An old moon was waning above the roof-tops of North Oxford. The sky over Linton Road was of a purplish blue special to the hour between summer day and night. Even the noise of Sunday traffic on the main road seemed to attune itself to the sensuous pleasure of the moment, as the Winters came away from Carisbrooke. A thorny hedgehog could be heard snuffling in the gutter, hoping for grubs and starlight. The gardens of houses on either side of the street, masked by dusk, so that their general air of neglect did not show, were voluptuously clad in green. Nature was not incompatible with old brick. This suburb had been established long enough for saplings, staked out by Victorian hands, to have developed hearty trunks, and branches which looked in at upper casement windows. They had been generous, those early botanizers, planting out not merely flimsy trees and ornamental cherries but what were now, in effect, grand forest giants, their roots, burrowing through clay under old walls, eventually defining metaphorical ways across ceilings in the form of hairline cracks seeking exploratory courses over coving and plaster. At this silvery hour, appearances suggested that North Oxford had been built in a wood. Oberon and Titania might have emerged from the leafy grounds of Carisbrooke, clad in their academic gowns, without untoward effect.
Clement walked back from College with Sheila beside him. He found that the pain in his left leg was eased if he progressed more slowly than usual. Perhaps in sympathy, she clung to his arm. He was glad of the solid feel of her against him and, enjoying her companionship and the warmth of the evening, felt disinclined to talk. Sheila was conversational; parties always energized her.
‘Nansey Fender-Lieversohn has had such an interesting life,’ Sheila said, and proceeded to regale Clement with some of the details. He half-listened, observing the dying light in the trees while trying to gauge how much pleasure he derived from it. He thought he remembered a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Salzburg, some years ago, where the advent of evening in Act II had been achieved more poignantly. With the recollection came the distant sound of hunting horns.
He and Sheila were returning home from a small party given by Aaron Fender-Lieversohn and his wife Nansey in Fender-Lieversohn’s rooms, before his return to Israel. Fender-Lieversohn had spent a year at Carisbrooke, working on a study of Husserl and phenomenology. Over the year, he and Clement had enjoyed several pleasant conversations. Fender-Lieversohn was a frail man in his late seventies; Clement wondered if they would ever see each other again, and if Fender-Lieversohn would finish his work on Husserl – or even if he wished to finish, while continuance implied creativity, that hallmark of life.
Whilst trapped tête-à-tête with one of the Fender-Lieversohns’ more tedious guests, Clement had been able to overhear part of a nearby conversation between Sheila and Nansey Fender-Lieversohn. Nansey was some years younger than her husband. He already knew – as did most of Carisbrooke – of her involvement with Jean-Paul Sartre, when Aaron’s interests had taken him to Paris, and of how the bright-painted creature had been kidnapped by Sicilian gangsters, had corresponded with Chou En-lai, and enjoyed other enlarging episodes. Her adventures had, in fact, become a topic to be avoided around the College. Her sensationally awful girlhood in Poland was also common knowledge. An anti-reminiscence mafia had sprung up to evade her anecdotes. In Sheila, Nansey had found a new listener, and out came the terrors once again, delivered with glittering eye, while Sheila responded with chirpy cries of, ‘Oh, and to think how happy my childhood was!’ As she retold Nansey’s tales, Clement listened with patience, checking on how accurate Sheila’s short term memory was. It seemed in good fettle this evening, despite a considerable amount of the Fender-Lieversohns’ white wine.
Once they were home, Clement and Sheila went through into the kitchen to make themselves cups of tea. Michelin appeared to be out, which was nothing surprising. They refrained from switching lights on, preferring to be together in the half-dark, enjoying the voluptuousness of dusk, the softening into ambiguity of day’s outlines.
‘You all right? You were walking a bit slowly. Still worrying about what happened to you yesterday in your brother’s flat?’
‘I certainly wonder how exactly to categorize that experience, yes.’
‘Does that affect your leg?’
‘Old Aaron’s interested in phenomenology and how Husserl’s trail led to existentialism, but he doesn’t seem to have investigated the psychology of perception very thoroughly.’
‘Nansey hinted that she had once been the mistress of Martin Heidegger. Was he a phenomenologist?’
‘I don’t think she could have been. She likes to embroider her tales, you know.’
‘You didn’t tell Aaron about your experience yesterday, did you? Wouldn’t that come under the heading of phenomenology?’
‘That’s private. Don’t go spreading it around, will you, or people will think I’m cracking at last. I could have touched Joseph. He was so real.’
‘But you didn’t touch him. So he remains an unclassified phenomenon. Sit down and rest. I’m a bit worried about you, seeing ghosts.’
The kettle was coming to the boil and making a song and dance of it. He sat down, surreptitiously rubbing his calf. He said rather loudly, ‘Significance doesn’t lie in the object itself, but in the object as perceived, however erroneously or distortedly. Husserl appreciated that. And that seems to be as true in science as in analysis.’
‘And that applies to Nansey’s early life?’
‘To everything. To a cup of tea. We regard tea as benevolent. The tannin is actually a deadly drug.’
Sheila laughed, pouring boiling water on to two tea bags, watching the clear water colour as steam rose to her eyes. She said, not looking at him, ‘You don’t really believe that. You’re just saying it for effect. Why do you always try to impress me?’
Despite the wine he had drunk, he was taken aback by the unexpected challenge.
‘That’s the Oxford manner. Everything’s effect, effect is everything. I’m surprised you haven’t contracted it yourself, living in this house in your fantasy world, immune from outside influence. Even at the party, you weren’t talking to any of my colleagues, only to outsiders like Nansey Fender-Lieversohn, who will be leaving Oxford in a week or two anyway. I’ve had to adjust to the environment. Even if it’s only protective camouflage, some of it gets through. Doesn’t matter how foolishly you behave, as long as what you say is either frivolously intellectual or intellectually frivolous.’
She stood immobile in the middle of the kitchen, milk jug in hand, half-raised in the air, as if about to pour a libation.
‘Your colleagues don’t like me. Timid rats! That’s why I talk to outsiders. They’re all male chauvinists and they absolutely hate what I write. Even Maureen criticizes my novels, and says they are not politically aware enough, although my central characters are women. As if Queen Gyronee wasn’t a real independent—’
‘You pay too much attention to Maureen. Ever since she’s made feminism pay.’
‘Oh, shut up. Don’t think I don’t know what people say about my …’
Feeling slightly dizzy, Clement rose from the chair and said, ‘I have to live with these people. If I may quote, we all have our crosses to bear. We all have our John Farrers living next to us. It’s a conformist place, the University, by its nature. No wonder there’s so much mental illness.’
‘Even in Carisbrooke, they only read spy stories. And you love it, Clem, don’t deny it. Oxford was made for you and you for it.’
He fell silent, not happy with the tone in which Sheila delivered this remark. So preoccupied were they with each other that in the dusk they missed the letter awaiting them on top of the refrigerator.
Carrying their cups of tea, they made their way slowly upstairs to bed. The street light outside meant that the front of the house was never dark at night. An antiseptic imitation of moonlight seeped round the curtains on to the landing, throwing shadows of pictures and their frames slantwise over the walls.
They sat down on the side of the double bed in near-dark, not bothering to draw the curtains.
‘Did you have lunch with Maureen, or did you work as planned?’
‘Inspiration ran out early. We went to the Perch for lunch. It was crowded.’
‘So you’ve been boozing all day. What a good preparation for Nansey Fender-Lieversohn. And how’s feminism these days?’
He could see in the dimness that she lowered her eyes, looking away from him as if moved by instinct to protect her thoughts.
‘Oh, we had a long talk.’ Said with studied carelessness.
‘Oh? What about? Love? Fecundation?’
‘Maureen was in fine form. Lots of ghoulish sexual anthropology stories as usual. She has nearly finished her latest book on women.’ Sheila folded her hands and looked across them sideways at her husband. ‘It’s to be called People with Breasts.’
‘People with Breasts…’ A sudden gust of laughter took him. Sheila joined in. He sank back on the bed, laughing and protesting that he was sloshed. She lay back with him, giggling and cuddling him.
It was while he was brewing himself a cup of coffee on the following morning that Clement observed the white envelope on the top of the refrigerator. As he took it up, he saw that it bore his name, written in Michelin’s neat handwriting. At once a premonition of dread filled his mind. He tore the envelope open.
The message inside was brief.
Dear Clement,
This is to tell you I shall leave now. I have enough of acting as your housekeeper. You have taken me for granted too much. It is final.
Not all of my things are with me. One will come later to take away more of my possessions. Good-bye to you both.
Michelle
P.S. You can see I sign with my proper name.
Clement brought a carton of single cream from the refrigerator and poured some into his coffee. He sat down with the note by his cup. He tried as calmly as possible to put aside guilt feelings, which he perceived to be contradictory: on the one hand, self-reproach because he had once tried to seduce Michelin; on the other, self-reproach because he had not tried often enough. He told himself that in some way he had let her down, searching for a sexual reason for this abrupt departure, since sexual motives lay behind most human activity.
When he had finished his coffee, he went slowly upstairs, taking the note with him. Sheila was just emerging from the shower, stepping naked and powdered into the bedroom. When Clement entered, she hurriedly covered her nudity with a bath towel – an unexpected gesture which registered on him only later.
‘A bit of a shock, love,’ he said, holding out the piece of paper. ‘I’m afraid our Michelin’s left us.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, glancing sharply at him as she snatched the letter. ‘That can’t be.’
She read it hurriedly, in a flurry of perfume.
‘I don’t believe it. How can she leave like this?’ Dropping the note on the floor, she tucked the towel more firmly round herself and went to look out of the window, as if hoping to see Michelin there. ‘The woman doesn’t even mention my name. It’s an insult. I’ve always been so careful of her feelings.’
‘She was one of the family.’ He wanted to go on to say, ‘She was like a daughter to us,’ but checked himself, not wishing to cause Sheila unnecessary pain. Like a daughter, he thought, she suddenly decided to up and leave. We mustn’t think of this as final. She may come back. Poor Michelin, something’s troubling her. But what a damned nuisance.
‘Fuck her,’ Sheila said. She flung her blue towelling robe over her bare shoulders and rushed from the room. He stood where he was, listening as she ran upstairs and banged open the door of Michelin’s room. After a while, she came downstairs again, frowning, biting a finger.
‘Well, this is just too much. She’s done a bunk. What does she mean, “acting as our housekeeper”? She lived here free, didn’t she? We looked after her when she was ill. Bloody bitch. Oh, if she’s pinched something …!’
‘I don’t suppose she’s pinched anything.’
She rounded on him angrily. ‘You’re defending her? What’s the meaning of such a stupid letter, after twelve years? Twelve years! We’ve arranged our lives around her. She’s stayed on in the villa in Marbella – had free holidays at our expense, met our friends … This is a fucking insult. Why didn’t she mention me?’
‘We don’t know what’s behind it.’
‘Oh, God, you’re always so calm, Clem! How are we to manage now? Have you thought about that? Am I supposed to do the housework, like an ordinary housewife? Is that what you expect, because I’m not!’
He said helplessly, ‘We’ll just have to get someone else. Probably Arthur will know of someone.’
‘Arthur?’ She stared at him blankly, frowning.
‘Arthur, yes. Arthur Stranks, or his wife. I think they have someone …’
She walked about the room, saying to herself, ‘Well, this really mucks things up. How thoughtless can you get? What got into the woman? What’s this grumble about her proper name? I suppose she was jealous of me in some way.’ She sighed deeply. ‘We’ll have the police round here next. They’ll have fished her body out of the Isis.’
‘Yes, I’m also slightly concerned for her safety …’
Again she turned on him with a look of contempt. ‘Are you trying to be funny at my expense? God, you’re irritating. Trust you to be “slightly concerned”! I don’t care what’s happened to her, not after she treats us like this. What kind of creature have we been clutching to our bosoms all these years?’
‘You’re being melodramatic. We must look for some explanation. There may be a man involved.’
‘What man? You know she isn’t interested in men. Never has been. You found that out for yourself, didn’t you?’
‘Well, there must be some explanation. I must get to work. I’ll ring St Emma’s and see if they know anything about it.’
She looked almost pityingly at him. ‘Life has to go on as usual, eh?’
It was Clement’s turn to sigh. ‘I fear it always does, Sheila.’
‘Oh, no, it doesn’t,’ she said.
‘Gordon Bennett, that’s awful,’ said Arthur Stranks, briskly. ‘I know how upset Cheri will be when I tell her. Er – she knows how much you and Sheila depended on Michelin.’
‘Well, we gave each other mutual support,’ said Clement. On arrival at Carisbrooke, he had not been able to keep the impact of Michelin’s dismal note to himself and, rather to his surprise, had told everything to his research assistant.
Arthur now stood in the bay window, scratching the Scrubbing Brush cut and trying to look for all the world as if something awful had happened to him.
‘You hadn’t had any kind of row?’
‘Certainly not. We never had rows.’
‘Let me drive you round to St Emma’s. I’ve got the car. We can find out straight away what they know about her. I’ll just ring Cheri and let her know what’s happened.’
‘Oh, no, Arthur, really, that isn’t necessary, is it?’ He was disturbed by the way his assistant seemed to be taking over Michelin’s disappearance, and waved his hands to reinforce the seriousness of his protest.
‘Perhaps there’s something Cheri could do to help. She could go round and see Sheila, perhaps. She’s free this morning because, as I think I mentioned, the library’s putting her on part-time. They’re having to make some cuts.’
‘Another of the government’s blows against culture?’
Even that remark failed to stop Arthur. Bouncing in his trainers, he led the way across the quad to the car park, where his new blue Zastava Caribbean waited. Clement found himself cramped into the front passenger seat, remembering his last lift, when Arthur and Cheri had taken him to see Tina Turner, in the days of the Mini with the printed jokes in the rear window.
‘She wasn’t – well, funny, or anything? Michelin?’
‘She told me once that her soul was in China.’
‘Soul in China? What does that mean?’
‘Arthur, sometimes I wish I had taken up a different career and was even now digging up dinosaur bones in Wyoming. I’m no good at dealing with people.’
‘That’s cool, coming from you!’ As he spoke, Arthur shot a quick smiling glance at Clement. To Clement, it came as a shock. Good God, he thought, he actually admires me. Or makes a good pretence of it.
They negotiated the Banbury Road traffic to the sound of Radio One.
The single window in St Emma’s secretary’s office looked out through leaded panes to an enclosed stretch of lawn, where a bust of someone once illustrious took shelter under a laburnum tree. The diamond pane motif was carried over in the embroidery on the secretary’s cotton shirt, while the glazing was continued by the spectacles she wore on a gold chain about her neck. Two small breasts lay concealed beneath the shirt. She was a birdlike creature of no particular age, with quick movements, glimpses of spiky teeth, and bony little hands which seemed poised as if about to attack an invisible piano. They ceased their foray on a typewriter as she darted a look at the two men. The spiky teeth were revealed in a momentary smile as she said, unhelpfully, ‘Yes?’
Arthur stated their business in an efficient way.
The secretary sat down on her hands, as a preliminary to not being helpful, and shook her head, as if she had practised these difficult movements many times. Forestalling her, Arthur, who had Clement firmly in tow, introduced him with full titles.
‘Oh, sorry, Dr Winterman, yes, I’m afraid to say that Michelle Bouyat has left St Emma’s,’ the secretary said, retrieving her hands from her sparrowy buttocks.
‘When did she leave?’
Feeling called upon to answer this question standing up, the secretary rose to her sandalled feet, saying, ‘It wasn’t very convenient for us, really, her leaving before the end of term. So inconsiderate. She went last Friday. Would you like to see the Warden? I think she’s available.’
‘Three days ago …’ While Clement and Arthur exchanged thoughtful glances at this evidence of iniquity, the secretary resumed her chair, perhaps as an indication that her duty was done. ‘Just tell me, miss, have you a forwarding address?’
She rifled through an antiquated card filing system. Arthur, computer born and bred, rolled up his eyes in horror. Peering shortsightedly at a large pink card, the secretary said, ‘We’ve got an address in a place called Saint Enemy.’
‘Sainte Enémie,’ Clement corrected her, without thinking. ‘That’s on the Tarn. It’s an old address – her aunt’s, I believe. Did she tell you why she was leaving?’
‘Oh, yes. She was going to get married.’
‘Married? To whom?’
‘She didn’t say.’ The hands were firm about that, and alighted on the typewriter.
‘Someone must have asked her that all-too-obvious question. When a lady in her mid-forties gets married, it’s quite an event. Who would know?’
But the secretary could help them no further. Her manner indicated that she was offended by the assumption that there was something going on to which others were privy and she not. Further questions were met with helpless shrugs and one further glimpse of the front teeth. In the end, Clement and Arthur left, and walked back to the Zastava.
‘I’ll ring the Warden later,’ Clement said. ‘I have some slight acquaintance with her. We’ve met once or twice at dinner.’
When they got back to the College, he phoned Sheila, but their number was engaged. Sighing, he turned to work, and was soon engrossed in the early weeks of 1940.
Arthur presented him with three new letters, one from a correspondent in New Zealand who had been a child in Coventry when that city was bombed by the Luftwaffe and remembered the cathedral burning. The other two were from correspondents who had written before, answering Clement’s forms, and had essentially nothing fresh to add. They wrote for the pleasure of talking about what one correspondent referred to, without apparent cynicism, as ‘the good old days’. It was a matter of conjecture as to how much these correspondents could be said to have adapted, not to the war and its upheavals, but to the peace which followed.
On his way home that evening, he visited the post office in North Parade to buy Sheila a box of her favourite Belgian chocolates. Directly he let himself in the front door, the emptiness of the house struck him. Closing the front door softly, he stood for a full minute in the hall, listening to the silent signals emanating from various rooms.
He directed his gaze up the stairs. Here were ranged some of the Victorian and Edwardian oils which Sheila collected: a Leighton, a Peacock, and a Stone, leading towards her two favourite John Collier puzzle paintings which hung in her sitting room upstairs. At the top of the flight of stairs, he could just see from where he stood an etching of Poynter’s sinister ‘Faithful Unto Death’. He looked, however, not at the framed pictures but at the shadowy vacancy before them – expecting, for a superstitious moment, that his brother might appear again.
Clement felt tired and dispirited, and went through to the drinks fridge in the kitchen to pour himself a Cinzano on the rocks laced with vodka. He observed that the bottle of Smirnoff he and Sheila had brought Michelin from New York had gone. Walking into the conservatory, he dropped the chocolates in a wicker armchair. He picked up the Independent, but dropped that too after a minute’s desultory scanning of the headlines.
Gyronee, Queen of Kerinth, was still staring into the future from her alcove. The doglike thing by her feet appeared to be looking direct at Clement. He had never trusted it.
If only Juliet had lived, she might have been here to greet me.
Making an effort, he forced himself to go and inspect Michelin’s room. She had folded her duvet neatly and piled her used towels, also folded, on top. A calendar of France for 1987 hung open at June on one wall. All her personal effects had been removed, except for two large suitcases standing by the door. A faint scent of perfume was traceable in the air. He reflected on the nature of the person who had shared his and Sheila’s lives for so long. She had entered their existence casually, one day on a mountain road, and had as casually left it. Was she happy about the prospect of marriage, or did the abruptness of her farewell note indicate otherwise?
Not to have her help during the party on Thursday was going to be difficult. Perhaps they should cancel the party. No, that would be to give away their precious privacy, to start rumours. Perhaps Cheri Stranks would come and assist.
He thought of Sheila. ‘I’m enjoying it too much to stop …’ Well, she had stopped, and no doubt Arthur Hernandez was as absent from her mind as he was from Clement’s. The upset of Michelin’s disappearance would drive him even further. Right now, she was most likely at a SOW meeting. SOW was the Society of Oxford Writers she had helped found. Even distinguished writers like A. N. Wilson had joined, to her delight. They would simply have to grow accustomed to Michelin’s absence.
In his study, he rifled through Joseph’s papers rather aimlessly, then lay on his couch and dozed for ten minutes, the Cinzano beside him.
In contrast with his wife’s Colliers, all that Clement’s study had to offer in the way of the pictorial was a severe 1927 Kandinsky, which Sheila had bought him at a New York auction.
The silence of the house weighed on him. Joseph seemed to be in a dream he had, but when he woke the contents of the dream eluded him – as perhaps after death, he thought, the contents of life might elude one.
He went over to the boxes containing Joseph’s literary remains, conscious of a slight resentment of his brother. Michelin’s unexplained disappearance gave him a feeling of being incapable of managing his life; the present had to be negotiated, without these encumbrances from the past.
He sat down on the edge of his couch with a hardbound notebook labelled ‘Book of Dreams’, to which Joseph had stuck a Chinese gift tag. The tag showed an undulant Chinese lady carrying a fan and trailing long flimsy silk scarves from her wrists. She appeared to be beckoning.
His intention was to study again one of Joseph’s dreams to which the latter had attached special significance. But, flipping through the unlined pages, he discovered writing at the back of the book. Turning it upside down, he began to read. Here were more of Joseph’s Eastern jottings. He opened with fragmentary accounts of what he called Three Great Disasters, the killing of perhaps ten million Chinese by Soekarno’s and Suharto’s governments in Indonesia, the Rape of Cambodia, and the Chinese Catastrophe under Mao Tse-tung. These appeared to be preliminary notes for a longer treatment, which Clement had in his possession.
The notes ended. Next, the pages were filled with a small script where Joseph had written accounts of his visits to brothels and his affairs with women. Each entry was dated. The years covered were the early seventies, when Joseph had been abroad preparing contributions to a guide to the East. Some entries were several pages long. Joseph had noted down things of interest the women said, together with details of their anatomies and descriptions of their breasts and sexual organs.
The entries were interspersed with aphoristic cries like, ‘Predatory man always turns victim’, ‘In every love affair there is one who pursues and one who falls flat on his face: both are I’, and, in imitation of de la Rochefoucauld, ‘We are neither as whored nor as abhorred as we think.’
Although he had settled himself to read, Clement soon grew impatient. Box File No. 3 on his window sill contained similar accounts of sexual adventure in a variety of cities, from Rangoon, Saigon, Penang, and Phnom Penh to Palembang, Djakarta, Hanoi, and Hong Kong. Box File No. 3 also revealed that Joseph had put some of his reminiscences together and sold them to the Luxury Life Limited Edition Club of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, under the pen name of Michael Meatyard, Duke of Suffolk, England. The resultant book bore the title, Eastern Arousals: Memoirs of a Dissolute Duke.
Joseph had travelled farther than his brother from the stifled respectabilities of Nettlesham and Bude. While Joseph, unlike some Casanovas, appeared genuinely to like women and enjoy their personalities, it was open to doubt whether he knew any of them as intimately as Clement thought he knew Sheila. Pondering this contrast, his thoughts went to his old father, forever at work in his shop and rising at five each morning to collect the day’s newspapers from Bude railway station. What would Ernest Winter have made of the careers of his two sons, had he known of them? What would he have made of Kandinsky, come to that? Both he and Joseph had escaped from their father’s narrow way of life.
And yet. Ernest Winter had had little to say in those long years of his working life. He had never complained. He had spoken of nothing that Clement could remember beyond the immediate affairs of the newsagent’s shop. As far as his family could tell, he had no imaginative life. He had remained closed. The rest of the family had pursued their own emotional concerns, virtually ignoring Ernest. He had died of lung cancer in the end: or rather, Clement thought, cancer, work, disillusion. Joseph had hated his father. Yet Clement had found something to admire in that long-sustained silence; and something in it he had unwittingly imitated and incorporated into his own character.
He turned to the series of dreams in Joseph’s book, leafing to the final entry. This he now re-read, concentrating with effort and having occasional recourse to his Cinzano.
There is a flaw in the universe (Joseph had written in his neat longhand). The Greek dramatists knew it. The good and the innocent suffer along with the rest. I have suffered so much that I am now neither good nor innocent. But being moderns means this: we understand that the flaw in the universe is inside us. What Aeschylus could have done, had someone explained to him about genetic inheritance and the eternal artistries of the DNA spiral!
Yet a flaw is not a fatal wound. However much I have suffered, I have not been utterly destitute of hope. I am visited by a cheering recurrent dream. This I set down now in some doubt, fearing that to drag that precious dream into the open may drive it away for good.
There’s one curious feature about the dream, apart from its persistence over nearly half a century (how’s that for permanent transience?) – the way in which I have never woken immediately afterwards saying, ‘There was that dream again.’ One or two days have always had to pass before I could say ‘I dreamed it again.’ In other words, the dream came, in some way I do not understand, slowly through consciousness, instead of direct from the subconscious, like an ordinary dream.
It first appeared to me, so I believe, when I was enjoying the enforced stay with my grandmother in Lavenham, as a vulnerable child of four. It has returned ever since, at intervals – perhaps once every five years – developing as I have developed. On paper, there is little startling about it; yet it has always given me comfort and hope. I told Lucy about it when we were quarrelling, and the quarrel ceased.
In essence, all the dream contains is a garden and a gateway. I am wandering in a vast, disconsolate garden. I am small, perhaps still in short trousers. I do not know where to go. There is a threat in the garden which I cannot understand. Looking about, I see no one.
After a while, I come to some steps. The steps are wide and paved, with ornate balustrades. The balustrades are all of a certain number, I know not what. I ascend the steps. The flights are punctuated by terraces, with nine steps between terraces (yes, that number I do remember, I believe, even from the earliest dream). I feel safer.
At the top of the steps stands a perfect wall. In the wall is a perfectly circular hole or entrance, its diameter taking up nearly the whole height of the wall, its circumference ornamented with stonework. A yard behind this entrance is another wall, a screen blocking the view beyond.
Perhaps someone speaks to me at this point. In any case, I am delighted and full of expectation as I approach the gateway.
There the dream ends.
I am sure of the details of this first dream, as far as they go, because I was so taken with it that I got out my water colours, with which I used to play, and painted the scene. My grandmother declared that the result was a masterpiece.
Aren’t dreams amazing? I was a kid, an infant. I knew nothing about anything. Yet this archetypal dream came to me and prepared me for much of my life, all the emotional part of my life.
About this time I was learning to read swiftly and easily. That was how I filled the time spent by myself. Newspapers in those days – the early nineteen-thirties – devoted a lot of space to children. There I read a long tale about a little boy who lost his shadow. He made a walking pattern with his shadow on a sunny wall, and the shadow simply ran away from him and was lost. The boy was inconsolable, and sought it high and low. He travelled to the far ends of the earth after it, and eventually found it, I forget how, in China, in a palace.
Although I was already familiar with Grimms’ fairy stories, this was the first story I ever read that seemed to say to me direct, pointing a finger, ‘This is about you – the real you – the secret you!’
Perhaps the story influenced the dream. Where else did I get it from? All its furnishings were Chinese. When first I saw one of those circular Chinese entrances, in Medan, I was overwhelmed by a sense of recognition.
As I grew older, the dream altered according to circumstance. On one occasion, for instance, the steps had flattened into a paved path. The path led through a dreary pine wood. On another occasion, I was in danger from floods. But always at the end of the track stood this confining wall, with the circular entrance and, beyond the entrance, a white screen.
I interpreted the entrance as symbolizing the female sexual organ.
Sometimes I met someone along the way. In my adolescence, the dream once took on the aspect of nightmare, for a maiden met me near the wall, a slender maiden, pale as paper. I drew near her and looked into her eyes. She was death. Shortly after that, I went into the army. More often, when the female appeared, she was a tutelary spirit, guiding me to safety.
The richness of that dream can’t be conveyed, any more than words can convey the richness of life. The dream enriched my life. Gradually I came to understand how Chinese the dream was. Desultory reading revealed to me that the multiples of nine, into which the dream steps were divided, represented the celestial number which divides the Chinese heaven. The square wall, the circular entranceway, conform to the ancient belief that Earth is square and the heavens round. I understood that the entrance was the entrance to heaven, or at least to happiness.
Also, the entrance, with the white blocking screen behind it, was built according to the Chinese belief that devils and evil spirits were notoriously unable to turn corners, and so would crash into the screen and be unable to enter beyond it.
Sometimes, it appeared that I was dressed in ceremonial vestments when I approached the entrance. Sometimes I was merely a lonely wanderer, my one ambition to get into whatever lay beyond the entrance. I had the impression that the hour was always the same, possibly at the first glimmer of dawn.
I cannot say how much this dream interested me, and how I longed for each successive visitation. It was as if I in some way partook of an ancient ritual, in which the ceremony was invariable. There was a negative aspect to the dream, in that if I could never get through the round entrance, then I must myself be an evil spirit, but this interpretation felt weak and did not appal me, as perhaps it should have done. For the dream came from my very being, that healthful biological centre within even the most desperate of us – the psyche, as the Greeks used that word, to mean the consciousness of all living things, and not only of human beings. This primitive, faraway aspect of the dream was not its least attractive feature.
The last time I dreamed that dream, it remained in its essentials the same, although I approached the wall across a desert, riding on horseback. I think it was a horse. I could see that beyond the wall lay a great complex of buildings and trees. Before the gate stood two tutelary spirits, as I have called them, both beautiful pale women, who came towards me with graceful gestures. They were the most lovely women I had ever seen, waking or sleeping. They spoke sweetly to me, beckoning me to enter the gate. I awoke, trying desperately to recapture what they had said, but without success.
This dream prepared me for a wandering life. Indeed, it may have set the pattern for a wandering life. It also prepared me to love a Chinese woman.
Clement grunted as he put the book aside. His brother was not so different from him as he sometimes imagined; both of them, having discarded their father’s religion, had become preoccupied with the inner life, bestowing on it a kind of sanctity. The times were uncertain; who could say if the sanctity was justified? Like God, the mind was easy enough to make use of, but almost impossible to understand.
Clement regretted the gulf that lay between him and his poor wandering brother, a gulf which had widened after their mother’s funeral in Nettlesham, when Sheila, normally so placid, had berated Joseph for his self-indulgence. They had not seen him for some while after that – not until they were next in Marbella, spending the Christmas holiday in Sheila’s villa. Michelin accompanied them. And Michelin it was who had announced Joseph’s unexpected arrival, after lunch on Boxing Day.
‘No room at the inn, Sheila dear,’ Joseph had said. ‘Have you a place to lay my head? A stable would be ideal.’
He looked at his worst. His clothes were filthy and worn. A small pack was slung over one shoulder. He had a long, incoherent tale to tell them of his wanderings. As they might have expected, a girl had been involved. He had been returning home from the East. The girl had stolen his wallet in Cairo. Joseph had managed to get a ship to Gibraltar, working as crew, and had hitched by road from Gibraltar to Marbella, hoping to find his brother at the villa. They had a spare room for him, but that night Joseph had been at his worst, getting hopelessly drunk ‘for Christmas’, as he put it, and cursing them all three for bloated capitalists.
‘Why don’t you throw me out, Clem?’ he asked next morning, when he finally made an appearance, his face pallid, his hair still lank from the shower. ‘I’m useless. I should’ve finished myself off long ago. Not that I haven’t tried. If I ever get in Who’s Who, like your lovely Sheila, I shall list “failing suicide” as my hobby. I just haven’t enough courage. Or else I can’t believe that the world wouldn’t wink out if I ceased to exist. There’s egotism …’
‘Your trouble’s not egotism, Joe,’ Clement said. ‘It’s a certain lack of self-esteem – something with which women can’t supply you, apparently.’
Joseph gave him a dark look. ‘Typical clever shrink-talk. Stealing my wallet was a symbolic castration, was it? But you’re right. Clever boy! I’m easy to see through. I certainly lack self-esteem. Those bastards of parents, they robbed me of that one natural biological quality which even a tadpole enjoys – self-esteem. But I mustn’t start on that tack or Sheila will be at my throat again. Lend me some money and I’ll be off – I can get to Madrid, and there’s a friend there who will look after me.’
Clement had given his brother a wad of pesetas and Joseph had disappeared, as so often he had done before.
He tried to recall more of what had happened on that occasion. Memory was, as usual, selective. He could not remember what Sheila had said. He could not remember how Joseph had intended to get to Madrid. He could remember a cat that Michelin had befriended. And he could remember his selfish relief when Joseph left.
‘I shouldn’t have let him go,’ Clement said now, savouring the taste of fruitless regret. ‘He was my brother and I wasn’t even his friend.
‘The time will come when I shall be Joe’s age when he died. One advantage of growing older is that one gets to appreciate more the living minute. Small pains creep up on one, pains in the joints and so on, but it is amazing how little they detract from happiness. Happiness can be such a good solid quality, although it wasn’t for Joseph, with his indwelling insecurity. He acted like a fool, yet at heart he was wise. Perhaps it’s the reverse with me; I did tell Sheila that it did not matter how stupidly you behaved as long as you said sensible things. I was a bit tiddly; nevertheless, I may have meant it, and it may have been the truth … Memory is so uncertain: not at all the mind’s equivalent of a filing cabinet, more like a compost heap from which unexpected plants grow. Take this old photo of the Winters, snapped by mother in the very hour war broke out. Even that is not reliable. It has usurped real memory and become memory. It has stopped past time. Because of photography, we have made our memories come to resemble family snapshots, static and posed. Yet the unique ingredient of the living moment is its malleable, transient quality, the fish swimming downstream, a glint of sunlight on its twisting body. No one has ever caught that evanescent moment, that dear thing, that solemnity in sunsets. All the world’s diarists are hotfoot in quest of it, yet it remains its own tricksy self, there and gone. Gone. Gone, only to be immediately replaced by another tricksy moment. I wish Sheila would come back. I love having her near. Why, I can’t even recall to the inner ear the timbre of her voice. Yet how often have I recorded it in mind – often listened to its music rather than to what it was trying to tell me. She’s so ordinary, my dear Sheila, so extraordinary. Perhaps I missed something in life by being so unadventurous, yet I found her. That was a bit of luck. She doesn’t seem to fret about the passing moment as women are supposed to – and perhaps it’s worse for them. How many images of her could I honestly conjure up from all the years we have been together? Out of the millions, precious few.
‘These minutes that go by now, where do they vanish to? It’s somehow against nature to think they’re lost for ever. Yet they’ve gone beyond recall and I’ll never remember them from this moment on. What was my train of thought just a moment ago? I suppose Joe wished he could forget his early years. For some people it is an absolute curse how those memories linger. Perhaps memory is the seat of all psychological disease. But that’s a thought I’ve had before. No thought is entirely new. That one’s staler than most – except for the one that wonders how Joe’s state of mind was when he knew he was dying. He surely didn’t really want to die … Perhaps the hour will dawn when I shall wish I could forget Joe. But that’s a base thing to say.’
He was sitting idly, spinning out his drink, with Joseph’s dream book by his elbow, when he heard a car draw up outside and Sheila’s key in the door below. He went downstairs.
She appeared flustered. He had the impression that she was trying to avoid looking directly at him.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, absolutely fine.’
‘It’s quite late. Did someone drive you home?’
‘Maureen drove me back. I went round to see her.’
‘It was only yesterday you had lunch with her.’
‘I’m sorry Clem, she’s a friend of mine, as you know. I really don’t want to talk. I’m tired, I have a headache, and I want to go to bed.’
She stood impatiently before him, formidable, and yet as if in some way awaiting a signal from him. Clement was the first to change stance.
‘Well, let me get you something. Have you had supper?’
‘Oh, don’t fuss. Please leave me alone. I’m fine, absolutely fine.’
She looked angrily at him. ‘Please, Clem, I just want to be quiet. What is all this anyway? What have you been up to?’
‘Nothing. I’ve been up in the study. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’
She brushed past him and rushed to the rear of the hall, fair hair aflutter, crying that she couldn’t stand any more interrogation.
Clement did not follow. As he stood at the foot of the stairs, he found himself listening to an unusual noise outside, like a long-protracted sigh, gentle, yet regretful. Oxford was being visited by a shower of rain.
On Tuesday, the weather was considerably cooler. The sky was cloudy but the threat of rain seemed to have passed. Clement decided to walk into town to his clinic. He wore a light suit and carried a raincoat over one arm. He adopted a slow pace, conscious of the pain in his left leg which he was unable to diagnose, although a list of more or less unpleasant possibilities ran through his head.
His walk took him down the Banbury Road, past the old cumbersome Victorian houses still disregarding the traffic as if their lives depended on it, through St Giles on the St John’s side, and along Cornmarket, making his way with difficulty among the crowds of people there. The people all seemed to him young, and dressed in tawdry fashion, although he realized that this was a subjective view which owed much to his age. If he stopped to think, he could remember how dingily and with what lack of variety his generation dressed in the early sixties, before Style had visited the multitude, and how they had probably smelt badly in the days before roll-on deodorant. By this intellectual effort, he could think well of those about him. But he could not like their habit of pushing by on their own rude course, without regard for others; he had been brought up to step aside for his elders, and such old training did not easily die – rather, became stronger with the years, like bands of ivy round a decaying tree. He found himself breathing heavily. Couldn’t these young barbarians see he was almost fifty, and slightly distinguished? What were they doing? The answer seemed to be, Nothing. Cornmarket had become a precinct of loafers.
One token of the loafing was the rubbish and filth which lay on the pavements. Young girls were smoking and eating in the open air, throwing down their litter, using the world as their ashtray. He sighed at his own disapproval. Of course, even the fourteen-year-olds would be having sexual intercourse every day. He overheard their use of swear words – forbidden when he was a boy – as he went by. Once he had hoped such freedoms would come about. They had arrived, and they did not please him.
Sheila was never far from his thoughts. She had made every effort to appear as normal at breakfast, so that he had not dared to bring up the incident of the evening before. So rare was it for them to have a difference, that he was disturbed by it; but he would not permit himself idle speculation on a subject he could not resolve. The cause of her unhappiness would no doubt emerge in time. Meanwhile, he turned his contemplation to the sessions which lay ahead of him, as far as that was possible among the jostling crowd.
It was hard to understand the state of Britain, he thought. Either it prospered or it was going downhill. But nobody could look on the Cornmarket with much favour, certainly not Britain’s European partners, the Germans, the Dutch, the French, whose own city centres were clean and decorous.
Turning into Boots, a garish shop containing all pre-requisites for brothel life, he purchased a packet of his favourite blackcurrant throat pastilles and proceeded down The High, congested with groups of tourists all looking for somewhere to sit and rest, or for even older colleges than those already visited. From The High, after lingering for a moment before the windows of the Oxford University Press, he turned right into King Edward Street. This grandly named street, which in Clement’s early days in Oxford had appeared friendly, containing lodgings and old professors versed in the Napoleonic Wars, was now coldly schizophrenic, with health shops on one side and on the other, the east side, grim offices of lawyers, solicitors and accountants, thus catering, in Clement’s eyes at least, to some of the less appealing features of the English character, crankiness and litigiousness.
On the east side of the street, however, Clement had his room, which he shared with two other analysts. Tuesday was his day of occupancy. This room, situated on the first floor, and overlooking from its windows the health shop opposite, had, by a legal trick, been saved from the encroaching lawyers; it catered to the minds and souls, rather than the pockets, of the locals. On every side, one had only to drill through a wall to overhear discussions of tax matters, dividends, and disputed wills: but in this room, dreams, fantasies, and selected snatches of the past were allowed.
Despite his worry regarding Sheila, he looked about the neutral room with some satisfaction. He might have been dominated by his brother, but here at least he was in control and could help people. The light in the room pleased him; the cloud having dispersed, sunlight slanted in with a rather artificial aspect, reflected from the windows on the opposite side of the street. With its hint of warmth, it recalled to his mind a hired room in which Sheila and he had once stayed, in a town in France, on their way to the Mediterranean. He remembered that they had been in high good humour, having just eaten a meal that began with a plate of delicious haricots verts. The old bed had creaked when they made love.
Punctually at ten o’clock, only shortly after Clement had arrived, his bell buzzed, and he admitted his first client into the tiny waiting room. Clement crossed to the inner door and ushered into his sanctum a plump cheerful man in his early eighties, who entered the room clutching a stick in one hand and a string shopping bag in the other, his head held high in order to see through thick glasses.
‘How are you, Clement?’ the newcomer said. He stomped here and there about the room, laid down his stick and shopping bag on the couch, peered out of the window, commented on this and that, admired Clement’s gloomy Piranesi print as he had often done before, finally coming to rest in the armchair by the electric fire and saying, with his habitual optimistic air, ‘Things much as ever?’
Captain Charles Parr was the oldest and most faithful of all Clement’s clients, a record tacitly acknowledged between them by the captain’s familiar use of Clement’s Christian name. He had been consulting Clement since the mid-seventies, with intermissions only for Clement’s or his own excursions abroad.
‘Much as ever,’ Clement now replied. ‘And with you? When did you get back from India?’
‘Just yesterday. Terribly sorry to be back here. Bombay was as pleasant as always.’ He launched into an enthusiastic account of his trip, to which Clement listened without giving it his complete attention. Captain Parr’s history was no stranger than that of many others; yet it was of interest. His endorsement of Bombay, a city from which other Western visitors often recoiled in horror, was of a piece with his boyish outlook on life, which had survived eighty years of stress.
One of Captain Parr’s most admirable traits was his openness to experience. He had begun life humbly, one of a large family brought up in the slums of Pimlico. Getting work in the offices of a minor shipping line, he had spent his pre-war years of adolescence holidaying in Belgium and Holland. The shipping line had allowed him discount fares over to Zeebrugge, and there he had cycled about the Lowlands, picking up fluent Flemish. One day, on the ferry returning to Harwich, he had encountered an Indian lady in some trouble, and, with his knowledge of the intricacies of immigration regulations, had been able to help her and her father. They had invited him to visit them, an invitation the youthful Parr had accepted, but the war came along and put a stop to the friendship.
The war was the making of Charles Parr. The number of Englishmen who could speak Flemish was small. He volunteered for service and, after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, was made an officer in the SOE. From London, he helped conduct the operation which airdropped secret agents into Holland. He also went twice to wartime Holland himself, on one occasion getting captured, escaping only by shooting two of the enemy and returning to England in a stolen fishing boat.
Clement had never discovered when, if ever, Captain Parr had left the secret service. After the war, however, he had become a travel writer and journalist, ostensibly to see more of the world, possibly as a cover. Shortly after India gained its independence, he was in the Indian Embassy to make some travel arrangements, where he met Sushila, the Indian lady he had helped some years earlier. They fell in love and married within a few weeks.
The newly married Parrs settled in Lathbury Road in North Oxford, and there raised two sons and a daughter. Captain Parr, however, was often away on his mysterious trips, which took him to the Far East, the Antarctic and elsewhere. On his return to Oxford, he was always united with his family and with Clement Winter’s armchair. He had discovered, however, that Sushila’s relations in Bombay were as prosperous as they were amiable, and often appeared to spend more of the year with them than with his wife in North Oxford.
Sushila left him abruptly in the early eighties, when the three children were adult, to go and live with a fox-hunting stockbroker in Gloucestershire. But Charles Parr, who quarrelled with no one, took his wife’s dereliction in good part, remained friendly with her, became chummy with the fox-hunting stockbroker, and returned regularly to Clement’s chair, sometimes bringing with him the present of a Gloucestershire pheasant. He had also become friendly with Sheila and Joseph.
And why did he return regularly to Clement’s chair? It was a question Clement often asked himself about his oldest client. Of course, old habits were hard to break. Captain Parr had nothing particular on his mind; he perhaps enjoyed the chance to talk, being somewhat lonelier than he would ever care to admit.
‘How’s your book getting on?’ the captain asked now, companionably. Clement replied with a few generalities, reflecting that there was, after all, something on the other’s mind, the subject which had first drawn him into Clement’s orbit. His wartime operations were known as Operation North Pole; the Germans having acquired knowledge of British codes, every agent Captain Parr’s organization parachuted into Holland had been captured and often shot by the Wehrmacht on landing. It was this – rather than the two soldiers he had had to kill in the line of duty – which occasionally preyed on the captain’s mind, and drove him into reminiscence.
The prescribed hour was drawing to a close when the captain said, ‘Look, Clement, I know I owe you for a few sessions. I’m afraid I can’t pay up until I get a couple of articles published in the States.’
‘Don’t leave it hanging about too long.’
Captain Parr heaved himself out of the armchair and collected up his belongings in a brisk way. ‘I’m sorry about your brother’s death, by the way, Clement. He was a bit of a blighter, your brother, but we got on well. He presented me with a copy of his dirty book, Eastern Erections, or whatever it was called. He was another Far East buff, although he didn’t exactly share my passion for India. It was funny how he completely changed during the last few months of his life, wasn’t it?’
Not wishing to admit that this remark took him unawares, Clement turned towards his desk and murmured, ‘In what way do you think he changed?’
‘I’m sure you as an analyst noticed the difference. He became much more contented. There was a whole lot of Jungian stuff he spouted to me, the last evening we spent together. Joe set more store by that sort of thing than I do.’
Clement said nothing, and the captain rattled on in his cheerful way, ‘I rather liked his girl friend, too, didn’t you? What was her name?’
‘Lucy.’
‘That’s it, Lucy. Very attractive girl, very vital. She knew a lot about the thing Joe went through – revelation, he called it. I got the impression they had plenty of sex. Joe was a bit of a randy bastard, wasn’t he? What’s happened to Lucy now? I’d quite like to see her again. She must miss Joe a lot. It was rather sudden, wasn’t it? His death, I mean. Well, mustn’t keep you, Clement, old boy. See you next week.’
He waved his stick in an authoritative way, his gesture of goodbye, only to pause in the doorway. Diving one hand into his string bag, he came up with a little bundle, wrapped in greaseproof paper, which he pressed into Clement’s hand.
‘I brought you a present from Bombay, old boy.’
Clement saw him out, smiling, and clutching a dozen spiced papadoms.
He went back into the inner room to phone Lucy Traill.