SO THE TELESALES JOB brought me very little, and I was still without a bank card. It was humiliating to have to search for lost pennies underneath my armchair cushion just to have enough to buy a sandwich. After four days of living on bread and jam I decided to phone Uncle Karl and arrange dinner at his house in Chelsea. We both knew the begging drill; we had done it before.
I have loved Chelsea ever since I first went there for Uncle Karl’s wedding party, at the age of thirteen. The tall, Victorian apartment buildings impart a childlike, fairy-tale feeling, like walking in a forest of wardrobes. From these buildings, with magical speed, richly dressed ladies emerge, as if all they do inside is put on and take off expensive clothes. Inside, Karl’s house is how I imagine all Chelsea houses to be: an enormous drawing room looking onto the rich street, a primitive and unused kitchen, a lovely bathroom on the second floor with curling, telephonic taps and hoses. Sofas in jungly chintzes (birds of paradise), thickly lined curtains heavy enough to wrap a corpse in, immovable furniture, beautiful old carpets worn in places down to little lyres of parallel strings, and on the dining-room table heavy silver cutlery, tarnished as if it has been drowned in ancestral lakes for a century.
Uncle Karl has done a very good job of impersonating an aristocrat. I’ve always felt close to him. First, we are both subject to delusions of grandeur. He knows very well that in
my dreams I would come from a distinguished family, would be able to tell you what the Buntings were doing during the Reformation, or at least the Counter-Reformation; and knows well that, things being less than ideal, I am barely able to tell you what the Buntings were doing during the Industrial Revolution. (Schoolteaching, as far as I can make out.) Second, and consequently, we both love fine things—food, fabrics, furniture. And, third, we are twins in thought—he a secular Jew, I a secular Christian. He generally dealt with my parents’ Christianity by treating it as a form of madness, of an admittedly benign, English kind. As far as he is concerned, religion is something invented by the priests, the rabbis, the mullahs, an enormous international caravan spreading war and hatred and inquisition across the sands of the world. Briefly a lawyer before going into art dealing, he once said, in lawyerly fashion, that the New Testament, if indeed a final testament, had been “so badly drafted that it had given rise to two thousand years of vicious litigation,” a mot so bon that I have copied it into my BAG.
Father told me about Karl’s life when I was a teenager. He came to England in 1939, when he was eight. His parents put him on a train in Berlin, and he never saw them again. At Harwich, he was among a group of Jewish children who were “viewed” and “selected” by English parents, in a manner that now seems to me a strange inversion of the famous sixth-century story told to us as schoolchildren, of how Pope Gregory came upon a group of English slave-children for sale in Rome, and, struck by their fair hair and blue eyes, asked which land they came from, and then requested that Christ’s word be taken to this benighted country.
Karl was “selected” by a wealthy London family who, unimaginably, sent him away to a boys’ boarding school for
a proper English education. Karl never talks about these early childhood experiences and I never ask, but my father told me that Karl stood every day with the other boys after breakfast, waiting for letters from their parents to be handed to them. For six months there were letters from Germany, and then there were none, though Karl could not stop hoping and quietly wept in the lavatories after these morning sessions. The picture stayed in my mind, and returns to me often when I see Uncle Karl: I imagine the little boy, darker than his fair-haired English schoolmates, dressed in grey short trousers … and then the headmaster, breakfast-warmed, stinking of pipe tobacco, reading out the English surnames from the envelopes: “Carter, Warburton, Hallchurch, Sim, Drury-Lowe, Wheeler, Scrase-Dickinson,” each of them solidly shouting out “Yes sir!” and going up to receive a letter and wandering off down a corridor still heavy with food smells.
Not surprisingly, Karl ran away from school, was picked up and returned, ran away again, and eventually the charity in charge of the refugee children reassigned him to a poorer but much happier family in rural Yorkshire. There were three brothers and one sister, and they welcomed him and played with him in their large garden. The father was a taciturn farmer—so they all ate comparatively well during the war—but the mother, whom Karl always called “Mamie,” was a warm and loquacious woman, kind but firm, given to non sequiturs and illogical statements. Karl did speak of these years in Yorkshire, he seemed to date his English life from this change, and he had a favourite example of Mamie’s way of talking. Near the end of the war, he told me, when he was thirteen or fourteen, Mamie overheard one of her sons calling the Germans “Nazi bastards.” The children, including
Karl, liked to imitate dogfights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe, running around in the garden, their arms outstretched, their mouths savagely tut-tutting imaginary bullets from wing-mounted guns, and in the course of one of these games, in which the Germans always lost, one of the boys shouted, “Kill the Nazi bastards!”
Mamie immediately stopped the game and asked her son to repeat what he had said. Haltingly he did so, adding in defence: “That’s what everyone’s calling them now.”
“Well,” said Mamie, “that may be, but not in this house. As long as this is a free country, nobody’s using that kind of language here about the Germans.”
Karl loves telling this story, as an example of English “decency”; I have heard it three or four times. He starts laughing before he has finished it, so that strangers often mishear it.
Karl did well at school, quickly becoming fluent in English (though never losing a slight formality of speech), and in 1949, exempted from National Service because of his background, he went to university at Durham, where a year later he met my father, who had arrived as a young lecturer in theology, and who had his own war stories to tell. The two men became very close friends. My father, I believe, somewhat adopted Karl. Peter was thirty, wanted a child—something my mother once told me suggests that my parents tried for a long time to produce me—and there suddenly was Karl, eleven years younger than Peter Bunting, vulnerable, trailing his past. Apparently Karl was often at my parents’ house in those years before my birth, a pretty old house near the cathedral with four stone steps which are depressed in the middle like saddles and a red front door hemmed by a bruised brass strip.
Karl, by the way, does not look especially worldly, except that his clothes are quietly expensive, with subtle crossstitching and discreet herringbone patterns and silk threads—the sort of wasteful and lavish attention to texture, barely visible to the distant eye, that puts me in mind of life as seen under an electron microscope. But his body is unsybaritic: he is very thin and bony, broad-shouldered, so that his clothes, despite their fineness, hang from him rather. His skin is sallow, and becomes even darker just under his handsome eyes, where there are creases and little ridges. As a child I was fascinated by these dark drains underneath Uncle Karl’s eyes; it seemed to my fanciful imagination that the skin there was stained with a kind of rust, a rust which might creep up on any of us if we neglected to wipe away our tears with a proper thick handkerchief.
At our dinner in Chelsea, Karl was wearing a rich, prickly tweed jacket, like a hair shirt worn inside out, and a fine tie patterned with blue digital dots. He stood in the doorway with his usual calm, ironic air. And standing right behind him in the hall was—Jane. It was an immense shock, but I struggled not to show it.
“Jane,” I said, “again! How nice. We mustn’t make a habit of this.” Karl had been naughty, if typically generous; inviting Jane without telling me was clearly part of his campaign to reunite us. Karl laughed as soon as he saw me.
“Oh, God, that beard will have to go, Tom. You look almost Hasidic, you know.” Every so often I neglect to shave; Jane knows this and corrected Karl.
“It’s not a beard, Karl, it’s an absence of shaving. It just means that Tom has run out of blades.” She gave my beard an affectionate stroke. Her hand was warm and delicate. She wore a short green suede skirt, which I had not seen before,
and which looked very good. This time I was strengthened by her earlier flippancy at Roger’s and felt myself the match for it. This time I was not going to display my weakness, I was not going to let her know how much I needed her. I “set” my face to the appropriate mask.
We had a pleasant dinner, actually, but it was shadowed by my knowledge that once it was over I would need to ask Karl for money. At the table, we talked about my mother. Karl was concerned about her and said that he would try to visit her over Christmas. I complained, a little gracelessly, that she was continually phoning me.
“But you cannot fail to know, Tom, that she loves you and is concerned about your future? That is all. Just as Peter was—and, yes, I know that you and Peter had some problems. Several problems, perhaps! How I miss dear Peter … Sarah wants just the utter best for you, like any parent.”
I couldn’t help saying, helplessly, “But what is the best for me? What should I do?”
Jane said briskly, “Come on, Tom, we’ve been through this.”
“Not with Uncle Karl, not with him.”
“As soon as you abandon your laudable commitment to higher thought,” said Karl, “I would love to help you on your way. But I suspect that what you want is to sit in a room on your own, reading during the day and earning no money at all, and then, no doubt, oysters and champagne at night at the Ritz.”
“That sounds fine to me,” I said. “Plato by day and Alcibiades by night.”
“You remember, Jane, I spent those two years in Nice?” said Karl. “There was a beach outside the town I liked to swim from, I went there on Sundays. After their church visiting,
the old Frenchmen, who were pure and freshly confessed from their church, real old Provençal types dressed in dark suits and white shirts, stopped at the beach on their way home to ogle the girls who were not wearing their bikini tops. Even on Sunday they were not very godly. Tom, you remind me of these men—I can’t for the life of me think why.”
Do I want incompatible things? In fact, it’s a better description of Karl, who is a considerable connoisseur of women. My parents often talked about “Karl and women” with the same kind of resignation that they talked about Durham weather. Karl married two more times after his famous wedding party in London, and is currently separated from his third wife, Antonia, whom I liked very much. I miss seeing Antonia in Karl’s flat. In each case, the issue has been his inability to refrain from extramarital activity.
I let Jane leave us early, so that she wouldn’t see me begging for money. Buoyed by the success of the evening, we warmly agreed to “do this again,” a repulsive charade in which we spoke to each other like mere lunching acquaintances. “I’ll phone you,” said Jane, as she kissed me with those lips.
Karl and I had brandy in his drawing room. A delicate ludic Klee looked down at us from above the marble mantelpiece.
“She won’t phone me.”
“You are too young to go through this, you realize,” said Karl.
I looked quizzically at him.
“Separation, divorce, ex-wives. Accept this from a specialist.”
“It was very sweet of you to invite Jane tonight. Thank you. Quite a shock.” I shook my head.
“Clausewitz’s most important principle. The element of surprise. He says it is the foundation of all undertakings.”
“I don’t think it’ll work, even on our tiny battlefield. I’m supposed to be winning her back, that was the arrangement, but she never sees me.”
“What were the terms?” Karl asked this like a lawyer, matter-of-factly and without any surprise.
“Oh, the usual. I have to be a better human being, and so on.” I laughed nervously. I didn’t want to tell Karl about the lying, about the real cause of our separation. I cherished his respect too much.
“Well, Tommy, I will do all I can. I will speak to her.”
“Thank you.”
“I would be doing nothing more than repaying you,” he said gently, with fondness in his eyes.
“Oh, that.”
It was true that I liked Antonia so much, and loved Karl so deeply, that when the familiar and expected news came from my parents—“Uncle Karl’s in the marital soup again”—I did all I could to convince Antonia of his immense goodness. She and I spent most of the summer of 1988 on park benches throughout London talking about Karl’s overpowering “sexual needs.” I hadn’t known that Antonia had told him.
“As I say, I will do everything that is in my power.”
I gently bent the conversation towards my bedsit on the Finchley Road. I would have Karl round for dinner, I said, except that it was too horrible where I was living, and Jane’s flat was no longer available to me. Now we were back on familiar terrain. We both knew the rules, and followed them. How awful is this place? asked Karl, and I made it sound a bit better than it was, in order to seem nobly stoical, the opposite
of a beggar. At which point, Karl said, “Now don’t obscure things from me, Tommy. If it is not a viable place to inhabit, you can always come back here. I have assured your mother this.” And I, restless in my seat, with mixed feelings about the knowledge that Karl and Mother were discussing me, said that I didn’t need to stay with Karl, but I was worrying a bit about the rent. “Well, why did you not say so?” said Karl, thus releasing both of us from further discussion. The cheque, I know, will appear in the post in a few days’ time, posed to look like a stray thought, a wisp of generosity unrelated in any way to our conversation last night. It will be for vastly more than it ought to be. And it will be the third such cheque I have taken from Uncle Karl since the funeral. Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a sin …