Altered States (24 page)

I let myself into the flat, decided to do without the coffee, and sank down into my chair. This interval which I had promised myself was turning out to be illusory, as had all my other plans. Nevertheless I enjoyed the quiet. I was hopelessly addicted to order, I realised, even to the extent of trying to introduce order into other lives. I was no prospect for a wilful girl—but she was no longer a girl. She was a rather heavy-featured woman with a shadowy lover in the background. Although I knew that I was not yet finished with her I dreaded further involvement. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: no doubt she felt the same. I should look into her closed face and try to will her to look at me. And if the tactic worked as effectively as it had always done I should have burnt my boats and uttered an unwise and untimely declaration and thus connived at my own unreason, I who was so eminently reasonable a man.

I made a pot of tea and tried to shrug off these suppositions. I splashed my face with cold water, and after a second’s hesitation changed my shirt. I drank my tea standing up, anxious now to go back to the office, where it was assumed that I knew my own mind. The brief afternoon was already merging into dusk as I walked down Wigmore Street. I should have time to sign my letters and retrieve my briefcase, without which I felt naked. Ahead of me stretched the disagreeable task of going through Humphrey’s assets, or rather what assets could be subsumed under the rubric of contents and to which Jenny was entitled. This might take some time, might indeed be a difficult subject to introduce on the day of
the funeral, but as a solicitor I was used to poking about in dead men’s affairs. Many widows and widowers were thankful to me for discharging this task; Jenny, I knew, would be incapable of undertaking it.

I found her alone, seated at the oval dining-table, with the shawl still round her shoulders. Mother kissed her and made her promise to keep in touch, to which she made no response. From time to time she passed her hand over the table, not as a gesture of possession but as if to reassure herself of the solidity of objects. The smile she gave me was timid. I thought she had aged since the morning, and for the first time feared for her health, though to my knowledge she had never given any sign of physical weakness. I sat down beside her and placed my hand over the restless hand. With a shuddering sigh she turned to me, and I prepared myself for my inquisitorial or curatorial task. But Jenny, it seemed, was not yet ready.

‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d be frightened to be alone. Even when he was in the other room and not speaking to me it was a presence. Do you understand, Alan?’

‘Of course I do. But there’s no need to be frightened. You’ll sleep soundly tonight and in the morning you’ll feel more confident.’

‘Alice was here,’ she went on. ‘That was nice of her, wasn’t it? Giving up her afternoon like that. We had a cup of tea together. Just like old times.’

‘Jenny,’ I said. ‘If you’re ready I think I’d better take a look round Humphrey’s room. You know you’re entitled …’

She turned to me, her expression desperate. ‘What’s to become of me, Alan, if I can’t stay here? And even if I could, what should I live on? I’ve got no money of my own; I’ve only got what he allowed me for the week in my purse, and when that runs out I shan’t even be able to buy a pint of milk. Alice invited me to stay with them in France, but I
can’t leave the flat, can I? Sarah could come in and change the locks.’

This thought had occurred to me; I rather wondered whether to advise her to change the locks herself. But I was anxious not to step outside the law, and confined myself to asking her whether she knew what Humphrey kept in his room, whether he had a safety deposit box: questions she was unable to answer.

‘I went in,’ she said dully. ‘But I couldn’t see anything. And I didn’t like to go through his things. You know he kept his door locked? I doubt if you’ll find much. I’ve left everything as it was.’ And here, to her astonishment, a sob threatened to defeat her composure. She swallowed abruptly, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide with panic, as if suddenly threatened by illness.

‘You stay here,’ I said. ‘I’ll try to be quick.’

Humphrey’s bedroom, or rather his bed-sitting room, was as rebarbative as I had imagined it. A coverlet had been hastily pulled over the unmade bed, which imparted its own particular aroma to the murky atmosphere. Humphrey’s grey suit, out of shape at the elbows and knees, hung spectrally on the outside of the wardrobe door: on the chest of drawers lay his watch, his cufflinks, and a crusty handkerchief. Cautiously I slid open drawers, and found nothing but fuzzy grey socks and outsize underpants. Bracing myself, I slid my hand into the wardrobe, palpated several pockets, and disengaged from scarves and cardigans two pocket books with old elastic fastenings, one of which contained a considerable quantity of white five-pound notes. Sliding my hand in again I found a leather purse, heavy with the sort of coins I dimly remembered as pennies. These, however, were dated 1933. He must have kept them from his boyhood. I reckoned they were worth something, perhaps even a considerable amount.

‘Why don’t we have some coffee?’ I remarked, back under
that centre light. ‘And some of that cake if there’s any left. I don’t seem to have had lunch today, and I doubt if you’ve eaten anything.’

‘Alice tried to get me to eat, but I don’t want to. Will you stay, Alan? I don’t want to be alone.’

I sat down and took her hands. ‘It won’t be so bad,’ I said. ‘You get used to it. And you lived alone before, didn’t you? In the hotel?’

Her face softened into a smile of reminiscence. ‘My little room,’ she said. ‘Right under the roof, the cheapest room in the hotel. But it was decent, and I had hot water, and a little primus stove, although it wasn’t allowed. I could make myself a coffee in the morning. And on Sundays I went out and bought myself croissants. Nobody knew I was poor. Not like now.’ The smile vanished.

‘You’re not poor,’ I said, putting the money on the table. ‘This is worth quite a bit.’

‘Foreign currency?’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what country it comes from.’

‘It’s English,’ I told her. ‘Old money. And when I’ve had time to find out about such things you might learn that it’s worth a great deal. What about his wallet?’

‘I couldn’t find it. I tried his suit …’

‘Did you try his dressing-gown?’

‘No, no, I didn’t, although he did hide things from me. I told you …’

I went back to the bedroom and searched the pockets of his dressing-gown, which someone, Jenny or the neighbour, had hung on the back of the door. In one of them I found his wallet, which contained about two hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes.

‘This will tide you over,’ I said. ‘Put the money in your bag. Nobody’s going to turn you out. Remember, they have to go through me first.’

I fished in my pocket and found the card that one of the men at the funeral had given me. I glanced at it: Lionel Taylor.

‘Get in touch with this man and tell him you want to sell the clocks. Invite him round, tell him to see if there’s anything else he wants. There’s that Art Nouveau vase, for example. And I seem to remember being shown a box of watches when I was a boy. Pocket watches, gold ones.’

‘They’re in the sideboard.’

‘There you are, then. That’s enough for one day, I think. Time you went to bed.’

‘Must you go, Alan?’

‘I’ve still got some business to see to. But I’ll be back in a day or two. Good-night, Jenny. You’ve got my number, if you want me. Remember, I’m quite near.’

I left, without my coffee. I felt hungry, but was too impatient to eat. I walked briskly through Upper Berkeley Street and Portman Square to Wigmore Street. I would drop my briefcase at the flat, I calculated; while there I would see if this irritating anticipation would subside. I might read a poem to steady my nerves. Tennyson was my current favourite: ‘Birds in the high hall garden …’ Perhaps the influence of Tennyson would calm me down. Yet, by the light of a street lamp, I looked at my watch, and saw that I should have to hurry. My next appointment beckoned, and I could not be late.

When I was very young the worst thing I could do to myself was to anticipate an ordeal. As a child this took the form of a visit to my grandmother: when I was at school it was swimming, and later examinations (which I usually passed with ease). My feeling on these occasions was not simple dread but a form of heart-break, as if I were being denied the pleasures of this world because of a rule arbitrarily imposed on me by a higher power. I would treasure my last glimpses of the street, the sun, the traffic, as if they were forbidden to me, only to be enjoyed by those for whom such rules did not exist. Prisoners must feel something like this when the gates close behind them. And the worst of it was that when I had endured the ordeal, whatever it was, the world was somehow diminished, as if my anguish had robbed it of some of its splendour. To my credit I never demanded to stay at home,
with some well-worn excuse or other; my dread was an illness in itself, although I knew myself to be physically intact. I would vow to myself so to construct my life as a man to avoid such ordeals, yet here I was, on this mild autumn night, walking up Baker Street either to face the last of my ordeals or the first of a long sequence of them, almost but not quite submitting to that paralysis of the will that emptied my mind of everything but the task before me. On these occasions I no longer acted; I merely submitted to events. Even as a man I underwent the emotions that had assailed me as a boy, and which I now recognised as habitual, part of my intimate economy, and no more to be shrugged off than the shape of my feet or the colour of my hair.

When under the spell of this anxiety, I would feel myself to be a sleep-walker, whose eventual waking would not prevent the experience from being repeated. The sleep-walker is said to wake up in time to stop him doing himself damage, but damage was precisely what characterised the whole experience. The world had been altered for me through its agency, and although it might look the same I was aware of a subtle difference. The friendliness of everyday phenomena could no longer be taken for granted, since ahead of me was an event that cast a shadow over everything that I had known. My father had reassured me that everyone felt faint-hearted from time to time, but I did not believe him. It seemed to me that I was being singled out for this visitation, and the fact that I remained physically unmarked by it was if anything further proof of its mysterious power. I would set out from home in a state of grief, and no assurance of a treat at the end of the day would mitigate it. If anything I despised such assurances, for I knew that my feelings had nothing to do with my status as a child. I had been inducted into the world of loss, and having eaten of this particular apple would never be truly whole again.

Fortunately my parents paid little attention to my strange fore-knowledge which, I repeat, was not visible. Nor did it in any way subvert my performance in the noisy swimming pool or the silent examination room. In time, and no doubt as I grew older, I came to dread the feeling even more than the event it foreshadowed, as if my essential being were under attack, and I were in no position to overcome the attack, since my will, and everything that had hitherto made me what I had become, were compromised. I was no longer in control of my destiny: God was no longer benign. I grew out of it, yet I could not ignore the experience, largely because I could not decide whether it was cause or effect. By the time I went up to Oxford it had receded, become overlaid with more rational concerns. On the whole I found life easy, and continued to do so for the next ten or fifteen years, until stopped in my tracks by the intimations of that illness which had turned out to be real and which was the herald of my unfortunate marriage. That was why I had reacted so badly to it, I now reasoned, as I came level with George Street: the inner and the outer worlds had come together, and the effect of this was to make me so terrified, so undone, that I had to take refuge in another person, assuming that other person, Angela in this case, to be strong enough to bear my weight, whereas in reality she had looked to me to do the same for her.

The tragedy was that we could not console each other. Our woes were never acknowledged and so remained unknown. To me she had always appeared transparent; I foolishly had not seen that there was more for me to discover. And what she had wanted, I now saw, was some kind of confessor, to whom she could reveal secrets over which she had kept silent for far too long, since childhood, perhaps, when the boy I was then might have understood her much better than the man I had become.

The irony of my turning such matters over in my mind just as I was about to face a dilemma in my life was not lost on me, nor was the fact that I was thinking of Angela when Angela was no longer there to benefit from my new understanding. Or, rather, from my recovered memory of dread, of fate, of the road I was obliged to take, though no one could accuse me if I refused to take it. It seemed to me (and I was nearly at Paddington Street) that for once in my life I would do better to go home and commune with my dead wife, in some way to let her know that I was thinking of her even at this juncture, when I was leaving what had been our home to pursue an early fantasy to its conclusion, to destruction, one might say. I saw, quite clearly, Angela’s face, her newly washed hair, and felt again that species of alienation I had known as a boy before the swimming lesson or the examination, as if the world had turned its back on me, as if I were newly excluded from God’s love, as if the ordeal must be undergone with as much self-mastery as was appropriate in the circumstances. I could have abandoned the whole enterprise, of course, but I had a mission to accomplish, one that was quite specific and fairly urgent: I had to persuade Sarah to let Jenny stay in the flat, and if possible—but I did not yet see how this might be possible—to persuade her to make the flat over to Jenny, in effect to give it to her. Knowing Sarah, and her inability to answer a simple question, this was in the nature of a knightly quest on my part, and yet I was committed to it, as I was committed to scrutinising her, and myself in relation to her, once more.