The Man on the Bridge

by Stephen Benatar

  “Why the medallion ‘above all’?” she asked. I felt the most wonderful relief.

  I answered simply, “Because he always wore it. I don’t think I ever once saw him without it. I…”

  “Yes? You what?”

  I shrugged. “No. Nothing else to explain. He always wore it. That’s all.”

  For a full minute neither of us spoke. I looked around the room; I allowed myself to remember things. I looked out at the garden, too.

  “Mr Wilmot,” she said eventually. “Why do you love my son, now that he’s dead, so much more than you ever did while he was alive?”

  “I think that, while he was alive, I loved him just as much. But—unhappily—I didn’t know it.”

  “And had you known it … would you still have married that American girl?”

  “No.”

  “It’s extremely tragic,” she said, “that it should take a death and the workings of a guilty conscience to make you understand your own mind. At least you do appear to have a conscience. I suppose that’s something.”

  “It is tragic,” I agreed. And as I said it I felt my eyes begin to smart.

  “But I don’t think you were even capable of love,” she added. “Not then, at any rate.”

  I looked at her a moment. “And would you think that I am now?”

  “If you are, then it only heightens the tragedy.”

  She spoke briskly and with a look of impatience. I gazed down into my glass and remained silent.

  “Mr Wilmot. Let us get something straight. I despise you. I think I always shall. Your selfishness and your greed took away from me the only part of life that was truly worth having. In him I could forgive weakness and self-pity. In you, now, those same qualities disgust me. Even so, I’m prepared to admit you may be less wilfully evil than I supposed; though that’s a matter for you and your Maker to decide between you and of little or no interest to myself. You may have the articles you ask for; you may take them away with you this afternoon. But unless it is absolutely necessary, I hope you will never feel impelled to try to get in touch with me again. There is nothing more, I believe, that you and I can ever have to say to one another. I have perhaps a further five years to live. Let me live them out in total ignorance of you.”

  “If that’s what you want.” I stood up. “But I would like to have…”

  “What?”

  “Made our peace, I suppose.”

  I added: “The truth is—again, quite contrary to expectation—that I grew fond of you as well.”

  She snorted but then said after a moment, “Well, if it pleases you, you may consider our peace as having been made. It’s all the same to me, I can assure you.”

  She held out her frail hand.

  “Goodbye, Mr Wilmot. James will help you collect the items you have asked for. Perhaps you’d be good enough to send him to me first?”

  She could have rung for him.

  “Goodbye, Mrs Cambourne.” We shook hands. “I suppose it’s stupid but I’d have liked to hear you call me John again.”

  “Never,” she replied.

  32

  ‘Young Men Reading the Paper’ had been the second picture Oliver painted using me as his model. The paper in question is The Manchester Guardian of November 27th 1958 and the fact that it happens to be folded over at the following item, some of which is clearly legible in the painting, is patently coincidental.

  “Mr Butler’s proposals on homosexuality were much as expected when the Wolfenden Report came before the House of Commons yesterday. He gave no prospect of any early change in the law, a change which many people would misunderstand and regard as condonation…”

  The young men reading the paper—I played both roles—are seated together on a bench at the breakfast table, one dressed, the other in his pyjama bottoms, each with an arm thrown around the other’s shoulder. We only get a back view but the partial profile of their faces and the very posture of their bodies are a brilliant and haunting evocation of tenderness, defiance, insecurity, dismay. Even the furnishings of the room, the geraniums on the windowsill, the unfinished chess game in one corner, the photos on the mantelpiece, are in themselves a feature of the argument. I thought it was a marvellous picture and I was proud to be a part of it.

  Now, following my afternoon in Surrey, I had hung it on the wall facing the bed. It was really too large for the room but that didn’t matter. I had gone to bed early, while Elizabeth was still taking her bath, and for the first time since March, gazing up at Oliver’s picture and wearing his medallion, I felt … no, not happy, exactly, but as though happiness was something which one day—one day—I might conceivably get to rediscover.

  The medallion was of silver: a St Christopher: and it linked me to its previous owner just as surely as possessing the whole of Merriot Park would have.

  Maybe even more so.

  And suddenly I came close to making a promise.

  I remembered how I had felt that afternoon in the churchyard: the wish—the need—the brief determination—to be so much better than I was. And perhaps, after all, it wouldn’t be too late. Couldn’t my life from now on be in the nature of a tribute—a dedication—an atonement?

  “With each new day, perhaps, I can try to be a little more like you!”

  Already this thought was sufficiently potent to give me back a sense of purpose.

  “No wonder that I am … almost … happy again.”

  The first signs of madness, when you start talking to yourself, or to anybody else who is neither in the room nor at the other end of a phone line. I didn’t care. I smiled, cheerfully. Yes! Cheerfully.

  Wouldn’t it be nice, I considered, if he could really be aware of all that I was thinking. (Yes, all. Because he’d instinctively know what to discount.) For a few minutes I gave fantasy free rein. I thought of films like ‘Sentimental Journey’, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, ‘Wuthering Heights’. If only things could truly be like that. If only when I died, Oliver’s spirit could come to meet mine, like Cathy’s meeting Heathcliff’s. I thought about ‘The Ghost and Mrs Muir’. It would have been immeasurably reassuring to imagine Oliver watching over me as Rex Harrison had watched over Gene Tierney. Some sort of omnipresent guardian angel, witnessing everything that was happening to me, day after day after day. Everything.

  No, merely to imagine it was obviously no good. The fantasy dissipated. And not its least ludicrous aspect, of course, was my assumption that Oliver’s spirit would even want to come to meet my own, or that it could ever be expected to take the smallest degree of interest in watching over me. There were countless occasions when I kept hearing again those desperate and abortive rings at my doorbell; sometimes the very fact I hadn’t gone to answer them, had left him standing on the doorstep in despair—this sometimes seemed more awful than any other part of the whole awful business … and often the single feature which had the most power to torment me was the idea that Oliver might in some way have known I was there, not simply surmised it but actually have known…

  Yes, it was more than possible that, even had a heaven existed, Oliver would not have wanted to meet me there.

  No, it wasn’t, I thought. It wasn’t more than possible at all. Oliver hadn’t been the type to harbour grudges. Despite everything, if I had only had the chance to show him I was sorry, if I had only had the chance to show him how deeply I loved him, how unendingly I railed at my behaviour, then I knew he’d have forgiven me. Wholly; unreservedly. I was sure of it. And if only, I reflected, if only he could have realized the extent of the hell I had been going through during these past four months! How terrible that he should never be able to do so; that his final impression must have been one of pretence and ingratitude and rejection. How terrible that he should never learn of all the emptiness and remorse, and of all the devotion, which he had engendered in me.

  My brief period of almost-happiness seemed to be over. I looked down at the medallion and across at the picture and struggled to regain it.

  I
couldn’t.

  But all the same it had left a bit of a residue.

  And that residue lasted, more or less, throughout the remainder of July. To some extent I lived up to my aim: I was a kinder, more considerate person. I was a better-informed one, too—I made a practice of reading the newspaper every day and of frequently listening to the current affairs programmes on the radio. With a broader knowledge of what was happening in the world there came—more or less inevitably—a greater range and greater depth to my compassion. I was definitely one degree nicer.

  But at the start of August I discovered my talisman was far from being foolproof.

  I went to bed on the second feeling comparatively at peace with the world; it had been a Sunday and we’d loafed for most of the day in Regent’s Park. We’d rowed on the lake and played a game of tennis and later I’d fallen asleep by the water’s edge. Afterwards we’d had a meal at The Volunteer and gone to the Classic: ‘Dial M for Murder’—fairly entertaining (and in which, oddly, the very cinema we sat in had received a mention). Then we’d walked home and drunk hot chocolate and listened to some music, made love, and put the light out a little before twelve. A nice day. Only, as fate would have it, before sleep came I remembered something. Tomorrow, it would have been Oliver’s birthday.

  His fortieth birthday. A landmark. (Life begins at forty.) I fell to wondering how we’d have celebrated it; the one birthday we had celebrated had been mine. Right now maybe, on some alternative time curve, I should have been wrapping up his presents, adding a few last-minute touches, excitedly going over in my mind the arrangements for the following day. I thought (I couldn’t help it; I tried not to) of some of the things I might have planned for him. I assumed at first that we’d have been in England rather than abroad, and in London rather than at Merriot Park, but afterwards, the fantasy growing ever more elaborate, I transferred the setting of our celebration to southern Spain (he’d said that in the spring, perhaps, he would take me to Granada and Seville—to the real Spain. “By comparison this northern tip is only made of plastic!”), to the Greek Islands, even to Southern California and Hawaii. To begin with, naturally, such imaginings were at best only bittersweet but there came a point, when I was close to sleep, at which reality and fiction so far merged that the bitterness was siphoned off and merely the sweetness remained. Possibly my sleep was influenced by this all night—I don’t know—yet certainly when I awoke next morning it was from a dream so pleasant that I struggled to remain in it, even though it hadn’t struck me for an instant that my partner in the dream wouldn’t still be lying beside me in the bed, just as, a moment before, he had been lying beside me on the beach. Still less than half awake and feeling immeasurably contented and secure, I turned over and lovingly reached out towards him.

  Bank Holiday Monday. Elizabeth had wanted to go to Hampstead Heath to see the pearly king and queen. I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face anything. I stayed in bed, with my eyes directed at the wall, and refused to get up. It seemed so pointless. I couldn’t be bothered. It required too much energy.

  At first Elizabeth was sympathetic.

  “What’s the matter, darling? What’s wrong? I’ve never known you be like this.”

  I continued to say nothing.

  “Shall I call a doctor?”

  “No.”

  She was sitting beside me on the bed stroking the nape of my neck. But she didn’t know about the smarting of my eyes. “What can I do then, honey, that might improve things?”

  “Go away,” I said.

  Eventually she, too, became depressed.

  “Well, if you’re not going to speak to me or even attempt to let me help, there doesn’t seem much point in my staying in. At least one of us can make some attempt to get a bit of fun out of this dreary day.”

  “Good,” I said. “Go out. Good riddance.”

  Three minutes later I heard the front door close.

  I hadn’t wanted her to go.

  Then I tried to shed tears in earnest. I couldn’t. I could manage nothing more than a series of dry, frustrated howls.

  For a long time I lay there almost without thought: a vegetable, a zombie: only believing I should never be able to cope with anything ever again, no matter how small. For instance, the very thought of having, even once more, to smile at the woman in the baker’s while answering her inane comments on the weather filled me with sheer dread. I had no idea what I was going to do. About that or about anything. “I wish I were dead,” I whispered … and then louder and with more emphasis: “I wish—I were—dead!” A childish cry. But I thought I almost meant it.

  At about one Elizabeth returned. She appeared more her usual self. She came and sat on the bed again and put her hand on my arm. “How are you feeling, hon?”

  I grunted.

  “What’s that, my love?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Poor Johnny,” she said. “Whatever are we going to do with you? I hate to see you feel like this.”

  She laid her head on my shoulder and her soft hair spilled across my back. After a while she straightened up.

  “It’s just so lovely out,” she said. “I went into the park again and watched people feed the ducks. And then two boys started messing about in a canoe and it capsized. They had the time of their lives. I was only sorry you weren’t there with me to share in all the fun.”

  “How could I have been? We’d have been on bloody Hampstead Heath. In all this bloody heat.”

  “Oh, darling, is that why you’ve been feeling miserable? I wouldn’t have cared about not going to the Heath. The only thing I care about is seeing you happy.”

  “Oh, don’t be so goddamned thick!”

  “Look,” she said, “I’ll go and make some lunch—why don’t you have a quick bath and a shave while I’m doing it? Or if you’re really not up to that, I’ll bring things on a tray, and we can eat in here. I think that’s maybe what you need: food. After all, you had no breakfast. And perhaps later you’ll feel a little more like doing something.”

  “I don’t want any lunch,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” she answered gaily. “And no arguments, either! I just won’t stand for them.”

  She turned back briefly at the door. “I’m sorry I was snappy earlier on. Poor Johnny. I love you very much.”

  Before she went into the kitchen she put some records on. Recently we’d been listening almost exclusively to classical music but today she chose Gershwin and Loesser and Coward.

  “There’s a somebody

  I’m longing to see;

  I hope that he

  Turns out to be

  Someone who’ll watch over me…”

  In spite of everything, I found that I was listening; almost automatically filling in the familiar and well-loved lyric in my mind when I couldn’t quite hear it on the record.

  As usual it struck me as immensely poignant.

  “So…

  Won’t you tell him please

  To put on some speed,

  Follow my lead,

  Oh—how I need

  Someone to watch over me!”

  The next record was also one I liked; she had clearly been picking out my favourites. It wasn’t possible to stay impervious.

  “I’ve never been in love before;

  Now all at once it’s you,

  It’s you forevermore…”

  I turned on to my other side. I caught sight of my arm lying on the blanket, smooth and tanned and well-muscled, and the line of it was pleasing.

  And suddenly—almost as though it were a veil being lifted—I felt the weight of my depression rise. Evidently there remained some good things in life. (It might even be feasible again to smile at that woman in the baker’s, while answering her inane comments on the weather!)

  I moved onto my back and put my hands behind my head.

  I had never known anything like it—never. Was this, to some degree, what manic depressives felt? Was it what Oliver had felt? Felt on Boxing Day? Fel
t on—?

  But I called a halt … and maybe only just in time: that line of inquiry could only lead right back into it, especially when I remembered my lack of genuine concern both on Boxing Day and on one other occasion, similarly short-lived, towards the end of January—and also during that more protracted period following his reading of my book. Poor Johnny, Angel Face had said. Well, poor, poor Oliver! I pushed back the blanket and leapt out of bed. I pulled on my underpants. I ran into the kitchen and embraced a smilingly surprised Elizabeth who had a fish slice in her hand. “God,” I said, “do I need to pee! ‘But we’ll fight for the stately homes of England…’”

  I discovered ‘In Memoriam’. In the past I had never much cared for poetry but I became enraptured over this. I carried the slim volume almost everywhere and read out lengthy excerpts to Elizabeth. At my insistence she also read the poem and—though not as swept away by it as me—seemed happy enough to listen to my observations.

  “Tennyson called his son Hallam. And there’s a Hallam Tennyson living today: great-grandson or something.”

  “I think that’s nice,” she said. “But what did Arthur Hallam actually die of?”

  “Cerebral haemorrhage.”

  “At twenty-two?”

  “Even at twenty-two.”

  Yet somehow I found that reassuring. I may not any longer have positively wished to die but I often felt I wouldn’t mind. After all, I’d had some good times. I’d travelled a bit, had enjoyable experiences, been to dances, read books, seen films, met many interesting and/or congenial people. I had known Oliver. I had known Oliver! Growing old, I thought now, seemed virtually aimless: a state which had to be survived with the minimum of grief and catastrophe. (That depression, though it had passed, appeared to have robbed me again of any true sense of purpose.) A fatal haemorrhage or a heart attack at twenty-two was no more to be feared than an all-out nuclear war; and I didn’t give a damn these days about that. Even success as a writer—and by ‘success’ I meant widespread recognition—would no longer interest me. That had been a phase: since March, I hadn’t given the least consideration to any further writing, other than (who knew—one day, perhaps) a faithful account of the events set going last November. Besides … afraid of death?…when there was always that faint, faint possibility that…