Inset in the front door of the house in Rawlinson Road was a stained glass panel. In the middle of an abstract lozenge arrangement was a circular design consisting of three elements: a small boat with a white sail skimming over a blue sea towards an imagined haven ensconced between two thickly wooded green hills. Clement had called the picture ‘The Soul Returning to its Home’; Sheila had a more boisterous title for it.
The sun, shining through thinning cloud, cast the white, the blue, the green, on to Lucy’s face and shoulders as she and Clement stood looking at each other in the hall. He recalled the sunny sexuality of her letters to Joseph.
‘There’s been nothing but interruptions this morning,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up to my study.’
She gave him a sly glance. ‘Do I get to lie on your couch?’
‘That depends on how you behave.’
He perceived that she was the sort who could not resist flirting with men.
‘I can see how good you are at handling people, Clem. I’m good at handling their bodies, and that’s all. If you knew the mess …’
Since she left the sentence trailing, as part of the hesitancy that was ingrained in her manner. He said, taking her hand, ‘Let’s get some more coffee and go up. Ron and Pat will be quite happy in the pool for a while.’
The hand was small and its skin tough. He felt a quickening of his pulse. ‘Everything worked out all right …’ Perhaps it would do.
In the kitchen, she picked up the woven bag with which she had come and slung it over her shoulder. They refilled their mugs. Politely indicating that she should go ahead, he followed her up the stairs, conscious of the movement of her thighs and buttocks encased in her old patched jeans. She stopped several times on the way to look at Sheila’s pictures, with a particularly long pause before ‘Faithful Unto Death’, though she made no comment.
In Clement’s study, she would not settle at first, but prowled about, looking at this and that, regarding the Kandinsky, fingering the spines of some of his textbooks, as if identifying their titles by touch, poking at Joseph’s papers on the window sill. Then she sighed deeply and sat down, folding her legs, on the seat Clement had indicated.
‘You live a learned sort of life.’
He smiled. ‘I was never much good at games.’
‘My life’s such a mess.’
‘Most people feel the same way, Lucy.’
As if with a sudden intuition, Lucy asked, ‘Where’s your wife gone?’
‘She’s in London.’
‘I see … Just as well, perhaps. She didn’t like me. She’s a famous writer, right?’
‘Yes.’
She fumbled in her bag, looking down into it. ‘You’re so different from your brother. Joe was very emotional. Sometimes he’d fly into rages, you know.’
‘That was fortunate for him, if not perhaps for you. He must have induced himself to fly into rages; expression of anger is important – women in particular, I find, tend to repress anger, and there are clear indications in his writings that there was a time when Joseph could not release his anger, or could release it only masked as humour. Anyhow, I want to hear more about Joseph’s visitation by his anima. It said, “Your mother loved you.” Is that correct?’
‘“Your mother did love you.” He told me about it down on the beach and he suddenly roared with laughter. Oh, he ran about like a child, and he caught me up and kissed me. He was so funny. I said to him, “You’re like a great dog.” Then he was very serious and said, “It means I have got to rethink my whole life. I shall begin today.”’
Lucy pulled from her bag an A4 notebook bound in a William Morris floral pattern cloth. She held it out to Clement.
‘You’d better read what he says about the whole business. Joe was great at telling these things. It’s my recipe book, which he lifted. Trust him!’
He looked at her, then accepted the book. It opened to a series of recipes, some hand-written, others cut from columns of newspapers and magazines. True to form, Joseph had turned the volume over and started to write from the other end.
His account took the form of a letter – presumably a draft for a letter never sent – to Ellen, and began in characteristic style.
My dearest Ellie,
There you sit, or maybe stand, down in Salisbury, with that faithful hound of yours by your side. Here stand I, or maybe sit, with a far rarer animal in my grasp. A visionary animal, a metaphorical hound which, by my following, will lead … God knows where.
We’ve suffered hard knocks in our time, Ellie, as have most people, but now a bit of luck has come my way, and I must tell you about it. I must tell you about it in a way that will not too far strain your credulity. You try so hard to live on the textbook level, but that’s never been my way. And you go to church services – and are a Friend of the Cathedral, aren’t you? – just as our dear parents brought you up to do. You know I’m the rebel, the defaulter, and you forgive me, don’t you? Because I once used to love and cuddle you when you were a tiny person in soggy nappies. In my heart I love and cuddle you still, so you will have to accept that I have had what in Christian terms would be a miracle. I’ve had a Visitation. St Paul on his way to Damascus couldn’t have been more knocked out than I’ve been.
This was last November, and I am still trying to reorient myself.
Oh, Ellie dear, life’s so strange … Why don’t people just throw up their hands and admit it?
That day, I had to go and see a solicitor. He’s a rogue who knows how to deal with rogues. I’m trying to sue a publisher, to get a miserable sum of money he owes me. My solicitor has moved from Harrow to Oxford. I was in Oxford and I did not go to see Clem and Sheila. Would Clem forgive me if he knew? He’s such a dry old stick – my guess is that the voluptuous Sheila does his living for him. But I don’t know what goes on in any marriage, do I? Having had that one failed marriage under my nose all my childhood – and it’s still a mystery to me – I’m not likely to set another up for myself.
Anyhow, Oxford. Home of the young. I like it. It’s like the East in that respect – everyone is young and hopeful. Tranny-culture, maybe, but the new generation has style: they swear and screw without being self-conscious about it. Frankly, I envy them. I sat in a coffee shop and watched them, setting up their plans and pretences so whole-heartedly. Girls very pretty, swearing like chaps.
Then I took refuge in one of the College chapels. It was more my age. Clem took me there once. New College – built in Plantagenet times, I believe. The carved misericords under the seats are my delight: little bursts of brutal peasant life as counterpoints to all that solemn upraising of eyes to God and the roof beams. Acrobats, people dancing, men gambling, a chap fucking a sow. That brute life of the centuries, not much tainted by mind; and allowed there in the church. That’s where I belong, in the gutter life, being sat on. But I too have had a vision of lovelier things, and not in a church either.
There must have been a time – perhaps in Plantagenet centuries, who knows? – when gutter and heaven were close. Our old Nettlesham poet Westlake, in ‘The Conversation’, has something of the same thought (you see I still read him):
However dark the gulfs that ope, the days
That ’whelm me, still I feel the Maker’s gaze.
From chapel to solicitor. He seemed to think we might extract some money from my back-street publisher. You see, back-street authors have back-street publishers. The thought of solvency went to my head. I buzzed straight back to Acton, collected Lucy from her hospital, and drove off to the south coast.
We found a little place in Dorset, near Lulworth Cove. It’s years since I was at the English seaside. I like palm trees and mangusteens and warm water. But the Dorset coast looked superb, like a film set; November had washed it clean of tourists, and the great chalk cliffs stood out into the waves as if creation had made chalk, rather than Homo sapiens, the highest form of intelligent life. The air turned me very spiritual. We got a neat little room under the eaves of a quiet pub, with a sea view out of the foot-square window. We took a long walk, arm-in-arm, along the cliff paths.
Everything was simple – none of your middle-classization in that pub – to match the great gentle forms of the cliff. Lucy and I felt so good, and were in harmony (English for not rowing for once). The meal that evening was okay and, after a drink and a chat with the landlord, we went out to look at the night before going to bed. The moon was up, sailing in a clear sky like a sparrow’s egg in a fit of hubris. Another simple form in the immense beauty of the universe.
On the beach were pebbles as smooth as the far-shining moon. As I chucked one of them into the foam dashing up to meet our feet, as I had the feel of it between my fingers, it occurred to me naturally that a recurring dream I had was about the moon, and that the moon was a female entity with which I was in communication. About the night was a unity that made this leap of thought entirely natural, as if something from a much more primitive way of life, long forgotten, had slipped through a panel in the universe and presented me with its visiting card.
This thought – it was something much more basic than thought – this illumination filled my mind like sunshine (it’s generally very dark in the brain, you know). We shook the sand from our shoes and went inside, up the wooden stairs to bed.
That nut Jung said that the crux of today’s spiritual problems lay in the fascination which psychic life holds for modern man. Or, alternatively, he might have said does not hold for modern man … But suddenly I was filled with a radiant psychic hope – I can’t tell you – quite unlike me. You’re religious and you’ll interpret it your way, but I felt it as a great pagan force, almost geometrically plain and pure, like cliffs, sea, moon, beyond our window sill.
Lucy was marvellous. She must have thought I was mad. We sleep naked. There she was in the nude, in the dim white light of the room, before creeping into bed. I didn’t touch her. She was a catalyst that night, a numinosity rather than the flesh. I was in a trance. There has never been a night like it in my life.
I recalled Muslims in Sumatra, prostrating themselves during Ramadan. The urge came on me to do the same. I flung myself to the floor. The light of the moon poured in on me like a white syrup. Without words, I addressed the anima, my female tutelary spirit – wayward priestess – beseeching her to speak to me, to emerge from behind the veil. I was complete, on the spiral, beyond myself, a creature, a flung pebble.
How I slept. Like a dropped pebble. Ellie, something wonderful happened to me. My anima did indeed visit me. Perhaps her face had always been turned elsewhere. Okay, it wasn’t like that, but it felt like that. I tell you some inarguable persona of female gender came unto me during that night while I slept and said –
Can you think of the most momentous thing she might have said? The most unlikely, the most tiny, the most illogical, the most inescapable? You can? Okay, well that’s what she said. I awoke with these words in my head: ‘Your mother did love you.’
You see, she was putting me right, putting everything right.
Your mother did love you. So I was worth something, after all.
It’s possible to be full of faith and joy and yet almost fainting. I told Lucy about it when she woke. And again she was great. She seemed extremely moved. At least, she didn’t laugh, and was strong enough to stand back and give me air. Somehow I managed to eat an enormous breakfast downstairs in a little back parlour, and then we went out into the morning air. There I tried to explain everything.
She listened and kissed me and did not run from me screaming.
Ever since that clear November day, I have been trying to rearrange my life according to the truth as delivered by that wondrous voice. Well – rebuilding rather than rearranging. It’s like arriving from Mars to try and live on Earth. Long, long ago, before geology happened, while you were still running about with a rusk in your mouth barking like a little dog, I came to the conclusion that the parents, sweet folk that they were, did not love their only little son. I had to come to that conclusion. It protected me from the uncertainty that was destroying me.
You won’t remember how you were kidnapped into persuading me how hateful I was. But mother grabbed you and strapped you into your pushchair and rammed on your bonnet and rammed on her bonnet and rushed off in the direction of eternity up Ipswich Street – simply in order to persuade me that I was such a little shit she had run away from me for good. Maybe that was the actual moment you got religion. You know – Teach Love Through Fear and all that. It was the moment when I got mad. I could not bear the nervous strain and found it as a matter of survival necessary to remain forever sullen, unmoved by kisses or threats, sheltered behind the doleful fortification of her assumed unlovingness. I mean, part of me knew even then that she did in a way love me, but was too much up the pole to admit it.
And ever since I have had to live my life behind that barricade. It has twisted everything out of true. All those whores in the East, all my attempts to cut my life short, all those fears of the permanent bond of marriage, all those delusions, all those broken hopes … all have sprung from that fragile defence erected at the age of four or five. Of course she was off her rocker, and she threw me off mine. I think she buggered up your life just as much, but I know you won’t have that.
Anyhow, somehow, I have survived sixty years of torture to be – it’s your word – Redeemed. I am a different chap. Lucy sees it. She knows there’s a touch of magic about me. Understanding follows forgiveness, blossoms follow drought.
As to what it has cost. The universe itself
There the letter broke off.
Clement closed the recipe book and laid it down on the desk, scarcely able to look at Lucy, who had sat by on the sofa, covertly studying his face as he read and crossing and re-crossing her jean-clad legs.
To break a silence that threatened to extend itself, she said, ‘Joe had some funny ideas – comparing the moon with a sparrow’s egg. He read too much poetry, Joe did.’
‘Did this letter get written out?’
She shrugged. ‘Are you annoyed? I know he’s not very complimentary about you … I think he wrote it only a week or so before he died.’
‘I’ll have it copied out and sent to Ellen, since it was intended for her. If you don’t mind.’
‘Why should I mind?’ she said, in a tone of voice that implied that she was never going to fathom the Winter family.
He said, speaking to himself, ‘Perhaps he felt in the end that everything did work out all right.’
Another long pause came, in which both of them sighed heavily.
As if putting many complex thoughts behind him, Clement brushed his hollow temples and looked directly at her with an intense gaze, smiling. ‘I’m so glad that you were with him, Lucy, at such a taxing time.’
‘Ever since I first knew Joe, times were taxing for him. But that bit about living on Mars is just an exaggeration. Being with Joe helped me quite a lot. He sort of gave utterance for both of us, really …’ She paused, but Clement’s grave yet friendly glance encouraged her to go on. ‘I felt a bit out of my depth – this talk of the anima and everything. But he relied on me. I quite liked that. He said that I would have to help him, but I didn’t see how I could, except by being with him …’
Clement nodded. ‘What more could anyone hope for? Why didn’t he come to me?’
Lucy said, without intending cruelty, ‘You asked me that before. You would have been the last person Joe turned to.’
Clement propped his elbow on his desk and covered his eyes, recognizing the truth of what she said. Always there had been a barrier between him and Joseph, a barrier not of their own making, compounded of the age difference and the effect of the ‘steel-engraving angel’ and the secretiveness of their parents. But his attempts to demolish the barrier had been singularly ineffective. It occurred to him now, as he shaded out the room with his hand, that an early awareness of and sensitivity to that barrier, to his brother’s predicament, had influenced him to follow his career in analytical psychology. All that he was owed mainly to Joe’s suffering.
The chief’s witness to his brother’s latter days had moved round the desk and stood beside him. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Touched by this unexpected display of affection, he put an arm round her lower waist, causing her to move closer against him. Feeling her warmth, he rose and put both arms about her. For a moment, he set his lips against her shapely mouth, and then withdrew.
‘You’re not entirely unemotional, then,’ she said, looking up at him.
‘Lucy – I’m being silly. You’re very kind. Let’s sit on the sofa together. I don’t know why I put the desk between us – force of habit, maybe.’
Without moving, she said, ‘You reckon I’m an easy lay, I suppose?’
‘I thought nothing of the sort.’
‘All right. No funny business.’ She sat down as he had indicated, contemplating him, not without a certain look of amusement in her eyes. ‘Perhaps the desk was between us for safety’s sake …’
‘My safety, then, not yours.’ They smiled at each other, as if something had been agreed with a delicacy beyond words.
‘Look at me, I’m carrying on with you,’ she said, with a mischievous smile. ‘The truth is, I’m glad to talk to you like this. How can I put it? I’m always snarled up in the minute – in everyday things. I’ve always got to be at the hospital or looking after Pat, or arranging for someone else to look after her, or shopping … Well, a thousand and one little things. Most people I know are like that. It’s a rubbish life. A cop-out, isn’t it? Sometimes it all seems unreal, as if my real life was going to waste. Does that make sense to you at all?’
‘Oh, it’s “everydayness” – that’s what H. G. Wells called it. We’re all victims of everydayness. Routine. It’s easier than thinking.’
She pulled a face in her endeavour to get an idea across to Clement. ‘That’s one thing I liked about Joe. He didn’t suffer from that sort of thing. He may have been a slave to his miseries, but he was free otherwise from – well, what you said, I guess, “everydayness”. I never met anyone else like that. But perhaps you’re like it too. Your parents can’t have been all that bad …’ She laughed.
‘We’re all given the means of refuge. Through dreams, for instance, which link us with our world of inner feelings, at least some of the time. Joe paid attention to his dreams, and they directed him to stability.’ He felt he was beginning to lecture, and added, more conversationally, ‘We’re so proud, as a species, of our big brains, yet they aren’t really all that good for thinking with, at least to judge by global results. What they really are good at is fantasizing. Most people do large amounts of fantasizing every day – by watching TV or videos if nothing else.’
‘Joe wouldn’t watch TV. He said he preferred the Far East.’
They both laughed. ‘Not everyone is as individual as Joe. Now, after this seminal dream, he set about rethinking his life, yes?’
She took a sip of her coffee and pulled a face. ‘I feel a bit guilty about this. You see, I did stay with him for a bit, then I didn’t. You’re used to all this mental stuff, and so was he. I wasn’t. I’m a physiotherapist, I’m physical. It’s everydayness, I suppose. Anything else I find – well, a bit freaky, to be honest.’
‘People do. That’s why analysts are treated as a joke.’
‘Also, I had my own troubles. Joe and Pat didn’t get on. He always said he couldn’t work with her around. He hated kids. He just wanted me. I couldn’t have that. I mean, she’s my child. He said to me once, “Shove her in an orphanage.” Fancy! “Shove her in an orphanage …” After all he’d suffered in that respect. He could be very hurtful. It wasn’t just me …
‘Also we had quarrels over CND. Oh, trivial things, really. So they seem now, now he’s dead. I got a room nearer my job, but Pat didn’t exactly take to the day centre. Cash was tight. Then I moved in with Ron, over in Brentford. Ron’s very easy-going.’
‘What does Ron do?’
‘He’s a sort of builder. I did go over to Joe at Christmas time, just for a couple of days. We were supposed to go on a march, but he wouldn’t come. Like a fool, I cleared off again. I know it was bad for him. It was bad for both of us. He wrote me a long letter in the New Year, and that persuaded me I loved him and should stay with him for good.’
‘I think I have a copy of the very letter.’
‘All the political stuff about what the Americans had done didn’t cut much ice with me, but I liked the trouble he’d taken. He was really quite a lot different when I moved back in – gentler with me and more patient with Pat. A sunny, gentler side was coming out. He allowed himself to be less guarded. You see, he meant what he said. He’d started to rethink his whole life. What a task – at sixty! There was nothing for it but to believe the message from his anima – the visitation had been too serious to ignore. He felt compelled to act on it. After all, the anima wasn’t the moon – wasn’t outside him. It came from within him, from something he had previously suppressed. You see what I mean?
‘He’d lived by the assumption that your mother did not love him. She’d wanted a girl to make up for the dead one and had only been happy when Ellen came along. Hence her treatment of him – all those threats that she didn’t love him, and her running away from him. Did you know she even threatened that she was going to die at any day? She was a right one, your mother! How come she didn’t behave like that to you?’
Despite his training, it was a question still capable of inducing guilt feelings. Clement clasped his hands together as he replied.
‘Joe bore the brunt of her mental disturbance. Illness, if you like. I came along twelve years after him, don’t forget, when mother had largely recovered. She’d had Ellen to console her, and so on.’
‘Mental disturbance. I should think it was. I see red when I think of a mother behaving in that way. To be honest, I don’t think she did love Joe, or she wouldn’t have done what she did. What do you say? I mean you’re the expert.’
Clement stared at the ceiling. ‘She had a neurosis. She was primarily preoccupied with her own life, rather than with anyone else’s. A diagnostic label isn’t very useful. She was unable to establish emotional boundaries, and was sexually unsettled; hence, in part, her rejection of Joe and over-possessiveness towards Ellen.’
‘But did she love Joe?’
‘Of course. If he said so.’
Lucy regarded him searchingly, as if she felt he had raised a barrier to further questions. Then she glanced at her watch and spoke in a deliberately casual tone.
‘Well, love is a whole bundle of things … Anyhow, after last November, Joe began to count up all the signs of love and affection she had shown him, totting up the positive side of the bill, as against the negative. How she had written to him twice a week when he was at that barbarous little school – St Paul’s. Even how she wept for joy – Joe said it was either joy or remorse – when he returned from that fatal stay with his gran at Lavenham. Lots of plus items like that.
‘But even the minus things. You see, what this rethinking process came down to was this – I guess it was the crucial bit – that he had to forgive. Forgive his mother and his father. Then he could forgive himself. He laughed and said he was getting as bad as Christ.’
‘I can imagine him saying it. The question of forgiveness would have been a crucial element, as you say.’
‘He was reluctant to do it. He fought himself. He had a fit of smoking and drinking hard, although he had been off the booze. I suppose you’d say he was mad?’
Clement shook his head. He saw that she wanted approval of Joe for reasons of her own, and spoke firmly. ‘Joe was never mad, Lucy. Far from it. Those infantile traumatic experiences, which destroyed the security he should have enjoyed, compelled him to recognize the insecurity of the human condition. So he grew up wise and unhappy, but not ill. Wartime suited him, for instance, because everyone shared the sense of insecurity which had become his lot. But, no, Joe was one of the sane.’
She smiled. ‘I think often it’s hard to tell. Often I wonder about myself. Thanks. What a good father you’d make, Clem. Anyhow, it was hard for Joe to accept that his mother had loved him after all the terrors she’d put him through, but he trusted in the communication of his anima, and pushed on. I could see the strain … Oh, I left him again, sod me. Just for a month. I couldn’t really grasp … It was wrong of me – I knew it at the time. Yet there I was, doing what his mother had done, deserting him. But I realized that if he couldn’t rely on me there was no one else … So I went back …’
‘Good for you. And for him. How did he receive you?’
She shook the curls at the memory. ‘He cried. He was very sweet. But next day he was angry and said he couldn’t stand me coming and going like that – he’d really rather I stayed away for good. Then – well, it was as if he stood back from what he was saying. He started to laugh, and said that was simply an old pattern. Now discarded. He kept saying it. “That was the old pattern.”’
‘Meaning?’
She sighed and put a hand on Clement’s knee. ‘He’d worked through the crisis on his own, while I was gone. He understood that the infant Joe had been unable to tolerate all the terrifying uncertainties of life with his mother. Did she love him? Didn’t she? He had to decide that she didn’t, and leave it at that. That was the old pattern. Signs of love, indications of love, had become unbearable – they just stepped up his anxiety. So much so that when she threatened to run away, he began to wish she really would. And me ditto.’
Clement nodded. ‘And when she said she would die, he wished she really would. All guilt-inducing.’
‘So by the age of six, he’d decided that neither of his parents loved him. A terrible thing for a kid. It also meant that he was unlovable. I know he was under terrible pressure, but I can’t see how he could have been so wrong – about such an important thing, I mean.’
Clement was silent, wondering how best to explain a case he had yet to understand fully himself. The question of phenomenology came into it. This attractive woman and the room they sat in undoubtedly had objective existence; yet his cognizance of her and the room was a subjective one, contained within his head. It was our perceptions, rather than reality, which determined what we perceived. The perceptions of the infant Joseph had been directed towards all that was threatening in the behaviour of his dominating parent. But there was also a transcendental reality, and towards that Joseph had been able, finally, to fight his way. His escapes from England were unconscious elements in that fight.
‘He had to choose between conflicting signals of love and neglect. When his mother did actually desert him – though only for a short while – Joe not unreasonably assumed that she did not love him, and decided in self-defence to cling to that decision. He kept his sanity at the expense of developing a depressive psychopathology.’
‘I don’t know about that. I wish I had read more … I read a bit of Dickens, following Joe’s example, because he was interested in Dickens’s orphans, feeling himself an orphan of sorts – but Dickens isn’t intellectual, is he? Anyway, he said he was stuck in a kind of limbo, a paralysis, from the time they sent him off to his granny until he met a girl older than him, someone called Irene, during the war, when he was still at school.’
‘Yes, Irene Rosenfeld.’
‘She gave him love, poor kid, love and a little confidence. Then there was his time in the Far East – his initiation rite, he called it. I hate the mere idea of war. The thought of the bomb petrifies me. That’s why I joined CND – women have to do something if men won’t. But Joe seemed to have enjoyed his war, as you said …’ She looked questioningly at Clement.
‘There’s a mythological component to the mind. Being involved in the heroic campaigns in Burma restored Joe to a sense of his own significance he had lost as a child. Being involved in great events is perhaps necessary for psychic health. My wife’s novels sell well because they deal with great, if highly fictitious, events. It may have been good for you to be involved in the great event of Joe’s personality adventure.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ She laughed uncertainly. ‘Then after Irene there was Mandy, the Chinese woman, and his passionate affair with her. That set him on the road to emotional recovery, didn’t it? Was that mythological, too?’
‘In both cases, the woman was older and more experienced, and Joe’s role, at least initially, appears to have been rather passive – a token of his depression.’
‘He certainly wasn’t passive by the time I met him, on CND marches, let me tell you … So that was where this recurrent dream eventually led him. It was very dramatic. He saw that he had entirely misinterpreted his life – had been forced into a false position by his early bad treatment. And he came to realize that his mother was to be pitied, that in fact she was in the grip of some awful misery that could not find expression except when acted out on him.’
She turned her head to look out of the window, so that Clement was able to study her wild hair, short and curled at its tips.
‘He had to keep on telling me the tale over and over again. When Pat was asleep we used to go down the road to an Indian restaurant to eat. There he’d go over the whole thing in great detail. I think the waiters wondered what on earth we were talking about.’
Clement laughed. ‘You must have been bored. You didn’t go away again?’
‘Joe took me seriously. So I listened. I knew I was being useful.’
‘To listen is sometimes the best thing anyone can do. He would have needed your attention. You have no cause to blame yourself. Joe should have made a new will and left you something.’
Lucy made a gesture and laughed in a displeased manner. ‘Wills? No, we weren’t careful in that way. He’d found new life in himself. He didn’t think of dying. He was full of a kind of glow … I can’t convey it. He said that the whole – the whole emotional coloration of his life was altered, as a result of his forgiveness … Oh, I’m no good at explaining this, Clem – you’ll have to study what Joe set down. You and he have learning. My education was rubbish.’
‘You had the great thing, though, a sympathetic understanding of his troubles.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ She lay back against the arm of the sofa, and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Joe became very calm and relaxed, as if a great prison door had been flung open. We had a lovely New Year – he was sure it would be good.’
‘And four months later – the heart attack.’
At that, Lucy got up and walked about, looking at Clement sideways to say, ‘I’m sure all his emotional struggles wore him out. Of course, he smoked too much. You know, he wasn’t resentful or anything about what had happened. Just grateful to be free of it at last. And of course proud of having solved the problem. I don’t know if he was what you’d call happy. Not many people are. I remember he told me that some foreigner – perhaps a Frenchman he’d met – said to him that we are not as happy as we think we are, or as miserable either.’
When Clement said nothing to that, she asked rather timidly, standing before him, ‘You don’t think Joe was mad, do you, I mean, in any way? Even to the last?’
‘I admire Joe. He learnt to cope admirably with a difficult psychopathology.’
‘I don’t see exactly what that means. He did really have the vision, didn’t he? If so, there’s hope for all of us!’ She gave a brief laugh.
‘Oh, he lived by what he perceived – often a very healthy sign.’
Dissatisfied with this response, she folded her arms, and then settled again on the sofa, saying, ‘Pity the two of you weren’t closer. I wish I’d had a brother.’
‘Joe had almost nothing to do with me when I was a child, and I’m afraid it stayed that way.’
She appeared restless now that she had told the story. As she set her coffee mug down on the desk, she bit her lip – displeased, Clement thought, with the turn the conversation had taken.
‘Well, he’s dead now,’ she said.
Boisterous cries of ‘Luce!’ came from downstairs.
‘That’s Ron,’ she said, getting to her feet again. ‘Listen, Clem, I’m having problems with little Pat, always have done. Can I come and see you some time – about Pat, I mean? Would you charge me the earth?’
He got up. ‘Come to my consulting room in the centre of Oxford. I’ll give you my card. I’ll fit you in and I won’t charge you.’
‘Oh, bless you for that.’ They moved together and kissed each other, touching only for a moment, as shrill cries from below redoubled.
‘I’m grateful to you for coming over, Lucy.’
‘It was my day off. I couldn’t have poured it all out over the phone, could I? I miss Joe so much.’
‘So do I, believe it or not.’
They went downstairs together. Ron Mallock and Pat stood together in the hall, hair spiky from the water. He was not holding the child, who swung energetically from his tattooed arm.
‘We had a lovely swim, Mum,’ Pat said. ‘Next time, you’ve got to come in with us.’
‘There may not be a next time, love,’ Lucy said, taking hold of her daughter’s hand.
It was almost twelve noon when the trio left Rawlinson Road. Clement Winter went indoors, locked the front door, and returned to his study. His coffee mug and Lucy’s stood together on his desk. Her presence seemed to hover in the air.
She had engaged his sympathies. Sheila’s and his earlier perceptions of her had been mistaken, he considered; her clumsy attempt to knead Sheila’s shoulders had been compounded of social awkwardness and a genuine desire to help. She was a woman, no longer young, struggling to survive in a harsh society, a one-parent family. She needed help and advice. Her attitude to Ron Mallock suggested that she regarded him as only a temporary prop in her life … He reined his thoughts abruptly. He was also sexually attracted to her. In their farewell kiss, she had darted a thin tongue into his mouth.
He relished the memory of it. Yet their meeting had not ended in too satisfactory a way. He had withheld something, in characteristic fashion. What she had wanted, perhaps the covert reason for her visit, was to hear praise for her unusual lover. A requiem of sorts. She had needed that beacon in her difficult life, and he, the weak brother being weak again, had not provided. Her magical tale – important to her – had not been adequately rewarded.
Clement walked about unhappily. Holding people at arm’s length presented a difficulty; the length of arms required varied. He could still make amends by writing his brother’s biography. And Lucy would have to be a star witness. Sheila, if she came back, would have to put up with that arrangement.
In any case, he would see Lucy again. For the moment, staring out of the window at the horse chestnut, he allowed his fantasies free play. There were other things he had inherited from his brother – why not his bedmate? The incestuous nature of the idea was not unpleasant, spice to the dish. It would be a way of getting his own back on Joseph.
‘Oh, God!’ He held the heels of both hands to his head. So that was the reason for all the indecisiveness …
He saw again the bar of soap turning, endlessly turning, the suds dripping like saliva into the basin. Had he all along wanted to wash his hands of Joseph, and of everything that was Joseph? What mysteries we were – especially to ourselves.
This was something to discuss with Mrs Emerova on his next visit. Not that answers could be expected, but new, interesting questions would be raised.
Poor homeless Lucy. Perhaps he should sell her the Acton flat cheaply – even give it to her? That would make her grateful. His reveries flowed, thick and rich, into the new channel. If Sheila had left him for good, then he was free to do as he pleased.
He hummed a tune to himself and recognized it as a snatch from Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. The two children had been left to perish in the forest; a Hansel without any Gretel, Joseph had been left in the same way. The problem of parental cruelty was one which, for Clement, far outweighed in importance any political questions. The matter of the oppression of the powerless by the powerful in fact had strong bearing on world politics.
Impatience seized him. How typical of him it was to be pondering a general question, when he was a man newly deserted by his wife. Here he remained in the house alone, while she had gone off to play the femme fatale with a New York publisher. Bloody Sheila! Money and success had gone to her head. But if that was all there was to it, then why hadn’t she run off with someone glamorous, someone powerful? Not with little Hernandez, a jumped-up copy-editor … Green Mouth should have had more ambition. Her fans would be disappointed.
He began pacing about the study, going over the long history of his marriage. Of course he’d taken Sheila for granted. After seventeen happy years, that was part of the deal.
But it wasn’t. Not these days. Marriages were breaking down everywhere. There were more homosexuals, more lesbians, more confused, more homeless, more suicides. The nuclear family – which he and Sheila had failed to establish – was breaking up. Society was in trouble. He was victim of a trend, and rebelled against the role; it was an indignity as well as a misery.
Bloody Sheila! Why am I so slow to find my proper anger against her?
By this time, she would have met her lover off the plane. They would have had time to get from Heathrow to central London. They could have checked into a hotel by now. She liked to stay at Brown’s: perhaps they were in Brown’s. In bed. Little Hernandez would probably be underneath, as in Boston … ‘I’m enjoying it too much to stop …’
Well, never mind Joseph and his forgiveness. He was not going to forgive Sheila. She had thrown too much away, had thrown real things away for a dream, a fantasy. The nature of the real world was such that it required forgiveness; but the hard fact, against which so many of his clients wrecked themselves, was that imaginary worlds were so much more delusive, ultimately so much nastier.
He would ask Lucy back. He could find plenty of pretexts. They would have an affair. She seemed willing enough, and he could help her. Her and that slender little tongue …
He went slowly downstairs. The ache in his left leg was back. He had resented the invasion by the Strankses; now he missed them. The house was eerily silent. Still, he would not let Sheila in when she came back. If she came back. Even Mrs Flowerbury did not have a key to the door; only Sheila and he had keys. He would get on to those people in Walton Street and have the lock changed.
Thought of action cheered him. He went outside, locking the door behind him, and got the car out. Happily, he saw no sign of Alice Farrer next door. Making a conscious effort to drive slowly, he took the Mercedes down Walton Street and arranged for a locksmith to come in the morning and change the front door lock.
And if she never returned …
In his estimation, the chances were that she would return. She was basically a sensible woman, who would soon realize that she had fallen victim to her own fantasies. Facing reality would be painful, but she could do it – as she had in Berlin, long ago.
He could not bear to go home. He was too sick at heart to feel hungry. Driving up the Woodstock Road, he took the ring road round Oxford and headed for Swindon. In a short while, he turned off the main road and drove up the winding way on to the White Horse Hills.
Only a half dozen cars stood in the car park. Nobody was about: an ancient pre-English silence brooded over the scene. Clement went to look at the view towards Swindon. It was unexpectedly hazy, and little could be seen. He was isolated on a bleak grassy island. He walked about, but the chill wind usually haunting this part of the world chased him back into the car. He sat there, drumming with his fingers on the steering wheel, staring out at the immense supine mound before him. The thought occurred to him that he might drive over a steep edge with some convenience to himself and everyone else involved, but he found he was not desperate enough to do it.
Blank misery settled over him like the haze in the valley. He thought of everything and nothing. Nothing coherent came through. He wanted to leave this isolated place but could not find the motivation. His misery drove him from the car again, and he trudged up to the site of the old Roman fortress, over the close-cropped grass. A man and a boy, well wrapped up, were flying a two-string kite. When they called to him, Clement did not answer. He came back down to the Mercedes, chilled to the bone.
Goaded by cold, he drove down the hill, past sheep nibbling in the hedgerows. The time was gone four-thirty. He drank a cup of tea at a thatched tea place in Uffington. Then he walked, wandering along the network of small roads lying at the foot of the downs.
When he returned to his car, it was almost nine in the evening, and the light was going. He had no idea, no memory, of where he had been; all he knew was that he was tired and sick at heart.
‘Sheila,’ he said brokenly, but could formulate no sentence to go with her name.
By the time he tucked the car into the garage in Rawlinson Road, it was all but dark. He entered the silence of the house and locked himself in.
In the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of Mouton Cadet, more from force of habit than from desire. He found he had no taste for it. Out in the garden, two sopping brown towels lay by the side of the pool. He kicked them into the water, where they floated like drowned bodies.
Taking a book, he settled with it in a chair, only to throw it down after a few minutes, unaware of a word he had read. There seemed nothing for it but to get to bed and take a sleeping pill.
As he was approaching the stairs, he heard Sheila’s key in the front door.