Golden Hour (38 page)

She'll be afraid. She'll be less ready than he is to cause pain to others. There'll be long hours of talk. But in the end she'll come to see what he has seen. It's no kindness to live a lie. Our partners are trapped, as we are, in false lives. Our act of love will set them free.

He hears the scraping of chairs and realizes with a start that the short service of prayer has ended and the monks are leaving. Somehow he managed to miss the “Nunc Dimittis” entirely. Roddy follows, and finds that outside night has fallen.

He walks slowly up the slope toward the car park, wondering what it must be like to be a monk. The black robe they wear, that falls to mid-ankle, is both comical and magnificent. Such a dress must change a man. Roddy imagines putting on a monk's habit, and appearing in it before his family. They would laugh, but they would also be afraid. A man who dresses like that is beyond the reach of scorn or shame.

A dazzle of headlights approaches. Henry's voice calls out.

“Here you are! Hop in.”

The odd thing is Roddy really likes Henry. Though maybe it's not so odd, since presumably Laura likes him too. Henry is one of the few people with whom he's ever been able to have a proper conversation.

“So what's this all about?” says Henry as he swings the car round the one-way system past the school buildings. “Laura says you've been in search of silence.”

“Yes,” says Roddy. “Change of pace, and so forth.”

“So did you find it?”

He heads out of the grounds onto the long straight road.

“Silence turns out to be quite hard to get,” says Roddy. “I suppose I need more practice. My brain won't shut up.”

“I go on walks,” says Henry. “High up on the Downs. Best of all where you see the Downs with the sea beyond. I find that shuts me up.”

It strikes Roddy that this is a late hour to be returning home.

“Are you usually so late getting back?”

“I've been having meetings about a possible new job. Nothing very conclusive. I'm not even sure I want it. But something is better than nothing, I suppose.”

This is all the prompting Roddy needs.

“That's not necessarily true,” he says. “If you're trapped in the wrong something, it may be better to go for nothing.”

“But I'm not ready to pack it in yet, any more than you are. I'm only fifty-four.”

“I'm not talking about packing it in,” says Roddy. “I'm talking about changing your life. One life ends, another life begins.”

He's discovering as he speaks that he has a powerful compulsion to tell his brother-in-law everything. Of course he mustn't, he won't, do anything of the sort. But there's a thrilling frisson of danger as he skirts the edges of revelation.

“Oh, yes, I remember now,” Henry says. “Apparently you're looking for God.”

“That's Diana. She only understands words of one syllable.” Henry gives a gratifying snort of laughter at that. “I don't have a name for what I'm looking for. All I know is there's more to life than I've been getting.”

Henry says, “There could be less, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“I'm becoming a bit of a fan of humility. Did Diana tell you we went to a Buckingham Palace garden party yesterday?”

“No. I had no idea.”

They're driving down a treelined road. Henry's gaze is on the beam of his headlights, dipping and undipping as cars approach and pass.

“It was quite a revelation for me. Not so much the royal side of things, though that was actually rather impressive in its way. It was the other guests. It's a very odd experience being at a party where no one knows anyone else. You realize then that your life consists of meeting people in cliques, and that all the time you're busy calculating, Am I in this group or not? Do they respect me or despise me? What do I have to do to win their approval? When you all meet as individuals, something quite different happens. You engage with strangers on their own terms. I suppose it's a bit like being in some faraway unpopulated
land. Anyone you meet is automatically your friend, because there's no one else. Plus, of course, everyone who's been invited to the garden party is tremendously proud to be there, which creates a bond. So we got talking to various people, and somehow it made me feel how much goodwill there is in the world, and how we so arrange things that most of the time we never see it. I don't suppose I'm making much sense. Actually it felt like a revelation. It was like seeing a different possible version of the world. One in which people actually want to make each other happy.”

Roddy is not interested in the dynamics of a royal garden party, but he seizes on this last suggestion.

“There is a different version of the world in which we can be happy,” he says. “I'm sure of it. But to find it we must allow ourselves to seek happiness. Most people are too afraid to seek their own happiness.”

“Do you think so?” says Henry. “Isn't that rather perverse? I mean, why would anyone not go for what makes them happy?”

He isn't disagreeing, Roddy can hear it in his voice. He's exploring.

“Because we're afraid of hurting others,” Roddy says.

“Maybe happiness isn't after all our primary need.” Henry pursues his own unfolding thoughts. “Maybe our primary need is respect. The need to be validated by others. And to achieve that we'll do things that may well bring us misery and suffering, even death. Look at the martyrs. Look at the suicide bombers.”

This isn't quite where Roddy wants to go.

“But why is it,” he says, “that so many people accept a life they know won't make them happy? Why do they endure what is really only half a life?”

“It's what you say,” says Henry. “It's fear. Why haven't I sat down and written the book I've been wanting to write all my
life? Fear. I'd rather do a good job I half-like than write a bad book. And I know what you say to that. You say, How do you know it'll be a bad book if you don't try? Of course, I don't know. But I do know I don't want to be one of those sad types who followed their dream, and the dream died on them, and now they're full of envy and self-hatred.”

On the main road south he kicks down on the accelerator.

“Won't be long now.”

“You say you'd rather do a good job you half-like,” says Roddy. “Would you choose to live a
life
you half-like? Because I think that's the real question. I'm just a couple of years older than you, Henry, and I totally agree with you, I'm not ready to pack it in. But on the other hand, I have to face the fact that I have a limited time left. I can't put a number on it, but if you count the years I'm likely to stay physically fit, you're talking about twenty-five at the most. So the question becomes, do you live those twenty-five years fully, or do you go on half-living?”

“That's what I mean by humility,” says Henry. “If we can only get past this bloody status competition that makes us all do everything in our power to intimidate each other, then we can start to actually enjoy each other's company.”

“I'm talking about love,” says Roddy, making a determined bid to control the conversation.

“Well, yes, I suppose I am too,” says Henry. “You could say love is the acceptance of another person as he is, and status competition is the use of another person as an instrument to boost self-esteem.”

“No, I mean love between a man and a woman.”

“Oh,” says Henry, surprised. “Okay.”

“The love between a man and a woman is, I believe, the core energy of the universe. It's the prime act of creation. Of course, there's sex. But I go further. I believe we are made to exist in
balance with a lover of the opposite sex, and without that we live only half-lives. Tolstoy believed this. Dickens believed this.”

Roddy does not elaborate, but both Tolstoy and Dickens, trapped in loveless marriages, fell in love with their wives' sisters. It was practically the norm in Victorian times, to find you'd married the wrong sister. They even had a law forbidding subsequent marriage to the wife's sister if the wife died, they were so afraid of husbands in this predicament committing murder. Henry is a historian, he'd know all about that. However, Roddy does not think it appropriate to speak of the Deceased Wife's Sister Act this evening.

Predictably Henry finds Roddy's theories comic, because Roddy himself does not conform to the stereotype of the lover.

“I don't know what to say, Roddy. You turn out to be a closet romantic.”

“There, you see. You want to laugh at me. But I know I'm right.”

“No, no, I'm not laughing at you at all. I'm just caught off-guard. You're the last person . . . I suppose it's just not the picture I've had up to now of you and Diana.”

“Who said anything about Diana?”

Henry drives in silence for a few moments. Roddy feels his heart beating. The closer he gets to confession, the more excited he becomes.

“So what are you saying, Roddy?”

“Probably I'm jumping the gun a bit,” says Roddy. “It doesn't do to force things. I just decided some time ago to stop struggling against life. I decided to let it carry me the way it wants to go. But I can tell you that there are big changes on the way.”

“Big changes. Right. I'm not sure I should know any more.”

But Roddy presses on, doggedly pursuing his goal.

“I've realized recently it's not about right and wrong. That's part of the ego world, in which we imagine that we're in control. But once you see how it really is, once you let the ego die, then the stream takes you where it wills. That's when you become free. And of course I need hardly add, only a free man has the capacity to love.”

“Let the ego die,” says Henry. “I think that may be what I mean by humility. But the stream—I'm not sure what this stream is. Is it God?”

Roddy shakes his head irritably. He doesn't want to talk about God.

“God is only a name. Let's say there's a force that governs all things. You might as well call it love. Though love is also intensely personal. Love presents itself in our life in the form of individual human beings.”

“I think you're losing me again,” says Henry. “This is all getting a little too cosmic for me.”

“But it's not cosmic at all,” says Roddy, frustrated. “There's nothing cosmic about a man loving a woman. Well, maybe there is, but you've still got a real flesh-and-blood basis for it. This man sitting in one armchair, this woman sitting in another armchair. A fire burning in the grate. A cold winter landscape outside the window.”

“What?”

Roddy realizes he's overstepped the mark.

“Just an image.”

“Where do armchairs come in?”

“Don't worry about it. All I mean is, love comes down to Person A and Person B, in a real time, in a real place. And all we can do about that is say yes or no. Maybe not even that.”

“You know what you are, Roddy? You're a fatalist.”

“Or a man in love.”

Henry hesitates. “Better not tell me anything you don't want Laura to know. I'm not good at keeping things from her.”

“Laura'll know soon enough,” says Roddy.

He feels the most delicious shiver all down his body. Then he says her name again.

“I don't think Laura will be too surprised.”

Carrie can't stop apologizing for the accident. The police have impounded the car and say it will be returned sometime next week.

“I'm just so sorry, Mum. Now you haven't got your car and it's all my fault.”

“It's not your fault, darling. And anyway, I've got you. Don't you think I'd rather have you than the car? And my ring. I've got my ring back.”

The reappearance of the ring is a mystery. So too is the manner in which Toby got it back. Right now Toby is out in the night garden, smoking one of his roll-ups. They can both see him through the window, as he strolls up and down the lawn.

“Do you think what I think?” says Carrie.

“About what, darling?”

“About Toby and the ring.”

“No. What's that?” Then Laura does think it. “Oh. Do you really think so? Surely he wouldn't do that.”

“Mum, someone took your ring from your bedroom. Toby has no money at all, he's told me that. And he's got his own version of morality. He believes that what he wants is more important than anything else in the world. He told me so. And how did he get that woman to give him the ring back?”

“But surely . . .” Laura feels bewildered. What has Toby to do
with the woman in the hospital? On the other hand, how else did the ring disappear and then reappear? “You think he took it and sold it?”

“He's capable of it. He'd just shrug his shoulders and say the ring has moved on to its next life or something.”

“Have you asked him?”

“No. But I'm going to.”

She speaks with a flash of anger. Laura realizes then that Carrie's intense nerviness may have a cause other than the accident with the car. She wants to ask what has happened with Toby, how serious has it got, but an instinctive discretion holds her back.

“I suppose he's not someone to rely on, really,” she says.

“You can say that again.”

“Do you want me to ask him to go?”

“No, it's okay. I think he's going anyway. You know what, I really need a drink.”

So they both have a glass of Orvieto.

“Oh my God, Mum. I'm so glad I didn't kill that boy.”

“I kept thinking, what if it had been Jack? I almost wanted her to keep the ring. Well, no, I wanted it back. But you know.”

“You have to have the ring. It's your engagement ring. I've always loved seeing that ring on your finger. It makes me feel safe, knowing Dad gave it to you, and you've worn it ever since.”

“Does it, darling?”