24

THE REASON I eventually returned to London, in late April, was that, despite my parents’ warmth, I was getting nothing done in Sundershall, and it seemed fairer to keep my nothingness to myself than to inflict it on my parents. Karl said that I could stay with him until Jane and I mended things, and Max extended the same offer (of course I would not have been able to stay with Max anyway, contaminated as he was by Jane’s information). So I went back to the city, and my parents waved me off. We were at the Durham bus station. The cathedral watched over us. My dainty parents stood very close to each other, like toy soldiers eagerly arranged by a slapdash little boy. Father quipped, “Don’t do anything I would do,” as he rather formally shook my hand.

I hardly noticed them, because I was in a “state” about taking the bus, and yet was embarrassed to admit as much to my parents. I very much dislike buses, but the train was much more expensive, and I was saving the money Zealy had loaned me. On long bus journeys I get afraid that the bus driver will fall asleep at the wheel. I can’t relax while this fear grips me, and I feel compelled to try to keep the driver awake. So on the trip to London I employed my usual tricks. I sat right behind the driver. I could see his speedometer. Then I spent the journey making various noises. I crushed my newspaper, and noisily turned the large pages. (It was Max’s day to have his Times column, I noticed.) I coughed a great deal, and shifted in my seat, and tapped the floor with my feet. Above all, I kept my eye on the back of the driver’s seat, and as soon as that head began to droop, I was ready to bring out my orchestra of effects.

Exhausted at Victoria Coach Station, I phoned Uncle Karl, and went to his house. Uncle Karl said he was not surprised that Jane and I were having problems. “You were looking too much at one another,” he said, oddly. “I can always tell when relationships are on the rocks, it is all quite simple—they are always watching each other and saying ‘Yes darling. No darling.’ But look, this is just a cooling-off period. All will be well with the two of you. Anyway, you’re welcome, Tommy. As long as you like. The last person to stay in your old bed at the top was a very early girlfriend of Lucian Freud’s.”

It was at Uncle Karl’s, two and half weeks later, that Mother phoned to tell me the news. She was very calm. But I became hot and began to shake. The telephone receiver felt like a weapon which I wanted to bring down on my own head. Father had gone to the church, had not returned, and Mother had found him lying on the stone floor, face downwards. He had broken open the collar of his shirt. Dr. Braun said that he had had a heart attack. I could tell that my mother had already wandered into the bureaucratic wilderness of funeral arrangements and telephone calls and the undertaker’s bills. By treading this arid ground she avoided drowning. It was no time for watery grief. But her voice was dull and weak. While she told me about the date for the funeral, Karl came up the stairs and stood inquiringly for a second. He smiled and so I smiled back and waved him on. He wrote a note and handed it to me: “Running out for the evening, back twelveish.” The heavy front door was opened, a taxi could be heard drilling outside, and then there was silence. I told Mother that Karl was out for the evening, but that of course he and I would immediately drive overnight to Sundershall.

Karl came back at midnight, flushed and smelling of society. I told him the news, and felt oddly embarrassed as I did so, perhaps because I thought he would be full of sympathy for me. But his own grief was too strong for that. He crumpled, he bent over as if I had hit him, with the top of his head pushed towards me, almost in my nostrils, so that I could smell on him the royal aroma of good wine and cigar tobacco, which seemed to be souring as he shrank before me. “Oh, why did he do that, why that?” wailed poor Karl. I couldn’t bear to see him so afflicted, I couldn’t bear to see his rusty eyes full of tears, and so I wept with him, and rather than embrace we stood in his drawing room, holding hands like children.

Karl said he wasn’t in a fit state to drive. I took the big Mercedes north, up the desolate AI, and he slept beside me. It was foggy; the strong headlights cut a world for us. We swiftly passed long articulated lorries, sighing and creaking their governed way north. They were covered with little lights like a starlet’s mirror and as we passed them the car briefly glowed inside with rough glamour. Then suddenly they were gone, and we were silent again. Hatfield, Grantham, Doncaster. At York the dawn arrived very quickly, like something unimportant. At Durham, the cathedral seemed to be rising with the rest of the world, receiving light and attention as the morning grew. We were in Sundershall by breakfast.

It was painful to see my mother trying to assume a former politesse—grave smiles and “I’m sure you’d both like some breakfast.” She seemed remote, like Karl, involved with her grief. She spoke to me immediately about the funeral, about the exact instructions he had left for hymns and prayers and music. I suddenly remembered that, in our conversation in the car, Father had spoken of a particular poem that he wanted read at his funeral.

“It was about a red flower, or about the flower of faith, or something like that. Does that mean anything to either of you?”

Mother looked at me as if I were lying. And also being a nuisance, an obstacle in the way of the proper rites.

“Mum, I’m not making this up! Dad mentioned this poem, and said he wanted it read at his funeral. I remember the phrase he used: ‘faith is the red flower.’ Then he recited the only bit he could remember—‘If thou can get thither, there will be a flower of peace,’ something like that. God, I’ve forgotten it … Oh yes! ‘The rose that will not wither.’ I remember that. Does that sound familiar? We must try to find this poem.”

But Mother looked at me almost coldly, and said:

“He never mentioned that poem to me in more than forty years of marriage, and there’s nothing about it in his instructions.”

“But he said it to me, to me.”

Karl pulled at my sleeve. “Come on, Tom, let’s have breakfast, and then go to the funeral home.” I took the hint, how could I not, and decided to drop the question of Peter’s poem.

As we ate breakfast, Mother swept the kitchen floor around our table, something I had never seen her do. She seemed obsessed with getting us to go as soon as possible. “He’s over there,” she said several times. So we ate quickly and went to Pickering’s Rest Home. Karl said I should go in first, and I walked into the room where the coffin lay on a trestle.

There he was. His nose looked prowlike, his brow forceful and almost glowing in the soft light. I realized how very rarely I had seen him asleep; he was a spirit of wakefulness. He was wearing a blue shirt I had never seen, and his tie was not properly adjusted. But for the life of me I could not possibly adjust it. I was terrified: he seemed so utterly alive. Surely he was only dozing. I was afraid that at any moment he would open his eyes and look at me and say “Tommy, have you seen my cigarettes?” or “Everything all right?” or “Sorry, O’Brien.” My eyes went up and down the length of him, searching for a sign. I was sure, for a horrid second, that I saw his chest give a twitch.

Suddenly my eyes were drawn to his right hand, which lay beside him, partly obscured by his body. I leant over the coffin to get a better look. His hand was wrapped around a small silver cross which I knew well. He had carried it everywhere with him, in his left trouser pocket. But there was something else, the top of which could just be seen. It looked like a piece of glossy paper. I willed myself to touch the hand. I had to see what this paper was. Closing my eyes, I felt the stiff hand. I could not move the fingers, and my body was shivering with the vileness of the sensation. But I tugged instead on the paper, and it gave way, and slipped out of the dead fist. The paper was stiff too, as if it had also died. Of course it was stiff: because it was a photograph. A photograph of my mother. Which she must have folded into his hand, and which she must have thought obscured by the closed fist. I looked at my father, and then at the photograph of my mother. And then I stuffed the photograph back into the tight fist, pushing against both the unwilling cold flesh of Father’s hand and the hard silver cross, doubtless bruising and creasing the paper as I did so.

It was hard to think of Father’s body simply stopped like a clock. Where had he gone? I firmly believe that “only burdock will grow upon my grave” and that the dead go nowhere at all; certainly not to hell; surely not to heaven. But the dead are fortunate; they have at least got beyond the ordinary celebrity of being alive. They are elsewhere, not here. Father believed that he would see his Maker in heaven, and his parents, and I suppose eventually his wife and his wayward son. But I won’t be there, Dad, I won’t be there, because I don’t believe. I will be elsewhere, like you. And our elsewheres will be different in death, as they were in life.

One of the religious thinkers I had read instructed me that grief was not a properly religious emotion. All the world, except angels, must die, and to be distressed at the death of a person is merely to mourn the fact that your loved one was not born an angel. Certainly my father was no angel, but why should I not mourn him? I crossed the room to the dim corner where a table was set with many candles. I lit one and stood still for several minutes: I lit it for my father, for my mother, for my childhood, for my wife. The small flame flickered, retreated, and then remembered itself, filling out with light in a little golden rage.

The funeral was held two days later. Canon Palliser, who was taking the service, asked me to deliver a eulogy. My mother agreed with his idea, and I liked the notion very much. So on the eve of the funeral I stayed up, and spent all night madly writing: I had the idea of combining a farewell to Father with some of the material from my BAG, and was unsure if a proper fusion had been achieved. Deprived of sleep, oddly excited (I would share a little of my BAG with everyone for the first time), I kept on returning in my mind to the only other funeral I had attended, my grandmother’s, when I had disgraced myself in the cemetery and Father made me stand next to him at the graveside.

Jane had arrived the night before from London, and together with Karl we accompanied Mother at ten o’clock in the morning from the vicarage to the church. I clutched eight pages of densely handwritten paper. Mother gave out a little cry as we entered, because the church was completely full—the “census-gathering” had come early this year. It seemed that the entire village was there. Paul Deddum had come; he stood behind the pew as if he were going to serve drinks. Shy, reclusive Sam Spedding—pale, bespectacled, and dressed in a green bomber jacket—was standing next to his mother, who had probably forced him to appear. Terry Upsher was there; he looked very sad. Miss Ogilvie, with the three canes, was also there, and Tim Biffen from Durham, and Mr. Norrington, who had pompously donned a black armband. He had the look of a sinister invalid. Susan Perez-Temple was standing next to a man I did not know. At the front were Colin and Belinda Thurlow, with Max. Colin had the calm, neutral stare of someone attending a secondrate lecture. Belinda, I noticed angrily, was disgracefully untidy; she seemed to be wearing her poorest gardening shoes. While on the subject of shoes, I should say I was wearing brand-new ones at father’s funeral, as Socrates is at the beginning of the Symposium. They were a good Italian pair, bought in Knightsbridge with the last hundred pounds of my research grant, and saved for the right occasion—which had never come, since Jane and I had been going out less and less in the months before our separation in December.

Mother, Jane, Karl, and I took our seats. The coffin lay in the middle of the nave, at the front. Canon Palliser began:

“We are here to say goodbye to Peter, Peter who illuminated all our lives, who tended to his flock like no other priest I have ever known, and who was loved in return, not only in this village, or this county, but wherever he went. Everyone who met Peter loved him. I know that there are many friends and family here today, and that each of us was touched in some way by Peter’s faith, hope, and charity.” Palliser spoke of Peter’s “gift of simplicity,” and the “quiet certainty” of his faith, and I found myself resisting his pieties. Was Father’s faith so simple? I remembered the jokey notice stuck to his Bible: “This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.” It surely hadn’t been just a joke, but some hint of anxiety, of complication, of philosophical sophistication. Yet at the Christmas gathering Tim Biffen had said that Peter was not “wily,” that he would certainly say, like Job, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” I was thinking these thoughts when Jane nudged me with her elbow. It was my turn to walk up the small church’s nave and deliver the eulogy.

I was a little shaky on my legs as I walked towards the pulpit; clearly the ghost of my old adolescent self-consciousness—that horrid era of being “born again”—was teasing me. I could feel a hundred faces appraising my back. Then I climbed the five steps, and turned, and saw Jane beautifully looking at me, and poor Mother with her eyes closed, and Max rubbing his glasses, and Colin Thurlow superciliously waiting, as if for a student’s viva voce.

I had decided to begin, as my teacher Mr. Duffy would have advised, “with a bang”—in this case, a joke:

“I feel, standing here, a little like a man I once read about in the newspaper who won a competition: he was given one minute to remove as much money as he could from a bank vault, money which he would be allowed to keep. Instead, the excitement caused him to hyperventilate, and he collapsed.” There was a rustling amongst the congregation—the sound of laughter anxiously displaced onto movement.

“Like that man, I don’t know if this is a moment of victory or defeat. I mean—for both my father, and for me. When I was a boy, I often dreamed of walking up into this pulpit and delivering a fiery sermon—the kind of sermon, thankfully, my father never gave—and here I am, standing in the pulpit of his very church, delivering, in effect, a sermon, and my father is not here to witness it. Like the man who won that competition, I have simultaneously lost the competition, too. I have the money, as it were, but I don’t get to keep it, and so it is worthless, ashes in my mouth.

“A great idol of mine, the free-spirited and freethinking Heinrich Heine, wrote that Martin Luther forgot that Christianity demands impossible things from those who follow it. But Catholicism did understand this, said Heine, and had worked out a comfortable contract between spirit and matter, between spiritualism and sensualism. In that sense, and that sense only, Father was a Catholic. No one in this parish ever felt that he was being judged by Peter Bunting. He used to joke about the Ten Commandments that it was not very impressive simply to observe the ten commonest elements of human nature and put ‘not’ in front of them. Can’t you hear him say that?”

There were some awkward laughs—I heard Max’s slow chuckle—and I felt, now, that I “had” my audience. At UCL I was never important enough to give a lecture, but had always imagined doing so in the big lecture room there. But here everyone was four feet below me, sitting like willing babies. Colin, Belinda, and Max Thurlow were staring up at me. The prospect of all those babyish tilted faces went to my head.

“Nevertheless, he and I did not agree about everything. Fundamentally, we were opposed. I am a very theological philosopher—as some of you may know!—and he was a somewhat philosophical theologian, and yet the width of our overlap was small. Yes, I must be honest here: it was small and grey. Did we ever talk about our differences? Only once, about two months ago, and it was frankly too little, too late. My father was an optimist, as many of you gratefully recall, but I am not an optimist. Schopenhauer said, towards the end of his life, that a philosophy where you do not hear between the pages the tears, the wailing and gnashing of teeth and the fearful tumult of general mutual murder, is no philosophy. I agree with that statement. My father by contrast believed in the calming grace of God, as well he should. I apologize, by the way, for all these necessary allusions, something that I have inherited from Peter Bunting, of course. We both of us at various times resembled the fabled scribe, Denys the Alexandrian, mentioned in various ancient texts, who is said to have received orders from heaven to read all the books in the world. Obviously, I am still following those orders, even though I don’t believe in heaven; my father, some of you may choose to believe, is now catching up by reading all those books in heaven.”

But now there was complete silence in the church. I looked around, for ballast. But Max would not let me catch his eye, and Jane was fiddling in her handbag, and both Belinda and Colin were looking down at the floor. Tim Biffen was overcome by a convenient coughing fit. I sensed that my audience had turned against me, that I had alienated them. Why? I was being frank, for sure, but wasn’t that a virtue? It seemed essential, at that moment, to speak the truth, to tell my father certain things I had not been able to say to him. Holding my sheets of paper with a sweating grip, I continued:

“Anyway, I have spent the last year writing something which I have provisionally entitled ‘The Book Against God.’ A big project. In recent months, up here alone and without a wife, I have had a lot more time than usual! Too much time. One of the arguments I make in my Book Against God is that life is essentially what I call a bowl of tears. In some people the bowl overflows; in others, it seems hardly full at all. Yet all suffer. Now, my father did suffer, I think, even though he used to joke that he was absurdly happy, that unlike most men he was seeking for the key to unhappiness. It may surprise you, but my father was no angel, that’s for sure—”

But I stopped because Jane had left her pew and was walking towards the pulpit. Her tightly persuaded ponytail swayed ominously. At the same moment, Canon Palliser left his seat and moved towards me. He and Jane converged at the foot of the pulpit steps. It was Granny’s funeral all over again! Jane beckoned to me, and I descended reluctantly.

“Tommy, darling, you’re overwrought,” she whispered. “You can’t go on with this. Please make it stop.”

Canon Palliser added more pacifically that there were several parishioners who wanted to say a word, and that time should be given to them, as well as to me. Perhaps I could finish my remarks at the graveside, or in the vicarage at lunch?

I was dumbstruck. I thought my eulogy had been going well; it balanced respect for my father with respect for the truth. I glanced from Jane and Canon Palliser to the congregation. Some were now whispering. Max had his head in his hands. My mother’s eyes found mine, and she gently summoned me with her little finger to return to the pew. She looked very sad, and I knew I had to obey her. But I was furious with Jane for initiating this humiliating course of events. Turning to the congregation, I said: “I think I am being told by various … organizers here that I have gone on too long—that’s what years of academic seminars will do to you! Please forgive me. All of you know how much my father meant to me.” And I returned, boiling with rage, to my pew. My mother took my hand and held it throughout the rest of the service, and I was grateful to her. It felt oddly familiar; the touch of her hand reminded me of something I could not quite recall.

Once the service was over, I learned, outside, that Jane’s version of the events inside had taken hold. I was apparently “overwrought”—Jane’s word was repeated by Mother—and this explained my rambling, unfinished speech. Everyone assumed that I had been forced to make the speech. Susan Perez-Temple approached, and quietly said:

“We all understand why you couldn’t go on there in the church. Personally, I disapprove of this modern tradition of children giving so-called ‘eulogies’ for their parents. It asks far too much of them at a very vulnerable moment. But don’t get me started. You should be allowed the privacy of your grief.”

I was most struck by Terry’s sadness. For once, his high voice was quiet, almost averagely pitched. He, too, felt sorry for me.

“It’s not proper that you had to make that speech. You cannat control yourself when yor da’s just gone. Remember me at my da’s own service?”

“Thanks, Terry. But, you know, I wanted to make that speech. No one forced me.”

“Aye, but it’s not right that you had to make it, still.”

I didn’t argue with him, but again thanked him. Terry lingered.

“Mary and I wanted him to marry us, now we have to get someone else.” Then he added, mysteriously: “I’m ganna push on with that shed, anyways.”

I was still angry with Jane for marching up to the pulpit in her most imperious manner. I was determined to reproach her, but first we had to bury my father. We stood in the northwest corner of the churchyard, where three closely planted cherry trees form a mesh and shade the grass. It was a clear, sunny day, the best kind of May weather. The trees were at the end of their brief bloom, but still full enough to frisk the sunlight before its entrance, which dappled us. The coffin was lowered, and as it hit the ground I thought of how many hundreds of unredeemed corpses lay around us. Terrible to contemplate: hundreds of dead souls, all or most of them believing in the prospect of heaven, and none of them getting any nearer to heaven, as far as I could see, than this piece of dead ground. Canon Palliser began to speak. Suddenly a mild wind blew, and hundreds of little white cherry blossoms, wingless white cloths, fell. They were missionaries sent to convert the ground to white. My mind wandered as the words sounded: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another … We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord … O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? …”

The coffin was docked, the earth was shovelled in. This would not be a bad place for Buntings to rot. Peter had a favourite Sundershall anecdote about this graveyard. In the middle of the nineteenth century a Sundershall farmer, Enoch Stott, was courting a local girl. But he was shy and had not yet put the question to her. So he took her for a walk in the churchyard, and said to her, “My folks lie here, Mary; would you like to lie there with them someday?” She took the hint and married him, said Peter. And indeed, the Stotts had a cluster of graves at the back, behind the church. I smiled through my angry tears as I remembered Father’s pleasure at this story.

 

I cornered Jane at the funeral lunch. She looked at me defiantly with enormous dark eyes.

“What were you playing at?”

“What were you playing at? What was that speech?” she asked.

“I’m … I’m furious,” I said impotently.

“There’s no monopoly on anger, you know. Why can’t we be furious with you?”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Well, Max said to me just now, ‘Did Tom come to praise or to bury his father?’ So I’m not the only one to think that speech a total disgrace.”

“Well, well, Max agrees with you, how very nice. You and Max. That explains why he’s been avoiding me since the end of the service.”

“Max agrees with me, and I’m sure your poor mother does, too.”

“Actually, she has been very sweet to me, unlike you,” I said.

“Don’t be such a baby.” Guests were glancing around at the frozen intensity of our postures and our fierce whispering.

“Come here,” said Jane. We walked out of the dining room. “Come upstairs.”

We entered the double bedroom we had shared at Christmas. “No, not this one,” insisted Jane, and so we went to my childhood room.

“Tommy, I stopped you speaking because you were embarrassing yourself. You were ranting. And then, when you mentioned our marriage, and got onto how Peter was no angel—”

“That was the beginning of a reference to a lovely sentence by a seventeenth-century theologian, but you stopped me before I could finish it! It’s all about how we shouldn’t mourn people, because their death proves only that they are not angels. The point is that none of us is an angel.”

“I don’t care if it was a reference to Gandhi, Einstein, and Mother Teresa rolled into one. It sounded as if you were picking a fight with the coffin. People were laughing.”

“I wanted them to laugh,” I protested.

“Laughing at you. Did you want that? Well, I don’t.”

“Janey, maybe you’ll find this odd, but I spoke those words because I wanted to be truthful. Don’t you understand that everything else in my life is a lie? The Book Against God isn’t a lie. I wanted to tell the truth to my father about my lack of faith. I was speaking to him, not to anyone else.”

“But, Tommy darling”—she was softening—“you, of all people, believe that your father is dead and gone. He couldn’t hear you, and we could. And your speech was awful, awful. You mentioned our marriage. You lie at the wrong times, and then you tell the truth at the wrong times, and it’s all such a terrible mess.”

I sat down on the bed and looked at Jane.

“Do you love me?”

“I love you very much.”

“What do I have to do to make you want to live with me again?” I asked.

Jane sighed; her thin chest rose and fell.

“I can’t live with a liar.”

“Of course not.”

“I can’t live with a liar, and you are a liar. Admit that.”

“I am a liar.”

“Furthermore, you would have to be honest with me about Christmas, about that disgusting incident. And you would have to be honest with me about children. Do you want them?”

“Well, I can tell you—”

Jane stopped me.

“I don’t want to hear it now, and now is not the place. I don’t want suspiciously easy fluency. Now everything has changed. Now you have to think a bit before you spout words. Yes, I want you to think, and then prove to me over the next few months that you can be honest with me, honest about absolutely everything, from the highest matter to the lowest. Above all about children. I’m not interested in philosophical truth—all that Schopenhauer mush you were quoting in the church. I want daily, practical, ordinary, living truth.”

“And over these next few months, however long this process takes, will I live with you or not?” I asked.

There was a long silence.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea, do you?” said Jane, gently.

“So when do I get the chance to be honest with you if I don’t live with you?”

“We’ll meet regularly, we’ll have lunch and dinner, we’ll go to concerts, we’ll do most things except actually live together. Think of it as several months of probation.”

“Does this probation start right now?” I asked, inwardly joyful that Jane might be giving me a second chance.

“Yes, right now. Admit to me that the speech was monstrous.”

“The speech was monstrous.” I was lighthearted.

“Don’t just parrot me,” said Jane, smiling. “Be actively honest. I don’t want to just pull truths out of you like someone forcing open a handbag and rummaging around for a penny.”

“Okay, here is something,” I said.

“Yes? Oh dear.”

“When I heard from my mother that Dad had died—remember, I was at Uncle Karl’s—I immediately had the shameful thought that now you might take pity on me and let me come back. I can honestly say that you were the first thought I had on hearing of Dad’s death.”

Jane looked away, and bit her lip.

“Oh Tommy.”

She stood, and I eagerly stood with her. We embraced. She was gentle, and held me gently—starved of her, I couldn’t help letting my hands move down her thin back. But she pulled off.

“Let’s go downstairs, shall we?” she said.

Thanks to Jane’s offer, I was ecstatically happy throughout the rest of the funeral lunch.

 

It was quiet once everyone had gone. I was desperate to leave and to begin the new era of marital “probation” in London, assuming I could find somewhere to live. Mother and I said little to each other, though we had one sharp exchange about the BAG, in which she confessed her dismay that I had not been working on the Ph.D., and urged me to finish the thesis “to honour Daddy’s memory.” In Peter’s presence, she and I had been his suitors, always petitioning for his vital, difficult attention. Without him, we were both husbandless. And both kingless, too—each room of the large house seemed to be dominated by an empty throne. Terry continued to work on my father’s shed; now I understood what he had meant at the funeral. “I don’t have the heart to tell him to pull it down,” said Mother. “Let him keep his tools in it.” When he was not working on it, Terry would sit in the shed, hunched on a little wooden stool he had brought with him.

My mother abandoned the kingless palace; she spent as much time as possible visiting villagers to thank them for flowers and food, or planting and weeding in the awakened garden. I often watched her from the sitting room window. She and Terry spoke quite a lot. He seemed to need to keep her informed about each tiny development of the shed. One afternoon, while she was in the garden, I went into my father’s study. It was frozen in squalor; not a thing had been touched. But already, without its daily renewal, the air was losing its scent of tobacco. I sat at the desk, fingered some books. Then more systematically I went through the drawers, and found an intriguing little notebook, half-full with jottings. One of the pages read as follows:

Polanie—the Poles; literally, “people of the plains”

shul—proper Yiddish word for synagogue (lit. “school” in Old German)

“bone-orchard” Terry Upsher’s phrase for graveyard

Ranke: “I am an historian before I am a Christian.”

Ranke on Michelet: “he wrote in a style in which the truth could not be told.”

St. Bede’s dying prayer to God: “O leave us not as orphans!”

Aristotle: Why is it that he who confers benefits loves more than he who receives them?

Celia Johnson = Mrs. Peter Fleming = Ian Fleming /James Bond (Mr. Norrington)

Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.

I read this page again and again. The last entry was nonsensical to me, but the others, types of which appeared on every page, clearly formed a particular kind of commonplace book. There was a whole section marked “Karl,” with entries such as this:

“The Slovakian officials offered their Jews to us like someone throwing away sour beer” (Eichmann)

Inventor of the word anti-Semitism: Wilhelm Marr

Inventor of the word genocide: Raphael Lemkin

So this was a book of promptings, in which Peter stored away little pieces of found knowledge, where he prepared privately for his public successes. For a moment or two, I thought: the cheat! Look how he cribbed! But I reflected that surely I had always known him to be a performer, even if the mechanics of the performance had been invisible to me.

On my last morning at home, as I was making for the bathroom, I heard my mother behind the door. The water was running, and it was only because I was so close to the door that I heard, amidst the other water, the sound of crying. When I was little I used to hear her doing her “reciting” in the bathroom. Those freezing, wintry mornings, years ago, when I used to take a few extra minutes in bed while Mother was in the bathroom … Father, seemingly irrepressible, rose first, and was always up and about by the time I began to stir in my sheets; I never saw him unclothed, as if he were a commanding officer who could not be seen out of uniform by the rank and file. Once he or Mother had woken me—she ghostly in her long white nightgown, with fretted panels in it that looked acoustical in function, as if designed to let the body speak—I turned over for a few more minutes, in the delicious knowledge that she would now occupy the bathroom. In winter months, I eventually stretched out a hand, parting the air for my clothes. Then I pulled them in, like an animal feathering its nest, and dressed under the blankets in the trapped warmth. So by the time I even approached the bathroom door I was fully dressed—perhaps that is where I developed my disdain for bathing? But it was a good thing I was dressed, because often Mother was still in the bathroom. I could hear her talking to herself. For seven years she taught religious knowledge at a junior school in Durham, and at weekends or in the evenings she sometimes gave speeches to town or village societies, or opened garden fetes and speech days, and for all these different forms of presentation her method of preparation was the same: she learned things by heart, reading out aloud a textbook or the speech she had written, in a low gentle voice as she sat in the bath or at her dressing table, calmly, as if speaking to a loyal pet: “Leaving Corinth, Paul continued on his travels to Ephesus and Antioch, where he addressed the congregations there, which were large in number.” But now she was crying, not reciting.