Making Things Better (3 page)

‘You'll have to go now,' Freddy would say. ‘It's nearly time for tea. I said I'd wash up afterwards.'

‘I'll see you next week,' they both said, as if this were somehow necessary. They embraced at the door of Freddy's room. In that embrace there was something of the fervour of two originally loving siblings. Then the visit would be over.

Julius accepted that his parents were unequal to the task he shouldered every week. Those parents (and Freddy too knew this) were too fearful of confronting the shipwreck of their hopes, and lived an obstinate illusion of normality in absolute denial of the facts of the case. It was a tactic which had ensured their survival, and one on which they fiercely relied. The burden was shifted to their younger son, who became guardian to all three of them, unaware of his own entitlements. Yet on the way back to the station he was habitually engulfed in a sadness that coloured the entire landscape. It was then that the full tragedy of Freddy's life appeared at its most significant. And it was not yet over: his decline from cherished prodigy to general handyman would take place without interruption, without intervention. For he had been young enough to believe in all-powerful agencies which would somehow reverse a process so ineluctably under way. He accepted without question that Freddy no longer wished to listen to music, but thought that art should not let one down in so deliberate a fashion. Art was surely the key to a better world, yet Freddy had renounced it as if his engagement with it had been a mere flirtation, and moreover a flirtation which had failed to develop into a mature relationship. His mother still listened to music on the radio, beating time with her hand, and they were, after all, surrounded by music in the shop, but for his father and himself it held no message. What held a message was Freddy and his rebellion, which had ended in an almost willing acceptance of defeat. Or was there freedom in that defeat? Was Freddy in some ghastly way appeased? It was as if he had cast off his previous life and with it all those earlier attachments which had filled it. It was Mrs Walters who was his new parent, and Julius saw no value in trying to bring him home, in all senses of the word. ‘My mother' and ‘my father' had become almost mythical personages, quite without application to the present day, and Julius himself too humble an interlocutor to arouse much interest. It was probably preferable that he should not be disturbed by echoes of the wider world, but Julius wondered what would happen if and when his parents died. Would that occasion some sort of reawakening, some cataclysm of buried feeling? That was to be avoided, if possible, for he could still break down again. And what would happen if Freddy were to die before his parents was not to be contemplated. The ruin of two other fragile lives, of three, if he were to count his own, would be complete. He had no doubt that other deaths would follow swiftly, and his own need to make things better, the task to which he still gave his loyalty, would be exposed for what it was: a wish, a vain wish that his efforts would be crowned, if not with glory, then at least with a sense of honour.

Fifty years later, a lifetime later, Herz reflected that Freddy's gift, though phenomenal, had been unsettling. It seemed a kind of autism rather than a genuine passion. Audiences had watched, fascinated, as different emotions chased themselves over Freddy's face, as if the unconscious were visibly at work. He had seemed totally unconnected to what he was feeling or experiencing, as if those experiences were taking place in another dimension, remote from everyday circumstances. Attendance at his recitals was always eager, but as if in response to a phenomenon, a fairground spectacle. The return to everyday life must have been painful in the extreme. No wonder he had had to stop playing, to stop vomiting, to stop being translated elsewhere. No wonder he had broken down. And once his illness had been accepted he had seemed lightened of a burden, as if nothing more could be expected of him. Even his mother was somehow aware of this, although she kept up the fiction of his recuperation for reasons of her own. Despite the horror of those visits Julius could see that there was nothing to be done, and would leave Brighton with no sense of a duty discharged but rather of the enactment of a ceremony over which no one had any control. His own emotions, though extreme, had had to do with himself, as if he were one of those victims in the French Revolution who were tied to a dead body and thrown into the river to drown. He had been sacrificed, in helpless attendance on someone who had in many ways already passed out of this life.

Herz wondered if all old people came to such knowledge when there was nothing to be done to remedy the damage. He wondered if the people he passed in the street ruminated on lost causes, as he did. There was little value in such reflections; they were a function of the passing of time, and so beyond applicability. What control could he exercise even now on those sad Saturdays, except to recognize that he was their legatee? Try as he might to divert himself he could never escape the suspicion that he should be elsewhere, that he should not be shopping in Marks & Spencer but walking resignedly along an empty road, his collar turned up against the wind from the sea. It was only when Saturday was over, and he was sitting in front of his own undoubted television, in his own verifiable flat, that he could relax. Yet even then he was half prepared to go out again, to see Mrs Frank to the bus stop, postponing his life once again in the vain hope that someone would restore it to him.

Freddy had died in a hospice, with only himself in attendance. As he had hoped, the parents had died before him. Julius had wondered whether to tell Freddy that these deaths had taken place, and had finally done so. Freddy was by that stage very weak, drifting in and out of consciousness, but he had appeared to understand. As if united in family piety they had held hands. It was when their hands grew cold, in unison, that Julius knew that Freddy's life was over. Once again he had not seemed discontented. His features had taken on the strange remote fascination that he had manifested when he was playing. It was as if death itself had made its presence felt in the remote days of his success. Only this time it was clear that he felt no fear.

3

Late in the afternoon Herz telephoned the garden centre where his former wife now worked and asked for Mrs Burns. Josie had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce but had kept the married style. He found this perfectly acceptable; he could appreciate that marriage, even a defunct marriage, conferred a certain dignity on a woman, and women nowadays were, or seemed to be, rather anxious to define their status. Besides, she was to all intents and purposes a married woman, comfortable with her condition, perhaps even more so than she had ever been as a wife. And she was of an age when dignity counted: the single state, despite all propaganda to the contrary, still had something sad about it. Widows were in a different category. He suspected that Josie would have been quite contented as a widow, but was still sufficiently attached to him to have alighted on what she saw as an ideal definition. He knew that their divorce had separated them; he also knew that they would remain friends. Indeed they had always been friends, even more so than husband and wife. Their marriage had lasted a bare two and a half years and they had parted without rancour. He still looked forward to seeing her from time to time, in the relaxed manner which had become habitual to them both. They met occasionally, without undue anticipation on either side, but took some kind of reassurance from the unchanging nature of such meetings. Nothing had been lost; they remained more than acquaintances, allies in fact, with the sort of familiarity gained from intense though brief physical proximity.

‘Josie? Julius here. I wondered if you could manage lunch next week?'

‘Love to. Monday's my best day. We're not busy on Mondays.'

‘Next Monday, then. Sheekey's at twelve forty-five.'

‘See you then. Goodbye, Julius.'

He liked her businesslike tone on the telephone. She was a woman without prevarication, one who spoke her mind in an instinctive, almost inoffensive manner. This was what had led, indirectly, to their eventual separation. He suppressed a lingering feeling of shame as he remembered the attempt he had made to deflect her outspokenness. For himself he had not minded; for others he had minded too much.

With a sigh he went to the mirror and surveyed himself, as if preparing to meet her straight away. She had thought him handsome, ‘distinguished', as she put it, and might even think so now. The great attraction for him was, and always had been, her physical ordinariness, although she was a pleasant-looking woman and might have made more of herself. This she clearly thought either unnecessary or impossible. In any event she presented an efficient if slightly unkempt appearance which he was always mentally tidying up, anxious for her to have her hair expertly cut, to put some colour on her lips, even to wear the scents he took pleasure in buying for her. But she laughed those away, and continued to content herself with a vigorous wash before facing the day. He found her natural smell exciting, although part of him was comprehensively disappointed that she did not resemble the pampered women he had been used to in his youth, with their painted nails and faces. His aunt Anna, for example, was always perfectly dressed and coiffed, and if the continued effort made her seem a little bad-tempered he appreciated that too. Instinctively he preferred women who made much of themselves, were capricious, flirtatious even, though he knew that such behaviour had gone out of style. Josie, with her bushy hair and unadorned face, which he had loved, had not altogether displaced the image which he would, somehow, have found easier to understand.

But they were old now, their looks no longer a bargaining counter. In the mirror he saw a sombre thin-faced man who could no longer be confused with his younger self, his eager smile eclipsed, more by solitude than by experience. In truth he felt himself to be as unprepared for life as he had been in his youth, though he tried to be as competent as he had always been, or so he supposed. He knew that he stooped, that he tired swiftly, that he could no longer walk as far as he had been accustomed to do, that he felt the cold to an abnormal extent. This chilly spring, these long light evenings, made him as fretful as a child, disturbed his sleep to an extent that made him anxious to get up and begin the day, even though that day was as empty as the night had been. He thought back to the nights he had spent with his wife, but without a flicker of desire—strange, since they had been such enthusiastic partners. He had been anxious for continuity, for permanence, after years of fleeting relationships, garnered opportunistically to satisfy his appetites. He was as idealistic about marriage as any young girl, could hardly believe his good fortune in finally acceding to the married state.

And he had wanted someone to be kind to him, to look after him, and to allay the sadness he seemed still to feel, a sadness which had nothing to do with hardships and disappointments but was rather an inheritance he did not fully understand. To attribute this sadness to early privation seemed to him not quite to explain it. Certainly there were legitimate sadnesses which were perfectly obvious, but the sadness had outlasted the various phenomena that had provoked it, so that now it was not only ineradicable but somehow renewed each day by the condition of old age. Those cold nights in an unwarmed bed were not only physically uncomfortable but emotionally, even morally, unbearable. This was not how things should end. And he felt bound to conclude that his divorce, while reconciling him once again to his solitary dreaming state, the state in which he still cherished Fanny Bauer, had brought about a diminution in his perception of what life still had to offer.

It was not even that his wife had satisfied every imaginary requirement, had embodied all his fantasies about companionship, stored up from youth. It was even simpler than that. She was robust, practical, normal, and in the early days she had seemed to have normality in her gift, so that he himself felt healthier, heartier, more optimistic, more enthusiastic as he went about his various tasks. Above all he did not have to compensate her for anything, console her for unhappiness, make things better . . . Although it was she who had demanded the divorce he knew that the fault was his, the original fault, like original sin, which might not have been detected at first glance. They were mismatched, but not in any obvious sense, despite their utterly different backgrounds; they were mismatched by virtue of their needs, though these needs had for a time been miraculously met. That he had failed her was abundantly clear, even though he was not technically guilty of any misdemeanour. Others perhaps were guilty, but he could not entirely blame those others. He reflected that to act out of need is always fatal. He tried to give himself some credit for not letting his own need compromise his sense of fairness. In that way he was still able to look forward to his next meeting with his wife. Their affection for each other had not soured, had if anything increased now that need no longer entered the equation. He sighed as he thought of the long week to be got through before he saw her again.

They had met in circumstances that had been so unexpected, so mysterious, and yet so humdrum that it seemed appropriate to mention fate. He had not at first paid much attention to the woman standing in front of him in the queue at the bank until she had asked if she might borrow his pen to write a cheque. Conscious of the shop's takings, which he had in a canvas bag kept for this purpose, he had smiled briefly but had made no attempt to engage in conversation. It was only when they left the bank at the same time that he sought to offer some acknowledgement of her presence. After a couple of anodyne remarks (‘Lovely day', ‘Yes, isn't it? At last.') they were alerted by a crash in the street beyond the bank's double doors, and instinctively ran out together to see a young man on the ground and a taxi driver standing over him. A large fuming motorcycle on its side, just in front of the taxi, explained the crash, though the taxi driver's part in it was, and was to remain, unexplained. One or two people had gathered, and there was talk of the need for an ambulance. ‘Let me through,' said the woman who turned out to be Josie. ‘I'm a nurse.' She bent over the boy, who seemed to be eighteen or nineteen and was clearly concussed, and asked, ‘Can you hear me? What's your name?'

‘Richard,' was the very faint reply.

‘Don't worry, Richard. We'll take care of you.'

Already someone had issued from the bank, saying proudly that an ambulance was on its way.

‘Don't touch him.' Her instructions were given in a kindly but authoritative manner. ‘I think he's broken his shoulder.'

It seemed entirely natural that the two of them should join the boy in the ambulance, and even wait in the hospital until he had been found a bed. With the arrival of a doctor (exhausted, and looking about as young as the patient) he put his hand under her elbow and steered her away. The incident seemed to have taken place in a dream; already he felt he knew her as well as he knew anyone.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?' he asked. She declined, saying that she had to go to work. It was with a feeling of regret that he saw her go.

After lunch he sent his father upstairs to the as yet untenanted flat above the shop for a rest. This he did every day, aware that what had become routine for them both confined him until the late afternoon, when his father would make an increasingly mournful appearance, unwilling to renew acquaintance with a commerce he despised. They would greet the odd customer with enthusiasm, grateful for the opportunity to make a little conversation. In the absence of customers they put up with each other but said little. Their proximity both at work and at home was oppressive but also comprehensible: there was no need to talk. Julius watched without comment as his father became more negligent, his hair disarranged by his recent siesta, his handkerchief trailing from his trouser pocket. There was little to be done; they were both too fundamentally disheartened to look for any kind of improvement. It was almost a relief to know that his father was incommunicable for a couple of hours, barricaded in sleep on the bed which had been left in the flat and which Ostrovski had used for the occasional assignation during the day. They had no idea what he otherwise did with himself. The shop, of which he was the uninterested owner, he was more than glad to leave to the assiduity of the father and son, went off to play cards or to visit one of his girlfriends, turned up from time to time to see how they were getting on, more in a spirit of curiosity than anything more considered, suggested a cup of coffee, and, after satisfying himself that the business was being looked after, disappeared again into the busy street. They suspected that their days in Hilltop Road were numbered, that Ostrovski would dispossess them without a qualm, satisfied that he had found them alternative accommodation. That this accommodation was inferior—dark, dusty, up a creaking staircase—did not seem to be negotiable. They all knew this, but his father was too polite to complain, or to express disappointment. It was not disappointment that they felt; it was, once again, despair. Willy Herz knew that his wife, who had yet to see the flat, would shriek with horror, declare it impossible, and, worse, would make no effort to make it habitable. That would be his task. How many times in his life had he had to mobilize his wife into some sort of energetic action, aware of her unhappiness, which was now also his own? The flat would do very well for him, but only on condition that he was on his own. His secret wish was to be a bachelor again, for it was only as a bachelor that he could have confronted this new life. The task of making his beloved wife happy was beyond him, as it was beyond everyone now. He dreaded the day when his unhappiness would break cover, was grateful to Julius—not his best-loved son—for his tact, realized sorrowfully that Julius had been sacrificed, and, short of a miracle, would continue to be sacrificed, by virtue of a family bound together by grief and with no prospect of rehabilitation.

During the afternoon hours, with little to distract him, Julius's thoughts returned to the morning's incident, concentrating on the boy's frightened face rather than on the so capable nurse. Richard, he had said his name was. Perhaps he had surrendered him too quickly, anxious as he had been to remain with the nurse? He resolved to go back to the hospital as soon as he had finished work, would ask the boy if he needed anything, would promise to look in again. This visit made him surprisingly happy. Divested of his leather accoutrements Richard looked younger than he had first appeared, was perhaps no more than seventeen. He had managed, he told Julius, to get a message to his mother and father and had told them not to worry. Julius thought this surprisingly mature of him and said so. The boy looked gratified. In his hospital gown and with the heavy dressing imprisoning his arm and shoulder there was little he could do for himself. ‘They're very kind here, but they're so busy,' was his only comment. Julius went away to buy him a few necessities from the hospital shop, and told the boy that if he wanted anything he had only to say so. There was a moment's hesitation, then came a request for a motorcycle magazine. He promised to bring it in on the following evening, prepared to leave, got up, and saw the nurse—his nurse—advancing from the end of the ward. He was suddenly overjoyed. They stood on either side of the bed and smiled down at Richard as if he belonged to them both. Then, when visiting time was over, they said goodbye, promising to come again. He wondered how to further this rather odd acquaintance. But there was no need to wonder, as it turned out, because as soon as they were in the street she turned to him and said, ‘I'll have that coffee now, if you've got time.'

‘Delighted,' he said. And he was.

In the course of that first tentative meeting he learned something, but not much, about her. She did private nursing, was under contract to a nursing agency, shared a flat in Wandsworth with two other girls. It seemed a little early to discuss their heredity but she told him that she had been brought up by her grandparents after her widowed mother had gone back to work, and had had a perfectly happy childhood in Maidstone, where her mother, now retired, still lived. ‘You're not English, are you?' she disconcertingly observed, so that he was obliged to tell her something of his background. Then she thanked him for the coffee and stood up to leave.