One evening, I managed to work round to this in an impersonal way, by talk of Prussian history.
“Don’t you sometimes think, sir, how history turns on such small things?”
Liddell relit his pipe and raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”
“Well. We were taught that Bismarck sent Napoleon III a teasing telegram. But Napoleon was so infuriated that he declared war on Prussia. Which was just what Bismarck wanted. But suppose Napoleon had just shrugged and said, ‘That’s life.’ There would have been no war, no French humiliation, no Germany, and no Great War either.”
“It may have been more complicated than that,” said Mr. Liddell.
“Were you alive then, sir?”
“Yes. Just about. The unification of Germany was probably inevitable. Large countries find ways of growing and consolidating. Usually they have to wage war.”
“But surely, sir, that makes all history seem predestined.”
“There are forces greater than the will of an individual.”
“Doesn’t the Bible show that humans have choice and weakness? Think of Adam and Eve. But also that we can choose to do good, which was what Christ showed us.”
Mr. Liddell sat back in his armchair. I envied him this seat; it had a miniature bookshelf let into the side, beneath the arm, where he kept detective stories. He smiled at me over his pipe smoke. I suppose he thought this was exactly the sort of sixth-form discussion he was paid to provoke.
“Are you calling me a Whig?” he said, with his dry little laugh.
“Or a Communist, sir.” I gave a quick snort of my own, to show that this was not serious. “A determinist at any rate. Of one kind or another.”
“And does that make you a Tory?”
“I don’t think so, sir. But I do believe that if Napoleon III had not had a headache that day, he might have thought differently. The Hohenzollern succession needn’t have provoked a war.”
“How do you know he had a headache?”
“Because he behaved irrationally. He had had one glass of brandy too many on the night before. And then without the Franco-Prussian War and the birth of the German empire we wouldn’t have had the Great War in Europe.”
Mr. Liddell looked at me pityingly.
“And my father would be alive,” I said.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. I wasn’t sure why I had veered into the personal, and I hadn’t yet read the psychological writing that would try to persuade me that what emerges by mistake is what the whole exchange is “really” about.
Then something awful happened. Mr. Liddell reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled out a handkerchief. He blew his nose hard, then pushed the cloth up under his glasses into his eyes. He had shed tears.
The inside of my belly seemed to fall away. Panic ran through my arms. A younger brother, perhaps, dead at Passchendaele … or perhaps he had lost his wife. Yes. Maybe my talk of death had reminded him of Mrs. Liddell. We had never mentioned her, and now it was too late.
* * *
AT MR. LIDDELL’S, my bedroom window overlooked not only the repulsive weeping larch but also part of the next-door neighbor’s garden. One evening, as I was sitting with a volume of Catullus, wondering if my own life would ever begin, a girl of about my age came out onto the lawn. My early start and late return meant I had had little to do with the family who lived there, though Mr. Liddell had told me they were called Miller. The father worked in electronics, and the daughter’s name was Mary.
She was wearing tennis clothes and carrying a glass of some orange drink. She lay down on a rug and began to read. I put Catullus to one side for a moment. I had no sisters; and while I had spent a few hours in the local library looking at native tribeswomen and human biological textbooks, I had been to the girls’ high school once only—to see a production of The Merchant of Venice, in which Lindsay Elliot’s Portia made the skin on my neck crawl strangely. After the play finished I stayed and talked to a few of the girls; I found them easier to get on with than the boys at my own school, but none of them invited me to their houses. Our friendship went no further than the odd wave at the bus station by the old wharf. I’d read some books in which there was both love and sex, but the girls I knew didn’t seem the types to provoke such passion. These book characters seemed exaggerated; my own reality seemed vapid by comparison. But perhaps that wasn’t good enough …
Maybe I wasn’t really trying, I thought, as I focused on Mary Miller lying on her rug. There was certainly something about her pose that was beguiling. The front of the leg was flattened against the grass while the slight tug of gravity on the back of the thigh gave it an almost conical shape on its way to the apex of the knee. It made you want to stroke the outline, to feel the flesh packed tight beneath the skin. One leg was bent up from the joint, the other was flat on the ground. She alternated their positions with a flick, like someone idly treading water.
When she threw aside the band she had been wearing for tennis her dark brown hair hung down over her shoulders. I couldn’t see the title of the book she was reading, but it didn’t seem to be holding her attention. She rested her face on her arm and closed her eyes. Her hair seemed to irritate her, and needed a good deal of pushing back; if it wasn’t the hair, it was some insect, invisible to me, that needed batting away.
She was up on her elbows again, back in the book, slurping from the glass. There must have been a lot of insect life in the Millers’ lawn, I thought, as Mary lifted her skirt to scratch the top of her thigh. Eventually, she settled down again, rested her cheek on her folded arms, and seemed to fall asleep. As she lay still, I imagined what she would look like without any clothes at all. I thought of Aphrodite rising from the foam of the Aegean, but the image seemed to belong to a world quite different from that of the dozing schoolgirl. The goddess I could see through an erotic haze, the sixth-former less so.
Did that mean that a condition of falling for someone was to misperceive them through a trance of imagining? Catullus might have the answer. I looked down to the book on the windowsill. “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,” he urged. “Give me a thousand kisses.”
I thought of Mary Miller as my Lesbia; I bent over her body, lifted her little skirt while she slept, and gave her a thousand kisses.
Soon afterwards I took to skipping tea after lessons so I could get back to Mr. Liddell’s at the same time I imagined Mary would arrive home from the bus stop. After a week or so, I managed to bump into her. I introduced myself and asked if she would like to come into my house and have tea.
“All right,” she said.
I stalled. “On second thoughts, it might not be such a good idea. Mr. Liddell’s quite strict. And I don’t really know if he’d like me to … What about your parents?”
“Oh, they’re fine,” said Mary. “They don’t get back till six. I’ll make some tea. Are you hungry?”
I was. I’d had no high tea for a week. “If it’s no trouble.”
Mary led me indoors. I sniffed. My mother’s house smelled of paraffin and bacon, Mr. Liddell’s of old upholstery and pipe smoke; in the Millers’ hallway there was floor polish, gravy, and something rather smart and flowery I couldn’t put my finger on.
We went to the kitchen. Mary moved about quickly, talking as she filled the kettle, pulled out cups. She might have been any age from sixteen to twenty-eight. Her skin was clear, like a child’s, with a few freckles under the eyes, but her body was a woman’s—not heavy or slow, but a finished work. I felt easy in her company and had to be eased out just before six, when her parents were due back.
Mary introduced me to other girls at the high school, and at last I found myself invited to a party. My mother had insisted on good manners, so I could manage, more or less. Some of the grammar-school boys looked surprised to see me, but I ignored them and pressed on. There was always Mary to talk to—to fall back on; then there was her friend Paula Wood, in whom I invested many hours. I found girls liked it if you asked questions an
d listened carefully to the answers. What was difficult was to see how this immersion in their grievances and hopes could switch into something erotic—for which they really, I felt, needed to be more mysterious or grown up.
One day, Paula asked me if I would come and help prepare for the party she had finally persuaded her parents to allow her. I left my lodging early and cycled through the town, past the Saturday livestock market, and up the steep hill towards open country. Paula came from a world unknown to me, where gravel drives rose from suburban streets through hedges of laurel and privet to reveal solid houses with gardens, swings, and summerhouses. A pair of dogs came wandering from the Woods’ open front door, through which I glimpsed the parquet of the hall and the empty stair beyond. Behind me there was the rumble of a delivery van grinding the pea shingle beneath its wheels; from inside the house came the noise of empty glasses conveyed on trembling trays. Paula and her sister were placing night-lights in jars along a paved path, down towards the rhododendrons that marked the garden’s edge. We raised a canvas canopy in case of rain, lashing it to the lawn with guys attached to wooden pegs. From the kitchen, we could hear the wireless playing, while Paula’s mother chopped and cooked, pushing back her hair, arranging the slivers and triangles on china dishes.
There were long shadows under the cedars, over the grass, when the guests arrived at dusk. Tall, awkward boys waved cigarettes and talked among themselves, while the girls admired each other’s clothes. A gramophone, set by an open window, played dance music while Paula and her sisters moved among the visitors with jugs of fruit cocktail, strengthened with gin and vermouth from the pantry.
I saw her father watching from an upstairs window, anxious but amused. To his searching eye, there may have seemed a pattern in the groups that formed and broke, boys and girls together now, glasses in hand, drifting inside to dance. To those of us involved, there was nothing but the impulse of the moment. I remember sensing that there was envy in the father’s look and feeling powerful because of it.
Later, when the guests were starting to go home, Paula asked me if I would come outside with her. We walked down the lighted pathway, where the candles were now burning low in their glass holders and sat together on the grassy bank. Paula put her head on my shoulder, as an old friend of the same sex might do after a hectic game of tag. I ran my hand over the light fabric of her dress, along her thigh, in the same spirit of friendship. She turned her face up to mine so I could kiss her lips. Her tongue flickered shyly to and fro while she stroked the sleeve of my shirt with her small, determined fingers. She stood up and took me by the hand. We went into a clearing in the rhododendrons where no one could see us, and Paula opened the front of her dress and put my hand on her breast. Then she lifted the skirt to show her bare legs. I had not known that human skin could be so soft. My fingertips seemed too rough, so I turned my hand over and brushed her inner thigh with the back of my fingers. I felt something scalding, unexpected. After what seemed a struggle not with me but with herself, she took my hand away, kissed it, and returned it to my side.
* * *
BY THIS TIME I had been keeping a diary for two years. Now I had more to include in it than small triumphs of translation or comments on school food. To defeat prying eyes, I wrote in Greek—not in the language itself, but using the alphabet; and to disguise identities I gave people names from myth: Mary Miller was Helen, Mr. Liddell was Anchises. My mother was Medea. My father, seldom mentioned, was Odysseus.
This journal was contained in a four-hundred-page blue exercise book I had brought back from the stationery cupboard at school. I preferred not to have the days of a printed calendar to reproach me with their emptiness but to take down the book from the shelf only when I had something to say. My writing was small and tidy, and I hoped the fat book would last for twenty years. I was careful to let no one see it, though to a stranger I suppose it would in any case have made no sense.
At night I read the Bible. I had always thought the stories were thrilling, but had gagged at the odor of sanctity that attached to the study of them. Jephthah, Joshua, and Gideon were warlords, and that was what made them exciting, as they crashed through Judaea and Samaria, taking land for the Israelites. I was meant to turn off my light at eleven, so after that I read by torch beneath the bedclothes. These Israelites produced successive leaders from some inexhaustible well of talent: patriarchs, prophets, soldiers, kings … What intrigued me was the balance of power between ruler and adviser. It was easy when Abraham and Moses took their instructions direct from Jehovah, but later leaders—Saul and David, say—relied on their court prophets to hear the will of God and relay it to them. It seemed that something had broken down, some direct line of command. And going deep into the later prophets, the ones that no one ever read from in church, I came across discredited men afflicted by voices that issued more advice, more urgently, than they could assimilate. From being the most important figures at court, they had become outcasts on a stony hillside. I felt for them, these Ezekiels and Amoses, almost deafened by the hectoring voices that their rulers no longer cared to consult.
So deeply buried was I in Latin and minor prophets that the sinister developments in Europe passed me by. I was so concerned with Napoleon III that I overlooked the way that Adolf Hitler was tearing up the Treaty of Versailles, while the Italians were poised to butcher the spear-carriers of Abyssinia with poison gas and machine guns. There was something about bald Mussolini with his pomaded army and even about the strutting little führer that made it hard to take them seriously.
After some exams I was offered a place at an old university in a little-known college of Scottish foundation. My fees were paid, and there was a small living allowance. Mr. Liddell saw me off with a calf-bound copy of Euripides that I think he treasured; he also gave me a spare jacket, which surprised me, as I thought he had only the two he alternated. My mother said she was heartbroken to see me go, but she showed no emotion when I left to walk to the station, suitcase in hand, sweating a little in the October sun under the weight of Mr. Liddell’s tweed …
I closed the old diary and shut away the life so full of chance, so oddly shaped, it had brought back to me.
* * *
IT MUST HAVE been forty-eight hours after I’d written my letter of polite refusal to Pereira that I saw the corner of the envelope, still unposted, beneath some junk mail on the hall table. I pulled it out, dropped it in the wastepaper basket, sat down at my desk, and began again. “Dear Dr. Pereira, Thank you for your letter. I should be delighted…”
A week later, I heard back from him; and ten days after that I was on the plane.
Flights to Toulon were rare and expensive; I doglegged via Marseille and a boxy hire car to the tip of the peninsula—what Pereira called the presqu’île, or “almost-island”—to a small area where pleasure boats and water taxis berthed. Here I stood outside a scruffy place with a red awning, the Café des Pins, waiting to be collected.
What reckoning with my past had made me change my mind? I conceded now that looking back over my youth in such detail was probably a way of preparing my defenses. Recent research showed that your brain came to a decision more quickly than your mind could do so and fired the relevant systems before your plodding “judgment” took the credit. Overlooking the implications for free will, or the illusion of it, I was happy to accept that that had been the case with me.
I was going to meet a man who could open a door on to my past: it made me vulnerable to think a stranger might know more about myself than I did; I needed to make sure my own version of my life was in good order. At the same time, the wretched Annalisa business (such a mess of lust and fear and blocked feeling) had made me admit there were aspects of my character—or behavior, at least—that not only were self-defeating but also inflicted pain on others. Even in my early sixties, I still felt young and vigorous enough to change—to confront whatever I had yet to face; and perhaps a medical man of my father’s generation whose special interest was in memory could be
the very one to help.
I was into my second cigarette when an old woman in black stopped and looked me up and down.
“Vous êtes Dr. Hendricks?” Her accent was strongly of the Midi.
“Oui.”
“Venez.” She gestured me to follow. I picked up my case and hurried after. Despite her bowed legs she moved at speed. We went down a stone jetty, past the public ferry that had tied up for the night, over a gangway, and onto a boat with a white canopy. It was big enough for a dozen people, though there were only three of us on it. The third, a man in the wheelhouse, opened the throttle and began to edge the boat out into the waters of the bay.
My French was good enough to ask how far we were going and how long it would take, but I couldn’t make out the old woman’s answers over the noise of the engine, and it seemed to me she preferred it that way. Eventually, I gave up trying to talk and instead looked back over the churning white wake to the port. Twenty minutes later, the mainland was no longer visible; we had left behind the croissant shape of Porquerolles Island as we headed away from the setting sun.
THREE
At some point, despite the heave of the sea, I must have nodded off. I was woken by the thump of the side of the boat against a rock. It was dark.
There was an urgent exchange between the pilot and the old woman. We had arrived at a rocky inlet, or calanque as the man called it. He shone a torch on an iron hoop hammered into the reef; through this he secured the painter. The sea was calm enough to allow him to jump out and extend his hand, first to the woman, then to me.
It was an awkward scramble by torchlight before we reached a path. Here the man left us and returned to his boat. I followed the old woman in the dark on an uphill wooded path. I caught the smell of pines and could feel their needles under my feet. Eventually we came to some steps, which after a considerable time—there were perhaps a hundred of them—led to a flat area on what must have been the cliff top. A large rectangular house was now visible, lit only by the moon; I could make out numerous tropical shrubs and trees along its shuttered verandah.