Chapter 21

I waited for Paul in the portraits room. The women and children there were strangers to me still, waiting themselves, it seemed, pink-cheeked from the outside world, in the vestibule of the dark laboratory. I had hardly been to see them since that first half-conscious visit, stumbling from the early shock of Luc. They were the beginning of the tour, spirits of the happy region the painter had left behind. They looked out, from their background of indecipherable old tapestry, like figures from a sunlit ante-bellum, suspecting nothing. The children especially, girl-cousins and long-legged boys, were stirring and faunal, for all their blue-ribboned hats and courtly knee-breeches. Orst captured their restlessness, the brevity of the repose he had exacted from them, penned in a deep corner of the sofa, or in a fur-edged coat and hat as if just returned from a winter walk alive with new knowledge, hands behind back pressing the door to, the attention barely held. He discovered the girl in his mother, also, though the swept-back hair was grey, the skin silvery-soft above the high white collar. Her eyes were cast down Memling-like on an open book, her cheek flushed as if by a first compliment.

Paul came in with his briefcase and trilby. We were going up to Brussels together, where we would see on Orst sculpture that was due to be auctioned, and I would go on to a chat with Martin Altidore that filled me with apprehension laced with furtive eagerness. Paul handed me the catalogue with the place marked, and I looked at the photo of the naked plaster torso, disingenuously called "Printemps", and the high-class patter beneath, "une de ses très rares uvres plastiques". I went out to the car wondering if I could possibly have converted the estimate rightly.

For a minute or so I found something inexplicably comic in the sight of Paul at the wheel of his desirable little Alfa Giulietta—upright and circumspect, as though he still remembered his lessons. I'm afraid it communicated itself in some way and sharpened his edginess. I did what I could, admired the car, then talked blandly about the town in the winter morning light—though once we were free of the outskirts I saw how little I missed it, what a ghost city it was, now Luc had gone. I felt a dread of living on there without him, the pointless months, the paralysis of ingrown failure.

"No news of the Altidore boy?" said Paul, out of some subtle and forgiving sympathy.

I turned my head and watched the slow wheeling-past of the farmlands, each shed and bungalow and leafless poplar bald and staring with his absence. "Nothing at all."

I was aware of Paul watching me for a moment. "You're very in love with him, aren't you?"

Poplars, a windmill, a level-crossing. "Yes—yes, I am."

A slowing, waiting, then overtaking. "I'm so sorry—sorry, that is, that you must be going through hell."

Paul was unembarrassed by my crying, or sensed the gleam of relief through its drizzle, the snivelling smile that welcomed comfort. "It must have been . . . obvious!"

"Oh, not at all. Or hardly. I think in retrospect perhaps I wondered, or had little glimpses that I failed to make anything of at the time."

"Quite often I thought you'd seen."

"It was Lilli who told me. You know, you left some of the boy's clothes mixed up with your wash. It was only then I realised that you were having an affair."

"Ah . . ."

"Don't worry, she won't tell anyone. I assume it is a secret."

"Urn—I don't think his mother would be very pleased."

"One can imagine the effect on her needlework," said Paul quietly, not sure if a joke was allowed. I gave a grateful low guffaw.

We drove on in silence, an expectant silence, whilst I wondered if I dared say more. I fingered the catch of the glove-box abstractedly.

"Rodney told me he'd seen you together in a bar," said Paul, so that I thought he had just been softening me up before the serious trouble could begin.

"I was very rude to him. I suppose he's been what he'd call researching me, has he? He probably thinks I've bumped Luc off. I'm sorry, but he's a nightmare—Rodney."

"I suppose he's not perhaps very . . . " mumbled Paul, trying to adjust to what was clearly an unexpected view of his new employee. "Anyway, that isn't the point—he just appeared very concerned about the boy's whereabouts. He was asking Marcel all about your expedition."

I thought, I'm too upset already to have to think about Rodney young. "I can't explain," I snapped. "He's just my bête noire." Paul made a "Sorry I mentioned it" face, and went on at once:

"I'm not criticising you, my dear Edward. I don't know if what you've done is right or not. Some would say that you are in a position of trust in the Altidore household, as you are in ours, and that such a trust hardly envisages your starting an affair with your pupil."

I muttered my fatalistic tag, "It happens, it happens." It would have been too feebly extenuating, too woundingly true, to have said that it was the boy who had seduced me.

"Of course it happens. I know it happens. Really what I want to say is that it does not alter or diminish my trust in you at all." The curiously formal language with which Paul entered this new phase of candour.

"Thank you." I glanced at him and saw that he was stiff with nerves; I began some further socially graceful acknowledgement, but he cut across it with the already prepared continuation of his speech, perhaps with a tiny stutter of delay—

"No, it's all quite fascinating to me. May I—there's something I'd rather like to tell you."

We were nearing another small city, large signs gathered to explain the inescapable choices we had to make. I gazed out across fields, depots, the sun-reflecting car-parks of factories, to the cluster of gothic towers like a bungled version of our own. I felt a certain reluctance to listen to Paul. My mind was running on ahead to the meeting with Martin, which I imagined would test me a good deal more thoroughly than this one with Paul. I thought Paul could be using this hour to rehearse me, as if for a viva after a wobbly exam. I didn't want the journey to be over too soon, but at the same time I fidgeted to be out of the car. I suspected what he was going to say would be one of those admissions the teller considers to be "oddly similar" to your own and which, offered as proof of sympathy, serve only to rob your predicament of its force and singularity.

As if I hadn't heard him, I said, "I'm terribly worried about seeing Martin Altidore."

I felt him flinch from my rebuff—for a second I recalled the atmosphere of scenes in the car, the two parties strapped in their positions, glaring forwards. But when he spoke it was in a tone of negotiation: "I can see it's difficult"; and after a moment he reached out and patted me on the arm just as I moved it. "Are you thinking of coming clean?"

"No. Not unless it's clear that he knows—if Luc's said something, or . . . I don't think anybody need know apart from me and him—and you. To be honest, I'm pretty certain his running off has nothing to do with him and me being . . . " (I couldn't quite pronounce Paul's happy version of events). "It's to do with other things. I don't want to muddy the water by appearing to incriminate myself."

"Altidore could hardly object," said Paul, "after everything he's done. You know, the poor mother must be sick of being run away from. But I think you're quite right. You're being truthful to yourself, and that needn't call for exhaustive or unnecessary truthfulness to others." There was a long pause in which I ran mis-trustfully over this welcome advice. "I've never told anyone about my first affair, because it would have caused distress and served no purpose—it would have been . . . gratuitously honest." His discomfort was palpable, his determination dried his mouth and gave an odd new depth to his voice. I was being callous: he had planned to be listened to; but even so I wanted to let him off the hook, spare him these abrupt breaths and incessant mirror-checkings. Perhaps he could tell me about it on a later day, when we weren't so busy, weren't riding steadily above the speed-limit. "I do think that, don't you? One mustn't mistake brutality for honesty, as so many young people do nowadays, or impertinence for wit, incidentally! Oh, in my case it was a summer's passion, when I was seventeen too, as it happens—with an older man." So there he went with the oddly similar—and brought out lightly after nearly half a century, in a tone not practised but certainly rehearsed, it caught my sympathy. I could see what it had cost him, though not yet why.

If I still failed to encourage him it was because I didn't want to seem crudely eager for the details—I didn't quite know in what terms to express an interest. I assumed an indefinably sham expression of sober receptiveness. "Tell me about it if you're sure you want to," I said. He nodded irritably, but then waited, as though struck unexpectedly by the margin of doubt my words allowed for. Or perhaps the rehearsed words had died on him, or turned into nonsense with time. My head was a little on one side, I was focusing on his predicament, which seemed to grow and become more inexpressible as a full minute passed, and then another. The tension became rather sickly and embarrassing then, and I couldn't look at him. I found myself shifting and gazing out of the side-window while my own briefly arrested spools of anxiety and regret started up again. I made some trivial remark, but he didn't reply, only held up his hand in that gesture of his that called for patience and consideration. We raced on for maybe a quarter of an hour, switching rather madly from lane to lane, Paul hunched forward as if the road demanded all his attention. I thought, if he's waited fifty years, what's fifteen minutes? But Brussels was already beginning to rise around us and inflict its own further squeeze of anxiety.

Paul said, "Do you know where I mean by the Hermitage?"

"Yes, I do," I said, with a relieved smile that he turned for a second to see, and thought perhaps was satirical.

"Oh, I daresay it's very routine to you. I believe it's very busy, what's the word, very cruisy these days."

"It's not part of my routine. I've been there once and got completely lost and freezing cold and had . . ."—well, I mustn't mistake brutality for honesty. "I had a hopeless time. I've sometimes thought of going back in the daylight, just to look at the trees, but I've never quite got round to it."

"It is a lovely park. There's only a fragment of the Hermitage itself left, very badly restored"—his confidence quickened with that professional phrase—"but fine avenues and a canal, and the remains of a round garden with a basin that is fed by a natural spring, and alcoves of yew—it's like a three-dimensional Fragonard."

"Yes, I think I saw all of that on my, probably rather drunken, peregrinations."

"I just heard someone mention it at school," said Paul, with a swift compression of time that it took me a moment to catch up with. "I pretended to take no notice, but like a lot of the boys I was fairly preoccupied with all that. This boy said that someone in the town, a shopkeeper who was very obliging to the Germans, was always going there in the evening. He went on with quite a detailed account, until he started to get funny looks—You know, it seemed he knew too much." He gave me a quick smile that was all at odds with the expression of his eyes. "Anyway, the idea took hold with me. I became somewhat obsessed with the Hermitage, though I knew I would never dare ask about it directly; I used to provoke other people into mentioning it, and then make a great thing about how I'd never want to go there. Which, of course, is what I finally did, one Saturday evening in early May of 1944; and not before establishing elaborate alibis to Maurice and Lilli and stuffing my head with excuses in case I should meet anyone I knew. As I told you before, we all found we were quite brave in the war, but I had only been brave up to then in obvious common causes—never for myself. I was almost running up to complete strangers to explain what I was pretending to be doing."

I laughed and thought of running out late to Dawn, under the wood's edge; I felt a certain delicacy, as if the tables were turned, and held back from contributing my own oddly similar anecdotes in support of what he said. I thought I'd quite like to see photographs of him at that age. There was something of the same self-conscious bravery in him now.

"Well, I won't spin it out, but I crept round, and the trees were all coming into leaf—you couldn't see far through the wood, and I couldn't in fact see anybody at all. I wondered what I would do if I did meet someone, and exactly how it was that whatever they did was done. If ever I go back there—oh, with Lilli and Marcel, on a Sunday morning!—I hear the wind in the trees and that reminds me in an instant of what it was like, alone, entering an empty avenue. The light was beginning to go, and so, I thought, must I; I knew that after dark was more likely to be the time, but I started to think none the less that my inadvertent school informant was wrong about the place. Then I saw a man stride across the glade straight in front of me—a young man, I would think now, probably about twenty-five, but old to a boy of course." I sighed resentfully, and remembered my own provoking faux-pas about Paul's age, out at St Vaast. "He caught sight of me and without slowing up called out a greeting, and went on into the trees.

"I wasn't sure quite what had happened. I stood there for some time weighing up things like what time it was against the obvious fact that he appealed to me, even if he wasn't my absolute ideal; which in turn was balanced by the likelihood that he was only out for a walk—a workman from town perhaps. But in that case there could certainly be no harm in following him.

"So I did take the path under the trees, and there, just a few paces on, the man had stopped—he was half-hidden by a great beech-trunk he was leaning behind. And so—one thing happened; and then another thing . . ."

I felt slightly cheated by this brisk curtailment, as though the dusk and the foliage hid these happenings from me—but perhaps glad, too, that Paul hadn't forced himself to say. I merely hummed approval.

"Well, they were the first shocks of sexual reality for me—a man's large hands, a man's rough chin and cheeks, as well as all the rest. I was not a little confused, my dear Edward, and terribly aware of doing wrong. But I found I was excited by the risk. And then afterwards what inflamed me, as much as the guy's big prick and everything, was his gentleness, like being cradled and protected by some great giant. I'm sure in memory I've exaggerated that difference—I must have been fully grown myself; but Willem was a big man. I'm sure there was that class thing, too, which you're supposed to have so much worse than us—the place and the event conspired to make me think of him as a, what's the word, a woodlander."

I felt it flourish, from deep nostalgic roots, and cast a dappled shadow across glass and concrete, slow-moving Africans outside discount stores, scaffolders high up. The whole recollection was beautiful, affirmative—it was hard to see why Paul had left it lying so long in the briars and the loam. "So you saw him again."

"I probably would have wanted to, because of course I was a young romantic and to me ten minutes with a handsome stranger was clearly the same as true love, and besides it had the romantic complexities of danger, and sin, as I suppose I thought of it then. I can see now that it also conformed to the sense one had in those years that everything important was secret, and so anything secret must surely be important."

"It wasn't a game."

"Actually, it was he who asked to see me again. I didn't reallse at the time, because to me he was marvellous, but he must have thought himself pretty lucky to get a fresh and well, quite nice-looking seventeen-year-old, don't you think? Anyway, it seemed that we had fallen in love." I was silent, rather shaken. Paul went on quickly, "This probably sounds foolish to you—all I can say is it was wildly unusual then."

"Not at all," I said warmly, to allay the recurrent note of uncertainty, as though he felt he couldn't measure up to some fast and cynical standard he imagined me to hold. I couldn't say without condescension how touched I was by his doubting, pedantic candour.

We mounted the pavement and swung into the low mouth of a buried car-park. At each turn of the hairpin descent the Alfa's tyres squealed. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth level that spaces showed—Paul backed into a bay and stilled the engine and we sat looking out into the shadowy coffered perspective, shuttered concrete, stripes of yellow light, the weight of silent floors above.

"Well, we kept seeing each other, Willem and I. I managed it because I had to. Often I used my visits to poor old Edgard Orst as a cover—I went to him for ten minutes in the afternoon and left the old fellow babbling and confused to cycle out to the Hermitage. We didn't think we dared meet elsewhere—in fact it was the perfect place. He came from a village a mile or two out, and lived with his old father. I outwitted everybody, at the same time being barely able to believe they couldn't tell something was up. It went on for a couple of months—of heaven and madness. We didn't at first, but later we did . . . everything with each other. Our meetings themselves were always terribly brief—I think we can hardly have talked."

I realised I was flinching with envy from Paul's account. I thought of my own two months of paralysed trepidation with Luc, nothing in them beyond talk, and the pointless wondering, now, if I should have moved at once, leaned very early on into his milky coffee breath . . .

"Then one day I was walking to school with Maurice. We were crossing the Grote Markt, making our usual jokes about the soldiers—just to ourselves; there was a group of them quite near, the local militia, and I knew already, just because I loved him and would have known the shape of him among a hundred strangers, that one of them was Willem. He had his back to me, he was talking with his fellows, smoking—how stupid they were, Maurice and I agreed, and how little time they had left, now that the Allies had landed in France and would be here within weeks. We had an image of huge, blond, actually rather Aryan-looking Americans sweeping into town on tanks, mowing down the Fascists at the same time as they gathered us up to ride with them above the crowd. That was my image, anyway. I think I rather hoped for a, well, a special relationship with one of the Liberators. And now I was plunged into confusion—I don't know, my guilt was suddenly ten times deeper, it was proved, it was in uniform; but at the same time there was a defiant thrill, as if I was a kind of double agent myself; and then there was the thought that this great big boy really, who was moved by strong passions of his own and was rather daring, a bit of an original, was about to be swept away by the good Americans and Canadians—I wanted to hold their advance back, perhaps the Germans would rally. Then a moment later I knew again that I was hopelessly wrong."

Paul's knuckles were white on the wheel, he was staring narrowly forwards like someone driving too fast through fog, weighing urgency against prudence. "Did he see you then?"

"I didn't think he had. I was completely distracted that day; and I couldn't sleep at all that night. Whenever I hear the phrase 'a sleepless night' it is that one that comes back to me, which lasted for ever, though it was a short summer night, with Maurice across the room, who was in far greater danger than me, sleeping peacefully. I went through every possibility and in the end I decided I would have to give Willem up. But I decided that I had to try one desperate measure, and ask him to renounce the Fascists before it was too late. I thought maybe I could save his life. I spent many hours running through the words I would say and bringing all the arguments of love to bear. My wildest plan was to persuade him to become an informer, I thought I could introduce him to my father, with his contacts in the underground, although I knew that would be to risk the lives of hundreds of other people. I felt the most dreadful weight on my heart, that I had to make such decisions and know such things when I was so young. I suppose the truth was I had to grow up over night, and I rightly doubted whether I was able to.

"The next evening I cycled out to the Hermitage, but he didn't come. I waited at our usual place till it was almost dark—I remember there were noises of other people moving about, I was afraid I would be found." Paul spread his fingers as if to conjure up the woodland maze in front of us, with all its blind options. "I was acting with a strong, if very romantic, sense of honour. My mind then, as I've said, was full of chivalrous imaginings, though now they carried a darker burden.

"I think it must have been a couple of days later that I went round to see Orst in the afternoon, after school. All I really recall of it is a scene of curtained gloom, rather as if he'd disappeared into one of his own prints, if you can imagine—so little light that the colour was closed out of things. The old housekeeper said he was much worse, the doctor who came to him secretly had warned them he probably didn't have long. I wasn't sure why they'd plunged him into semi-darkness, since the ought meant nothing to him. I suppose it was a symbolic or superstitious gesture. It was frightening in a way, but I think I was too preoccupied with my other fears to care, and anyway prided myself on the secret access I had to him and on my good-heartedness in coming at all. Nothing he said made sense, except perhaps a suggestion that I was beginning to neglect him, which I tried to brush away as just another of his paranoid delusions. He was full of plans around then for a holiday at the seaside—I think they were mainly what he talked about, what's the phrase, 'among the deepening shades'.

"When I came out of the house Willem and another soldier were standing just across the street. I was an accomplished pretender by then, but I know I jumped guiltily, or looked astonished enough for the other soldier to call me over. He made me show my papers, asked me whose house I had just come from, and what I was doing. I said I'd been visiting the old cook and housekeeper, whom I helped with various things. We looked back at that very big house, and I was glad of the curtains and shuttered upper windows. I didn't dare catch Willem's eye, whilst he said that the house had already been searched, and that the degenerates had fled, and that it was in the care of a couple who came of good Flemish stock—which seemed a lot for him to know about it. The mass deportations of the Jews were going on all that summer—by then they thought they'd pretty well got them all, so I suppose they attached more glory to finding any who were left; in fact there were thousands hidden, but they were getting nervous about. . . the end. I got on my bicycle, and as I moved away Willem called out 'A nice evening for a ride', and then I looked back and saw him smiling, and the other fellow frowning suspiciously still.

"So I took that as a sign and went out later to our meeting-place. He was there waiting, but in uniform. 'You know now,' he said, and looked rather ashamed as I undid the jacket and took it off him, horrible brown stuff. I thought I couldn't do anything with him, but then I found I could, just as usual. After we had . . . made love, he tried to make me put his jacket on, he wanted me to be a little soldier, he said. I did put on the jacket and sat there in the undergrowth with the prickly cloth against my skin and talked and talked to him. I remember the surprise and novelty of that for us both. But not what I said. The truth is I went through it so many thousands of times afterwards, slowly pressing it into a new and less accusing shape, rather as a carpenter or boatmaker steams and twists the wood into the curve he needs. I won't pretend now to know what reasoning I used or what evidence I produced. I know most of what I remember is what I made up later, to my own advantage."

"Well, you were only trying to help." I felt my nerves about Luc's father focusing on Paul's predicament—I was trying to justify myself as well with this bland remark.

"The next morning I woke up knowing I had done something terrible. I slipped out very early and cycled round to Orst's place as fast as possible: I had to warn them that the house was being watched. When I turned the corner—into our street—I saw a van parked, a group of people outside the front door, soldiers, a tall Gestapo officer who was well known in the town, the Gruppenleiter, as well as various neighbours. It was most imprudent of me, but I couldn't keep back—I should have turned away at once, my father had drummed into me how I must never involve myself unnecessarily. I came up to the edge of the group, and just then the dear old couple were brought out and pushed into the van. They didn't see me, but the image of their silent terror makes me ache to this day. There was a long pause, a stoical illusionless pause on the part of the neighbours; though they were curious too, there was a miserable sense of occasion, that something so hidden was about to be brought to light. When Orst came out, they all crossed themselves, Willem was pushing him in his wheelchair, though he was dead, and bounced and lolled as the wheels went over the cobbles. His face was bloodless and his eyes wide open: he seemed to stare angrily, his mouth was open in a sneer. There was a smell, and the women lifted their aprons to their faces. It was grotesque, but the faith of the bystanders was equal to the challenge—it was quietly stated among them who he was, tears were shed, prayers were muttered, the spectacle was taken in without flinching.

"Then the soldiers hoisted the body, the painter, up into the van in his chair, and he stayed for a moment, before the doors were slammed, as if he was sitting in judgment, it was pointless my hiding in the crowd, he could see me now though he never had before. I was in that mad shocked state when your head is full of rhetorical voices: he seemed to be bitterly asking me, as he always used to, what it was I had seen in the street, what colour the clouds were now. Then he was gone—they were all gone. Later the bodies of the servants could be claimed for burial. Orst as you know has no tomb."

No tomb. How often I had failed to register the negative evidence, the white canvas, the invisible wingbeat that flutters the page. "But what had happened?"

"That, my dearest Edward, I do not know." And he glanced at me keenly for a second, as though I might at last be able to tell him. "Willem must have known. I watched him standing by the van, and I remember thinking how well I knew him, physically. I saw through his dreadful uniform. I knew just how his shoulders moved, and how the hairs grew on his chest and at the bottom of his back, and between his legs. I knew where his appendix scar was, and the rings of his vaccination on the upper arm. I knew what he could do with those big limbs in his other life, his love life. In spite of disaster all that still seemed a triumph. You'll think I'm mad. He could have walked over then and arrested me; he saw me weeping in the crowd and maybe didn't know it was not for Orst but for him. He gave me a look, but he didn't betray me."

"But he already had betrayed you!"

"Well, I don't think he betrayed me to anything like the same degree as I betrayed Edgard Orst, and the blameless people who protected him."

"And you can't be sure you were responsible—the house was being watched, you don't know how he died . . ."

"But how does one know what one is responsible for? It seems to me a youngster cannot know. He picks up an older person's life and then—he is distracted, self-absorbed, over-zealous, or perhaps quite unreflecting, he's no idea what he's doing—lets it drop."

For all the humiliations Paul was owning up to, I felt again his subtle grasp on life, the quick intelligence that was impotent against his own problems, which it could only watch and bemoan. And then the confession itself was so hopelessly belated, kept back, by some begrudging mechanism, until the secret it enshrined had spread and shadowed his existence almost to the end. I felt properly sorry for him, but was aware too that the long perspective of his revelations made him faintly unattractive to me. I sighed and shook my head and wondered if there was some way in which I could politely dissociate our two predicaments. "Now let's go and see this sculpture of his," he said.

We waited in silence for the lift to rattle down. I knew I was failing to make the capable response, and sensed his disconcertment—it was tinged with a panic that he overrode with a fresh avowal: "I can't quite explain how it is that you've helped me so much with all this, but you have—oh, you've helped in a dozen ways with the proofs and your patient work, but that's not quite it." He hesitated. "I've sometimes felt like protracting the catalogue even longer, just to keep you busy and looking after me, to keep us looking after each other." There was a ping! and the doors slid open on to an aroma of cigar-smoke, like the still fresh trace of a wanted man. We stood inside, the doors closed, and after a second or two of ascent Paul kissed me on the cheek and flung his arms around me, banging his briefcase against the small of my back. I stared over his shoulder at my reflection in the lift's steely wall.

I found "Printemps" quite sinister, a little smaller than life-size, with a steady grey eye and a torrent of red hair. The right breast was shiny and worn, as if often rubbed, like the burnished toe of a saint, by day-dreaming devotees. The figure ended at the knee and stood on a dulled and chipped get plinth. It gave a troubling sense of merely suspended animation, as though waiting to catch the viewer off-guard. I felt there should be a slot in the base for a coin that would set the head nodding, the eyes rolling, the lower lip and chin dropping and snapping shut; perhaps it would utter a slow, repeating laugh; then it would freeze again, just as it was, with the mockery and promise of its stare and its smile.