg turned aside to buy a bag of apples, counting out the pennies from a little leather purse, softly snorting still and shaking his head, his hat pushed back. I could see him as a schoolboy, fat, funny, troubled, the butt of playground jokes. We walked on again. I watched him sidelong as he ate his apple, the pink prehensile lips and yellow teeth mumbling the white mush, and was reminded of Carrickdrum and Andy Wilson’s pony, which used to turn its mouth inside out at me and try to bite my face.
“A whore, yes,” he said happily. “And if they heard me saying it…” He put a finger to his temple. “Bang.” And laughed again.
Another IRA bomb in Oxford Street tonight. No one killed, but a glorious amount of damage and disruption. How determined they are. All that rage, that race-hatred. We should have been like that. We should have had no mercy, no qualms. We would have brought down a whole world.
10
It was during one of the first of the great daylight bombing raids on London that I received the news of my father’s death. I am convinced this is the reason that I was never as frightened in the Blitz as I should have been. The shock somehow deadened my susceptibility to terror. I like to think of it as my father’s final kindness to me. I had returned to Gloucester Terrace after delivering a lecture at the Institute when the telegram arrived. I was in uniform—I always wore my uniform when lecturing, being an incorrigible dresser-up—and the telegraph boy eyed my captain’s pips enviously. In fact, he was not a boy but a cadaverous oldster with a smoker’s cough and a Hitlerian cowlick. He also had a lazy eye, so that when I looked up from the stark news—Father dead stop Hermione Maskell—I thought that he was giving me a broad, conspiratorial wink. Death chooses the most unprepossessing messengers. We could hear the bombs exploding, a muffled crumpling sound like that of something vast and wooden falling slowly down a series of stone steps, and under our feet the floor quaked. He cocked an ear and grinned.
“Old Adolf’s paying us a daylight visit,” he said cheerfully. I gave him a shilling. He nodded at the telegram in my hand. “Not bad news, I hope, sir?”
“No no,” I heard myself say. “My father has died.”
I went back into the flat. The door closed behind me with a solemn thud; how obligingly at times like this the most commonplace procedures take on an air of pomp and finality. I sat down slowly on a straight-backed chair, hands on my knees and my feet planted side by side on the carpet; what is that Egyptian god, the dog-headed one? The afternoon around me had settled into a dreamy stillness, except for the sunlight falling in the window, a pale-gold tube of teeming particles. And still the bombs were falling afar in dulled funereal cannonades. Father. A weight of guilt and dry grief descended on me, and I shouldered it wearily. How familiar it seemed! It was like putting on an old overcoat. Was I somehow remembering back to my mother’s death, thirty years before?
But the person I found myself thinking of, to my surprise, was Vivienne, as if it were she and not my father I had lost. She was in Oxford, with the child. I attempted to telephone her, but the lines were down. I sat for a while listening to the bombing. I tried to imagine the people dying—now, at this moment, and close by—but could not. I recalled a phrase from my lecture that morning: The problem for Poussin in the depiction of suffering is how to stylise it, as the rules of classical art demand, while yet making it immediately felt.
That night I took the mail boat to Dublin. The crossing was unseasonably rough. I spent it in the bar, in the company of English travelling salesmen and Irish hod carriers mad on porter. I got vilely drunk, and tried to make maudlin conversation with the barman, who was from Tipperary, and whose mother had recently died. I leaned my forehead on the back of my wrist and wept, in that odd, detached way one does when one is drunk; it only made me feel worse. We arrived in Kingstown at three in the morning. I collapsed on a bench under a tree on the harbourfront. The wind had died, and I sat in the soft cool late-summer darkness and listened in melancholy rapture to a lone bird warbling in the leaves above me. I dozed for a while, and presently at my back the dawn came up, and I woke in anguish, not knowing for a moment where I was or what I should be doing. I found a taxi, the driver still half asleep, and travelled into the city, where I had to sit for another hour nursing my burgeoning hangover in a deserted and eerily echoing railway station while I waited for the first train to Belfast. On the platform, ill-tempered, putteed pigeons swaggered about under my feet, and a strong, heatless sun beat upon the grimed glass roof high above me. These are the moments that lodge in the memory.
It was afternoon by the time I got to Carrickdrum. I was numb from travelling and the night’s drinking. Andy Wilson was at the station with the pony-and-trap. He greeted me warily, avoiding my eye.
“Didn’t think I would outlast him,” he said, “I surely didn’t.”
We set off up the West Road. The gorse; the pony’s straw-and-sacking smell; the ash-blue sea.
“How is Mrs. Maskell?” I said. For answer Andy only shrugged. “And Freddie? Does he realise what’s happened?”
“Och, he knows, right enough; how would he not?”
He talked enthusiastically about the war. Everyone was saying, he said, that Belfast and the shipyards would be bombed; he spoke of the prospect in a tone of gleeful expectation, as of a promised treat of fireworks and staying up all night.
“There was a raid on London yesterday,” I said. “In daylight.”
“Aye, so we heard on the wireless.” He gave a wistful sigh. “A terrible thing.”
The house as always star
tled me with its familiarity: all still there, all still going on, careless of my absence. As I alighted on the gravel below the front steps, Andy unprecedentedly offered me a helping hand. His palm seemed made of warm, malleable stone. I realised that in his eyes I was the master of St. Nicholas’s now.
I found Hettie in the big stone-flagged back kitchen, sitting on a spindle-backed chair listlessly shelling peas into a battered saucepan. Her hair, those big auburn tresses of which she had once been guiltily proud, had turned into a matted nest, with grey wisps dangling over her forehead and trailing down the back of her cardigan. She was wearing a sack-shaped brown dress and those fur-lined ankle-boots that are exclusive to decaying old women. She greeted me without surprise and cracked open another pea-pod. I leaned down awkwardly and kissed her forehead, and she shied away from me in a sort of sullen alarm, like a beast of burden more used to blows than endearments. I smelled her smell.
“Hettie,” I said, “how are you?”
She nodded dully, giving a tremendous sniff. A tear rolled down at the side of her fat nose and plopped into the saucepan on her lap.
“You’re good to have come,”, she said. “Was it dangerous, travelling?”
“No. The bombings have only been in London.”
“I read in the newspaper about these submarines.”
“Not in the Irish Sea, I think, Hettie. Not yet, anyway.”
She made a sound that was half sigh, half sob, hunching her back and letting it fall slack again, a big old bag of bones. I looked beyond her through the window to the garden, where the sunlight glistened in the leaves of the sycamore standing there in its solitude, vastly atremble, its green already tinged with autumnal grey. One day when I was small I fell out of that tree, and lay motionless in the lush grass in a kind of misty languor, with a numbed arm twisted under me, watching Hettie running in slow motion towards me across the lawn, barefoot, her arms outstretched, like one of Picasso’s mighty maenads, and in that moment I experienced an inexplicable and perfect happiness, such as I had not known before, nor have since, and for which even a broken arm seemed a not unreasonable price to pay.
“How are you, Hettie?” I said again. “How are you managing?” She seemed not to hear me. I took the saucepan from her and set it on the table. She continued to sit with shoulders hunched and head bowed, a sorrowing old buffalo, picking distractedly at her fingernails. “Where’s Freddie?” I said. “Is he all right?”
She lifted her eyes to the sunlight and September’s fading green in the window.
“He was so calm,” she said, “so calm and good.” For a moment I thought she was speaking of my brother. She heaved another sighing sob. “He was there in the garden, you know, putting out scraps for a fox that comes down at night from the hills. I saw him bending over, and he gave a kind of start, as if he had remembered something important. And then he just fell down.” I saw her again, billowing towards me across the lawn, bare arms outstretched, her big white legs flexing and her feet hardly seeming to touch the grass over which she ran. “He held my hand. He told me not to worry myself. I hardly knew it when he was gone.” She put her hands on her knees and heaved herself to her feet and went to the sink and ran the cold tap and pressed wetted fingers hard into the sockets of her eyes. “You were good to come,” she said again. “We know how busy you must be, with the war on.”
She made tea for us, moving from sink to table to sideboard at a flat-footed, leaden pace. A friend of hers, she told me, had taken Freddie to the seaside for the afternoon—Freddie had always been fascinated by the sea, and would sit on the shingle for hours gazing out with rapt attention over this strange, unknowable, shifting element, as if he had once seen something rising out of it, a sea monster, or a tridented god, and was patiently waiting for it to appear again.
“Have you spoken to him about… about Father?” I said.
She peered at me in momentary puzzlement.
“Oh, but he was here,” she said. “We were both here. He came and sat beside your father on the lawn, and held his hand as well. He knew what was happening. He cried. He wouldn’t come away, I had to get Andy to help me make him go indoors while we waited for the ambulance. And when they were taking your father away he wanted to go with him.”
The teapot smoked in the pale light from the window; soon it would be full autumn. I had a sudden vision of a world in flames.
“We shall have to think about his future, now,” I said.
She became very busy with the tea things.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “we’ll need to find a position for him.”
I thought of Freddie sitting splay-legged on the seashore, in his jersey and his stained trousers, his face lifted to the horizon, grinning happily into that vast emptiness.
“Yes, of course,” I said, faintly. “A position.”
I went for a walk, alone, up in the hills. Even on the clearest days the sunlight here seemed hazy and somehow aswarm, falling like gauze over rocks and bushes, thickening to a milky blur the tremulous blue distances. How cunningly the grieving heart seeks comfort for itself, conjuring up the softest of sorrows, the most sweetly piercing recollections, in which it is always summer, replete with birdsong and the impossible radiance of a transfigured past. I leaned on a rock and gently wept, and saw myself, leaning, weeping, and was at once gratified and ashamed.
When I returned to the house Hettie was plying the teapot again and the kitchen seemed filled with people. Hettie’s friend was there, a Mrs. Blenkinsop, tall, thin, pale visaged, in a frightening hat, and Freddie, sitting with an ankle crossed on a knee and his right arm flung over the back of his chair, looking uncannily like my father in one of his rare relaxed moments. Most startling of all was the presence of Andy Wilson. He was sitting at the table with a mug of tea before him, hardly recognisable with his cap off, his bald pate pale as a blanched leek above his narrow little weather-beaten weaselly face. I had never in my life known him to come inside the house, and now that he had got in I did not like his defiantly easy, proprietorial air. I gave him a hard look, at which he refused to flinch, and he made no move to rise. The Blenkinsop woman in turn was looking hard at me, and seeming not to approve of what she saw. It is always the most unexpected people who see through one. She offered me brisk condolences and went back to talking of church matters to Hettie, who, it was evident, was not listening. Freddie was shooting me shy glances from under colourless lashes. The corner of his mouth was gnawed to pulp, always a sign in him of acute distress. I laid a hand on his shoulder, and he went into a paroxysm of affection, shivering like a gun dog, and stroking my hand convulsively with his own.
“We had a grand time at the seaside,” Mrs. Blenkinsop said to me loudly in her knife-edged, Presbyterian voice. “Isn’t that right, Freddie?”
Freddie did not look at her, but another, different sort of spasm passed through him, and I knew exactly what he thought of Mrs. Blenkinsop.
“Aye,” said Andy, “he do love the strand.”
The funeral was a grim affair, even for a funeral, with urns of flesh-smelling trumpet lilies in the church, and quavery organ music, and much stylised lamentation by a succession of alternately rotund and shrivelled churchmen. Hettie stood in the front pew with Freddie clinging to her arm; they were like a pair of lost, ancient children. Now and then Freddie would send up one of his werewolf ululations to the varnished rafters, and the congregation would stir uneasily, hymnals fluttering. The weather, though fine before and after, laid on a pretty little sun-shower for the interment. Afterwards, as we walked back to the motor cars along an avenue of dripping yews, I engaged in covert consultation with a jolly old hypocrite by the name of Wetherby, who was to be my father’s successor to the bishopric, and whom I knew to have special responsibility for a number of Belfast’s charitable institutions. When he understood my purpose he tried to sidle away from me, but I would not let him go until I had got out of him what I needed to know, along with a reluctant promise of help. Back at the rectory I shut
myself into my father’s study with the telephone, and by dinnertime that evening I had the plan ready to put to Hettie. She could not take it in at first.
“You know there is no other way,” I told her. “He’ll be taken care of there; they have facilities.”
We were in the upstairs drawing room. Hettie in her widow’s weeds had a monumental aspect, sitting squarely in an armchair by the window, like the figure of an ancient idol on display on a temple altar, with a rhomb of late sunlight smouldering redly on the carpet at her feet. She gazed at me unblinkingly from under hanging straggles of hair, frowning in an effort of concentration, and agitatedly twining and twining her fingers, as if she were wielding a pair of knitting needles.
“Facilities,” she said; it might have been a word in a foreign language.
“Yes,” I said. “They’ll look after him. It will be for the best. I spoke to Canon Wetherby, and I telephoned the Home. I can bring him in today.”
She opened her eyes very wide.
“Today…?”
“There is no reason to delay. You have enough to cope with.”
“But-”
“And besides, I must get back to London.”
She turned her great head slowly—I could almost hear the gears working—and looked out unseeing at the hills and a distant thin brushstroke of purplish sea. Mingled gorse and heather glowed on the hillsides.
“That’s what Myra Blenkinsop says too,” Hettie said, grown sullen now.
“What does Myra Blenkinsop say?”
She turned her head to look at me again, with a kind of puzzled curiosity, as if I were someone she thought she had known but now did not recognise at all.
“She says what you say, that poor Freddie should be in a Home.”
We were silent then, and sat for a long time, looking away from each other, adrift in ourselves. I wonder what it will be like to die. I imagine it as a slow, helpless stumbling into deeper and deeper confusion, a kind of mute, maundering drunkenness from which there will be no sobering up. Did my father really hold Hettie’s hand and tell her not to worry herself, or did she invent the scene? How do we die? I should like to know. I should like to be prepared.
The Untouchable Page 24
