by Joseph Hone
A middle-aged woman, unsuitably dressed in a green trouser suit, was introduced to me – the housekeeper I understood – a woman called Anna with flushed, attractive, Italianate features in a face that was too small for her body, and some sort of deeply New England accent. ‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said, greeting the twins with an affectionate ease she did not show to the adult arrivals. And there were two other children already there, a boy and a girl from a neighbouring family who had come to make up the party. It was very much a family occasion and, of course, I felt outside it: there was the sense, all the more clear now, that I’d been asked up here too precipitately, for reasons that were not entirely to do with hospitality or friendship. I felt uncomfortably close to the fiction of The Man who knew Too Much.
Guy Jackson took me up to my bedroom at the end of the house facing out over the lawn and the meadow. The branches of a tree, I noticed, almost touched the window and when I looked out I saw in the fading light that it was a huge tree whose trunk had divided itself in an extraordinary way so that it had spread itself out over a large area, its branches falling to the ground across its central stem, like the spokes of an opened umbrella, and then – re-seeding itself in some way, or joining the trunk of another tree, I couldn’t quite tell which – it had sprung up again in another serpentine growth, great branches rising and falling over a space bigger than a tennis court. Along the inside, twining itself among all these bizarre natural forms, a wooden balustraded walk-way had been built leading to a thatched tree-house, a little conical pavilion, at the far end. How wrong the phrase ‘the idle rich’ was, I thought.
When I came down the party was under way with the ticklish, sweet smell of mild explosive in the air over the woodsmoke as the children pulled the English crackers with faces savagely taut for a moment as they tugged, screwed up and frightened before the snap and the short sparks of light in the firelit room. Helen Jackson moved round the table supervising the party, watching her children, Sarah and Sheila. She was close to them now, so obviously tending, watching them: reason enough for not leaving her husband. I thought. That seemed so clear now, and I was surprised that I had ever thought otherwise.
They were not identical twins, though identically dressed in brown corduroy dungarees and white pullovers and straight fair hair with fringes like the spokes of a rake down about their noses. I watched her watch them and it was as if her life with George Graham, all the past she had written and we had spoken about, the places where she had lived, no longer existed in her – that it had been completely erased in this link she had made again with her roots in this house in the woods. This was where she really belonged, where her natural affinities lay, and what had happened in those other places were no more than visits of a rich man’s daughter, a grand tour made by a woman essentially domestic, calm and full of her children.
The hall had become warm with the roused fire, the excited breath and movement of the children, and with an impalpable warmth of family community where this present reunion was one more play in the long repertory of meeting and departure that had taken place in the room over the years – a warm confirmation, for the moment, of continuity, of a heritage willingly accepted.
I stood with my back to the grate next Mr Perkins with a cup of tea in my hand and he said, ‘It was good that you could get up here. Very good.’ But he said nothing else, looking away abstractedly. The children now put on paper hats and there was some squabbling over the peanut-butter sandwiches before they settled into them, hurrying over the plainer food, eyes fixed on the two birthday cakes in the middle of the table, iced in pink and blue with sugar animals and five candles apiece. Finally Harold Perkins was called to the table to light the candles. And when he was finished they put the lights out and two small circles of flame lit up four pink faces and fired the chandelier above with diamonds.
After tea they opened their presents. I had brought them a pair of Babar books – Babar’s Travels and Babar’s Friend Zephyr. And of course the first thing they noticed on the second page of the Zephyr book was the double-page spread of Monkeysville, the city with its shops and rope ladders built in the trees. ‘Like us,’ they shouted. ‘The tree houses – like ours!’ They were children for whom even the most inventive art naturally imitates life.
‘They can change them – if they have them already. I asked at the shop,’ I said to Helen.
‘No,’ she smiled. ‘Not them. They have the earlier ones. Thank you. And this is surely from Alice in France,’ she went on turning again to the children, helping them open a flat, well-packed parcel. Inside was a selection of children’s records, small forty-fives, French nursery rhymes, folk songs and fables – and also a larger record: Alice Perkins at the Porte des Lilas. There was a glossy photograph of her on the sleeve, a girl like Louise Brooks with glasses and short dark hair, bobbed and fringed, cradling a guitar. She had at the moment the features of a beautiful but severe schoolmarm. ‘I may be a popular singer,’ the photograph suggested, ‘but that’s not the point; that’s neither here nor there. I have serious work to do’ – an impression which Helen immediately confirmed for me.
‘That’s Alice – my runaway younger sister. Lives in Paris. She’s the revolutionary for you. Every cause you can think of from Viet Nam to the battle of Wounded Knee. She got herself locked up in Paris with the students, May ’68. Do you remember the song? – “This City never was for lovers.” She’s very serious.’
‘I’ve heard of her, not the song. I’d no idea –’
‘Oh yes. She’s the famous sister. Guy and I don’t see much of her. Thinks we’re outrageously bourgeois and right-wing. Almost fascist pigs. Father – do you want to hear Alice’s latest?’ She turned to him, waving the sleeve in the air like a flag.
‘What is it this time? “Wrap the Red Flag round me”? Let’s hear it. I like her.’
Helen put the record on in the next room – a dark drawing-room with heavy leather furniture I could just see through a doorway off the hall – and the sound of a sharp, classic guitar emerged through the hi-fi equipment, a decisively fingered, lilting introduction, followed by a surprisingly deep, almost male voice – ringingly vibrant, slowly rising into the music, becoming passionately modulated, Piaf-like, whenever the words offered the chance:
‘Si je n’avais plus
plus qu’une heure à vivre,
je la voudrais vivre
auprès de ton lit –
sur un lit d’amour …’
‘That’s not altogether revolutionary,’ I said when Helen returned.
‘I’m sure there’s something in it – some hidden political thing,’ she said, picking up the sleeve. ‘It’s by someone called Moulouji – “Algerian musician and singer.” The Arab cause. It’s that, don’t you think? That’s it.’
Helen seemed strangely anxious to cast her sister in the role of musical agitator – as someone who, in her rather mocking tones, she viewed as politically irresponsible. Yet her father’s politics, as I was to learn later that evening, had been very similar – as were her own, I knew, despite the pains she took to disguise this. The three of them had taken from this rich estate not the autocratic bounty that was their inheritance but a deep sense of shame in the injustice of that gift. Their history in this house had somehow led them all to a shared political cause – the concerns of an imperilled world that lay beyond its gates. How on earth had all this ever come to pass?
*
… He remembers Alice so affectionately, Helen thought as she listened to her sister’s voice, a radiant presence about the hall. He thinks of her so much as a continuation of his own philosophies, as someone making up for his own political failure. I’m the older, safer, drearier daughter – the Manhattan socialite who married a dull diplomat: a stuffed shirt from the British Foreign Office. I’ve taken after Mother, an old daughter of the revolution – while Alice is a daughter of the proper revolution. That’s what he thinks. But that’s how I wanted it, exactly how. That was the cover. And now
the point of it all? It’s gone. I needn’t have bothered – all the lies, the distances I’ve made with my family. I could have been true in the open and sung rebelly songs like Alice and had a good time with her and Father and shocked my husband. Although Guy wouldn’t have married that me, the real one. Not a chance. So that marriage was a lie I could have avoided too.
I shouldn’t have taken it all so seriously. It could have been something you sang about when you were young, talked about in college, argued about in bars and cafés, a dream you shouted from the rooftops while the pigs were letting off gas grenades at you: kidnapping the Dean, burning the draft cards and blowing up the computer building. I could have done it that way – the way you grow out of it, like Paris in the spring, because you weren’t ever really going to see it come about, were you? The revolution or whatever you called your hope. Sing about it passionately, yes, like Alice; that was very much part of the scenario – because it was going to fail. That was always in the last reel, wasn’t it? – the riot police, gas-masks, rubber bullets, then real ones, then tanks, finally the rigged trial and the ten-year sentence. And then you spent the rest of your life making up sad songs about it all, commemorating the failure.
But oh no, not that. That’s why I took it seriously. I didn’t want that. I saw that from the beginning. Alexei showed me and George too – the student phase, the amateur revolution of the privileged. I took it seriously. Took it and made it like a hidden birthmark, a faith like a disability that could never be displayed until the day broke – when the illness, the sore, would burst into miraculous flower and all would be well. But would it? Miracles were worse than the songs: they never happened. The seriousness had failed. God, how it had failed.
Serious. That had been the key word in everything. ‘If you are serious about it,’ she remembered Alexei saying, ‘you will put up with every setback. And they’ll come, be sure of that – the public disappointments, and much worse, the personal loss of faith. And when they do, remember the choice, the decision you make now – that you believe these ideas we’ve talked about are right. And nothing should really change that. We have only one life – and people like us try to cram too many opinions into it. But the others can’t. They have to live without comment.’
And yes, she thought, I still do believe those ideas to be right. But it’s a dry belief, without feeling. And I must suffer that. I must go on. That was part of Alexei’s whole scheme – that whatever happened there would still be people outside to carry the business through. The person next to me – George, who shared and warmed my belief – is gone, that is all. And someone has taken his place. He smokes his pipe, wears his watch, carries his old fountain pen. But it is not him. I have not properly understood all that yet – looking at these objects that once touched the body I touched.
The children can have their story now. He can read it to them, this other man, whoever he is. And I shall find out who – that, and what has happened to him – that other. I shall find out all of it – about him. And him. He will tell me.
*
The party finished and the children went to bed. ‘Will you read them one of your Babar stories, George?’ Helen asked me, something unexpressed in her voice and face: ‘George.’ George Graham. I wished I could have told her the truth of it all – my truth and his.
I read to the children in the nursery next their parents’ bedroom where Helen had gone, moving about, unpacking. ‘“The elephant’s school at Celesteville is closed for the whole summer,”’ I read. ‘“Zephyr, the little monkey, as well as his bigger schoolmates, goes off for the holidays. What fun to go and see his family again! But how sad to leave his friends, King Babar, Queen Celeste, the Old Lady, his teacher, and his beloved Arthur …”’
*
‘“… Queen Celeste, the Old Lady, his teacher, and his beloved Arthur! All four have promised to come to the river near the bridge to see him off and bid him a last fond farewell …”’
Helen listened to his voice in the next room, quietly pointed and assured as if he’d been used to reading bedtime stories all his life. Had he children of his own from his failed marriage, she wondered? But she asked him? She’d forgotten. There was nothing she knew about him. And worse, there was nothing she could remember in him, as there had been with the other men. He stood up for her in the guise of someone deeply loved, as a memorial to him, and thus he constantly provoked her memory of the real man. And so, in the days since she had met him, she had started to remember, involuntarily at first, the past cascading back to her – odd very clear incidents at odd moments. But soon she found that she needed these memories and so she came to create, to nurture them, to hold them to her like a passport, her only identity – these papers which alone would take her successfully into the future. Without them, the present, the days ahead were condemned. To survive she must carry her past with her all the time – the ideals, the purposes and the men who had shared her life with these things – and to be able to produce it as an immediate reference whenever she asked herself ‘Where – and what now?’
‘“They have to use a rope ladder to climb up to the house perched there in the treetops. Zephyr scrambles up easily, but laughs as he says to himself, ‘This wouldn’t do for my friends the Elephants’ …”’
*
Elephants. She closed the drawer she had filled with the twins’ clothes. After the filming in Ethiopia, she and Graham had gone on alone, southwards to Kenya, to Tsavo National Park to look at the elephants. George had been researching another TV story – the College of African Wildlife on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. And from there they’d gone out on a training safari with the College instructors and students – careering across the open plainsland of the huge park in open lorries.
That first morning had always been a clear enough thing to hold. It hardly took the form of memory, but lived safely, ever available in the grammar of the historic present: that first time properly alone with him, believing so surely than in the next few weeks – a happy stretch of certain days ahead of them. Confident with him, yet not grasping, a reasonable happiness, no more than that, and surely that would come in this empty world – this plainsland which human dissension had not yet marked?
And loving him too. That as well. But love as an easy thing now, something you could stop thinking about if you wanted to.
… The first night out we camped, not in tents, but in the crumbling manager’s house in a ruined mining village at the centre of the park with the students bedding down in the old labour lines. And it was creepy and far more strange than tents under the stars. There was no electricity in the house yet the bulbs were still there and the electric fires had never been taken away and I found an old hair-dryer in a cupboard of the manager’s bedroom where we’d been put to sleep with our bags. Mr and Mrs Graham …
That evening when it turned cold and pitch-dark within half an hour of sunset, great blocks of cedar from a ruined tree in the garden roared in the living-room grate, the Tilley lamps hissed like snakes as they were pumped up in the kitchen, and people chatted and laughed over their beers before dinner.
And that night up in the manager’s old bedroom getting undressed, talking to George, watching him, standing with one hand against the chimney breast, warm from the huge fire that had blazed all evening in the grate immediately below – and thinking him somehow uneasy now that we were alone.
‘Do you like it here? Or loathe it? Honestly? You’re so wary of liking things. Or just wary of running round East Africa with someone else’s wife?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s what you might, or might not do with me in the future that worries me.’
‘This is just a prolonged one-night stand?’
‘Not for me.’
‘Nor me.’
‘There’s the problem then.’
‘What about living now?’ I asked. ‘What about that great old idea? Let’s leave the words for later, George, when we’ve lost this, if we do. That’s what words are for.’
> He got into his sleeping bag in the narrow camp bed beside mine – the two beds like two separate valleys with an iron ridge between them. It was ridiculous. We took the sleeping bags off and put them down next to the grate where the floor was warm from the fire below and made love and slept there, very warm in the cold night, a broken window-pane rattling, sleeping and doing it again, waking when the wind had gone very early before dawn, and feeling entirely alone stretched out naked in the middle of Africa.
*
‘“… Zephyr falls asleep almost as soon as his head touches the pillow. But in the middle of the night, the nightingale wakes him with his song: ‘Trou la la -tiou; tiou-tiou! Tidi-Tidi’ …”’
The twins had fidgeted during the story, unable to relax after the excitement of the day. But now, quite suddenly, they were still, their eyelids wavering. And by the next page, with Zephyr, pushing his little rowing boat out into the lake, they were both fast asleep. ‘“Oh, what a daredevil that fellow Zephyr is,”’ I read to the sleeping, empty room, closing the book.
But it wasn’t empty. Helen had come in and was standing behind me. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’ she asked, turning off the main light and standing now in the half darkness, a small bedside lamp with a decorated shade illuminating the room faintly with the colours of some nursery fable. ‘I don’t remember – you told me you were married to someone in the same business, in British Intelligence.’
‘No. None.’ I stood up. She was carrying some of the twins’ clothes and had started to put them away in a small chest of drawers.
‘Did you know about her from the beginning – I mean, that she was in the same business?’
‘No. I only found out in the end. Almost the very end. She’d been in the business as a colleague – and more – of a number of other men – in other organisations.’
Helen looked up at me – with compassion or derision, I couldn’t say in the darkness.
