The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

HUGH FLEETWOOD

For

Marina Magi, Damiano Abeni and Luigi Cerina

CONTENTS

1. Title Page

2. Dedication

3. Introduction

4. The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

5. The Nature Of Angels

6. A Woman Of Integrity

7. Sacrifice

8. The Man Who Loved England

9. Why Are You Wearing My Daughter’s Earrings?

10. L & I

11. Copyright

INTRODUCTION

On Beauty, and The Beast:

An Interview with Hugh Fleetwood

Hugh Fleetwood was born in Chichester, Sussex, in 1944. Aged twenty-one, he moved to Italy and lived there for fourteen years, during which time he exhibited his paintings and wrote a number of novels and story collections, originally published by Hamish Hamilton, beginning with A Painter of Flowers (1972). His second novel, The Girl Who Passed for Normal (1973), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. His fifth, The Order of Death (1977), was adapted into a 1983 film starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon. In 1978 he published his first collection of short stories, The Beast. Subsequent collections have included Fictional Lives (1980) and The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (1988). He currently lives in London, and continues to work both as writer and painter.

In this interview with Faber Finds editor Richard T. Kelly, recorded at the Faber offices in April 2013, Hugh Fleetwood discusses some of the key influences on his work, both from life and from art.

RICHARD T. KELLY: Given the distinctive expatriate/Anglo-Italian dimension of your writing it does seem very significant that you moved away from England while still a young man. Was this a special ambition of yours?

HUGH FLEETWOOD: Yes, I found England parochial, I hated the whole class business, absolutely loathed it – I still do. When I was seven years old I was sent to boarding school in Worthing, and we had an English master there who actually did say to us, ‘You know, you boys are going to grow up to run the empire …’ Even at that age, I thought, ‘You are insane.’ Then at thirteen I went to a public school, Eastbourne, which I hated with a passion – so much that it was the making of me, really. I was so determined to get away from the sorts of people I encountered there that I vowed I would leave the country as soon as I could.

There was a history teacher who loathed me – I don’t know if it was personal, but one of my forebears had been a general under Cromwell and one of the many signatories of Charles I’s death warrant. This teacher never forgave me for that. I remember writing in an essay something to the effect that Gladstone was the first English statesman to try to incorporate Christian morality into practical politics. He crossed this out and wrote, ‘What about King Alfred?’ Alfred hadn’t much figured in our syllabus, if he indeed existed. And at the bottom he added in red ink, ‘But what can you expect from the descendant of a regicide?’

RTK: Weren’t there any teachers who encouraged you in a creative direction?

HF: I always painted, and there was one art teacher who thought I should go on to art school. But then he went off to America on an exchange, and his American counterpart didn’t like me and I didn’t like him, which put me off. But that was probably fortuitous … The school did have a painting competition, and I did a large oil of a black woman, naked, full frontal. They had to give me the first prize, it was the best entry, but they were terribly embarrassed. I was awarded £25 and a book of my choice, so I picked Les Fleurs du Mal. I think the general reaction was ‘Typical Fleetwood’ …

RTK: What about literary interests? Were you reading much early? Did you write?

HF: I started reading seriously, I suppose, when I was about 14 – Ibsen and Strindberg, and other names I would claim to have read, and then had to catch up on very quickly … But by the time I was sixteen, seventeen, I loved German literature and music, I was fascinated by that culture. These were the post-war years, of course, and it often seemed that the Germans were blamed for every sin throughout history. Obviously they were guilty to an extent. But I also felt the English weren’t nearly so spotless as they purported to be. There was an awful lot of self-righteousness. I mean, history teaches us – we may be rich and civilised now, but we didn’t get to be so by being nice, did we? We did it basically by killing people who were less rich and less quote-unquote civilised. We all know that and we all accept that.

RTK: As Ernest Jones said of the British Empire, ‘On its colonies the sun never sets but the blood never dries …’

HF: Yes, and all empires have been the same. I’m sure when the Romans invaded Britain they were hated. But a thousand years go by and the account becomes rather more sanitised …

When I was sixteen or seventeen I started writing short stories, too, and then a novel – I knew it ‘wouldn’t do’, but I did finish it. And as soon as I finished school I went to Paris for six months.

RTK: Why Paris? Did you speak the language?

HF: Only a little, but I’d been there with my parents and liked it; I had family in Paris who agreed to put me up. And Paris seemed the nearest place that was ‘abroad’ – it was just that lure of getting away. And I loved it. I was passionate about film, and Paris was wonderful for the cinema. I would go three times a day, it only cost one franc, and I got my film education that way, saw every old Hitchcock, Ford, Renoir, Von Sternberg … Eventually my parents said to me, ‘Come back to England, go to university, at least until you’re twenty-one, and if you still want to live abroad then go.’ I always got on well with my parents – they both seemed very normal to me, and I suppose I must have seemed very un-normal to them, but they were extraordinarily tolerant. So I did as they asked. I started studying Law, detested it. All I remember is I sat in lectures next to Tim Rice. And the day after my twenty-first birthday I left the country and vowed never to return – a vow I didn’t quite manage to keep … But when I went my parents said, ‘It’s your life, you’re old enough to know what you want to do, we hope it works out.’

RTK: How did you manage to arrange your escape?

HF: I was sharing a flat in Lambeth and a girl in the flat worked for OUP. She introduced me to a German publisher based in Munich who told me that if I went to Munich and learned some German he’d give me some sort of job. So I went, but I wasn’t happy – it was expensive, I could see my money running out in a fortnight, certainly before I’d learned enough German.

One day I went to the train station and saw there was a train leaving for Italy the following morning. I’d never been there, didn’t speak a word of Italian, but I thought, ‘What the hell, I can’t go back to England …’ The next morning – it was 8 a.m., 26 October 1965 – I got on that train. It was freezing cold, the taxi driver who drove me to the station was blowing on his fingers. But when I arrived in Florence at eight o’clock that evening it was still summer, and I’d never seen anything so beautiful. That was that …

I stayed in Florence for three months, learning Italian, but there were too many foreigners in Florence to teach English, and soon I was down to my last £1.50. So I hitch-hiked to Rome with an American girl I’d met. She had a ‘sort of’ boyfriend there, and she said if she slept with him then he would put us up for a week. So I urged her to sacrifice herself … In Rome I thought the only thing I could do was teach English so I called at a language school. They didn’t need anybody but they pointed me to another place down the road, and there the directress essentially asked me when I’d like to start. I said ‘Now’, and she said, ‘I suppose you’ll need an advance …?’ She opened her handbag and gave me 80,000 lira, a month’s salary, me having just walked in off the street. But I did a training course, and an American who started the same day as me had a room in a pensione, so I moved in there.

RTK: And in Rome did you feel you had found the place you’d been searching for?

HF: To begin with, I didn’t like Rome as much as Florence. But by the time I had enough money to leave I didn’t want to. Yes, I loved it. It was very easy as a foreigner, I had to get a permesso di soggiorno but the school did that for me. After that you paid no taxes, and there weren’t so many of us foreigners about, so you met people. I made friends, got an apartment of my own, was very happy. Also I just felt, perhaps naively, that there weren’t the same class divisions in Italy as in England. There were regional differences, people said they were from Tuscany or Naples or whatever, but not the stultifying class divisions you saw in England. As ‘a foreigner’, one was labelled to that degree, but not as any sort of class.

RTK: Did the Rome of the mid-1960s still have the feel of la dolce vita?

HF: It was the tail end of that, yes. I’d been there a year when a friend drove to visit me, his first time in Italy, and these were the days when the Via Veneto was still the place to meet. So I arranged to see him at the Café de Paris, the centre of civilised life at the time. You had to fight to get a table, always, but I fought and won one for us – next to a table that had been reserved, oddly. My friend joined me and sat down and two minutes later Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, and Raf Vallone came and took that reserved table. So I felt I’d organised it perfectly …

After 1968 things changed, then the Red Brigades stuff started, which changed the atmosphere of the place to some extent – not altogether. You became conscious of it, of bombs going off. But then bombs were going off in London too.

RTK: How were your literary tastes developing in this time?

HF: My great literary love at that time was Christopher Isherwood. When I went to Italy I couldn’t take much luggage but I did take Goodbye to Berlin, which I would read from cover and cover, and then start again. Patricia Highsmith I loved, too. The Blunderer in particular I thought was wonderful. Like most people of that age I loved the Russians – Dostoyevsky, Chekhov’s stories, Lermontov. Then I read Pushkin’s Queen of Spades and Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark. Queen of Spades just struck me as a perfect story. There was an element of magic in it. And it wasn’t English … But both the Pushkin and the Nabokov made a huge impression on me, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do …’ I hadn’t written since school but I started writing more short stories.

I couldn’t see my way for a while, wasn’t sure what kind of novel I would write. But then, I knew an English girl in Rome – I’d known her before, and she had an appalling mother. This girl came out to Rome, her mother followed, and this mother was all pink and white, apparently genteel, and absolutely poisonous. That gave me the basic materials for my first novel, A Painter of Flowers. The main character was an autobiographical element. But I suppose all my books have been autobiographical, to some extent. It’s not conscious, it just happens.

I’d been teaching for four years when I got the news that A Painter of Flowers would be published. So I went to the language school and informed them that I’d never do another honest day’s work in my life. And, touch wood, I never have … But they were very nice about it. The directress actually bought the painting of mine that was on the jacket of the novel.

RTK: You were still painting as keenly as before?

HF: Yes. I exhibited for the first time in 1970, in Spoleto, The Festival of Two Worlds. I knew a young American art dealer in Rome who liked my paintings. He called me, said, ‘I’m having a small exhibition of a Spanish painter, would you like to have a joint exhibition?’ I said, ‘Who’s the Spanish painter?’ He said, ‘Picasso.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I got a nice review in the Herald Tribune, from someone who’d presumably gone to see the Picassos … But for some time thereafter I really concentrated on the writing, still painting, but not so much.

I got the idea for my second novel through a friend of mine who was teaching a girl who had learning disabilities – teaching her, more or less, ‘to be normal.’ And the girl she was teaching had a mother who washed her hair in eggs, which her daughter apparently hated. So that was the seed for The Girl Who Passed For Normal, and the rest of the story came to me somehow …

RTK: Did you find the storytelling part of novel-writing came easily? Or was it a lot of work to make all the elements fit together?

HF: Plotting for me was always natural. It’s usually just a small incident that forms itself into a whole story – like the proverbial grain of sand in the oyster, where the pearl forms around it. I work out the story on the back of an envelope, as it were, but I try not to think about it too much or else I find it becomes contrived. I’ve begun books where I’ve tried to plot too much in advance and then had to abandon them, because they haven’t worked. I’ve tried never to analyse where the work comes from, because I’m afraid if I did then it would all disappear. The same with my painting – people ask me what a picture means and I say, ‘I have no idea.’ Someone once suggested to me, when I was being more than usually neurotic, that I should go see an analyst. I said, ‘No, that would destroy any talent that I’ve got …’

RTK: Do you think you’re inclined by temperament toward ‘dark’ endings for your stories? Rather than, say, ‘redemptive’ ones?

HF: Oh, I think most of them are redemptive in a way. People get what they want … Like Barbara in The Girl Who Passed For Normal, or like Wilbur in An Artist and a Magician. Originally I wanted to call that book ‘A Tax On Added Value’ but I was advised it wasn’t a good title. Essentially, though, that is what the book is about. Value has been added to Wilbur’s life but he has to pay a moral tax on it. You could say the same of The Girl.

RTK: You say your characters ‘get what they want’. But I sometimes find myself wondering how they would manage to go on with their lives after the last page.

HF: Well, that’s something we all have to deal with, isn’t it?

RTK: Earlier you mentioned Patricia Highsmith as an influence on your writing. Highsmith famously said that she was ‘interested in the effect of guilt’ upon the heroes of her stories. Do you think you are interested in something similar?

HF: No – not ‘guilt’, that’s not something I really recognise. I would say I’m interested in characters coming to terms with things, in themselves and in the world. It’s about their arriving at a knowledge, of murder, of death … And then they use this, and grow out of what they were. That’s a conscious theme of all my books.

RTK: In your own life would you say you’ve had experiences that affected you in just this way?

HF: I think for my generation a big part of it was growing up just after the war, in the shadow of that, which had a profound effect on me, certainly, and from an early age. I remember, at school, reading accounts of concentration camps. And you were told this was what the Germans were capable of – or the Russians, in the case of the gulags. But these things weren’t dreadful because they were done by Russians or Germans. I thought, ‘This is what human beings are capable of.’ It led you to wonder how you would cope in that situation – cope, I mean, whether on one side or the other, whether one was in such a camp or running it.

The other main theme in my books, I suppose, is the ‘beauty and the beast’ element – that you have to have them both, you can’t have one without the other. Beauty without the beast is shallow, meaningless.

RTK: Would you say it’s a necessary acknowledgement of evil in the world?

HF: Not ‘evil’, just the facts of life. I don’t really ‘do’ evil (laughs). I hate the word ‘innocent’, too – I know what people mean by it but I just don’t buy it. There’s ignorance and then there’s knowledge, or there should be.

People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald Crucifixion in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.

RTK: So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?

HF: Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than anyone else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re less.

THE MAN WHO WENT DOWN WITH HIS SHIP

On the morning of his fifty-fifth birthday, Alfred Albers announced to his mistress that someone was planning to kill him.

‘Oh lovey, they’re not,’ Dorothy said, running a comb through her hair, giving her lover a peck on the cheek, and doing up her coat. She smiled at him with what was clearly meant to be a disarming smile. ‘Not today, anyway.’

For a moment Alfred thought of arguing his case, or even of showing her the anonymous letter he had just received. He knew, however, that if he did the one he would only upset her, and if he did the other he would make her angry, and make her accuse him of having cut up some newspapers, glued the words to a sheet of paper, and sent the thing himself. Besides, she was late for work. So he contented himself with giving her a hurt, owlish look; with trying to make sure no tears came into his eyes, as they always did when he was accused of lying; and with telling her soulfully ‘Well, maybe not of killing me’. Then he raised himself on his toes, kissed her on the lips, and said ‘Don’t be late. Remember we’re going to Louise’s for dinner.’

Someone really was though, he protested to himself after Dorothy had muttered ‘Louise indeed’, had added, ‘Be good’, and had practically run out of the house. And after he had gone into the kitchen, been almost knocked over by Matilda rushing out of the house after her mother to go riding—‘Oh Alfred Happy Birthday see you later can’t stop Bye’—and had taken the letter out of his pocket, he couldn’t help becoming slightly tearful. He understood Dorothy, of course, and if he had been her he would have reacted in the same way. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had told her that someone was planning to kill him. In fact he did so on average twice a year; whenever he had one of his attacks. Only, he told himself, all those other times his announcement had been part of a recognisable pattern. First, the obsessive reading of newspapers, of magazine articles about terrorism, and books about the Second World War. Then the headaches, the cramps that made him retire to his bed, and lie there curled up like a little child in pain. And finally the uncontrollable tears, the awful sense that at any second the door was going to be flung open and They, whoever they were, were going to come in and get him, and the whimpering, pathetic pleas for Dorothy to put her arms around him and protect him, because having carried him off somewhere—probably bundling him into the boot of a car without a numberplate—and having tortured him, They were going to murder him.

Whereas today, it had all been quite different. For one thing, he had been in a good mood when he had got up this morning and contemplated the day ahead. For another, it was only a month since he had come out of hospital, and never before had he started to slide back into darkness so soon after re-emerging into the light. And for still another, even if he had, exceptionally, had a sudden relapse, he wouldn’t, surely, have started at the bottom of the slope, so to speak; nor have been capable of going so relatively calmly into the hall as Dorothy was preparing to go out, standing there like a schoolboy who has been told to relay a message to the headmaster and isn’t certain how to put it, and getting that message out in such a, for him, bald and undramatic way.

‘Oh, thank you,’ he had said when Dorothy had wished him a happy birthday, and had gone on, when she had smiled at him, and asked ‘What are you looking like that for?’, to say ‘I just got an anonymous letter. Someone’s planning to kill me.’

No, he understood her, he told himself as he stood and looked down at the letter again; but she should have taken him seriously, and she shouldn’t have been so smoothly, so very thoughtlessly dismissive. I mean, if she told me she’d just received an anonymous letter—but then she wouldn’t, would she? Either tell me, or get one.

It was a very nasty letter.

‘To the Jew Alfred Albers. It’s a shame they didn’t kill you when they killed your father. Or that Hitler didn’t make it six million and one. But don’t worry. We’re going to remedy those mistakes. In the meantime if you know what’s good for you you won’t write another word. Otherwise—how would you like it if something happened to your beautiful Dorothy? Or to her beautiful daughter? It might you know. And it should. Damned Jew lovers. From: a Jew hater.’

The trouble was: if he didn’t get Dorothy to believe him this evening, and wasn’t able to convince her that he hadn’t composed the beastly thing himself, it was more than likely that he would have a relapse; and that he would find the shutters being banged shut again, though they had only recently been reopened, and it was still mid-morning in the day of his sanity. And if that happened—well, naturally Dorothy would never believe him. He might even start to doubt himself, and wonder if perhaps, it was possible, he could have …

No, he told himself firmly, and once more stuffed the letter back into the pocket of his old woollen dressing-gown. Someone—someone who clearly knew him and his circumstances rather well—had composed that filth and sent it to him, and he was not imagining things. And now what he must do, before he allowed himself to start dwelling on its contents, or allowed that cold, sick feeling in his stomach that opening it had caused to spread up through the rest of his body, was take a shower, have some breakfast, and get to work. To resume his account of ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’; and not reflect for a moment that it might be precisely this long-delayed, long-overdue account that had prompted someone to buy a newspaper or newspapers, and start searching for the words ‘To’, ‘the’, ‘Jew’; and for the individual letters that, pasted together, would spell the name ‘Alfred Albers’.

Of course he would never permit his account to be published, he murmured silently as he made his way to the bathroom. Not in his lifetime, anyway. It was even possible that he would never be able to finish it entirely. All the same, he had to get as much of it down as he could. Because—well, because it was the truth; the truth about himself, and the truth of what happened that night. Because, too, if he did manage to tell the story, to his own satisfaction if not to anyone else’s—mightn’t he, albeit at this late stage, be able to salvage something from the wreck of his mind?

Yes, he told himself now, still trying to be firm. He might. For as he had mentioned in that same newspaper interview in which he had alas let slip that he was engaged on writing about the wreck of the Chateaubriand—though had failed to say anything about not intending to publish it—all his mental problems had started that night.

The night, as he liked to think of it, that all his dreams had gone down.

*

He had been twenty at the time; a shy, stuttering, portly young man with staring, short-sighted eyes and already thinning hair; and his pleasure at being shown to a first-class cabin when he had embarked at Cherbourg, having his photograph taken, and being asked by reporters who looked as if they could barely read or write about the little book of poems he had recently published, was hardly lessened by the fact that he felt that just by stepping on board this ship he was betraying everything his father had stood for, worked for and died for. Anymore than it was lessened by the fact that he knew perfectly well that if his father hadn’t been who he was, and died the death he had, not one of his fellow passengers in first-class would have given him more than a disdainful glance, nor would any of those reporters have so much as stepped out of his way, let alone asked him about a volume of poems.

His father had been a hero; a martyr to the cause of liberty and equality; not to mention a romantically good-looking man with long, dark hair and, to judge by the photographs, a haughty expression. Whereas he—he was just a plump, none-too-attractive versifier; who, if he didn’t get used to the idea that he was not his father, would never be happy for a moment. All right, perhaps he was betraying everything Jean Albers had lived and died for. Yet hadn’t he also lived and died for the right of the gauche, overweight, unattractive and poor to be treated the same way as the sophisticated, sleek, beautiful and rich? Indeed, he had, the young Alfred answered himself, conscious of a certain speciousness in his argument, as he followed a steward down a corridor of polished wood. And what did it matter what had caused the eyes of some of those sleek and beautiful people to flicker with recognition as they saw him come on board, and would, he was certain, cause their lips to smile at him and issue invitations to him as soon as the ship had sailed? All right, they did it only because he was the son of a hero. Having greeted him, however, and having questioned him, might not one or two of those rich, titled and in some cases famous people, or one or two of those reporters, be tempted to go so far as actually to buy a copy of his little book, actually to open it, actually to read what was written there? There was at least a chance. Then if they did, and recognised that seed of truth he hoped was planted there, God willing that seed would take root, and grow, and put forth, however delicately, a flower. And if that happened—then his betrayal, if betrayal there had been, was justified, or even became an affirmation of all his father had stood for. So that far from feeling guilty about the way he was being treated, he would feel proud, and feel that he deserved such treatment; and feel that if his little flower in turn put out other seeds that scattered across the earth, and caused further flowers to grow, not only was he affirming his father’s life, but he was, in a sense, completing it for him. Through me, he told himself, as with a flush of excitement he recognised an American film star being shown to her cabin, my father might live again.

This sense of pleasure mixed with a sense of betrayal, and a feeling that such betrayal could be reversed or annulled if only he was able to touch the souls of one or two of his fellow passengers, stayed with Alfred for the first three days of his Atlantic crossing; as he made his way towards a New York where he was being awaited—with flowers and a brass band, he’d been promised—by a man his father had helped escape from occupied France. A textile manufacturer who had, in the five years since the war had ended, made a fortune large enough to feel able to send a first-class liner ticket to a person he had never met, and promise that person the use of a duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue for just as long as he wanted to stay there. ‘And that means all your life, if you want, Alfred. Seriously.’

Moreover, this feeling would probably have stayed with him for the entire duration of the crossing, if, for whatever reason, Alfred hadn’t been so thoroughly taken up by such a number of his fellow passengers that by the morning of his fourth day at sea he hadn’t told himself it would be futile hypocrisy to pretend any longer that he felt in the slightest degree guilty about the treatment he was receiving. And as for touching the souls of his fellow passengers: he might or might not do so, for fifty people had sworn they would order his book the moment they arrived in New York. But whether they did or not no longer seemed to be any concern of his. As far as he could see, most of them, rich and powerful though they might be, and the sort of people his father would have excoriated, had perfectly fine souls already; and those that didn’t were beyond the reach of poetry anyway; his or anyone else’s. I’m enjoying myself, he told himself as he lay on his bed in his stateroom. I’m happy. Why should I feel bad about that?

Alfred spent the whole of that day in a state of elation that bordered on hysteria. He had breakfast with a French millionairess who was going to New York to marry an American racing driver; he walked around the deck with the film star, who was on her way to make a film with Hitchcock. He had a drink with a plump American man who seemed to be as uncomfortable as he had been expecting to feel, but who was intelligent and funny despite his blushes and his—as someone muttered to Alfred—‘positively existential embarrassment’, and who was reputed to be, according to the same mutterer, ‘quite the richest person on board’. And he ate lunch with a man who said he’d been a friend of his father’s, took coffee with an American publisher who said he’d been amused by all these people swearing they’d buy a copy of his book since he was sure that most of them didn’t realise his poems were in French and the volume wasn’t available in New York (‘But if you write a novel, I’d really love to see it’) and spent the afternoon talking with a whole group of people whose names he’d never quite caught but didn’t like to ask for again because he felt he should know them anyway. And what made him most happy was that all of these people seemed to talk to him and yes, like him, not because he was his father’s son, but because they genuinely liked him, and found him, for all his lack of physical charms, bright, unaffected, fun and nice.

That evening Alfred’s new friends gave, without really planning to or meaning to perhaps, a party for him; a party that was to remain in his mind ever after as the most enchanted occasion of his life. A little interlude—a mere couple of hours—in which nothing jarred, in which nothing was sour; and a moment of magic in which he, who had spent much of his first fifteen years in hiding, being smuggled from one place to the other in cardboard boxes, steamer trunks, or simply under cover of darkness, and who, as he absorbed the lessons his mother gave him every hour of the day and night when it was safe to speak, had come to think of life as a lonely curse to be endured and if possible redeemed by death, suddenly felt it was possible to live not cut off from the world, but attached to the world, and to everything the world contained. It was a party that both at the time and in retrospect seemed tinged with a mist of gold, at which everyone was young and healthy and happy; and throughout which Alfred wanted to embrace everyone, dance with everyone, and shout out to the world that to be happy means to be good.

It was also a party that, having started at ten, would probably have gone on until the following morning, when the ship was due to dock in New York; if, at midnight, the S. S. Chateaubriand hadn’t collided with a Panamian tanker and been practically cut in two.

*

The general opinion was that Alfred had behaved badly. How badly, no one knew; though it was agreed it must have been pretty badly for him to be so severely traumatised that from then on, two or three times a year, in the words of some, he had a nervous breakdown, and in the words of others, went barking mad. ‘It must have been the contrast with his father,’ he knew people said of him. ‘You know, the father being a hero, and the son being—well, one doesn’t know quite what of course, but—a coward, I’ve heard, is putting it mildly. I mean, tossing women and children out of a lifeboat. Or wrapping a shawl round himself so he’d be mistaken for a woman. Or something like that.’

‘It was being so lionised by society,’ he knew that people said of him. ‘You know, he was nothing. Just some unappetising youth who’d published a volume of I’m told not very good poetry. Then, suddenly, because of his father, he was taken up by all these rich and famous people. Only when it came to it, he couldn’t behave properly. I mean I’ve heard—of course I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard …’

‘What do you expect?’ he knew that people said of him. ‘The son of a socialist and a Jew. Okay, so the father was a great resistance hero, and was tortured to death. But I mean frankly, if you ask me, the Germans only did what we’d have had to do, sooner or later.’

‘Ugly little … yid.’

However if, particularly in the first few years after the disaster, this was what was said by those who hadn’t actually been on the ship, and possibly felt they didn’t quite belong to the inner circle of New York and Paris literary café society, not one of Alfred’s fellow passengers ever accused him of having behaved incorrectly.

They didn’t deny it when people said to them, ‘I hear he did this or that,’ and they smiled indulgently when others muttered that they thought that under the circumstances going mad a couple of times a year was the least Alfred could do. But they never added any wood to the fire—indeed, as far as possible, most of them avoided any mention of the events of that night, as if they were too awful to remember—and it never occurred to any of them, as some said they should, to ‘drop’ Alfred. On the contrary, from the moment he stepped off the rescue ship in New York, wearing only a blanket over the remains of his dinner jacket, and was whisked off to the promised duplex on Fifth Avenue, which he found crammed with clothes of every kind that his host had bought for him as soon as he had heard of the tragedy, he was more than ever taken up by society; and through his father’s friend, and through the friends he had made on the ship, he soon got to know and to be invited to the dinners and parties of every fashionable publisher, writer, composer, painter, and actor and actress in New York. Not to mention the dinners and parties of those wealthy women who collected writers, painters and composers, and helped to make them fashionable so that they themselves could be considered so.

For six months he kept it up; the fat, greedy boy let loose in the sweet shop. Until, one day, he found himself possessed of an urgent need to buy every available newspaper and scan them for reports of terrorist attacks, bomb outrages and the still continuing trials of war criminals. Possessed of such a need that that evening, for the first time since he’d arrived in New York, he had to telephone his hostess and say he was terribly sorry but he wasn’t feeling very well.

He didn’t feel very well, and read the newspapers obsessively, for a week. Then, one morning, he woke up with the most agonising cramps in his stomach, and far from not feeling very well started to feel very ill; so ill that he telephoned his mother in Paris, and asked her to come over and take care of him. And a week after that he woke up in the middle of the night convinced that all those terrorists he had been reading about, and all those war criminals, were after him, were poisoning him, and were soon going to come and ‘get him’. He was whimpering and crying and backed himself into a corner of his bedroom; and when his mother and his father’s friend came to help him to the ambulance that was waiting downstairs to take him to a ‘rest-home’, he threw himself on the floor and begged them not to move him. He was screaming, squealing, choking with tears, and made his mother so afraid that he was going to fling himself out of the window that she sent for the male nurses who were in the ambulance, and had them come and take Alfred away by force.

He was in hospital for a month; by the time he came out weak, humiliated, and frightened, and started, almost immediately, doing the rounds of his rich and fashionable friends again, people—people who didn’t know him well, the hangers-on of his actor, composer and socialite friends—had begun to mutter that the breakdown he had suffered was undoubtedly due to his having behaved—‘How shall I put it?… Badly’—the night the Chateaubriand went down.

‘Oh, poor Alfred,’ his friends and fellow passengers would murmur with a smile, before going off to tell Alfred what such and such had said of him. ‘Poor little Alfred.’

*

So it went on as the years passed; with Alfred living between New York and Paris, producing the occasional volume of poetry and acquiring a degree of fame not only as a poet, but as an essayist and critic. He wrote in French and English, since his mother was half American and he had been brought up speaking both languages; and he wrote on every sort of subject. Literature, philosophy, art, politics, history, fashion, the difficulty of being the son of a famous father. In fact there was only one subject he did not write on; and that was, it was said, because everyone was too tactful ever to ask him to do so. That Alfred had his side of the story was beyond dispute. But frankly, isn’t it better to let sleeping dogs lie? Especially when they get up of their own accord every six months, and drive poor Alfred crazy with their howling. I mean, maybe one day, but for the moment; no, if we need something … What about the influence of Gertrude Stein on the Structuralists? Or an article on the rights and wrongs of war crime trials? Or—oh, I don’t know—a commentary on the changing shape of the Coca-Cola bottle.

And slowly, as those years passed, and Alfred married the daughter of one of his New York socialite friends, had two daughters with her, and then, after fifteen years of relatively happy life together, amicably and reasonably profitably separated from her, although a few people did still mutter when they met Alfred at parties that he had behaved badly, for the most part his association with the Chateaubriand was forgotten, and he was known only as a man with a certain literary reputation who had a name that thanks to his father was more famous than his published work warranted. A minor poet who still, after fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years was one of the most assiduous partygoers around; and an essayist who was the darling, when he wasn’t in hospital, of innumerable rich women on both sides of the Atlantic. Hostesses who patronised him unmercifully, called him their dear little, sweet little Alfred, and merely cooed, and sighed, and went immediately to tell him when, ever more rarely, some guest at one of their parties happened to mention that they had heard that funny little Alfred, who looked so like Donald Pleasance that people who had seen the actor in some film would stop and ask him for his autograph, had some sort of stain in his past.

Yet it was, possibly, just because his apparent infamy was largely forgotten that thirty-five years after the Chateaubriand went down, Alfred suddenly got the idea of writing about that night. Got it so suddenly, the words falling out of his mouth when the journalist who was interviewing him for the literary pages of a Sunday newspaper asked him what he was working on and what he was planning to work on, that he asked Dorothy, when she got in from work, if she had mentioned the ship to him recently.

‘No, lovey,’ Dorothy said, since she too had heard the rumours about what her lover had supposedly done or not done, and had always thought it kinder to steer clear of the subject. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it.’ ‘But come to think of it,’ she added a little later, somewhat cautiously, ‘it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you did, would it?’ Thereby, the implication was, setting the record straight one way or another. Or at any rate, getting whatever’s been on your chest all these years, off.

‘No,’ Alfred thought every evening, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. On the contrary, it might be a very good idea. Furthermore, if he knew quite well why he had never written of the sinking before—and not only not written of it, but put it out of his mind so thoroughly that to all intents and purposes what had happened had not happened to him—now it came to him that in a sense all his adult life he had been waiting for this moment, when the creature would spring out of the cover in which it had been hiding, and stand exposed in the light; and he had been preparing himself mentally, or morally, for it.

The years of hanging around are over, he told himself bravely. It is time to face the beast.

As he was still telling himself the following morning; when he received a letter that according to the postmark had been mailed before the publication of his interview in the paper. A typewritten page from the son of the captain of the Chateaubriand: informing him that he was planning to write a biography of his father, and saying he would be very grateful if Alfred, as one of the most distinguished passengers on board, would give him the benefit of his recollections.

A coincidence, or an omen? Alfred wasn’t certain, but he wrote back to the son saying he would certainly be willing to talk to him, though he might be interested to know that strangely he was planning to write, if not immediately publish, his memories of that night, ‘as you may have seen in the interview I did with Olivier Rosenthal that came out last Sunday. Of course,’ he added, ‘mine will be a strictly personal account, and won’t in anyway encroach on your territory.’

That the son might not, nevertheless, be entirely happy with his version of the facts, he thought it prudent not to mention for the moment.

*

Yet now, he reflected, as he stood under the shower and decided that on second thoughts the first thing to do was take the letter to the police, it seemed that the son, or someone else, already knew what he was likely to say, and was determined to prevent him saying it. Either because he knew that although Alfred had made it clear, in his letter at least, that he wasn’t going to publish his account, when it actually came to it he would probably be persuaded to, not least because it would cause a certain scandal and sell a few extra copies of the newspaper in which it appeared, or simply because he didn’t want the truth to be told to anyone, not even to Alfred himself; as if, once it were out, in however private a form, it would somehow escape, like a wild animal from a zoo, and cause irreparable damage.

That meant, therefore, that he had two choices. One was to announce publicly that he had given up the idea, and had decided to continue to forget about that night all those years ago. The other was to go away somewhere in secret, with Dorothy and Matilda, and stay away until he had finished his task. By which time, with any luck, his persecutors would have forgotten about him; and anyway, he would have deposited copies of the story with a number of different people, with instructions that it was most definitely to be published should anything happen to him.

Unless, he seemed to hear a voice whispering to him, he followed a third course. Namely: at this rather late stage in the game, emulate his illustrious father. By taking at last a public, unequivocal stand against anti-semitism, injustice, the greedy, the cruel and the murderous, and not just the veiled, sublimated stand that he had always felt his poems and essays represented. And by coming out into the open with his account of the sinking of the Chateaubriand, relying not only on the police but on his rich and powerful friends to protect him from would-be murderers, and making it clear that having thought about it he was not just going to publish his story, but publish it with the greatest fanfare possible. The sort of fanfare that could only be laid on by people who had connections with newspaper publishers, the owners or controllers of television and radio stations, and politicians in the ruling parties of three or four nations; and the sort of fanfare that would cause not just a certain scandal, but an almighty scandal that would be reported all around the world.

And though he was a nervous, portly man, given to periods of madness and, in his own mind, an inveterate and lifelong coward, he knew, by the time he had finished dressing, had put on his coat, and was preparing to set off to the police station, that however foolish it was of him, it was going to be this third, subversive voice he was going to listen to, and this last course of action, that might well cost him his life, that he was going to take.

He had thought before that just by writing his account he might discover some island of sanity amidst the sea of madness in which he had been flailing about for the past thirty-five years. Now, though, he saw that that was not enough. Like it or not he had at least to try to be a hero; and finally to put what his father would have seen as his betrayal to some good, some positive use.

He wondered what Dorothy would say.

*

Perhaps inevitably, when he told her that night, she didn’t seem terribly interested to begin with, as if she thought that this was a form of his lunacy she hadn’t encountered before, wasn’t sure how to handle and was hoping, if she didn’t pay too much attention to it, might go away of its own accord. When however, after they had returned from Louise’s dinner party, and she had asked him why their hostess, usually the most profuse of all his friends in showering him with ‘Alfred darlings’, ‘Alfred sweets’, or plain ‘Alfredinos’, had been so extraordinarily chilly towards him on this of all nights—‘I mean, it is your birthday’—she began to take him seriously. And when, by three o’clock in the morning, he had finished telling her not only about the letter but, if only in the most general terms, about what had really happened that night, and what he was planning to write in his article or story, Dorothy not only believed him, but had gone as far as he had in concluding that the famous Louise’s chilliness had been due to his merely intimating to her what he was thinking of doing, and that he might have to enlist her husband’s aid in order to do it successfully.

‘I mean, you must realise,’ she said, lying back in bed, smoking, and stroking Alfred’s forehead, ‘none of those women actually like you. Oh, I know they adore you and they love you, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? And if you start being, as they’d put it, boring, or tiresome, they’ll drop you like a hot brick or a hot potato or whatever the expression is. It’s jejune in their book, getting indignant about something that happened so long ago. It’s unnecessary. And worst of all, according to them, it’s ungrateful. Like kicking a gift horse in the mouth. Like kicking them in the mouth. Or anyway, like dragging some long-drowned corpse to one of their parties and expecting them to welcome it as a friend. Rich bitches,’ Dorothy sighed. ‘Fascist cows.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Alfred said, unable to keep a petulant note out of his voice at hearing his friends spoken of thus. Unable, too, not to protest that just because Louise had behaved like that, it didn’t mean to say that all his other friends would; nor to reflect that much as he loved Dorothy, and beautiful as she undoubtedly was—tall and blonde with a low, soft voice—there was something bitter and resentful about her. She didn’t so much object to the wealth and power of his society friends, as not see why she, who was better looking and more intelligent than almost every one of them, didn’t have such wealth and power herself. Deep down, too, she didn’t see why she, with all her advantages, should at the age of thirty-nine have a bald fifty-five year old and half-crazy poet as a lover, instead of some smooth, good-looking, probably crass industralist whom she might loathe but who at least allowed her to forget that by birth, upbringing and intellectual, if not emotional inclination, she was on the side of the ugly, the persecuted and the sick. Of course he was being unfair thinking such things of her; and even if there was an element of resentment in her feelings towards his friends she was perfectly justified in objecting to Louise’s behaviour. Nevertheless, he did wish she wouldn’t use such crude, debased jargon like ‘rich bitches’ and ‘fascist cows’; and he did wish she would see that the more immediate question was not how his friends were going to behave, but what was to be done about her and Matilda. It was all very well his deciding to be a hero. Should, though, the writer of that letter be serious and do something to either of them, he’d never forgive himself.

A point he put to Dorothy when he had finished sulking, and when he had added, after perhaps half a minute, that ‘just because Louise is like that, it doesn’t mean that everyone else will be. Besides, maybe she was just feeling out of sorts this evening.’

‘Out of sorts, my arse,’ Dorothy snarled, and blew the smoke of her Gauloise in his face. ‘I bet she’s already been on the phone telling all her friends that you’ve finally gone too potty and you’re really going to have to be ditched.’

If the thought of Louise and her like had called forth scorn, however, the suggestion that he would never be able to forgive himself if she and Matilda were kidnapped, or had acid thrown in their face, or were murdered, provoked only a smile from Dorothy. ‘I don’t suppose I’d ever forgive you either, lovey,’ she said, and gave him a kiss. ‘But I’m sure they weren’t serious. What did the police say?’

Alfred shrugged. ‘They said they weren’t serious. They said that people who write anonymous letters rarely are. But you can’t be sure, can you? And frankly …’

‘Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t just disappear. I’ve got to work. And I don’t see Tilda giving up her horses, or her boys, just because someone’s threatening to kill her.’

‘No, I guess not. I just thought—oh, I don’t know.’ Alfred sighed. ‘Maybe I am jejune, and tiresome, and boring. And in a way, you know, I liked everyone to think I had behaved badly. But I really didn’t, you know,’ he muttered, once again sounding petulant; or like a baby who is sure he’ll never be believed. ‘In fact, I mean I know it sounds terribly immodest or unmodest. But I was practically the only person who didn’t.’

*

A statement which, Alfred admitted to himself over the days and weeks ahead, as he settled down to his task, wasn’t strictly true. What would have been more accurate, though it might have sounded still less modest, was that while some people had behaved very badly indeed and he, he had to say, had behaved very well, most people had behaved neither badly nor well. They had simply—behaved. Had done what they had been told to do by whoever had the presence of mind to give them an order, of it hardly mattered what nature. Had not done what they had not been told to do, even if under normal circumstances they would have done it like a shot. And had, by and large, closed their minds to the evidence of their senses, and neither seen nor heard what, also under normal circumstances, would have appalled them. Such as: the fact that while within five minutes of the collision most of the lifeboats were safely down in the water, they were occupied almost exclusively by the crew, who having received the command ‘abandon ship’ had done so instantly, following their Captain’s example, without bothering to make it clear to the vast majority of the passengers that they should do likewise. Such as: the fact that within ten minutes of the collision those few lifeboats that hadn’t been appropriated by the crew were also safely down in the water; occupied now, under admittedly somewhat cramped conditions, by ninety-five per cent of the first-class passengers, and those members of the crew who, not having got away with their colleagues, had thought it politic, or found it unavoidable, to order into the boats and save those people on board who would have created the most fuss or would have had the most fuss created about them, had they not been saved. And such as: the fact that but for the action of a portly, shy, young poet who, seeing what was going on, had become so hysterical with anger he had lost control of himself, the loss of life—thirty-five people in the final count—would have been immeasurably greater; amounting perhaps to some eight or nine hundred men, women and children. For it was Alfred who refused to obey when one of the last remaining officers had, without too much conviction, ordered him into a boat. (The officer had shrugged, as if to say: suit yourself.) It was Alfred who had almost physically forced a sailor he had found who, thank God, knew how to use the radio, to call the tanker that had sliced the liner in two and tell someone to send their boats over immediately. And it was Alfred who had run around screaming orders like a madman (so much so that afterwards people would say he was a madman, even though they had done what he had said), and practically single-handed organised everyone left on board. So that when the boats from the tanker did arrive, as well as those from another couple of ships that had been nearby, and had steamed full speed to the rescue when they had heard the tanker’s, if not the Chateaubriand’s, SOS, the evacuation of the liner could be completed with the minimum of confusion, and the maximum of speed. With such little confusion, and at such a speed, that when, an hour and a half after the collision the Chateaubriand sank, the only people who went down with her were those who had been killed when the tanker crashed into her, or those who were trapped in their cabins and couldn’t be cut free in time.

It was because there was such a relatively small loss of life—and because in the pandemonium that followed the accident very few people were aware of the exact sequence of events, and because the accident itself was entirely due to the negligence of the tanker’s captain—that in the enquiry that followed the captain of the Chateaubriand was praised for the part that he and his crew played in the rescue, and for his courage and coolness and presence of mind; and was elevated by the French press, and to a certain extent by the American press, who found some of the reports just a little too contradictory to be unreservedly enthusiastic, to the status of hero. And it was again because of the relatively minor loss of life that once Alfred, one of the last people off the liner, and one of the very few to fall in the water as they clambered into their lifeboat, had reached New York, and had been swept off to his duplex, and received all sorts of messages from his former fellow passengers in first class inviting him here there and everywhere, that he had thought ‘Oh hell, what’s done is done,’ and had refused to speak to reporters about the events of that night. Maybe later, he had told himself, when I’ve recovered from the shock. Maybe later, when I’ve completely gotten over my hysterical anger, and can think about things—rationally.

Only Alfred never did completely get over his hysterical anger, and never was able to think about what happened rationally; and so—or at least, that was how he explained it—six months later he had his first mental breakdown; and so, in all the years that followed, he found himself unable to talk to a reporter or anyone else about the events of June 28, 1950.

Just very occasionally, in all those years, did he tell himself that maybe it wasn’t some residue of anger boring away inside his brain, or it wasn’t his inability to think rationally about what happened on the Chateaubriand, that caused him to have his periodic attacks. Then, though, he would ask himself: but if not that, if not them, what? And he would let the matter rest.

What else could it be but his anger; what else could it be but the madness that had come over him that night and made him behave in a manner that was so unlike the way he normally behaved that it had, in a sense, shattered, or anyway damaged irreparably, the vessel that contained his mind? A madness he had never, thereafter, been able to rid himself of.

*

What else indeed, Alfred asked himself again and again as he wrote and rewrote his story; and as he found that however often he rewrote it, and however hard he tried to make it dramatic, and frightening, and to infuse it with some of that anger of his, it was curiously lifeless and anti-climactic. Perhaps I’ve waited too long, he told himself as he started ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’ for the fifth time; and realised he was writing almost word for word what he had written the first time. Maybe I should still let sleeping dogs lie; and admit that Louise and my other friends are right to be cool about this enterprise; realising it can do no more good to anyone after all these years and is frankly not very interesting. All right, so the captain and the crew behaved badly. So what? The important thing is that everyone who could have been saved was saved, and it really matters not one bit how they were saved, or by whom. What is more, the idea that I’ve always had in the back of my mind, that whereas the captain was not a hero, I in fact was, is probably erroneous. All right, I did get that sailor to radio for help, and I did lend a hand—if not do it quite all myself—in organising everyone who was left on board. Nevertheless, it’s just possible that someone else had radioed for help, or that the lifeboats from the tanker and the other ships were already on their way. As it’s possible that I really was as mad as everyone subsequently said I was, and people would have organised themselves or been organised by someone else, equally well, if not better, had I not been there.

Oh, if only, Alfred told himself as he started his sixth draft and then his seventh, I could give this business up.

But, and this he told Dorothy again and again as she stroked his head, and kissed him, and murmured ‘Why don’t you just put it aside for a while lovey?’ he couldn’t. Partly because he did feel this was his last chance of regaining some sort of foothold on the shore of sanity. Partly because he did feel a certain moral compunction, however priggish and possibly self-serving it might be, to tell, as he saw it, ‘the Truth’. And partly—principally, he admitted to himself, though would never have admitted to anyone else, above all not his bitter, beautiful Dorothy—because since the night of his birthday, when Louise had been so chilly, he had found himself being dropped by practically all his other friends. A state of affairs that was so unbearable to him that the only way he could take his mind off it was by continuing to write, for all that he knew that the more he wrote, the more he would be dropped.

To think, he told himself, he had thought of enlisting their aid! One might just as well have asked a Nazi for a contribution to a Jewish charity.

What was really shameful about his distress at being dropped was that, as the invitations and the telephone calls became fewer and fewer, until the former flood had become less a trickle than an occasional and no doubt mistaken drip, he realised that just as Dorothy had said that all his ‘friends’ didn’t really like him, so he didn’t really like them. He didn’t even ‘love’ them or ‘adore’ them, as Dorothy claimed they loved and adored him. What he did like, though—what he had always liked, and it was this that really hurt him as he found it being blown away—was the sort of golden mist that enveloped him whenever he was in their company. A golden mist that seemed to emanate from their houses, their paintings, their jewels, their clothes, their porcelain, their silver, their arrogance, their carelessness, their thoughtless, charming, generous brutality; and a golden mist he had first become aware of at that party they had given for him on board ship, the night the Chateaubriand went down. It was the mist, he told himself, of western civilisation; of Mozart and Shakespeare, of Schubert and Dante, of Velasquez, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Vermeer. And it was the mist that was thrown up by the sun when it shone upon an earth drenched with the blood of all the millions who had died in the name of western civilisation; the victims of the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the two World Wars and the Holocaust; not to mention all the other greater and lesser wars, battles, pogroms and massacres throughout history.

He, a Jewish poet, had stood in that mist for years and declared it, in the final analysis, to be good. The reason why those most responsible for creating its golden swirls had taken him up. For here was someone who, while potentially perhaps a member of the opposition, and by no means a fool—indeed someone who was fully aware of the horrors that the gods of civilisation fed on and needed to survive—had nevertheless lent his support to those gods. Now, though, by being so determined to write that foolish, unnecessary and not very interesting article of his, he was, in however feeble a fashion, declaring that mist, and thus by implication its principal manufacturers and distributors, to be bad. He had withdrawn his support for their gods. Well, good, they would withdraw their support for him: ugly, ungrateful little you-know-what.

At any rate, Alfred supposed that this must be their reasoning. He could think of no other explanation for their behaviour. Moreover, he went on, they were quite right to reason thus. Withdrawing his support he was, in a way. In another way, however: Oh God, he thought, that golden mist, that terrible golden mist that some would dismiss him as a turncoat, a toadie and a lackey for wanting to stand in, was, and he suspected always would be, the greatest love of his life. A love still stronger than his love of ‘the Truth’. That wasn’t, in any case, so much of a love; more, at this stage, a matter of necessity.

*

Two days after Alfred had started his eighth draft his car was stolen. He told the police, went for a walk to try and calm himself, and to convince himself that this little incident had nothing to do with the larger drama in which he was involved, and returned home to find the telephone ringing and be told that it certainly was.

‘If you want your car,’ a muffled voice told him, ‘go to the corner of boulevard Malesherbes and rue Viète. And let this be a warning to you. We’re not joking. Stick to writing articles about books and music and politics. Otherwise …’

Feeling faint, and half suspecting what he might find, Alfred walked the five hundred metres from his flat in rue de Phalsbourg and exactly where the voice had told him, saw his car. The paintwork was all scratched. Inside, the upholstery had been ripped, apparently with a razor. And on the driver’s seat, amidst the ribbons of shredded cloth, there was a pile of human excrement.

Feeling fainter, Alfred turned away, uncertain what to do, and wanted to stop some passer-by and ask him or her to help him. But naturally he couldn’t; so he simply stood there for a while, a plump, bald and not very tall man, who looked like Donald Pleasance, and made no effort to stop tears first coming into his eyes, and then running down his cheeks.

‘Oh, Mummy please,’ he heard himself pleading silently, suddenly four or five years old again. ‘Oh, Mummy please, please, do something.’

But his mother had been dead for some twenty years now, his dark, solemn, unhappy mother who had been born in Baltimore, and had only just been able to summon up the energy to save herself and her son during the war, as if she had been worn out before she was born, and her husband’s enthusiasm, idealism and, she sometimes told Alfred, determination to die a martyr’s death had only made her feel wearier yet. ‘And cheated, too, in a sense,’ she had muttered to her son once, with the same soft, smiling bitterness, he reflected now as he stood on the street corner and recalled her voice, that his fair English mistress had. ‘Because it was as if he knew I … well, wasn’t too keen on life, let’s say, and didn’t want me to pinch the—how shall I put it?—emotional spotlight from him by ‘doing something stupid’ before he had had the chance to do something heroic. I can tell you one thing, though, if I had done something stupid, he would never have had the courage or the desire to do what he ultimately did. He was a sort of dandy, who couldn’t bear to be seen wearing the clothes that someone else had already been seen in, if you follow me. Just as I, after he’d done what he’d done—or put himself in a position where it would be done to him—couldn’t do something stupid. First, I had to take care of you, obviously. And secondly …’—her voice trailing away into a fog—‘because, well, I know this is a terrible thing to say about the great hero, but I couldn’t help feeling he’d done what he had partly—only in part, but in significant part—just to spite me. And I felt I had to try to rise above such personal matters and behave as if … as if … What I mean is, I was a dandy too, or an egoist, and having lost the race to be first, didn’t want to come in second. Especially when I could never have made my gesture with the flare, the glamour, and above all the sense of purpose with which he had made his. My death would have passed absolutely unnoticed, achieving nothing and only causing a certain amount of inconvenience to those around me. Whereas his—well, I don’t suppose it changed the course of history. Any more, or any less, than anyone’s life changes the course of history. But it did provide inspiration in a time that had need of inspiration, and it was a picture, or an outline, that could, afterwards, be filled in and coloured by others to extraordinary effect.

‘He was posing for a portrait of the Frenchman, and the socialist, and the Jew, if you wanted to see it as such—as hero. And it was that portrait that touched people’s’—she paused—‘hearts.’

‘Oh, no,’ Alfred repeated to himself, turning back to look at his wrecked car, and still hearing that soft, bitter voice in his ear. Neither his mother nor anyone else could do anything. He and he alone had to deal with this horror; and he had to deal with it now that the person or persons who had perpetrated it had, as they said on the telephone, proved that they meant business, quickly. He could no longer pretend, as the police had told him, and he had been lulled into believing by the fact that there had been no more anonymous letters after that first one, that someone was merely trying to scare him. They, whoever they were, were dangerous; and he, without a moment’s delay, must take evasive action.

He started by calling a garage from a bar on the corner, asking them to come and tow his car away, and telling them that as the driver’s seat had been ‘soiled’—he didn’t specify how—they should remove the whole thing and replace it with a new one. The other seats could simply be re-covered, he muttered, and the paintwork sprayed. He went on by hurrying back to the large, dark apartment he had inherited from his mother (and she had inherited from her French mother) to telephone Dorothy in her office and tell her that he was very sorry but for the forseeable future she and Matilda were going to have to return to the small and rather shabby apartment that she had always kept in Auteuil; which Dorothy, he knew, wouldn’t mind doing, but to which Matilda would object violently, since she had led all three of her somewhat snobbish boyfriends to believe that the large dark place on the rue de Phalsbourg, filled with dusty, decrepit but nonetheless valuable antiques, was something to do with her grandparents. (Though how this could be she never, so far as Alfred could tell, explained to those boys of so-called ‘good’ families; since in the next breath, for motives Alfred preferred not to dwell upon, she would be making it clear that Alfred was not her father, and telling them in fact she had been born in Venice, where her mother, who had spent her early life in Kenya, had been living with an ‘aristocratic’ Italian. A man whom Dorothy had left—foolishly, Matilda implied—because his politics were too far to the right, and who had subsequently gone off to live in Africa and die an absurd death by drowning in a bathtub in a hotel in Johannesburg.) And he concluded this increasingly frenetic burst of activity by gathering up Dorothy and Matilda’s most essential belongings, cramming them into as many suitcases as he could find, and having piled them into a taxi along with the various drafts of his story and a few of his own things, taking them over to the flat in Auteuil himself, glancing out of the back of the cab the whole time to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

The reason for such almost excessive haste and fearfulness, even given his determination to take immediate action, was that when he had opened the door of his flat, on the first floor of the imposing gloomy building in which it was situated, he found that in the time it had taken him to respond to his anonymous telephone call, walk down to the corner to inspect the damage to his car, and contact the garage, someone had managed to get in through the street door, climb the stairs, squirt what smelled like lighter fuel under his front door, and set fire to it. An attempt at arson that, thanks to the fact that the door was thick and well fitting, that it had draught excluders on it, and that luckily there were no carpets nearby (for even given the tightness of the fit some of the fluid had got in), had caused no more damage than extensive scorching of the exterior woodwork, and a scarcely perceptible marking of the parquet of the hallway.

They were watching him, Alfred told himself, trembling in the back of his taxi, and feeling not so much faint at this stage as so weak that at any moment he thought he might have a total collapse, or just dissolve into a wet, quivering jelly. Right now eyes were probably on him, watching him sitting here in his cab. And the sensation of being followed, being got at, being in imminent danger of being abducted, tortured and killed that had always been so terrifying in his imagination, and had led him to press himself into a corner weeping and flailing and whimpering ‘No, no,’ until Dorothy or someone else helped him to his feet, led him downstairs to an ambulance, and took him off somewhere white and warm and safe, now that it was happening in real life was, if anything, still more terrifying. Not least because now he knew that there was no safety anywhere, and that however much he wept and whimpered no doctor would come to sit by his bedside and say in a soothing, professional voice, ‘All right Alfred, what seems to be the problem today?’ Nor give him an injection, or some pills that would, for an hour or two, calm and reassure him. ‘What seems to be the problem …?’

Nothing seems any longer, Alfred wanted to blub to the driver, who, remarkably, appeared quite unaware of the state his fare was in. (Unless, Alfred muttered to himself, he too is ‘one of them’—even though it was the concierge who went down to the corner and found him for me.) Now everything is; and henceforth, until this matter is resolved one way or another, everything will continue to be. From now on the word ‘seems’ will no longer exist; and from now on, however frightening the situation becomes, you will never be able to escape into the luxury of a breakdown. You, who, for the last thirty-five years, have found reality unbearable will now have to bear it. Unless, that is, he muttered to himself again, in a small, pathetic voice, you want to renounce it forever. For you do have that choice. The choice of endless, permanent drowning.

Just because, however, he knew that if he slipped back into the sea now he would never again be able to stand on dry land, Alfred ignored that small pathetic voice, and concentrated on trying not to let the middle-aged, indifferent man driving him (and no, he was not one of them) have any reason for ceasing to be indifferent; and on worrying, as he always worried when he was in a taxi, about whether he would, when he arrived at his destination, give the right tip. It was the reason why he had, all his life, been loath to take cabs. In case, when the moment came, he got confused, couldn’t work out his percentages and either gave the driver far too much—so much that he would think him mad—or so little that he would start to insult him, and maybe even attack him physically. ‘You ugly, stupid, mean little Jew …’ It had never happened yet, and he didn’t know anyone it had ever happened to. All the same, there was always the possibility. And unless he was prepared …

It was already forty-three francs. That meant that if they arrived now—fifteen per cent of forty-three … But they hadn’t arrived, they were perhaps no more than three-quarters of the way there; which meant that the final fare might be …

Then there was all that luggage to be taken into account. Did one pay extra for that? Or had that already been calculated by the driver, and was now included in the figure on the meter? He didn’t know, and thought that maybe he should ask. If he did that, though …

Say it was seventy francs, the final fare. That would make … fifteen per cent of ten is one-fifty. Fifteen per cent of twenty is three. Fifteen per cent …

So somehow, Alfred got to Autueil; and so somehow, he stopped worrying about whether he was being followed.

‘No, of course I wasn’t,’ he told Dorothy that evening, when she let herself in and asked him if he had been; looking around with something like pleasure at the shabby, cheerless place she had taken, furnished as it had been in the nineteen thirties, seventeen years ago, when she had arrived in Paris, and kept ever since. For the last five years she had been living in the rue de Phalsbourg. Before that she had been living in Montparnasse with the American psychiatrist who had treated Alfred for ten years and who had, one evening at a party, introduced his patient to his mistress. (When the doctor had discovered that the two of them were having an affair, he had tried to be understanding, telling Alfred that he was simply venting his feelings of hostility towards his father-figure. When Dorothy announced that she was leaving him for Alfred, he threatened to shoot himself and her, and told Alfred that he was a fat, ugly, mad, little freak whom he hoped would go so crazy living with Dorothy he would end up in a straitjacket. After which he started taking so much cocaine every day, in an effort to cheer himself up and make Dorothy feel sorry for him, that he was quite soon deeply in debt, totally addicted to the drug that he continued to insist was non-addictive, and looked, when Dorothy last saw him, with his hair long and matted, his teeth stained, and his eyes red and oozing, not only madder than Alfred himself, but older; whereas he was in fact fifteen years younger. ‘You bitch,’ he had hissed at Dorothy when they had met in the street. ‘You fucking bitch. You’re our real madness, you cunt. You fucking, patronising, British bitch.’ Then tears, or the matter that was perpetually welling up in his eyes, started to run down his cheeks and he changed his tune. ‘Please come and have a coffee with me,’ he pleaded. ‘A drink. Or just—please,’ he crooned. ‘I love you so much. You’re the only woman who ever …’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ Dorothy told Alfred she had told the man, whose name, confusingly to most people, but symbolically satisfying to him, was also Alfred. Then she had turned away and, crying herself, had run to the nearest Metro stop.)

Before her years with the psychiatrist, she had lived in Issy with an architect, about whom Alfred knew nothing.

Yet all the time she had continued to call this third-floor flat, with its framed prints of hunting scenes, its upright piano in the corner of the dining room, its once cream wallpaper that had faded to yellow and in patches brown, and its dusty plants in fake Chinese pots, home; and to say that the day she had to give it up would be the day she left Paris.

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said now, as she removed her coat, hung it on a gilded hook behind the front door, and began to look, for the first time since this business had started, genuinely worried. ‘I mean, if they’re watching you closely enough to know when you go out to look at your car …’ She shivered, and wrinkled her nose. ‘How horrid. What do you suppose they did? Went out and had a big meal, and then squatted over the seat? Yuk,’ she said, and shivered again. ‘It makes you feel sick.’

‘Though what I don’t understand, lovey,’ she told him much later that evening, as they were sitting eating; and she was still feeling shaky after a fight with Matilda, who had indeed objected so violently to living in what she termed ‘this squalid petit-bourgeois dump’ that she had swept all the crockery from the sideboard in the kitchen onto the floor, had done likewise to all Dorothy’s lotions and potions in the bathroom, and had stormed out saying she was going to move in with Patrice, the most snobbish and ‘best-born’ of all her boyfriends.

‘I’ll be fucked if I stay here and let myself be dragged down just because your friend’s going completely off his head,’ she had shrieked at her mother, who had snapped back with a calmness and a faint little smile that even the watching Alfred found infuriating. ‘You’ll be fucked if you go to live with Patrice.’ To which Matilda had replied ‘Oh, ha ha ha’, and Dorothy had added, with a still more superb—and exasperating—show of lofty disdain, ‘Oh, I don’t mean literally, you poor little thing.’

‘Though what I don’t understand, lovey, is why all your Louises and Marie-Christines’ (for they had left the subject of precisely who They were and had moved onto what Dorothy called his ‘real persecutors’, even if they weren’t, ‘if you follow me’) ‘care so much. I mean, it’s not as if any of them were on the damned boat. Or have the faintest idea what happened on it.’

‘No, I don’t either,’ he said, fearing that if he embarked on an explanation as to how all those rich and powerful people, whose darling he had been for so long, saw his article as an attempt to undermine the foundations of their world, it would have come out sounding portentous, pretentious and just plain silly. ‘But that’s their problem,’ he went on after a moment. ‘The only thing that matters now is to get the damned thing finished. That, and, of course,’ he smiled, ‘to make sure you’re safe.’

‘Oh I’ll be safe enough here,’ Dorothy said, as if she had always known that one day she would need this place as a refuge, and had always kept it for that reason. ‘None of your ladies are going to send their killers out to a place like this.’

*

As was, Alfred reflected a week later, probably true. Somehow this whole affair concerned those who, for one reason or another, travelled first class, and the doings of those in steerage—or just the existence of those in steerage—interested them not one bit. The police, the church, the prejudices of their neighbours and above all the necessity of having to earn their daily bread kept them in order. It was treachery in their own ranks that they were concerned with; for it was the treachery of the strong—who played upon the anger, frustration and misery of the weak—that had been behind every successful revolution in history. Mere spontaneous uprisings of ‘the People’ had always been put down without too much effort. Obviously the times weren’t remotely propitious for any sort of revolution, of however limited a nature; and for the present, ‘the System’ was strong enough to withstand any sort of treachery. All the same, the body stayed strong only when it nipped any infections in the bud; only when it sent out antibodies to combat intruding germs at the first sign of trouble. When it relaxed its vigilance—oh, before one knew it even the healthiest of organisms could be laid low; and weaken, and sicken and die.

Dorothy, alone amongst the dusty aspidistras of her flat in Auteuil, was neither a threat, nor could be threatened. Dorothy, living near the Parc Monceau as the companion of a fairly well-known poet and journalist and a frequenter of literary and social salons, was, and could be.

At least, Alfred told himself, he hoped that was true. Just as he hoped that Matilda, by moving in with the awful Patrice and nailing her colours so ostentatiously to that particular mast, had made herself safe. It was possible that he was being as ridiculous here as he was in seeing the threats that were being made against him, and his sudden exclusion from the drawing rooms of his patrons and patronesses, as being connected, and as being the almost unconscious but nevertheless irresistible efforts of a society determined to defend itself against what it perceived as contagion and attack. Perhaps the letter and the destruction of his car and the lighter fuel under his door had all been the work of one man; in all probability the son of the late captain of the Chateaubriand, determined to preserve the reputation of a man he either knew, or suspected had behaved dishonorably. Perhaps too he had been dropped because without really realising it he had made such an issue of his bloody old boat story that he had ceased to be an asset in anyone’s drawing room, and had become a definite liability; a whining, self-righteous, sanctimonious prig. Moreover, when he had started badgering one’s husband or father or lover to take up arms on his behalf and begin boring the nation about what few remembered and fewer cared about—‘All right Alfred, the captain behaved like a louse, the first-class passengers got away first—and for God’s sake why shouldn’t they, they paid more didn’t they and don’t look so damned shocked either—and you were an even greater hero than your father. Now please—ça suffit, basta, that’s enough. In whatever language you like, just shut up, have another drink, or go away!’—then it was time to say goodbye. ‘We want to hear what you think of the latest books, the latest films, of what’s happening here in France now, or in America, about AIDS, and Star Wars, and relations with the Russians, or about the current difficulties of producing Wagner, doing something about the unemployed, or going somewhere in the world that hasn’t been trivialised by tourism. We do not want to hear about some silly ship. And henceforth when you mention the word Chateaubriand in our presence you will either be talking about a man, or a piece of meat. Otherwise, well, I’m sorry, but we’ll really have no alternative.’

Yes, perhaps this was the truth. He didn’t think it was, however; he hoped it wasn’t, for if it was, it meant Dorothy might still be in danger, and Matilda too; and even if it was he didn’t see that it entirely invalidated his other theory as to what was going on. In fact, he told himself as he sat in the garden of the tiny house he had rented in the Tuscan countryside, twenty minute’s walk from the nearest shop and forty from the nearest village, he refused to allow it entirely to invalidate his other theory. For if there was no ostensible link between his persecution and his being dropped, at a deeper level there was a connection; and if he chose to see this affair as a clash between the rich and powerful and the forces of—well, whatever it was he represented—then that, until he was proved wrong, was what it was.

All the same, he had to confess that the thought of just exactly what he did represent did give a moment’s pause. Because if he saw himself as ‘the Truth’, wasn’t he maybe making a little too large a claim on his own behalf? Committing what Catholics might have called the sin of pride? Yes, he told himself, he was.

But if he didn’t see himself as such, then what, in God’s name, was he? Just a middle-aged, disturbed and lonely man biting the hand that had always fed him, out of pique at always having been fed, and never feeder?

No, he wanted to shout out to the pine tree under which he sat, to the grass, the rose trellis, the olive trees, the green valley and the wooded hills over which he was looking. No, no, no!

*

Possibly because he had always been vaguely conscious of the fact that throughout much of their history Jews had been forbidden to own land in Europe, possibly because he felt (the evidence of the past not withstanding) that there was safety in numbers, and possibly just because he did enjoy frequenting literary salons and the drawing rooms of the mighty, Alfred had not only never thought of living in the country, or buying any property in the country, but he had, so far as he could remember, never spent more than two consecutive days in the country in the whole of his adult life. Even weekends in country houses with his friends had made him feel uncomfortable, and he had returned to Paris or New York or London with something like the relief of a small, hunted animal returning safely to its burrow. And the first few days after he had arrived at this pink, one-storey house amidst the Tuscan hills had been among the worst he had ever experienced. He was worried about Dorothy, safe though he had tried to convince himself she was now. He was worried about money, for having quickly spent the cash his wife had settled on him at the time of their divorce, he had always only just been able to make ends meet by turning out a constant stream of articles, essays and reviews, and now he had been forced to tell his various editors and publishers that he was going off to the country for a while, and until he had finished what he was working on, was uncontactable. And he was depressed about his situation in general, about his motives for doing what he was doing and, given that he had nothing else to think of, about the difficulty of the task he had set himself.

What if I am wrong in my let’s say cosmic interpretation of events, he asked himself as he sat under his pine tree, and this is simply a rather crude attempt by some doubting son to protect his father’s memory? What if my friends, or whatever they are, or were, really were right to drop me? Maybe I really am boring and tiresome. And maybe my task is not only questionable as far as my motives are concerned, but utterly irrelevant and without interest.

‘I’m so fed up,’ he told Dorothy on the ’phone, having been soaked by a shower on his way into the village, and then having had to wait fifteen minutes while it seemed everyone in the village had to call his mother or her boyfriend, ‘I could die.’

And though he managed to convey a sort of smile over the line as he said this, when he repeated it to himself that night, lying in bed unable to sleep, he smiled not at all, and told himself he was absolutely serious.

The weather, since this was now May, was not only changeable, but unseasonably chilly; so that though he did sit under a pine tree to write, he did it only because inside the cottage it was still colder than it was out. His landlady, a friend of a colleague of Dorothy’s who lived nearby, was so determined to show that she respected his privacy and understood his need as a writer not to be disturbed that she left him totally alone, and made him so desperate for the sound of another human voice that he found himself walking into the village twice a day to call Dorothy in Paris. And, for all that he tried to tell himself this was absurd, everything about him seemed to recoil from his presence, and conspire to make him feel more alien in this setting than he knew himself to be. For instance, the first day he was there he went by the local cemetery, on his way into the village, and noticed that on almost every grave there were vases of fresh flowers; brought by the local women, who passed him on the narrow, overgrown lane, their arms laden with what looked to him like the entire contents of their gardens, or of the local flower shops. On his way back from the village, and seeing that it was near closing time for the cemetery, and that there were thus few people around to be disturbed by his awkward presence, he decided to walk round the place, to admire the astonishing show. Yet no sooner had he stepped through the gates—and the place was indeed deserted now—than there was a sudden, single gust of wind, and the vase nearest him, a tall, earthenware pot that looked as if it could have withstood a hurricane, toppled over and shattered at his feet. With a crash that made him feel he had committed an act of sacrilege, and that if anyone entered and saw him standing there amidst the wreckage of gladioli, irises, carnations and roses, he would be denounced for desecrating tombs. Then, two days later, walking round his landlady’s extensive property, he was standing admiring the bark of an olive tree when, without the slightest warning, and as far as he could see for not the slightest reason, a piece of that bark simply flaked off the tree and fell, accusingly, to the ground. And the day after that, he was once again on his way down into the village, and had just stopped to sniff—though he should have learned his lesson by now—at a hawthorne bush in flower, round the base of which some delicate white rock roses were growing, when out of the middle of the bush, for all the world like a demon from a nightmarish fairy story, leapt a rat. Which so shocked Alfred, and made him feel so very much as he had when he had looked into his slashed and defiled car, that for a moment he suspected that whoever had committed that obscenity in Paris was lurking in the hawthorne bush, and had been waiting for him to sniff the flowers, knowing that sooner or later he would, just so he could toss the rat out at him.

Nonsense, he told himself, and reminded himself that while he could impose his interpretation of events on what had happened there, if he started doing it on what was happening here, he would soon be madder than he ever had been before. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. All the same …

Then, however, after eight days in his hideaway, the weather settled down to a succession of brilliant spring days, so bright and clear the air seemed new, and made even alien Alfred feel intoxicated. Not only did everything he looked at in the countryside stop withering at his approach but, on the contrary, started to glow more thoroughly the more it was admired. And finally, far from being assailed by rats, he found himself receiving the attentions—and the friendly attentions!—of both his landlady and, rather more often, an army of local cats and dogs, who not only didn’t seem to find him out of place, but seemed actively pleased to have a new face to see, and new hands to feed them scraps and biscuits.

And with that, everything fell into place; and now without a hitch, without the slightest hesitation, Alfred found his story practically writing itself. In fact, it came to him so easily that he felt like a magician whose tricks had taken him over, and merely had to stand back and watch the rabbit jump out of his hat, the scarves endlessly pull themselves from his jacket, and various assistants appear and disappear, saw themselves in half, and put themselves together again. Only in his case the rabbits were all the little details of life on board the S. S. Chateaubriand in the days preceding its sinking, the scarves were a liner and a tanker steaming towards each other, and the appearing and disappearing assistants, sailors, passengers, and everyone with whom he had come into contact in those days. Oh, how it all came back to him, as cleanly and completely as clothes that had been kept in careful storage for years, and then unpacked and found to be as good as new. There was nothing he couldn’t recall, nothing he couldn’t recapture. The muffled sound of the engines, thudding through the ship; the colour of the cover on his bed. Not only what was served, but the taste of every dish he ate at every meal on board; not only the dresses and suits his new-found friends wore, but the scent the women used, the smell of shaving cream and soap that certain men emitted; while others, impeccably groomed though they were, always had about them the faintest odour of sweat, or of a not quite concealed halitosis. He saw the way people walked, he saw the way they leaned on the railings and gazed out over the perfectly flat Atlantic. He heard their laughter, their complaints; the way their shoes squeaked on the deck, the way one or two of them creaked as if corsetted in girders; the way they burped and farted, and either looked embarrassed, giggled, or with patrician indifference went right on talking without a break. It was as if he were back there, the plump, ungainly twenty year old being taken up, patronised, flattered, listened to, gazed at with dewey eyes, despised and made—though whether we actually care for you matters not one bit!—‘one of us’. And finally, finally, he came to that night; or that night came to him. The night that started with him putting on his dinner jacket; that went on with that party—the brightest, the best party he had ever been to in his life, that celebration of all that was civilised, all that was finished and perfect—and ended with those looks of panic, with those cries, with those meaningless orders being barked out by men who were incoherent with fear, and with that running around, that screaming on the part of some, that extraordinary calmness on the part of others, and with the lowering of lifeboats, the realisation of just who was in those lifeboats, the organisation of people, the shouting, the calling on the radio, the rushing hither and thither, the saying with an authority one had never possessed before and was never to possess again, ‘Do this, do that, go here, go there’, the helping, the soothing, the feeling of disgust, the whispering, the exhorting, the feeling of disgust, the feeling of disgust, the feeling of disgust … and that undignified tumble into the cold sea, the being hauled out and then being lugged on board the tanker like an awkward, stupid child who couldn’t even be relied on to be rescued properly, but who would be forgiven as long as he went straight back to the dance, followed all the steps, and never, ever had the bad taste to refer to what had, so briefly, interrupted the glittering ball.

For four hours, five hours, sometimes up to eight hours a day he kept at it, as the bees buzzed around him, the finches twittered in cypress and pine, and cuckoos cuckooed so incessantly it sounded to Alfred as if the needle had got stuck in a recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

My God, he thought, as his pen raced across the page, and as he walked down into the village and saw the daisies and the bluebells, the little wildflowers whose names he didn’t know, and the poppies more scarlet than any scarlet he had ever seen: I’m happy here. I’m happy! And Wordsworth, philosophical old Wordsworth, was wrong; something can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass. Bring it back, and make it more splendid than ever. It was as if he was returning to his youth and, instead of setting sail on the Chateaubriand, moving off in quite another direction. I am healed, Alfred told himself—conscious, as he did, that he was becoming a little hysterical now—I am one again. And now there isn’t just glory in the flower; there is glory in the sun, in the sky, in the tree, in the bird, in the air, in the stream, in me.

‘I’ve done it,’ Alfred told himself every morning; and wrote on a postcard to Dorothy (though to her, in case his boasting incurred the anger of the gods, he prefixed his phrase with the words ‘I think’). ‘I’ve done it,’ he told himself every evening, as he sat back, tired but content after his day’s work, and drank a glass of wine. And ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it,’ he practically shouted to his mirror when, after eight weeks up in his little house, he wrote after the last sentence of his hundred and twenty page account of ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’, ‘The End’.

So he had. It had taken him longer to write, he scribbled on another postcard to Dorothy, than it had Stendhal to write La Chartreuse de Parme. He was also afraid that his little effort wasn’t quite as much fun, nor would prove so popular, as that particular masterpiece. Nevertheless, he had done it; and now all that remained, once he had typed it out and made copies of it, was ‘if I can’ to find a publisher for it.

‘Which may well be,’ he told Dorothy on the ’phone, ‘the most difficult part of all.’

In this, though, he was being unduly pessimistic. Indeed, within a week of his sending off the manuscript to the editor who had been responsible for publishing most of his collections of essays, and all of his poetry, he received a telegram saying ‘Wonderful congratulations letter to follow’; that made him so excited he put out of his mind any misgivings he had been feeling over the last few days at having, at last, revealed his whereabouts to someone other than Dorothy. Of course Claude was a person of the utmost rectitude and discretion, and Alfred both liked him as a man, and had the greatest respect for him as an editor. Since he hadn’t liked to forbid him to reveal his address to anyone—it would have sounded, he felt, melodramatic and a little mad to do so—he was afraid that while Claude himself might not go round saying ‘I’ve finally discovered where Alfred’s been hiding and what he’s been doing,’ someone else in his office might.

‘He likes it!’ he shouted down the line to Dorothy as, at the same time, it occurred to him that just as soon as he had signed some sort of contract and was sure that there were enough copies in existence to prevent even the most fervent defender of the late captain’s name from destroying them all, he would return to Paris. The countryside, and Italy, were glorious, but home was home; and for all his weeks of romantic ecstasy, he was still, in the final analysis, an urban creature.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Claude wrote in his promised letter, ‘how much.’

If Alfred had been unduly pessimistic in thinking he would never find a publisher for his tale, however, he was unduly optimistic in thinking that however much that publisher liked it—‘and I do, I do, I promise you; it is quite admirable’—he liked it enough to publish it as it was.

‘You see,’ his letter went on, as Alfred started to feel giddy and as if he was in for one of his attacks, ‘I don’t know whether your story is precisely true, whether it’s “faction”, or whether it is fiction.

‘But I do know that the laws of libel being what they are, I couldn’t possibly let this come out as it stands. Because though one cannot defame the dead, and the captain himself could not sue you, a great many of the people you mention are still alive, and could indeed take action against you. And against—more to the point from my point of view as a publisher—me.

So Alfred, what I must ask you to do is this. Not change your story. I would never ask you to do that, as, I must repeat yet again, it is too good to be changed. But change just the superficial accessories, if you will, of the story: the names of the people, the name of the ship, maybe even the nationality of the ship (couldn’t it be English, “The Shelley”, or Italian, “The Dante” or “The Leopardi”?). And make just the tiniest adjustments to timing, so the actual date of the sinking can’t be identified. That way—true or not!—I think we could bring the story out as a novel without too much fear of having its publication blocked by the courts; and, from your point of view now, without the danger of you being branded as, not to put too fine a point on it, a mythomaniac or a liar.

‘I do hope you will not be offended by this, Alfred; and yet again I must assure you of my admiration. But I must also assure you that if you do not make certain changes, not only cannot we publish it, but you will never find a publisher for it. Neither here in Paris, nor anywhere else. Therefore, my dear Alfred, think over what I have told you, and tell me you’ll do what I ask. For really, this is so good, it must be published.’

So, Alfred thought, sitting down heavily on the grass of his little garden (whereupon an ant promptly ran up his leg and nipped him, announcing thereby that his truce with nature was over?) they have won. Or, to be precise, they will win. Because now he had just two alternatives. Doing what he was asked, having his story made, as Claude had requested, into a work of fiction, and waiting for the success that his book would have, among his friends if not with the public at large—‘Oh, Alfred darling, it’s wonderful! All that time you were twittering on about that boat we had no idea you were just planning a novel. Oh, darling, you are clever, and it’s so marvellous to have you back!’—or reverting to his former idea of not having the book published at all in his lifetime. A decision which, now that word was presumably out that Alfred had actually written his ‘boat story’ might not be enough to save his life. Oh God, he thought, realising that the sun was burning his bald head, that it was summer now rather than spring, and that not only was it starting to be uncomfortably hot but there were fewer flowers now amidst the beginning-to-be-parched grass than there had been a couple of weeks ago: what am I going to do?

This was a question he asked himself several times over the next few days, as he sat in his house listening no longer to the singing of birds, but to the chirping of crickets; a sound that had always conjured up visions of dryness, sterility and death in his mind. And a question that he asked himself with particular emphasis five days after he received his letter when, walking dejectedly down into the village to do some shopping, he was overtaken on the little country lane by two young men on a large motorcycle. Two young men dressed in black leather and wearing black helmets; two young men who turned to look at him as they raced past, then having sped round the corner, changed direction and drove back past him more slowly, staring at him quite deliberately now, as if they wished to note his features for future reference; and two young men who were undoubtedly, he told himself, emanations of the same spirit that had caused the vase to topple over in the cemetery, the bark to flake from the olive tree, and the rat to leap from the hawthorne, and were almost certainly the creatures of whoever it was (in other words practically everyone he knew) who was determined to make sure his story, his true story, that is, never saw the light of day. And try though he might to convince himself that they were just two local boys who were trying out some new motorcycle and wanted to impress this bald, plump, staring-eyed, little foreigner they had seen around, he wasn’t able to; becoming so frightened of going out that he went over to his landlady’s house, told her he wasn’t feeling well, and asked her if she would mind doing some shopping for him when next she went into the village herself.

Oh, what, he asked himself, cold and shivering in his house, despite the now oppressive heat outside, oh, what am I going to do?

A further five days later, after he had spoken to Dorothy on his landlady’s telephone and she had told him she had gone over to rue de Phalsbourg and, coming out of the building, had been followed by a very sinister-looking man—‘probably nothing to do with anything, he probably just wanted to pick me up or something’—he decided, and wrote to his publisher accordingly.

‘Dear Claude, I have been thinking over what you said, and see now that you are absolutely right.’

*

It took him just four weeks to rewrite his story; and only two more after that to get another telegram from Paris, saying this time: ‘Well done contract to follow all best Claude.’

Nevertheless, that was long enough for him to be starting, by the time he held the telegram in his hand, to be suffering from the first symptoms of one of his half-yearly breakdowns; and long enough for him to be terrified in case it was too long and in the meantime something appalling had happened to Dorothy, and something appalling would happen to him if he so much, now, as stepped out of doors for a moment. This, therefore, he avoided doing, relying on his starting-to-be aggrieved landlady to do, at this stage, everything for him. To the extent of telephoning Dorothy herself, first to make sure that she was still all right, second to tell her that Alfred was fine but for the moment was laid up in bed and therefore couldn’t get to the ’phone, and third, to ask her to send him some money, both to pay the rent on the house that he had been obliged to take for longer than planned, and to pay her, his landlady, for all the extras she was providing him with. ‘That I really don’t have time for and didn’t bargain on,’ he was sure the woman told Dorothy, ‘and I really can’t go on providing indefinitely.’

Once his breakdown had started in earnest, however, matters in a sense started to improve. If only because once he could no longer tell if his terrors were inside or out, imaginary or real, though those inside were horrible enough, they couldn’t, he assured himself while still in a state to reason at all, be any worse than those outside; and because, recognising his symptoms, he had the sense, having had his landlady make some enquiries, to admit himself to the nearest hospital that accepted cases such as his. A clinic whose address he didn’t even give to Dorothy; he simply asked his landlady to tell her not to worry, that he had gone away for a little while, and she wasn’t on any account to go near rue de Phalsbourg—and in which, even at his very worst moments, he was conscious of feeling safer than he would have had he not been in hospital. Yes, here, dressed in black and riding their motorcycles, they were coming to get him. And made him whimper and cower as they approached. There, though, they really would have come to get him; and with their coming, dragged him into a darkness which no light would ever have broken again.

For six weeks—his usual time ‘away’—he was in hospital; and when he came out he was feeling better than he had in a year, possibly, apart from those weeks in the spring when he had thought he was taking on the world and might win. All right, he hadn’t won, and it had been foolish to think that he could have. Nonetheless, he had done his best, he had got off his chest something that had been on his chest for years, and frankly, even if he hadn’t told the truth, he couldn’t help feeling quite proud of his effort all the same. Claude was right, he told himself in the taxi on his way back from the hospital to his home on the hill, where he was planning to pack up his things and return to Paris. It was good, what he had written, and maybe it was actually an improvement, in a way; to remove that implicitly priggish voice that insisted ‘I am the truth.’ Now it was just a bitter-sweet comic story about an unattractive youth whom everyone thought had behaved badly when he had in fact behaved well; a misapprehension that would guarantee his social success for the rest of his life, but would periodically cause him to go crazy.

And he felt still better—or anyway, couldn’t resist letting a wistful smile come to his lips—when he reached his little pink house, and found a number of letters waiting for him. One was from Claude, enclosing the promised contract. One was from Dorothy, hoping he was feeling all right now, and telling him she had seen no more sinister men and why didn’t he come home now. One was from Louise, who told him she had bumped into Dorothy who had told her he wasn’t well, and she did hope he’d be better soon because they had all missed him terribly, ‘though I must say you were working up to this last attack for some time, weren’t you darling? You have not been easy recently.’ And the fourth was from a woman he knew only slightly, who said she had heard he was renting a little house very near where she and her husband had taken a villa for the autumn, and they would like it if, when he had a moment, he came over and saw them. So, he told himself: they were going to be magnanimous in victory. But what had he expected? And to look on the bright side, didn’t this mean that the news of his defeat had spread so widely by now that he was no longer in danger, the dogs had been called off, and he could go back to Paris and resume his former life at any time he liked?

Yes, he nodded; it did. Furthermore, he couldn’t help admitting that he felt a great relief that it was so. All right, he had probably condemned himself to having his six-monthly breakdowns for the rest of his life, something inside him cracking under the strain of—what? Loving perhaps a little too much a civilisation that was a little too stained with blood? Or just pretending to be a truthteller to people who wanted anything from him but that, and were prepared to make him their darling so long as he did keep quiet? But that wasn’t such a terrible fate, surely? After all, he was used to his breakdowns by now. And God knows, most people in the world had worse to put up with than that.

At least, to his own satisfaction, he knew the truth. At least he had seen the blood.

He was feeling so much better, in fact, that he decided the following day—since he was leaving the day after that—he would take up his scarcely remembered friend on her offer to come and visit her. And having looked at a map and seen that the villa was only a couple of miles away, and could be reached, according to his landlady, by climbing this hill here, going down that track there, and then climbing another hill, he further decided that rather than try and get a taxi from the village, he would walk there.

As, setting off around four, when the October afternoon was at its most glorious, he proceeded to do; putting a hat on his head, taking a stick from the umbrella stand just inside his front door, and feeling, by now, almost jaunty. You old failure, he told himself cheerfully. You weak, mad, old fraud.

A refrain he was still quietly humming half an hour later; any idea that the news of his defeat had not spread widely enough yet, that the dogs had not been called off yet, so far from his mind that for a moment he couldn’t think what that noise was when he first heard the sound of a motorcycle coming up the dusty track behind him. When he did identify it, however, and turned, and saw the two young men dressed in black speeding, so far as they could, over the stoney ground towards him, all traces of jauntiness left him, and he was conscious only of the terror he had felt in those weeks before sending the manuscript back to Paris.

Magnanimous in victory indeed, he told himself; as, at the same time, he realised that the imaginary had at last become real; that They, at last, had come to get him. They simply wanted to lure me from the safety of my home, up onto this deserted hillside where no one would see what happened to me.

And though he tried to add ‘Oh well, it isn’t really a tragedy, because in a sense I died thirty five years ago,’ he couldn’t quite form the words in his head. For he was too conscious of his heart beating, and of the fact that he had lost control of his bowels.

He stood there, a sweating, frightened, overweight man; while all around him, in the woods, crickets chirped.

THE NATURE OF ANGELS

It was six-thirty on the morning of Good Friday; and as he did around six-thirty every Friday morning, Good or no, Giuseppe Bellettini looked at his wife, working in the kitchen, and said ‘I don’t understand why you’re making those cakes.’

For fifteen years now he had been saying it, ever since the autumn of the year their daughter got married. And for fifteen years now, ever since the day she had stared at him as if he were going mad, when she heard him, Maria found herself having to suppress the urge to throw something at him, pummel him with her fists, or anyway snap ‘You told me that last week.’ After which she would force herself to explain, as reasonably as she could, ‘It’s just in case someone drops in over the weekend. I’ve got to have something to offer them.’

From then on, the scenario was not so invariable. Sometimes Giuseppe nodded, before going off to sit in the front room. Sometimes he shook his head and murmured, ‘No one’s ever dropped in. Why do you think they will now?’ And sometimes, as this morning, he gazed at the mixture Maria was stirring on the kitchen table and said, with an air of wonder, ‘If people drop by they don’t expect to be served cakes and biscuits.’ A comment to which Maria had a number of replies, but which today provoked just this response: that since this weekend was Easter weekend, she had thought she had better make the effort. ‘You know, just in case. I mean, how would it look if a visitor did come and we didn’t have anything on hand?’

‘I suppose,’ Giuseppe nodded, though he didn’t sound convinced. ‘I suppose. But it does seem to me an awful waste of almonds.’

In a way of course it was comic, Maria told herself as her husband, impeccably dressed in his white shirt and tie, in his fawn trousers and cardigan, and in his soft leather slippers, shuffled off to take up his position in the front room. A position from which he wouldn’t move until eleven o’clock, when he would join her in the kitchen for a coffee, and in which, apart from the odd break for meals or to go to the bathroom, he would stay until, at nine-thirty or ten this evening, he went to bed. It was comic, and almost sweet. And she sometimes suspected that his unchanging routine was merely an attempt to amuse her, or, very gently, to mock her; and that he knew quite well what he was doing. In another way, however, it wasn’t comic at all, and try as she might to convince herself that he was just pulling her leg, every Friday, when he shuffled off to the front room, though her urge to hit him had passed, she felt so nervous that it was all she could do to stop herself following him and telling him the real reason why, every Friday, winter or summer, she baked biscuits and cakes, which she would then set out on a silver dish on the table just inside the front door.

It was the effort of forcing herself to give him a rational reply that made her so nervous. Or, if it was a game he was playing, the effort to go along with it, and not lose her temper and shout ‘Stop it! That’s enough! Fifteen years it’s been going on and it isn’t funny any more!’

What would he do if she did tell him the truth? she wondered, as she tried to calm herself by lighting the gas in the oven, giving her mixture a final stir, and considering whom she would meet in town this morning, what the weather would be like over the holiday weekend and whether, since Easter was so early this year, there’d be as many tourists as there were normally. Would he give her one of his blank stares, as if he hadn’t heard her, and turn back to his magazine, or the television? Would he simply shrug, as if to say, ‘We all keep our balance in our own way and if that’s your way, so be it’? Or would he nod his head a few times, look at her accusingly and then tell her very quietly that it wasn’t his fault he had to stay in all day, and couldn’t work and didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for anything? He hadn’t chosen to get sick, you know, to be in considerable pain most of the time and to have nothing to look forward to except further years of inactivity, sickness and pain. And frankly, he found what she said unfair, unkind and uncalled-for. She didn’t know; and she would never find out because she knew that whatever happened, however nervous she became or strongly tempted she might be, she never would follow him and tell him the truth. Just because it would be unfair, unkind and uncalled-for. Oh, she thought, but how she’d love to! And what wouldn’t she have given to have been able to! To stand over him as he sat there neat, disfigured and slowly, slowly, more slowly perhaps than even she, dying, and say to him ‘Shall I tell you why I bake those cakes every Friday? Because ridiculous though it may sound, I feel they’re my only link with the outside world. With reality, sanity, health, happiness, with light, and youth, and hope. Of course I know we’re never going to have visitors. Who wants to come here, with the shutters always closed, with the place perpetually dark, with this air of … of death? I mean, if anyone has anything to say to me they say it in town when I’m shopping, or they telephone. And when Elisabetta and the children come to stay it could hardly be said that they drop in because we know weeks in advance when they’re coming. Nevertheless, I have to feel that someone might, that someone could, and if that if they did I’d be ready to welcome them. Those cakes are my hands stretched out towards life, if you like. They’re my only possibility of contact with life, except when I see Elisabetta and the boys. What do you want me to do? Not stretch out my hands? Not be ready to welcome life should it, by any miracle, suddenly decide to stop by? I’d be mad if I did that. I’d go mad if I did that, and anyway, what would happen to us if we both just hung around here all day, if we both just … sat on our hands? How long do you think we’d last? How long could we stand it? We’d go crazy, we’d fall to pieces, we’d—oh, I’m sorry Giuseppe, I’m sorry. Really, though, it’s not very extravagant, when you think of it. I mean, I know it’s a waste to bake cakes week after week, month after month, year after year, that never get eaten. But under the circumstances, I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay, is it? For, as I say, sanity, hope, life. What’s more, you must admit, apart from that one extravagance, or eccentricity, if you like, I’ve always been very careful, haven’t I? I’ve never wanted lots of clothes, or anything. I’ve never asked for new furniture. It wasn’t me who wanted a colour television set. That was you, wasn’t it? You said you didn’t like the black and white. So please, please, don’t begrudge me my cakes. Because without them, I don’t think I could go on.

‘I mean, I know these last fifteen years, haven’t been easy for you. But they haven’t been easy for me, either.’

Sickness, silence and darkness. Sickness, silence and darkness …

No, of course she’d never tell him any of this, she thought as she began to scoop out handfuls of her cake mixture and pat them into shape. Not only would it have been unfair and unkind, but also, though the truth, it wasn’t perhaps the whole truth. Nevertheless, she was glad to have made her speech, if only in her head. For now, having unburdened herself, she felt not just calm again, but her normal, quietly cheerful self again. A self who would probably be able to get through the week ahead without a single recurrence of her bad temper. And a self who might even be able to get through more than that, as long as nothing untoward happened. Or as long as Giuseppe didn’t come into the kitchen next Friday morning, gaze at her, and say, with a puzzled air, ‘I don’t understand.’

*

Maria baked her cakes to keep a hold on life and sanity and reality, or at least to stretch out a hand towards them. The reason why, however, had she told Giuseppe this, it would not have been the whole truth, concerned the form that life, sanity and reality took in her mind; and the precise nature of the visitors (or, to be absolutely honest, the visitor) whom she knew wouldn’t, but hoped might, drop in one day. For it wasn’t just any old passer-by she maintained her perpetual welcome for, though had by chance someone unexpected rung the doorbell, she would have been only too glad to offer the fruits of her Friday morning labour to him or her, and to have crowed to Giuseppe afterwards, ‘You see.’

And the form that life, sanity and reality took in her mind, and the precise nature of the person she was, in the final analysis, baking her cakes for, concerned, as most things in her life seemed to, the events of that summer fifteen years ago, when Elisabetta had married. When Elisabetta had left them; when Giuseppe’s sickness had first manifested itself; and when, without wishing to be too dramatic, her world had started to fall apart.

Oh, that summer, Maria would tell herself every day, carrying the subject round with her like a child who never changed, but who remained a constant source of interest and provided her with all the company she needed, wanted, or was ever likely to need or want. Oh, that summer, that summer, that summer.

She had been working with her aunt at the time, in her uncle’s tobacconist and newsagent’s; supplementing her income by taking cleaning jobs in the houses and apartments that had been let for the season to tourists. Meanwhile Giuseppe, who didn’t approve of this second job—he said she wasn’t strong enough and anyway didn’t like the idea of her being a cleaning woman—was employed by the local water authority, supplementing his income by working as an odd-job man and freelance plumber.

In which capacity he was called one Sunday morning towards the end of April to ‘The Villa’, as it was known locally. One of the few houses that hadn’t been built in the last thirty years. It was a large, not particularly attractive turn-of-the-century building that belonged to some industrialist or businessman who lived most of the year in Milan and spent only the occasional weekend in Sardinia. A tube had become blocked and someone had mentioned Guiseppe’s name as a person who could be called upon in an emergency …

It was not a particularly remarkable occurrence, as local people were always mentioning Giuseppe’s name as someone who could be called upon, at any time of day or night, in an emergency. He never complained; he never made a fuss; he just turned up, did what had to be done, charged a reasonable amount for his work and disappeared. And that was how it went today. He got the phone call at nine-fifteen; by ten-thirty he was home again. What was remarkable—or anyway curious, or amusing, or a coincidence—was that in the hour and a quarter he had been absent, Maria, who didn’t do either of her jobs on a Sunday, had stopped by the tobacconist’s on her way to Mass, just to say hello, and while there had overheard a thin, drawn, but apparently pleasant woman asking her aunt if by any chance she knew someone who would be prepared to come and do some cleaning for an hour or two a day. ‘We have that old villa up behind the Hotel Roma,’ the woman said. ‘And we’re going to be here all summer this year. So I wondered—do forgive me for asking you, signora, but I thought maybe … You being here in the centre of town, you probably know everything that’s going on, and …’

‘Well,’ zia Clara said with a laugh, waving her hand across the shop, ‘you could ask my niece Maria. Sometimes she—Maria, do you want a job?’

‘The poor woman,’ Maria told Giuseppe when she got home, smiling at this coincidence of both of them being approached by members of the same family at more or less the same time. ‘She looked so embarrassed. She started wringing her hands and apologising, and saying how sorry she was … I’m not sure why. There was no need to be embarrassed. I mean she only asked …’

‘What did you say?’ interrupted Giuseppe, who seemed to find nothing amusing about this story.

‘I told her, yes, of course. I’m going to do two hours a day, three days a week for a start, and maybe later, if they have a lot of guests, I’ll go in every day. But she’s offering almost twice what I get at the Franceschini’s, she said it won’t be hard, and—she thought it was funny too, when I told her my husband had just gone off to mend one of her pipes. Or fairly funny. She seemed embarrassed about that as well. She said “Oh, we’ll soon be employing your whole family,” and laughed, and then seemed ashamed of laughing and really, I thought she was very nice. Unhappy, perhaps. But nice.’

As she continued to find Amelia Cavalieri when she started working for her, and found her still more so when she started not only going in every day, but when the tormented industrialists’s wife really did end up employing the whole of the Bellettini family. That is, she asked Giuseppe if he could come in a few evenings a week to try to do something about the ‘garden’ surrounding The Villa; a stretch of land that had hardly been touched in years, and was overgrown and dismal. Then, after she had discovered that Elisabetta, who was getting married in mid-September, was a maths and physics teacher in the local school, she had asked her if she could come in for five or six hours a week and give some lessons to her thirteen-year-old son, whose maths exam had gone badly at school; he was going to have to repeat it in October.

Indeed, she became so fond of her, and so sorry for her, that by the middle of July she felt she had known her for years. She didn’t even mind too much, couldn’t, for all that she thought she should, mind too much, when she realised that Giuseppe, in his quiet, undemonstrative way, was, well, ‘falling in love’ with her, absurd though it sounded when she said it to herself. She didn’t and couldn’t mind because Amelia did absolutely nothing to encourage Giuseppe, and was almost certainly unaware of his feelings. Moreover, Amelia was so nice and so unhappy she deserved to be loved by someone; she clearly wasn’t by her husband, who only rarely made an appearance at the villa. Indeed, Maria couldn’t help feeling that temperamentally Amelia was rather like Giuseppe or Giuseppe rather like Amelia. Both were withdrawn and tended to see the serious side of things. Both were, or appeared, troubled, though for no discernible reason. And both bore whatever troubled them with a reserved, slightly formal grace, never waved their problems in other people’s faces, and went through life made gentler and kinder by the doubts that assailed them, rather than harsher and more aggressive. Naturally, there were differences: Amelia did have a certain sense of humour and sometimes seemed about to confess what it was that disturbed her; whereas Giuseppe’s tendency to look on the dark side almost never left him, and he was so stoical that one knew he would never break down. Also Amelia, for all her air of fragility, had that underlying assurance and sense of power that an upbringing based on solid economic foundations generally confers; whereas Giuseppe, for all the apparent firmness of his stance, had that underlying lack of assurance and sense of helplessness that an upbringing based on the most precarious of economic foundations generally confers. Still, they were alike enough for Maria to think, when she saw them together, that they were two offshoots of the same plant; and to feel confident that even if Amelia were to become aware of what Giuseppe felt for her and even if, extraordinarily, she reciprocated his feelings, neither would do anything about it. Amelia because she wouldn’t want to hurt her children and possibly her new-found friend Maria, and would know that however passionately she loved Giueseppe, those differences between them would be sufficient to keep them apart. And Giuseppe because he too wouldn’t want to hurt his Maria, and he too would realise that ridiculous and sinful though it might be to allow oneself to be constrained by the past, neither he nor Amelia would ever have the strength not to be. His sense that ultimately his place was with the dispossessed and disinherited of this earth was too strongly and intricately bound around him ever to be uprooted, or disentangled. And her sense of belonging, however much she blushed for it, in the officers’ quarters on the ship of life was as deeply etched into her as her feeling that, for all their sins, officers were necessary if that ship was to keep moving forward, be there ever so many casualties below decks, be there ever so many people lost overboard and drowned in the process.

Paradoxically, though, and not surprisingly, it was this one great difference between them that could have caused some sort of passion to grow up between them, and was the cause of Giuseppe’s feelings for Amelia developing into that grave and silent love that only he, and his wife, were aware of.

Was it this love, however, that if she wasn’t aware of it consciously, she might in the back of her mind have realised existed, that caused Amelia to make the offer she made at the beginning of that August? Or was it rather her affection for her admirer’s wife, allied to her ingrained sense of guilt, and her still more ingrained sense of what was economically desirable, and who was not merely exploitable, but was actually willing, and eager, to be exploited? Maria didn’t know; and it was something about which she preferred not to think, neither when the offer was made, nor for some time after. As she preferred not to think about Giuseppe and her own motives for accepting that offer. Amelia had made it; they, after a minimum of discussion, had said yes, if with a mutual, faint and inexplicable sense of shame, and foreboding. That was all there was to it; and whatever the motives of the parties concerned, it hardly affected the result.

The nature of Amelia’s offer was the following. As Giuseppe and Maria were well aware, The Villa was too big and grossly underused. ‘I mean I know we’ve spent all this summer here, but’, (this with a look of terrible appeal, as if everything depended on the two people to whom she was so anxiously talking) ‘there’s no way of knowing whether we’ll come again next year.’ Moreover, the surrounding garden was huge, unmanageable, and even with constant and expert care was never likely to amount to much, ‘not with this wind blowing all the time,’ the pale, thin woman said, waving a hand towards the sea, but in a tone that suggested she was talking about some affliction of the soul. ‘Not here, on the hill, and being so exposed. I mean the best we could hope for would be a few woody shrubs and that sort of thing. When what I’d really like’—and now, surely, she was talking of some interior landscape—‘would be a sort of English garden. You know, all lawns, and big shady trees, and great banks of flowers that look wild but aren’t, and roses, and honeysuckle, and everything scented, and sweet.’ A pause. ‘That’s my dream. However, since that’s not possible here and since Santa Teresa is growing by the minute, and apart from the wind and the position, it makes no sense to have a garden this size in what will be almost the centre of town in a few years time, my husband thought that the best thing to do would be make a low wall across the garden there’—she indicated a point about four metres from the back of The Villa—‘and put up some holiday apartments. He suggested a building of four or five floors, with, say, four apartments on every floor. That way, we’d solve the garden problem, we wouldn’t be wasting all this ground, we wouldn’t be interrupting our own view of the sea and, if the apartments were built carefully, most of them could have terraces that would also have sea views. Those that didn’t would be cheaper of course, but the thing is, and this is why I wanted to talk to you …’ She looked from one to the other now and seemed to be imploring them to say ‘no’, in advance, to whatever it was she was going to propose. ‘My husband said that if we did do that—and as long as we get permission I think it could be done fairly quickly—we’d have to have someone permanently on the spot to take care of the place. A …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, a porter, in a sense, I suppose. But,’ she rushed on, to cover her confusion, ‘more than that really. A caretaker, a … I mean not only in the summer, when there’d obviously be things to do, but all year round. You know, someone who can paint the apartments in the winter, go and make sure the wind hasn’t blown the shutters off, make sure … Oh, you know,’ she repeated, ‘everything. And naturally, I mean, I hope you don’t mind, I thought of you two. You see, we do want people we can trust. The work wouldn’t be hard. I mean, in the winter, Giuseppe, when you come home from work, maybe just half an hour a day. And Maria, instead of going from place to place, and doing an hour here and an hour there … And the thing is, over the road there …’ She pointed now across the dusty track that ran by the side of the villa and petered out on the crest of the hill in what was at present an unofficial car park, to which the young people of the town came at night. ‘Where those garages are, and that storeroom, my husband thought he’d build four little houses. Three of them we’d let too, as holiday homes, but one—the one at the end, I thought, so it’d have views as well—would be for you. And I mean, we could design it together, so it’d be exactly as you wanted it. That would be the first thing to be done, so you could move in immediately and keep an eye on the work while they were doing the building behind here, and … and that’s it, really. I’m sorry to spring this on you and I know you’ll want to think about it, but’—and now, in her eyes at least, she practically went down on her knees and took their hands in hers, though at this point apparently urging them to say yes, rather than no—‘I would love it if you did accept. I mean, it’d be so wonderful having you so close and if you did accept, well, probably it’d make us that much more eager to come again next year, and the year after, and the year after that. We’d be … it’d be as if we were all part of the family. And I know Dario would like it and the girls, and—as I say, I’d love it. Truly. So do, please, think about it, and let me know what your decision is. And then maybe tomorrow, or the day after …’

She was already, in her mind, selecting tiles for the bathroom and discussing with Maria what colour the kitchen should be.

She had asked them to think about it. However, just as, both at the time and afterwards, Maria preferred not to reflect upon her motives for accepting, so, beforehand, she preferred not to reflect upon whether she should accept. And part of that faint sense of shame and foreboding she felt when she and Giuseppe did sit down over the kitchen table and say, rather stiffly to each other, ‘Well’, came from her knowledge that whatever there was to consider regarding this quite major change in their lives, she wasn’t going to. Of course they would go to the new house, she told herself—and saw that Giuseppe was telling himself—and of course they would take up their new jobs. They’d be mad not to, wouldn’t they? After all, when you looked at where they were living now, in this old dark apartment with its cracked walls and floors, its dampness in the winter and suffocating heat in the summer, its views only of other damp, dark apartments, and narrow, sunless streets, I mean, really, she thought, who in the world wouldn’t move and what is there to think about? Unless, perhaps, what colour the kitchen should be …

The other thing, the greater thing, that made Maria and, she was sure, Giuseppe, feel that faint sense of shame and foreboding, as they had their brief and useless discussion about their future, was the idea that by accepting Amelia’s offer they were delivering themselves a little too thoroughly into the hands of the Cavalieri family and were, as a result, losing their freedom and putting themselves into some sort of danger.

Still, she told herself, there’s probably nothing to worry about. If we do find ourselves becoming too involved, well, they’re only here for two or three months a year. And when you think of a new house, and the extra money, and a view …

She hardly slept that night, and gave Amelia her answer first thing next morning.

*

Later, Maria was to think that if only she had realised that her sense of foreboding was justified as soon as it became so, she might have been able to pull back. But it became so so very soon and so obliquely that she didn’t, at the time, nor for some time thereafter, make the connection.

‘I mean,’ she would sometimes tell herself, ‘I was looking to the future, at all the summers to come. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening there and then. Besides, all the other events of that summer seemed totally separate from the issue of our acceptance. As in a way, I suppose, even now it could be claimed they were. So how, when I was in the thick of things, I could have been expected …

‘Though it’s possible,’ she would sometimes add, ‘that even if I had made the connection I might not have pulled back. Because I was so excited at the prospect of having a new house. And since by then it was too late anyway …’

The first thing to occur in the post-acceptance part of that summer, as it became clear that whatever restrictions there were regarding the development of The Villa’s garden, they were going to be ignored by Amelia’s husband, was that Giuseppe, quiet and neat at the best of times, now became almost obsessively so. It was as if he were guarding his quietness and neatness, and were afraid of seeing them damaged. He let himself into the apartment so silently that half the time Maria didn’t know he was home. Having always changed after work into clothes that, though sober, were comfortably informal, he suddenly started to dress up, so that as he sat at the kitchen table eating his dinner, he looked as if he were at a wedding, or a first communion dinner. And from being a man of merely few words when he was around the house, he became a man of virtually no words at all, and while remaining as courteous and kind towards his wife and daughter as ever, expressed his courtesy and kindness only in a series of melancholy, strained expressions and the occasional gesture that was made not as if it were natural to him, but as if he were forcing himself to make it.

A state of affairs which both Maria and Elisabetta commented upon, but which Giuseppe simply shrugged off, telling them, with an air of desolation that made nonsense of his words, that he just felt like being quiet at the moment, and wanted to dress up.

‘But in the summer, Papa?’ Elisabetta asked, laughing and throwing her black hair back, and looking beautiful in a bright orange and yellow dress. She stroked her father’s grey hair with her sun-brown, pink-nailed hand. ‘And anyway, even in the past you’ve never been this quiet.’

Event number two consisted of Gisueppe’s telling Maria, one night in bed when she asked him again why he had been so silent of late, that he was very sorry and he knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t bear the idea of losing Elisabetta; whose marriage and subsequent transferral to Cagliari were fast approaching.

‘I mean, I know Piero is a very nice boy and we couldn’t hope for a better son-in-law. I’m sure they’ll be very happy together. But she’s so beautiful, isn’t she, and so alive, and being our only child and … Oh, you know.’ Of his telling Maria this, and of his starting to behave thereafter not just as if he were the possessor of some sad secret, but as if he had suffered some unendurable blow and were mourning a loss for which he would never be consoled.

His mourning took the form of his going every day now to The Villa, to work on what would remain of the garden after the new apartment house had been completed, or, in contrast to his silence at home, to spend hours standing under a tree talking to Amelia Cavalieri about, Maria gathered, English gardens, his coal-mining father, the way that Santa Teresa was changing and the way the world was changing. Talking to her, it occurred to Maria when she saw them together, as if Amelia alone understood the nature of loss; and as if Amelia alone, just by understanding, could at least give him the scent of consolation, even if she couldn’t present him with the flower itself.

Event number three of that confused and turbulent summer consisted of Giuseppe’s telling her, the very evening of Elisabetta’s wedding-day—a wedding-day throughout which, after all, he had seemed to be in the best of spirits and had made Maria think and hope that he was starting to come to terms with his daughter’s departure from the family home—that he had been in great pain the whole afternoon. ‘All my jaw,’ he said, ‘and the inside of my cheek and nose. I think if it isn’t better tomorrow I’d better go to the doctor.’ Of his telling her this, and of his being told by the doctor—an opinion that was soon confirmed by a specialist in Sassari—that he had a rare and malignant disease of the membranes of his cheek and nasal passages. A disease that, though treatable, was incurable, and while it would go through periods of remission, would ever more frequently cause recurrences of the pain he was feeling at present, and would slowly and inexorably, as it ate away the bones of his jaw and nose, disfigure him.

And events numbers four and five, after the shock of this news, consisted of Giuseppe’s not quite announcing to Maria that he had lost his faith, but of his making her understand it anyway; and of Maria’s coming to realise that she too, in a funny sort of way, was ‘in love’ with a member of the Cavalieri family.

But first: Giuseppe’s loss of faith.

Maria herself was a reasonably devout Catholic, and either because of this, or because she was temperamentally inclined to accept rather than reject, and make the best of a situation, however wretched it was, she could never bring herself to think that society should be changed in order to improve the material circumstances of people like herself. This despite the fact that if now she was middle-aged she was almost comfortable, she had been raised in a poverty still more extreme than Giuseppe’s. If change was desired it was up to the individual to change, that was how she looked at it; and if things were in a sorry state, then it was God’s will that they should be so. ‘One is born holding a particular piece of music,’ she was taught by her thin, bitter, wheezing father, ‘and either one sings that tune, to the best of one’s ability, or one doesn’t sing anything at all. One simply rants and raves, and makes a noise, and in the end come to silence anyway.’ A lesson she came to believe.

She came to believe it. That did not make her believe however, like her father, that the people who had the best tunes, so to speak, were also the best people. Nor did she think that because it was God’s will that things were in a sorry state, they were not really in a sorry state at all. They were, she knew: one only had to look around to see that. And though she accepted those things and believed it was up to the individual to make changes in his or her own life, if he or she so desired and were capable of it, she couldn’t help admiring those who did not sing the tune they had been handed at birth, and did rant and rave. She believed, but she didn’t see why everyone should. Moreover, those who didn’t, well, it was only right that they should make themselves heard in whatever way they chose. She loved her father, and felt sorry for him, and she was grateful for what he had taught her. All the same, she couldn’t help wishing at times, for his own sake more than hers, that he had taught her something else; and couldn’t help thinking that if he had he might have been a happier, healthier man. For the tune that he sang was a depressing, discordant dirge, destined to be brief and to finish unresolved; and probably, in his case, rants and raves would have been sweeter.

Besides, she sometimes wanted to ask him after his death, what is a man to do if he is handed some lusty revolutionary hymn at birth?

It was because she felt as she did that, when she was twenty-three, she fell in love with and married Giuseppe, who was four years older. For Giuseppe seemed to her ‘The Way’. He ranted and raved, and believed that, yes, society should be changed: but he ranted and raved quietly. He supported the Communist Party, and believed that communism would provide post-war Italy with the only solution to its problems that it was likely to find; but he didn’t object, or not very strongly, to her supporting the Christian Democrats. And though he didn’t believe, he had in his quiet, neat way a faith that was just as strong as hers. He was certain of the eventual triumph of justice over injustice, of equality over inequality, of the hungry over the greedy, and looked forward to man’s ultimately being able to live in harmony not only with his fellow men, but with the whole world, animal, vegetable and mineral.

‘Of course it won’t happen overnight. I mean, it won’t happen in our lifetime, nor in Elisabetta’s, nor even in Elisabetta’s great-great-grandchildren’s lifetime,’ he told his wife. ‘But I do believe that one day, one day it will happen, and that when it does, people will look back at this time with the same sort of wonder with which we look back on—I don’t know—the Stone Age. And they’ll say to each other “How primitive they were,” and think how difficult life must have been, in those days.’

A speech that conjured up in Maria’s mind a vision of a whole world full of quiet, neat people, and made her first give a wistful smile and then stroke her husband’s hair.

He was a good man, she thought, even if he didn’t believe in God, and even if he sometimes told her that the word ‘good’ didn’t really mean very much anymore. Moreover, while she couldn’t adopt his faith as her own and tried to tell herself, as her Church told her, that it was evil, she knew that had he not had it, she would not have loved him. It was his faith, she told herself, that made him. It was his faith that kept him alive.

It was this faith that Giuseppe made her understand that he had lost that summer. She wasn’t certain how he made her understand it; he didn’t suddenly turn to her and start telling her that he thought all workers who went on strike were traitors to the state and enemies of democracy; nor did he suddenly start extolling the virtues of the rich and the powerful, reading about the crowned heads of Europe in gossip magazines, or saying that he thought human beings were lazy pack-animals who needed to be kept in line by a strong leader. It was just that a certain strength seemed to have gone out of him, a certain inner tension. Plus the fact that when she looked at him and talked to him, she had the impression that, though the doctor had told him that his newly diagnosed disease wouldn’t kill him for years and years, he had in fact died already.

‘Oh, have they?’ he said, when she told him that ‘his communists’ had made some gains in a local election in Sicily. Murmuring, after she had asked him if he wanted to see a television report on this election, ‘No, not really.’ Then, ‘Well,’ he said without interest a few days later, when she told him that some engineer in Nuoro had got away with paying a small fine after a house he had built with substandard materials had collapsed and killed four people, ‘what do you expect?’

‘Oh, please Giuseppe,’ she wanted to tell him, ‘please don’t lose that. Because though of course it’s no longer true that I wouldn’t love you if you lost your faith, you’re going to need that faith to get through the years ahead and to get through your illness. Without it, it’s going to be dreadful, for both of us. You’ll have nothing to hang on to, nothing to stare at, except your illness; and if you do that for long enough you’ll go mad, or you’ll become depressed, or—oh, please, please,’ she wanted to tell her husband, ‘don’t lose that.’

Naturally, however, she said no such thing, not being the sort of person to make statements of this nature; and simply watched, in vain, for some sign from Giuseppe that would tell her that she was wrong, or that if loss there had been, it was only temporary and what had gone would soon, in a matter of weeks if not days, be restored.

She was still watching for this sign, and telling herself that of course she wouldn’t stop loving him, or at least caring for him, even if he didn’t regain his faith (how could she, under the circumstances?) when she realised that she too had fallen under the spell of one of the Cavalieris.

She hadn’t really ‘fallen in love’; not as Giuseppe had with Amelia. Nevertheless, she had formed an attachment that was stronger than mere liking; and she did find herself watching and waiting for the object of her curious passion with something like the same intensity as she had once watched and waited for Giuseppe. Or even, she sometimes confessed to herself, with a somewhat greater intensity. For she had been a sensible, serious young woman at twenty-three, not much given to watching and waiting.

You’ve become stupid with age, she told herself, as she spent longer and longer cleaning The Villa everyday, and found herself making cakes and biscuits more often than was usual for her, in order to take them to The Villa as presents. Stupid, and a little pathetic. After all, at least Giuseppe has fallen in love, if you must put it like that, with an adult woman. Whereas you, you’ve become enchanted with a child. A mere thirteen-year-old boy.

She hadn’t, to begin with, when Dario had first started coming to have his extra maths lessons with Elisabetta. She had thought him just extremely polite, extremely pleasant and left it at that. What is more, she probably never would have, had she not discovered as she was cleaning Dado’s room in The Villa, in the days following the identification of Giuseppe’s illness and her realisation that he had lost his faith, that the great hulking youth, who was mad about sports, already nearly two metres tall and looked far older than his years, was behind with his mathematics, in part, because he wrote poetry.

Maria had never read much poetry, apart from a bit of Dante and Leopardi she’d been forced to learn at school, and she couldn’t make head or tail of Dario’s efforts, which seemed to her so obscure as to be written, almost, in a foreign language. Reading his poems, however, or understanding them, was not the point. What seemed to her wonderful (as wonderful as Giuseppe’s having a vision of the world and being so convinced that one should or had to rebel, even while wearing, especially while wearing, a suit and tie), was the fact that he did it. And did it neither furtively, as if it were something to be ashamed of, nor too openly, as he might have done had he simply wanted to show off. No, Elisabetta’s now former pupil, Amelia’s sports-mad son, wrote poetry and that was an end to the matter. It went without saying, Maria told herself, that there were other factors involved. For a start, her sense that as well as being immensely, yet quite naturally polite, Dario had about him an air of great and equally natural seriousness. That seriousness that one generally finds only in intelligent adults who are at ease with themselves, and that seriousness that, however much it borders on the sombre, does not preclude lightness, or humour, or grace.

Then there was the fact that he was in his grave and, for his age, somewhat overgrown way, a good-looking boy; with the sort of quiet, unassertive good looks she had always admired in men. And finally, there was the fact that serious and well-mannered though he was, she detected in him a certain impatience with his mother—as if he considered her constant nervousness a matter for irritation rather than concern—and a quite definite sense of hostility whenever he so much as mentioned his father. Feelings she could not and would not go along with, especially as regards Amelia, but feelings which she supposed from a boy’s point of view had a certain justification. They were somewhat akin to Giuseppe’s attitude towards the rich and the powerful, and provided that necessary touch of sharpness to the sweetness of the knowledge that if Dario found his mother tiresome and disliked his father, he found the Bellettini family well-nigh perfect. From the beautiful black-haired maths-teaching Elisabetta, through the quiet and dignified Giuseppe, to, above all, the pale-skinned, faded auburn haired … well, Maria thought, whatever she was.

As he did find them practically perfect, she knew, and had from the day he had met them all. Nor was it vanity that prompted her to tell herself this, since she had started to before it had ever occurred to her that the boy might write poetry, or that she might come to think of him as … as hope. ‘I know,’ she told Giuseppe, as soon as she realised—though Giuseppe did too—that Dario seemed to be infatuated with them all, ‘it’s only because he thinks we’re so different from his own family. He thinks we’re more simple or something, or more … I don’t know … down to earth. It’ll pass in a little while, I’m sure, and he’ll soon become like his parents. I suppose he won’t be able to help it, will he? And anyway, Amelia’s so nice, and it’s probably because he’s so big and healthy that he doesn’t like her being so delicate. He’ll probably be laughing at his feelings in a year or two and then’—and then come to think of us as stupid ignorant peasants, she thought but did not, now, say. ‘But I must say, for the moment, he is a very sweet boy, and … well, it’s always a pleasure to be liked, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm,’ Giuseppe nodded, and then turned back to his newspaper. ‘Though I have a feeling,’ he added, with just the faintest air of resentment, ‘that it’s you he really’—he paused—‘admires.’

Yes, there had been other factors involved, and all of them, though especially the last, had contributed to her ‘falling in love’. Nevertheless, had it not been for the discovery of the poetry, she, or her feelings, wouldn’t have taken that decisive last step into an area that was no longer quite that of mere liking. His polite seriousness would have been simply admirable; his good looks simply a pleasure for the eyes. And as for his apparent infatuation with the Bellettinis in general and her in particular, that would have been just something to smile about; as one prepared oneself for the eventual and inevitable hurt when he either decided to drop one altogether, or started to treat one with a feigned and condescending affection. To smile about or to feel guilty about, for feeling gratified, while Dario was showing impatience for the mother who had been so good to one and of whom one was so fond. The poetry, though, transformed everything and touched everything with magic. So what had been admirable became wonderful. What a pleasure, joy. And what had been a matter for smiles, guilt and eventual disappointment, became a source of happiness, faith in the future, and yes, why not admit it, a certain cruel satisfaction that one had, for all one’s apparent disadvantages, triumphed over a rival whom one would have thought held all the cards in her hand. Honestly, she did like Amelia, Maria told herself: very much. And if the woman was unhappy, she had reasons to be so, none of which her wealth and her three healthy children in any way discredited. All the same, for Dario to prefer her, Maria Bellettini, to such a well-bred, finely-tuned creature couldn’t help but make her want to do a tiny, private dance, and to say, in the direction of The Villa, ‘Ha ha ha, see what I’ve got.’

A temptation that made her wonder if her feelings for Dario were simply maternal, and if she saw in him the son she had never had but always longed for. (Giuseppe, perhaps strangely, hadn’t; which was why, she was convinced, after the birth of their first child, a daughter, he hadn’t wanted any more children. In case he wasn’t so lucky next time.) She didn’t think they were however; any more (thank God! she told herself) than they were ‘simply’ the feelings she might have had if, grotesque though the idea was to her, she had wanted Dario as a lover. No, she told herself, she had ‘fallen in love’ with Dario, became stupidly attached to the boy and come to think of him as some sort of knight in shining armour. Yet her feelings were not those of an over-possessive mother, any more than they were those of a sexually frustrated, middle-aged woman. Really, it was just her seeing his poetry as a declaration of faith, a message of hope, that had made her feel as she did. It was also because she saw him as a bearer of faith and an embodiment of hope that she didn’t try to struggle against her feelings but saw them, in themselves, as declarations of faith and hope.

How can such feelings be wrong, she would ask herself, when without them I’m not sure I could cope with all that’s happened? Of course I have my religion and nothing will ever make me lose it. But somehow, just at the moment, wrong though I know it is, that isn’t quite enough.

These, then, were the events of that summer fifteen years ago. And it was hardly surprising, Maria often repeated to herself as she went through them in her head, that she hadn’t immediately seen them as being associated with Amelia’s offer of a house and a job, and her and Giuseppe’s acceptance of that offer. Indeed, amidst all the distress of Giuseppe’s illness, the promise of the house (and the promise from Amelia that went with it: ‘You must never worry, whatever happens, you’ll always have a home, both of you’) had seemed liked a nest of safety being held out to two exhausted birds. Moreover, they had all, those events, formed such a complete, interlinked block among themselves, that she would have defied anyone to see them as justifying her sense of foreboding. Giuseppe’s increasing quietness had been caused by his depression at the idea of Elisabetta’s marriage and the onset of his disease. The intensity of his depression regarding Elisabetta had also been due to the onset of the disease, though one could have looked at that the other way round and put the onset of the disease down to the intensity of his depression regarding Elisabetta. The loss of faith had been a natural result of the actual diagnosis of the disease. And her own strange, to her unsettling, attachment had come about because she too was suffering from Elisabetta’s departure from the family circle. In the gloom that had suddenly settled over the Bellettini household, the poetry-writing schoolboy had seemed like some sort of beacon to her; and all her life she had needed a beacon. That, surely, was all.

Well, Maria told herself: until they actually moved into the house, in the February of the following year, that was all. Then, little by little, she had started to see.

It was the shutters that gave her her clue.

The Villa was built at the top of a hill to the north of Santa Teresa; and against the disadvantage of the wind that blew twelve months of the year, driving dust and sand into every corner, and stunting the growth of the garden, had to be set the advantage of its position. From one side one could look down over the town; from the other one had a view of cliffs, headlands, the sea and, over the straits of Bonifaccio, Corsica. A view so magnificent, especially from the upper floors, that once Maria had started to work at The Villa, she told Amelia that though she had lived in Santa Teresa all her life and thought she knew all its vantage points, she had never found anywhere that even came near to giving one a picture like this, and had never imagined that such a place existed. ‘There was always a hill in the way, a bit missing, or the cliffs were at the wrong angle,’ she murmured. ‘Even from just down there, in the car park. But here, it almost makes you feel as if you’re drunk.’

It was to give Maria and Giuseppe a chance of sharing most, if not all of this view that Amelia had proposed that her friends should have the top house in the row of houses her husband was rebuilding across the way; and that in the front room there should be a window facing north. ‘So you can sit there and feel drunk the whole time,’ she had said, smiling anxiously. As seven months later, when the rebuilding was completed, a window there was. With a frame solid enough to withstand the constant wind, and fittings of brass that would not be corroded by the salt.

Yet, built though this window was and have though it did a view nearly as splendid as that to be seen from the lower floors of The Villa, Maria was not able to sit in front of it and feel drunk. Any more than she was able to sit in front of it and feel simply grateful to her employer for having provided it. It was not because she had suddenly gone off the view, or was afraid of suffering from some kind of visual hangover; nor because she, as she suspected Giuseppe did, felt, however slightly, resentful of the fact that though what she could see from here was splendid, it wasn’t quite as splendid as what they could see from there. It was rather because literally after the first few minutes that they had occupied their new and beautiful home, Giuseppe had half-implored her and half-ordered her to close the shutters, and hide the view; and she, feeling sorry for him and not being used to receiving so much as half-orders from this normally most considerate of men, had done as he had asked, or commanded. And after that, the shutters were never reopened.

Giuseppe’s explanation for his—he admitted it himself—irrational and, as far as Maria was concerned, unfair behaviour was that his jaw was particularly sensitive to draughts and, while the window was solidly constructed, just the sound of that endless north wind blowing against the glass made him think he could feel some almost imperceptible current, or imagine he could even if he couldn’t. That in itself gave him twinges.

‘Besides,’ he said quietly, sitting with his hands in his lap and staring at his knees, ‘as the doctor said, quite soon I’m going to be—well, you’ll be able to see quite clearly what’s happening to me. And frankly I’d rather … I mean, for your sake, as much as my own.’ He raised his head and gazed towards the other window in the room, that overlooked the dusty lane and the side entrance to The Villa. ‘And maybe, if we put some light cotton curtains over that …’

An explanation that Maria never questioned. Any more than she ever attempted to bring light not only into what should have been that brightest and sunniest of rooms, but into any of the rooms of the house (except the kitchen, which she insisted must remain unshuttered). She simply turned on a lamp if she wanted to read, or sew, or write a letter to Elisabetta and, for the rest, grew used to living in obscurity.

Yet, though she never questioned him and the pity she felt for him was genuine, Maria never, either, believed Giuseppe. What he had said could have been true: it sounded true enough. Moreoever, if he hadn’t said it in the way he had, she might have been able to go along with it. Only there had been a peevishness, a petulance in his tone that had somehow given the lie to what he said; and a fawning, faintly servile set to his shoulders that had almost shouted at her, ‘You mustn’t believe this nonsense.’ No, she told herself, that’s not the explanation at all. What is the explanation, is that that view, and the light and the space and the sense of exhilaration that that light and space induce, remind him of his lost faith and seem to him a mockery of his present, unbelieving state. And while he can bear his pain, and even the knowledge that he has an incurable disease that will, eventually, if only after much suffering, kill him, that—that memory of the width, the scope and the brightness that he once had—he cannot bear. It would be like a blind man being reminded of his sight.

Such was Maria’s first step along the path to understanding. If this step had been taken without too much effort, however, and within days of moving into the new house, another two years were to pass before she took the next step and reached her destination. Even then, she sometimes suspected, she wouldn’t have taken it if Elisabetta hadn’t given her a shove …

They were walking, the mother and her three-month pregnant daughter, along the clifftop, on what was proving to be the first decent weekend of a hitherto wretched year. The wind had dropped to scarcely more than a breeze. The sky was blue and the clouds were white. And although it was still only March, the sun had real warmth in it. So much so that whereas just three days ago there hadn’t been a flower in sight, now, as the two women made their way carefully along the muddy little track, the whole clifftop seemed to be blooming. Cyclamens, wild orchids, violets, dandelions—everywere amidst the coarse green undergrowth there were splashes of colour. Scarlet, blue, purple, yellow …

It was beautiful; and both Maria and Elisabetta, already excited about the baby, felt as if they had been reborn themselves; and that, as Maria had been on the top floor of The Villa, they were intoxicated. The choppy sea was green and sparkling; the air was so clear it looked as though it had just been washed; and over the straits, in Corsica, the snowy mountain tops gleamed as if lit from within.

‘Oh, Mamma,’ Elisabetta said, taking her mother’s hand and squeezing it, ‘isn’t it wonderful?’

And ‘Oh, Mamma,’ she added a few moments later. ‘How can you bear to live in that darkness all the time? In a way, it would have been better if you’d never moved.’

‘Yes,’ Maria said, without thinking, ‘I know.’

And that did it.

Maria stood there, gazing out on the splendour and feeling now, as befits one who has just been reborn, that she was seeing the world for the first time. For all these months, she told herself, she had been thinking of Giuseppe’s loss of faith as coming towards the end of that dreadful summer, as a result of his sickness and to a certain extent of Elisabetta’s marriage. But, she suddenly saw, she was wrong: it had come right at the beginning, and she had only recognised it towards the end. It was Giuseppe’s loss of faith that had caused him to be so downcast at the prospect of his daughter’s wedding. It was Giuseppe’s loss of faith that had contributed towards, if it hadn’t precisely caused, the spread of his disease. Naturally, he might have become sick anyway, loss of faith or no. She was a great believer in the power of the minds, however, and a great believer in the power of faith; and though he might have become sick, she liked to think that he wouldn’t have. Yes, she told herself, standing amidst the flowers, with the cries of the gulls mingling with the sound of the surf. It was Giuseppe’s loss of faith that had undone him; Giuseppe’s loss of faith that lay at the heart of everything.

And what had caused this loss of faith?

Ah, but that, she told herself, feeling now that for a second she was the wisest, most far-seeing woman on earth, was easy. It was because Giuseppe, her good, honest husband who believed that the world was moving slowly towards a time when all men would be free and equal, had fallen in love with someone who was, to his way of thinking, the enemy. He had fallen in love with her. He had, rightly or wrongly, interpreted her particular brand of hand-wringing and her particular form of unhappiness as a voice calling, from up on the officers’ deck where she stood, ‘Oh, if only you could see the emptiness that I see. Oh, if only you could see …’ And he had come to think that her view was somehow better or truer than his own.

A betrayal of which the final proof was: his acceptance of Amelia’s offer of a house that almost shared the outlook of The Villa …

So, at last, she got there.

Of course, Maria rushed on as soon as she reached this conclusion, it was possible that she was talking nonsense. Equally, it was possible that she was imagining things and getting over-excited, partly as a result of Elisabetta’s pregnancy and partly because the strain of living for two years in the half-light with a man she no longer really loved was beginning to tell on her. She could well be, she knew, particularly as there was one further factor to be taken into account that might have affected her reasoning. She didn’t think she was, though. Truly, she told herself, that was how things had gone, however unlikely it might sound. Giuseppe’s loss of faith was at the root of everything: of his depression, of his disease and of her looking to Dario for, as she liked to think of it, an alternative source of light. And Giuseppe’s loss of faith had been a direct result of his attachment to, and his being corrupted by, Amelia Cavalieri.

She was absolutely convinced.

The further factor that Maria had to take into account, as regards her conclusion, was that since the day she had left Santa Teresa, some two and a half years earlier, Amelia Cavalieri had neither returned to The Villa, nor had any contact whatsoever with her friends and employees, the Bellettinis. Her husband had occasionally flown in for a day or two to give Giuseppe and Maria the keys of the house, or to see how the building work was progressing; and for a fortnight the previous year the two daughters had come with an aunt. From and of Amelia herself, however, there had been neither a word, nor a trace. And while Maria told herself there was nothing unusual in this—after all, the Cavalieris had never been regular in their visits to the island, to say the least—she couldn’t help but feel hurt by the way she and Giuseppe had been so taken up and then apparently dropped, and certain that though it was possible that Amelia would return that year, or the year after, in fact she would never see her again.

Amelia, she told herself, is a bird, a strange, unhappy and maybe terrible bird. Who flies into town for a couple of months; takes people under her wing; and then flies away. And once she has flown away, she never, ever comes back. Either because she can’t bear to see the destruction she wrought on her previous visit; or because, a bird of prey, she sees no sense in going back to bones she knows, by now, are dry.

Hadn’t she picked them clean herself?

Maria might have been wrong about Giuseppe’s loss of faith. About Amelia, though, she was not wrong. The woman never did return to Santa Teresa. And by the time another twelve years had passed, her certainty that she never would was as fixed in her mind as her religion, particularly as for the last five and a half years not even Mr Cavalieri had been in touch. A cheque arrived every month from a lawyer in Milan to cover her and Giuseppe’s—or in fact, now, one of her cousin’s son’s—wages. (Though small and though she did give Luca half of it for doing what Giuseppe had formerly done in and around The Villa, the cheque was regularly adjusted to keep pace with inflation and enabled them, since they were not paying any rent, to live with a fair degree of comfort.) A letter, from that same lawyer, arrived every six months, to ask if they had had any unforeseen expenses; and if they were both well. And once a year, around Christmas, a case of wine was delivered; with the best wishes of ‘Cavalieri & Co’. But apart from that, silence; and at times Maria had the impression that she would never have any direct contact with any member of the family again. She would just go on here, year after year, cleaning and washing and baking her cakes, until first Giuseppe died and then she died, and someone from Cavalieri & Co turned up to hire a new resident housekeeper for The Villa. Or, as was possibly more likely, The Villa—and the holiday apartments (and her house?)—were sold and she either started working for the new owners, or found herself having to pay rent, or fight an eviction order in the courts. At times …

Normally, however, it was only when she was feeling particularly depressed that this feeling came to Maria. For the most part, she did expect some further contact with the Cavalieri family, or at least with one member of it. It was silly of her, she knew. If only she had been able to throw open those shutters and let some light into her clean, neat house, her fantasy would have flown out the door and reality would have won the day. The reality that told her, no, indeed she would not have any further contact with the Cavalieri family. Since she couldn’t open them, though, she couldn’t prevent her fantasy from swelling like a fungus in the dark, nor prevent herself from thinking that at this stage of her life it was this fungus alone that provided her with nourishment. Oh, she loved Elisabetta and her grandchildren; but somehow she doubted, had she had only them, if she could have put up with the gloom in which she lived. (‘Of course you could,’ a tiny voice sometimes muttered to her, ‘Stop being so melodramatic. You could put up with anything.’ Generally, however, she ignored this voice when she heard it, and even when she didn’t, gave it no more than a small smile and a shrug, and the sighed admission, ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’) As it was, her fantasy kept her alive, kept her going and made her feel that as long as she preserved it she would be able to put up with anything on earth.

One day, she told herself as she baked her cakes every Friday, the doorbell will ring. And when I go to the door and open it, I’ll see a handsome young man standing there, with the sun shining on him and his face illuminated like an angel. And as soon as I see him, though all these years have passed, I’ll say ‘Good morning, signor Dario, come in’; and know that all my waiting has not been in vain. For it won’t just be that he has grown into a handsome young man of what, twenty-eight it must be by now; nor even that he has come to tell me that he is going to open up The Villa and come and stay with, perhaps, a wife and a small child. No, what will really make him glow and what will really make me think that my years of cake-making were justified will be the knowledge, that will be evident in every pore of him, in the way he holds himself, in the very shade of his skin, that though he is now twenty-eight, he still has not lost his faith, he still writes poetry and he still, as he did at thirteen, distrusts and holds at a distance his mother; or her memory, if she is no longer alive. Oh, you were right to distrust her—poor, kind, unhappy Amelia—Maria told the figure of Dario in her imagination. And I know, I’m absolutely convinced, that though you are now grown-up and have in a sense come to terms with her, you still distrust her. For you spotted her corruption instinctively, didn’t you? And once one has spotted corruption, one cannot, however much one has come to terms with it, put one’s knowledge aside, can one?

No, Maria told herself firmly, whenever she found herself asking this question: one cannot. Not if one wants to live.

Oh, Dario, Dario, she would almost mutter out loud: please, one day, do come.

My angel.

*

When, on that Easter Sunday morning fifteen years after Amelia Cavalieri had first spoken to her, Maria heard the doorbell ring as she was starting to prepare lunch, she didn’t even tremble. In fact, she told herself, as she wiped her hands and patted her hair into place, she had never felt calmer in her life. Moreover, while of course it could have been any one of a hundred people ringing her doorbell, she knew that it wasn’t. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind. It was him. What she had always dreamed of had come to pass. What reason had she to be agitated? she asked herself as she looked in at Giuseppe, sitting in an armchair in the bedroom watching the Pope’s Easter address from St Peter’s and murmured to him, unnecessarily, ‘I’ll go.’ One isn’t agitated when the sun shines, or when the rain falls. One cannot be agitated about what is only and entirely natural.

There had to be angels on this earth, she told herself. Otherwise, the earth would not survive.

Opening the door and letting the Easter Sunday sun fall on her, Maria saw a massively built, handsome young man standing in front of her, with a grave yet smiling face, and a brightly dressed and beautiful young woman by his side.

‘Signor Dario,’ she said, at exactly the same moment as the young man said ‘Signora Maria’. ‘Do come in and have a coffee. How nice to see you again after all these years.’

So Dario and Giulia his wife came to the small dark house across the dusty street from The Villa; and so, after Maria had apologised for the gloom, and explained very quietly and gently the reasons for it—and for the fact that Giuseppe would not be coming out to welcome them, but was closed in the bedroom watching television—she was able to offer them the cakes that were set out in a silver dish on the table just inside the front door. To offer them cakes. To hear Dario tell her that alas his mother had died some seven years ago (‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Maria muttered. ‘No, don’t be,’ Dario said with just the faintest of frowns, ‘I mean I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but she was never a happy woman and somehow I can’t help feeling that maybe, well … you know.’) To learn that they were going to open The Villa again and from now on were planning to spend as much of the year in Sardinia as possible. And to be told, in answer to her question as to what the two of them did, that while Giulia was in her last year of studies before qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, Dario himself, having been uncertain about a career for sometime and having even considered joining one of his father’s companies, had finally decided to do what he had always wanted to do and become a partner in a small publishing company owned by a friend of his.

‘That makes a little money out of school textbooks,’ he said, ‘but whose real business, as far as I’m concerned, is the publishing of poetry. I mean, I don’t know if you ever knew, signora, but I always wrote poetry myself when I was young. I still do,’ he said, lowering his head in embarrassment. ‘And I thought well, we’re only here once, aren’t we, so I should do what I want. And since Giulia’s going to be doing what you could call a proper job … We were thinking,’ he concluded, ‘I mean, it’s just an idea, but … There’s a possibility that we could get some sort of grant, you know, some sort of backing, from the regione here. And if we did, we were thinking of moving here permanently. Because there are quite a number of young Sardinian poets, and I do feel—well, I mean, I know no one reads poetry nowadays, but it is important to publish it, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got to keep the flowers growing, haven’t you, even if no one … Anyway,’ he said, looking up again, ‘we both love swimming, and riding, and walking, and I think that perhaps here … It’s so beautiful, isn’t it? And you know, that summer all those years ago, the last time we were here, it’s always stuck in my mind as the most beautiful summer of my life.’

In fact, Maria was to tell herself later, everything had turned out so very much as she had always dreamed it would, and she had been made so very happy by Dario’s visit, that by the time the young couple had left she had been feeling almost frightened. It was as if the Devil had had a hand in what had happened. In real life, she had thought, nothing works out that neatly; no one’s prayers are answered that thoroughly. I mean, there has to be a catch in it, somewhere.

And so there was. For when she went into the bedroom to tell Giuseppe the news, she found that her husband, still sitting in front of the television, had died—of a heart attack, it transpired. So that while she could never quite bring herself to be sorry that Dario had come, she could never, equally, stop wishing that he hadn’t.

All right, she told herself two months after Giuseppe’s funeral, leaning on the windowsill of the front room and looking out over the shining glorious sea; maybe the Devil didn’t have a hand in what happened. But it does rather make one reflect on the nature of angels, doesn’t it? And it does rather make one wonder whether I should have been baking my biscuits all those years.

Maybe Giuseppe was right to come into the kitchen every Friday, and tell me that he didn’t understand.

A WOMAN OF INTEGRITY

Sitting by the window, with a shawl pulled around her, Alice looked at her watch and wondered when she could turn the heating on. In another five minutes, she supposed. At a quarter to eight. That way even if Humphrey, or Jim and his Italian friend, arrived at precisely eight o’clock, they wouldn’t find the place freezing, as it was now; and if they arrived at eight-fifteen, as was more likely, they would find it almost warm. Certainly warm enough for them not to suspect that until very recently there had been no heat at all in the fashionably located flat to which they had been invited for dinner; and certainly warm enough for them, whatever else they did, not to feel sorry for their hostess.

To stop people feeling sorry for her and not to feel sorry for herself sometimes seemed to Alice the only real principle of her life. It was a constant battle, one that she fought from morning till evening every day of the year. And she knew that if she ever relaxed, as occasionally she had done in the past, she would be so speared, so stabbed, so run through, cudgelled and shot that her whole body would feel like a wound; and for a month, or three months after, she would find the struggle of such overwhelming difficulty that she would be tempted to give up altogether; just to lie down and howl to the world, or to herself, ‘Poor me’. It was a battle she had to fight, however, she reminded herself again and again—she reminded herself now, as she left her post at the living-room window and walked back to the kitchen—because without it there was no living; or no living in the sense that she understood that word. Besides, she told herself, as the cold seemed to find the last inch of her it hadn’t already invaded, and made her feel dazed, and pinched, and sick, she had no reason to feel sorry for herself, or to expect other people to. Didn’t she live in what was—in the summer, or when the heating was on—a very comfortable and beautifully furnished two bedroomed flat in one of the most pleasant squares in London? She did. Didn’t she have a wide, a huge circle of friends and acquaintances, nearly all of whom liked her even if they did, despite all her efforts, inevitably talk about her—sometimes talk to her—as ‘poor Alice’? Yes, she did. And didn’t she have a son whom she loved, however far away he was, and the satisfaction of knowing that, short though she might fall of her goal, she did at least try to live with integrity? Yes, yes, yes. So if she was decently, even luxuriously housed, in a world where an immense number of people were hardly housed at all, if her friends not only liked her but were, for the most part, intelligent, talented, amusing and in some cases practically famous, and if she had been given, by nature, by accident, or by design, the greatest gift of all, that of being able to live with a degree of integrity—for who wouldn’t so live, she liked to ask herself, if given the chance—how could she seriously complain?

Of course not everything in her life was wonderful. And for all the various pluses, there were a number of minuses. There was the fact that much as she liked England, it wasn’t her native country, and that often, particularly on cold winter nights, she was very conscious of being away from home; cut off, as she perceived it, from the main. Then there was the fact that though she did have this well furnished flat with its fashionable address, she didn’t have enough money to heat it or, on occasions, to eat very much in it; and was prevented from selling it by the knowledge that it was the one thing she possessed of any value that she could pass on to Derek when the time came. As well as by the suspicion that if she did sell it now, and invested the money in some way that would give her a small income and, eventually, Derek the capital, she would live way beyond that income, spend the capital herself, and Derek would have to pay the price of her trying to live ‘dans le vrai’. That, wasn’t, in her book, right.

And the last in this list of the principal flaws of her life was the fact that though she did have such a wide circle of friends, and those friends not only made her feel she could rely on their kindness but gave her work—work helping to edit the literary magazines they ran, work for the relief organisations they were involved with, work typing out their manuscripts, answering their mail when they were away, and feeding cats, placating lovers, and fending off lawyers or government agencies—that work did not always pay her enough to live on. Or to live on in any degree of comfort.

Nevertheless, all in all she reckoned she came out ahead; and even if it was at times a nearer thing than she might have liked—well, she had made her choice and in the final analysis she never, really, regretted it. Particularly as she was aware that most of the disadvantages she suffered were self-imposed; and had she really wanted to she could have gone back to the States, sold the flat, or found some better paying work. No, Bohemia was her country, Bohemians her fellow citizens, and if she sometimes had to be cold, or go hungry, to live in it with them, then so be it. It was a better place than any other she knew, for all its faults; and they were more pleasant companions, for all their foibles, falsehoods and foolishness.

Her determination not to see herself, or be seen, in a pathetic light had at times made Alice act in a way that her friends would have considered perverse, had they known about it; and she herself thought of as being her own contribution to the cause of foolishness. For example, her refusal to sell the flat, though principally a result of her desire to have something to leave to Derek, was also prompted by the reflection that having such a smart address and such a thickly carpeted, finely furnished home, none of her friends would ever guess to what extent she did live in what all would have called relative poverty and some would have called absolute poverty. Then there was her propensity for buying, when she had some money, cashmere sweaters, silk blouses and expensive shoes; all of which made her feel guilty when she wore them and none of which she particularly cared for. Here again, though: better to feel guilty and spend money uselessly than to see that look in people’s eyes; or to catch sight of herself in a mirror and think, involuntarily: you silly, forlorn creature, washed up on this shore that is not your own. Also, the knowledge that she did own such items of clothing and the fact that she did occasionally wear them meant that she could, for six days out of seven, go round in second-hand clothes and plastic-soled boots bought in closing-down sales; and do this without people thinking that her hand-me-down look was anything other than a conscious desire not to be ostentatious, or wasteful. She had actually been told once by a friend she met in the street, ‘Oh, Alice, you look like a bag-lady.’ A remark that would never have been made if that friend hadn’t seen her at other times in her finery, and therefore thought that she was entitled to say such a thing without being considered in bad taste. And perhaps the most perverse and foolish of all was her refusal to tell the truth of her situation even to Derek; and to keep up the pretence of affluence most thoroughly whenever her big, black-haired, rugger-playing son, who was studying engineering at Durham University, and who was always off walking up mountains and scaling cliffs when he wasn’t in Durham, did come to see her. It was foolish because Derek, who loved her and was protective of her, would have been a great comfort to her and, without ever feeling sorry for her—it wasn’t in Derek’s nature to feel sorry for people—would have helped her withstand her attacks of self-pity. Also, because she knew that he not only would, but could, without much sacrifice on his part, have given her a portion of the generous allowance his father gave him. A monthly payment Derek had always understood—his mother had made him understand—similar to one that she received; and according to her always had, ever since her husband had bought the flat in Knightsbridge, furnished it, put it in her name, and then said, ‘Goodbye, I’m off, if you want some alimony you’d better tell your lawyer to get in touch with mine.’ If she had told Derek, however, not only might he have said something to one or some of her friends and thus demolished her whole luxuriously appointed façade, but he would, she knew, have pointed out that he was soon going to be earning good money, assured her that he would never want to live in Knightsbridge, and insisted not only that she sell both the flat and the furniture, but that with the proceeds in her pocket she leave Bohemia and join him on the solid ground of England. Of an England to which he was entirely native, despite his American parents. A move that, however much she loved him, liked England, and every now and then longed for solid ground beneath her feet, she would never have been able to make.

He might even, it sometimes occurred to her, have insisted, too, that though fifteen years had passed since his father had walked out on them both, she should still sue her ex-husband for alimony. And had she ever allowed herself to be bullied into doing that, she would have lost, she told herself, whatever remained of her self-respect. It was bad enough having accepted the flat.

Yet for all the perversity and foolishness of what she had said and done at times, Alice had never, until recently, been ashamed of having said and done them. Moreover, she wouldn’t really have been ashamed if the truth had come out. If it had been revealed that she was not just a comfortably off American woman living in London who amused herself by flirting with Bohemians, but was a genuine waif, who had been put into a false position, both figuratively and literally, by her ownership of her flat, and who, if she wasn’t at home in Bohemia, wasn’t at home anywhere. She would have laughed; she would have blushed; and she would have said ‘So what?’ She was, she had always liked to think, in control of her fantasies. Then, though, about six months ago, something had happened.

Coming back one day from Harrods Food Hall, dressed in her bag-lady outfit and clutching a packet of lentils, she had bumped into Humphrey; and for just a second, after he had stared at her, laughed ‘Oh, good heavens, Alice I didn’t recognise you,’ and taken in the packet of pulses, he had revealed to her that he had, suddenly, understood everything. So, Alice told herself, as Humphrey lowered his eyes, not wanting to hurt her by appearing shocked, that’s it. The game’s up. She was on the point of stretching out a hand, touching Humphrey on the arm and saying ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ But even as she was about to say it, Humphrey smiled ‘How are you?’, and without in the slightest meaning to, or knowing where the words came from, she said, ‘Oh, I’m very well, Humphrey. I’m just coming back from Harrods for the third time today. I keep on forgetting to buy things—’holding up her packet—‘and I’ve got a friend coming to dinner tonight, and I promised I’d make him some lentils.’

Then, for another second, as Humphrey looked both relieved that the truth he had suddenly learned was not to be discussed and intrigued as to the identity of this ‘friend’, Alice felt a sense of panic; as if all at once, driving along a dry, straight road, she had skidded into a ditch. ‘A friend?’ ‘Him.’ For God’s sake, what was she talking about? She didn’t have anyone coming to dinner and if she had she would never have spoken of ‘a friend’. Coyness had never been one of her failings. She would have given a name, or said ‘someone I met’ at such and such a place; he’s this, or that, I wonder if you know him. You’re going mad, she told herself, as it occurred to her that in all her years of keeping up a front she had never actually told a lie. She had simply let people gather what they would and if what they concluded wasn’t how matters really stood, that was their lookout and nothing to do with her. Now, all at once to start inventing things—and to start without intending to—oh, that was to invite disaster. That was truly to unleash the wolves of pity. Already she could hear them in the distance, howling in the cold and the night. That is really pathetic, they were howling, when you start telling lies. That’s the beginning of madness. You always liked to think you were in control of your fantasies. But now …

We’re going to get you, the wolves howled, as Alice stood there in the Brompton Road, talking to Humphrey. We don’t care how long it takes. We’ve caught your scent and now—now you’ll never escape. A friend! Him, indeed! Oh, you poor, poor thing.

And from then on, try though she might to get a hold on herself, Alice realised that her fantasies were controlling her.

The trouble was compounded by the fact that Humphrey, having caught his brief glimpse of the truth, even though he had lowered his eyes almost immediately, couldn’t help but sneak the occasional glance to make sure that he had seen what he had, and that he hadn’t been imagining things. It was a sneaked glance that took the form of a telephone call three times a week as opposed to his former once a week; and of his constantly bringing up the subject of the friend, and Him, as if to reassure himself that even if all the rest of Alice’s life were a fantasy, this at least was true, so one still didn’t feel sorry for her. All right, she might be poor, she might be cold, she might, often, be hungry; but she did, for all that, have a friend.

He meant well, Alice was certain; it was his way of telling her he cared for her. Also, he felt guilty about being her oldest friend in London and her most constant employer, and never having realised until now just what her situation was. However, because she hadn’t introduced him to the truth, so to speak, when it had suddenly popped up, and because she had shown herself determined to keep her mask up, he felt it incumbent upon him to let her know he would respect her secret. That he would continue to take her mask as her real face. And that to prove how thoroughly he understood she didn’t want to be pitied, while being extra solicitous, he would show his solicitude only by endlessly referring to and making jokes about that one aspect of her life that didn’t seem to him to be sensitive.

The first time he phoned her after their meeting in the street he said ‘How did your dinner with Him go?’

‘Oh, very well,’ Alice laughed. ‘He’s really very nice.’

Two days later:

‘How’s Him?’

‘Fine. We went to the theatre last night to see …’

And a week after that:

‘Him?’

‘Well, thank you. Well. We’re going to Brighton for the weekend.’

And after that, of course, she was lost. She had to make up where they had stayed in Brighton and what they had done there; and she had to accept the fact that while Humphrey, in his discretion, would never tell anyone what he had guessed about her finances, he would, almost as if to relieve himself of the tension that his silence imposed upon him, tell everyone he knew who also knew Alice about the existence of, and the part played in Alice’s life by, Him.

‘Good Lord, did I tell you?’ she could almost hear him saying over the phone. ‘Alice has got herself a friend. No one’s allowed to know who he is—he’s just known as Him—but she seems to be seeing a great deal of him. I think it’s wonderful. I mean, she must have had a fairly lonely life, since Bill left. Oh, I know she’s always been quite comfortable’—this said very quickly, to uproot any seed of doubt that might have been planted by his reference to loneliness—‘but even so. And with Derek away …’

That, for example, to Jim. Then Jim, she had no doubt, would tell Richard. Then Richard would tell Penny. Then Penny would tell Laura. And Laura, having called Humphrey to have the news confirmed, would call her and boom down the phone, ‘Alice, what’s this I hear? You’re having it off with some bloke? Well, I do think you could have told me. But now listen; who is he, what does he do, and he’s not a Syrian, is he? Because having been married to a Syrian for twenty years I can tell you …’

So it had turned out.

‘No,’ Alice had laughed. ‘He’s not a Syrian, Laura. He’s not even an Egyptian, a Moroccan or a Libyan. He’s just …’

‘Well?’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. Not just at the moment.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. What a lot of nonsense. What’s his name, at least?’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t even tell you that at the moment. Let’s just say he’s called—Him.’

‘Him,’ snorted Laura. ‘Him. Well, I shall just phone Humph back and pump him some more. He obviously knows more than he’s letting on.’

‘Oh no, he doesn’t,’ Alice said. ‘No one knows anything. Now please, forget about it and I’ll tell you more when I can.’

‘Well, I think you’re being bloody unfair,’ Laura boomed. ‘Christ, how do you get a man in London nowadays? I wish I knew. Him! Well, you’re very lucky, that’s all I can say.’

Yes, Alice thought. I am. Lucky Alice, who has a mysterious friend. Lucky Alice who doesn’t have to be pitied, because she has a beautiful flat, interesting friends, and Him.

At the end of three months the fantasy was so out of control that not only had Alice come to believe in the existence of Him, but even when she reminded herself that Him didn’t exist she couldn’t help but be pleased, like a gleeful child with a secret, that she had invented him. She was not only going mad, she told herself in the mirror every morning; she was enjoying going mad.

Stop it, she told herself, as she said sorry to someone she couldn’t go out to dinner tonight; she was having dinner with Him. (And oh, how she would have loved to go out to dinner! She hadn’t had a decent meal in a week.)

Stop it, she told herself, when someone asked what Him did, and she said, deciding it was time to flesh out the portrait just a little, ‘Oh, he imports and exports things.’

And stop it, stop it, stop it, she told herself at the beginning of December, when someone remarked to her that she was looking very pale and fragile, and that she really should go away for a holiday, and she replied that in fact just as soon as Him had some time off, they were going away somewhere hot.

But she couldn’t stop it and every morning as she lay in bed with the blankets pulled around her, feeling like a cold little sparrow that has fallen out of its nest, she planned what she was going to do with Him today, what she would tell Him and how she could bring up the subject of a holiday with Him. And though she felt like a cold little sparrow, a sparrow whom the cold had rendered grim and songless and wasted, when she did conjure Him up she also had the illusion of warmth. It might have been the type of warmth one is reputed to feel just before one dies of exposure. All the same, she couldn’t help welcoming it and basking in it; and when she woke every morning, and started rummaging through her imagination searching for Him, she would look forward to that moment in five minutes, ten minutes time when, lost in her fantasy, she did feel what would probably be her only glow of the day.

Alice loved her integrity and she couldn’t have lived without it; that idea that while she wasn’t particularly talented or intelligent herself, she could do her bit for art, for beauty, for—above all—truth. And though obviously she could have got a job that paid her properly—as she could have sold the flat, moved back to the States, or applied to Bill for funds—she was certain that had she done so she would soon have ended up drinking too much, contemplating suicide and being many times more unhappy than any lack of heat or food could make her feel. If one didn’t at least attempt to stand on the side of the angels then there was no standing anywhere on earth.

Nevertheless, for all that love and for all that it was her choice to live as she did, the image of Him became ever more irresistible; and the more irresistible it became, the more she told herself that not only was this madness going to end in disaster, but that Him, even if, or precisely because, he didn’t exist, was not on the side of the angels at all, but was instead entirely on the opposite side; on the side of ugliness, untruth, and the Devil. Him had no time for art, she told herself as she snuggled up to him; Him had no time for doubt, questions, or the suffering of mankind. Him cared for money, expensive cars, handmade suits and good food; and Him’s idea of a good time was to stay in some luxurious hotel in the South of France, to eat his meals in a restaurant that Michelin recommended and to drink a wine that cost over a hundred pounds a bottle.

It was so tawdry, so infantile, so clichéd, this picture she had of her self-confident, dynamic lover; and here, too, the more tawdry, more infantile and more clichéd it was, the more she found it attractive.

So, she told herself as, looking at her watch, she saw that she could at last turn the heating on, it would continue; until, when the disaster struck, she lost Him. How she would react then she had no idea. Maybe in her humiliation she would hardly notice his passing. Or maybe, by then, she would be so mad that she would mind his passing more than her humiliation; and it would be her being abandoned that finally allowed the beasts of pity and self-pity to spring at her throat, rather than her being exposed as a woman who had gone crazy. At that stage, however, she supposed, it would hardly matter what unleashed the creatures; and though she had no doubt she would survive even their attack, she would emerge so torn from her mauling that apart from being an object deserving of, or anyway demanding, compassion, she would practically have ceased to exist at all.

The Alice whom everyone knew and liked, the plucky little Alice who was the friend and confidante of writers, painters, refugees and the eccentric would, to all intents and purposes, have disappeared.

*

These reflections on her madness, her situation and her imminent demise were the form that Alice’s daily battle against feeling sorry for herself took. A battle she always came nearest to losing around seven thirty in the evening, before she went out to eat with friends, could bring herself to turn the heating on if she was having friends over, or, if she was alone, could force herself to go into the kitchen and, depending on her finances, prepare herself a bowl of lentils, a plate of pasta, or a small vegetable stew. Once she had made that move, though, the enemy tended to retreat. And tonight, since her current financial situation was comparatively so brilliant that she had felt able to run to not just a steak and kidney pie, a fruit salad and a bottle of red wine for her guests, but also a bottle of whisky, it didn’t so much retreat as seem to leave the field altogether. No doubt her victory was made more complete by her decision, with the heating on, to have a small glass of the scotch she had bought; and by her being conscious, as both warmth and whisky had their effect, that the smell from the oven was really quite good. Still the reason wasn’t very important. The main thing was she was going to have a bright and drunken evening with two of her best friends, was going to meet someone new, and would go to sleep looking forward to the day ahead.

She was feeling so very contented with her lot, indeed, that, by eight o’clock, with the table set, the wine uncorked and her hands starting to turn from purple to pink, when she just thought of Him she did so with a feeling of pleasure. Far from being conscious of eventual disaster, she was amused by this story that had so taken hold of her, and couldn’t help thinking that if she was careful she might get away with it indefinitely. It didn’t have to end in tears, she told herself as she poured another small whisky; and even if it did, she might still be able to make a joke of it. After all, if it had been absurd of her to invent Him, the reaction of some of her friends to the invention had been no less absurd. There had been Laura, who had become quite jealous at the idea of Alice, little orphan Alice, having an affair with a mysterious businessman. There had been Irish Tim, who had first been published thanks to her efforts and seemed to think that this exempted him from having to pay for the typing that she did for him thereafter. He had become all sentimental when Alice had mentioned in passing that Him had proposed to her and, that while she probably wouldn’t, she might just accept him and go off and lead a comfortable life in what Tim called the straight world. ‘You can’t,’ he told her, taking her hand. ‘I won’t allow you to sell yourself for a few thousand a year.’ And one famous evening just over a month ago, there had been a whole group of mainly fellow expatriates who had fairly erupted with indignation when, someone having pressed Alice as to when and where she and Him were going off on their long-delayed vacation, she had, as out of the blue as ever, chirped: ‘Oh, we’re off in two weeks time, to Can-Cun, in Mexico.’ ‘To Can-Cun?’ Jean had roared and wrinkled her nose. ‘To Can-Cun?’ Lidia had squeaked; and ‘To Can-Cun?’ David had muttered. ‘But you can’t,’ she’d been told. ‘You’ll hate it,’ she’d been told. ‘It’s an awful Miami-type resort town full of dreadful people spending too much money.’ In fact, so violent and ludicrous had been the reaction of half the people at the gathering (the other half hadn’t heard of Can-Cun, didn’t know where it was or what it was like, or didn’t care where she went, even though they really disapproved of anyone flying off for two weeks in December to lie in the sun, and of Alice’s doing so in particular) that at first she had been tempted to confess her invention there and then. Commenting that for a group of people who prided themselves on their simplicity, it was astonishing how many of them just happened to have been to the particular helltown that Can-Cun apparently was. Then, however, she had decided that in a couple of days she would simply spread the word that after all she wasn’t going to be able to go to Mexico, as Him had to fly off to Japan on business. She was sorry not to go: she would have enjoyed making the trip in her imagination. As she would have enjoyed the lies and the excuses she would have had to make for returning as pale as she had been when she had left. But aside from the fact that she might be caught out if all those people had already been to her chosen destination and that she would have to stay shut up in her flat for two weeks—not a prospect that attracted her at any time of the year, but particularly not just before Christmas, when she tended to be invited out to dinners and parties almost every night—she was afraid that if she did insist on going and telling her friends, as she would, that she had had a wonderful time, they would consider her such a renegade that she would end up despising them. And that she wouldn’t like. No, it was better to cancel the trip; to think her friends merely ridiculous; and to accept the extra invitations that would be forthcoming from Laura and Lidia and everyone else to stop her feeling too downhearted. ‘I mean, I’m sorry you haven’t had a holiday, because you really do look as if you need one,’ Lidia would, and did, squeak. ‘But on the other hand, I can’t tell you how glad I am you didn’t go to Can-Cun. I mean, honestly Alice, you’d have hated it. You can’t imagine. It’s hell.’

Humphrey and Jim alone of the people she had told she was going to Mexico had not expressed their disapproval; had, on the contrary, told her they thought she was very lucky and, God, envied her going off like that. And it was because they had, that Alice had vowed that when she did have a little bit of money they would be the first people she would invite to dinner. Not, moreover, she had told herself, just a dinner of pasta and salad; the usual dinner she made when she had friends over, telling them that she was a hopeless cook, and pasta and salad were all she could manage. No, she would really pull out the stops for them; and if she couldn’t run to a steak and kidney pie—her speciality—she would at any rate attempt a roast chicken.

They would have such a pleasant evening.

*

As, when Humphrey and Jim and Gianfranco turned up at around eight-twenty, they proceeded to have. It would have been better perhaps if she had made the roast chicken, because by the time they had had a few drinks, and she remembered to take the pie out of the oven, it had dried up; and though all three of her guests declared it to be delicious, she could see that it cost them a certain effort to eat it; and she nearly choked on her little portion. Moreover, it would have been better perhaps if she hadn’t had those two whiskies before anyone arrived, since she was so far ahead of the men by the time the meal was half over that she hardly knew what she was saying, and was becoming increasingly uncertain as to what to make of, and how to act towards, Jim’s friend Gianfranco. However, neither of these circumstances lessened the pleasure of the evening for her. And by the time Humphrey, at only ten-thirty, said he really must be going, as he had to make an early start the following day, she was flying so high that not even a faint suspicion that had come to her, nor a more than faint feeling that her wings were out of kilter could bring her down to earth. If anything, they made her fly higher still, albeit in an unbalanced way.

She had assumed, when she had phoned Jim and invited him to dinner, and he had said that he would love to come but he had an Italian friend staying with him for a month or so, and would it be all right if he brought him along, that this friend was—well, a friend; a boyfriend, or a lover, or something of the sort. And dear, discreet Humphrey, who knew half the truth of her life, hadn’t disabused her when she had called him to see if he could come too and had mentioned that she had just invited Jim and—what’s his name? Ginacarlo? Gianfranco?

‘Gianfranco’ was all Humphrey had said; before laughing: ‘Oh, good heavens, Alice, I don’t know if you’ll like him. I met him at a party last week and I thought he was frightful.’

He had if anything heightened her conviction as to the nature of Jim’s relationship with his Italian friend, and had made her expect some uncouth waiter whom Jim had picked up somewhere, or a Roman streetboy. When Jim had arrived, however, he had introduced her to a companion who was neither uncouth nor a Roman streetboy. On the contrary, Gianfranco was an immensely polished, immensely pleased with himself, Neapolitan lawyer of around forty, who was almost, but not quite, overweight, whose suit was so smart as to be almost, but not quite, vulgar and on whose shapely pink lips, beneath his perfectly trimmed little moustache, a smile of contentment for being Gianfranco Lavinelli was never absent for more than a second.

Alice was enormously fond of Humphrey, whose wife, a thin, wire-haired and very fierce translator of Russian verse, had introduced them many years ago, and very rarely accompanied him when he went out in the evening. She was also fond of Jim, despite the fact that he was so nervous and twitchy he tended to make her twitchy; and that even as he laughed with one and was charming to one, he watched one as carefully as a snake might watch a mouse—and with very much the same intentions as a snake, Alice always felt. Fond as she was of both, though, and as preposterous as he was unexpected though she found Gianfranco, it was the lawyer who was chiefly responsible for her high spirits. And it was entirely the lawyer who was responsible for her spirits being coloured, and raised higher still, by a feeling of disquiet.

Gianfranco delighted her because he was so fat-cat pleased with himself. Gianfranco delighted her because he was so obviously trying to delight her. Gianfranco delighted her because though his perfectly cut, black hair was thinning and in another couple of years he would have an uncontainable paunch, she found him, as he did everything to make her find him, extremely attractive. And Gianfranco unsettled her, and made her feel she was losing her balance—made her feel, once or twice, that she had really slipped over the border into lunacy—because from the moment he arrived and kissed her hand, smiling up at her with a certain complacent irony, she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that Gianfranco, though he didn’t in any way match the portrait she had been gazing at thus far, was Him. It was as if something had gone wrong with time, and she had started having an affair with him before she had ever met him. Or as if, still more alarmingly, she had imagined him with such intensity that she had actually made him exist. Was it possible, she wondered, as she served the drinks, took the dried-up steak and kidney pie from the oven, opened the bottle of wine Humphrey had brought, the bottle of wine Jim had brought and the two bottles of wine that Gianfranco had brought (along with some hand-made chocolates), that if one really thought hard enough about something or someone, one could bring them to life? Very much as if God, profoundly bored with the emptiness of space, had dreamed of stars, planets, oxygen, water, fishes, monkeys and men with such intensity, and at such length, that finally the dream had come true? No, of course it wasn’t, she told herself as she quickly drank another glass of wine. That way was genuine madness. If God had merely dreamed of the universe and everything in it, the universe and everything in it, including herself and Gianfranco, were still just dreams. And if she had merely dreamed of Him, invented Him so that people shouldn’t feel sorry for her, then Him was still a dream. And that was that, and there was nothing more to be said. Yet tell herself what she did and be as rational as she could, she wasn’t quite able to convince herself. In the back of her mind—in just a small corner of it, lurking like an intruder somewhere in the darkness of a many-roomed house—she did have the feeling that Gianfranco was Him. Moreover, not only did the suspicion that had slowly surfaced in her mind during dinner do nothing to spoil her evening; it did nothing to dislodge this intruder, or to make her feel that the intrusion was unwelcome.

The suspicion was that Humphrey, exhausted by his discretion, had let slip to Jim—at that party where Jim had introduced him to Gianfranco perhaps—that ‘You know, I suddenly realised poor Alice is absolutely broke, and goes round looking like an orphan of the storm most of the time because she is an orphan of the storm.’ After which Jim, snake-eyed, snake-natured Jim, had put two and two together, had looked behind Humphrey’s revelation and concluded that not only was Alice’s well-heeled-American-in-London act just that, an act, but that Alice’s great love story with the unknown Him was also a fabrication. Whereupon, being a novelist and poet, and having Gianfranco on hand, he had thought to wield his art and had brought Gianfranco along, just so the Italian could, with luck, fulfil, if only for a little while, the role of Him.

Why this suspicion did nothing to spoil her evening, nor dislodge that idea that had sneaked into her mind, was because if it was justified, Alice told herself, all it meant was that she had a fellow conspirator—a conspirator who didn’t find her in the least pathetic, but rather thought of her as someone with whom he could indulge his own fantasies—and that Gianfranco was, as it were, a joint effort; or the result, though no payment had been made, of a commission. ‘I want Him,’ her whole story had clearly said to Jim. ‘Very well,’ Jim had replied. ‘I will provide you with Him.’

And why, she concluded, as she felt her head spinning and nearly fell over as she accompanied Humphrey to the door, she even felt her pleasure had been enhanced was because if this was what had happened, the impossibility of Gianfranco’s having been created was somehow removed, and she was able to think that if he were an invention he wasn’t her invention but Jim’s; of that Jim who was, at the end of the day, in the business of inventing people. So perhaps she wasn’t mad, she told herself, even if Gianfranco didn’t exist. It was just Jim at work. And really, wasn’t that why she had always preferred to live in Bohemia, rather than in America, or France, or any other real country on the map? In Bohemia, anything could happen.

Bohemia! Gianfranco not existing! Really Alice, what are you talking about? she asked herself as she walked back into the living room, swinging her black taffeta skirt and making one final effort to pull herself together. Okay, maybe Jim did bring his friend round on purpose, in the hope that the two of us would hit it off, as they say. But if he did, that’s the end of the story. Him! For God’s sake, get a grip on yourself woman. It is Him that doesn’t exist. Him is a lie, a fantasy. Whereas Gianfranco is a Neapolitan lawyer who is in London on business, who if things go well for him may buy a flat of his own here. And if he isn’t a lover of Jim’s whose nature impels him to flirt with every woman he meets, in order to disguise the truth even from those who don’t give a damn, he is undoubtedly married. He has two children, and is the owner of a large and almost, but not quite, vulgarly furnished apartment overlooking the bay of his native city. Now sit down, don’t have anything more to drink and try to behave.

She was fighting a losing battle, however. Because when she did sit down and caught Gianfranco either smiling at her or still, at this stage of the evening, smiling at himself, Alice realised that she no longer cared whether she was mad or sane. She could be a successful goddess, a collaborator in a story that was being written, or just a lonely woman throwing herself at the first attractive man who invited her to do so. It no longer seemed the slightest bit important. All that concerned her now, she told herself, was that Jim too should say he was tired and going home, and that Gianfranco should say he would stay on and have one more drink if that was all right with her. And that when she had closed the door behind Jim, and gone back to the living room, she should find herself, very shortly after, putting her arms round Him.

*

In fact, it didn’t work out quite that way, since Gianfranco went home with Jim, murmuring that he was sleepy. Also, when Jim phoned next day to thank her for the evening and she made one or two reasonably discreet enquiries about Gianfranco, she learned that he did indeed have a wife and two children back in Naples; and, what was more, that their apartment overlooked the famous bay. All the same, it worked out reasonably satisfactorily, because when Gianfranco himself called to thank her, around five o’clock that afternoon, he asked if she would have dinner with him the following night. And when, at the end of a ludicrously expensive, disappointingly small-portioned meal, Alice asked him if he would like to come back to her place, where she had, with a combination of extravagance, foresight and optimism, left the heating on, he agreed; and thus she was able to put her arms round him, and to establish him in her life, if only for a while, as Him.

It would be only for a while; she knew that. They really had nothing in common except an admiration, however involuntary on her part, for Gianfranco Lavinelli. Not even their sex was all that good, since Gianfranco accepted just a little too easily and a little too often, her apologies for being so thin, so pale and so very much (five whole years!) older than him; and made her just a little too conscious of the favour he was doing her by submitting to her embraces. Nevertheless, if it pleased Gianfranco to go slumming in Bohemia and to allow a tiny, undernourished, albeit—hell yes, thought Alice, as she looked in her mirror—still quite attractive waif to share her bed with him, it pleased Alice to go slumming in Naples and to allow her well-fed lawyer to think that two or three minutes lying on top of her grunting ‘Amore, amore’ was one of the more satisfactory performances she had encountered in a man. And when it did end, well, she wouldn’t have lost anything, she told herself, certainly not her head, or her heart, or any other figurative part of her body; and at the very least, she would have had one or two moments of pleasure, and have seen and reminded herself how the other half lived; and been reassured that for herself, if no one else, her way was better. Poor Gianfranco, she found herself thinking more and more often, he is all show and no substance. Poor Gianfranco, she found herself thinking: he is really too absurd.

It was probably because both of them, with part of themselves, involuntarily pitied the other, while both rejected utterly the pity of the other—He pity me? How unthinkable! She pity me? How preposterous!—that, despite Alice’s certainty that the affair wouldn’t last, somehow, for all that lack of common ground on which to meet, it did. Gianfranco went back to Italy after a month and to his family, and phoned a week later to say he was returning in two days time and was going to be buying a flat in London as he had hoped. Alice continued to see her friends and do all her various jobs, and told Gianfranco that she really wouldn’t be able to see him when he was in London more than a couple of days—or say three—a week. And both of them accepted that the world, and London in particular, was full of women younger and more desirable than Alice Allom, who would be grateful to receive the attentions of, and the occasional invitations to dinner from, a successful Neapolitan lawyer. Not only younger and more desirable women, was the unspoken rider to this understanding; but women who did not consider success in the real world somehow false, nor believe that integrity was found only in art, and poverty, and self-denial. Yet when Gianfranco came back to London they saw each other generally four and sometimes five times a week; and when he returned to Naples again he got into the habit of phoning Alice every day, if only to tell her how he was.

She liked him, Alice realised at the end of six months; because despite his vanity and shallowness, he was good-hearted and was actually grateful, in a curious way, to have her pity; however much he rejected the grounds for that pity. In the same way, she supposed, he must like her, if only because she, despite herself, was grateful to receive his pity. All the same, she did no more than like him—they did no more than like each other—and it remained true that if their affair had come to an end tomorrow, it wouldn’t have worried her very much. Certainly, she would have missed the physical warmth of a body sleeping next to her and missed, too, Gianfranco’s desire to be approved of and listened to as he took her out to fancy restaurants, lectured her about art and literature, and told her that he had bought two seats in the front row of the Grand Tier at Covent Garden next week, and while she probably couldn’t really appreciate or understand Verdi, he hoped she would enjoy herself nevertheless. (As, a week later, she did, even if Gianfranco either slept through most of the performance, or distracted her by continually glancing at her to make sure she was trying to understand the finer points and whispering in her ear when he was certain that some subtlety had escaped her.) Apart from that, though, she would have carried on as before, would probably sooner or later have started a relationship with someone else, and would have used the occasion of Gianfranco’s departure to announce to all her friends that her affair with Him was over. For none of them knew about Gianfranco (not even, according to Gianfranco, Jim himself; though, probably the novelist at least suspected that his guest had phoned Alice after her dinner party and that it had been with Alice that he had spent many of the following nights), and as far as they were concerned the affair with Him had been continuing all this time. As in a way, Alice reflected, it had.

After nine months had passed, however, and then it got closer to a year, Alice realised that she was more deeply attached to Gianfranco than she cared, most days, to admit. It was partly because when she was with him she remembered how lonely she had been before she met him, despite her friends; and partly because the more time Gianfranco spent in her flat (and he always came to her—he showed her once the flat he had bought and never thereafter invited her back) the more she perceived that not only was he grateful in a touching, little-boy way for her pity, but that even he, for all his immense self-satisfaction, wasn’t entirely convinced of the reality of the appearances by which he set such store. In the main, though, she realised, as she patted down his hair after he had so far forgotten himself while they were making love as to mess it up slightly, it was precisely because he had become Him that had made her start to view the idea of losing him with a certain alarm. By becoming Him, Gianfranco had saved her from the risk of exposure; and by becoming Him, Gianfranco had saved her from any charges, including her own, that might have been made against her: charges of being mad, sad, or really just a little too pathetic.

Yet perversely, it was the very fact that Gianfranco had become Him that also made Alice, as the first anniversary of their meeting approached, decide that she should end the affair. Or, if not that, the fact that had he not become Him, she would never have taken up with him in the first place, however lonely she might have been, and however much she had come to believe that even he was not absolutely convinced of the solidity of the earth’s crust. He had been her way of covering her deception, her way of avoiding discovery, humiliation and defeat. And it was wrong, in her book, to have an affair with someone just to hide past sins.

Besides, she told herself, after Gianfranco had phoned to say he was flying over just for the evening of their anniversary and they would go somewhere special, if she did continue with Gianfranco for much longer, she might find herself questioning all the rules she lived by. Going through all those old debates she had had with herself, and with others, when young—commerce versus art, action versus reflection, the pursuit of money versus the pursuit of truth—debates she had hoped were decided upon and put aside for good. It was too late for that; she was too tired now, if not too old, suddenly to decide that she was on the wrong road and to start hacking her way across country until she got to the right road. That wasn’t, in any case, the right road, she told herself with a note of desperation as she began to wonder what she would tell Gianfranco at their celebratory, and farewell, meal. It wasn’t. Moreover, attached as she had become to Gianfranco and much though she would miss him when she had said goodbye, he did stand on the side of ugliness, untruth and the Devil—as she had always told herself, before she met him, Him stood. He did stand on the side of chaos, folly and illusion. He did stand on the side of everything she had fought against all her life. Didn’t he? Oh yes, she almost cried, as she admitted that it hardly mattered what speech she made Gianfranco, since the second he caught the slightest whiff of defection he would announce that he was leaving her and would probably manage to convince her that indeed the decision had been his. Yes, yes, he did.

Ugliness, untruth and the Devil. Ugliness, untruth and the Devil.

*

By ‘somewhere special’ Gianfranco in fact meant that he wanted to celebrate their first anniversary at the same overpriced restaurant where they had eaten the year before.

‘I have booked a table,’ he said when he called the day before he was due to arrive, not only to confirm that he was arriving, but to tell Alice that his elder daughter had a cold, his wife had a bad back and his mother was getting on his nerves. ‘I liked it there.’

Alice, however, who was determined to avoid the possibility of a scene in a public place, put her foot down and held out for eating at home.

‘We don’t have to have a steak and kidney pie,’ she told him. ‘If you like I’ll get something readymade. But I really don’t want to go back there. Besides,’ she added, trying not to sound sickly, ‘it was here that we met, wasn’t it? And it would be nicer if … well, you know.’

‘You’re not going to ask Jim or that other friend Humphrey, are you?’ Gianfranco asked.

‘Good heavens, no,’ Alice said, never having been certain whether Gianfranco’s desire to keep their affair a secret was because he was ashamed of being thought to associate with someone like her, or for some other more obscure reason that concerned, possibly, Jim. Some things, though, she thought it better not to ask about, especially Gianfranco, since he wouldn’t have told her the truth, however simple it may have been. ‘It’ll just be the two of us.’

‘Oh, all right,’ Gianfranco said, sounding slightly peeved. Either because he didn’t like being deprived of the opportunity of spending money, or because he wasn’t used to Alice taking a stand. ‘Whatever you prefer. But please, do me a favour. Make sure the place is warm, won’t you? I remember last year—Jesus, I almost froze.’

‘Yes, of course I will,’ Alice sniffed, wanting to tell him that as she remembered it the place had been beautifully warm by the time he and Jim had come; as warm as it had always been every time he had come since on a cold night, despite her having to run up debts in order to pay the gas bill. If she had told him any such thing, however, she might have lost control and, when she was almost rid of him, have told him far too much. No, she thought, just simper on for a few more days and tell him what he wants to hear. After that you won’t have to pretend any more. Poor Gianfranco, what would he do if he knew I was forced to live as I do, rather than choosing to? Would he be so horrified at what he would call my foolishness that he would drop me instantly? Or would his unconscious pity for me become conscious pity, that would be impossible to feel grateful for and would oblige me to drop him instantly? The latter, probably, though both might happen simultaneously. Not that it matters, of course, because I am going to drop him anyway tomorrow. Still, I would prefer our parting to be amicable; and, if possible, I would prefer him never to know the truth. Almost froze, indeed! This year I’ll turn the heating on at seven if it’s cold, and if it’s very cold, it can even go on at six.

As it turned out, the following day was very cold; very, very cold. And that, Alice was to reflect later, was her undoing. It had snowed all morning and she had had a lot to do; and what with waiting in the slush for buses that didn’t come, running for buses that she had just missed, slipping on the ice and hurting herself, and having to wait everywhere she did go for her stockings to dry sufficiently for her to be able to go out and get them wet again, it was already past seven when she arrived home. Still, she wasn’t worried, and as she closed the door behind her she told herself she only had three things to do. The first, obviously, was to see about the heat. The second was to have a drink. And the third was to get into a hot bath and soak for half an hour. Gianfranco wouldn’t mind if he had to wait for his half avocado and his Fisherman’s Pie. In any case, it only took a second to prepare the one and half an hour to heat the other in the oven. There was no rush, no need to fret. And if she turned the gas rings on as well as the boiler—well, the place might not be tropical by the time Gianfranco showed up, but it certainly wouldn’t be as bitter as it now was. Especially if she turned the thermostat to maximum and really, on this last of their evenings together, splurged.

She was so chilled, however, and so bruised that even as she was telling herself this, and even as she was going into the kitchen to do what she had to do, Alice couldn’t resist reversing the order of the proceedings slightly, and as she passed the bottle of whisky Gianfranco had brought last time he had flown in, opening it and taking a quick swig from it. Very much, it occurred to her, as she had the year before, before the others had arrived. Though last year she had put it into a glass … And either because she was thus sidetracked into thinking about the events of the previous year and wondering again whether she was doing the right thing, or because, not having eaten all day, the alcohol went to her head and made her feel she was about to pass out, she also couldn’t resist (just for a second, she told herself) sitting down. And next thing she knew it was eight o’clock, she was shivering uncontrollably, and if the temperature in the flat when she had come in had been around freezing, it felt now as if it were ten degrees below.

She couldn’t believe it, she told herself as, instantly awake, she rushed to hit the boiler switch. It wasn’t possible. Not tonight of all nights. Not after Gianfranco had specifically asked her to put the heating on early. Not when she wanted integrity at least to seem comfortable, as it turned its back on temptation. Oh God, Alice thought, running to the bathroom to take a shower, I hope he doesn’t come early.

He didn’t. He came at exactly eight-twenty, bearing flowers, champagne and his favourite hand-made chocolates. He came too early, though, for anything other than the bitterness to have been taken out of the air; and he came too early for him, as he stepped inside, held out his gifts and shuddered, to think about removing his coat.

Any other man, Alice was also to reflect later, would have exploded at this point and either become patronising in his fury, telling her about infantile aggression and subconscious desires for revenge, or become petulant and started moaning about thoughtlessness, stupidity and selfishness. What was more, she would have sympathised with him if he had. Gianfranco however, whose self-absorption was such that he didn’t care what threatened his wellbeing, as long as the threat was eliminated and basta, was not like other men. For although, when he came in, he did shudder and say ‘Oh, Alicia’, and make a great show about refusing to take his coat off, he was also, Alice saw, obscurely pleased that his instructions had not been obeyed. And having been prepared, had the flat been warm, to be as peevish as he had been yesterday on the phone, as soon as he discovered that it wasn’t, he became instantly prepared to be in the best of tempers all evening.

For a moment, as she apologised, begged him to close the door and thanked him for his gifts, Alice couldn’t understand this perversity and felt thrown off balance by it. Surely, she thought, he must be angry. She was, God knows, herself. Then, after that moment, the explanation came to her. It wasn’t, she told herself, that Gianfranco got a kick out of having his requests apparently wilfully ignored; nor that he enjoyed seeing her discomfited. No. It was just that he liked to be reminded of how lucky he was to live in Naples and only have to take sidetrips to Bohemia when he felt like it. That this way he could be more nostalgic than ever at the thought of Bohemia; and thus make himself more attractive than ever to his Bohemian mistress. And that this way he could insist on their going out to eat after all; and she, damp, half-dressed and totally unprepared, was no longer in a position to refuse.

He really was a monster, she thought as she went to get herself ready; a smiling, charming monster.

She could hardly stop herself laughing at the idea of Gianfranco’s complacency. Moreover, Gianfranco proved to be magnanimous in victory and didn’t hold out for going to the same restaurant as last year. Nevertheless, by the time Alice had sunk into a red, velvet chair in the pompous, beflowered and overheated place that he did chose, her good humour had left her; and been replaced by a feeling of panic. It was not only, she told herself, because her head was spinning with the champagne that she and Gianfranco had drunk before leaving home; nor even because, however hard she tried not to, she did indeed find Gianfranco more attractive than ever tonight—so attractive that she was afraid that unless she were very strong, she would never be able to make her farewell speech or simply say goodbye. But above all, because joking apart, she couldn’t help recalling that Gianfranco was a monster, a monster called Him, whom she had had a hand in creating, and feeling that if she didn’t manage to break with him he would, as monsters do their creators, take her over. He would do so with kindness, gifts and pity; but he would take her over, all the same, and destroy her.

She had to find the strength, she told herself, as her panic rose within her; and, threatening to make her vomit, it paradoxically almost pushed her into making her speech immediately, to avoid the indignity of vomiting. She had to. Otherwise …

Her thoughts were interrupted by a vision of herself as a little female Frankenstein, being pursued by a Neapolitan lawyer with a neat moustache and a smirk of self-satisfaction; and once again, for all that she fought against it, she found herself wanting to laugh.

Gianfranco is ugliness, falsehood and the Devil, she told herself; as her panic started to subside and she murmured yes, she was feeling fine.

Gianfranco’s way is not the true way, Gianfranco’s way is not the right way, Gianfranco’s way is not the good way, she told herself as she sipped yet another glass of champagne, and listened to Gianfranco tell her about his wife and daughter’s ailments.

‘Oh, Gianfranco, I’m sorry,’ she told herself, and wanted to tell him, as she looked at the menu and ordered. ‘But really, our worlds are too different.’

And for all that she was feeling so weak when she arrived in the restaurant, the last thing that Alice was to reflect later was that she might actually have got the last of these phrases out before the evening was over. If, three-quarters of the way through the meal, something so disturbing, yet so inevitable hadn’t happened that she was knocked totally off balance, and left lying as helpless as she had been two or three times earlier that day, on the icy paving stones of Bloomsbury and Chelsea. For by the time she had got some food inside her she was feeling sober enough, and strong enough, to ditch someone she loved. And attached as she had become to Gianfranco and as attractive as she found him tonight, she certainly didn’t love him.

What happened to leave her once more lying, so to speak, on her back, and this time unable to get up—at any rate for two or three weeks; because there would come a time when she’d fight back, Alice swore to herself, there would be a time when she’d win—was this. As some sticky, flaming dessert arrived at the table, presided over by a studious and intense young waiter, Gianfranco told her that tomorrow he wasn’t returning to Naples after all, but was going to take a two-week holiday. He went on to say that whether she liked it or not she was going to come with him—he didn’t care what she had to do, she needed a break and by God she was going to have one. And he concluded by informing her that they would be leaving at midday tomorrow for Mexico City, en route to a resort in Yucatan she probably hadn’t heard of but which he had been to a couple of times and was called, strange name, Can-Cun.

Even as she keeled over Alice felt a second and now colossal wave of panic hit her; a wave so great she thought for a moment it might bob her up again and really lift her to where she wanted to be. It didn’t, though; it just dropped her and moved on; and after that all was stillness, calmness and peace.

The Devil, she told herself as she lay there prostrate, had won. Lies, treachery and deceit had prevailed. Her monster had taken over.

It really would be only for two or three weeks, she thought smiling at Gianfranco, and taking his hand and squeezing it. As soon as she had come back she would make her stand. She had to, hadn’t she, she reasoned; if not, she’d be lost forever. One couldn’t turn away from the truth and hope to survive. After all, what had her friends said last year, when she had first mentioned going to Can-Cun with Him?

Lifting Gianfranco’s hand to her mouth, Alice kissed it and murmured ‘Hell’.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Gianfranco said, loooking delighted at the extent of his triumph. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I was just wondering what my friends will say when they find out,’ Alice smiled. ‘And thinking they can go to hell.’

SACRIFICE

It was the night the policeman pushed her that Gloria decided to leave.

She had been taking part in a demonstration all day, and she returned home cold, tired and depressed. Cold, because it was January and an east wind had been blowing. Tired, because she had been on her feet for ten hours without a break, and the mere effort of trying to keep warm had exhausted her. And depressed, because though her opposition to the government against which she had been demonstrating was sincere, she suspected that her attitude towards what that government stood for was a little more ambiguous than she would ever have admitted to her fellow demonstrators and liked to admit to herself.

Didn’t she pride herself on her ‘civilisedness’? Yes, she did. Wasn’t her ‘civilisedness’ a very European affair? Yes, it was. And wasn’t that government an upholder of European standards? Well, yes, in a way, in a contradictory, possibly perverted way, it was. Therefore … of course, she tried to tell herself, tolerance, a love of justice, and a belief in democracy and the equal rights of all human beings were also a legacy of European civilisation. But, first she wasn’t sure if she was on very firm ground in telling herself this, and secondly, even if tolerance, justice and democracy were the legacy, she couldn’t help feeling that the fortune from which that legacy descended had been acquired in the name of quite other precepts; specifically, those of intolerance, injustice and tyranny. And if that were the case—Oh, it was all so complicated and perhaps the best thing to do was not think at all, but simply do what one believed was right. Even if one did have doubts, even if one had been born and raised in that very country whose rulers one found so abhorrent and despite everything, with a part of oneself one wished one were back there, still there, now. Under the sun, amidst the flowers and away from this England in which one felt a stranger, in which one lived, for all that one had a goodish job and a reasonable income, in a squalor that was no less squalid for being self-induced and in which one’s children, for who knows what reason, had come near to being destroyed.

It was because she was feeling so cold, tired and depressed, Gloria told herself later, that instead of having a long, hot bath and a large glass of watered whisky when she got in, and then calling Paul to see if he wanted to come over, she sat on her bed without even taking her coat off and swigged scotch straight from the bottle. And it was because she had thus fallen asleep, still cold and still wearing her coat, that she felt so very awful when, she wasn’t sure how much later, she was woken by the doorbell ringing and ringing. That she felt so very awful, and that her reaction to what happened when she groped her way downstairs was so extreme. Naturally it would have been fairly extreme at the best of times: her anger was such she would have had to do something. But, she suspected, had the circumstances been different, that something would have been something good, something constructive. Something that would have made her redouble her efforts against what she considered the forces of evil and helped to silence any questions she might have been asking herself as to which side, ultimately, she was on. It might also have been something, she occasionally admitted, that allowed her after a while to laugh, albeit bitterly, at the very irony, the very grotesqueness of what happened. As it was, she was led to do something harmful and destructive, something she was aware was wrong even at the time. And something that she knew, far from silencing them, was only likely to swell disturbing voices in her mind. Not to mention make it impossible for her so much as to smile at the memory of that evening.

What did happen when she opened the door was this.

The five youngish men who had identified themselves through the letterbox as policemen rushed forward and muttered something about David and Michael Bernstein. When Gloria pulled herself up to her full five foot ten, stood arms spread out in the middle of the narrow hallway, and managed to ask in her grandest manner if she could see a search warrant, one of them, who as luck would have it was black, looked at her as if she were insane, said ‘Get out the way, lady,’ and gave her a shove that sent her flying. And when she had picked herself up, had suppressed the temptation to go racing down the stairs to the basement after them shrieking ‘How dare you treat me like that!’ and contented herself with looking as disdainful and, she hoped, as transcendentally indignant as possible, the last of the policemen who had burst in, a pasty-faced, thickset man who was now standing by the front door to make sure no one tried to leave, looked her up and down, gave her a sort of nodding smile and said,

‘What is it? You don’t like the nignogs? Well, don’t worry; neither do I.’

Then, for a moment, Gloria thought she really would shriek; shriek, and wail, and scream, ‘You fool, don’t you know who I am, don’t you know what I’ve spent my life, not to mention the whole of today, fighting for? How dare you talk to me like that! How dare you!’ After that second, however, and feeling now too confused to know what to say, she merely opened the door to the living room, on the left of the hallway, walked in and started taking books off the shelves. A policeman—an agent to the powers that, for all the lip-service they paid to the opposition, supported the government of her native land—had used violence towards her, had pushed her over. That policeman had been black. And his colleague, another agent of those powers that, in the final analysis, believed in the superiority of white men to all others, had attempted to ally himself with her by appealing to her sense of a shared European (i.e. white) past. It was beyond her. She couldn’t work it out. A black policeman. ‘Out the way lady … You don’t like the nignogs …’ No, she once again wanted to scream, it isn’t possible. I cannot cope with this any more. I will not cope with this any more. Me, me! Who has spent all her life fighting. Me, to try to appeal to me. Me, being pushed over by … no, no, no, no. That’s it. I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more. All right, I know that one must go on fighting, or die. I know that one shouldn’t, one cannot allow one stupid, one grotesque incident to change the course of one’s life. As I know that what one violent policeman does to me is not really important in the long term. But I don’t care. I cannot, I will not put up with this squalor, this wretchedness, this misery any more. I hate this country. I do not belong in this country. And although of course I also cannot and will not return to the one country I would in a way love to return to, I am going to move to some other country, similar in climate if nothing else, and I am going to retire from the world. I am abandoning civilisation. I am turning my back on civilisation, be it the civilisation of economic and cultural dominance, the civilisation that worships, above all others, a white god, or the civilisation that promotes justice and freedom and love for one’s fellow men, and rejects, as much as it dares, the very god which in its heart it worships. I am going to do it, moreover, just as soon as I possibly can; within a week if it is feasible, within a month whatever happens. I have fought and fought and fought. Now other people can take up the sword. Dear God, dear God, how dare he? How dare he, how dare he, how dare he? Me. In my own house. How dare he?

Uncertain as to which of the two ‘he’s’ she was referring to, Gloria left her task for a moment and looked round at her pasty-faced, would-be conspirator, who was looking at her.

‘Your colleagues won’t find anything,’ she told him, as if speaking to him from a great height. ‘My sons have been in Mexico for the past six months, and they’ve been off drugs for seven.’

*

It would have been easy for her to change her mind the following day; she knew that. And if what had happened had happened to anyone else, she knew that it was more than likely that he or she would have. Since, though, she had, if only vaguely, been searching for an excuse to leave England practically from the day she had arrived, sixteen years before, she did not. Moreover, after the police had left, having piled all her books on the floor, she had proceeded in a sort of delirium of fury to demolish her living room so completely it would have cost hundreds of pounds to make it habitable again. With the result that when she came downstairs at midday and surveyed the wreckage, the thought of not going didn’t really enter her head for more than a second. Of course I’m going to go, she told herself, as she picked up the cushions she had torn apart last night and then threw them down again. Of course I’m going to go, she told herself, as she contemplated sweeping up the pieces of broken ashtrays, broken vases and broken lamps; and then shrugged and thought: why? And: how could I change my mind? she asked herself when she looked out of her grey, dirty windows at the neat, clean houses opposite, with their largely young, well-off owners piling out of their front doors in order to go and eat their Sunday lunch in some fashionable restaurant, or in order to clean their Volvos and Saabs, or in order simply to chat to their largely well-off, young neighbours, and demonstrate to the world and to themselves that they were young, well-off and successful. Rhetoric apart, I don’t belong here, never have, and even if it weren’t for myself, I should leave for the sake of all these people who are living around me and have moved into the neighbourhood over the past few years. They don’t want some tiresome, patronising woman in her early fifties looking askance at their success, or casting a beady eye on their Swedish cars. They don’t want a woman who doesn’t keep her house as painted and clean as theirs, and therefore threatens to drag down the prices in the street. And they certainly don’t want a woman who not only has two sons who are drug addicts and have been arrested innumerable times for possession of and suspected dealing in heroin, but whose house gets raided in the middle of the night even when those sons aren’t there.

It was actually possible, Gloria reflected as she looked at the dusty old rubber tree she had uprooted last night and felt tears of remorse come into her eyes, that one of those nice, respectable young neighbours had called the police and said something was going on at number fourteen, just to get them to raid the place again and encourage its owner to leave.

Well, she concluded, as she turned away from the window, if that is the case, you have succeeded. Indeed, you have succeeded if it isn’t the case. For though I was hysterical when I told myself this last night, it remains true: I cannot take any more. And now, just as soon as I possibly can, I’m off.

She wondered, as she went back upstairs to get dressed, what the boys and Paul would say, when she told them.

*

This was something she thought about a great deal over the next three weeks. As she resigned her post in the Department of Social Security; put her house on the market and found a buyer for it virtually within hours (almost warming to her successful young neighbours when she discovered what their presence enabled her to ask and get for her own shabby dwelling); and consulted lawyers and accountants. She wanted to know about her tax situation, and about how to invest both the money she received for the house, and the not very large sum she had managed to save over the years, so as to have an income of some kind in whatever country she did fetch up in. And if Paul’s reaction when she finally got round to explaining why she had hardly seen him recently was both predictable and faintly alarming (he looked at her as if he felt she was doing it simply to get away from him and told her that he didn’t care where she went—one country was as good as another to him and he’d come with her in any case), the likely reaction of the boys troubled her so much that she couldn’t bring herself to tell them at all. She knew that sooner or later she’d have to and she knew that for one reason or another they wouldn’t approve. How strongly they would disapprove, though, and how strongly they would express their disapproval she didn’t know; and the idea that it might be very strongly indeed almost made her think that maybe, after all, she should change her mind. She didn’t; if only because by the time she really thought she might it was too late; the house was already sold. But it was a close thing; and she spent hour after hour, once she had told him, discussing with Paul what their likely objections would be and how best she could counter them.

‘Just tell them,’ Paul shrugged initially, clearly irritated by her concern. Clearly unaware, too, that his response was only making her feel still more alarmed at the prospect of his accompanying her wherever she went. Could her relationship, or whatever it was, with this pale, morose young man for whom she felt normally only pity, continue indefinitely?

When he did become aware of it, however, he was a little more forthcoming. He suggested that she should write them a nice letter, saying what she had to say and not giving them a chance to express either their approval or disapproval. She could tell them that she had never been happy in England, and that now they had moved away she saw no reason for her to stay on and keep up a house that they would probably never return to.

And when he saw that not even this would do, and that if he wasn’t careful he would be told he wasn’t coming anywhere with her (cause him though it might to do what he had vowed, having done it once, he would never do again, namely, raise his hand to his mistress), he entered properly into the spirit of things; and though he remained irritated, not only allowed Gloria more or less to think out loud, but actively encouraged her to do so.

‘I mean, you can’t allow them to dominate your life forever, can you?’ he fed her, as he reminded her that David was twenty-three now and Michael twenty-two. ‘After all, you do have a right to lead your own life, and sooner or later …’

‘Yes, yes, you’re right of course,’ Gloria agreed, swallowing the bait gratefully, and proceeding to swim up and down the near empty living room attached to that particular line. ‘But I do feel responsible for them and I do feel that if they have now finally kicked the habit—and I’m sure they have, they never lie to me—I should at least stay here for a little while longer. Just to make them feel they have got some sort of base, just to make them feel there is something solid in the world, even if it isn’t the solidity they might have wished for. And certainly isn’t,’ she allowed herself to smile mournfully, ‘the solidity that I would have wished for.’

Then he threw her this fish: that the more she allowed them to feel that she was still responsible for them, the more they would be tempted to backslide. ‘I mean, I know what’ll happen,’ he said. ‘After another few months in Mexico they’ll get bored. Then they’ll think “Oh well, Mummy’s still got the house in London, let’s go there.” And they’ll drift back, call all their old friends and before you know it …’ Paul made the gesture of injecting something into his arm and shrugged. ‘They’ll blame you for it, too. No, really, you mustn’t do it.’ A fish that allowed her to indulge her sense of guilt and tell him, for perhaps the twentieth time, that if they blamed her for their addiction they were, in a sense, right, because she had always given them a facile idea of what freedom was. She had always made them think that freedom was simply a matter of eating with their hands in a restaurant if they felt like it, of dressing precisely as they pleased and of experimenting with drugs if it amused them to experiment with drugs. ‘But I never made them understand that—well, though it makes me sound like some sanctimonious politician, or some television pundit, freedom is responsibility, is commitment and is not simply, really to sound like a politician, licence. I mean, it was all very well for me to tell myself that the people back home who objected to their eating with their hands were the people who equated civilisation with suppressing the political rights of four fifths of their fellow countrymen. For me to tell them that when they were small, though, just confused them and made them think that everything about the adult world was suspect. It condemned them to a sort of permanent infancy, and made them feel terribly sorry for themselves when people stopped treating them like unruly infants and began to treat them like adults themselves. So to assuage that sorrow they felt for themselves …’

And finally, by throwing her another fish (in the form, this time, of a question as to whether, if she did feel so doubtful, it wouldn’t be best if she flew out to Mexico herself and told the boys in person) he allowed her to sing a passionate, tragic aria—it was her favourite—that touched on how much she loved them and how she thought they were essentially good. That soared with the theme of how frantic she became when she wondered what would happen to them and how she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how they were going to be able to continue to be good and survive in this world (‘Oh, I know, you’ll tell me I’m equating goodness with childishness. But I’m not, truly, I swear it. We do live in a hateful world and unless one is prepared to get blood on one’s hands or have others get blood on their hands for one, one won’t survive.’) And that concluded with the declaration that despite all her doubts and fears, she nevertheless believed that somehow they would find a way, they would survive, and by surviving and finding a way might yet show her how to live, fifty-three years old and sick of the whole business though she was. ‘Because I can’t help feeling there is a way; I’ve never been able to help thinking that, and I can’t help feeling there must be more to life than … than this’, (sweeping a hand round the room), ‘than a newly fashionable street in West London, than aspirations to a Volvo or a Saab, than … than … calmness, decency, order—and dullness, smugness and underneath, an appalling, withering arrogance. It must be possible to find the sort of splendour one used to find back home, without having to live under the sort of government under which we lived there. And I’m sure it is. It’s just a matter of finding how, how, how, and I can’t help feeling that the boys are going to find how. They must at least try,’ she added as a sort of coda, ‘or die in the attempt. Otherwise’—she looked around again, tall, auburn-haired, thrilling-voiced and with tears in her eyes—‘this is the long and the short of it. And that’s too terrible to contemplate.’

Yet though Paul encouraged her in this fashion and thus ensured his inclusion in her travel plans, whatever suggestion he made she rejected, in the end, as being unsuitable. Letters, she said, were too definitive, and however subtle and Jamesian one tried to be, there were always nuances that escaped one. There was always the possibility that by not saying precisely what one meant, or not saying everything one meant, or not anticipating every objection that might be raised and answering it, one could give the wrong impression. Which in this case, might cause the boys to see her flight from her own moral confusion and from the climate, physical as well as moral, of England, as no more than a veiled abandonment of them. The telephone, she said, was unsatisfactory, because one never knew when one telephoned someone in quite what mood they were. The danger being that if—always assuming she could actually find them on the telephone in the monastery or commune or whatever it was they were staying in—she happened to catch them on a bad day, or at a bad time, well, there again she might only hurt them and make them think she was fleeing from them, rather than herself. And the idea of going to see them, she said, as Paul’s irritation became so visible now that she began to think it might be he who would say he wasn’t coming away with her, a thought that also, paradoxically, made her feel faintly alarmed, was excluded not because it was too brutal or because she couldn’t pick the best moment to break the news, but for a more prosaic and practical reason. To wit: that although she had got a very good price for the house, even that sum, when invested, wasn’t going to bring in a huge income; and she simply couldn’t now be swanning off around the world spending money on planes and trains and hotels and who knows what, in order to …

‘Unless you decided to settle in Mexico yourself,’ Paul interrupted and added, adjusting his pronouns somewhat, ‘if they allowed us to stay.’

Thus it was that, unsatisfactory though it seemed to Gloria in many ways, this third alternative was picked upon as the least injurious way of doing what had to be done. ‘I mean, I’m sure the boys aren’t going to like me suddenly turning up in their haven, disturbing their peace,’ Gloria murmured. ‘And I’m sure they won’t be too pleased having me even reasonably close at hand, even if I assure them we’re not going to settle anywhere near them. But it is true that if I’m actually with them, I can make them understand. I can tell them exactly what happened the other night with the police, for instance, and I suppose it’s also true that if I am at least in the same country it’s better for all of us. After all,’ she said, looking down at Paul and wondering whether this somehow most English of plants would be able to flourish in foreign soil, ‘they didn’t leave England to get away from me, did they?’

It was a question she did not expect Paul to answer; and one that, since she knew what she would say, she had no intention of answering herself.

*

She knew what she would say. Yet probably for the very reason that she refused to answer it, it was a question that she asked herself as often over the following three weeks as she had wondered about David and Michael’s reaction in the preceding three. She asked it still more often after she had completed her tasks in England, had bought two one-way air tickets and set herself and Paul up in an inexpensive hotel in Mexico City. Where she made first the necessary arrangements for her trip down to San Cristóbal, near which town the boys were staying, and then the necessary arrangements for her and Paul’s subsequent transferral to the state and city of Vera Cruz, where they had decided to instal themselves for an initial six months. And when, one morning at the end of March, Paul accompanied her to Mexico City airport, repeated his offer of making the journey with her and waved goodbye as she answered a call for a flight to Tuxtla Gutíerrez (where she would hire a car and drive the rest of the way to San Cristóbal) she found herself asking it with such insistence that, sitting on the plane and looking down at the crumpled landscape below, she couldn’t help but think that she should answer it; and answer it, reluctantly, with a yes. In a sense, it had been to get away from her that the boys had left England.

To get away from her constant if generally unspoken insistence that Western culture, Western civilisation was fundamentally flawed, fundamentally wicked and should be, so far as was possible, rejected. To get away from the suggestion, occasionally imparted she knew, that it wasn’t to avoid prison, but for their sakes that she had left the country that she couldn’t help, despite everything, loving, and come to England. A country which, though she could appreciate its virtues and see its beauties, she couldn’t help not loving and frequently, though she knew it was ungrateful and unfair of her, loathed. (Prison back there, she was aware she sometimes inferred, would have been better than liberty here.) And to get away from her unceasing if involuntary efforts to undermine their feelings when they, who had after all arrived in England at the ages of six and seven, seemed to be showing signs of loving their adopted country themselves. Loving it and thinking of it, however much she was unable to, as home.

Of course those efforts had been involuntary, she assured herself. She had been forever telling the boys that love, real love (though she had never gone into that ‘real’) was by its nature positive and good. ‘Love’s the only thing that can keep us going, can, however temporarily, save us,’ she remembered instructing them one day, amidst the sagging bookshelves, stained carpets and piled-up records of her living room. One could claim, she had gone on to say, that it didn’t grant just temporary salvation, but permanent salvation, in the sense that if one loved, one affirmed not merely one’s own life, but the whole of life. So that as long as life lasted—any life, anywhere—one also lasted oneself.

Nevertheless, she suspected that what she had irradiated from her subconscious had had a more profound effect than anything she had been able to tell them, and that they had been more aware of that effect than she had. Being aware, they had resented it, and possibly, to a certain extent, hated her for it. And since they hadn’t wanted to hate the one person in the world whom they nevertheless loved—the person who had exposed the sham of Western culture to them and sacrificed herself for them—they had made the only move they could. A move they had, no doubt, expected her to respect; and one that by following them she was now rendering superfluous.

Oh God, Gloria thought, as the aircraft suddenly lurched, and the ‘Fasten Seatbelt’ sign came on, what have I, what have I done?

*

Contrition and a desire to be blamed were with Gloria often, for one reason or another; and once with her, they tended to stay for a while. So, having come to the conclusion that it was to escape her that the boys had left England and not, as they had told her when they announced their departure, to escape their friends and the temptations that London offered, she expected them to stay with her now. Hovering about at least until she had talked to the boys; received, as she was sure she would, their assurance that she wasn’t to blame; and convinced them that in any case she and Paul would be almost as out of contact with them in Vera Cruz as they had been back in London. Yet as she sat behind the wheel of her big American hire-car (she had asked, both out of a sense of economy and a sense of what became her, for a Volkswagen, but this was all that had been available), cruising along with her lips pursed and her head tilted back at what she hoped was a suitably tragic angle, and rehearsing the scene she would have with David and Michael, she slowly became aware that, for all the pose she had adopted, she didn’t in fact feel contrite any longer. Or if she did, she was feeling less and less so with every kilometre that passed. She tried to. She reminded herself again and again that it was because of her that her sons had sought refuge in the commune or whatever it was towards which she was now heading. As it had been her insistence on their nonconformity and her constant whittling away at any moral straw they tried to cling to that had helped send them to prison and brought them near to death. Somehow, though, it didn’t work. And by the time she was half way to San Cristóbal, climbing up and up through spectacular mountains and passing brightly clad Indian women who made her feel that but for the car and the road nothing much had changed here for the past thousand or so years, although she did everything she could to keep her lips pursed, as if the boys were hurling imprecations at her that honesty didn’t allow her to reply to however much they hurt her, she realised that they were breaking into a sort of smile. It was, perhaps, a bitter sweet smile—she could, for the moment, still manage that. A smile, too, she hoped, that suggested all manner of sufferings past. Nevertheless, a smile it was. And the further she drove and the higher she climbed, the more certain she became as to why she was smiling it. For the first time in years, for the first time since—she couldn’t remember when, but certainly since she had arrived in England and probably since she’d been a child—she felt free. She had served her term in hell, she told herself, even if she knew that that was putting it a little strongly; she had done, as she saw it, her duty. Now, now she was alone at last; and having recovered from her jetlag was spinning along a practically deserted road through scenery so magnificent that at times it literally took her breath away. She had, moreover, if she was careful and lived frugally, enough money to live on for the rest of her life. I have come through, she wanted to shout out to the wooded mountains and the Indian women. I have, however hackneyed the word has become, survived. And not only do I feel free for the first time in years; for the first time in longer still I feel happy. Yes, she almost cried, wondering if the altitude were making her light-headed: guiltless, free and happy!

No wonder, she told herself, the boys had been able to break their drug habit here. And I wonder, she asked herself, as the car sped down a steep incline into a shadowed valley, whether this sudden sense of freedom and happiness has anything to do with my consciousness of being, as I once was before, a white woman in a predominantly brown land. An over-civilised product of European culture who only really feels at home amidst those who have not yet altogether accepted that culture; or those who, if they unwittingly, involuntarily have, are in two very different minds as to whether this acceptance is a blessing or a curse. In a country like England, where almost everyone, for good or ill, is a product of the same culture, I cannot feel myself superior; and find it difficult to maintain a sense of bad faith. A sense that is perhaps as essential to me as blue skies and warmth; and tropical flowers and gorgeously feathered birds …

However, not even these doubts that came to her, not even these troughs in her soaring spirits could really bring her down to earth. And by the time she had parked in the main square of San Cristóbal, noted with alarm that despite the near freezing temperature a good number of the inhabitants of the place were walking around bare foot and decided to stay the night there and go off and find the boys in the morning, she felt as if she were flying steadily above sea level at at least the same altitude as the city itself. An altitude that was, according to her map, something over two thousand metres. High enough, she told herself, as she was shown to a room in a big old hotel built round a covered and echoing courtyard, and watched, unable not to smile now, as an eleven or twelve-year-old boy prepared a fire in the grate and set a match to it. High enough.

And one way or another she was still at something over two thousand metres the following morning, when, after what seemed to her a very English breakfast of oatmeal, eggs and bacon, and toast and marmalade, she set off for Las Frechas. A place about which the boys had read in some obscure ‘counter-culture’ or ‘alternative’ magazine and to which they had written explaining that for several years they had been addicted to heroin. They had, they said, without wanting to sound too dramatic, reached the stage where either they broke the habit or accepted the fact that very soon they would be dead. They had received a letter, in reply, written in English but signed by a Mexican, telling them that not only had Las Frechas not been set up as a drug rehabilitation centre, but that there were no ex-addicts among the twenty-three community members. Moreover, there was no one who had any practical knowledge of dealing with the after-effects of drug addiction and the taking of drugs of any kind, including tobacco and alcohol, was strictly forbidden on pain of immediate expulsion. If, however, the boys wanted to come for a month’s trial period, the letter had gone on, they were welcome to. Though they should accept the fact that as well as drugs of all kinds being prohibited, there were few modern amenities apart from electricity and running water. That, too, they would be expected to do a full day’s work on the land the community farmed, or in the kitchens, or in the school and infirmary that was run for needy local children. And finally, they must accept that if they came to this particular place, notwithstanding the community rules, they would be living in an area in which drug-taking, albeit not heroin, had played a certain role in the local culture for centuries; and they might well find themselves exposed to temptations they wouldn’t encounter elsewhere. ‘I am not saying that if you come,’ the letter had concluded, ‘you will be like ex-alcoholics living in a boat on a sea of gin; but you will have to accept the fact that here, in a certain sense, as a non-drug-taker you will be the cultural exception, rather than the rule.’

A point which, Gloria reflected as she negotiated curve after curve in the road, far from putting the boys off, had finally decided them in favour of Las Frechas, as opposed to any of the other communities to which they had written.

‘You see, if we can do it there, Mummy,’ David had told her, ‘we can do it anywhere. Also, I think it’s better if we do go somewhere as far away as possible from our own, let’s say culture. I mean if we are, as everyone is in his or her different way, a product of our culture, well, we’re not terribly successful products, are we, and who knows if we won’t be more successful if we try to fit in some other culture? Even if, of course, you never can really.’

Yet though she was so high, both when she left San Cristóbal and an hour or so later when she drove up a rutted track, parked in a grassy clearing and, making her way towards a cluster of huts and houses, met a young fair-haired man who directed her to what he said was the visitors’ house and told her, yes, of course David and Michael were here and he would go and call them immediately, within five minutes of meeting her sons she not only felt that she was most definitely back at sea-level, but that her wings had been broken in the descent.

It wasn’t, as she had feared back in London they might, that the boys objected to seeing her there. On the contrary, they came running up to the visitors’ house, on the verandah of which Gloria was now sitting, shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’, and threw their arms around her and kissed her, and jumped up and down as if they were five year olds. Nor, as she had also feared, that they precisely objected to her announcement that she too had decided to move to Mexico: ‘But right on the other side, in Vera Cruz for the moment.’ Though this did give them pause and make them, if not appear their age (they never appeared that, whatever happened; David, small and dark, looking at most like a seventeen year old, and Michael, plumper, paler, but also on the short side, like a vague and distracted fifteen year old), at any rate grow up a little and behave like preoccupied adolescents. No, what really seemed to offend them and, as they looked at her with not just suspicion but near loathing, made her think that if anything she had underestimated their opposition, was the fact that she managed to convey to them with self-deprecating little smiles, meaningful sighs and immense circumlocutions, that she wasn’t just moving to Mexico and to Vera Cruz in particular, but that she was ‘giving up everything’ in order to do so. She was abandoning the cause for which she had fought all her life: the cause of justice, the cause of equality, the cause of liberty. And she was doing it—and that was the great mockery, the great contradiction, the thing they really found it impossible to understand or forgive—in the name of that very freedom to which she had always been so devoted.

You are betraying everything you have ever fought for, she understood their looks and their words to say. You are betraying everything that is good in the world and everything that makes the world worth living in. Worst of all, she read in their furious little faces, you are betraying us and making nonsense of the sacrifice we have made. We didn’t mind being victims, they reeled somehow on, though expressing themselves in quite another way, as long as our being victims served some purpose. What we did, our very defection, was a challenge to the wrongness, the wickedness of the world and was all just a part of your battle against—well, let’s call it evil, for want of a better word. For you to come here now and calmly announce that you’re going to sit by the seaside in some hot provincial Mexican town and do nothing for the rest of your life—and do nothing with Paul, who’s not only a worm and a depressive but who beats you up!—that just undermines everything. That even makes our continued stay here impossible. You were fighting on our behalf. You were carrying the torch for us, until we found the strength to bear what the world, what our culture, had thrust upon us, and picked up the torch ourselves. You were our conscience, our morality, our goodness. So if you now say to hell with conscience, morality, goodness, we’re left without anything, and all we can do is return to the world and … and, they allowed her to understand, either risk going back onto the drugs that they had managed here to free themselves from, or doing, or attempting to do, what formerly she had done.

To begin with, as they shrieked at her, standing on the verandah practically stamping their feet, utterly ignoring the other members of the community who came and went from the house (who utterly ignored them), Gloria was so stunned by this attack and so appalled to find herself lying broken-winged on the ground that she hardly knew what to do or think. She simply writhed around, trying to defend herself from these two terrifying little birds of prey who were swooping down on her. Trying, too, to keep in mind that she wasn’t in fact a bird herself, but was rather a tall, auburn-haired woman with a faintly grand manner who was standing on the verandah of a guesthouse in some extraordinary community miles from anywhere, being berated by her sons, sons transformed into self-righteous, weather-beaten little prigs by their efforts to stop taking drugs, merely for wishing to be happy. Being berated, moreover, while those same sons were living some fantasy existence that they liked to think was outside their culture, but was of course as much a product of it as they themselves were. They have no right to tell me I cannot give up, Gloria tried to insist to herself; they have no right to talk to me like this.

After ten minutes or so she managed to get a grip on herself, however; and after another five minutes or so, during which she had now, as she stood there towering over them, lips indeed pursed and head indeed at a suitably tragic angle, allowed tears to run out from under her dark glasses and trickle down her cheeks, she managed also to get a grip on them. At any rate, to the extent of persuading them to sit down on the bench that ran along the back of the verandah, while she sat down on a rocking chair; and then to put their objections to what she had done calmly and not scream them at her for all the world to hear. She didn’t, however, get them to alter the nature of those objections; and she didn’t, for a moment, get them to stop behaving, as she saw it, like two spoiled and insufferable brats.

They told her it was people who gave up who really condemned people like them to drugs and vagrancy and criminality, and that it would have been better had she never started her fight against ‘the system’, or even actively supported it, than abandon it at half-time.

They told her they weren’t really thinking about themselves at all, but about her: they knew her, and loved her, better than she knew herself, and what they were trying to do was save her from herself; from the desert of non-commitment into which she was casting herself.

And they told her, again and again, scarcely bothering to disguise the intended blackmail, that if she did stick to her plans and did indeed settle down with Paul—with Paul, they kept repeating in tones of disbelief and contempt—in Vera Cruz, their loss of faith in her, their disappointment in her would in all probability drive them away from here and back to England; where they would be in the gravest danger of returning to their bad old ways.

Whatever they told her, though, and in whatever manner they told it, they did not get her to change her mind; nor, really, come near to doing so. Their very attitude forbade it, their shining, noble little faces, their earnest, concerned little eyes, their coaxing, patronising little voices. The fact that she had sold the house, got rid of the furniture and in every way come too far to go back, forbade it. And the thing that forbade it most thoroughly of all was a voice inside her, firmer and louder than ever theirs could be, that told her that even if her decision should for some reason cause the boys to return to England—and, possibly to their drugs and to their deaths—she too had a life, she had sacrificed herself enough for them, and if she wanted to live that life she must do what she thought was right for herself now. And what she thought was right was what she was doing; and what she was convinced was wrong was her spending so much as one more day in a country that was not her own, trying to solve problems that were either insoluble, or would only be solved over hundreds of years by a historical process in which individual action counted for little or absolutely nothing.

Furthermore, though they invited her to stay for a couple of days in the community, so they could discuss the matter more fully, and though she accepted their invitation, by the end of an hour on the verandah the boys had heard that voice inside her themselves, and realised that nothing they would be able to come up with would silence it or countermand its orders. It wouldn’t stop them trying and it wouldn’t stop them using weapons of pity, petulance and would-be Olympian disdain to see if those might succeed where anger and argument had failed. It would, however, and did make them behave with a modicum of grace thereafter towards her; and it would and did ensure that Gloria stuck to her promise to stay, and didn’t rush off to the car as soon as they were out of sight and drive away.

In fact, Gloria felt over the course of those forty-eight hours she spent with them, she got on better with them in a way than she had for years. And the slight estrangement that their initial argument had caused and the resultant formality of their subsequent relations only served to make them get on better still. They took her, nervously and obviously hoping she would like him, to meet the bearded, youngish Mexican whom they claimed was the leader of the community; but who, treating them like foolish children who didn’t know what they were saying, laughed off their introduction and told Gloria there weren’t any leaders, or led, in this place. All decisions were taken jointly, he said, and if there were disagreements, the matter was discussed until everyone had accepted that this or that course was correct. They tried to explain the precise nature of the community to her; ‘that isn’t anything like a monastery, as you see there are men, women and children all living and working together but in which we live as simply as possible in order to achieve what monks presumably hope to achieve, and that is a relationship, if possible a oneness, with God. Even if’ (they had added hurriedly) ‘we don’t actually believe in God ourselves, or not what has been popularly accepted as God over the past two thousand years.’ (They had also added, somewhat condescendingly, that they quite understood it if she was feeling sceptical. Indeed, scpeticism was to be encouraged and they had felt sceptical themselves for the first few days here. ‘Only when you relax, and come to see how clogged up with petty vanity and sterile egoism you are, somehow that scepticism evaporates and all you are left with is this,’ sweeping their hands round to indicate the fields, fruit trees and animals, ‘and the realisation that though God doesn’t exist, in a sense and illogical though it sounds, God exists, and is simply life, the love of which, the more you truly feel it, confers on you a reality that up till then you’ve never experienced fully.’) And they tried, too, to give her an adequate explanation as to why all these people working away on the land, cooking and cleaning (and attempting ‘What was the expression?’ she couldn’t resist sniping, ‘to get in touch with God?’) were either Europeans, north Americans, or of European descent if they were Mexicans. ‘I mean,’ she said, looking at the Indians she saw around the place, some as brightly clad as those she had seen on the road to San Cristóbal, others in clothes that suggested that if there was any heavy labouring to be done it was they who did it ‘it is rather odd, isn’t it? That in what is an almost exclusively Indian part of the world there are no Indians in the community as such, and those who are here appear to be on hand only to lend a bit of local colour or do the dirty work. I mean in a way it smacks of—well, segregation, doesn’t it?’

‘No, no,’ was what they said to that. ‘There’s no segregation at all and any Indian who wants to join the community is at absolute liberty to do so. It’s just that they—well, most of them still instinctively understand what we used to understand instinctively but now have forgotten and that is, as we were telling you, how to get in touch with, have a relationship with what we have to call, for want of a better word, God.’

Yet though she stayed willingly enough for those two days and though, by the end of her stay, she felt confident enough to say, only faintly condescendingly herself now, that while she didn’t really think that such a place was for her she was delighted that it had been so good for them, just as they were unable to make her reconsider her plans for the future, so she was unable to make them reconsider theirs if she persisted in doing what she had told them she was going to do.

‘But why?’ she asked them again and again, after she had watched them take care of a class of four children, three of whom suffered from Down’s Syndrome, one of whom was autistic and all of whom had been entrusted to the care of the community; and as she watched them helping to cut rushes for the roof of one of the huts. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I mean, you might not approve of my plans; I can see that. And that’s your right, to disapprove. Disapprove as violently as you like. But why, however much you disapprove, should that affect your plans?—I mean, you’re happy here, they seem to like you here, you’re safe here, and all that mumbo jumbo about me being your conscience, your being willing victims, your being … it’s just nonsense. And if you’re going to leave here and go back to London just to punish me, well, I suppose I would be punished if you did, and if things don’t work out. But that’s grotesque. I mean, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. That’d be cutting off your head to spite your neck. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous. It’s … I just don’t understand. I’m sorry. Explain it to me again.’

As they did: telling her now that though they were of age in years, emotionally, as she must know for herself, they were still somewhat backward. Of course they were catching up fast here and, if they stayed another year or so, they hoped that, well, they would no longer be the second or third cousins of the autistic child she had seen them taking care of. Until they had caught up, however—‘and when we say emotionally I think what we really mean is morally’—they still needed a base on which to build. A base that, their father being dead, whether she liked it or not, whether they liked it or not, for the moment only she as their mother could provide. ‘I mean, we admire Enrique,’ David told her, frowning with sincerity as he referred to the community’s maybe unwilling but—Gloria had seen for herself—indisputable leader, ‘and we admire and like everyone else here.’ (‘Ugh,’ Gloria was tempted to say, but controlled herself. Not because she felt a small dose of flippancy would be inappropriate; just because she knew that the boys either wouldn’t understand such a comment, or would pretend not to and ignore it if they did.) ‘Still, for the moment, that’s not quite enough. We need to feel—we need to feel that you’re there, in the so-called real world.’ (‘And need to know I’m unhappy and detest that real world,’ Gloria almost snarled now.) ‘At least until we feel truly confident, inside ourselves, that that reality is only so-called, is only an illusion, and that real reality can only be found in …’

‘… God,’ Michael muttered.

‘But if you now, as you say you’re going to, turn your back on that so-called real world, we have no alternative but to go back into it and either find someone else on whom we can rely, or try to rely on ourselves in the hope that we will be strong enough to bear our own weight and eventually be able to return if not here, to somewhere like here. I mean, I know we’re being selfish, I know it must sound silly to you. But we do feel that, we always have, haven’t we, Mike?’

‘Yes,’ Michael murmured.

‘And we’ve often said that the only way we were able to embark on this let’s say spiritual journey was because we knew that you were at the same time making a physical journey and taking care of that part of our lives until we were capable of taking care of it ourselves. So you see, Mummy, we have no real choice, and although I’m sorry we shouted at you when you just turned up and broke the news like that, it wasn’t an hysterical, spur-of-the-moment reaction. It was just the reaction of two people who felt and feel that their spiritual survival has been put at risk. There. That’s all.’

Spiritual survival. Spiritual journey. What clap-trap. What utter and absolute bullshit. What a load of infantile, pompous, posturing drivel was Gloria’s final if still unspoken comment upon her sons’ speech; a speech during the course of which, paradoxically, the real reason why the boys were threatening to take and undoubtedly would take this drastic and very possibly catastrophic step had come to her. It wasn’t anything to do with moral bases, and the need to rely on themselves and support their own weight, she told herself. It was simply that they couldn’t bear the idea of her being irresponsible, of her being for the first time in their life and in the sense that they had always understood the word, free. And if she would be, despite their protests, they would deliver themselves into captivity in her place and suffer, and if necessary die to stop them dwelling on the unacceptable fact. Emotionally, morally immature, my foot, Gloria wanted to say. Unstable though you may be, or might have been, you’re behaving just like every other male child, or every other male. You think you have the right to be free, you think you have the right to make spiritual journeys, while mother stays at home to keep the hearth warm. Only should you decide that after all spiritual journeys are not for you and that the old, unreal, gross and comfortable physical world is more your sort of thing, you expect to have a home in that physical world to go to.

‘Well, darlings,’ she actually did say then, ‘I’m very sorry. But if your spiritual survival has been put at risk, I got to the point in London of feeling that mine was more than at risk—it was in danger of being snuffed out from one moment to the next. And that being the case, I’m sorry, but it’s every man for himself.’

‘And every woman for hers,’ she let them take as read.

‘Still, assuming you’re not going to leave here immediately, as soon as Paul and I have found a place to live in Vera Cruz, I’ll send you the address. That way …’

You can do whatever you like.

But if, after all, pale, sad, little Michael might have come round to turning up in Vera Cruz and settling there with his mother—settling anywhere with his mother—his elder, darker and more assertive brother allowed himself, allowed them, no such escape route. And Gloria’s last memory of him, after he had kissed her goodbye, was of his standing in front of Michael (so she wouldn’t see any backsliding on his face, if backsliding there were?) shaking his head and saying, as she got quickly into the car to conceal the tears that were once again running down her cheeks, ‘Vera Cruz? Paul? Mummy, you’re mad, you’re absolutely mad.’

*

She was to remember those words because they were the last that David had spoken. More than a year, however, was to pass before she started to give them any real weight in her mind and to wonder whether he was right.

The first months of that year passed almost without her noticing them, so taken up was she with finding a small white house for herself in one of the long, straight roads stretching back from the seafront in Vera Cruz, helping Paul paint it and make the repairs that were necessary, and, if barely to begin with, furnishing it; especially as, when she wasn’t engaged in any of these activities, she seemed to spend hours every day in various local offices, procuring documents, taking them across town to be notarised or checked or countersigned and then returning them to the clerk who had issued them so he could then issue others. The following months were hardly more of a burden, even if, as the summer reached its height, Paul suffered so much from the heat that it made him bad-tempered and homesick, and one night, after an argument, he lost his temper and knocked her over. However, this incident and Paul’s general moroseness apart, (he seemed to have carried his London with him and to dwell in it as thoroughly here as he had there) they spent their time sitting on the grubby beach and wishing they felt a little more enthusiastic about bathing in what looked like a grubby sea, starting (at least Gloria did, Paul tended to mutter something about bloody Mexicans and say he was staying home) to make friends, and principally, having decided that their budget ran to the purchase of a small, second-hand car, going off on trips. Down the coast to Merida and the Yucatan peninsula. Up the coast to Tampico and other shabby towns that Gloria hated but Paul declared were his sort of places. And more and more, as the heat began to make Gloria herself uncomfortable, inland and up into the mountains, to Xalapa and Fortín, where everything was lush and green and soft and cool, and where even Paul was forced to admit that maybe there was beauty on this earth, for all the absence of truth.

And the remainder of that first year was spent, again only by Gloria in the main, settling in, consolidating her friendships and deciding to work in an art gallery and crafts shop every afternoon. A gallery and shop owned by the one person in Mexico to whom she had had an introduction before she arrived, the person who had made her pick on Vera Cruz as the place to settle—just because she had an introduction to her—and the person who had introduced her to all those other people she had started to think of as friends.

‘You know,’ she said to this woman, an artist herself, as the first anniversary of her arrival approached, ‘I honestly think I’m happy here. Happier than I ever imagined I’d be.’ Moreover, she told herself, she was speaking the truth. She was happy here; away from her confusion, away from her doubts, away from, not the world (Vera Cruz was as much a part of that, she told herself defensively, as London, New York or Paris) but from her world and everything in her world that she had come to find unbearable. Of course, nothing had changed in that world, but it was no longer her concern. All that concerned her now was what the weather was going to be like tomorrow, and whether she and Paul should go away this weekend. Whether she should take up Maria-Elena’s offer of working full-time at the gallery and risk having a major falling-out with Paul as a result. And whether they should eat at home tonight, or in a restaurant. Normal problems, she told herself, real problems, none of those ‘My God, am I doing the right thing?’, ‘My God, what a mess the world is in’, ‘My God, I must make my stand against the forces of evil’ type problems. She didn’t regret the years she had spent worrying about such, she supposed, larger matters; she was just relieved that it was up to other people now to worry about them and that she had, at last, gone into a sort of moral retirement. She began to look forward to waking up in the morning, and to wondering how she and Maria-Elena would chose the work of six local artists for a forthcoming exhibition, when there were at least thirty-six who insisted on having their works shown. She began to look forward to her long, late lunches, generally eaten with Maria-Elena; when the two of them would sit around, and laugh, and talk. And she began to look forward to her walks home in the evening, when, even in the winter, she was warm just wearing a cotton shift. Oh the sun! she told herself every time she felt that heat on her back and wanted to raise her arms in praise. Oh the sky! Oh the light!

This being so, why was it then that, after she had been in Mexico about fourteen months, Gloria did start to repeat to herself what David had told her that day she said goodbye, ‘You’re mad, you’re absolutely mad’? Well, she told herself one morning, when she realised that she was repeating it and found herself asking this question, there were a number of reasons. One—the least serious—was that however shortly she told herself it was her world she had fled from, she couldn’t suppress the feeling, once she had really settled in and got the hang of Vera Cruz, that it was the world she had meant. A feeling that wasn’t serious, she tried to convince herself, in that it was what every city-dweller who moves to the provinces experiences; but one that she would have preferred not to have, in that it seemed to her typical of the sort of person she didn’t want to be.

A second reason for her growing discontent, and this one was serious—or anyway far more so than the other—was, as David had suggested it might be, Paul. It was bad enough that he carried a special sort of London seediness with him wherever he went, and that his dislike of the heat and apparently of all things Mexican caused his mood to be darker still than it had in England, and caused him not only to strike her that once, but threaten to often. And, that the more she started to make friends and involve herself in local life, the more morose, gloomy and ill-tempered he became, and the more he resented her efforts to put down roots, however shallow they might be. What was worse, though, was that when she therefore suggested, tentatively at first and then more forcefully, that if he was so unhappy here he might be better off (they both might be better off) if he returned to England, he made it clear that he would never go back to England alone, and since, just as she had with the boys, she had always done everything in her power to destroy him, she must now face the consequences, and if she did want him to leave, must come with him herself. ‘Otherwise,’ he told her one night, when they finally had it out, ‘I’m staying here, hell though it is, until you do say you’ll come. Or until one of us kills the other, which is quite likely,’ he spat out as an afterthought.

Which threat, though Gloria tried to convince herself it wasn’t genuine, made her feel so depressed that she began to think of England as a sort of haven, where she would probably be able to unhitch herself from this weak, pitiable man with whom she had nevertheless in a sense fallen in love, or where he did at least have cronies with whom he went out drinking and seemed to prefer living by himself.

And the more she thought of England as a haven, the more she too began to think of Mexico as a kind of hell, in which she would be tied forever to this thirty-seven-year-old baby. Whom, insofar as she did love, she loved just because he was so without faith, even in himself, and just because she could and did pity him. For being weak, for being hopeless and for having so thoroughly squandered the gifts of beauty and brains with which he had been born, the last remnants of which he had, as it were, laid at her feet when they met.

The third and real reason why Gloria found herself repeating ‘You were mad to come here and you’re madder still to stay,’ however, concerned the boys themselves. For if she could have settled into Mexican provincial life and accepted the occasional pang of nostalgia for the bright lights as the price to be paid for peace and serenity, she could probably also, in the long run, have persuaded Paul either to go back to London alone, or, despite his misgivings, to take some sort of part in the life of Vera Cruz himself. To play a role which, she suspected, had he only overcome his petulance and his ‘No I won’t join in’ mood, might have suited him still better than it suited her. Underneath his cross-little-boy act he was desperate to join in; and desperate, too, to go out into the sun, in the hope that even at this stage of his life and decline he might revive, and put forth the sort of flowers he had seemed likely to put forth when young.

What the boys did to make her come round to their way of thinking was first write her a letter care of Maria-Elena restating their opposition to what she was doing, and telling her again that her having abandoned the fight made them feel that she had abandoned them and rendered, as a consequence, their present position untenable. They then wrote her a second letter telling them that the following week they were setting off for England and that while she shouldn’t feel responsible if anything did happen to them there, she should remember that when she had come to San Cristóbal they had warned her. And finally, as Gloria fired off notes to the marginally more reliable of their friends in London, to the bearded Enrique at Las Frechas asking if he had a forwarding address, and even to the British Consulate in Mexico City to see if by chance anyone there knew anything, they twisted the knife in the wound, so to speak, by writing not another word.

To begin with, so angered had Gloria been by their second, ill-natured scrawl, she was almost glad not to hear from them. Besides, she was so taken up at the time with putting the house in order and making her first contacts in town that she didn’t have time to worry too much. And even throughout that first, hot summer as she and Paul travelled, and throughout the following autumn, she managed to put her mind at rest by telling herself that their very silence showed that they were alive and well (had they not been, someone would have been in touch) and was just another example of their spite. ‘Little sods,’ she said to Paul, who tended to agree with her explanation for the lack of any further news. ‘Mean, nasty, little prigs. That community of theirs filled them so full of high ideals that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives despising people who aren’t. If, that is,’ she had felt obliged to add, both worriedly and bitterly, ‘they haven’t already killed themselves just to prove what an unnatural mother I am.’

As the novelty of Vera Cruz did start to wear off however, and as Paul did become more and more difficult, so that silence, that had lasted now for more than a year, began to eat into her and corrode everything around her. Of course she could tell herself that they were mean little sods and of course she could condemn them for the tone of their last letter; not to mention their whole attitude towards her ever since they had spoken at Las Frechas. But that didn’t alter the fact that they were her sons and she loved them; nor alter the fact that the thought that they might have killed themselves, or might now be in a desperate state, started to make her feel unhinged.

‘Vera Cruz, Paul—you’re mad,’ she told herself. ‘You’re absolutely mad.’

She was equipped for fighting moral battles, for waging, however privately, perpetual war. The boys, though, just because she had always been so bristling with arms, just because she had always insisted on standing up there and wielding the sword as if it were hers and hers alone by right, were utterly defenceless. So how could she have imagined that if she suddenly threw down those arms and marched off the field, they would survive? She should have had, she should still have, her head examined. It was obvious that being left alone without so much as a shield, they would be mown down. They would be mown down, moreover, not only by those forces she had opposed all her life, but by a combination of her cowardice and her lifelong insistence that they shouldn’t, as she hated anyone around her doing, learn how to fight themselves. It was obvious, obvious, and she was mad, mad, mad.

She was mad, Gloria told herself as she got drunk and burst into tears at Maria-Elena’s gallery one afternoon; crying to the tough, bright woman, of whom she had become very fond, ‘I feel as if I’ve cut myself off from my life-blood—as if I’ve severed my main artery.’ (A lament that provoked from Maria-Elena, who thought it was the distance from the theatres and concert-halls of London that really distressed her, the remark—under the circumstances not surprising—that for someone who prided herself on her unflagging opposition to imperialism, she seemed mighty attached to the glitz and glitter of Empire.)

She was mad, Gloria repeated to herself, as she got drunk and burst into tears at home one afternoon; telling Paul that she was terribly sorry, and that she realised she had first disarmed him and then abused him for not fighting, and that he mustn’t worry: she would never abandon him as she had the boys. (Paul merely raised his eyebrows and said ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Gloria.’ But that evening, for the first time since they had arrived, he went into town by himself and stayed out till four in the morning. He returned, though he tried to disguise the fact by putting on his gloomiest face, looking more pleased with himself than Gloria could ever remember having seen him.) Yet however mad she told herself she was, and however unbearable she now started to find both Vera Cruz and Paul—whom she had to come to look on as her own Vera Cruz, as she told him one night with a vague smile and absolute sincerity—there were two things that Gloria couldn’t do. One was leave the place; and the other was come to that understanding with Paul that she might have been able to come to, had she not been so frantic and felt so guilty about the boys.

‘What would I do if I left?’ she almost shrieked at her lover; who as she fell to pieces, not only seemed to be gaining the upper hand in some way, but seemed to be becoming more sanctimonious by the minute. ‘I haven’t got a job any longer, I haven’t got a house, I haven’t got anything.’ A question that Paul had answered with an irritated little shrug of the shoulders, as if he couldn’t imagine why she was bothering him, and a comment, ‘well, you could actually buy another house, you could actually get another job, you know,’ that was delivered in the tone of one who, having worked hard and had no problems all his life, couldn’t understand why other people didn’t stop snivelling, pull up their socks and get on with the job themselves.

‘Besides,’ she had added on another occasion, when she had asked Paul more or less the same question and he had given her more or less the same answer, ‘even if I did go back, how would I go about looking for them? I mean, all their friends move house every few months, and in any case, are probably dead. If something had happened to them, the police might not have known their names and if I just wander around looking in rehabilitation centres—well, I suppose I might find them, but the chances are a million to one against.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up,’ Paul had shouted. ‘Why do you go on about those kids? If they’ve gone to hell, it’s their own bloody fault and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘I was mad,’ Gloria told herself. ‘I was absolutely mad.’

Then, one morning, a year and a half after she had left England and just when she was coming to the conclusion that whatever difficulties she would have to face, and however hard it might be to trace the boys, she would and should return to London, a letter arrived. It came in a clearly typed envelope, so Gloria wasn’t certain whom it was from before she opened it; and its message was so unexpected that though her initial reaction was and had to be, ‘thank God’, her subsequent reaction was altogether more mixed. It was, however, a letter; and it was a letter that at least didn’t cause her to mourn.

It was signed, this letter, by David; and what he—or a secretary, it occurred to Gloria—had so neatly typed was the following. That he hadn’t written before because he hadn’t wanted to concern her about real problems in the real world, since she had opted out of the real world and undoubtedly didn’t want to be bothered by it. That now, since, ‘insofar as real problems can ever be solved’, his and Michael’s for the moment had been, he had thought she might like to hear from them. And that to cut a long story short, they had come back to England armed with not only the admittedly still fragile self-confidence they had gained at Las Frechas, but with a number of letters of introduction to people who had been associated with the community in the past, or similar, affiliated communities. They had followed these letters up and met several people through them, ‘who without exception turned out to be most helpful and kind’. And the result of that had been that he had found a job with a small ‘but dynamic’ advertising agency based in Manchester and had earned £17,000 in the past year—‘just imagine, £17,000!’—Michael was working for a tulip import company in Norwich who were paying him fourteen thousand plus, but had promised him a rise, and not only were they both buying their own houses, but Michael, ‘believe it or not’, was engaged to a Norfolk girl whom he planned to marry in three months’ time, ‘though we’ll let you know the exact date later.’

Startling developments indeed. Nevertheless, had David ended his letter there, ‘thank God’ would probably have continued to be Gloria’s reaction to it, despite those snide remarks about her opting out of the real world and her misgivings at sons of hers boasting about how much they were earning. But after a fairly chilly salute, ‘Hope you and Paul are well, let us know what you are doing, Love from us both, David,’ David had added a postscript. And that made it impossible for her to repeat any expression of relief with very much conviction. For in what Gloria couldn’t help feeling was the real body of the letter (all that business about introductions, jobs, money and houses had just been so much stuffing, designed no doubt to irritate her), David had gone on, still in a chilly, rather detached fashion, to say that he and Michael had spent a lot of time talking about her and their past lives when they saw each other. Moreover, they had come to the conclusion that while of course they didn’t in any way blame her for what they had gone through,—‘after all, you only did what you thought was right and no one can be blamed for that’ (he made it sound like an advertising slogan)—they had to confess that they were really quite pleased that she was living out of the country now. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to see her; they did and they hoped she might be able to come over for Michael’s wedding, ‘or at least for a week or two sometime next year’; but because ‘well, apart from the fact that we’ve always felt you’re happier living in hot countries surrounded by small brown people, (it does allow you both to feel superior and to agonise over your feelings with a fair degree of comfort, doesn’t it?) you must confess, Ma’—and it was the first time he had ever used this word to her; she had always, to both of them, been Mummy from the day they learned to talk—‘that you do rather monopolise the moral stage, don’t you? You don’t allow an awful lot of room for those around you to stand in the lights and play a part. However insignificant or trivial that part may be, especially when compared to your altogether more meaty role. And we do feel that were you to come back to England again and live here, even without meaning to you might shove us off into the wings again and make us have to put up with simply watching you. I realise we are probably being terribly unfair and it’s just that we’re still not used to our independence, or grown-upness, or whatever you like to call it. If it came to the crunch we probably would be strong enough to keep on our feet and in the light. You never know, though, do you? Some relationships never lose their power, whether for good or ill. So do us a favour Mummy, please—don’t, now that you’ve heard from us, suddenly come rushing home.’

In a way of course, Gloria told herself as she read and reread this postscript—and, more particularly, as she walked down a shimmeringly hot street to the gallery, an hour later, and went through the whole letter again in her head—she should be feeling not just relieved, but delighted. For, in a way, everything had turned out for the best. The boys had become solid, respectable citizens, and she—she had her place in the sun. And the facts that she had never wanted her sons to become solid, respectable citizens and that now, notwithstanding David’s yes, unfair remarks, she no longer wanted her place in the sun were, surely, incidental. Weren’t they?

She couldn’t help herself, however, she thought; as she found herself answering her question with a no. She couldn’t help herself just because she was answering her question with a no. Oh, she supposed she could have grown accustomed to the idea of the boys becoming useful members of society. After all, if that wasn’t the future she would have chosen for them, it was undoubtedly better than the future they looked like having not so long ago. But for their becoming useful members of society to depend on her staying out in her unwanted place in the sun: that was another matter entirely. I mean, she almost said out loud, as she began to feel dazed now, either by the heat or by the contents of the letter really starting to sink in, do I have to sacrifice myself in order for them to continue being useful members of society? Do I have to be a martyr to the cause of solidity and respectability? Oh no, no, that can’t be, isn’t right. And I won’t, damn it, do it.

Except that now that you’ve heard from boys and you know they’re all right, she seemed to hear a voice whispering, your dislike of Vera Cruz and your hatred of Paul will evaporate—as you were always sure they would if you heard that the boys were all right. Now you really will be able to settle in here, now you really will be able to work something out with Paul; and in six months’ time you’ll be so relieved that you’re here and not back in wet, smug, shabby old England that you’ll even admit that unfair though David’s remarks were, he was only telling you things you’ve told yourself in the past. So go on, that voice whispered to her, relax. Everything has turned out for the best. For the very best possible, and for a best far better than any you ever imagined. Why are you fighting it? Go on. Relax. Smile. Be happy.

Yet though she heard this voice and acknowledged that there was something in what it said, Gloria still couldn’t relax; nor be happy. It was partly because the good if extraordinary news from England had come too late, when Vera Cruz was already lying in ruins round her and her relations with Paul had reached the stage that though she was constantly reminding herself that he had once been beautiful and was still attractive in a pale, depressing sort of way, whenever she looked at him she thought him the ugliest person she had ever seen; a person so monstrously, obscenely ugly that she outraged her eyes by raising them towards him. More, though, she couldn’t obey that voice’s instructions because now that she thought about it, she suddenly felt sure that David knew exactly what she was going through here. He knew; and his wishing her to stay, and his making his own and Michael’s continued survival dependant on her staying, were not only, not really, because he was afraid of being pushed off the moral stage should she return to England, but because he actually wanted her to be pushed off stage herself and wanted her to suffer, even die, as a result. David and Michael didn’t just want her to be a passive, relatively happy sacrifice, she told herself. Oh no. That wouldn’t do at all. They wanted her to be an active, profoundly unhappy sacrifice; and unless she were prepared to be one, she suspected they were trying to tell her, then by God they were still prepared to go back to their drugs to punish her. A game she couldn’t and wouldn’t play. Why the hell should I, she asked herself. Why the hell should I?

Because you actively sacrificed them and condemned them to unhappiness so you could stand centre-stage, she tried to tell herself in the month that followed the arrival of David’s letter, and she tried to write an answer to that letter and send it. She didn’t convince herself, however, as she tore up sheet after sheet of paper and began to wonder whether she’d ever manage to communicate with her children again. If David and Michael had been sacrificed—and she denied it absolutely—their sacrifice had been entirely unintentional; a tragic by-product of her determination, as David had so glibly put it, ‘to do what she thought was right’. And her determination to do what she thought was right had in no way been dependent on their being sacrificed. Of course it hadn’t, she told herself as she tossed away yet another sheet. The idea was ludicrous! As if she hadn’t been fighting the fight since she’d been sixteen—years and years before they were so much as conceived, let alone started sticking needles into their arms. How could she even think such a thing? she asked herself, more and more angrily, as that month went by. How could she? And she’d be damned if she’d put up with the boys’ threats. She’d be damned if … She may very well be damned, she reflected, whatever she did.

In which state of mind she was eventually able to complete a letter to her sons. One that said just two things. The first was that she was very happy to hear from them after all this time and happier still that everything had turned out so well. And the second was that while she understood what they said about her not returning to England, even if she was a little hurt by it, or by the manner in which it had been said, she was curious about something. Namely, as to whether what they were really saying was that their integration into society was dependent upon her exclusion from it. Even if that exclusion should cause her, as it now had (and as they had rightly predicted that it would) to feel she were going mad, had been cast out into hell and would either put an end to herself if it wasn’t terminated fairly quickly, or would kill or be killed by Paul. ‘I mean, I love Mexico,’ she wrote, ‘and I’m sure if I had come here when I was younger or in different circumstances I could have involved myself in Mexican life and in Mexican problems. As it is, I have realised that either because of my age, or because of Paul—whom I have come to think of as a ball and chain which keeps me attached to England and English problems—I can never now be a part of Mexican society. Moreover, if I do stay on here I am bound to live as an outcast, who will be ever further cast out with every day she stays.’

She supposed, she murmured to herself as she took the letter to the post office and mailed it, that she had better make sure she was not imagining things before she started getting too worked up.

She only had to wait another three weeks to find out that no, she was not.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mummy,’ David wrote back (and now she might have preferred a ‘Ma’), ‘stop being so melodramatic. Living in hell. Being killed by Paul. What a lot of rubbish. You know quite well that if we had written telling you that we were living under a bridge stealing and selling ourselves in order to buy drugs you would have written telling us you were blissfully happy and that Paul had bloomed in the sun. Instead, just because I write and tell you that we’re now happy, or look as if we have a chance of being so, you start clutching your head and moaning that you want to come home. Well, no, Mummy, I’m sorry—to be perfectly frank, we don’t want you. If you’re an outcast in Mexico, you’re an outcast here. We, however, belong here now and we don’t want you, intentionally or unintentionally, making outcasts of us again. Of course, we can’t precisely forbid you to return, or prohibit your entry into England if you are determined to. But I promise you one thing; I’ll never speak to you again if you do. And when you do manage, nevertheless, as I know you will if you return, somehow to worm your way back into our lives and undermine us, I’ll make sure that when we collapse it’ll be on you whom we fall.

‘Oh Mummy, I’m so sorry to write like this, because you know we love you and always will. We really would never have had another mother. I mean, we both feel that with you we’ve really been through it, whatever ‘it’ is, and come out the other side. With the result that we’ve not only seen far more of the world, or of life, than most people, but that we’re in a position to appreciate it more than most people. However, perhaps what it really boils down to is this. The world needs martyrs if it is to continue, and the cause of let’s say decency, honesty and morality—civilisation?—is to prevail. For years—and I repeat, I’m sure without your intending us to be so—we were the martyrs, while you took up the cause. And I’m sure before us you found other people to sacrifice. Daddy, for one. Or all those friends you told us about you’ve lost contact with. Now, though, we’ve taken up the cause, Mummy, and you’re the martyr. Perhaps what I’m saying is nonsense. Perhaps the cause doesn’t need martyrs, only willing conscripts. But I can’t help feeling I am not talking nonsense. After all, you did always teach us that civilisation requires blood, didn’t you? Well, for years that blood was ours. Now, Mummy, I’m afraid, though I’m still convinced you were exaggerating in your letter and that you’re actually quite happy there, if blood there must be, it’s going to have to be yours. I don’t want to be selfish, but I do feel that Mike and I have given enough; and if we give even another drop, we’ll die.

‘Honestly Mummy, please believe me: we do love you very, very much. But please, too, believe this: that if you love us, you will stay away from England; and you’ll never, whatever happens, try to come back.

‘In the end, all we are asking you to do is retire.’

The trouble was, by the time Gloria did get this confirmation of her worst fears, she had stopped feeling angry about the boys’ previous letter and about the fate they had reserved for her. And her anger wasn’t even revived when she came to the sentence in which David seemed to be equating honesty, decency and morality with working in an advertisting agency, or importing tulips. Perhaps he was right, she told herself wretchedly; and perhaps she was, as usual, being priggish to feel that she should be angry. Yes, she was in hell here, in hell for the very reason that she had retired here, and had come to the conclusion that one couldn’t retire, not from the fight in which she had been engaged, and go on living. Moreover, she really didn’t think that she was being melodramatic when she told herself that she would end up either killing or being killed by Paul. But somehow, for some reason, she no longer cared. And though she had told herself earlier that she’d be damned if she stayed, as well as damned if she didn’t, now she told herself she didn’t mind if she were damned; and that whatever happened to her here, no, she would not go back to England.

Was it because, somewhere inside herself, she believed that the boys were right? Because some latent masochism made her want, after years, as if were, of handing out the punishment, to be that martyr that David said was necessary? Or simply because this country that she had come to love—and she had not been lying to David—had in a sense corrupted her; corrupted her with its sun and sea, corrupted her with its beauty and flowers, corrupted her with its poverty and its air of a place that had lost its past without ever having found a present in which it felt comfortable?

She really didn’t know and she fought against the sudden inertia that had come over her. An inertia, she had the feeling, that having come over her would never now go away. But however hard she fought, she couldn’t dispel it.

So she settled down to her retirement. To her days of working in the gallery; which as a result of several initiatives of hers, was becoming unexpectedly profitable and was providing her with an income superior to that which she received from her investments in England. To her further attempts to integrate herself into Mexican society; attempts that were, despite what she had told the boys, on a drinks and dinner party level, fairly successful. (Even if on a political level, the only level that counted according to her, she continued to feel, wrong of her though she knew it was, that Mexican problems were not her problems, and that the main arteries of world thought, world opinion and world culture did not run through, or even near, Vera Cruz.) And to her evenings spent with Paul arguing, fighting, crying—and now violence, on both their parts, became the norm rather than the exception—and wondering for how much longer she, or both of them, could endure this nightmare. A nightmare that made her dread going home, dread the weekends, wear a curious little smile whenever she walked out of the house to disguise the fact from any watching neighbours that everything inside her four walls was even worse than they must have imagined it was; and made her think that it was hardly surprising if the world’s and Mexico’s problems didn’t seem very relevant to her, when her own problems excluded any thought save how she was going to get through to bedtime without having Paul punch her, without her throwing a bottle or an ashtray at him, and without both of them ending up lying on the stained and dirty carpet drunk, crying and telling each other, ‘Please stop it, please stop it, oh, please, please stop it.’

And so, probably, it would have gone on in a kind of never-ending and profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion to a story that had started, in Gloria’s mind, one night in her house in London, when a policeman had pushed her over. A never-ending ending that didn’t even achieve tragedy, due to the utter lack of resistance she had offered when she’d been faced with it. She was the sacrifice necessary for her sons’ continuing to live and prosper in the world? All right, so be it. She had renounced what was, in the final analysis, her life, in order that David could become an advertising executive and Michael an importer of tulips? Yes, she had and so what? She was, as David had said, the living proof that what she had always claimed and taught them was true: that civilisation needed blood to survive? Yes, yes she was, and frankly, what did it matter? After all, she did love the boys, at least it was hot here and the scenery was splendid, and she had a reasonably interesting, relatively well-paid job as well as her income from England. I mean, things could be worse, she told herself, there are hundreds of millions of people far more worthy of pity than me in the world and anyway my fate simply isn’t the stuff that tragedies are made of. Tragedies are like symphonies that end in some great dark resolution of all that has gone before. Whereas my life is just going to string itself out in a series of unresolved notes, until someday, for some reason, there will be silence. And that, without any ado whatsoever, will be that. No tragedy. No fight. No nothing.

And so, probably, it would have gone on … if six months after David’s last letter she hadn’t received another little note from him telling her that Michael was now married (‘sorry we didn’t let you know before, but it was a very small affair and anyway as I hadn’t heard from you …’). And if she hadn’t, after a particularly awful battle with Paul, found herself repeating and repeating that phrase of hers about civilisation needing blood to survive, as she walked to work wearing a pair of dark glasses to hide a bruised eye. Found herself repeating it and found herself wondering whether that blood necessarily had to be hers. For not only had she not been melodramatic when she had told the boys that she would end up killing or being killed by Paul, but she was beginning to think that that killing wouldn’t be delayed much longer. However, she thought, if it was she who did, rather than she who was done-to, and if she didn’t actually wait till the night when she couldn’t control herself any longer and grabbed a carving knife and stuck it into him, but took a somewhat more calculated attitude towards what was inevitable anyway, mightn’t she be able to edge her way, however cautiously at first, back into the swim of things? All right, maybe she wouldn’t return to England; that much she could continue to do for the boys. And maybe she wouldn’t ever become fully a member of Mexican society. With Paul out of the way, however, she might become a good deal more a member of it than she was at present; even to the extent of becoming, yes, politically involved again. Further, with Paul out of the way she might feel she was that much nearer to the heart of world affairs, had her hand a little more firmly on the pulse of reality, and had the time, the energy and above all the will, to care. Of course, she went on, she didn’t have to do the thing itself; but she had no doubt that if she made one or two discreet enquiries, and paid sufficiently well, she would find someone who would help her to make it look as if Paul had decided that enough was enough and had got on a plane, or taken a train, and left. And as long as it was done moderately carefully, she saw no reason why anyone should ever suspect anything, let alone discover the truth. After all, apart from her, Paul didn’t have a friend in the world.

Oh yes, she told herself as she walked along, thinking that she would write and congratulate Michael as soon as she arrived at the gallery, and feeling more cheerful than she had in ages: civilisation needs blood. Or at least, as I believe I actually put it: one must be prepared to get blood on one’s hands if one wants to survive in this world. Or have others get blood on their hands for one.

After that, things started to look up.

THE MAN WHO LOVED ENGLAND

For a moment he thought she must be sick, or that her father, sitting next to her, had said something to upset her. Then, following the direction of her gaze—a gaze that never faltered even as the tears ran down her cheeks—he realised what she was crying about. And as he realised, first he found a phrase from Shakespeare’s Othello coming to him, ‘and I loved you that you did pity them’, and second, as that phrase, perhaps because she was Italian, set itself to music and became a phrase from Verdi’s Otello, ‘e io t’amavo per la tua pietà’, it struck him that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life. Partly on account of her hair, that, tied back in a pony-tail, was so dark and shining it made one want to reach out and stroke it; partly on account of her skin, that was so perfect it conjured up images of velvety wild roses growing in the shadows of a summer wood; and partly on account of her eyes, that were so black and deep they called to mind pictures of Mexican cenotes, the great ceremonial wells where the Mayans used to drown their victims. But beautiful more on account of the total innocence with which she sat there crying, and of her utter absence of guile, affectation and, as he thought of it, self. Of course she was only sixteen and, coming from a well-off Milanese family, had probably never before been exposed to the sight of children, small children, and children of her own age, scrabbling around on great piles of garbage, looking for something they could sell, or eat. All the same, he had seen other sixteen year olds from prosperous European families catch their first glimpse of what they no doubt termed ‘Third Wordlism’ and none had ever reacted like this before. In fact, most had reacted exactly like their parents; staring out of the window of their taxi, or hired car, or coach, with looks of dismay, of horror, of shame, of embarrassment and an undisguised fascination that bordered on glee. ‘Wow, look—it’s just like you see on TV. They do, actually, do it. Jesus, isn’t that terrible?’ She was so beautiful that Charlie himself felt moved, as much by her distress as by what was causing it, though that too he felt he was seeing, through her eyes, for the first time. And she was so beautiful and he wanted so much to protect that beauty, that innocence, that selflessness, that he did what he had never done before and never would have done for anyone else. He fished in the pocket of his jacket, took out the perfectly clean and ironed Irish linen handkerchief that his Italian mother had given him, with a kiss, as he was leaving the house this morning, and, leaning over the back of his seat in the minibus, held it out.

‘Signorina,’ he said, trying to make his voice as gentle as her expression, ‘have this.’

The girl looked and saw what he was offering her; for the briefest of instants there was a flicker of revulsion on her flawless face, though whether for what was being held out, or for who was holding it out, Charlie couldn’t tell. Then she murmured, with a sweetness that made his effort at gentleness sound as boorish and crude as a croak, ‘Thank you, but I’ve got one.’ ‘But thank you,’ she repeated after a moment, in a voice still more exquisitely tender; as she stretched out and just touched him on the back of his hand, so he would forgive her for that flicker of revulsion which she knew he had caught, gave him a smile that didn’t so much remind him of Shakespeare now as Mozart at his most desperately sad and lovely, and cast on him the full depth of that gaze that had formerly been reserved for the children on the garbage heap. ‘And please,’ she said, wanting him, he told himself, to forgive her now for her very compassion, ‘call me Isabella.’

‘Yes,’ he mumbled, and said something about her calling him Charlie. Then, wiping his sweating hands—or paws, as he thought of them—with his handkerchief, he resisted the temptation to let Isabella know with a glance, a smile, or a word of his own that of course he forgave her, and beamed mournfully round at the other passengers in the mini-bus. He told them he was very sorry for the state of the traffic and indeed for the state of his country, which as they saw was going through rather a bad time. And he assured them, trying not to sound ironical or bitter, and wishing even as he spoke that he had kept his mouth shut, that they wouldn’t be exposed to too much of this sort of thing, waving his hand at the squalor and misery outside. From tomorrow they would be seeing ‘the real Egypt’.

He wished he had kept his mouth shut because he knew what the reaction to his statement would be. ‘But no, this is the real Egypt.’ And he had heard it once too often. It was such a glib, fatuous response—as fatuous and glib as his own remark—and it was a response that on every level, according to him, was false. The ‘real’ Egypt that these people had come to see was the Egypt of the Pyramids, the Nile, Luxor and Abu Simbel—and to a lesser extent, of the mosques of Cairo, the Khan-el-Khalili Bazaar and the High Dam at Aswan—just as the ‘real’ Egypt that he himself believed in was the Egypt of the Pyramids, the Nile, Luxor and Abu Simbel. That was the Egypt that everything else, everything that followed, was based on; and in the same way as Italy would not have been Italy had it been deprived at a stroke of all the works of the Etruscans, the Romans and the masters of the Renaissance, and England would not have been England without Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, so Egypt without its past, without its cultural foundations, would not any longer have been Egypt. It would have been a mere name on the map, a mere geographical entity, without interest, without, possibly, life and without, precisely, ‘reality’.

‘This is not the real Egypt,’ he wanted to shout at his passengers, ‘any more than the slums of Liverpool are the real England, or the lower depths of Naples are the real Italy. They are the flaws in the reality, if you like, and the people who live in them are the victims of reality. But they are not the reality itself. And it is cant and sentimental nonsense to say they are. So now please, shut up, read your guidebooks, or let me tell you what we will be doing tomorrow. Reality indeed. Huh! Pah! What crap!’

It goes without saying that Charlie did not shout any of this to his charges—never had, to any of the people his father had persuaded him to accompany on their Egyptian holidays in the past—and simply waited until his moment of bad temper had passed. As it did, today—after all, only two members of his party actually coming out with the dreaded words—quite quickly. He would have liked to, however, he told himself and one day, if he was really pushed to it, he would.

But rather than do that, he reflected, it would be better to tell his father that he was sorry but he couldn’t undertake any more of these trips. Even if that hurt his business. And even if that meant, from then on, that he would have lost the opportunity of meeting people like Isabella Orsini.

Whose beauty, in his eyes, had not been diminished by the fact that of the two people on board who had trotted out the ‘But this is the real Egypt’ line, one of them had been her. If anything, he told himself as he glanced in the side mirror, hoping to see her reflection, it had been enhanced by it. For the girl had said it so naturally, so spontaneously, that she had sounded as if she believed it; and had made him wonder if what really angered him when he heard those words was not so much that people said them and they were false, but that they said them while knowing them to be false.

It had largely been because Isabella had been one of the two people who had given the stock response to his cliché that Charlie’s ill temper had passed as quickly as it had; and he forgave not only himself for having tossed that trite ball into court in the first place, but the other person who had batted it back in such a facile fashion. To wit: the person for whom his father had laid on this trip—or anyway, to whom he had offered the services of his son as guide—was a short, stocky, bearded and balding industrialist called Rizzuto from somewhere in the north of Italy. It was also largely because Isabella had this power to make him see as virtues in her what would have appeared as vices in others, that though he had begged his father not to send him off for two weeks—‘You know how much I hate it,’ he had said, trying to make himself as ungainly and ugly as possible, so his father might feel sorry for him and stop asking this favour of him—by the time the minibus had left the worst of the slums and was heading down town towards the Hilton, he was feeling glad that he had finally agreed. Glad and relieved that his father had not said ‘All right Charlie, if you really don’t want to …’ and ruffled up his hair, and turned aside so his son shouldn’t see how deeply he loved him.

After all, he told himself, it’s years since I took a boat up to Aswan. And even though no one in Mr Rizzuto’s party seems to know quite how to treat me—as a guide, as friend, as an almost business acquaintance—they all seem quite amiable. And just as long as I can look at Isabella every so often, and sometimes talk to her … Turning round again now, to explain something else to the ten people whom his father had entrusted to his care, once more Charlie caught a look of the sweetest, most unaffected compassion in Isabella’s eyes as she, like all but one of the other passengers, gazed at him, wanting to hear what he had to tell them.

And as he saw it, he once more heard, within his head, that phrase from Verdi’s Otello.

‘E to t’amavo per la tua pietà.’

*

Pity, in one form or another, had been with Charlie all his life. He had grown up with it, like a brother or sister. He had gone to school with it, having it sitting next to him at his desk, and keeping him company as he watched his schoolfriends play football and tennis. And it had joined him in the little office his father had put at his disposal when, at the age of seventeen, he had said no, he didn’t want to go to university, nor take a year off travelling in Europe, nor even—nor above all—go and stay with distant relatives in England, but wanted to start work immediately in the family firm. Yet it was not he, he hoped and was almost certain, who had demanded this companion. Indeed, he liked to think he could have done very well without it. It was rather others who had always been determined to saddle him with it, to thrust it upon him, and to say, with their every gesture, ‘Oh, do take it with you when you go out Charlie, otherwise you’ll be lonely.’ ‘Oh, do let it come with you when you go on holiday Charlie, otherwise you won’t have anyone to talk to.’ ‘Oh, do just let it sit with you Charlie, in a corner of the room, and keep you company.’

If he thought that he could very well have done without this friend whom everyone insisted he go about with, however, he was well aware why his parents, relations and fellow workers in the office did so insist, and wasn’t in the least upset that they did. On the contrary, he was very grateful. For they didn’t do so meaning, ‘That way we don’t have to bother about you.’ Instead, he felt, they did it because they cared for him and honestly believed he would be happier if he had their pity—as well as themselves—to go around with. How could he not be grateful, he would sometimes ask himself, when people showed such concern for him? In fact, he sometimes felt that he was the most loved—and therefore happiest?—person in the world and the gods had only made him physically ill-favoured so he wouldn’t be too heaped with blessings; so heaped that he invoked the jealousy of mortals, who would see it as their task to destroy him. He could never have been as happy as he was had he been born good looking, or even attractive; and he was fairly sure that he would never have been so loved. This was why he never, not even in his heart of hearts, he told himself, wished that he could be transformed from the toad he was into the handsomest of princes; and why, too, grateful though he was for everyone’s insistence that he never go anywhere without his good friend pity, he himself would have been quite content without him. He never found himself calling for him, sulkily insisting on his presence, or arrogantly demanding his constant attention. Oh, sure, he did at times overdo his ugly toad act, make himself more graceless, awkward, unlovely and misbegotten than he actually was, just so those close to him would press his companion on him with particular attention, just so he would be given an extra dollop of love. But there was a difference between feeling sorry for oneself and wanting to indulge one’s craving for sweets, wasn’t there? Especially when one happened to be, as all people were at times, depressed. In the same way, as there was a difference between being aware of one’s own shortcomings, and accepting them with a possibly bitter sweet smile and the occasional curse, and hating oneself so much for what one could do nothing about that one wasted one’s life longing to be someone else. And truly, Charlie often told himself—and told himself with something approaching smugness on the afternoon of December 29, 1987, after he had said goodbye to Isabella Orsini and her party, promising to see them bright and early the following morning in order to start their sightseeing—he didn’t want to be anyone else. For who but a toad would be gazed at as he had been by that gorgeous, that breathtaking child? Who else but a toad would have been able to contemplate spending two whole weeks in her company, without the slightest risk of rejection?

A handsome prince would have been dismissed out of hand, he told himself as he waddled happily home, pretending to be Charles Laughton in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Even someone just reasonable looking would not, he suspected, have found such favour in the cenote black eyes—and in the heart?—of the tender, flawless Isabella. Whereas he—oh, his only rivals were those desperate children rooting amongst the garbage. And if he could help it, she wasn’t going to be seeing any more of them.

*

Nor, in the four days that Isabella spent in Cairo—with her brother and father, her father’s second wife with her two children from a previous marriage, an Englishman and Mr and Mrs Rizzuto and son—did she. She would have liked to, he knew; for she was unimpressed by the Pyramids and the Sphinx, though her heart bled for the poor camels who had to give tourists rides all day. ‘Poor things,’ she sighed to Charlie, ‘they must hate it. With all this dust. And with all these people.’ She had to be led—by the hand! (‘Oh, thank you Charlie, you’re so sweet, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’)—out of the museum in Memphis that housed the fallen Statue of Ramses II, because it was too crowded. And she looked, his woodland rose, as if she might wilt for good when he insisted on taking her all round and telling her the history of the step pyramid of Saquaara. In fact, the only things that almost made her enthusiastic were the treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb and the jewellery shops in the Great Bazaar. These, Charlie saw, she would happily have spent her entire time in Cairo looking at, if she hadn’t been aware that to do so, or just to have expressed the desire to do so, would have denoted a superficial soul: not an attribute she had any intention of possessing. ‘Oh Charlie,’ she murmured, keeping close to him as he guided her down narrow streets and alleys that she found, he saw, disappointingly clean despite the occasional puddle and rotting cauliflower. ‘You know I feel terribly ashamed of being here. I mean here I am, sixteen years old, in my cashmere jacket and English shoes, with a nice clean hotel to go back to and money in my pocket, whereas most of these people’—nodding nervously in the direction of shopkeepers, passers-by and children of various ages—‘look as if they haven’t got anything, or not very much, except their dignity of course … and … if I were in their place I think I’d spit at me.’ A pause. ‘I mean, do you know how much this jacket cost? And it isn’t even one hundred per cent cashmere. Though you wouldn’t know it to feel it, would you. Go on. Feel it.’

If Isabella would not admit to what she most wanted to do, however, Charlie had no intention of allowing her to do the thing she next most wanted to do—the only other thing she wanted to do in the city—and steered her away from the subject, when she looked like approaching it, by saying that certain areas of town were not safe to go walking in. He added, trying not to sound as if he were addressing her in particular, but were rather making a general remark at most aimed at Mr Rizzuto, who would also have liked to make a tour of the lower depths, that he found it grotesque when tourists came here, or went to any other poor country, he tossed in quickly, and got some sort of pleasure in looking at or taking photographs of those who were immeasurably worse off than they. ‘I mean, really, I find it disgusting,’ he said, getting worked up despite himself, and thereby letting Isabella know that even if she had confessed to being interested primarily in jewels and trinkets he wouldn’t have granted her other wish; he more than ever wouldn’t have granted it. ‘When people come here and start making television films or writing articles about conditions in “The Third World”. Because ninety nine times out of a hundred, though they might mean to instruct, they really just entertain. If they were genuinely interested in the fundamental causes of the misery they see they’d devote most of their films or articles to London or New York or Tokyo or Zurich. Because that’s where’—he suddenly felt himself running out of steam, or having an accident if he didn’t apply the brakes violently—‘well, I don’t want to start being contentious, or sounding like some tinpot radical, but that’s where the root of the problem lies. Or lay, in the past,’ he murmured, attempting now to slip into reverse, or at least come to a complete stop. ‘I mean, what you see here is just a symptom, isn’t it? The disease lies elsewhere. And has been in the body for so long now that … but really, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get carried away. And I know that lots of people say that theory’s nonsense. It’s just that …’

‘No, no,’ the chorus went up, with Mr Rizzuto himself leading it, as Charlie should have guessed he would. ‘You’re absolutely right, Charlie, we may call you Charlie mayn’t we? It is disgusting. Disgusting and grotesque. I mean, people don’t go round hospitals to look at the sick and the dying, do they? So why should they go round the slums? Unless they want to show the people who live there how much better off they are. Or unless they want to congratulate themselves on being rich and healthy, and able to fly away somewhere at a moment’s notice.’

‘Or unless,’ Isabella breathed wistfully, ‘they want to remind themselves that this could happen to them, and that they should try and do something to help those less fortunate than themselves.’

‘Oh Isabella, Isabella, my darling,’ Charlie told himself, as her brother, father and step-mother all weighed in with remarks such as: ‘Like what?’ ‘Oh Bella, don’t be so fatuous.’ ‘What do you mean, “do something to help them”? Give them a sandwich every time they allow themselves to be photographed standing on a rubbish tip?’ ‘Oh Isabella, Isabella, my darling, you’re so incredibly, wonderfully …’ he paused, nearly said ‘naive’ and concluded with the less ambiguous ‘innocent’. ‘And so incredibly, wonderfully tenderhearted. But I’m sorry, my darling’—trying to make himself more toadlike than ever and thus convince her that his outburst hadn’t been directed at her—‘if you are determined to find a subject worthy of your compassion here in Egypt, then I am determined to be it. And if you must cry for someone, then insofar as it is in my power to make you do so, it is me and me alone you will cry for. Oh Isabella,’ Charlie pleaded silently, ‘look at me. Look how hideous I am.’ A message that, for all that it was unspoken, Isabella seemed to receive; for from then on she not only never gave the faintest sign of wanting to see anything other than what Charlie decided to show her, but seemed determined to spend as much time as she could in the company of her monstrous guide. In this she was not alone, for more and more, and particularly after his tirade on their last day in Cairo, all the other members of her party—or his party, as Charlie supposed it was—gathered about him, or came to look at him as the centre of their circle. He was not just their guide but their leader, their adviser and their confidant. But whereas when Mr and Mrs Rizzuto or Mr and Mrs Orsini sought him out, or tried to take him aside and talk to him, and make him his or her particular friend, while he allowed himself to be wooed and was happy to be contended for there was always a part of him that stood back and held itself in reserve, when Isabella took him aside—oh, then there was no standing back and he entirely forgot that he had other people in his care.

Yet, as they embarked on their cruise ship and sailed down to Luxor where they stayed for a further four days, though Isabella did seem keen on spending as much time as possible in his company and though she did seem to have received that message he had sent her in Cairo, Charlie couldn’t help feeling that his outburst that day had affected the way she thought about him. For try as he had to convince her it wasn’t her he was talking to, of course more than anyone it had been; and she had realised it. With the result that for all her lavishing her undivided compassion on him and a great deal of her undivided attention, she was, underneath, very slightly frightened of him. He had made her suspect that he wasn’t just the flabby, wet-lipped, loping clown he made himself out to be, but that somewhere beneath that disagreeable exterior there was a man of passion, a man of intelligence even; and a man who was, therefore, capable of transcending himself and achieving a sort of beauty. And if poverty, misery and utter wretchedness both attracted Isabella and made her cry, passion, intelligence and above all beauty made her wary. Why, he had no idea, and anyway, the reasons didn’t really interest him. All that mattered was that it was so; and that since it was so, he would have to do everything in his power to reassure her that he was not a threat and that he was indeed quite as repulsive as he looked.

As for the best part of a week, at any rate until they had left Luxor and were making their way slowly down to Aswan, he believed he succeeded in doing. He slobbered and slavered. He let his shirt flop out from inside his trousers and he let his stomach flop out behind his shirt. He dragged his right foot behind him when he walked and if he didn’t exactly not shave he shaved irregularly, so there were tufts and patches of hair on his round, somehow unformed face. And while it was beyond him not to shower and to allow himself to stink—as he did when he didn’t shower and as he perhaps should have allowed himself to: it would have been the finishing touch—he did force himself, though it caused him almost as much pain as not showering, not to wash his hair every day, nor clean his teeth. So that his brownish wavy locks, already tinged with grey despite his mere twenty-three years, flopped greasily over his perpetually sweating forehead; and his teeth, after no more than twenty-four hours, were furry and coated with whatever it was that was deposited on teeth when one ate, as he did, too many sweet and sugary things. At times, as he grinned tragically, smiled pathetically, or lost his temper in a shrill, undignified fashion with money changers, carriage drivers, or stallkeepers who dared to importune any of his charges (who didn’t at all mind being importuned) and particularly his beloved Isabella (who actually enjoyed it) he thought he was overdoing it. He was giving too barefaced an imitation of his namesake Laughton as the Hunchback. At any moment he expected one or other of the group—above all Isabella’s father, a tiny, birdlike, sardonic man who looked with an amused and beady eye at everything Charlie pointed out to him, and made Charlie feel he didn’t take anything quite seriously—to say ‘Oh, come off it, Charlie,’ or ‘All right, we’ve guessed and you do it very well, but enough’s enough.’ Yet not only did no one say anything, but the broader, the cruder the caricature, the greater seemed everyone’s desire to look on him as a figure of authority. Each wanted to be the one who stood closest to him as he talked about this or that temple or tomb, and the one who accompanied him as he dragged his lame way from monument to monument and seemed barely able to clamber up and down the gangway of the ship. Even little Girogio Orsini, who so gave the impression of seeing through him, appeared able to accept this part of his act; and only really began to view him as an imposter when he stopped putting on a show, and forgot himself in his stories of Ramses, Amenophis IV and Hatshepsut.

Perhaps I really do look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Charlie told himself at times; and no one objects to or notices my performance because it’s indistinguishable from the way I act normally. He didn’t think he did; after all, the Hunchback was actually deformed, whereas he was just, let’s say, badly finished. Maybe, however, he had been fooling himself all these years; maybe the fact that he had always been so loved had tended to obscure his vision, cast a layer, a thick layer, of gauze over his eyes; so that what he saw in the mirror was but a distant, softened and highly flattering version of the truth.

Unfortunately he wasn’t quite able to transform himself from man into beast. For along with his inability not to take a shower every morning and his habit of losing himself whenever he got onto the subject of the ancient Egyptians—about whom he knew far more, he realised, than any of the actual tourist guides he heard lecturing their charges—he couldn’t quite disguise the fact that beside being well-read in Egyptian history, he had a far wider knowledge of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Hardy, James, Isherwood, Waugh and Greene, and of Verdi, Donizetti, Dante, Leopardi, Pirandello, Pavese and Calvino, certainly than his darling Isabella and probably than any of the other members of his party. What do you expect though? he wanted to bleat whenever he did inadvertently give them a glimpse of all the knowledge he had stacked away in the larder of his mind. A glimpse for which he tried to apologise, or make them think they’d been imagining things, by behaving for the next hour or so afterwards in a manner still more grotesque than normal. More grotesque, indeed, he told himself, than any half-way discerning audience would have found acceptable even in the most notorious ham. ‘I mean, while all of you have been, or are, out keeping slim on life, on experience, on marriages and love affairs, on travel here and work there, on meals in restaurants and holidays with friends all over Europe, I’ve been stuck in Cairo, in my parents’ apartment, with nothing to do but stuff myself with culture and squirrel things away for a winter that will probably never come. Is it any wonder that I’m bloated and that that larder is full to bursting?’

All the same, betray himself though he did now and then, on the whole his impersonation of some creature that hadn’t quite made it out of the primaeval slime was, however overdone, convincing; and if it hadn’t been for the person whom he thought of as the tenth member of the group and certainly the odd man out, he was fairly sure he would have been able to keep it up until the day he said goodbye to Isabella at Cairo airport. Shook her hand, and saw her, as he had no doubt he would, not just become damp-eyed, but dissolve into a storm of tears. Weeping, as she tried to assure him with her final backward glance that she would never forget him and that as always happened in the best fairy tales—and in the best Jacobean tragedies, Charlie reflected—Beauty had fallen in love with the Beast.

One night up on deck, however, Charlie had had one of his ‘moments’; had been so softened, so weakened, so, in a sense, made up to and seduced, that he hadn’t been able to resist not just flinging open his larder door and displaying all the goodies he had laid up there, but of opening the special cupboard within his larder, in which he kept his most precious, his rarest preserves, and bringing those out into the light of day. A gesture that, though it had possibly won him a friend, or anyway given him some real contact with another human being, perhaps for the first time outside his immediate family in his life, had lost him Isabella for good. For she was present at the opening, or a good part of it. And afterwards, she both realised that the toad was not a toad at all but, if not a handsome prince either, just an ordinary mortal, and half saw, or half suspected, why this ordinary mortal had pretended to be a toad in the first place. And that she couldn’t forgive. Ah, she had been right to feel a little afraid of him after his lecture about tourists in the slums; and paradoxically, though he had now revealed himself not to be a monster, in a sense he had revealed himself to be a worse one. Only not, any longer, the sort of monster she liked. How could she feel sorry for, or weep for, someone who was so cynical, so false, so—in his soul—ugly?

Isabella’s father, the beady eyed Giorgio, was a partner in one of Mr Rizzuto’s many companies. ‘And a friend, and a friend!’ the bearded industrialist chirped, as he put his arm around the little man’s shoulders, and Giorgio himself practically winked at Charlie as if to say, ‘Don’t believe a word of it.’ Her step-mother, a slim, attractive, make-up-less woman of forty-nine (Charlie had seen her passport) with a worried expression and an urgent, intense manner, worked in some local government office in Florence. Her seventeen-year-old brother was still at school, while her step-brother and sister, twenty and twenty-two respectively, were both at university, the one studying medicine and the other architecture. Mr Rizzuto’s wife, a tiny, also attractive, but Charlie suspected unhappy woman, was a teacher. And the Rizzuto son, a curiously lopsided, shy child of ten, was simply—a child of ten, albeit an appealing one. So much had Charlie learned in the first week or so he had been shepherding ‘Mr Rizzuto and friends’ around. Who their English acquaintance was, though, and what he did, he not only hadn’t discovered, but had the feeling he never would discover unless he asked the man point blank. A step he couldn’t take. Partly because he rarely asked anyone anything point blank, preferring either to pick information up as best he could, or to have it volunteered by those he spoke to; and partly because just as Isabella felt slightly frightened of him, so he felt slightly frightened of the Englishman. What was more, at least to a certain degree, he felt slightly frightened of him for the same reasons that Isabella felt slightly frightened of him. That is, he suspected that behind the man’s mask of a reserved, faintly haughty, unfailingly well-mannered Englishman in his early forties, there lay if not a larder full of unsuspected goodies, at any rate a library full of unsuspected volumes—or possibly, Charlie found himself thinking, a zoo full of unsuspected animals. So that when he spoke to the man, he couldn’t help wondering both why he wore a mask at all—none of the others did; they were all, transparently, what they were—and, more to the point, if he mightn’t suddenly and unexpectedly haul out one of his hidden volumes; release one of his captive animals.

The other reason he felt somewhat nervous when the man was around was just because he was English and the English, in all their different varieties, had always made Charlie nervous. The ‘typically’ English, as to Charlie’s way of thinking this one was, in his tall, slim, fading, fair-haired fashion; the crabby, mean-voiced Englishman or woman one came across only too often; the booming, barking, military—or more often would-be military-type; or—Charlie’s favourite sort—the shy, awkward, somehow mottled sort, who wore funny clothes, went scarlet in the sun and had something profoundly gentle and kind about them. The sort who looked as if they had been terribly crushed by the weight of their country’s history and had emerged from their ordeal bruised, uncertain of where they stood in the world, or if they could stand at all, but sweeter than they might have been if they had not been so injured and maimed.

Yet though they made Charlie nervous, he also tended to like the English—apart from the crabby ones and the barking, arrogant, disagreeable ones—more than any other people he had ever come into contact with. Just as he loved England—and this unreservedly; for he thought of those hateful English as changelings, outcasts who had no right in and could claim no part of their native land—more than any other country that he knew of.

And it was this liking for the English, and this love of England, that undid him. That, and the beauty, the sheer, extraordinary splendour of the upper-Egyptian night.

One of the reasons Charlie had finally agreed to his father’s request to accompany the Rizzuto party on their Egyptian holiday (‘Please Charlie,’ the very tall, very thin, grey-haired man had said, giving his son a look that meant, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t go alone, we’ll send your friend pity with you’) was that he remembered what the sky had been like on his previous trip down south, when he’d been fifteen. Indeed, it was the thing he remembered most clearly. Somehow Karnak and the Valley of the Kings had always been with him, and were, in reality, only slightly more magnificent than he had always imagined. Whereas the sky he had never spared a thought for before he went, and would have said, had he been asked, that he couldn’t believe it would be any different from the sky in Cairo or Alexandria; the only two places in the world that he knew at the age of fifteen. But when he looked up, the night the ship left Luxor, he saw above him an immense, smooth, blue-black sheet of darkness, with innumerable tiny rents in it through which shone lights of various colours more dazzling, more welcoming, more enticing than he would ever have thought possible. Extraordinary hues, that suggested that behind that vast, dark, yet strangely comforting sheet there was a brilliant kind world in which, had one only been able to burst through the skin of this suffocating, tormented bubble in which one was trapped, one would have been able to live and play and be happy. A world in which one would never come up against those tight, judgmental words that here on earth were constantly binding one and forcing one to be only, and for the whole of one’s life, oneself: words such as ugly, fat, ungainly, sly, greedy, selfish and of course worst of all, pitiful. And when he looked up and saw all that, he became quite dizzy with wonder; and became certain that should he live to be a hundred, he would never see anything even half so glorious again.

Naturally, he had told himself in the years since then, impressive though that sky had been and stick though it had in his memory, the effect it had had on him had had as much to do with himself and the fact that he was at a particularly sensitive age as it had to do with any absolute, intrinsic beauty—if indeed there was any such thing. After all, it was just then that he was really starting to run up against those limitations that he was soon to realise would be with him till he died. Before then he had imagined that the bubble in which he felt both cocooned and trapped was only the bubble of his childhood. Nevertheless, he would one day like to return, to see to what extent the night and the stars south of Luxor were different from the other nights and stars he knew—which remained those of Cairo and Alexandria—and to what extent he had merely perceived them as different. So maybe if at some future date his father had some client, as he occasionally did, to whom he wished to do a favour by making the arrangements for his holiday in Egypt and providing him with a guide, well, if his father didn’t wish to go himself, maybe he’d allow himself to be persuaded to. He wasn’t sure. But maybe …

‘Please Charlie. They’re very nice. I mean, I don’t know what their friends are like. But the Rizzutos themselves, I’m sure you’ll like them. I met them last year, and they’re very kind.’

‘Oh, all right then. You’re not paying for them all, are you?’

‘No, of course not. I’ve just made sure that the Rizzutos get the best cabin on the boat, and I just said I’d try to get someone to go with them. To take care of … oh, you know, all the little things that could go wrong, or might need taking care of. And I know you like to think you’re no good at that sort of thing and that you prefer to stay shut up here in the office all day. But I’ve seen you in action, and actually you’re not half so inept as you like to make out. In fact, underneath I suspect you have the makings of a very good businessman. And it’ll do you good to get away for a bit. I’d go myself if I could, but they’re doing the whole thing and I really can’t take two weeks off at this time of year.’

‘I said,’ Charlie had muttered, unable not to sound a little petulant, ‘I’d go.’

‘Well, try and sound a little more cheerful about it. After all, it’ll be a holiday. You won’t have to run around them the whole time. They’re all more or less adults, apart from the Rizzuto’s son. And you’ve always said you wanted to go back some time. Do you remember on the way to Aswan? You spent the whole of one night up on the deck, just staring at the stars.’

‘Ah,’ Charlie had smiled, without a trace of petulance now, ‘I was just going through a romantic phase then.’

As, he told himself a month after this conversation with his father, he supposed he must again be doing. For he had spent practically the whole of the first night of this trip, after they had left Luxor, lying in a deck chair staring up at the stars. Finding, moreover, not just that his memory hadn’t lied to him, and given a gloss to what had undoubtedly been fairly spectacular, but that if anything it had cast the faintest mist of scepticism over the scene, and dimmed the splendour of the reality. Indeed, eight years later, that splendour made him feel he was dissolving in it, being rendered invisible by it. So much so that it literally brought tears to his eyes, as he lay up there at two-thirty in the morning, hearing only the sound of the water hissing gently by, and the slow heartlike throb of the engines as they moved the ship forward, so smoothly that the lightest sleeping passenger wouldn’t be woken. Tears to his eyes, and a lump to his throat. Look, he wanted to cry to someone—to, he told himself, Isabella, who was at this moment no doubt sleeping in her cabin—isn’t it the most extraordinarily beautiful sight you’ve ever seen? And isn’t that the sign of true beauty? When it so captures you that it makes nothing of you, it totally eliminates you and all your petty fears and hatreds—and your loves and your sense of duty and honour, too—and so makes you become it that through it you become part of the entire universe, a part that can never be cancelled even if you drop dead right now? For this, insofar as we can understand eternity, will go on forever. And if you give yourself to it, or allow yourself to be taken by it, you yourself will go on forever. Oh look, he wanted to cry to Isabella. Look my darling. Look at the colours. Look at the light. Feel it—oh, feel it drape itself around you. The magic cloak that gives everyone who puts it on immortality. The intoxicating, unutterably lovely sky; stretching over the river where civilisation first started, and man, shedding blood, first started to cut himself off from the sky. Oh, look my darling. Look!

And he would, he told himself, have gone down to her cabin, woken her and, dragging her up on deck, cried just this to her; if he hadn’t known that Isabella would have gazed up at the sky with the same lack of interest with which she had regarded the Pyramids at Giza; and would have gazed at him, made mad by his rapture, made invisible by his rapture, yet at the same time made beautiful by his rapture, with horror.

He knew this. He knew it. And yet, less than twenty-four hours later, he had done it. Not to the extent of going down to her cabin and waking her, of course; had he allowed himself to get that carried away Isabella would no doubt have started screaming and insisted he be removed from the ship. Nor even by singing his, in the event much abbreviated and watered down, hymn of praise directly to her. (Though as with his speech about the tourists it was aimed at her and she realised it.) Nevertheless, cry out to her he had; and with enough insistence, enough passion to make her then turn her gaze on him with a revulsion that was not followed by any apologetic touch of the hand, or any compensating smile of pity. And having cried out to her, instead of trying somehow to make amends, he had both panicked at the damage he had already done—launching into another hymn out of desperation and thereby compounding the damage—and at the same time become defiant; thinking ‘Oh well, my darling, since I’ve already made myself ugly in your eyes, I don’t see any point in stopping now, and while we’re about it you might just as well get the whole portrait and really be revolted.’

That damned, damned Englishman, Charlie found himself thinking afterwards; for it had been to him, standing on the top deck with Isabella at eleven o’clock on the second night of the journey from Luxor to Aswan that he had, at least ostensibly, chanted his paean to the sky. As it had been the Englishman who had started the whole ball rolling, so to speak, by murmuring, in his quiet, encouraging voice, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Charlie had blurted out. ‘In fact, I spent just about the whole of last night up here on deck looking at the stars. I think this is the most extraordinary sight in the world. Or at least,’ he had added apologetically, ‘the most extraordinary sight I’ve ever seen.’

Oh why, he asked himself afterwards, hadn’t that man kept quiet, or addressed his remark to Isabella? And why, having heard that brief lovesong from a creature he had hitherto taken to be a slug—an agreeable slug maybe, but a slug nevertheless—hadn’t he left it at that, told himself, ‘So you see, slugs too have souls,’ and either retired to his cabin or suggested to Isabella that they go to the bar for a nightcap? Instead of allowing his almost but not quite supercilious face to soften at the discovery that the slug had a soul and then gently, sadly even, and without the slightest trace of malice, starting to wheedle further snatches of that melody out of him; or if not that one, which the slug seemed unwilling to come out with at any length, some other, sweet song.

He supposed, though, it hadn’t really been the man’s fault. It had just been his misfortune to come across a music lover, and an Englishman, when Isabella was present.

It had gone, the remainder of that unfortunate encounter, like this.

After Charlie had confessed to spending most of the previous night up on deck, the Englishman had asked him if he often made this trip. And when Charlie said no, in fact this was only the second time in his life as far as he remembered, though his parents told him they had taken him to Aswan when he was very small, whether by train, car, boat or plane he wasn’t sure, and he had often flown to Aswan with other clients of his father’s, where he had put them on their cruise ships before returning to Cairo by plane, the Englishman had said that this was the second time that he had made the trip too, though he would like to make it every year. ‘Not so much for the monuments and temples and things,’ he murmured, his voice as attuned to the sound of the river as the ship’s engines had seemed the night before, ‘as for the Nile itself.’ He smiled. ‘You know, for the whole idea that this is where everything started and that in a way this river is the source of all art, all religion, all politics, all economics, all culture, all history.’

Then, when Charlie, glancing apprehensively but with a smile of his own at Isabella, had only taken him up on these remarks to the extent of muttering, almost incomprehensibly, that he had been thinking just the same thing last night and that it was true; and that he’d always had an image of the Nile as the principal artery in the body of civilisation (a very sheepish smile after that) and that in a way, in a sense, in his opinion, ‘I mean, it’s probably stupid, but … all art, all civilisation possibly, though we don’t really know too much about the precise day-to-day working of those days, started at the top in ancient Egypt and has been in constant decline ever since. Because no art has ever equalled the purity, the sophistication, the sublimity of Egyptian art …’ and after hitting that particular high note, had lapsed into a gloomy, embarrassed silence in which he tried to look, as he leant on the railings, more baboonlike than ever, the Englishman had gracefully—but understandingly?—changed the subject. He had asked exactly what Charlie did. ‘I mean, in Cairo, though without wishing to be rude I’m not exactly sure what you’re doing here with us now, other than keep us company—which is very reassuring I must say. No, no, honestly, I’m not being sarcastic. It really is.’ He had nodded when Charlie had muttered something about supposing his father was the classic Levantine businessman, ‘You know, in the export/import business as they call it. I work for him, though in fact he isn’t really Levantine, my father …’ And he had taken a step back, as if he were genuinely sorry to be so intrusive, before asking Charlie (‘if it isn’t a rude question’) how come he was called Charlie. ‘I mean, it’s not what one normally thinks of as an Egyptian or an Arab name.’ To which Charlie, giving one of his most tragic grins and looking down at the deck, and wriggling his shoulders uncomfortably, had replied that the reason was, he wasn’t an Egyptian himself, nor even an Arab, ‘though I was born here and my parents were born here’. In fact—and oh how he writhed now, as if trying to turn himself inside out—he … he … he was English, he was an Englishman, himself.

Whereupon, sensing perhaps that all this stuttered information, this verbal and apparently moral twisting was just Charlie’s way of vocalising, and that all that was needed now for the music to flood out was the mildest of pressures to be applied, the Englishman paused, leaned forward, right over the railings, and, staring into the black, star-reflecting water, applied it. ‘How come?’ he murmured. ‘I mean, doesn’t it make difficulties for you here, or hasn’t it in the past? I should have thought

Charlie found himself pausing. He gave Isabella a final, imploring glance, and saw that she was looking at him with some curiosity now, as a witness in court might a murderer who is about to be cross-examined. Then he took, in his imagination, a deep breath and opened his mouth.

‘Difficulties? No,’ he said, starting in a very subdued manner that gave no clue as to the pyrotechnics he suspected, knowing himself, were likely to follow. ‘You know on the whole, in spite of everything, the Egyptians like the English, and look on them as being civilised and friendly. The French they tend to find standoffish and anyway they have a reputation for being prejudiced against the Arabs. The Germans they find—well, German. The Americans they think loud and stupid, generally nice, but sort of crass; and the Italians—present company excepted of course,’ he muttered to the watching, waiting Isabella, ‘friendly, very friendly, and cheerful, but at times, and especially when they’re trying not to be, just a little bit—well, vulgar. Whereas the English, I mean, it’s all nonsense of course and just a pack of generalisations. And maybe I feel this way because of who I am and what I am. You see, all right, I was born here and my father was born here. My mother’s Italian, from Ravenna, or at least her family was, because she was born here too. And in a way, despite the fact that I have a British passport and I have to apply for a resident’s permit every month—we all do—I’m Egyptian and this country’s part of me and I love it as if it were, which as I say it is in a way, my own. Also, because I’ve never been to any other country in my life. I’ve never actually wanted to, though my father’s always trying to persuade me to. But although I was born here, and although to all intents and purposes I consider myself an Egyptian, inside I have this dream of England. I’m sure it doesn’t correspond to the reality in any way. Or not much. And I’m sure if I actually went there I’d be terribly shocked. Either pleasantly or unpleasantly. But that doesn’t really matter. Because my England’s an imaginary place and I can’t help feeling, I’ve never been able to help feeling, that even if it doesn’t exist, it’s a place I’ve got to aspire to. It’s the one place in the world I’ve got to be … worthy of. If you follow me. Because, well, I mean, in a sense I’m an outcast here, someone who doesn’t fit …’ he hesitated, laughed nervously, and shot on. ‘I mean, look at me.’ He laughed again, ‘I don’t look like an Arab, do I? On the other hand, I don’t look like an Englishman either. Or an Italian. Or … anything. And so—oh, I suppose most people who feel like me tend to identify with America, to think of themselves as Americans at heart. The land of the free and all that. The land of opportunity. But aside from the fact that I’ve never quite gone along with that idea—oh, I suppose my imaginary England is more congenial to me. I feel it would harbour someone like me more … understandingly than America would. You see …’—and now he could hear his, as it were, interior voice starting to rise and see Isabella taking a step back; but it was far too late to stop now, especially with that damned Englishman urging him on, exhorting him, saying with his very stance, ‘Go on, Charlie, you can do it, sing’—‘I’ve always pictured it as the green and pleasant land that tourist books tell us it is and poets have always written odes to, where the very landscape, the very soft wet weather will take one in and make one feel welcome. Unlike here, where there’s only sun and desert, and the Nile. But as well as the landscape, or even more than the landscape, it’s the people of my imaginary England who I feel would welcome me, would take me in should I ever want to … go home. Of course, it’s sentimental nonsense, this is home and I probably wouldn’t even be allowed to stay there for more than a month or two, for all my British passport. And the English I’ve come into contact with here, business contacts of my father’s, friends of distant relatives who have been told to look us up, just tourists in the street, are no different, no better, no worse, than any of the other people I come into contact with. But my dream English—oh, they’re a people who have committed terrible crimes, worse crimes, I can’t help feeling, than any people who have ever lived. I mean, not just because of the British Empire and all that, nor even because I myself in a certain sense am a casualty of British history, a bit of driftwood left here in the sand when the British tide went out. But because of their attitude. Because of their manner. Such a stunned, awkward, at times smug, at times arrogant, people must have committed great crimes. How else could they have become as they are? There’s no other people on earth who do give such an impression of being weighed down, somehow stained through and through with guilt. Not the Russians. Not the Americans. Not the French. Not even, not above all, the Germans, who in this particular century should perhaps, more than anyone else. And yet, and yet, though they are so stained, though they are so riddled with guilt, or just exhausted from the too heavy weight of history, they seem to bear their exhaustion, their guilt, with—how can I put it?—grace. All right, they seem to be telling you, our hands are dripping with blood and like Lady Macbeth we’ll never be able to wash it off. But please, can’t we extend this hand to you, and won’t you take it and allow it to help you? For only those who have greatly sinned, unforgivably sinned, can really offer … consolation. Oh, I know I’m talking nonsense,’ Charlie repeated, with, as he had had last night when looking up at the stars, tears in his eyes; tears that didn’t, however, blind him to the fact that Isabella was not just backing away now but was, as discreetly as she could, actually leaving him alone up there with the Englishman. ‘And you’ll probably think I’m mad and disappointed or simply typical of someone who doesn’t really belong here, there or anywhere. Well, maybe I am. All the same, that grace, that consolation I sense in my imaginary England, or in my imaginary English, seems to me the very essence of civilisation, which I can’t help feeling all men, everywhere on earth, should aspire to. Not because they will ever attain it, or because it will ever wash their hands clean, but because otherwise—oh, the sheer stain of being human will drag them down, destroy them and deprive them of any chance of happiness that they might have here on earth.

‘And I know that people say that happiness is not the goal of human life,’ Charlie said, adding a brief wistful coda to his aria. ‘But it seems to me it must be. Because to me, happiness is almost synonomous with goodness. And if you do not try to be the one, you can never hope to be the other. Which is why,’ he concluded, ‘I have always loved Egyptian art, my art,’ he shrugged, ‘so much and have always thought that the ancient Egyptians must have known in reality what the English know in my imagination. For those statues, those paintings, seem to me supremely graceful, supremely consoling and seem to me to be the expression of a culture that, more than any other, equated the good with the happy. What was it that Chekhov wrote in The Three Sisters? “We aren’t happy and we can’t be happy, we only want happiness.” It’s a beautiful line. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it passionately. We can be happy. Just as long as we try, however hopelessly, to be good. Of course, I suppose we should say what we mean by “good”. But I think maybe, really, we all know that, don’t we? Or, at any rate, we can talk about it some other night.’

So, at last, Charlie came to a halt; and, at last, he felt he had said something, said everything, he had been wanting to say for years. Moreover, though he had claimed, once or twice, that he was talking nonsense, that had just been good manners passing as self-deprecation. He didn’t believe for a moment that he had been talking nonsense and stood totally behind every word he had uttered. He did love England and the English of his dreams for the reasons he had given. He did believe that the only culture that was still more full of grace, still more consoling than the English, and thus still more aware of the blood that had been shed in order to create it and still more representative of human achievement, human civilisation at its highest, was that of ancient Egypt. And he would have continued to believe it even if someone had proved him wrong, or convinced him that he was a fool. For his love of both was essential to his life; and without his love he would have been only what he appeared to be, or worse; not just ugly; but yes, unhappy and, if only in his own estimation, bad.

He was so drunk on his own words, so relieved finally to have said more or less completely what he had been wanting to say for ages and so happy that he had allowed that Englishman to drag out of him what he had always wanted to reveal, that although he was aware that by thus revealing himself he had made himself loathsome in Isabella’s eyes and lost her, it wasn’t until the morning after—having once again stayed up on deck till four, and slept no more than three hours—that what he had done really sank in, and with part of himself he started to regret that he had allowed himself to be so played upon, so encouraged to display what he thought of as his soul. Once it had sank in it sank in deeply, however; and that part of him that was regretful became almost the equal of that part of him that was glad. Not because Isabella scarcely said good morning to him when he went down to the dining room for breakfast, and wouldn’t have said good morning at all had she not known that to be so overtly rude would have drawn the attention of her father, whose dark little eyes never missed a trick. Rather because, as she gave him a quick resentful glance, muttered ‘Morning’ in reply to his own beamed, tender, but he already knew doomed greeting, and went straight back to her coffee, he saw why, in her mind, it had become necessary for her to be suddenly so cold, to look at and upon him with such an air of hurt and scorn. For while the truth was that he had lost her by revealing himself not to be a monster, Isabella had come up with another reason for cutting him off so abruptly. Namely: by exposing himself morally, it was as if he had exposed himself physically, and she was forced to admit what she must have known all along. That this beastly toad whom she had pitied and been kind to loved her. And maybe not only loved her, but lusted after her and wanted to take her slim, dark, sixteen-year-old body in his foul, sweating hands, to kiss her mouth with his wide, wet, slobbering lips and cover her with his bloated, misshapen flesh. You must be mad, her expression told Charlie as he watched her eating her breakfast. You should be taken away and locked up somewhere. After all the goodness I’ve shown you, after all my friendliness, to be treated thus! To have you, you horror, show yourself to me. How could you? How could you? And if you ever so much as touch my hand again, I swear I’ll tell my father you tried to rape me. Oh Charlie, Charlie, pretending to be talking to that man last night. I know whom you were really talking to. I know what you were really doing, you obscene, vile pervert, you ungrateful, repulsive… freak.

What could he say to defend himself? How could he apologise, or take her aside and say ‘No, Isabella, it wasn’t like that, it isn’t like that. You’re fooling yourself, lying to yourself because, for whatever reason, you can only care for what is ugly. And having listened to me last night, you can no longer help admitting what you half suspected before: that I am not entirely the monstrosity you saw me as previously and that even in me there is some trace, some possibility, of beauty.’

He couldn’t, he told himself, however idiotically he beamed and sloped around the ship, however grotesque he tried to make himself. First, because having lost her, he knew that Isabella wouldn’t listen to a further word of his, whether he spoke rationally or whether he simply blurted out ‘You must realise I didn’t actually “expose” myself to you last night and you really shouldn’t blame me or make me suffer just because you have some psychological hang-up that makes it impossible for you to like what is beautiful apart from clothes and jewels.’ And second—and this is what clinched the matter, and made him sit down at the table and start to eat his breakfast in a manner that even he found disgusting—because seeing that scorn, that shocked revulsion on Isabella’s face, he became aware that he too suffered from what he would have termed a psychological hang-up.

From the moment he had seen Isabella crying in the minibus on her way in from the airport, Charlie had thought her the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and had been in love with her. He had thought her perfect, tender, innocent and exquisite, and made only more so by the various little flaws he had discerned in her that in others he would have found irritating, if not unacceptable. For to have those flaws—that were, in any case, just the scars left on her by other people’s wickedness or stupidity—and still be perfect, didn’t that, mustn’t that make her more perfect, and more innocent and more beautiful yet? Yes, he had told himself, oh yes. But though he had loved her, or because he had loved her in the way that he had, seeing her as an ideal being who was hardly touched by reality, he had never really thought of his love as having any consequence. It had in itself been an ideal love and the idea of him, who felt lovely when Isabella gazed at him with those deep, black eyes, and heard again and again that heartbreaking fragment of music ‘E io t’ amavo per la tua pietà,’ actually doing anything to express that love—other than grovel at her feet and play Quasimodo to her Esmeralda—had been so out of the question as never to enter his head. Isabella was there to be worshipped, cherished, protected, blessed; adored, dreamed of and revered, But not, but never, to be the object of his—or, in his imagination, anyone else’s—lust. Such a thought would have struck him as genuinely obscene.

Yet now, dipping his buttered, honeyed roll in his coffee, and dripping honey over his hands and chin, and coffee over the table cloth and down his shirt, and dropping half the roll in the coffee where it floated like a rotten and disintegrating grey fish, he realised that all that had suddenly changed. Pitied, he could love an ideal, disembodied Isabella. Despised, he did indeed lust after the girl, feeling such a desire to get up, go round the table and slip his hands under her white blouse, and touch her small, warm breasts, and press his mouth to them and run his lips over her smooth, dark stomach, and open her legs and kiss her and slip his tongue into her and unbutton himself and Oh, Isabella, Isabella, slide, glide, ever so gently, into her—that he didn’t hear what Mr Rizzuto was saying to him. He became conscious of a sort of veil of flames passing over his eyes, and of something hot and solid blocking his throat, and thought that if he couldn’t get that image out of his head he would either pass out or, more probably, ejaculate right here at the breakfast table.

You are a freak, he told himself, as, with his mouth full, he mumbled an apology to Mr Rizzuto and said he had been miles away, and what was it he had asked him? You are a pervert. And Isabella in a way was right to back away from you in horror and tell herself that you had exposed yourself to her physically. Only in a way, of course, because you didn’t and it was just her backing away that aroused you, or put the idea into your head in the first place. All the same, she only expressed her horror a few hours too early; and had her horror and your lust coincided precisely, you’d have had to admit that she was absolutely right to back away from you. You’re a monster who can only desire those who loathe you for your monstrosity, just as Isabella is a poor, confused child who can only pity—only in her way love—those who are entirely monstrous.

I don’t know which of us is more in need of help, Charlie told himself, as the part of him that was regretful now tried, but failed, to oust altogether that part of him that was glad he had spoken last night. God knows how I am going to get through my remaining days with you. Perhaps I really will become ‘beastly’ and break into your cabin one night, and hurl myself on you and, as beasts are wont to do to maidens, ravish you. Perhaps I will find the experience unendurable, and will ditch you and your family and friends, and fly back to Cairo by myself. Or perhaps I will merely become sullen, brooding and stupid, and now no longer act Quasimodo, but whether I want to or not, become Quasimodo. A hunchback obsessed by, in this version, an at last utterly pitiless Esmeralda.

Oh Isabella, Charlie muttered silently down the table—saying, at the same time, to Mr Rizzuto, that if he were him he’d wait till they got to Aswan before changing any more money—I don’t know if I can bear it.

Yet, ‘of course’ Charlie told himself when it was over, bear it and not too badly all things considered, he did. Naturally, he had moments when he thought he wouldn’t. When he became so dizzy, so sick with longing that one night, five minutes after Isabella had announced that she was going to sleep, he couldn’t resist slipping away from his friends and walking as quietly as possible along the deck outside Isabella’s cabin … pausing as he passed it … glancing through the windows, that weren’t completely covered inside by curtains … and catching just the quickest, stealthiest glimpse of Isabella in her brassiere and pants … When he lay on his bed in his cabin crying for two hours, without a break, crying for the sorrows of the world, he told himself, but crying for himself, because he loved and was not loved, he knew. And when another night, as he stood staring up at the sky trying to find it beautiful but instead seeing only stars and hearing a voice muttering ‘Rents in a dark sheet, my foot!’ he felt so very much like the Hunchback of Notre Dame that it was all he could do to stop himself lolloping around the boat howling, a twisted, tortured abortion of a man for whom the Nile had become a river of pain running through him, splitting him in two as effectively as it did the desert. There were moments when he found himself thinking that if he didn’t have Isabella he would die, that she was his last chance in life and that no one from now on would ever love him; and that whatever the consequences he should go to her cabin right now, gag her and tie her up, and then do everything to her he had ever imagined doing to anyone. Even at his most miserable, however, he couldn’t silence the quietest, most hesitant of little whispers inside him that told him that love Isabella though he did and find the idea of life without her unendurable, in just a few more days now she would be gone from Egypt probably forever, and he would be glad and relieved when she was. He would be able to return to his old life, with his old friend pity by his side, and with any luck nothing would come along to disturb him for months, years, or decades—though maybe that was asking a bit too much.

A whisper he suspected that Isabella knew he was hearing; the reason why she held back from declaring total war on him and contented herself with never looking at him, never speaking to him apart from muttering those unavoidable ‘good mornings’ or ‘goodnights’, and always threatening him, but never actually doing it, with the possibility that she might go to her father and tell him, no doubt with tears and blushes, that Charlie, the loathsome Charlie, had, er … exposed himself to her.

Had she not heard it, he had a feeling that she might just have taken this last step, wicked though it would have been. And had she taken it, he was almost certain that he wouldn’t, except perhaps to the Englishman, have denied it.

Only five days to go. Only four days to go. Only three days to go …

Then, finally, it was the last day. And because Charlie hadn’t silenced that little voice inside him—on the contrary, had at times strained his ear to make out its message more clearly—and because, too, he was feeling proud of himself for having got through his week of misery as well, on the whole, as he had, on that last day he felt able to take a couple of risks. One of them consisted of his telling the Rizzutos and company, when they arrived in Cairo on an early morning flight from Aswan, that he was going to take them to this father’s flat for a second breakfast, and was going to leave them there for a couple of hours while he went off and attended to some business. Some business that involved his going to the bank, withdrawing a great deal of money, and then taking a taxi to the Bazaar; where he went to a jeweller’s shop in front of which Isabella had paused two weeks before; chose what seemed to him the most beautiful necklace in the place; and paid almost what the jeweller asked for it, having neither the time nor the inclination to haggle. And the second risk, later that day, consisted of his offering to take Isabella out in a boat on the lake at El Fayoum; an oasis in the desert west of Cairo, where he had taken his friends for a final lunch. That is: Isabella said to her father, as they stood looking out over the glittering, utterly still lake, that she would like to go rowing on it. Whereupon Giorgio Orsini said that was fine by him, as long as he didn’t expect her to go with him; her brother and step-brother said more or less the same thing; her step-mother didn’t even bother to comment on what she clearly saw as a foolish whim; and the Rizzutos and Isabella’s step-sister were some distance away, talking amongst themselves. Thus Charlie was more or less obliged to shuffle forward, look as hang-dog as possible, and mutter that if Isabella liked, he’d row her out into the lake. It was a risk, all the same; for he realised that by so putting himself forward he had laid himself open to the danger, even at this late date, of being denounced by Isabella; or anyway having her disgust at the idea made so plain that her father would have said ‘Isabella!’; an explanation for such rudeness would have been demanded; and once again the truth—or Isabella’s version of it—would have been hauled out. As, he told himself, as he sweated still more profusely than normal, might have happened; had not the Englishman, within a second of his making his offer, stepped forward and said that if they were going out on the lake, would they mind if he joined them. He should, Charlie reflected—as he burbled no, of course not—have been furious at this intervention that deprived him of his only chance of spending twenty minutes or half an hour alone in the company of his beloved. In fact, however, it simply made him feel relieved, since it took the wind out of Isabella’s sails, and made it both impossible for her to express her disgust, and slightly more likely that she would actually accept his offer; as she never would have if it had seemed there were only to be the two of them. The principal motive, Charlie suspected, as he said he would go off and find a boat and pick them up at the water’s edge where they stood, for the Englishman’s intervention. He was undoubtedly aware of the tension between the sixteen-year-old girl and the ungainly guide; probably had a good idea why that tension existed; and knew as well as Charlie that Isabella would not go out unchaperoned.

As it happened she wouldn’t go out even with a chaperone. For by the time Charlie had stumbled over to the jetty where boats were rented and rowed round to the hotel garden where he had left the others, Isabella had disappeared. Not to reappear before Charlie, to the embarrassment of both, had helped the Englishman on board and had rowed him a couple of hundred yards out into the lake. She reappeared, however, only to stand on the parapet of the hotel garden and wave no, she didn’t want to come after all, and to signal that Charlie shouldn’t think, as he’d already started to, of rowing back to fetch her.

Yet though he did take uselessly the risk of offering to go boating with Isabella, the twenty-five minutes he spent on the lake with the Englishman were not entirely wasted. Because while the first fifteen of those minutes were spent in almost complete silence, as both rowed and rower wished he were not where he was, the remaining ten were passed in talking about Isabella. And if she couldn’t be with them—well, Charlie thought, talking about her was the next best thing. Particularly as, when he was rowing in silence, he had been brooding about her and reminding himself of all the stupid, vacuous things she had said to him when she was still speaking to him. ‘Oh, Charlie’—walking through the streets of Cairo—‘you know I’m a very complex person. I think maybe I’m even a little schizophrenic. On the one hand I love crowds. And on the other, you know, I hate crowds.’ ‘Oh, Charlie’—looking at some children working in a rug factory, which she had insisted upon being taken to, though Charlie had told her he hated such places (with one or two exceptions they were just sweat shops, exploiting in the most cynical fashion children who should have been at school)—‘how can you be so beastly, saying they’re exploited? Look at all those happy little faces. The man in the other room assured me they only work half a day here and the rest of the time do go to school.’

Silly, spoiled little brat, he had been telling himself; fatuous, false little Italian.

It was just then, as he was saying this to himself, unable at the same time not to look round at his silly, spoiled beloved, that the Englishman, as if knowing now that this was what Charlie was thinking and wanting to say ‘Stop it’, suddenly murmured, ‘I feel terribly sorry for Isabella, you know. She’s a genuinely sweet and kind girl. But she’s so surrounded by people; not here, I mean at home, with her mother, and even more her mother’s friends, who have intellectual pretensions but hardly an original thought in their heads. Everything is taken from somewhere else, from intellectual fashion magazines, if you know what I mean and unless she’s very careful, or very lucky, she’s going to be corrupted. And it would be a real shame. Left to herself I think she’d be happy, because underneath she’s not only kind and sweet, but actually very honest. Whereas if all those people she has to live among—and I know them, I’ve met them; they’re the sort of people you just know from the tone of their voice are false—if all of them get at her, she’s going to be miserable. And she shouldn’t be. I mean, no one should be, obviously. But, well, you know what I mean, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes,’ Charlie wanted to tell him, yes. And thank you for pulling me up, for stopping me going down the road of resentment. Of course you’re right and of course it’s not her fault if she says silly, vacuous things. It will be, in a little while, when she knows what she’s saying and continues to say it. For the moment, though, yes, she is still innocent—innocent and sweet and kind—and until she ceases to be, I would be mad not to go on loving her. Mad and wrong and bad. For surely, if anything can save Isabella from the fate this man predicts for her, from the lies she’s been telling herself about me in the last week, it’s love, the love of her family and friends; and the love of monsters like me.

Oh Isabella, Isabella, Charlie wanted to shout across the water, of course I don’t hate you. And until you really do denounce me, or renounce me, I promise you can count on me.

To the Englishman he said: ‘Who are all these people she lives with, and why doesn’t she live with her father and step-mother?’; and, as the man told him, he rowed his way slowly back to the jetty.

*

If Charlie had stopped hating Isabella because of what the Englishman had said, it was also because of those words spoken on the lake that Charlie, that afternooon after he had taken his friends back to Cairo, decided to compound the first risk he had taken that day and give Isabella the necklace he had bought her himself. Till then, he had been planning on giving it to her father and asking him to hand it to her after the plane had left. When it would be too late for her to start telling lies about him, or he wouldn’t be around to hear if she did. Since she was so fundamentally kind and sweet and honest, however, (or if she was, Charlie couldn’t help telling himself) maybe, by giving her the necklace in person, he would be able to reassure her; hand her, at the same time, an unspoken and unwritten message that said more or less what he had wanted to shout from the lake.

If she wasn’t kind and sweet and honest, and had already been corrupted, then of course that message would be ignored, or torn up and thrown in his face along with who knows what accusations. But that, Charlie thought, was all just part of the risk.

He was feeling nervous; and he had gone over the presentation of the necklace ceremony about a hundred times in his head by the time the minibus had reached his father’s flat, his friends had picked up their bags and said goodbye to his father and mother, and he was accompanying them to the airport for the ten o’clock flight to Rome. He had imagined thrusting it into Isabella’s hands and running away. He had imagined taking the girl aside and saying ‘Isabella, please …’ And he had imagined creeping up behind her and without warning putting it round her neck. In fact, though, the traffic being still worse than usual and the airport still more crowded than his father had warned him it would be, by the time they got there Charlie hardly had a chance to think about ceremonies at all, or feel nervous about anything other than everyone missing their plane. He rushed around trying to find how and where to check in. He pushed, shoved, panted, sweated and lurched from counter to counter trying to save his friends from having to join long lines of German and Scandinavian tourists. Mr Rizzuto cornered him and made a long but well-meant speech about how grateful they all were for his help, and ‘this’—a little package placed in a hand—was from all of them. Giorgio Orsini gave him a sardonic little wink and a somehow ironic slap on the shoulder, as if to say ‘You and I know one or two things that they don’t know Charlie.’ His wife earnestly implored him to come and stay with them in Italy. Her children kissed him on the cheek. Isabella’s brother shook his hand. And the Englishman, also on the sardonic side, said, ‘Keep dreaming of England, Charlie, and thank you for everything.’ By which time, Charlie was in such a flap that he had not only practically forgotten he hadn’t said goodbye to the one person he really wanted to say goodbye to, but had also practically forgotten that she existed. Indeed, if he hadn’t seen her standing just a yard this side of the immigration control, waiting for her brother to join her, she might well, he told himself afterwards, have disappeared without trace from both his life and his memory. (Of course she wouldn’t really have, he also told himself. He would have been heartbroken and distraught if she had slipped through the barrier without his being able to say goodbye to her. He suspected, however, that he added this more out of a sense of duty than conviction, and just as with a part of himself he had been looking forward to Isabella leaving, so with a part of himself he would have been relieved if she had simply vanished.)

But Isabella was standing just a yard this side of the barrier. She didn’t disappear without a trace and, seeing her there, Charlie felt once again both that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life, and that when she did go through immigration control and he lost touch with her undoubtedly forever, it would be as if she had hacked off some part of his body with a blunt knife and was taking it away with her. She would leave him still more deformed, more grotesque than ever and without, now, the slightest chance of his ever being whole, or unscarred again. She couldn’t go, he told himself as he stumbled towards her, the apotheosis of ugliness, gracelessness, disconnectedness. It would more than disfigure him if he never saw her again; it would kill him. And her beauty, her untainted beauty, her untouched beauty, was itself the blade that was thrusting into him and was causing him such agony he thought he was going to scream. Oh, her slim dark arms. Oh, her long wonderful legs. Oh, her small, round breasts. Oh, her thighs, her cheeks, her hair, her eyes; he couldn’t go on if he never saw her again. He couldn’t. Oh, why hadn’t she just gone through the barrier and disappeared? How could she torture him like this, standing there grave and perfect as his limbs were severed, his nails torn from his fingers, his eyes gouged out and his bowels burned with irons? Oh Isabella, go, go, he wanted to scream at her. ‘Oh Isabella, please, let me hold you, touch you, enfold you, envelop you. Oh Isabella, Isabella …’

‘Isabella.’ But that, as she turned and looked at him, no longer in horror, or pity, but just with the mild surprise of someone who has been dreaming and hasn’t realised she is being approached, was all he was capable of saying. And aware, out of the corner of his eye, that little Giorgio Orsini was moving in fast from the left to claim his daughter, and was looking more sardonic and beady-eyed than ever—indeed, was looking absolutely delighted about something; that something being almost certainly the torment he had seen that Charlie was going through—he just thrust out the packet he had been clutching in his hand, glanced at it with a feeling of sweating terror when it occurred to him he might have given her the packet that Mr Rizzuto had just given him and then, having seen he had handed over the right one, turned and fled.

Keep going, Charlie, he shouted to himself as he crashed away, unconscious now of his foulness, of the abomination that he must have seemed as he careered into people, tripped, picked himself up and staggered on. Keep going, don’t stop, and don’t, whatever you do, look round. Don’t, don’t, Charlie commanded himself. Keep going, keep going, keep going. If Orpheus, though, who was a god, could not resist the temptation, how could Charlie Epps, who was a miscarried foetus that had survived? And while it seemed to him that he must have covered at least a hundred yards, when he did turn round he saw that he had gone no more than twenty. What was worse, by some horrible trick of fate, in the time it had taken him to walk those twenty yards, all the people who had a moment ago been crowding the space between him and Isabella had, for a second or two, moved aside. So not only was there no one to shield him from his beloved’s gaze, but there was no one to shield him from the gaze of Isabella’s father, Isabella’s step-mother, and brother and sister, in fact of the entire Rizzuto/Orsini party. If embarrassment had ever been distilled, all the self-consciousness of the world reduced and refined to an essence of quite appalling intensity, Charlie was certain it couldn’t have been more bitter, more agonising than the wave of whatever it was that washed over him in that instant. He felt, he told himself, as a butterfly must feel, when a pin is thrust through its heart. Or perhaps as a man must feel when about to be shot in the head. He was paralysed; he was stripped to the bone; he was more exposed than he had ever imagined it was possible to be exposed, and survive.

The eyes looked at him. They turned to Isabella, who was staring down at her present, herself scarlet with embarrassment, and then back to him. They watched, some here, some there, and all flashing back and forth, as Isabella, made clumsy by the attention, stripped the paper from the little box. They watched as she opened the box and took from it a gold necklace inlaid with garnets that looked, from where Charlie was standing and in her hands, like the cheapest, most vulgar trinket that man had ever invented. And they watched—their owners, Charlie was certain, scarcely breathing now—as Isabella stared at the necklace, as she contemplated (and this was so obvious Charlie himself held his breath) either just dropping it on the floor, as if it were contaminated, or actually hurling it from her, as if it were white hot. And as she then, very slowly, clasped it in her hand and walked over towards Charlie.

What was she going to do? Lash his face with it? Give it back to him without a word? Or content herself with hissing some obscenity at him, before marching off to show her passport to the waiting, watching officer?

For it wasn’t just her friends and family who were watching now, Charlie felt. It was as if the whole airport and everyone in it had frozen, all waiting to see the outcome of this sudden little drama.

Six yards … five yards … four yards …

‘Thank you, Charlie,’ Isabella murmured, still red in the face, as she leaned forward and kissed him gravely, but sweetly, on the cheek. She lowered her eyes. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been beastly to you this last week. But you made me cross, pretending to be so ugly. You’re not ugly at all. You’re …’ and with that she paused, almost added something else, and turned and walked quickly away.

For a second, as the airport came to life again, the space between Charlie and the others was filled once more with tourists and officials, and he became conscious of the noise and the confusion around him, Charlie, though he was no longer paralysed, didn’t move. He simply stood there, watching Isabella rejoin her father and friends, and seeing those friends wave at him as they started to move away.

Then, remembering he had promised the driver of the hired minibus that he would be back immediately, he gave a quick wave in return and made his way, briskly, towards the exit.

She had told the truth, he nearly cried out as he dodged and weaved through the crowds. In the end, even if she could have gone further, could have said why his pretending to be ugly had made her cross, she had told the truth and hadn’t tried to hide behind some fable about his having exposed himself to her. That was what had made her cross. What was more, she had been quite right to be cross. It had gone on long enough, this nonsense; this self-mutilation that necessitated the constant attention of his companion, pity. Oh Isabella, Charlie nearly cried out, aware that he was getting carried away now, but not caring, oh Isabella, you’ve saved me. I shall never pretend again. In future, I shall admit to my passions, to my hatred of the false, to my wonder at the sky, to, to above all perhaps, my love of and dream of England. And if I do admit to them, if I am always faithful to my love, who knows if we won’t, one day, see each other again?

Briefly, as Charlie reflected that there he was going too far and that not only would he never see Isabella again, but that it was very doubtful if, having had her moment of truth, Isabella would ever have another in her life, he felt a faint mist of melancholy obscuring the sun of his happiness.

Then that mist cleared; and walking on and touching his cheek, Charlie told himself it was useless to speculate about what might be. All that mattered was: he had been kissed. And that, for a while at least, anyone looking at him would see not a fat, ugly twenty-three year old of uncertain origins, but a young man who bore a remarkable resemblance to an Egyptian statue. A young man of ineffable beauty; with far-seeing eyes; an enigmatic smile; and an expression of consolation and grace.

Why Are You Wearing My Daughter’s Earrings?

The headmaster had written in March that the school wasn’t entirely satisfied with Natalia.

She’s a lovely girl, of course, and we’re all very fond of her. Moreover, and I say this without the slightest desire to flatter or use hyperbole, she is the most intelligent girl we have in the school at the moment. Indeed, she has the finest mind of any pupil we have ever had in the school. Nonetheless, for the last few months, it has seemed to my colleagues and I that Natalia is determined to dissipate her great natural gifts. I realise this may be just the rebellious phase that all teenagers worth their salt go through. But I am afraid, precisely because Natalia is so intelligent, that she might take her rebellion further than the average teenager. She might even take it too far, and hurt not only the school but herself. So I would be grateful if, during the Easter break, you could try to have a serious talk with your daughter, and while stressing how much we value her presence, remind her what a waste it would be if she were to squander her talents.

The letter James Nelligan wrote in June, however, was of a different nature.

It deeply grieves me to have to write this, [he started]. But I fear we are going to have to ask you to remove Natalia from the school with immediate effect. She has become not merely disruptive, but a positive danger to herself and others. A moral danger, in that she seems determined to spread dissension and discord, plant doubts in the minds of those less equipped than herself to confront them; a physical danger, in that we believe she is distributing drugs to her fellow pupils. We have no proof of this; her friends are fiercely loyal to her, or perhaps are frightened of her. Nevertheless, given that a number of pupils have been found in possession of drugs or under the influence of drugs, despite their refusal to say where they obtained them, we believe Natalia is the source of these substances. What is more, she seems determined that we should believe it. For one thing, all those who have been caught form what I might call the ‘Kalugina inner circle’. For another, when challenged, while Natalia herself refuses to confirm she is the supplier, she equally refuses to deny it.

I really could not be more sorry; as I said in my letter of 6 March, Natalia is possibly the brightest student we have ever had at Battlement. But we cannot allow even the brightest star to dim, or threaten to snuff out, the planets that circle round her. For which reason, I would be grateful if, on receipt of this, you get in touch with me at your earliest convenience, so we can discuss the matter further, and Natalia’s future can be decided.

Yours very sincerely,

James Nelligan.

*

Irina Kalugina had been upset by the first of these communications from her daughter’s school. The second, however, made her cry, rage, feel sick, call her friends to ask for their advice, try – in vain – to get in touch with her husband, Natalia’s father, to ask for his advice, and finally call the school, speak to James Nelligan’s secretary, and arrange to drive down to Battlement College the following morning and meet the headmaster at eleven o’clock.

‘Will you come with me?’ she asked her best friend, Victoria; but Victoria said no, she was sorry, she thought it better if Irina went alone.

So, the day after she had received the hateful letter, dressed in an expensive black suit and black high heels, with her pale blonde hair tied tightly back, and wearing only a touch of make-up, Irina set off at nine o’clock from her house in Chelsea, and drove towards East Sussex.

She got to the school in good time; at 10.58 she was shown into the headmaster’s study, to find herself facing not only Nelligan – a tall, broad-shouldered, red-faced former England rugby player, who had an almost self-consciously open expression and smile – but also the deputy headmaster – a small wiry man with bright dark eyes and a pale face made paler by the darkness of his hair and his six o’clock shadow – and James Nelligan’s sister – the school’s head English teacher and, until recently, Natalia’s greatest champion. In her last report, the woman had written, ‘I believe the very fact that Natalia didn’t come to England or learn English until she was ten accounts for her astonishingly fresh and inventive use of the English language. But more than that, Natalia thinks in an original and inventive fashion, and while it is always unwise to say such things, I am convinced that if Natalia wishes to be a writer, as she claims she does, she will have a bright future.’

Mary Kemp nee Nelligan was tall, grey-haired and a few years older than her brother, Irina guessed. She was also, Irina was sure, more intelligent and serious than her brother. Not for her any fake, or even genuine bonhomie. Her expression, her manner, everything about her spoke of thoughtfulness, straightness and decency; a Cambridge graduate who, Natalia said, was reputed to have worked for fifteen years in the Foreign Office before a divorce, a nervous breakdown and her brother’s entreaties had persuaded her to leave London, take a teacher-training course, and join the staff of the boarding school in East Sussex that the Nelligans’ father had founded in the 1950s. A school that had a reputation for academic excellence, a liberal but not permissive attitude towards its students, and extremely high fees.

These three – headmaster, deputy and sister – stood on one side of James Nelligan’s desk as Irina came in, though Mary Kemp seemed pained at having to assume such a judgemental position. On the other side there were two empty chairs, to one of which the headmaster waved his visitor, beaming at her as if he knew exactly what she was going through and he was an old hand at comforting women in distress. Especially pale and lovely Russian women.

‘Please, do sit, Mrs Kalugina,’ he said. ‘Would you like a coffee? A cup of tea?’

Irina shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ Her manner made it clear she wanted to cut the niceties and get on with it.

Nelligan obliged. Sitting himself, he waited till his colleagues had followed his example and began, ‘As I said in my letter, Mrs Kalugina, this decision we have reached is extremely painful to us all here. Particularly so to my sister, I might say, who has always entertained the highest hopes for Natalia.’ Nodding towards Mary Kemp, he paused and changed tack. ‘We had hoped that Mr Kalugin might be joining you, us, today.’

‘My husband is travelling somewhere in Uzbekistan, or Tajikistan, or – I have no idea where my husband is,’ Irina said, sounding, she heard, more dismissive than she meant to. ‘But he leaves me entirely responsible for Natalia. Whatever needs to be said or done …s’

James Nelligan cleared his throat. His face became redder. ‘Normally, we would be delighted if one of our pupils started reading Strindberg, Nietszche, Dostoevsky – in the original, of course! – and would encourage such intellectual curiosity. And Bill here,’ he indicated his deputy, ‘Mr Birling, who teaches philosophy and religion,’ mother and teacher nodded at one another – ‘like my sister, has enormously appreciated and valued Natalia’s – as I say – spirit of enquiry, and willingness, eagerness to discuss matters that your average fifteen or sixteen year old scarcely dreams of. Or if he or she does, tends to become earnest, pretentious about. Whereas Natalia …

‘In the last year, however, Bill has remarked that Natalia has seemed determined not merely to discuss philosophy and religion, but to demolish philosophy and religion, and undermine the beliefs of her fellow pupils. And because she is intellectually more of a heavyweight than her fellows, she has achieved, if I may put it like this, quite a high knockout rate. She hasn’t just undermined her friends’ beliefs – she has in a number of cases destroyed them. The trouble is: Natalia herself has the intellectual strength to remain standing even without beliefs. Whereas her less morally sturdy companions – having had their beliefs destroyed, they tend to collapse. And in their confusion, turn to petty or not so petty crime, and general dissoluteness. What is more, having arrived at their position not by any real intellectual process, but simply because they have been let us say bludgeoned into it by Natalia, they tend to become – silly.’

‘Brain-damaged,’ Bill Birling said.

‘As I also wrote in my letter, I believe: that in itself may not be entirely desirable in a school such as this, where we have students from many parts of the world, some of whom have parents with very strongly held beliefs. Or perhaps it may not be desirable in any school. Heavyweights delivering knock-out blows to their weaker companions smacks of bullying, even if not of the physical kind.’ Somewhat apologetically, Nelligan added, ‘Natalia gives the impression of enjoying flooring her fellows, seeing the canvas littered with bodies. Even so – we like to believe we are strong enough at Battlement, well-trained enough in the art of picking up the fallen and helping them back on their feet, to accommodate in our midst the occasional bruiser … or let us say subversive. Particularly when that subversive is as remarkable as Natalia.

‘When though it comes to physical undermining, physical destruction, drug-taking – there, I’m afraid, we have to draw the line.’

Irina, faced with the triumvirate behind the desk, had till now stayed silent; not least because she had a certain difficulty in following some of Nelligan’s boxing terminology. But she felt at last compelled to break her silence.

‘Natalia does not take drugs,’ she stated. ‘She has told me so – she tells me everything she does, whether I want to hear it or not, whether I approve of it or not, and – she has told me she does not take drugs, and I believe her.’

‘All parents believe their children,’ chipped in Bill Birling, who unlike his colleagues plainly had no time for plutocratic Russian beauties, and still less for their unruly offspring.

James Nelligan glanced at Birling, and let it be seen he could have done without an intervention that was neither timely, nor true. He went on to Irina, pointedly, ‘In this case I believe you are right to believe her. And that – I was going to say, that is the trouble. But what I should say is, that compounds the trouble. You are right, Mrs Kalugina: Natalia does not take drugs. Though no doubt,’ he felt bound to say for the sake of his deputy, ‘she has experimented with them. But for one who does not take drugs herself, who has said on more than one occasion that only the weak take drugs – and that, therefore, drugs should be freely available so the weak can go to the wall – yet who exhorts others to take drugs and permits herself, at the age of seventeen, to decide who is weak, who is expendable – that is not just bullying, Mrs Kalugina. That is – I’m not sure what word to use. Totalitarianism. Incipient fascism. In any case, extreme and unacceptable arrogance.

‘We have spoken to Natalia on a number of occasions, of course, and whenever we have, she could hardly be more reasonable, more charming, more understanding of our attitude. She agrees herself that the deliberate destruction of a fellow student – of a fellow human – would be wrong, wicked, intolerable. She claims, with utter reasonableness, that we only cast her as the villain of the piece because of the way, in the last year or so, she has chosen to dress.’

Until she had been fifteen, Natalia Kalugina had looked like a slightly taller version of her mother: pale-skinned, pale-haired, diaphanous. The only difference being that whereas Irina had greyish-brown eyes, Natalia had remarkable pale-blue eyes – like her father. From about sixteen onwards, however – more or less at the same time as she had pinned up in her bedroom at home a quotation from The Brothers Karamazov – ‘If there is no God, everything is permitted’ – she had started to dye her fair hair black, to circle her eyes with heavy black make-up, and to dress in a variety of all-black costumes that had tested to the limit Battlement’s policy of allowing pupils to wear what they like. ‘Within reason,’ the school curriculum stated, and Natalia was always prepared to debate the limits and meaning of reason.

Himself always prepared to see the other side of any argument, James Nelligan continued, ‘She may not be entirely wrong in that. Her – I don’t know how she would define her style. Post-punk, semi-goth – I can’t keep up with the young and their fashions. But I suppose her general look might have inclined us to see her as more of the Lord or Lady of Misrule than she really was, is. Nevertheless – one of our students recently attempted suicide, Mrs Kalugina. She was one of Natalia’s closest friends.’

‘Natalia told me,’ Irina murmured. She thought it worth repeating, ‘She tells me everything.’

‘The girl said she was depressed, unhappy, and upset by her parents’ recent divorce. As she may well have been. But we all’ – Nelligan glanced left and right – ‘believe that essentially it was a case, as I say, of bullying. Madeleine, like so many teenagers, was standing as it were within sight of the edge of the cliff. But who urged her forward? Who practically shoved her over the edge?’

Before Nelligan could name her daughter, Irina said firmly, ‘No. I do not believe that. I will not accept that. I know Madeleine. She has come to stay with us in London. Natalia has been to stay with her in France. They are devoted to each other. What does Madeleine say?’

‘What I just told you,’ Nelligan said, starting to losing patience. ‘That she was depressed and upset about her parents.’

‘So why do you blame Natalia?’

‘Because we suspect that Madeleine had been taking drugs for some time before she made her attempt. Because those who are not part of the Kalugina set say that she had been taking drugs, and tell us that it was Natalia who procured them for her, and maybe even paid for them.’

‘Jealous racists,’ Irina snorted. ‘Just because she is Russian. Just because Natalia likes to go round boasting that her father is a gangster.’

‘Is he?’ Bill Birling enquired.

‘No!’ Irina almost yelled. ‘He is an international businessman. A financier. A trader. A – he may be,’ Irina conceded. ‘I have no idea what my husband does. I very rarely see him any longer. He was a chemical engineer when I met and married him. And then – everything changed, and we came to England, and … But that has nothing to do with it,’ the pale Russian woman roared in her quiet way. ‘So, maybe he is a gangster. Are we going to blame the children for the sins of their parents? Natalia may be very intelligent, but she likes to say silly things like all teenagers. She likes to boast, to shock. Where some children might say their parents are politicians, or famous actors, or – I don’t know, she likes to say her father is a gangster. And because of that you are going to take the word of a lot of silly jealous sixteen-year-olds who are resentful of Natalia’s popularity and prowess?’

She could feel her nostril flaring; her voice was growing shrill with indignation.

‘Fine, that is enough,’ she declared. ‘You believe Natalia is a bullying drug-dealer who systematically and deliberately sets out to destroy her fellow students. I believe she is a kind highly intelligent young woman who refuses to accept any truth unless she has tested it for herself, who wants to explore the world not just accept other people’s reports of it, and who – who refuses to be held back, held down by intellectual and moral – lightweights,’ Irina said, glaring at each of the triumvirate in turn. ‘You want to expel Natalia? No, you shall not. I shall withdraw Natalia from this school, with, as you put it in your letter, “immediate effect”. I shall not have a daughter of mine accused without reason, condemned without proof. That is totalitarianism, of which I believe I have greater experience than you. Now if you would be so good as to send for Natalia, we will leave. I would be grateful if you could pack up her things and send them on – I will of course cover any expenses. How dare you accuse my daughter of being a virtual murderer – because she reads Dostoevsky? How dare you try to destroy her?’ Irina paused for breath, and got to her feet. Her parting line, however, was addressed not to Nelligan nor even to his deputy. Rather, she looked again at Nelligan’s sister, whose eyes she had not liked to meet when she had flung out the word ‘lightweight’, and said, with as much hauteur as she could manage, ‘And you, madam – why are you wearing my daughter’s earrings?’

She had hardly realised, until she spoke, that Mary Kemp was wearing Natalia’s earrings. The small blue diamond earrings that Ivan Kalugin had given his daughter for her sixteenth birthday, because they matched exactly the colour of her eyes. She must have noticed them subconsciously, Irina guessed, when she had tried to wither the threesome sitting in judgement on her, and had felt a little guilty about lumping the English teacher in with her brother and the dark-eyed deputy. But there could be no mistaking them: small though those diamonds were, they were unique.

If she had tossed a hand-grenade across the desk she could hardly have caused greater consternation. Mary Kemp went white and clasped her hands to her ears, obviously having forgotten that she was wearing Natalia’s earrings. James Nelligan stared at his sister with a combination of horror and profound, somehow metaphysical disappointment. And little Bill Birling, who in his astonishment revealed that he loathed Mary Kemp for being not only more intelligent and serious than her brother, but more so – far more so – than he, looked first at the English teacher not just with hatred, but with contempt, and then at her brother with a sort of triumph. At last, the terrier-like scrum-half in the game of Battlement, the game of life, had seen the big beefy captain of the team discomfited, humiliated. And do what he like, say what he like, James Nelligan would never again recover his authority.

As it happened, James Nelligan said nothing. There was nothing he could say. It was his sister alone who could provide an explanation, and he could merely listen – and, now, judge her.

For all her shock and embarrassment, Mary almost immediately recovered her composure. She stood, she gazed at Irina as if the two women were alone in the room. And looking now, to Irina’s eyes, noble, even magnificent, she said in a quiet, gentle voice, ‘I forgot I still had them on. Natalia loaned them to me. I was admiring them the other day – they match so incredibly the colour of Natalia’s eyes – and she said I should try them on, wear them. She said she hardly ever did any more. Pale-blue diamonds don’t really go with her outfits … So I put them on, and Natalia told me I could keep them for a while if I liked, and –’ Apparently dissociating herself from everything her brother had said till now, Mary Kemp told Irina, ‘I love your daughter, Mrs Kalugina. She is not just the most remarkable pupil I have ever had, she is, despite her age, the most remarkable person I have ever met in my life. I believe Natalia is a genius.’ She paused. ‘I also believe, however – maybe just because she is a genius – she is a monster. What is more, I do not know whether I love her because she is a genius, or because she is a monster. But I suspect, on balance – it is more because she is a monster.’

The woman raised her hands to her ears again and removed the diamond earrings; she handed them to Irina. ‘Here,’ she said. Then she turned to her brother and said, ‘I am sorry, Jim,’ gave Bill Birling a look that was still more contemptuous than his own, and left the room.

Irina wanted to call out after her, ‘Don’t go, please, stop.’ Instead, she looked back at James Nelligan and said, quietly, ‘Will you please call Natalia.’

Half an hour later mother and daughter were driving back to London, and Irina was asking, ‘Did you know she loved you?’

‘Yes, of course I did, Mum,’ Natalia said. ‘It would have been pretty difficult not to.’

‘And did she ever – did you ever …?’ Irina, frank though she normally was, couldn’t finish her sentence.

‘Have sex?’

Irina, her eyes on the road, nodded.

‘Will you go to the police if I say yes?’

‘Do you want me to?’

Natalia considered. ‘No,’ she at length said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘In that case I won’t.’ She waited. ‘Well?’

Again Natalia considered. Finally, she too staring at the road ahead, murmured, ‘No Mum. We didn’t.’

‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘Don’t I always tell you the truth?’

‘Yes. But I thought maybe, just this once …’

Natalia glanced at her mother, and said, ‘We’ll have to find another school now, won’t we?’

*

They did, almost immediately; a sixth-form college near the house in Chelsea to which Natalia could go as a day-girl. By the time she started at the school, however, in early September, Natalia’s hair was almost its natural colour again; she tended to wear either jeans and a white shirt or a blue skirt and a pale-blue blouse that brought out the colour of her eyes; and she told her mother that once she had finished school next year, and assuming she passed all her exams, while she might go on to university, she thought it more likely that she would go abroad somewhere. To Italy, maybe, or to France. She wanted to try to write a book …

‘I’m probably wrong, and I’m sure it’s arrogance or stupidity on my part, but – I feel I’ve learned enough, Mum. At least for the moment. Now, I just want to try and put down – interpret what I know.’

‘You must do what you like, darling,’ Irina said. ‘What you think is best. Maybe take a gap year—’

‘I think my life is going to be a gap year!’ smiled pale, demure Natalia Kalugina. ‘But – we’ll see.’

*

Irina did see, two and a half years later. She saw a great deal when an excited Natalia called her from Istanbul, where she’d been living for the past twelve months, to say she had just heard that her first little novel had been accepted for publication. ‘In England, the States, and Russia, Mum!’ She saw more – she saw, she told herself, almost everything – when, only three days later, on the Brompton Road, she bumped into Madeleine Morel, who had been Natalia’s best friend at Battlement but with whom, so far as Irina knew, Natalia had not had any further contact after leaving the school. As she had not had any contact with any of her old friends, or the members of her set. ‘That’s all in the past, Mum. That’s over.’

Madeleine was looking well; she was in her second year at University College, London, she said. Irina invited her to have a coffee, and after the slim, elegant if somewhat nervous younger woman had asked after Natalia, and been told about the novel, Irina couldn’t resist enquiring, ‘How was your last year at Battlement, Madeleine? All right?’

‘I suppose so,’ Madeleine replied. ‘Though after the scandal, the whole place was in such a state of shock for about six months, we all felt in a way we were sleep-walking.’

‘Scandal?’ Irina echoed. ‘You mean about Natalia leaving?’

Madeleine flushed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Didn’t Natalia tell you?’

‘What?’

‘Right after she left – I mean about a week after she left – Mary Kemp, the headmaster’s sister, killed herself.’

Irina, sitting in the coffee shop on Beauchamp Place, felt faint. ‘Oh, that’s awful,’ she said. ‘How terrible. Poor woman. Why?’

‘No one ever knew. But everyone said—’ Madeleine hesitated. ‘That she was so much in love with Natalia that she couldn’t live without her.’

‘Poor, poor woman,’ Irina repeated.

Again Madeleine hesitated before continuing. ‘Though one or two people said it was because, after she left – Natalia wrote to Mary Kemp …’ The young woman avoided Irina’s eyes. ‘She said you were going to go to the police.’

‘I wasn’t!’ Irina protested. ‘Natalia told me not to. She said there was nothing to go to the police about. She – that’s not true, Madeleine. It’s not true.’

‘I said it wasn’t,’ Madeleine murmured, still not meeting Irina’s eyes.

‘Natalia will be so shocked when she finds out,’ Irina said. ‘She was really very fond of Mary. She told me once, after she had left, that she owed her everything.’

Now Madeleine did at last look directly at her friend’s mother. ‘Natalia knew,’ she said. ‘I wrote her an email, telling her.’

‘What?’ Irina breathed, feeling faint again. ‘Are you sure? I mean – maybe she never got your message.’

‘Oh she got it all right,’ Madeleine said. ‘She wrote back.’ There was a pause. ‘She said, “Well, now I’ve got the subject for my first book.”’

*

When Irina received a proof copy of Natalia’s novel, and saw the title, she was not surprised.

Part black comedy, party murder mystery, the book told the story of a teenage girl who wants to be a writer, but who believes – who has been taught by an older woman, the headmistress of the school she attends – that to be successful in life, in any field including that of art, sacrifices must be made. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the success, and if one can offer up a human life to the gods – ‘Ah, how won’t they then reward you?’

The novel was called The Monster.

L & I

‘Strauss! Peter Strauss!’

Already when he had seen the car approaching he had shrunk back – like everyone else in the street. And when the great black vehicle with its tinted windows had started to slow down, he had felt his stomach lurch, his legs go weak. There again like all the other passers-by, he had continued walking and tried to stare straight ahead of him; at the same time he had kept an eye on the car and wondered why it was pulling up. Of course it couldn’t be stopping for him, he had told himself. Nevertheless …

When he saw the rear window lowered, and heard his name called, not only his stomach and legs felt they had dissolved. Such was his panic he felt his whole body had turned to jelly. He thought he would faint. He told himself he was imagining things. It had to be a mistake. He looked around, wildly, and all those people who had shrunk away from the car, as their forebears might have from the plague-cart, now shrank away from him, the fear and pity in their faces mingled with relief.

He wondered whether he should run, but knew he couldn’t – he couldn’t move. He wondered whether he should deny he was Peter Strauss, but knew that that was useless, too. Oh God, he told himself, this cannot be happening. This happens to other people. And what compounded the nightmare, was that even as the driver’s door opened and a massive bullet-headed chauffeur in a black uniform got out, stared straight at him and opened the rear door, it occurred to him that he recognised that voice that had called. He couldn’t have; he had to be imaging things. And yet …

The chauffeur gestured with his chin.

Again Peter looked round, still more wildly than before, and saw now only pity on the faces of those passers-by, some of whom he recognised and some of who probably recognised him. Would they ever see him again? It seemed unlikely. Then, since there was nothing for it, and feeling as a passenger must on a plane that is crashing – knowing that even if he screams there is no way out – he managed to take one, and then another step towards that rear door.

He was nearly there. He looked up at the blue sky. He saw the clouds. Oh please, he wanted to cry. Oh please. Not me. What have I done? Oh please, please …

Making an effort not to lose control of his bowels, he ducked into the car and sat in the empty seat – next, he was aware, to an officer in uniform.

‘Strauss! Peter Strauss!’

Again that voice – and now as he heard it, and a split second before the officer removed his peaked cap, he remembered.

‘L?’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘I mean …’ He felt sick with relief himself, and in a way still more terrified. ‘Should I – what should I call you?’

‘L will do just fine,’ the officer said; as, with his cap off, he allowed Peter to see his face. Nearly twenty-five years had passed; but with his short brown wavy hair, small pale eyes, large nose and grinning dangerous mouth, the man was still quite recognisable. As the L who, at eighteen, and in his final year at college, had spotted a thirteen-year-old just starting at the school; and had taken it upon himself to make the boy’s life a misery, both physically and emotionally.

The physical abuse that L had inflicted had taken various forms. He had tied his victim over scalding pipes in the shower room, sodomised him, and got his friends to sodomise him – or beat him if they preferred, or stick their penises in his mouth. He had made his victim do push-ups and other exercises, again and again, till all his muscles were screaming and eventually he collapsed onto the concrete floor of the shower room – over which L and his friends had urinated, or defecated. And he had made his victim accompany him on long runs in the winter, and had lashed him around the legs with twigs, or stinging nettles, whenever he had slowed down.

The emotional abuse he had inflicted however, had taken just one form. Even while subjecting him to these tortures, L had contrived to make Peter Strauss fall in love with him.

It was not the tortures themselves that had prompted this response. Rather, the fact that as well as being a bully and a sadist – and a star athlete and boxer – L had revealed himself to be the best-read boy in the school, the most musically knowledgeable; and the first person ever to recognise that young Peter Strauss had talent – or even genius, it was once suggested. Sometimes this talent seemed to drive the older boy mad, as if he couldn’t bear not to be possessed of it himself. Other times, more often, he felt proud that he was the only person who did so recognise it – and saw it as his task to nurture it. ‘You have to have steel put into you,’ he had shouted at Peter. ‘You have to have fire put into you. Otherwise your talent, as it matures – as you mature – may become … fluttery. Pretty. Whereas if I make you strong … Oh,’ the eighteen-year-old had said, longingly. ‘You can be great, Peter. You can be – extraordinary.’

It was not only by inflicting pain on him and raping him that L sought to make his protégé strong. It was also by teaching him to box, and box well; by teaching him to shoot, in the school’s military corps; and by getting him to make clear, somehow, to the members of ‘The Gang’ – as L’s side-kicks were called – that they were fawning stupid thugs who would never amount to anything in life. And to bear the further abuse to which, as a consequence, he was subjected.

‘I can’t bear fluttery things,’ Peter remembered L shouting one day – when they had gone off to the country together, and for the first time L had made him shoot something living. ‘The Spanish like killing bulls. But I like killing – no, not necessarily killing, hurting, fluttery things. I like ripping the wings off butterflies. I like breaking the fingers of semi-talented pianists and violinists’ – he did, too; Peter had seen him do it, even while managing to make it look like an accident – ‘who refuse to explore the outer limits of their talent, but just – flutter around on the edge of it. I like – there Peter, look!’ L yelled, as a pheasant, alarmed by his voice, flapped up from the undergrowth. ‘Fire! Fire!’ He waited a second, and watched; and as Peter squeezed the trigger and the bird crashed out of the sky, he turned back with bright eyes to look at his creature, who felt giddy and sick, but dared not show it. ‘Good. Well done!’ L continued to study the marksman, and did of course see his revulsion, however hard Peter tried to conceal it. But he pretended not to, and grinned. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Whenever I fire and hit something – it’s like coming. Now, let’s go get a rabbit.’

‘Why?’ Peter said, quietly.

‘Why what? Why do I hate fluttery things? I don’t know,’ L said. And then: ‘because we’re only here once, and it seems to me, while we’re here – we should go to the very ends of the earth, so even if we die tomorrow, we know we’ve been there. Whereas people who just hover around the entrance, just stand at first-floor windows and say “Oh what a pretty view” – I despise them. They’re just tourists. And – all right, that’s what most people are meant to be. Are happy – in a manner of speaking – to be. But when, once in a while, you find someone who could go further, who could even point out things to you you’ve never seen, take you places you’ve never been to yourself or even suspected existed – and that person refuses to do it – I see it as my mission to destroy him. To make him wish he had no ability, no talent at all. That’s what I mean when I say I hate fluttery things. And that’s what I won’t …’ Suddenly uncontrollably, insanely angry, the young man caught himself, and grinned. ‘Well that’s the theory, anyway. In practice, I’m just a psychopath who enjoys inflicting pain and killing things. And …’ The roller-coaster dipped again, and once more he was serious. ‘I shall kill you, Peter Strauss, if you don’t fulfil your – destiny, let’s call it. One day, however long it takes … You are the first person, the only person I have ever met or am likely to meet who could, really – yes, go all the way. And if you don’t, I swear to you – I shall be like a demon in your dreams. Haunting you. And even though ten, twenty years may pass, one day, when you’re least suspecting it – when you’re just walking down the street maybe, trying to look insignificant, normal … Look!’ L shouted, as another pheasant rose into the air. ‘Shoot it, Peter! Kill it!’

Dutifully, and not feeling so sick now, Peter raised his gun, and shot.

At the end of Peter’s first year at college, L left; to the relief not only of all the people he had tormented, but of his friends, such as they were. Even the masters were glad to see the back of him; unsure what to make of this young man who seemed to delight in out-bullying the bullies, out-arguing or out-shining the more intellectually brilliant boys, and in regarding both with a contempt that was as all-encompassing and all-consuming as a swarm of locusts.

Some said he would come to a bad end; others that he would go far. But both agreed that in the current uncertain political climate, he was likely to find an outlet for his peculiar gifts.

The only person who missed him was Peter Strauss; and he missed him with a passion that was almost as great as his sense of liberation – his joy that the horror had gone. Or perhaps, he sometimes thought, his passion was still greater than his joy …

Whatever he felt: L never really abandoned him. Peter completed his own five years at school. He went on to university. And he abruptly left university when, at the age of twenty-one, he at the same time published his first book, had the first exhibition of his paintings, and was hailed, almost overnight, as ‘the brightest hope of his generation’. Yet for all that in the meantime he had not heard from the man again, the demon with which L had threatened him – the demon that was L – was always in his mind. Making him work, work, work, making him strive, strive, strive for always better, higher, more extreme things – and making him feel, by the age of thirty, that he had already exhausted his talent. Some of his friends called him ‘The Colonel’, because tall, thin, and inclined to severity, he seemed to pursue his career with almost military zeal – and besides, ‘You look like a Colonel.’ Others called him ‘The Puritan’ because fair of hair and grim – at times – of lip, he seemed to pursue his career with almost religious zeal – and besides, ‘You look like a puritan. Some bleak, Protestant pastor.’ But neither the one group nor the other, Peter suspected, realised to what extent he tried to keep up that outward appearance so that no one – above all that invisible but ever-present L – should suspect that inside him there was some soft, feeble, and yes, fluttery creature. A creature that was only too eager to lie back and rest; and might have done so had he not needed to earn a living, and not been scared that if he even attempted it, L would come to get him.

It was, he sometimes thought, as much to get away from L, as to distance himself from the political turmoil, that he had sold his flat in town and retreated to a small town on the banks of the River R——. All right, as government after government fell, the extremists gained in power, ‘The Leader’ took advantage of the confusion to advance his own cause, and with a combination of cunning and ruthlessness eventually got himself named head of state, wisdom dictated that people such as he – so-called intellectuals, and homosexuals – should keep as low a profile as possible. But fear – fear of L looking into his soul and seeing that what had once soared like an eagle now but weakly flapped its wings in its nest – was what made Peter listen to the voice of wisdom. To listen to it, and conclude that even should The Leader be killed and his regime overthrown – as sooner or later they must be – he might stay on where he was; coming in his middle and then old age to be taken for a retired military man, who had never been ‘the marrying kind’; or a Protestant pastor who had lost his faith, and never ceased to regret it. For surely, Peter argued, even if that threat that L had made all those years ago had been real, he wouldn’t come to seek him out here, would he? Not in this provincial backwater where, for the present at least, ‘P. Strauss, artist’ was hoping to survive by living off his savings, and painting flower-paintings or portraits of local worthies and their families. Once the war was over he might think about getting back to serious work. But till then – surely, surely, he asked himself time after time when he woke at four in the morning and was unable to get back to sleep, L would stay away till then?

Surely, surely, Peter told himself now as he sat beside L, the real L, in his black armour-plated car, he should have realised that the answer to that question was ‘no’. What was happening had been bound to happen, and he had been crazy to think he could get away. All right, maybe the real L wouldn’t be quite so terrifying as his imaginary L, but—

Even that hope was absurd. Of course he would be! Still more so, probably. Imaginary demons were one thing; senior officers in an elite division of the state police were something altogether different. Not for nothing did people cringe at the sight of these huge black cars as they made their way through the narrow streets of the town. Not for nothing had he always cringed himself. One could fool oneself all one liked; not talk about ‘that place’ that had been built some fifteen kilometres up river. But even if one pretended it didn’t exist, still when there was a wind from the north-east, the smell that came to one was unmistakably the smell of death. Moreover, every now and then one of those black cars would be seen cruising the streets at night, and in the morning it was reported that Mr X or Miss Y had ‘gone away’. ‘Probably just visiting a relative,’ people said – not daring to ask the family or neighbours of the missing person for confirmation of this fact. But they knew that having left, it was most improbable that Mr X or Miss Y would return.

As it was most improbable – Peter told himself for the second time in five minutes – that he would return; to his flat in Mozart Street; to his quiet life. Of course it was possible that L had just spotted him walking down the street and told his chauffeur to stop because he wanted a chat for old times’ sake. But the chances were …

He had left a window open at home, he remembered. Oh well, he guessed it didn’t matter. Someone, eventually, would close it.

‘So, how’ve you been?’ L said, continuing to grin. ‘I heard you were living round here. To tell the truth, that was partly why I accepted this posting when they offered it to me. Though I would probably have accepted anyway, given the job … I was planning to look you up. I’ve only been here a few months. Got a lot to arrange, clear up. My predecessor killed himself! Stupid fool. But then, when I saw you walking along … You haven’t changed much. Got a bit older, obviously, but – how old are you now?’

‘Thirty-seven,’ Peter murmured.

‘Yes, I suppose you would be if I’m forty-two … You still queer?’

Peter glanced at the driver.

‘It’s all right. We’re in private here. Nothing you say will be taken down and used in evidence against you. Right, Otto?’

Otto, at the wheel, grunted.

‘Yes,’ Peter murmured, his throat dry.

‘Thought you probably were, from your books. Besides, people don’t often change … I used to fuck him in the ass when we were at school,’ L said to the driver. ‘He used to scream and squawk, but – always give a boy what he wants, I say. Eh?’

Otto, glancing at Peter in his rear-view mirror, grunted.

‘How long you been living out here?’

‘Nearly – seven years, now.’

‘What you doing? Lying low till the war ends?’

Again Peter glanced at the driver.

‘Stop looking at Otto every time I ask you a question! We’re not fools. We know it’s all over bar the shouting, as they say. Another six months, a year at most … We should never have got into a war. That’s what really messed us up. And once America became involved … If we’d just done it quietly, creeping up a little here, a little there … In twenty years the whole of Europe – the whole world, probably – would have come round to our way of thinking. Or recognised that in the final analysis they had always been of our way of thinking. But impatience, impatience, and what do you get? Defeat, ruin, and another century or two of dullness, worthiness and hypocrisy. Well I’m glad I shan’t be around to see it. These past twelve years have been so exhilarating I don’t think I could bear … Well?

‘Well?’ Peter echoed.

‘Have you been lying low?’

‘Yes,’ Peter murmured. ‘I suppose so.’

L looked at him; looked, Peter felt, into him, as he used to, all those years ago.

‘Or did you think that if you moved to a small town you’d be safe from me?’

Again Peter felt faint. It really was as if the man inhabited his head, could read his every thought.

‘I always told him’, L said to Otto, ‘that if he didn’t fulfil his promise I would come back to get him. Fuck him – figuratively speaking now, of course! – like I used to. What’s more,’ L continued, still to the driver, ‘he always believed me.’ He turned. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Peter whispered.

‘Well,’ L went on, ‘we’ll talk about that later. But I have read all your books, you know. And I used to sneak off to see your exhibitions. You still painting?’

‘Yes,’ Peter whispered. He cleared his throat, and went on, not much more loudly: ‘Though in the present climate …’

‘It’s all right. You don’t have to apologise. I quite understand. A man must make compromises to survive. As long as they’re only temporary of course, and he doesn’t deviate permanently from his allotted path … I must say, I think you’ve been quite clever in your books. But then you always were, weren’t you? The knuckle-heads could see one thing – if they could read at all! – and the … sharper of eye, let’s say, could pick out the real figure in the carpet. Do you know that story?’

Peter nodded.

‘Thought you probably did … Anyway, it’ll all be quite different once we’re gone and the good guys have won, and – why did you never leave? You could have gone to America, couldn’t you?’

‘Yes. Probably. But … I wanted to watch, I suppose. See the whole thing at first hand … And even if I’d gone to America, I couldn’t have got away from …’

‘What?’ L asked, with real intensity; he waited a beat, then went on to say, with an almost wistful smile rather than his usual grin: ‘Me?’

Peter too waited a beat, and met the man’s eye before he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. He hesitated, and continued: ‘You meant it, didn’t you?’

Just for a second L wondered what he was talking about; then he got there. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’ Another pause. ‘And I still do.’

The car was picking up speed; they had reached the outskirts of town and were driving beside the river.

L nodded in the direction they were heading. ‘You ever been out here?’

‘No. Of course not. It’s forbidden to go more than two kilometres along this road. And even if it wasn’t …’

‘Out of sight, out of mind, eh?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, it’ll be an experience for you. Something else you’ll have seen.’

Peter wondered if this implied that at some stage he would be coming back along this road. He realised that L hadn’t quite said so, but – he relaxed very slightly.

‘Not many of your colleagues have seen a fully functioning extermination camp, I’ll be bound.’

Peter stared.

‘Not many would be interested, I suppose, but – no, that’s not true. They’d all be interested. Just most wouldn’t admit it. They’d be too frightened of their consciences. And of course of not getting out alive themselves! But that’s not something you have to worry about, is it?’

The grin returned; Peter didn’t reply.

What he said, after he had looked out of the window at the fields on the far side of the river, was: ‘And you? I mean what do you …?’

‘I’m the commandant, of course! What did you think? That I’d be taking orders from someone? Come Peter, you should know me better than that. I’ve never taken orders from anyone in my life, even when I seem to.’ He frowned, and said seriously: ‘I wouldn’t take orders from God, if he existed.’

‘That’, Peter said, ‘I can believe.’

L’s eyes narrowed slightly. He changed the subject. ‘I’m married. I have three young children. My wife used to be a barmaid.’ Did he say that with just a hint of defiance, of defensiveness? ‘She cries a lot,’ the man murmured, himself looking out of the window.

Peter glanced at him as if to say: I imagine you give her a lot to cry about; L, who had turned back and caught his look, nodded.

‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘I’ve been coming into town myself most days. But in disguise, as it were. In civilian clothes. I’ve been bringing the children to school.’

Again there was wistfulness in his voice; even love.

‘And since no one ever sees my face when I’m in uniform, or can look into this car when I’m riding around selecting my next victim,’ he laughed, ‘as far as the other parents are concerned I’m just a good papa doing his duty before going off to work. Somewhat reserved of course – in fact I never speak to anyone other than to say good morning – but oh, a real gentleman.’

Peter considered him at length now, before asking, quietly, as he had asked many years before: ‘Why?’

‘Why do I play the good papa?’ L paused. ‘Or why that?’ He lay back in his seat and appeared to be thinking. ‘I sometimes ask myself the same question. I suppose the short answer is the same as ever. I am a psychopath. One who gets pleasure in inflicting pain and destroying his fellow human beings. I always have been. I’ve always loathed humanity. I think humans are the most repulsive of all animals, the cruellest, the most greedy, and the most, far and away the most, hypocritical. No other animal believes itself to be good. Or bad. Yet we, in our self-serving way … We pretend that Mozart and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Michelangelo can somehow justify the horror … and we also seem to think that if we weren’t around to see them, sunsets, mountain ranges, spring flowers wouldn’t be beautiful. Of course they would be! It’s just our staggering egos that make us …’ He stopped, looked down at his hands, then up again at Peter. ‘I suppose, given the choice, I would have been some sort of “artist” myself. Part of the justification. Since I have no discernible talent … I’ve always had a longing to expose. To expose all the baseness, the stupidity, the foulness of …’ He pointed, surreptitiously at Otto the driver. ‘Of the brutes, the blowflies that buzz around those who stink of power. Especially those who give themselves airs and graces and think they’re superior animals … But also to expose, as I say, the hypocrisy of the – of the hand-wringers, the intellectuals, the aesthetes, the – artists. The other flies that cluster on the bloated, disgusting body …’

A further examination of the hands, then: ‘When I left school … well, everything was descending into chaos, and I suppose I joined the Party because I thought I was going to have some fun. Like a small boy who gets to go round smashing things up … At the same time, even while I was having fun, and was attracted to the whole – psychopathic streak in the Party, I think in the back of my mind I knew that it was doomed. It reeked of self-destruction. No movement, no religion, no … love, can be that powerful, that violent and nihilistic – even if it pretends to be the opposite – without having its end built into its beginning. It was going to be a blaze that lasted – well, rather less than it has lasted, I thought at the time. And its destructiveness has been on a far greater scale than any I ever dreamed of – hoped for. It’s been staggering, hasn’t it? All mankind’s beastliness not just bubbling to the surface, but bubbling right over and flooding the earth. Oh it’s been breathtaking, Peter, glorious, and – now it’s almost over. We’re just mopping up the last drops before … as I say, it’s back to the same old show …’

Complete silence fell now, and L stared gloomily out of the window as if he could see, through that dark glass, the ruined earth.

Indeed, the only further words he spoke before they arrived at the camp were in reply to a question of Peter’s.

They had just gone through the second of two check-points – at which the guards had saluted L – and in the distance watch-towers, a great expanse of low dark buildings, and five high chimneys could be made out.

As if there had been no lull in their conversation, Peter said, very quietly: ‘But you did, in your fashion, care about me, didn’t you?

L turned back to him, and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, his voice distant. ‘In my fashion, I did think – I thought you had … promise.’ Looking straight ahead of him now, at those watch-towers and chimneys, he said: ‘It’s the usual old cliché, isn’t it? Hope springs eternal. Even in the hopeless …’

They drove, after L had lowered his window several times more to prove that it was really he in the car, right into the camp. Past three rows of barbed wire; past guards with guns at the ready and black dogs on leashes; past innumerable ghostly figures in grey rags shuffling around as if they had been given orders to do just that. Shuffle aimlessly in circles until … Here and there bodies lay on the ground, whether alive or dead it was impossible to tell; now that L’s window was permanently down, the stench was appalling. A smell of urine and faeces, of rotten meat and burnt flesh, over which lay a thin and ineffective layer of disinfectant, that only served to make the underlying effluvia more revolting yet.

L breathed in deeply and grinned as the car came to a halt. ‘Ah the perfume, the perfume,’ he said. ‘Out you get, Peter. We’re here.’

Just half an hour ago Peter had been walking down a street on his way to buy some milk. Now – he had already forgotten the terror he had felt when he had heard his name called. It was as if there had been an earthquake, he had slipped through a crack, and plunged so far, so fast, that the world above was impossible to imagine, let alone recall. This was an entirely different world, and if he should not leave it alive – even that, from this perspective, was no tragedy. It would be just normal.

‘I thought first we’d have a little tour. Then I’ll take you home to meet my wife and children – they’re on holiday at the moment. And, then, after we’ve had some lunch – we’ll talk about your work.’ He grinned again at Peter. ‘I’ll – pass judgement.’

No, it would be no tragedy if he were killed here today; even so, Peter felt a twinge in his bowels again.

He walked around the camp in a daze. Looking into huts where the prisoners slept, or lay all day if they were too weak to move, four to a bunk. Not quite daring to look at the guards, whose blank brutal faces reminded him of L’s side-kicks at school. Not daring to look at all at those thousand upon thousand of shuffling spectres; yet seeing them anyway, and registering the fact that it was impossible to tell what age they were, what sex they were, so emaciated were they, with their shaven heads and shrunken eyes.

‘What’, he heard himself whispering to L, ‘is the point? What are they doing here? Why, if you’re going to kill them all, don’t you just – kill them?’

‘Logistics,’ L explained. ‘They’re sent here from other camps when they’re too weak to work any more. But the crematoria can only cope with so many a day. And now that other places are closing down or being evacuated, we’re getting more and more – every night trainloads arrive. We’re working round the clock as it is. But eventually a back-log builds up, and as it’s useless putting them to work here … Come, I’ll show you what we do.’

He marched off, leading Peter through more and more rows of low, stinking huts, across a marshalling yard from which a train had just pulled out, past a high wooden fence, and on towards the river; following at last a set of rails that ran down into the water, and over which, suspended on pylons, hung a thick steel cable.

On the other side of the river the great black chimneys of what were obviously the crematoria pumped dark smoke out into the fine October morning.

‘We won’t go over there,’ L said. ‘You might find it a bit much, with your delicate sensibility. But I just thought I would show you … I don’t know if you can see, right under the main entrance, there are a series of cages on wheels?’

Peter narrowed his eyes and looked where L was pointing; he nodded.

‘It’s very simple. Quite beautifully simple. The prisoners are loaded into the cages on this side. The cages are hauled by that cable on those rails, which run right across the river on the bed. It takes about ten minutes for the crossing to be completed; for six or seven minutes the cages are completely submerged. By the time they emerge at the other side – the contents can be unloaded, and tipped straight into the furnaces.’

The man spoke so casually, so flippantly even, that Peter more than ever felt he was dreaming.

‘Don’t they protest?’ he heard himself whispering. ‘Before they’re … loaded?’

‘Some do. But the guards don’t take very kindly to protestors, so – on the whole they go quietly. Also, that fence there hides what’s going on from the main body of the camp. So they don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when they’re put into the cages. Though obviously they have a pretty good idea. It’s amazing, isn’t it? When you see all those people, and think just a few months, or maybe a couple of years ago, they were housewives, bank-clerks, lawyers, school-teachers, nurses, miners, shop-assistants, factory-workers – even artists! And now, reduced to …’ He looked at his watch. ‘But enough of all that! It’s lunch-time!’

They were driven in a jeep to L’s house, which stood about a mile outside the perimeter fence, and was built on the side of a low hill; from its windows, it was impossible to see anything of the camp itself, but the smell was as pervasive as ever.

As they approached the front door, and Peter gazed down the hill across a wood stretching almost as far as the eye could see – the trees were changing colour in the autumn, and all was gold, and russet, and red – L said: ‘I’ve taken a small flat in town. I take the children there to change, before they go to school. Or my wife does. Otherwise I’m afraid their friends might complain of the odour clinging to them.’

‘Don’t they say anything to their friends?’ Peter said, still whispering.

‘No. I’ve told them that I work in a top-secret establishment, so they can’t know anything more, and, as far as they’re concerned, it’s true.’

‘Even so,’ Peter continued to whisper, ‘they must know.’

‘Must they?’ L said. ‘Did you? Or any of your fellow citizens?’

‘No. But – yes, of course we knew. But not – not that it was like that.’ He gestured towards the unseen camp.

‘Bullshit,’ L muttered. ‘What did you think? That it was a rest home? Of course you knew, if you thought about it. Just as the children must have a pretty good idea, even if they’re too young for their ideas to be clear. But – they prefer not to think about it, too. As their friends prefer not to think about it, and their teachers prefer not to think about it. It’s easier if you tell yourself that this place is top-secret, and that, therefore – Marie!’ L bellowed. ‘We have a guest!’

As L and Peter went into the hall of the house, a woman emerged from a room on the far side. She was blonde, and quite pretty in a washed-out way; but she looked tired, scared and unhappy. Her eyes were puffy.

‘Hello,’ she said, in a voice as lacklustre as her complexion.

‘This is Peter. An old friend of mine.’

‘Hello,’ Marie repeated, her tone unchanged.

‘Do you think we can give him some lunch?’

‘Yes. I expect so.’ The woman paused, and went on, a little petulant now: ‘It would have helped if I had known in advance.’

‘I didn’t know myself in advance! I just saw Peter walking down the street and I called him over, and – Peter’s a distinguished writer, you know. And painter.’

Marie stared. ‘Oh,’ she said. Then, wearily: ‘It’ll be ready in five minutes if you want to go and wash your hands.’

‘Marie’s very particular about hands being clean,’ L said, with one of his grins. ‘I think she thinks soap is the solution to all the world’s problems.’

Marie gazed at her husband, then went back through the door from which she had emerged.

Peter couldn’t help glancing at L; L, as ever, knew what he was thinking.

‘Why did I marry her? Because she was pretty. Because she was submissive. Because – she was lost.’ The man hesitated, and went on, striking for the first time since he had hailed Peter, a slightly false note. ‘I have an affinity with the lost.’ He caught that note himself, and pulled a face. ‘At least,’ he said, with a smile, ‘I like to think I have.’

When the men went into the dining room they found the children already seated at the table. The two boys and one girl rose, instantly, to greet their father’s guest.

Peter’s first impression was that L was almost as severe and pitiless a father as he was a commandant. Hans, Brigitte and Peter seemed too perfect to be true. Their fair hair was neatly brushed and combed. Their clothes were spotless and without a crease. Their beautiful faces had not a blemish or an irregularity. They looked, all three of them, as their mother must have looked when she was young. It was only if one looked into their extraordinary blue eyes that one caught a glimpse of their father in them – a glimpse of spirit, of wildness. And if one then looked back at their father, one saw that though he appeared to be scanning them for any hint of a flaw – that he would no doubt pounce upon and use as an excuse to mete out punishment – in fact his severity was for the most part a mask to disguise how intensely proud he was of his offspring. Proud and amazed, that such saplings should have grown from so unpromising a soil.

Indeed, Peter thought, having observed him further, the man could scarcely conceal his love …

The meal was stiff and formal. L’s wife, who sounded as if she had learned ‘polite conversation’ from a manual, asked Peter a number of questions.

‘What made you move to this area, Mr. Strauss?’

‘Oh, the hills, the river – the quiet, I suppose,’ Peter replied.

‘I bet you didn’t know what they were planning to build when you bought your flat!’ L said with a laugh. ‘I bet you hoped you would be moving some place where your conscience would be as out of sight as you were!’

‘What kind of books do you write? I’m afraid I don’t have much time for reading.’

‘Oh, you know, all sorts. Novels. Short stories. And I’ve written a couple of plays …’

‘My husband said you were also a painter?’

‘Yes. Though just at the moment I’m rather – I mean I’ve been doing landscapes, and flower-paintings, that I can sell.’

‘I like landscapes and flower-paintings.’

‘Flutter flutter,’ L growled, ominously. ‘Flutter flutter.’

Then, intimidated by her husband, or having exhausted her supply of questions, Marie fell silent; and it was up to Peter to try to lighten the mood. He did so by talking to the children; asking them what their favourite subjects were at school, if they liked exploring the woods.

The answers he was given were – of course – immaculate. Polite complete sentences, even from the youngest; each one accompanied by a ‘sir’. Yet, conscious of L’s gaze on him, every time he addressed the angelic-looking creatures, Peter sounded to his own ear as fatuous as Marie; and felt that for all their faultless manners, the children were regarding him with contempt.

Oh, they had their father in them all right; and even if their parents had kept everything hidden from them, those sapphire-blue eyes had already seen too much.

As soon as they had finished eating L, who had been growing steadily more impatient, got to his feet. ‘Let’s go,’ he muttered to Peter. ‘I’ve got to get back to work. I’m sorry the food wasn’t better. Cooking is not one of Marie’s talents.’

‘No, no,’ Peter mumbled, flushing slightly. ‘It was delicious, thank you,’ he went on to his hostess, though in fact L was right.

‘And I’m sorry the talk wasn’t as brilliant as that to which you are accustomed.’

‘No, no,’ Peter again felt obliged to protest.

‘No doubt in another few years the children will be able to contribute something. At the moment, they’re a little small. Hans! Brigitte! Peter! Say goodbye to Mr Strauss.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Strauss,’ the children chorused, their unwavering stares sinister. They sounded as if they were bidding Mr Strauss farewell for ever.

‘And now,’ L said, opening the door of the dining room, ‘I suggest we adjourn to my office.’

‘Goodbye,’ Peter told the children. ‘Goodbye,’ he muttered to Marie, even as he was being herded out. The woman looked as if she were about to start crying. ‘And – thank you again.’

As they walked towards the jeep that would take them back to the camp, L murmured, reasonably: ‘It can’t be easy being married to me. And having to put up with all this.’ He gestured towards the brow of the hill. ‘That’s why I don’t say more to her. Poor thing. But what can you do? We can’t always choose those whom we love, can we?’

‘No,’ Peter replied. ‘We can’t.’

L’s ‘office’ was a narrow, four-storey house on the edge of the camp. L accompanied Peter to the top floor, and showed him into a study at the back. The room had a view of the river; into which, even as the two men went over to the window and L murmured ‘Look,’ three cages were being towed by the now taut cable, that was attached to a winch on the far side. Each cage contained what must have been a hundred tightly packed people, half of whom were screaming, reaching out through the bars of the cages, trying to clamber on each other’s shoulders, half of whom stood with heads bowed apparently resigned to their fate. It was a scene so horrifying it reminded Peter of some painting by Bosch; and for the third time that day he thought that he might faint. But L was holding his arm, holding him up; and despite himself he was unable not to keep watching, until all those cages, running smoothly on their rails, had disappeared beneath the surface of the river.

‘We’ve built a system of locks and weirs a little way downstream’, L murmured, ‘so even in summer the water level never falls below … what is required.’

Those were the only words spoken by either man until, some minutes later, the cages re-appeared. Now all was still inside; the bodies piled in contorted heaps, arms outstretched between the bars.

As he finally allowed Peter to leave the window, and accompanied him out of the study, L said: ‘The rails go right into the crematoria; the cages are up-ended automatically. So no one has to touch anything …’

The front room of the office-building was furnished only with a long table and twenty or so wooden chairs; off it there was a large terrace that over-looked the main body of the camp.

The first thing Peter noticed, as L opened the glass doors to the terrace, was a rifle propped up against the railings.

There was also a single stool, set right in the middle of the broad expanse of tiles.

It was to this stool that L led his prisoner, as Peter suddenly came to think of himself. ‘Sit,’ he barked; and as Peter did so, the man started to pace slowly up and down the terrace, his black boots clicking on the terra cotta.

‘We were talking, earlier, about figures in the carpet,’ L started; then paused, and seemed to start again. ‘I suppose, even when you were thirteen and you seemed undecided whether to become a serious person or a fluttering, effeminate … butterfly, I detected a vague, as-yet ill-drawn … yes, let’s call it figure in your carpet. That made me both want to fuck you, destroy you, and hope at the same time that I didn’t – that I could make you stronger, make you – yes, choose your serious side. You seemed, as no one else at that school did, and as few people whom I have met since, to see … clearly. And when I looked at those paintings you were doing then, and read your first little stories – they were immature, of course. Careless. Unformed. Even so – I detected in them that same – hint of a vision I could share. There always seemed to be, somewhere within them – the stories, now, I’m talking about – some figure who saw civilisation as both an unceasing struggle for decency, justice, a degree of equality and a certain amount of freedom – plus a seed-bed for extraordinary inventions, amazing discoveries and great works of art – and, at the same time: a catalogue of crimes. Of unspeakable, appalling crimes, that fertilised the seed-bed, and without which those flowers – those trees – could never have grown.

‘Maybe I was reading too much into them; seeing what I wanted to see rather than what was there. And I’m not saying that your vision was the only valid vision. It was just … one that appealed to me. One that I responded to. That was why I decided to take you under my wing. Though it may not have seemed like that to you.

‘And then, after I left school and went into … politics, let’s say, I always kept an eye out for you. I think I saw the first poems you published when you were – seventeen, you must have been.’

Peter nodded.

‘And then the first short story you wrote, and the first novel, and – I felt a tremendous sense of achievement. I felt you were my creation. Pure vanity, of course, you were your own creation. Nonetheless … And always, if your work could be seen as a carpet and there were a thousand different patterns in it, all wonderfully well arranged, I felt that I could detect one underlying pattern, the pattern that bound all those others together.

‘For five, ten years – I was so proud of you I cannot tell you. So proud of myself, for having first spotted you, even if I had had no real hand in your creation.

‘And then, as the political situation became more … fluid, and the world – our world – started to fall apart – I thought I detected a certain … paling of your imagination. A loss of energy that became more marked as the Party took over, and my own rise became more marked. Though I was always too crazy, even for the lunatics, to make it quite to the top; I disturbed even the profoundly disturbed.’

L gave one of his slightly wistful smiles.

‘It wasn’t that that fundamental pattern that I had always found so attractive had disappeared. Rather the opposite. It was that all the other patterns had disappeared; all the colours, the variety, the vitality. Until, in you last few books, there was nothing left in the carpet apart from that one ur-figure. Again and again, however much you changed the story, however much you … changed the clothes, let’s say, the hanger off which you suspended those clothes was the same. There, at the centre of the novel, or the novella, or whatever it was, was some artist-type – whether he was literally an artist or an artist in all but name – who, instinctively liberal in outlook, came to believe that he was living in an essentially corrupt society, and that to have any measure of success in that society – both material success and yes, ‘artistic’ success – he had to embrace the corruption. Or at least, acquiesce in it. He had to become an accomplice to murder, if not an actual murderer himself. He had to lie about what he saw, and at the same time draw strength from it. He had to – what is it you keep saying? “Become a laughing, prancing joker in the court of a depraved monarch.” I think I’ve read that, or words to that effect, in about six of your last seven books.

‘It was the truth, of course, to my way of thinking. But paradoxically, the more you told the truth, or the more baldly you told it and it did become the only figure in the carpet, the more contrived, schematic, somehow less truthful that figure became. Until I couldn’t help feeling – this has just become theory for him. This is just some automatic response he is trotting out, that he no longer really believes in. It became as superficial, frivolous … fluttery, in its way, as your paintings had become. Oh, I realise you had to protect yourself, had to go on earning a living. And I have to say, the more schematic, arid you became, the more my fellow animals in the zoo were taken in by you, and didn’t see what, by now, was the only thing left to see. They praised your breadth the narrower you became; they admired your palette when you had ceased to use all colours but grey, they took you to be wry and ironical and if not on their side at least indifferent, when I saw that over and over you were condemning them, damning them. If, there again, damning them constantly with the same words, in the same automatic fashion, until even your curses became meaningless. You retired to this place not so much because you wanted to keep a low profile, Peter, or even hide from me, as because – you wanted to get away from the world. You wanted to cease being what you were born to be. And you thought if you kept on trotting out the same line, you could keep your conscience clear. “You see, I was always denouncing the beasts, even if the beasts were too stupid to notice.” But if you get away from the world, if you let everything become theory …

‘Everything becomes dust, Peter. The jungle becomes the Sahara. And frankly – you might just as well be dead.’

L stopped his pacing at last and stood staring at Peter. His eyes narrowed.

‘You have disappointed me, Peter. In the final analysis … You were climbing, climbing the mountain, but then, when you got to within reach of the summit, you stopped. You didn’t turn back. But you didn’t go on. Whereas had you dared to go those last few metres … yes, you would have seen what you had come from. The dark valley, let’s call it. But you would also have seen, on the other side – I don’t know what, Peter. Maybe that’s why I am disappointed in you. I feel you have given me only half the story. The half I already knew. Whereas if you had reached the top … Oh, maybe the view on the other side would have been identical. But at least it would have been the complete picture. Instead of just … I feel sometimes, Peter, that you have given me only the Beast. The Beast I know so well because I am he. What you never gave me – what you teased me with, but never entirely offered, was … Beauty. As I say, maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe there is no such thing. Maybe there is only the corrupt court, and you so-called artists can only be jesters, licking the arses of the powerful and telling them their shit tastes sweet. But, whether it is your fault or my own, whether you are to blame or essentially I am disappointed in myself – in my own inability to haul myself out of the slime, the filth, the horror, that instead I revel in – you have, ultimately, failed me, Peter.

‘I told you many years ago I should be your demon, and should come back to haunt you.

‘So I have. And as soon as I got this job, and I found myself near you, I determined that before everything went up in flames and the new age of decency was ushered in, I would do what I had long ago threatened to do. To punish you – I suppose is what it amounts to – for not saving me …

‘I was just trying to work out how to do it, when, amongst all the … rubbish sent here for disposal, I spotted someone who reminded me so much of you that when I first saw him I did a double take. I thought it was you. Same build, same colouring, same self-effacing manner, same … I hauled him in and asked him what he had done before he was arrested. In his clear, yet slightly soft voice, he told me he had been – wonder of wonders! – a writer and a painter … It really was you, I thought. A lightweight writer and painter, the poor fellow went on, plaintively. A writer and a painter who had never meant to give offence to anyone. Who had never meant to criticise the regime, let alone “‘tell the truth”. He had just wanted to amuse … Yet, irony of ironies, one of our most noted and respected critics read his last book, and thought that the light, yes fluttery figure in the centre of that little rug was indeed a damning indictment of the powers that be. He had a word with a highly placed party official … it was discovered, horror of horrors, that our home-grown Dostoevsky was a homosexual – actually, I suspect the critic was too, and that’s the real reason why … but that’s another story. In any case, he was arrested, “tried”, and sent here.

‘Poor thing. If it wasn’t so funny, I think I should cry.

‘On your feet, Peter,’ L said, summoning the writer to the parapet by which he was standing. He pointed down into the vast compound round which the prisoners were shuffling. ‘You see that figure in the blue shirt – that’s rather like yours, come to think of it.’

Peter nodded, and felt himself grow cold.

‘And the blue jacket and the beige trousers … that are rather like yours, come to think of it.’

Colder still, Peter nodded again.

‘And the brown shoes … I had him specially dressed like that so you would be able to pick him out. That is he. Your frivolous alter-ego. The person whom you might have become had it not been for me. And the person who is now down there where, if my dear colleagues did but know it, you should be.’

L went over to the rifle propped up against the railings, picked it up, pulled back the bolt, and handed it to Peter.

‘Shoot him,’ he said. ‘You were always a good shot. Thanks to me. Oh, I dare say you have grown a bit rusty, but if you miss the first time you can always have a second go. Or a third or fourth, if needs be.’

Peter stared.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ L snapped. ‘I said shoot him. If you do not wish to, you may shoot yourself. And if you do not wish to do that either,’ he drew a pistol from the holster in his belt, ‘I shall shoot you.

‘I hope it won’t come to that. It would be so banal. But I assure you I shall if I have to, Peter, and I think you have known me long enough, and you have seen enough today, to know I mean what I say.

‘Shoot him. Shoot yourself. Or be shot. You have a choice. But whatever it is, be quick about it. I have a meeting in five minutes. We have to decide how to close this place down. Destroy every piece of evidence that it ever existed, so that when the good times come again – oh, people will say this could never have been. It was just some – sick dream.

‘A couple of months, I reckon it’ll take us. To restore all this to nature.’

Peter stared at the rifle he was holding; he could smell its particular smell. He contemplated shooting L, but knew that before he could even raise the rifle to his shoulder L would have shot him. He contemplated shooting himself, but knew he would never be able to bring himself actually to fire. So, feeling that his world had come to an end – no, that the world had come to an end – he shouldered the rifle – and oh, how it all came back to him, as clearly as the memories triggered by the sound of L’s voice – took aim at the figure in the blue shirt, blue jacket and beige trousers, and shot him in the back.

A few of the shuffling figures lurched away from the man as he fell; Peter thought he heard one of them scream. Then they went on shuffling, shuffling.

‘Bravo,’ L said – looking, for the first time that Peter could ever recall, quite stunned himself. ‘It’s not just theory now, is it, Peter? You’ve actually – done it.’

He cleared his throat, aware perhaps that he was shaken, that his face was pale. Then he pulled himself together.

‘I’ll have a car take you back into town.’

*

Peter never saw L again.

Shortly after their meeting, it was reported that the promised dismantling of the camp had begun; and by the time the war ended, just five months later, not a trace of it remained. Every scrap of barbed wire, every brick from the crematoria, every plank and every rail had, apparently, vanished – though for a long while no one liked to go and check. And within weeks, as L had predicted, the townsfolk were either pretending that the place had never existed, or were careful never to mention it.

Still, in certain bars, late at night, when people had drunk a little too much, rumours circulated; and Peter gathered that one building – the commandant’s house – had survived the general destruction. ‘Presumably because it didn’t really form part of the camp itself,’ said a man who claimed to have ‘inside knowledge’. Since, however – the man went on – in that house had been discovered the body of a blonde woman who had been strangled, the bodies of three children who had been shot in the head, and, in an out-house, the charred remains of a middle-aged man, it was likely that that too would be demolished, before very long. So there would be nothing to remind people of what had been.

Peter, as he packed up his belongings and prepared to move back to the city, accepted without question that the woman found was L’s wife, and the children, L’s children. But whether the charred remains were of L himself, he sometimes wondered, and more often than not doubted. He couldn’t help feeling that somewhere in the world, that man still existed; a demon, destined to haunt him for the rest of his days.

Alive or dead, L – or a fictional version of him – was the central character in the first book that Peter wrote after the war. A book in which there was not a single artist figure, nor even the suggestion of one. Rather, it was a novel that charted the rise and fall of a self-confessed monster; a man who was so much larger, and more frightening, than life, that he was taken – by critics and the public at large – to represent the regime that had so recently been swept away, leaving behind it a continent in ruins, and countless numbers of people dead.

It was, it was almost universally agreed, ‘a stupendous achievement’, a ‘terrifying cataclysm of a book, that exposes with merciless accuracy the true face of evil’; and it was awarded so many literary prizes that its author soon grew quite used to being acclaimed as ‘the first great artist to have emerged from the rubble’. ‘Nothing in Strauss’s spare, austere previous works has prepared us for such a shattering, magnificent apotheosis’, one commentator wrote; while the London Times headed its review with the single word: ‘Genius.’

‘Strauss! Peter Strauss!’ was for a while the name on everyone’s lips …

There was just one critic, in a small literary magazine that was published in Buenos Aires, who begged, a little apologetically, to differ from the general view. He signed himself, this dissenter, simply ‘I’: and his complaint was the following.

That for all that Strauss’s depiction of a monster was a masterpiece of sorts, and ‘reminds us why the author has a reputation as a painter as well as a writer’ … and for all that ‘he does not spare us a single wart on the face of the beast … one ends the book with the uncomfortable feeling that despite everything Strauss, like Milton before him, is just a little in love with the Devil he has created.

‘But then perhaps, in a sense, precisely because he has inspired a masterpiece, the Devil has created Strauss. So it could not be otherwise.’

To this anonymous reviewer, Peter wrote a short note, c/o the magazine. ‘You have seen what no one else has.’

He did not receive a reply.

Copyright

This ebook edition first published in 2013

by Faber and Faber Ltd

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All rights reserved

© Hugh Fleetwood, 1988

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This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–30484–4