Ever After (8 page)

The same prayer for our little ones, though I know they are little ones no longer. They are grown up and old enough to have families of their own—is it so? I had hoped that they—but enough of that. Bid them farewell from me. May they be a comfort to you. I miss my Lucy.

The same prayer, if they will accept it, for the Rector and his dear Emily. They age well, I trust. Your father owes to me not a few of his white hairs. But white hairs become a clergyman, and he is a good shepherd, who is rid now of the black sheep of his flock. Salute my old adversary!

I should tell you—but perhaps you know—that my own father breathed his last in Launceston some four months ago. Since then only the necessity of putting his affairs in order has kept me from my present purpose. I was at his side at the end, as I have been these last years. We had become friends once more, after the cooling of our relations. In truth, I always loved my mother more than I loved him, and he had always known it, though only in his last days could we freely acknowledge this to each other, as he could acknowledge what his whole life, for all its lapses, has manifested: his undying faithfulness to her memory. There is no justice or logic in our favouring, in certain circumstances, the dead over the living (who surely have greater claim to our benevolence) and crediting the flame of remembrance more than the warmth of life. But perhaps in these last years I have done something to restore the balance.

We were not so different, perhaps, he and I. We came to the same place, he by the road of that early loss, I by the road of my own thoughts. Who is the more blameworthy? Yet, at the very end, he confounded me utterly. Bade me rummage in the depths of an old, locked cupboard, where I found the little old, leather-bound clasp Bible—I supposed I would never see it again—from which my mother used regularly to read to me and which I had thought, in the wilfulness of his bereavement all those years ago, he had thrown away. Then he confessed, if not in so many words, that he was always jealous of the faith that
I
had kept but which he in his innermost heart had lost. Jealous, furthermore,
of the good Rector, in whom he thought I had found a father—since a spiritual father—preferable to him. Yet surely it was my father who, if anyone, found me my father-in-law and steered you and me (happy, ill-fated steersman-ship!) into wedlock. And if he supposed that I found thereby a sanctuary he could not provide, I did not refuse, in the end, the sad sanctuary of his own neglected hearth.

You are wondering, perhaps, how much his habit of the bottle hastened his death. I must tell you that for at least eighteen months before he died he touched not a drop, though I would not have begrudged him a dash of brandy in his milk, if it had eased the wretchedness of his illness. He died the devotee of temperance he was when my mother lived. All his confessions were soberly made. We said no prayers (how could we?), and what inward prayers he may have uttered I do not know. But my mother’s Bible, which now I keep, was beside him. Death is a strange breeder both of truth and of superstition.

It is late. Rain is falling, and there is scarcely a footstep in the street. Part of me feels—a fine confession for a man who has just turned fifty—like some small boy running away to sea, with as yet no better conception of the perils of the ocean than the comfortable sound of rain beating on a window-pane. My dear, dear Liz. How many voyagers, how many ocean-goers have sat up late in this town, penning letters to their loved ones?

Superstition? Yes, I must say that. There has been no counter-reversal, no retracting of retraction. I hold to my groundless ground. And yet as I sit here, a traveller about to submit himself to the deeps, my mother’s Bible is with me. It has a place in my trunk—I clutch it to me as a savage must clutch his talisman—while my notebooks do not.

Fifty years! What is fifty years? Life is short, we say. And we guess not (but I will not harp on my theme) how infinitesimally brief, how as nothing, as a “twinkling of the eye,” is the span of human life within the great duration of the aeons. Yet life is long too. We feel it so. We feel ourselves become part of the ages. I remember, when I was a small boy, my poor mother telling me of her own visits to this
town when she herself was a girl. How she had been in Plymouth when it was red with the coats of Sir John Moore’s army bound for Spain, and how again she had gone with her father and mother to behold with her own eyes the fallen Emperor of the French, who was then a captive on the
Bellerophon
, anchored in the Sound, and daily drew out crowds in boats to observe him.

These things seemed to me to belong to some distant era, even to the realms of legend, and I confused in my mind Sir John Moore’s army with the gathered bands of the Israelites at Hebron, which must have been at the time the subject of my Scripture readings with my mother. As for the Emperor of the French—“Boney,” as he was called then—he seemed to me a figure entirely out of fable, out of
commedia dell’arte
or Punch and Judy. And this, perhaps, was how my mother conceived of him even as she beheld him, for she would insist—and I will never know if this were some nice embellishment on her part—that as she was rowed with my grandparents by the stern of the warship, the Emperor, in full view on the quarter-deck, raised his hat and smiled, expressly at
her
.

“How are the mighty fallen” was her gloss on this little digression. So we continued on our path through the Old Testament. How strange to think that three times as many years have now passed since she related these things as had elapsed then from the events which she recounted. And what an age it seems since I heard her voice and since I sat beside her at our parlour table with the Bible between us.

The time may come, my dear Liz—perhaps it has come for you already—when it will seem just as long ago, just such a thing of fable, that we ever married and shared life together. But come what may, dearest Liz, you may trust that, as I revere still in my memory my poor mother—who showed me the way to a world that can no longer be mine—so will you always be remembered by

6
 

I was born in December 1936, in the very week that a King of England gave up his crown in order to marry the woman he loved. Naturally, I knew nothing about this at the time and, of course, other events than the Abdication Crisis were then at large in the world. But I have always felt that the timing of my arrival imbued my life, for better or worse, with a sort of fairy-tale propensity. I have always had a soft spot (a naïve view, I know) for the throneless ex-king sitting it out on the Riviera. And I have often wondered whether my mother’s pangs with me on that December day were eased by that concurrent event which must have been viewed by many, rather than as a crisis, as a welcome intrusion of Romance, allowing them fondly to forget for a moment Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. All for Love. Or, the World Well Lost. “Let … the wide arch of the ranged empire fall!” (As indeed it began to do under poor, put-upon George VI.) All for love, yes.
Amor vincit
 …

And Paris, fairy-tale city, might have endorsed the point. Paris, with its enchanted streets and eternal air of licensed felicity, might have taken me to its heart. Was there any other city in the world in which to live but Paris? (I thought this even aged nine.) I might have become one of those countless aspirants who have flocked to the city by the Seine and become great artists, great dreamers or great liars. I might have become, trained in the free school of my mother and Sam, a great
boulevardier
, a great philanderer. I might have lived the life of Riley. But my father
died before I had even passed the gates of puberty. And what I became was—bookish.

Though this did not happen immediately. If the truth be known, when we returned to England I didn’t grieve for my dead father. I didn’t want to grieve for him. I didn’t want to think of him. I didn’t want to think of my father as the man who had fired a gun at his head. I grieved for my adorable ballet-girls, who by this stage had received honorary names—delicious, seductive French names, Yvette, Simone, Michelle—who, even then, were alive and literally kicking, stretching their beautiful limbs in the ballet school, utterly ignorant of my distant worship and entirely without need of it.

And this was not a good time for grief. Or rather, it was a very good time for grief, which made one little parcel of it unexceptional and negligible. People had got used in recent times to the fact that every so often, so it seemed, nature required a culling, and thus to mixing a little callousness with their sorrow. Perhaps it was only after my father’s demise that the war, which I had lived through but conceived of as some remote, rumbling, impenetrably grown-up affair, became real for me. It was about death: slaughter, bodies, casualty lists.

And if I did not grasp the general point, I had the specific reminder of Ed. Shot down, aged nineteen-and-a-half, over the blue Pacific. That photo of his grinning brother became Sam’s trump card. How could I take out my feelings on Sam, how could I unleash on him all the venom due an arrant usurper (a murderer in all but name), when he neatly reminded me that we were companions in the same grim business of bereavement?

And what was an “accident” with a pistol in a Paris office to the Battle of the Coral Sea? (“Yep, a lot of brave boys went down.…”—his sentence would end in a mimetic
gulp.) And what was my father’s death to the deaths of the fathers of other boys (I met them, these high-grade orphans) who had died, as the saying went, “in action?” My father, soldier though he was, had died in circumstances which required from me either a considerable degree of risky inventiveness or a suspect, rumour-breeding silence.

And how could I deny—for all his exploitation of it—Sam’s plight? You are twenty-one years old, happily exempted, for complex reasons of primogeniture and your father’s involvement in a new and militarily useful industry (“Perspex, pal—you heard about perspex?”) from armed service. But your younger brother, your little kid brother, Ed, joins up, learns to fly and is killed. It might have been you, you think: it should have been you. Whatever you do now will be over your brother’s dead, sea-shrouded body. You have to live for Ed now; to take on all Ed’s lost chances (and Ed was great with the girls; they just fell over him). To become a perpetual nineteen-year-old …

“Sure—it’s tough. I know. It hits you hard,” was the extent of his attempts to sound out the measure of my sorrow and show his willingness, if necessary, to console. I have to admit he handled with a degree of delicacy the problem of disguising his relief that I didn’t appear to be hopelessly distraught, while preparing for the onset of a possibly vicious delayed reaction. And there was, in any case, that air of frank confidingness (so unlike my father), that bluff disavowal—I’m sorry if I have no conscience, if I have no shame, but it’s not my fault—that thick-skinned, businessman’s charm.

But I knew just how thick-skinned he really was. I had seen him with his hand trembling—I would see him, twice again in my life, with his face as drained of vigour as it was on that day. I knew his weakness. His tactical strength
was his strategic disadvantage. Even I could see that, with all its fraught implications, with all its dangerous blend of the expedient and the needful, Sam saw in me a bizarre substitute for Ed. (And you gotta have substitutes.) That he side-stepped the dread question of his surrogate paternity—not to say his entire adult responsibilities—by this appeal to the chummily fraternal.

And he was right to prepare for a delayed reaction. He underestimated, that’s all, the extent of the delay and the persistence of the reaction. It seems that I’m a slow burner, a long-term investor of emotions.

We returned, briefly, to Berkshire in April ’46, to follow my father’s coffin, then permanently in June to settle in his home. I had a strong sense now of its being “my father’s house” rather than “home,” though my mother rapidly began asserting her proprietorial rights. Furniture was replaced. Decorators appeared. There was plainly money on tap. The little gallery of framed photographs from above the sideboard, recording the “India days” (cane chairs; verandahs; turbans; polo sticks) disappeared one morning in the van of a man collecting for a jumble sale. I did not believe, any more than my mother, that the place should become a shrine to her husband’s memory, but I felt the injustice. And I felt, as the physical remnants of my father were whittled away, the accretion, as it were, of his ghostly stock. It was
his
house. He may not have earned his plot in the ethereal fields of fame, but he had left this solid enough memorial. It was the husk of his life.

I should have protested. I should have said, at least, about those photographs: take them from the dining-room, if you will, but let me keep them in my bedroom. But the hypocrite and the coward in me stopped my tongue.

They got married the following March. There was a decent interval in which she practised being a widow and
Sam, to give him his credit, kept his relative distance, turning up only for plainly licentious weekends. It’s true, he had much to occupy him. He was sowing (also) the seeds of his little empire—spreading the bright new gospel of polymers. I still have a vision of him offering his New World marvels to a depressed and war-wrecked England. The picture merges with all those smiling GIs, in their jaunty jeeps, handing out gum and being kissed and garlanded in the ruins of liberated villages. This was not Sam’s experience, but he was built in the appropriate mould, and perhaps even imagined himself in the same blithely triumphal role.