My aunt said, ‘You are very silent, Henry.’
‘I have a lot to think about,’ I said.
‘You were quite taken by that miserable little woman,’ Aunt Augusta accused me.
‘I was touched to meet someone who loved my father.’
‘A lot of women loved him.’
‘I mean a woman who really loved him.’
‘That little sentimental creature? She doesn’t know what love is.’
‘Do you?’ I asked, letting my anger out.
‘I think I have had rather more experience of it than you,’ Aunt Augusta replied with calm and careful cruelty. It was true – I hadn’t even answered Miss Keene’s last letter. My aunt sat opposite me over her sole with an air of perfect satisfaction. She ate the shrimps that went with it one by one before she tackled the sole; she enjoyed the separate taste and she was in no hurry.
Perhaps she did have reason to despise Miss Paterson. I thought of Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr Visconti – they lived in my imagination as though she had actually created them: even poor Uncle Jo struggling towards the lavatory. She was one of the life-givers. Even Miss Paterson had come to life, stung by the cruelty of her question. Perhaps if she ever talked about me to another – I could well imagine what a story she could make out of my dahlias and my silly tenderness for Tooley and my stainless past – even I would come to some sort of life, and the character she drew, I felt sure, would be much more vivid than the real I. It was useless to complain of her cruelty. I had once read, in a book on Charles Dickens, that an author must not be attached to his characters, he must treat them without mercy. In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens’s wife and mistress had to suffer so that Dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager’s money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn’t leave a trail of the martyred behind him. Where was Curran now? Did even Wordsworth still survive?
‘Have I ever told you,’ my aunt asked, ‘of a man called Charles Pottifer? In his way he clung to a dead man as fervently as your Miss Paterson. But in his case the dead man was himself.’
‘Not tonight, Aunt Augusta,’ I pleaded. ‘My father’s death is enough of a story for one day.’
‘And she told it reasonably well,’ my aunt admitted, ‘though I think that given her opportunity I would have told it a great deal better. But I warn you – you will be sorry one day that you refused to let me tell you the story I proposed.’
‘What story?’ I asked, thinking of my father.
‘The story of Charles Pottifer, of course,’ my aunt said.
‘Another time, Aunt Augusta.’
‘You are wrong to be so confident in the existence of another time,’ my aunt replied and called for the bill so loudly that the dog barked back at her from the bar.
19
MY aunt did not return with me to England by the car-ferry as I thought she intended. She told me at breakfast that she was taking a train to Paris. ‘There are things which I must settle,’ she said, and I remembered her warning of the night before and wondered – quite wrongly as it turned out – if she had a premonition of death.
‘Would you like me to go with you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘from the way you spoke to me last night I think you have had enough of my company for a while.’
Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer.
I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta,’ I said.
‘You resemble your father more than your mother. He believed no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.’
‘And my mother?’ I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue.
‘She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far.’
‘Why didn’t she marry him?’
‘She hadn’t the right disposition for a life in Highgate. Will you buy me a Figaro before you go?’
When I came back from the bookstall she gave me the keys to her apartment. ‘If I am away a long time,’ she said, ‘I may want you to send me something or just to look in to see that all is well. I will write to the landlord and tell him you have the keys.’
I returned to London on the car-ferry. Two days before, from the window of the train, I had watched a golden England spread beside the line – now the picture was very different: England lay damp and cold, as grey as the graveyard, while the train lagged slowly from Dover Town towards Charing Cross under the drenching rain. One window could not be closed properly and a little pool of water collected at the side of the compartment; the heating had not been turned on. In the opposite corner a woman sneezed continuously while I tried to read the Daily Telegraph. There was a threatened engineering strike, and the car industry was menaced by a stoppage of cleaners in some key factory which turned out windscreen-wipers. Cars in all the BMC factories waited without wipers on the production line. Export figures were down and so was the pound.
I came at last beyond the Court News to the Obituaries, but there was little of interest to read in that column. Somebody called Sir Oswald Newman had died at the age of seventy-two, he was the star death in a poor programme. He had been chief arbitrator in a building dispute in the 1950s after retiring as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works. He had married Rosa Urquhart in 1928, by whom he had three sons, and she survived him. His eldest was now secretary of the International Federation of Thermofactors and an OBE. I thought of my father whispering, ‘Dolly, my darling,’ before he died on the floor of the auberge in the Haute Ville, too soon to meet Sir Oswald Newman during the building dispute, which would probably not have concerned him anyway. He always kept on good terms with his men – so my mother had told me. Laziness and good nature often go together. There were always Christmas bonuses, and he was never in the mood to fight over the rise of a penny an hour. When I looked out of the window it was not Sir Oswald Newman’s England I saw, but my father’s grave in the smoky rain and Miss Paterson standing before it in prayer, and I envied him his inexplicable quality of drawing women’s love. Had Rosa Newman so loved Sir Oswald and her son, the OBE?
I let myself into the house. I had been away two nights, but like a possessive women it had the histrionic air of being abandoned. Dust collected quickly in autumn even with the windows closed. I knew the routine that I would certainly follow: a telephone call to Chicken, a visit to the dahlias if the rain stopped. Perhaps Major Charge might address a remark to me over the hedge. ‘Dolly, my darling,’ my father whispered, dying in the small hotel, as I lay in the Highgate nursery with a night-light beside the bed to drive away the fears which always gathered after my mother – or was it my stepmother? – had pecked me goodnight. I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.
A month passed, and no news came to me from my aunt. I rang several times, but there was never any reply. I tried to interest myself in a novel of Thackeray’s, but it lacked the immediacy of my aunt’s stories. As she had foreseen I even regretted having prevented her telling me the story of Charles Pottifer. I found myself living now, when I lay awake or waited in the kitchen for the kettle to boil, or when I let The Newcomes fall shut on my lap, with memories of Curran, Monsieur Dambreuse and Mr Visconti. They peopled my loneliness. When six weeks went by without news I became anxious, in case, like my father, she had died in a foreign land. I even telephoned to the St James and Albany – it was the first time since I left the bank that I had telephoned abroad. I was nervous of my poor French when I spoke into a receiver, as though the errors might be magnified by the microphone. The receptionist told me that my aunt was no
longer there – she had left three weeks before for Cherbourg.
‘Cherbourg?’
‘The boat-train,’ the receptionist said and the line was cut before I could ask him what boat.
I feared then that my aunt had left me for good. She had come into my life only to disturb it. I had lost the taste for dahlias. When weeds swarmed up I was tempted to let them grow. Once I even consented, as a possible relief to my tedium, to attend, on Major Charge’s invitation, a political meeting: it turned out to be a meeting of British Empire Loyalists, and I supposed then that it was Major Charge who had given the organization my address for their pamphlets. I saw several of my old clients there, including the admiral, and I was glad for the first time that I was in retirement. A bank manager is not expected to have strong political preferences, particularly eccentric ones, and how quickly the gossip of my presence would have gone around Southwood. Now, if my old clients looked at me at all, it was with a puzzled expression as though they were uncertain when it was we had met and on what occasion. Like a waiter on his day-off I passed virtually unrecognized. It was an odd feeling for one who had been so much in the centre of Southwood life. As I went upstairs to bed I felt myself to be a ghost returning home, transparent as water. Curran was more alive than I was. I was almost surprised to see that my image was visible in the glass.
Perhaps it was to prove the reality of my existence that I began a letter to Miss Keene. I made several drafts before I was satisfied with what I wrote, and the letter I am copying now differs in many small details from the one I dispatched. ‘My dear Miss Keene,’ I can read in the draft, but I cut out the ‘My’ in the final version, for it seemed to presume an intimacy which she had never acknowledged and which I had never claimed. ‘Dear Miss Keene, I am truly distressed that you don’t feel properly settled yet in your new home at Koffiefontein, though of course I cannot help feeling a little glad’ (I altered the ‘I’ to a ‘we’ in later drafts) ‘that your thoughts still rest sometimes on our quiet life here in Southwood. I have never known so good a friend as your father, and my thoughts often go back to those pleasant evenings when Sir Alfred sat under the Van de Velde dispensing hospitality, and you sat sewing while he and I finished the wine.’ (That last phrase I cut from the next draft – there was too much emotion in it barely concealed.) ‘I have been leading a rather unusual life the last month, much of it in the company of my aunt of whom I wrote to you. We have even gone as far afield together as Istanbul where I was a good deal disappointed with the famed Santa Sophia. I can say to you – as I couldn’t say to my aunt – that I much prefer our own St John’s Church for a religious atmosphere, and I am glad that the vicar doesn’t feel it necessary to summon the faithful to prayer by a gramophone record in a minaret. At the beginning of October we paid a visit together to my father’s grave. I don’t think I ever told you (indeed I only learnt of it recently myself) that he died and was buried in Boulogne by a strange concatenation of circumstances too long to write here. How I wish you were in Southwood that I might tell you of them.’ That sentence too I thought it prudent to eliminate. ‘I am reading The Newcomes at the moment, but I don’t enjoy it as I enjoyed Esmond. Perhaps that is the romantic in me. I open Palgrave too from time to time and read over my old favourites.’ I went on with a sense of hypocrisy: ‘My books are a good antidote to foreign travel and reinforce the sense of the England I love, but sometimes I wonder whether that England exists still beyond my garden hedge or further than Church Road. Then I think how much harder it must be for you in Koffiefontein to keep the taste of the past. The future here seems to me to have no taste at all: it is like a meal on a menu, which serves only to kill the appetite. If you ever come back to England –’ but that was a sentence I never finished, and I can’t remember now what I intended to write.
Christmas approached with no news of my aunt, not even by the medium of a Christmas card. A card, of course, arrived from Koffiefontein, a rather unlikely card with an old church seen across an acre of snow, and a comic one from Major Charge which showed goldfish in a bowl being fed by Father Christmas; it was delivered by hand to save the stamp. The local store sent me a tear-off calendar with a different treasure of British art for each month, the colours bright and shiny as though they had been washed in Omo, and on 23 December the postman brought a large envelope which when I opened it at breakfast shed a lot of silvery tinsel into my plate, so that I couldn’t finish my marmalade. The tinsel came from an Eiffel Tower which Father Christmas was climbing with his sack over his shoulder. Under the printed Meilleurs Vœux was only one name, written in block capitals: ‘Wordsworth’. He must have seen my aunt in Paris, for how else could he have obtained my address? At the bank I had always used the official Christmas cards to send to my best clients, with the bank’s coat of arms stamped on the cover and inside a picture of the main office in Cheapside or a photograph of the board of directors. Now that I had retired there were few people to whom I posted cards: Miss Keene, of course, Major Charge perforce. I sent one also to my doctor, my dentist, to the vicar of St John’s and my former chief cashier who had become manager of a branch in Nottingham.
A year before my mother had come to me for Christmas dinner, and without the aid of Chicken I had cooked a turkey quite successfully under her directions, then we had sat almost silent, like strangers in a restaurant-car, both of us feeling that we had eaten too much, until she left at ten. Afterwards I had, as was my habit, attended the midnight service with carols at St John’s. This year, since I had no wish to cook a meal for myself alone, I booked a table for dinner at the Abbey Restaurant off Latimer Road. It proved a mistake. I had not realized they were mounting a special menu with turkey and plum pudding to attract the lonely and the nostalgic from all over Southwood. Before I left home I had rung my aunt’s number in the vain hope that she might have returned just in time for Christmas, but the bell tolled and tolled in the empty flat, and I could imagine the noise setting all the Venetian glasses atinkle.
The first person I saw when I came into the restaurant, which was a very small one with heavy beams and stained-glass windows and a piece of mistletoe in an undangerous position over the toilet, was the admiral sitting all alone. He had obviously dined early and he wore a scarlet paper crown – a torn cracker lay on his plate with the remains of plum pudding. I bowed to him and he said angrily, ‘Who are you?’ At a table beyond him I could see Major Charge, who was frowning over what looked like a political pamphlet.
‘I am Pulling,’ I said.
‘Pulling?’
‘Late of the bank.’
There was an angry flush below the red paper hat, and an empty bottle of Chianti stood on the table. I added, ‘Happy Christmas, Admiral.’
‘Good God, man,’ he said, ‘haven’t you read the news?’
I managed to get by, though the channel between the tables was very narrow, and found to my distress that my table had been reserved next to Major Charge’s.
‘Good evening, Major,’ I said. I began to wonder whether I was the only civilian in the place.
‘I have a favour to ask of you,’ Major Charge said.
‘Of course … any help … I am afraid I no longer keep up with the stock market …’
‘Who’s talking about the stock market? You don’t suppose I’d have anything to do with the City? They’ve sold this country down the river. I’m talking about my fish.’
Miss Truman interrupted us to take my order. Perhaps to encourage her customers she was wearing a paper cap, vaguely military in shape but yellow in colour. She was a large boisterous woman who liked to be called Peter; the little restaurant had always seemed too small to contain her and her partner as well – a woman named Nancy who was timid and retiring and perhaps for that reason showed herself only occasionally framed at the service hatch.
Unable to look elsewhere, I made some complimentary reference to her cap.
‘Like the old days,’ she said, looking pleased, and I remembered that she had been an offi
cer in the women’s navy.
How ambiguous my feelings were. I realized in those moments how deep was the disturbance my aunt had caused. This was my familiar world – the little local world of ageing people to which Miss Keene longed to return, where one read of danger only in the newspapers and the deepest change to be expected was a change of government and the biggest scandal – I could remember one defecting clerk who had lost too much money at the Earls Court greyhound track. It was more my country than England could be, for I had never seen the satanic mills or visited the northern wastes, and in my way I had been happy here; yet I was looking at Peter (Miss Truman) with an ironic eye, as though I had borrowed my aunt’s vision and saw with her eyes. Beyond Latimer Road there stretched another world – the world of Wordsworth and Curran and Monsieur Dambreuse and Colonel Hakim and the mysterious Mr Visconti who had dressed up as a monsignor to escape the Allied troops, yes, and of my father too, saying ‘Dolly darling’ to Miss Paterson with his last breath on the auberge floor and gaining a life-long devotion by dying in her arms. To whom now could I apply for a visa to that land with my aunt gone?
‘Will you take the set meal, Mr Pulling?’
‘I don’t think I can manage the plum pudding.’
‘Nancy has made some smashing mince pies.’
‘Perhaps one,’ I said, ‘because it’s Christmas.’
Miss Truman rolled away with a Tom Bowling stride and I turned to Major Charge. ‘You were saying?’
‘I’m going away for the New Year. To a study group at Chesham. I’ve got to board my fish. Can’t trust them with the daily. I thought of Peter – but she’s a woman too, in a way. You can see how she feeds us. Any excuse to pile it on. She would probably do the same with the little buggers.’
‘You want me to look after your fish?’