Ever After (6 page)
I only guessed later what she was doing. She had decided that the time had come to dispose of all that “junk” of Uncle Ratty’s that had come to her via her brother and which her brother had never had time to sort out for himself. All that research. All that
evidence
. All that burrowing after noble origins. And in amongst the junk there might so easily have been the disregarded notebooks of Matthew Pearce of Burlford—who knows if some other, unknown manuscript was not casually cremated that afternoon? With my own ignorant hands I might have tossed Matthew on to the pyre.
I don’t remember her showing any special emotion, only her evident pleasure in what she called a “jolly good bonfire,
sweetie.” She wore for this occasion—but this was typical of her—not some sloppy gardening outfit, but an
ensemble
much more chic than practical: sleek, well-cut trousers, which at that time must have been a matter of fashionable novelty; a figure-hugging, collared jersey, with a Paisley silk scarf; all of which would have looked well at the best golf club. While she wielded the rake and struggled with branches, this gave her the appearance of being skittishly feminine, sillily, fetchingly out of her element, so that any male passer-by (though we were alone and at the end of the garden) would have felt compelled to say, “Here, let me,” taking the rake from her; and my mother would have stepped back in blinking, coquettish satisfaction.…
The memory of the smooth pear-shape of her waist and bottom, which her trousers calculatedly set off; the memory of our faces glowing greasily and mischievously while the sparks danced and a blackbird tink-tinked indefatigably in the beech hedge; the memory of her, on a sudden whim and without explaining, going into the house and returning, through the thickening twilight, having raided my father’s special reserves, with two glasses, one, filled only partially, for me; of her raising her glass to catch the full rubescence before the fire, then bidding me, with a wink, sip with her. My first taste of wine. “Chambertin, darling—divine.” My mother: Sylvia Unwin, née Rawlinson. I don’t believe my father ever communed with her more intimately than this.
I see her, in the gathering dark, rake the embers of Uncle Rupert’s dreams. And I hear her, as she steps back, grasping the rake like a spear, and as the blackbird in the hedge at last admits defeat, begin to sing:
“Who is Sil-via …?”
• • •
She lay in that rufous, glowing light, and the wipe-clean clipboard lay untouched beside her. I realised she was too weak to use it. If she had wanted to use it, I would have needed to guide her hand. I will never know what she might have said. But surely while she still had her voice she would have said all she meant to say. Or written one last letter … I will never know how much she felt the agony of willing words but having no means to utter them. I will never know if, to her, the words and all the resources of her voice still seemed to be
there
, as they say amputees still sense their absent limbs. Fish are mute when they tumble into the net. Perhaps the near-to-death (but I should know this) have already retreated a long way into themselves. They cannot waste their energies on those strange irrelevancies the living, on all those wearying transactions that happen on the surface of things. They can do without words. Perhaps my mother’s silence was golden.
I held her hand, which could only muster a faint returning grip. If I had not known this was my mother, I would scarcely have recognised her. All the cheerful plumpness she had gained in middle age had gone. She was a bag of bones. Her eyes, little trapped pools in their sunken sockets, seemed the only living things about her. They looked at me, over the wall of her speechlessness, and I could not tell what their infinitesimal glints and dilations meant. Apology? That I should have to witness her in this state? Or just apology? Defiance? Yet it seemed to me that whatever those eyes expressed, they were looking, intensely,
at me
, they saw me clearly; they were looking into me, assessing, questioning.
There was this sound of tennis balls. She lay with her thin arms above the covers, and her head in the peculiar, chin-jutting pose necessitated by all the scaffolding beneath her jaw. I will never know if that air of queenly
serenity was a trick of that enforced posture and the drugs circulating through her, but I like to think of it as her genuine state of being. The curtains stirred, allowing a fuller beam of sunlight momentarily to penetrate the room, and she smiled, faintly but distinctly, the way a child smiles at some simple distraction. So she was not that far within herself. But as I bent towards her—it seemed to me that in order to speak to her, I had to whisper almost directly into her ear, otherwise she would not have heard—her eyelids slowly closed. I knew this was not death—she lasted almost another twelve hours. I knew her eyes would open again, for Sam. But I knew she was saying, after her last smile to me, Go. Goodbye.
I kissed her brow. Whispered my own goodbye. I left the room like a tiptoeing parent at bedtime. I felt perfectly calm, as if I were doing something familiar and routine. Immunized? Perhaps. Along the corridor, I found Sam, all alone, in the waiting room. The look of terror on his face focused for a moment into a sort of searching expression that was an echo of hers, then dissolved into bewilderment. He might have been going to his own death. I squeezed his arm. But our little change of sentry duty was conducted, fittingly perhaps, without any exchange of words.
I went out immediately into the park. Into this Indian-summer balm, this land of the living. The air was almost completely still; only an occasional breeze stirred the trees, as it had stirred my mother’s curtains. The sun was low and rich and everything under its touch—the midges whirling under the trees, the veins of leaves, the mica in the path—appeared specially illuminated. People’s voices sounded slow and hushed.
It seemed important that I should track down the tennis game, and I followed the sound of the balls, which, strange to say, was harder to make out at ground level. There were
only two courts beside each other, in their tall, wire cage, and only one of them was occupied. A young couple were playing. As I approached they stopped, and I thought for an anxious moment they had finished and were about to leave. But they were only changing ends. The girl’s legs were slender and tanned. As they passed at the net, they paused to fondle and kiss, and it seemed again to hang in doubt whether they would continue their game or not. But then they walked to their respective ends—the whole court was bathed in the rays of the sinking sun—and then the reassuring, inconsequential sound of the balls began once more.
There are three things which have complicated my presence in this place and made me the subject of prying attention as well as recrimination among my fellow collegiates—setting aside, that is, the principal fact that my presence here is a joke. I am speaking now of the period before my recent botched brush with death. It is too early to say, except in practical terms, how this will have affected my general status. The business of Sam’s death, which should, I suppose, be called complication number four, has not helped. I sense outrage modified by pity. Not a sweet combination. But then they do not know that I have changed.…
There was first the fact that I had been Ruth’s husband. This, along with Sam’s money, was, I soon realised, my chief asset and counted for a good deal of initial unction—no, let me say genuine cordiality. Even envy. However much the academic world likes to maintain its persona of high-minded aloofness, it is not insusceptible to a little glamour—even the vicarious, refracted glamour that belongs to the husband of an actress cut off at the peak of her success. The contemplative life secretly yearns for the active life—or, in this case, the acting life. I know this, having once been, myself, the dowdy moth, meant for some inconspicuous cranny of scholarship, yet drawn to flutter helplessly round the flame of a show girl (which is what Ruth then could legitimately have been called). I was lucky. My wings did not get burnt. They even acquired, in the
fullness of time, a sort of borrowed iridescence, which seemed to linger on (I suppose it is all gone now) after her death.
Glamour, I know, having lived with Ruth, is only a kind of dressing, a trick, a concoction, the promise of something else. (Beauty, love, happiness …) It is as desirable and as meaningless as money. Yet these grave and erudite dons, these seekers after knowledge, they would trade not a little of their learning and wisdom for just a touch of glamour.
(Look at Potter. He does these absurd radio programmes. His big moment came when at last he progressed to TV. He offers watered-down or souped-up scholarship for the masses. Potter’s potted history. Talks any old bilge. Even I can tell this. We will see him soon hosting a quiz show. He is, by all accounts, a genuinely accomplished historian. Yet he feels obliged to prostitute himself, for the sake of a little dubious limelight, by turning himself into something he is not.)
I was thus regarded when I first came here, not least by Potter, as something of an intriguing novelty. Something that might add a little pep and lustre to the otherwise sober atmosphere of academic life. Fellows’ wives—and Fellows too, with a touch of resentment—itched for the moment when they could ask me what was it like, what was it really like, to be married to
her?
What was she
really
like? No one was interested in my (admittedly unsensational) thoughts on Renaissance prosody.
I was under no illusions. Iridescence lingered on, at least in the eyes of beholders. But I was fully aware (what was true of my former self is even truer of the thing I am now) that I possess no intrinsic magnetism. What worldly adroitness I can muster, what chutzpah and charm, what spring in my step (I suffered in my younger days from flat feet), I owe to Ruth. I was not slow to detect, amidst all the actual
or implicit interrogation, another, unspoken question (I was used to it): Could I really have been the husband of Ruth Vaughan? What—him?
But here the pathos factor came into play. I was not only the former husband of a well-known actress. I was the former husband of a well-known actress who had died in circumstances publicly reported and lamented and officially labelled (is there no other word?) “tragic.” I was no ordinary widower. A school of thought which held that I should be treated gently—and therefore girded around with a sort of halo of knowing looks and evasions—was largely overruled by the school of thought which held that now was the very time (five months after the event) when I should be encouraged to “talk”—an excuse for fêting me liberally (if you can fête the bereaved) and milking me for the “inside story” I was supposedly bursting to tell.
And in all this, all this being the centre of dubious attention, all I wanted was to be the opposite thing, to be the dowdy, forgotten moth again. Yes, Sam was right—devious revenge or not—I accept that he was right. Perhaps I could never have coped. How much longer could I have gone on, holed up in that Kensington flat, in those roomfuls of memories, a redundant theatrical manager (my sole client had died on me), besieged by the commiserations of stage and screen, by agents, lawyers, morbid hangers-on and prurient journalists. I needed shelter, I needed sanctuary.
The contemplative life.
My period of spurious celebrity here lasted some three months. It carried me through to my mother’s death, which did not have the effect of extending the prerogatives of grief. Rather, it was about that time—summer turning to autumn and a new academic year looming—that my special privileges fell away from me like some ineffective disguise,
and I began to be scrutinized for my real credentials. It was then that the general view took hold that my academic qualifications, though not entirely absent, were way below the college standard, and that, Ellison Fellowship or no Ellison Fellowship, I was an impostor.
And it was then that the Pearce manuscripts, which my mother’s death released into my hands, came—in more than one sense—to my rescue. I should explain that the terms of the Ellison Fellowship are generously vague. The incumbent, with all the resources of the College and the University at his disposal, is at liberty to pursue whatever line of scholarly research he wishes. The question of the duties he owes in return is left largely a matter of unwritten agreement. I had already undertaken—primarily to give myself something to do, but also to show willing and spare the College embarrassment—some supervision of students. After a gap of fifteen years, I found myself once more speaking to these strange, young—even younger now—people. (They too blurted out their little condolences.) I flattered myself that my teaching was not ineffective, though how much this depended on my students’, like others’, suspending their usual rigorousness of appraisal, I don’t know. But now I was to understand that because of certain “feelings” in the Faculty (I will come to this) the continuation of my tutorial services was under review.
What was really under review was not my teaching but my whole contribution to scholarship. What exactly was the line of research for which College and Faculty were providing me with such superlative amenities? It looked very much to them—it looks the same to me too (Sam, you bastard!)—that my line of research, apart from a little desultory and random browsing, was doing nothing at all.