I didn’t think that at the time. What I thought was: this is my father’s brother. He must be strong and kind because he’s my flesh and blood. Soon I’ll understand; soon it’ll become clear.
Then I looked at his hands and wondered what games they’d played as children, if he’d bowled while my father batted, if they’d made snowmen together at this time of year. I searched his eyes, hoping for some light of recognition. Adulthood was strange. It looked joyless.
Tea came on a trolley, and Uncle Bobby sipped noisily from his cup. Tearing my eyes from my uncle for the first time, I noticed that my mother was still wearing her felt hat with a feather in the brim.
Conversation seemed to die down. My mother began to look uncomfortable; Uncle Bobby took a cigarette from his cardigan pocket and lit it with a shaking hand.
I looked hard at the lined skin of his face, well shaved apart from a small patch under his lower lip. I stared at his eyes. This was the closest I would come to my father. I longed to touch him.
* * *
THE EVENING AFTER the upstairs party and the misunderstandings that followed, I looked again at the letter from Alexander Pereira, the man who claimed to have known my father. It concluded:
I live on a very small but rather lovely island off the south of France, which you can reach by water taxi from the foot of the presqu’île south of Toulon. (The island is about five kilometres from Porquerolles, if you consult a map.) Would you care to come and spend a couple of days as my guest? I didn’t know your father well, but I have a few souvenirs of the war, photographs and such like, that include him. The island has a vineyard whose wines are little known, but worth getting to know.
Let me end by assuring you that my admiration for your book is sincere. I have made some discoveries of my own in the field in which you worked, so when we have finished with my few bits and pieces from the Great War, I feel sure we could have much to say about our shared interests. Then if all goes according to plan, I hope you may consider an arrangement in which, if you were so minded, you might take my work forward after I am dead and become my literary executor.
I know this is an unusual offer to receive from a stranger, but I do hope you will indulge an old man! Even if the executor proposition does not appeal to you, I can assure you that you would have a most pleasant and relaxing time here.
Yours sincerely,
Alexander Pereira
* * *
THE NEXT DAY I went to the London Library in St. James’s Square to see what I could find out about this Pereira. In the reference section I found the Conseil de l’Ordre des Médecins en France. Sure enough, there was an Alexander Pereira, who had been born in 1887. It gave a list of appointments, some clinical, some academic. His career seemed to have come to an end quite abruptly after the Second World War. In a second reference work I saw that he had published a number of articles as well as five books, all of which seemed to relate to memory and dementia. Before the war, he had held some notable posts in his profession and had clearly had that privileged inside track of French education that eases its elite through lycée and grande école to the handful of top jobs in engineering, medicine, and finance.
How very different it was, I couldn’t help thinking, from my own education. Our village school consisted of three rooms in a building in the corner of a field with a five-bar gate. Can it really have been like that? I’m making it sound like a byre, a sty. And perhaps it was. There was little money at that time, the early twenties, just a need to forget the recent past. The cook with her hair in a net, Mrs. Adams, holding a spoon over the giant rice pudding, poised to break its skin … My feet running over the uneven yard that separated the rooms … Mr. Armitage, the headmaster, who had been shot at Ypres, with his right arm tucked into his jacket and the mysterious spring that disappeared up his trouser leg from the instep of his right boot …
We were always being asked to make raffia mats or to model with plasticine; the teacher was impatient, and I was made to stand in a corner. Then in the second year there was less craft and more arithmetic; there was spelling and learning to read. I remember the morning on which the words began to make sense. I felt shifty because I was no longer working them out letter by letter, but if the word began env and still had some way to go it was obviously going to be envelope. I wasn’t sure if this was allowed.
After school I walked over Pocock’s fifty-acre field to the farm where my mother worked. I liked to get lost on purpose, which was easily done by plunging into the deep woods. With foliage all round and over me, there were no bearings to be had, and it freed my mind to be among the roots and mosses and the small wildflowers that no one else would ever see. Once I lost myself so successfully that I had to be brought home at night by the local policeman when I emerged in the neighboring county.
At my mother’s farm there was a stable lass called Jane, who used to let me help muck out the stables, and if she was in a good mood, which wasn’t often, she’d tell me about the different characters of the horses. I longed to get on a pony and see for myself. There was a piebald called Stoker that I had my eye on; and eventually I learned to ride.
Soon, I moved into Mr. Armitage’s class. He beat your hand with a ruler if you were slow on the uptake, but he explained the work clearly. One day he asked if I would get my mother to come in early before lessons began. She and I presumed there was trouble. I wasn’t aware of what I’d done, but there were rules I didn’t know, any one of which I could have broken.
We arrived soon after seven o’clock, while the classroom was still being swept and the milk churns were arriving. There was nowhere to talk except the schoolrooms, so my mother and I sat at desks in the front row, with Mr. Armitage in the teacher’s big chair. He told her that the boys’ grammar school in town was obliged to take a quarter of its pupils on free scholarships from village schools like his. If my mother had no objection, he was going to put my name forward. She had many objections, baffling ones to me—about our place in life and so on—but Armitage carried some authority; his shot-up body was proof of experience beyond our imagining.
He pulled himself up and limped to the window, where he stood looking out over the fields as though picturing some other hills.
“When we were over in France,” he said, “I used to think about a quiet life teaching in the village. We all had thoughts about what we’d do afterwards. A lot of men used to think they’d go into business together or open a pub. I used to imagine a moment like this, when I might be able to open the door for a boy from the village. You don’t have to send him, Mrs. Hendricks, but I think he should go.”
She was shamed into agreeing, and the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a redbrick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In imitation of older and grander places, it concentrated on Latin and Greek. Just as no one is better dressed than the arriviste, so no school in England could have devoted more time to the subjunctive and, in due course, the works of Ovid and Euripides. Fortunately, I liked these subjects. Parsing Latin prose and composing verse was an exercise in mechanics that let me understand the pleasure some boys had in dismantling and rebuilding engines. I had no literary appreciation of Livy or Homer, but that kind of response was not required; it was only about the logic of grammar. The physics teacher advised us to look at the water in the bath at home, to consider how liquid turns into vapor, and to think about the displacement caused by our getting in; but I looked at water, tap, mirror, basin, according to how their scansion would fit into a hexameter.
In retrospect, all this seems insane, but I suppose it kept us from thinking about anything more troublesome. One thing it clearly left us with was a sense that our century was insignificant and, compared to the heroes and lawgivers of antiquity, our leaders paltry; it was hard to picture Mr. Neville Chamberlain cleansing the Augean stables or Mr. Baldwin bringing home the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides.
After high tea with my mother, I would go upstairs to
do my homework, with Bessie the sheepdog (given to us as surplus to the farm’s requirements) rounding me up into her imagined pen. The work usually took no more than an hour and left me time to read the Bible. My mother used to worry that I spent too much time with my “nose in a book.” I didn’t see how she could object to my doing what we were all urged to do, but I took some pleasure in making her anxious. A child is so desperate to be acknowledged that even inflicting pain on someone he loves can seem like a small victory over insignificance.
The house we lived in was bigger than you might imagine. It had fallen into my father’s hands before the war. The sum of a hundred pounds and an insurance policy were part of a story my mother seemed not to understand. “Your father was an educated man,” she used to say, as if that explained it. Most people then were tenants in tied cottages; the price of houses was low; there were plenty to be had where we lived; and no one thought of them as investments.
Ours stood in an acre of garden that backed onto fields; it had outbuildings that had once been used for tanning. There were more rooms inside than we needed, and my mother took in lodgers. I didn’t like it when a new one arrived, as when she’d shown him to his room and they’d agreed on the rent, she always ended up saying “Never mind Robert. He’s a funny lad, but he won’t get in your way.” This was followed by a rumpling of my hair.
My bedroom was at the end of a corridor and overlooked the front garden. This was lawn with a few shrubs at the edges and a knotted apple tree in the middle. We had neither the time nor the know-how to plant tulips or dahlias or something that might have brought color. My mother and I used the kitchen as our living space; the other rooms downstairs were too expensive to heat, so were used only in the summer. Except for tea in the kitchen at half past six, the lodger was expected to stay in his room.
Yet the house was more than closed rooms and a coal-fired range. Though built only a hundred years before, it seemed older; some of it was too frightening to explore. Off the old tannery outside, there was an unlit room that held an open-topped wooden chest inhabited by rats, or worse; beyond that was a door that opened into a darkness so black I never risked it. On the side of the house itself, attached to the wall, was a metal ladder that went up to a window that seemed to have no equivalent inside. In its draughty passageways and brick-floored yards, in its outdoor cellars and musty lofts, there was always the sense of those who had gone before; there were the murmurs of another life.
* * *
I HAD NEVER felt convinced by my own education; it seemed fragmentary and full of useless facts. In the course of my career, I had often felt at a disadvantage when faced by those who had been to better schools—by their confidence and range of reference. It was true that I had published one book of my own, but I hardly felt that qualified me to work with a man of such apparent distinction as this Pereira.
Then there was the question of my father. My mother told me that in life he had been a kind man and a good citizen; other people in the village seldom spoke about the war dead, but any chance comments that came my way confirmed her high opinion. My father consequently occupied a defined space in my existence; from the grave he had exerted a minor but constant influence. His example was something that, unconsciously, I tried to emulate; and I suppose that as I grew older a good deal of what I strove to achieve was driven by a desire to experience life on his behalf. There were moments when I even hoped he might be watching.
I wouldn’t say I had always been “happy” with this arrangement, but I was able to work with it. Although I was tempted by the idea of talking to someone who had actually known my father, I was suspicious of what might lie behind Pereira’s stated purposes, and I was anxious that meeting such a person might expose some failings or unresolved traumas in me—that the sleeping dogs might be kicked into life.
On balance it was wiser to let them doze on. The next day I wrote a letter of reply declining the offer, sealed it, and left it on the hall table.
* * *
IT WAS NOT until the following Saturday morning that Annalisa was able to come and see me.
“Geoffrey has found out about us,” she said. “That’s what I was coming round to say when I found you with that woman.”
“How did he find out?”
“It doesn’t matter, but he knows. I think he followed me here one day. We’ve been arguing all week. He packed his things and left last night.”
I felt a sickening pity for her. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I’m going to start my life again.”
“That doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“I don’t want to see you again, Robert. It’s too painful.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. It’s not going anywhere.”
“So you’re going to lose both of us.”
“Yes, it’s easier that way. I can go back to being me. I can begin again.”
I sat down and lit a cigarette. “I suppose too much intimacy can be dangerous.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Robert. I’ll always think well of you. I’ll always remember. I don’t regret it.”
* * *
PERHAPS I SHOULD have run after her. I heard the front door of the house close with the boom that always rattled the windows. I looked down at my hands and feet and wondered if they would move. Was I really content to let this woman walk away from me, from our shared closeness? Where on earth would I find a comparable excitement? And for her own good, I should make her see that such things came seldom in a life.
I went into the kitchen and made some tea. That’s what my hands and feet seemed to want to do. In the afternoon, I went to the cinema in Curzon Street and watched a three-hour French film of the kind I enjoy, in which the main characters pursue their personal goals with no sense of ethics or contingency, just cigarette smoke, sex, and the streets of provincial towns.
That night, the loss of Annalisa worked its way through my sleeping defenses and woke me with a lurch. I went to the bathroom, drank some water, and took one of the mild sleeping pills I had prescribed myself.
Unpleasant though it was, the sense of rupture and the vista of solitude it opened up didn’t feel traumatic; they felt more like a reversion to the norm. I had been here before: I was a habitué of loneliness, which was in any case the underlying condition of mankind from which the little alliances and dependencies we make are only a diversion. Since knowing L during the war, more than thirty-five years earlier, I had made no lasting arrangement for myself, only ties of lust or convenience.
When I was about sixteen, at the grammar school, I had begun a diary. For decades, it lay in the bottom drawer of the desk, beneath the loose photographs I would one day find time to put into an album. The day after Annalisa left, I retrieved it from the darkness.
The world it bought back was still viscerally alive in me; for this, it occurred to me with the force of revelation as I looked again at the black-inked pages, was where I had first accepted solitude.
In my final year at school it had been suggested that I might try to win a place at one of the universities. Classics would be the subject; but I would have to win a scholarship, as there was no question of my mother finding the fees. Extra tuition would be needed to bring me up to this level, and the headmaster suggested I go to lodge with Mr. Liddell, a retired teacher, recently widowed, who lived near the school. In that way I could be at my studies all day and all evening too. So at the age of seventeen I began my life as a lodger. Dear God, the attics, the garrets, the box rooms; the eaves, the roofs of slate and tile over which I’ve looked …
Mr. Liddell’s house was a ten-minute bicycle ride from the school gates, through a wood, down a stony path bordered by rhododendrons. My room was on the top floor. It had an iron-framed bed, a chest, and a desk. Its window overlooked a garden with a weeping larch that looked like one of those dogs with hair like a mop; you couldn’t see a trunk or even branches, just shaggy f
oliage. It seemed to be always on the point of moving, and when the wind blew I looked the other way.
I was woken in the morning by a bell jangling outside my room. It was rung by Mr. Liddell, using a string that dropped down inside the banisters to the ground floor.
“Good morning, Robert.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Time for Tacitus.”
I was allowed a cup of tea before an hour with the Histories. Liddell had chosen Tacitus because his density of expression made the grammar difficult to unpick. By the time I joined the others for the first lesson, I was already in gear.
At the end of the working day, when the rest had gone home, I went to the dining hall alone to eat the boiled egg or sardines on toast that had been left under a tin cover with my surname and initial on a card. There was strong tea, said to contain bromide. In the evenings, I did my homework, then went down to Liddell’s study on the first floor—a square, book-lined room with a sash window that overlooked a lawn and a laurel hedge.
Mr. Liddell had retired the term before, so was presumably about sixty-five. Yet he looked like an old man. His hair was white, his face was lined, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses; there was something dry and powdery about him. He had two tweed jackets, which he swapped over every half term. Our evenings were spent in Greek verse composition: Liddell would give me some Victorian verse, and I was meant to turn it into a Pindaric ode; or a bit of Macaulay that I should translate so it sounded like Homer.
If I was right about Mr. Liddell’s age he must have been born about 1868—before the unifications of both Italy and Germany. We had studied the Franco-Prussian War in history class; it was as close to the modern age as we were allowed. The Siege of Paris, the Commune, the flight of Gambetta by hot-air balloon … all this, I suddenly thought, had taken place while the man next to me was already in the world.