Damage (18 page)
‘Do you want me to send it to you at Edward’s flat?’
‘Andrew, I want to have a talk with you — about the future. Can you come to the flat?’
‘I’ll come this afternoon, about four.’
‘OK.’
He handed me a large brown packet filled with letters.
‘All for me?’
‘No. Quite a few for Ingrid, some for Sally.’
‘Can you send them to Hartley?’
‘There might be some … well … crank letters.’
‘Can you tell?’
‘Let’s look at each envelope carefully.’
We picked out a few that looked strange. But there was nothing sinister. It was just normal post, special cleaning service offers, sale announcements, et cetera. ‘The rest look safe,’ I said. ‘Send them on to Hartley.’
‘You won’t be seeing Ingrid … in the next few days?’ He looked at me, then glanced away.
‘Andrew. Ingrid and I will not be together again, ever. I want you to liaise with Paul Panten and come to an arrangement. We’re both wealthy. Ingrid must have everything that belongs to our old life. Hampstead, the paintings, everything. If you would liaise with Johnson at Albrights for a statement of affairs, we can agree on a financial settlement. Sally, of course, has her trust fund.’
‘And Martyn’s … now. I’m sorry, but this is a financial conversation.’
‘No. Please, you are right. Yes, and Martyn’s now. It automatically transferred to her if Martyn died without a family. Andrew, I need a few days to think about my own future. Can we talk on Friday?’
‘By all means.’ He looked down at the letters. We both saw the one from France.
‘I’ll go now. We’ll talk on Friday. I’ll put everything into operation.’
‘Andrew, I’m profoundly grateful. No arguments from you? No advice?’
‘I know you too well to try to advise you. Or perhaps too little. Till Friday.’ He left.
I opened the letter from France. It was from Peter.
“I have a letter for you from Anna. She insisted that I should give it to you personally. Can you call me? We can discuss how and when I can do this.”
There was nothing else. I rang immediately.
‘Where is Anna?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
He sighed. ‘Please understand that what you believe or don’t believe is completely irrelevant to me.’
‘I’m sorry. When did she leave?’
‘On the day of Martyn’s funeral.’
‘How did she know the date?’
‘My God! It’s hardly been a secret in the English newspapers.’
‘Where did she go?’ He remained silent.
‘I’m not asking you where she is now, just where did she go that day?’
‘She went, my friend, to visit the grave of her brother.’
For a moment I was blinded by the white light of shock.
‘Alone?’
‘All alone. I will say it once again. The last I saw of Anna was the day of Martyn’s funeral. She left my home in a taxi. She said goodbye to me. I think this time she meant it.’
‘What did she wear?’
‘What? A white dress. She said she was going to buy roses for his grave. Then she was gone.’
‘Red, I suppose?’ As if in a dream.
‘I don’t know what colour. This is a hopeless conversation. Now, as my last act for Anna, do I bring the letter to you, or do you come to collect it?’
‘I will come to collect it.’
‘You’d better come to my apartment then.’ I took the address. ‘Tomorrow at six.’ ‘Tomorrow at six.’
T
HE APARTMENT HAD
all the understated elegance and deceptive simplicity I had come to associate with Peter Calderon. He was a very clever man. The kind of man clever enough to hide his brilliance. The kind of man who would quickly learn from the few mistakes he would make. Like the kind of mistakes he’d made with Anna, long ago.
‘This is very kind,’ I started conversationally.
‘No. It is not kind. It is a duty.’
‘Ah!’
‘Here is the letter. I’d rather you did not read it here.’
‘Why? Do you know what’s in it?’
‘No.’
‘But you could hazard a guess?’
‘No. I could give you my professional opinion. But then you probably wouldn’t listen.’
‘I’m listening now.’
‘Anna will not find it possible to continue her relationship with you.’
‘Why not? Oh, I know the obvious reasons.’
‘You mean guilt? No, no, Anna could handle the guilt all right. Actually most people can. For example, you managed perfectly well to deceive your son. One barely finds it necessary to refer to the minor betrayal of your wife. Yet you are here days after your son has died, his death undoubtedly all but occasioned by you. You are here to search for Anna. So please! Guilt, guilt, its pious expression alone is in fact today’s great absolution. Just say the guilt prayer, “I feel guilty,” and hey presto, that’s the punishment. The guilt is the punishment. So punished, and therefore cleansed, one can continue with the crime.’
‘Why then? Why can’t she continue with me?’
‘Because it’s only now that she has finally said goodbye to Aston. Anna has spoken to me of your relationship with her. You were part of the healing process. You were a vital part. The outer limits which you visited were — how can I put it — a journey which you and she were destined to make. But one which is over. It is over.’ He looked at me. ‘At least at this moment in time it is over for Anna.’
‘The last thing she said to me was, it’s over. But I won’t accept it.’
‘Because it’s not yet over for you.’
‘It never will be.’
‘Maybe not. Maybe not. But you will only be a visitor now to old views, old rooms, old dreams. Perhaps that’s enough for you.’
‘I won’t give up.’
‘Read the letter. Then decide. Be grateful you made the journey at all. Few people do. Perhaps it’s just as well. Tragedy almost always follows. But then, if you’d known a year ago?’
I looked at him.
‘My wife wished I’d died. Not lived to do this.’
‘But then you’d never have lived at all. Would you?’
‘No.’
He smiled, as he led me to the door. ‘Few regret the experience.’
‘Do you?’
‘I never had that kind of experience with Anna. Neither did Martyn. In that one way you were truly made for each other. Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths.’
I
N A GREEN
grove in the Tuileries Gardens I found a quiet place, leaning against a plane tree, to read my fate:
“I must take myself back from you. I was a fatal gift. I was the gift of pain which you sought so eagerly, pleasure’s greatest reward. Though bound together in a savage minuet, whoever and whatever we truly are or were meant to be, soared free. Like aliens on earth we found in each and every step the language of our own lost planet. You needed pain. It was mine you hungered for. But though you do not believe it, your hunger is fully satisfied. Remember you have your own pain now. It will be ‘everything, always’. Even if you found me, I would not be there. Don’t search for something you already have. The hours and days allotted to us and now for ever gone are also ‘Everything. Always.’
Anna”
A leaf fell slowly to earth like a giant green tear. I had no tears to shed. I felt my body, touching my arms and chest. This thing will need to be housed somewhere until it is finally ready for burial. I must keep my promise to Ingrid — live, live on. But I needed a coffin, of sorts.
I stood up to walk away. A child in frantic pursuit of a ball crashed into me. We looked at each other, and some wisdom made her race away from me, crying.
I
T TAKES A
remarkably short time to withdraw from the world. Certain basic affairs, of course, must be formalised. Andrew deals with all bills, and transfers a monthly figure for living expenses. Personal letters forwarded from Hampstead or Hartley are destroyed by him. The supply dries up with considerable speed. Few people have my address, Sally of course, Peter Calderon — just in case. But I know, deep down, there is no reprieve.
I had only one formal public appearance to make, the inquest. The verdict was accidental death. Ingrid, Sally, and Edward did not attend. Of course much was made of the non-attendance of Anna Barton.
I have an apartment in a small street in the city in which I now live. I chose it carefully. Its white walls and white wood-panelled ceilings guided my choice. Since then I have added white blinds to its high windows, a white carpet, white bookcases. In time I also bought embossed white paper to hide the covers of the books. I found the shades, however subtle, too much.
The cleaning lady who comes each day for two hours dislikes the fact that I sit and watch her. But I have to. Once she brought red roses. She couldn’t get the white lilies I had ordered. Agonies began, which took me days to bank down.
I have two large pictures, which are turned to the wall when she comes. I know she would try to turn them round if I weren’t there. They hang opposite each other, in the small hallway that leads from the main living-room to the bathroom. Though the photographer had difficulty enlarging them to the size I wanted, he managed eventually. Mounted on a white background they stand about five feet high. Or lie.
I have a routine. I exercise. I bought a book based on my father’s old regime — thirteen minutes of naval exercises each morning. Then breakfast. Reading. Always the classics. There’s a lifetime’s reading there. I certainly haven’t got a lifetime left. While the flat is being cleaned I listen to language tapes. I take one holiday each year in the sun, always to a different country. I challenge myself to have at least a grasp of the language of the country I shall visit. This is my third year of such challenge.
After my cleaning lady leaves I take a long walk. I have a light lunch at a cafe. Then I return to my white haven and continue my reading or I listen to music. Just as often I sit for hours letting the white purity of my room invade me.
I hear from Sally regularly. Wilbur died. Not, after all, from a heart attack, but in an automobile accident. It was Edward who died from heart failure, within a year of Martyn’s death. I thought … I feared that might happen.
Ingrid has remarried, a captain of industry, who has just received a knighthood. Sally hasn’t married yet. She and Jonathan are still together. ‘It’s not’, she wrote to me some time ago, ‘that I don’t trust love. It’s that I no longer know what it is.’
I am never lonely. My favourite place in the world, my world, is the long narrow corridor to the bathroom. There I sit sometimes in the evening, gazing at the life-size photograph of Martyn. I change the position of the chair, so the perspective changes all the time.
Once I simply stood in front of his image with my arms touching the sides of the frame. For hours and hours I tried to search for the knowledge in his eyes that his life would not be as he had hoped. But caught for ever by the camera in a moment of laughter, power, and beauty, his face seems to burst from its trap of technology and glass with triumphant, defiant life.
Sometimes I gaze at Anna … at a photograph taken during her engagement weekend at Hartley. I took it from the study as I left Hartley for the last time. Quizzically, she gazes back at me. The movement of her dark feathered hair in the breeze is at odds with the steady, unsmiling eyes and solemn face. I remember how rarely she laughed. When I search her face from all perspectives I can find in it only a passive power that seems to say ‘I am not caught, for I do not move.’
Her years of silence are presaged in that face.
Desire rarely troubles me. Once (and since then I have ceased to drink) I laid her picture on the floor. Stretching out on it, in what I thought was a rage of grief, I found myself instead lost in a storm of the body’s desperation. As I cried out in agony there came semen and tears.
And I remembered what she had written of the night Aston had come to her bed: ‘Semen and tears are the symbols of the night.’
I
WEAR CASUAL
clothes now, and often dark glasses. I find all colour offends me.
I pack very little for my short holiday. Germany this year.
The airport is hideous, crowded, colourful, and noisy. I turn a corner. All becomes quiet. It seems to me that other people are in sudden slow motion.
Anna appears before me. She moves towards me. She takes my dark glasses from me. She looks into and beyond me as though gathering herself from me for ever. Silently, she wrestles for the part of her I still keep. She is all-powerful. It is an act of repossession. My body seems to fall in on itself, to become a song or a scream, a sound so high, so thin, that it shatters bone and tears muscle.
I know my heart has been ripped. It is disintegrating. I fall to my knees. It is an act of worship and defeat. My lips brush the cotton of her dress. Its summer garden colours of green and yellow are acid in my eyes. Someone rushes to help me. Anna simply walks on.
‘Do you need a doctor?’ The young man helps me to my feet.
‘No. No, I’m fine. I am a doctor.’
I rush back in the direction she has taken. I see her join a man holding a small child by the hand. He turns slightly towards her and Peter Calderon’s lips brush her hair. From this perspective, I see that the slight disarray of her skirt is due to pregnancy.
I find a taxi. As it speeds back to the flat I doubt now I will ever leave, I wonder how long my body will survive. Not long, not long, I hope.
Final thoughts come to me. With a sigh I close the door.
Dying, possibly years before the idiotic mechanism of my body finally surrenders, I whisper to myself and to the silent faces in the hall, ‘At least I am certain of the truth now.’
For those of you who doubt it — this is a love story.
It is over.
Others may be luckier.
I wish them well.