18

We got married in Paris, in June 1960; and in the following September Johnny enrolled at the City of Westminster College in Victoria to study four ‘A’ levels. Less than a year later he passed them all and—having applied to Durham to read for a degree in music—he never met Sandra and was never lucky enough to have Geneviève for a colleague. In fact, Geneviève never went to Air France. Apart from all else, she was too busy bringing up babies. Anne came in 1961, Jacqueline in ’62. After a two-month honeymoon in France we had returned to live in Lincoln: a rented house in Steep Hill, quite close to the cathedral. There I studied for three years at the Theological College, which I could scarcely have managed if my parents-in-law, bless them, hadn’t been helping out financially. Life was good. Life was terrific. My wife and my daughters were as lovely as any man’s wife and daughters possibly could be. And I had very much chosen a career which suited me. My studies weren’t purely academic, either. Far from it. I spent a lot of my time getting out into the villages around Lincoln, being inducted into preaching and pastoral work, hospital-visiting, school-teaching, learning about mental health and psychiatric care—I mean, learning about them as much on the job as in the classroom. And then towards the end of my course the college found me a position in the one city which I’d been holding out for. At Petertide I was ordained as deacon in Southwell Minster and having been licensed to St Andrew’s in Nottingham I then began life as a curate. My curacy and Geneviève’s new pregnancy roughly coincided. The following year I would be twenty-seven. I wanted the baby to be born on my birthday and I prayed that it would be a boy.

Obviously I knew I must be grateful for whatever God sent, but to have a son born in Nottingham on my twenty-seventh birthday had been an overriding ambition since my late teens. More than an ambition. A necessity.

And he had to be called Arthur.

“Zut! What kind of crazy British name is that? In France they would just laugh at it. This isn’t Camelot, it’s not the Middle Ages.” Geneviève ran her finger round my ear enticingly—along the nape and round my other ear. “Darling, why can’t we have Philipe? Even Philip? I know you like Philip, you’ve already told me so.” I promised her that Philip would be the name of our next son and remained adamant on the choice of Arthur. Since, for the girls, I had wanted Sally and Rebecca, but had prudently given in to her on each occasion, she knew she wasn’t justified in denying me the name I wanted now. “Merde!” she said. “I hope that it will be a girl!” But her pout turned—as I had known it would—to giggles when I told her that even the crazy British might consider this a touch eccentric: a little girl named Arthur. It also helped that I had deliberately brought the topic up in bed and that I knew her ticklish spots and had most shamelessly exploited my knowledge.

However, I still realized there was something virtually unbalanced about the way I felt. I was objective enough to know that if I’d met anyone who had advocated a similar scenario, or even smilingly encouraged mine, I should have given them a pretty wide berth. And yet the thing was in my blood. I lived it, breathed it, thought about it as I went to sleep, thought about it when I woke.

For Arthur—of course—was to be my means of recompense to Brian Douglas: the son he’d never had, never could have had, but who was going to make his dream come true—as literally, that is, as lay within my grasp and within Arthur’s own predisposition and abilities. A senseless vow maybe, made to myself, not even to the man whom I had so finally, if ambivalently, sinned against…or in any case not made to him directly. Senseless and perhaps inordinately presumptuous.

Yet wholly inescapable.

Or so it had seemed.

But also… Wasn’t it significant that from the time I’d made my vow I hadn’t once been troubled by that nightmare? A nightmare hitherto relentless?

Okay, this could well have been psychological. Yet, even so, I saw it as a sign.

Though again I agree: I was always fairly good at spotting signs.

On the 20^th of March 1964 I wrote a letter to my former English master and sent it via his publishers. It was a short letter in which I simply told him I had read his poems and how very much some of them had meant to me—and in which I asked if we might meet, possibly in London. I don’t know which was dominant, my sadness or my guilt, when two days later I received an answer not from him but from his editor, to the effect that Humphrey Hawk-Genn had “very tragically passed away on March 9^th,” barely a fortnight earlier, “just when he seemed to be getting fully into his stride, potentially a most tremendous loss to the world of English letters.” I was shaken, and castigated myself for days because I hadn’t written sooner. There wouldn’t have been a thing to stop me. But I’d thought I still had plenty of opportunity and hadn’t made allowance for the fact that time so often caught me out: either by the sheer rapidity of its passing or, indeed, by the exact opposite. Still. Since my feelings of shame and inadequacy, which even prayer apparently could do little to exorcise, were obviously of no value to anyone, it was as well that by then my birthday was approaching and that things about the house were hectic: Geneviève was expecting to go into labour at literally any moment.

And she did so—most wonderfully—at 9pm on March 27^th; and our child was born a little under six hours later. And he was our first boy and when he was merely minutes old Geneviève held him to her with tears in her eyes and whispered, “Oh, mon petit mignon, que tu es beau! Tu es tellement beau, mon chéri, que je te pardonne immédiatement que tu t’appelle Arthur.”