18

Perhaps it was fear of drowning in the poisonous flower-trap of Naples that was responsible for the dream I had that night. Fear was my inseparable companion in one form or another—and it has many forms.

A pervasive presence in this dream was a woman called Pat, whom I did not see but knew to be living in the desolate aftermath of an unhappy love affair with the president, he too invisible. I was approaching Pat’s ruined cottage, which I knew in my dream represented her ruined life. In the abandoned garden was an old Morris Minor, half submerged in water. The garden itself had sunk and flooded, and I found myself standing chest-high in black water, tepid, not unpleasant. A woman who was not Pat appeared beside me and told me to look at my legs. I succeeded somehow in getting one leg out of the water. It was naked and covered with black centipede shapes printed on the skin. I felt a horrified repugnance and knew that I had stayed too long in the water. Rising before me was a sort of stone column, not very tall. If I could climb that, I could get out of the water. I had to embrace the column in order to climb. But the stones were loose, they crumbled in my hands, I kept slipping back. Surmounting the column, outlined against the sky, a figure leaning towards me, a shimmer of light on his chest. He leans towards me, but he does not offer to help. He is leaning to watch me, not to help me. He is faceless, some suggestion of wispy hair. He is wearing the same cocked hat, I feel the same terror as he brings his face nearer.

I woke from this sweating profusely, and for some time afterwards I groaned to myself in the darkness. Thoughts of my dead father came into my mind, and I was stricken with a sense of irreparable loss, as if something immensely valuable, irreplaceable, had slipped from my grasp and shattered beyond mending. It was myself I grieved for, what I might have been to him; I suppose I knew that then. It was the same grief that coloured my dreams, all-enveloping, too pervasive to be contained, an element of weather, like mist or dew.

Memories spring without warning or bidding into the mind, near and far, real and fabricated, all weeds in the same garden. There was no definite moment of transition, no moment when you saw him cross the great divide. There should be a moment, there must be a moment. The one detectable change was when his face lost that cruelty of keenness, of questioning. He died then.

So many things realized too late, understood too long after. I thought he was concerned with truth. A May afternoon, late May, I was seven years old—it was the year after my stay at the hospital. Another of those country walks, but this time my mother was with us and it was in Cambridgeshire, where her parents lived.

Childhood memories are so helplessly subject to tampering. So difficult not to take a chisel to them, or a brush. Sure memory of it is only sunlight, of being first high up as we walked, then low down between the hawthorn bushes, my mother in a light blue summer coat, no hat, her hair loose, blown sometimes across her face. Later days of similar weather must have got into the picture, but to me the essence of May is concentrated in that afternoon of broken cloud and hazy sunshine, the silver gleam of the birches, the hawthorn blossom everywhere in profusion, pink and white, accompanying us along the path like a prodigal bridal.

We had driven out to Devil’s Dyke, to where the road crosses the dyke on the Newmarket Downs, not far from the racecourse. The footpath ran along the top of the dyke and it was high at first, you could see a long way across the downs on either side. To children from London the openness was exhilarating, the broad views, the vast sky crisscrossed with singing larks. The larks were stitching up the sky, so my mother said, that day or another. Who had torn it? Some giant, I imagined. I am not sure, she said; perhaps it tears itself. But the larks are busy stitching it up. Smiling, flushed with the sun, her reddish brown hair falling sometimes across her face. Blue eyes, like mine.

Then the dyke flattened down into wooded gullies, with clumps of alder and scrub willow. Names not belonging to that day, learned later. The path was more winding, less clearly defined, there were possibilities of detours and shortcuts. My father set Monty and me on to a game of his own devising, in retrospect totally characteristic of him, a game of observing and competing and reporting. Perhaps he had seen that we were flagging. In any case, a good way of getting rid of us for a while. We were to go on ahead, take careful mental note of everything, and return to make a full report.

It was seductive, to be an explorer, to break new ground before the adults, to be able, just for once, to tell them something they didn’t know, couldn’t know. I remember the excitement of running ahead. I kept close to Monty at first, thinking that if I looked where he looked I would see what he saw, a tactic wholly mistaken—I could not know what messages were being conveyed to him, and he, wanting to outshine me, offered no clues.

So I developed ambitions of my own, and from the very beginning they were enormous. I wanted to have something outstanding to report. I wanted to find another pathway, one that nobody else knew about, a sort of secret alternative to the one we were on. Did it start there, the fascination with the parallel track, the private access, a life to run alongside my own life?

Down into those wooded hollows, plunging down, looking for the big scoop. Cardinal error, looking for what you hope to find rather than looking at what is there before you. My father would not have made that error, nor did Monty. I was lost in the confusion of detail, not knowing the names of things. Flowers, birdsong, broken sunlight.

Meanwhile my brother, sober and methodical, three years older, not distracted by grand designs, pursued his observations. When I saw him run back I ran after him, wanting somehow to share in the credit, but then I had nothing to report, I stood silent under a blank sky. Monty had seen tracks of a dog, a big dog, in a place where the ground was soft; he had seen a colony of ants in a dead tree; he had seen briar roses in the hedge. He brought back, concealed till the moment of presentation, a pheasant’s tail feather, a piece of the chalk on which the downs rested. Good work, Monty. Try again, Charles—use your eyes, boy, you must learn to use your eyes.

But my eyes were clotted with failure. My mother was smiling, but she knew what I was feeling, she knew my distress. Did I know hers? So difficult, across this ocean of time, to see her, to know. She spoke very quietly to me, a little aside. Perhaps you will see some oxlips. The yellow flowers with leaves like primroses. Not among the trees, they grow on the banksides. They like the chalk, you know. My father could not hear, but he saw, he guessed. No special treatment, Dorothy. The boy must learn to use his eyes. But I knew that with my eyes I could not win.

I knew there were creatures called moles, and they fascinated me because they were black and blind and had a mysterious alternative life under the ground. What more triumphant thing than to see one in broad daylight? I reported that I had seen a mole.

My father’s face at once took on a certain gleam. I think he understood from the beginning that I had made it up, but he didn’t say so, he expressed no hint of scepticism, offered me no joking way of escape. That was not his way. No, he led me on with questions, friendly questions.

Gracious me, a mole. Did you hear that, Dorothy? What was it like?

I said it was little and velvety-black and explained that it kept its nose close to the ground as it went along because it couldn’t see very well.

What was it doing when you saw it?

I said it was just walking along; it was enjoying the sunshine after being in its dark burrow underground.

Is that all it was doing, just walking along?

Some hint of disappointment in my father’s voice. My report was not dramatic enough. I said that I had seen it eating something.

Really? Now that is really interesting. What was it eating?

I think my mother attempted to intervene at this point. I have a vague memory of some words, an expression of remonstrance on her face as she looked at my father. But he was enjoying the game too much.

No, no, fair play. The boy must be allowed to make his report. What was it eating?

I said it was eating a piece of sandwich. It seemed reasonable—I had seen scraps of old picnics blown down there.

The trap was closed. My father’s face lost its smile. Moles don’t eat sandwiches. Look me in the eye, Charles. You didn’t see any mole at all, did you?

I didn’t see any mole, Monty said. I was in the same place that he was and I didn’t see any mole.

You know how imaginative he is, my mother said. Don’t be hard on him, he got carried away.

You told us a deliberate lie, didn’t you? The whole thing was a lie.

Still that gleam of alertness about his face. Not anger, not reproach. He was interested, he was waiting for my confession. Then the moment of inspiration. No, I said, it wasn’t a lie, it was a trick. His face changed as I spoke. This was unexpected, it was not part of the entertainment.

Come, you must learn to face up to things. Admit it was a lie and we’ll say no more about it.

Not a lie, a trick, it was a TRICK.

I was afraid of him in all his moods, but that afternoon I was afraid of humiliation more. This was the fear that made me obstinate, that gave me one of the few triumphs of my childhood. For I did not retract.

He was enraged. He had been ready to put the rabbit out of its misery, but if I would not admit to being a liar, where was the rabbit? He made me walk back on my own, behind the others, in disgrace. Until you own up, until you learn to face the music. But I never did own up.

It was not that I thought him in the wrong or myself in the right. At the time I believed his anger was due to outraged principle, my failure to face the music and so on. Only much later did I come to understand the true nature of my offence: I had spoiled his game. But I knew even then, as I trailed behind the others, forlorn but unrepentant trickster, knew that I had held out against an adversary immensely more powerful on his own ground and I had done it by not yielding, not admitting—I had done it by not showing. I began to learn the lesson then: reveal yourself and you are lost, you are crushed. It is by concealment that we avoid the fate of the rabbit under the boot.