Black Dogs (3 page)

I married into a divided family in which the children, in the interests of self-preservation, had to a degree turned their backs on their parents. My tendency to play the cuckoo caused some unhappiness to Jenny and her brothers for which I apologise. I have taken a number of liberties, the most flagrant of which has been to recount certain conversations never intended for the record. But then, the occasions I announced to others, or even to myself, that I was ‘on the job’ were so rare that a few
indiscretions became an absolute necessity. It is my hope that June’s ghost, and Bernard’s too – if some essence of his consciousness, against all his convictions, persists – will forgive me.

T
HE FRAMED PICTURE
June Tremaine kept on the locker by her bed was there to remind herself, as much as inform her visitors, of the pretty girl whose face, unlike her husband’s, gave no indication of the direction it was set to take. The snapshot dates from 1946, a day or two after their wedding and a week before they set off on their honeymoon to Italy and France. The couple are arm in arm by the railings near the entrance to the British Museum. Perhaps it was their lunch break, for they both worked nearby, and they were not given permission to leave their jobs until a few days before they set off. They lean in towards each other with a quaint concern for being cut off at the edges of the picture. Their smiles at the camera are of genuine delight. Bernard you could not possibly mistake. Then as always, six feet three, outsized hands and feet, a preposterous, good-natured jaw, and jug-handle ears made even more comical by the pseudo-military haircut. Forty-three years did only predictable damage, and that only at the margins – thinner hair, thicker eyebrows, coarser skin – while the essential man, the astonishing apparition, was the same clumsy beaming giant in 1946 as in 1989 when he asked me to take him to Berlin.

June’s face, however, veered from its appointed course much as her life did, and it is barely possible to discern in
the snapshot the old face benignly wreathing into welcome when one entered her private room. The twenty-five-year-old woman has a sweet round face and a jolly smile. Her going-away perm is too tight, too prim, and does not suit her at all. Spring sunshine illuminates the strands that are already cutting loose. She wears a short jacket with high padded shoulders and a matching pleated skirt – the timid extravagance of cloth associated with the post-war New Look. Her white blouse has a wide open V-neck daringly tapered to her cleavage. The collar is turned back outside the jacket to give her the breezy, English rose look of the Land Girl posters. From 1938 she was a member of the Socialist Cycling Club of Amersham. One arm tucks her handbag into her side, the other arm is linked with her man’s. She leans against him, her head well short of his shoulder.

The photograph now hangs in the kitchen of our house in the Languedoc. I have often studied it, usually when alone. Jenny, my wife, June’s daughter, suspects my predatory nature and is irritated by my fascination with her parents. She has spent long enough getting free of them and she is right to feel my interest might be dragging her back. I put my face up close, trying to see the future life, the future face, the single-mindedness that followed a singular act of courage. The cheery smile has forced a tiny pucker of skin in the creaseless forehead, directly above the space between the eyebrows. In later life it was to become the dominant feature in a seamy face, a deep vertical fold that rose from the bridge of her nose to divide her forehead. Perhaps I am only imagining the hardness beneath the smile, buried in the line of the jaw, a firmness, a fixity of opinion, a scientific optimism about the future; the photograph was taken the morning June and Bernard signed up as members of the Communist Party of Great Britain at the
headquarters in Gratton Street. They are leaving their jobs and are free to declare their allegiances which throughout the duration of the war have wavered. Now, when many have their doubts after the Party’s vacillations – was the war a noble liberating anti-fascist cause or predatory imperialist aggression? – and some are resigning their membership, June and Bernard have taken the plunge. Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring. They are heading off across the Channel to the chaos of Northern Europe where they have been advised not to go. But they are determined to test their new liberties, personal and geographical. From Calais they will be making south for the Mediterranean spring. The world is new and at peace, fascism has been the irrefutable evidence of capitalism’s terminal crisis, the benign revolution is at hand, and they are young, just married and in love.

Bernard persisted with his membership, with much agonising, until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Then he considered his resignation long overdue. This change of heart represented a well-documented logic, a history of disillusion shared by a whole generation. But June lasted only a few months, until the confrontation on her honeymoon that gave this memoir its title, and hers was a profound alteration, a metempsychosis mapped in the transformation of her face. How did a round face become so long? Could it really have been the life, rather than the genes, that caused that little crease above the eyebrows pushed up by her smile to take root and produce the wrinkle tree that reached right to the hairline? Her own parents had nothing so strange in their old age. By the end of her life, by the time she was installed at the nursing home, it was a face to match the elderly Auden’s. Perhaps
years of Mediterranean sunshine toughened and buckled the complexion, and years of solitude and reflection distended the features, then folded them in on themselves. The nose lengthened with the face, and the chin did too, then seemed to change its mind and attempt the return by growing outwards in a curve. In repose her face had a chiselled, sepulchral look; it was a statue, a mask carved by a shaman to keep at bay the evil spirit.

In this last there may have been some simple truth. She might have grown her face to accommodate her conviction that she had confronted and been tested by a symbolic form of evil. ‘No, you clot. Not symbolic!’ I hear her correcting me. ‘Literal, anecdotal, true. Don’t you know, I was nearly killed!’

I do not know if this was actually the case or not, but in memory each of my few visits to her in the nursing home in the spring and summer of 1987 took place on days of rain and high wind. Perhaps there was only one such day, and it has blown itself across the others. On each occasion, it seems, I entered the place – a mid-Victorian country house – at a run from the car park set too far away by the old stable block. The horse chestnuts were roaring and shaking, the uncut grass was flattened, silver sides up, against the ground. I had pulled my jacket over my head, and I was damp and hot with irritation at another disappointing summer. I paused in the entrance hall, waiting to get my breath and for my temper to settle. Was it really just the rain? I would be pleased to see June, but the place itself brought me down. Its tiredness reached into my bones. The oak-effect panelling pressed in on all sides, and the carpet, patterned in kinetic swirls of red and musty yellow, rose up to assault my eye and restrict my
breathing. The uncirculated air, held in long-term residence by a system of regulation fire-break doors, carried in suspension the accreted flavours of bodies, clothes, perfumes, fried breakfasts. A shortage of oxygen made me yawn; did I have the energy for the visit? I could as easily have passed the untended reception desk and wandered the corridors until I found an empty room and a bed made up. I would slip between the institutional sheets. Check-in formalities would be concluded later, after I had been woken for my supper, brought on a rubber-wheeled trolley. Afterwards, I would take a sedative and doze again. The years would slip by ...

At this, a minor flutter of panic restored me to my purpose. I crossed to the reception desk and struck the sprung bell with the flat of my palm. It was another false touch, this antique hotel bell. The intended atmosphere was that of a country retreat; the achieved effect was that of an overgrown bed and breakfast, the kind of place where the ‘bar’ is a locked cupboard in the dining room, open at seven o’clock for one hour. And behind these divergent presentations was the reality itself – a profitable nursing home specialising, without the wholesome confidence to acknowledge the fact in its literature, in the care of the terminally ill.

A small-print complication in the policy, and the insurance company’s surprising severity, deprived June of the hospice she had wanted. Everything about her return to England some years before had been complicated and distressing. There was the tortuous route we took to a final confirmation, with reversals of expert opinion along the way, that she had an untreatable disease, a relatively rare form of leukaemia; Bernard’s distress; transporting her possessions from France and separating from them the unwanted junk; finances, property, accommodation;
a legal fight with the insurance company which had to be abandoned; a series of difficulties in the sale of June’s London flat; long car trips north for treatment from a dim elderly fellow said to have the power of healing in his hands. June insulted him and these same hands almost slapped her face. The first year of my marriage was completely overshadowed. Jenny and I, as well as her brothers and friends of Bernard and June, were drawn into the vortex, a furious expense of nervous energy we mistook for efficiency. Only when Jenny gave birth to our first child, Alexander, in 1983, did we – Jenny and I, at least – come to our senses.

The receptionist appeared and gave me the visitor’s book to sign. Five years on, June was still alive. She could have lived in her Tottenham Court Road flat. She should have stayed in France. She was, so Bernard had remarked, taking as much time over dying as the rest of us. But the flat had been sold, the arrangements were in place, and the space she had made around her in life had been closed off, filled in by our worthy efforts. She chose to remain in a nursing home where staff and deathbound residents alike consoled themselves with magazines and TV quiz shows and soaps booming off the glossy, pictureless, bookless walls of the recreation room. Our mad arranging had been nothing more than evasion. No one had wanted to contemplate the appalling fact. No one, but June. After her return from France, and before the nursing home was found, she moved in with Bernard and worked on the book she was hoping to finish. No doubt she also practised the meditations she described in her popular pamphlet, ‘Ten Meditations’. She had been content to let us spin about with the practicalities. When her strength ebbed far more slowly than medically predicted, she was equally content to accept the Chestnut Reach Nursing Home as uniquely
her responsibility. She had no wish to move out, back into the world. She claimed that her life was usefully simplified, and that her isolation in a house of TV watchers suited her, even did her good. Moreover, it was her fate.

Despite what Bernard had said, now, in 1987, she was fading. She spent far more time this year asleep during the day. Although she pretended otherwise, the only writing she was doing was in her notebooks, and there was little of that. She no longer walked the neglected footpath through the woods to the nearest village. She was sixty-seven. At forty I had just reached the age myself when one begins to differentiate between the stages of later life. There had been a time when I would have regarded it as plainly untragic to be ill and dying in your late sixties, hardly worth struggling against or complaining about. You’re old, you die. Now I was beginning to see that you hung on at every stage – forty, sixty, eighty – until you were beaten, and that sixty-seven could be early in the end-game. June still had things to do. She had been looking well as an elderly woman in the south of France – that Easter Island face under a straw hat, the natural authority of unhurried movement as she made the early evening inspection of her gardens, the afternoon sleeps chiming with local practice.

As I trod the bilious, swirling carpet that continued out of the hall, under the wire-mesh glass firedoor, along the corridor to cover every available inch of public space, it came to me again, how deeply I resented the fact that she was dying. I was
against
it, I could not accept it. She was my adopted mother, the one that love for Jenny, marriage conventions, fate, had allotted me, my thirty-two-years-late replacement.

For over two years I had made my infrequent visits alone. Jenny and her mother found even twenty minutes
of bedside chat a forced march. Slowly, far too slowly as it turned out, there emerged from my meandering conversations with June the possibility of a memoir I would write. The idea embarrassed the rest of the family. One of Jenny’s brothers tried to dissuade me. I was suspected of wanting to threaten a difficult truce by turning up forgotten quarrels. The children could not conceive how so wearingly familiar a subject as their parents’ differences could hold its fascination. They need not have worried. In the uncontrollable way of daily life, it worked out that there were only two visits towards the end when I managed to get June to talk about the past in an organised fashion, and from the very beginning we had quite different notions of what the true subject of my account should be.

In the bag of shopping I had brought her, along with the fresh lychees from Soho market, Montblanc black ink, the 1762–3 volume of Boswell’s Journal, Brazilian coffee and half a dozen bars of expensive chocolate, was my notebook. She would not permit a tape recorder. I suspected she wanted to feel free to be rude about Bernard for whom she felt love and irritation in equal measure. He usually rang when he knew I had been to see her. ‘Dear boy, what’s the state of mind?’ By which he meant that he wanted to know if she had been talking about him, and in what terms. For my part, I was glad to be without boxes of tapes in my study filled with compromising proof of June’s occasional indiscretions. For example, long before the idea of a memoir had taken hold, she had shocked me once by announcing in a suddenly lowered voice, as a key to all his imperfections, that Bernard ‘took a small penis size’. I was not inclined to interpret her literally. She had been angry with him that day and, besides, his, I was certain, was the only one she had ever seen. It was the phrasing that struck me, the suggestion that it had been mere obstinacy in her
husband that had prevented him from ordering something more capacious from his regular suppliers in Jermyn Street. In a notebook the remark could be encoded in shorthand. On tape it would have been simple evidence of a betrayal, one that I would have needed to keep in a locked cupboard.