I wondered how I was to reply. I knew that the letter she would like best would contain news of Southwood: the small details of every day, even to the condition of my dahlias. How was I to deal with my bizarre journey to Istanbul? To mention it only in passing would seem both unnatural and pretentious, but to describe the affair of Colonel Hakim and the gold brick and General Abdul would cause her to feel that my mode of life had entirely changed, and this might increase her sense of separation and of loneliness near Koffiefontein. I asked myself whether it would not be better to refrain from writing at all, but then on the last page – her paper had slipped in the machine and the print ran diagonally up into the previous line – she had typed, ‘I look forward so to your letters because they bring Southwood close to me.’ I put her letter away with others of hers that I kept in a drawer of my desk.
It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father I rarely buy new books though I don’t confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself – and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream – I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R. L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins, though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I don’t share my aunt’s taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury). Perhaps it was Miss Keene’s mention of St John’s Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.
There’s a bell in Moscow,
While on tower and kiosk O
In Santa Sophia
The Turkman gets;
And loud in air
Calls men to prayer
From the tapering summit
Of tall minarets.
Such empty phantom
I freely grant them;
But there is an anthem
More dear to me, –
’Tis the bells of Shandon,
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters
Of the River Lee.
The lines on Santa Sophia had never before rung so true: that dingy mausoleum could not compare with our St John’s and the mention of it would remind me always of Colonel Hakim.
One book leads to another, and I found myself, for the first time in many years, taking down a volume of Walter Scott. I remembered how my father had used the volumes for playing the Sortes Virgilianae – a game my mother considered a little blasphemous unless it was played with the Bible, in all seriousness. I sometimes suspected my father had dog-eared various pages so that he could hit on a suitable quotation to tease and astound my mother. Once, when he was suffering severely from constipation, he opened Rob Roy apparently at random and read out, ‘Mr Owen entered. So regular were the motions and habits of this worthy man …’ I tried the Sortes myself now and was astonished at the apposite nature of the quotation which I picked: ‘I had need of all the spirits a good dinner could give, to resist the dejection which crept insensibly on my mind.’
It was only too true that I was depressed: whether it was due to Miss Keene’s letter or to the fact that I missed my aunt’s company more than I had anticipated, or even that Tooley had left a blank behind her, I could not tell. Now that I had no responsibility to anyone but myself, the pleasure of finding again my house and garden had begun to fade. Hoping to discover a more encouraging quotation, I opened Rob Roy again and found a snapshot lying between the leaves: the square yellowing snapshot of a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bathing-dress taken with an old-fashioned Brownie. The girl was bending a little towards the camera; she had just slipped one shoulder out of its strap, and she was laughing, as though she had been surprised at the moment of changing. It was some moments before I recognized Aunt Augusta and my first thought was how attractive she had been in those days. Was it a photograph taken by her sister, I wondered? But it was hardly the kind of photograph my mother would have given my father. I had to admit that it was more likely he had taken it himself and hidden it there in a volume of Scott which my mother would never read. This then was how she had looked – she could have hardly been more than eighteen – in the long ago days before she knew Curran or Monsieur Dambreuse or Mr Visconti. She had an air of being ready for anything. A phrase about Die Vernon printed on one of the two pages between which the photograph lay caught my eye: ‘Be patient and quiet, and let me take my own way; for when I take the bit between my teeth, there is no bridle will stop me.’ Had my father deliberately chosen that page with that particular passage for concealing the picture? I felt the melancholy I sometimes used to experience at the bank when it was my duty to turn over old documents deposited there, the title-deeds of a passion long spent. I thought of my father with an added tenderness – of that lazy man lying in his overcoat in the empty bath. I have never seen his grave, for he had died on the only trip which he had ever taken out of England, and I was not even sure of where it lay.
I rang up my aunt, ‘Just to say goodnight and make sure that all is well.’
‘The apartment,’ she told me, ‘seems a little solitary without Wordsworth.’
‘I am feeling lonely too – without you and Tooley.’
‘No news when you came home?’
‘Only a letter from a friend. She seems lonely too.’
I hesitated before I spoke again. ‘Aunt Augusta, I have been thinking, I don’t know why, of my father. It’s strange how little one knows of one’s own family. Do you realize I don’t even know where he is buried?’
‘No?’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course.’
‘I would have liked, if only once, to visit his grave.’
‘Cemeteries to me are rather a morbid taste. They have a sour smell like jungles. I suppose it comes from all that wet greenery.’
‘As one grows old I think one becomes more attached to family things – to houses and graves. I feel very badly that my mother had to finish like that in a police laboratory.’
‘Your stepmother,’ my aunt corrected me.
‘Where is my father?’
‘As a half-believing Catholic,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘I cannot answer that question with any certainty, but his body, what is left of it, lies in Boulogne.’
‘So near? Why wasn’t it brought back?’
‘My sister had a very practical and unsentimental side. Your father had gone to Boulogne without her knowledge on a day excursion. He was taken ill after dinner and died almost immediately. Food poisoning. It was before the days of antibiotics. There had to be an autopsy and my sister didn’t like the idea of transporting home a mutilated corpse. So she had him buried in the cemetery there.’
‘Were you present?’
‘I was on tour in Italy. I only heard about it much later. My sister and I didn’t correspond.’
‘So you’ve never seen the grave either?’
‘I once suggested to Mr Visconti that we make a trip, but his favourite Biblical quotation was, “Let the dead bury their dead.”’
‘Perhaps one day we might go together.’
‘I am strongly of Mr Visconti’s opinion, but I am always ready for a little travel,’ my aunt added with unsentimental glee.
‘This time you must be my guest.’
‘The anniversary of his death,’ my aunt said, ‘falls on 2 October. I remember the date because it is the feast day of the Guardian Angel. The Angel seems to have slipped up badly on that occasion, unless of course he was saving
your father from a worse fate. That is quite a possibility, for what on earth was your father doing in Boulogne out of season?’
17
STRANGELY enough I felt almost immediately at home in Boulogne.
As the direct boat from Folkestone no longer sailed, we took the Golden Arrow from Victoria and I was relieved to notice that my aunt had not brought with her the red suitcase. The English side of the Channel lay bathed in a golden autumn sunlight. By the time we reached Petts Wood the buses had all turned green, and at Orpington the oast-houses began to appear with their white cowls like plumes in a medieval helmet. The hops climbing their poles were more decorative than vines, and I would gladly have given all the landscape between Milan and Venice for these twenty miles of Kent. There were comfortable skies and unspectacular streams; there were ponds with rushes and cows which seemed contentedly asleep. This was the pleasant land of which Blake wrote, and I found myself regretting that we were going abroad again. Why had my father not died in Dover or Folkestone, both equally convenient for a day’s excursion?
And yet when at last we came to Boulogne, stepping out of the one coach from Calais reserved for that port on the Flèche d’Or, I felt that I was at home. The skies had turned grey and the air was cold and there were flurries of rain along the quays, but there was a photograph of the Queen over the reception desk in our hotel, and on the windows of a brasserie I could read ‘Good Cup Of Tea. East Kent Coach Parties Welcome Here.’ The leaden gulls which hovered over the fishing boats in the leaden evening had an East Anglian air. A scarlet sign flashed over the Gare Maritime saying “Car Ferry” and “British Railways”.
It was too late that evening to search for my father’s grave (in any case the next day was his true anniversary), and so my aunt and I walked up together to the Ville Haute and strolled around the ramparts and through the small twisted streets which reminded me of Rye. In the great crypt of the cathedral an English king had been married, there were cannon balls lying there shot by the artillery of Henry VIII, and in a little square below the walls was a statue of Edward Jenner in a brown tailed-coat and brown tasselled boots. An old film of Treasure Island with Robert Newton was showing at a small cinema in a side-street not far from a club called Le Lucky where you could listen to the music of the Hearthmen. No, my father had not been buried on foreign soil. Boulogne was like a colonial town which had only recently ceased to be part of the Empire, and British Railways lingered on at the end of the quay as though it had been granted permission to stay until the evacuation was complete. Locked bathing-huts below the casino were like the last relics of the occupying troops, and the mounted statue of General San Martín on the quay might have been that of Wellington.
We had dinner in the restaurant of the Gare Maritime, after walking over the cobble-stones and across the railway lines with no one about. The pillars of the station resembled the pillars in a cathedral deserted after dark: only a train from Lyon was announced like a hymn number which no one had bothered to take down. No porter or passenger stirred on the long platforms. The British Railways office stood empty and unlighted. There was a smell everywhere of oil and weed and sea and a memory of the morning’s fish. In the restaurant we proved to be the sole diners: only two men and a dog stood at the bar and they were preparing to go. My aunt ordered soles à la Boulonnaise for both of us.
‘Perhaps my father came here the night before he died,’ I considered aloud. Ever since I had picked Rob Roy from the shelf I had thought frequently of my father, and remembering the photograph and the expression of the young girl, I believed that my aunt must have loved him too in her way. But if I were looking for sentimental memories I had come to the wrong character – a man dead was a man dead, so far as my aunt was concerned.
‘Order the wine, Henry,’ she said. ‘You know you have a morbid streak. This whole expedition is a sign of it – and the urn which you so carefully preserve. If your father had been buried at Highgate I would never have come with you. I don’t believe in pilgrimages to graves unless they serve another purpose.’
‘What other purpose does this serve?’ I asked rather snappily.
‘I have never before been to Boulogne,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I am always ready to visit a new place.’
‘Like Uncle Jo,’ I said, ‘you want to prolong life.’
‘Certainly I do,’ my aunt replied, ‘because I enjoy it.’
‘And how many rooms have you occupied so far?’
‘A great many,’ my aunt said cheerfully, ‘but I don’t think I have yet reached the lavatory floor.’
‘I got to go home.’ One of the men at the bar spoke in piercing English. He was a little tight and when he stooped to pat his dog he missed it completely.
‘One more for the ferry,’ his companion said. From the phrase I took it that he belonged to British Railways.
‘The bloody Maid of Kent. My wife was a maid of Kent once.’
‘But no longer, billyo, no longer.’
‘No longer. Tha’s why I have to be home at twenty-one fucking hours.’
‘She’s jealous, billyo.’
‘She’s hungry.’
‘I’ve never loved a weak man,’ my aunt said. ‘Your father wasn’t weak – he was lazy. Nothing in his opinion was really worth a fight. He wouldn’t have fought for Cleopatra herself – but he would have found a way round. Unlike Antony. It astonishes me that he ever came as far as Boulogne.’
‘Perhaps it was on business.’
‘He would have sent his partner. Now his partner – his name was William Curlew – was a weak man if ever there was one. He envied your father his little adventures – he found it hard enough to satisfy one woman. It weighed on his mind terribly, for his wife was really without fault. She was sweet, efficient, good-tempered – the fact that she was a little demanding might have been taken by another man as a virtue. Your father, who was a much more imaginative man than people usually thought or your mother realized, suggested a plan to him, for, as William had pointed out, one can’t leave a perfect woman – one has to be left. He was to write his wife anonymous letters accusing himself of infidelity. The letters would serve a fourfold purpose. They would protect his vanity, offer a reasonable explanation of his flagging attentions, crack his wife’s perfection, and might even lead eventually to divorce with his honour as a man saved (for he was determined to deny nothing). Your father composed the first letter himself; William typed it badly on his own typewriter, and put it in the kind of yellow envelope he used for bills (that was a mistake). The letter read, “Your husband, madam, is a shameful liar and an ignoble lecher. Ask him how he spends his evenings when you are at the Women’s Institute, and how he gets through all the money he spends. What you save on the housekeeping enriches another woman’s placket.” Your father liked obsolete words – that was the influence of Walter Scott.
‘There was to be a party at the Curlews’ the evening the letter arrived. Mrs Curlew was very busy plumping cushions; she took the yellow envelope for a bill, and so she put it down on a table without looking at it. You can imagine poor William’s anxiety. I knew him well in those days, indeed your parents and I were both present at the party. Your father hoped to be in at the death, but when the time came to go, and your father couldn’t linger any longer, even on the excuse of talking a little business, the letter still remained unopened. He had to learn the details of what happened later from William.
‘Melany – that was her silly name and it sounded even sillier when attached to Curlew – was tidying up the glasses when William found the yellow envelope under an occasional table. “Is this yours, dear?” he asked and she said it was only a bill.
‘“Even a bill has to be opened,” William said and handed her the envelope. Then he went upstairs to shave. She never insisted on his shaving before dinner, but very early in their marriage she had indicated unmistakably that she preferred him at night with a smooth cheek – her skin was very delicate. (Foreigners always said that her complexion was typical
ly English.) The bathroom door was open and William saw her put the yellow envelope down on the dressing-table still sealed. He nicked himself in three places under the strain of waiting and had to stick on little dabs of cotton wool to stop the bleeding.’
The man trailed past our table with the dog. ‘Come on, you bugger,’ he said, hauling dispiritedly on the lead.
‘Back to the maid of Kent,’ his friend teased him from the bar.
I had begun to recognize the gleam in my aunt’s eyes. She had had it in Brighton, when she recounted the history of the dog’s church, and in Paris, when she told me of the affair with Monsieur Dambreuse, and in the Orient Express when she described Mr Visconti’s escape … She was deeply absorbed in her story. I am sure my father – the admirer of Walter Scott – would not have told the story of the Curlews nearly so dramatically; there would have been less dialogue and more description.
‘William,’ my aunt went on, ‘came in from the bathroom and climbed into the enormous double bed which Melany had chosen herself at Maples. In his anxiety William had not taken a book with him. He wanted the crisis to arrive. “I won’t be long, dear,” Melany said, busy with Pond’s cold cream which she preferred to any newer brand for the sake of her old-world complexion.