Lessons, page 45
He got his legs out of the river and pulled himself into a sitting position. A few seconds later he heard Peter’s voice above him, at the top of the slope.
“Got to rush. Late for lunch. Sorry we couldn’t do the business together. Looks like you’ll survive.”
Roland sat for half an hour recuperating and checking his arms and legs for breakages. He was fortunate, if that was the word, to be out here on a warm day. Finally he stood and made his way a few yards downstream where it was easier to gain the bank. The empty jar was resting against his pack, which he searched for painkillers, paracetamol and ibuprofen. He took a gram of each with a long pull of water. It hurt, raising his arms to put on his fleece. He opened out a collapsible hiking pole and, with difficulty and loud groans, got the pack onto his shoulders. After twenty minutes he was making good progress. The path was easy and the descent along the valley imperceptible. His boots made a homely squelching sound, the painkillers were doing their business. What weighed on him was the fact of his defeat. He tried to fight it off. It was death that had stolen Daphne, not Peter. Various daydreams of revenge helped him along the path but he knew he would do nothing. Back at the cottage, where there was no bathroom, no hot shower, he changed his clothes, lit a fire and sat before it, eating his provisions—nuts, cheese, an apple—then he fell asleep.
It took a long while to load the car the next morning. His aches had magnified overnight. Before setting off he raided the pharmacopeia in his backpack for more painkillers, along with some modafinil to keep him alert and focussed on the road. It made the journey almost pleasurable. In tribute to Daphne, he played her Magic Flute selection on the machine he had brought and listened without being thrown back to the past. He was sustained by the prospect of dinner with Lawrence, Ingrid and Stefanie.
After three stops along the way he was parking outside the Lloyd Square house in the late afternoon. He walked into a surprise. The hall was filled with balloons and cheering children. Lawrence and Ingrid had arranged for Nancy, Greta and Gerald to be there with their families. In the kitchen, over a mug of tea, with Stefanie on his lap, he described how he had slipped from the path and tumbled into a river. The children gasped at the notion of an old man being allowed out on his own to risk himself on such a mad adventure. Before Roland took a shower, Gerald, now a registrar paediatrician, examined the injuries. He was recently married to David, a curator in the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum. The young doctor was not troubled by the lurid bruises and grazes down Roland’s left arm and upper legs, or the heroic wound on his forehead. It didn’t need stitches. He was, however, interested in the bruise on Roland’s chest. The freckly little boy who used to come after school for a sleepover with Lawrence now possessed the bland authority of a seasoned medic. He recommended an X-ray. A fractured rib could puncture his pleura.
Before joining the party Roland bit off another fragment of modafinil to get him through the evening. They were fifteen squashed around the dining table, as well as two babies in high chairs. Stefanie had asked to sit at his side. Now and then she took his hand and squeezed it to reassure him. She tugged his head down level with her lips and whispered, “Opa, ich mach mir Sorgen um dich.” Grandad, I’m worried about you.
Later, Roland gazed at the company, at the boisterous good-willed family: a climate-change mathematician, an oceanographer, a doctor, a full-time mother, a housing specialist, a social worker, a community lawyer, a primary-school teacher, a curator. Perhaps they were all, in the spirit of the times, the newly irrelevant. For now, in this small corner of the world, it was Peter Mount and his kind who ruled. In an instant of dissociation, he saw the family members as figures in an old photograph and everyone in it, including the babies, Charlotte and Daphne, had long grown old and died. There they were, those people from 2018, expert and tolerant, whose opinions were lost to time, whose voices had faded away until they had left hardly a trace.
Lawrence stood to propose a toast, not only to his father on his seventieth but to the memory of his stepmother and to all the children at the table. Feeling sharp twinges in many places, Roland stood to thank everyone and lifted his glass to his wife and the grandchildren. He tasted the plummy richness of southern Europe and there came to mind the hike he and Daphne had taken across the Mediterranean island, down to the beach with the bamboo grove and the still water in the dark blue bay and on the return the scent of wild herbs crushed beneath their dusty boots. When she was still strong enough to take the day’s warmth and distance in an easy stride. His hand went involuntarily to his chest, to the sore constricted part below his heart and he thanked them all again.
12
The fall, the second in three years, occurred in June 2020, not long before the end of the first lockdown, as Roland descended the stairs. He had finished a first draft of a piece, “The Thatcher Legacy,” for an American online magazine. $125 for 1,000 words. Why her, why now? He did not ask. As a part-timer at the hotel he was not in line for furlough money, so his hip Japanese employers, keen for bebop and edgy blues, had told him. He had a state pension and less than £3,000 in savings. Relaunching as a journalist at any price was all he could think of.
He descended with care, keeping one hand on the banister, as constantly reminded by Gerald. Falling, in showers, out of bathtubs, on pavements, over carpet edges, off buses, down slopes was how many among the old started to die. Roland’s destination was the kitchen and a late lunch, a can of sardines in olive oil on a toasted slice of pumpernickel bread with a cup of strong tea. Tastier than it sounded. On his way down the stairs he was wondering how he might improve his article. It was plodding, earnest, lifeless. On the website men and women one-third his age turned in copy with a joke and a jab in every line and still managed a stern face of bookish or political know-how. Nearly thirty years after leaving office, her legacy, her mark on the country’s psyche ran deep, so he had written. Her fingerprints were all over the present and she would not be forgotten: a housing crisis due to the collapse of social provision, a deregulated and crazed City whose greed the country paid for with austerity, a disabling notion of national grandeur, a general distrust of Germans, of the French and the rest, medium-sized towns across the north Midlands, Wales and the Scottish central belt still comatose from her free-market rigour, national assets sold off, shareholder frenzy, fabulous disparities of wealth, reduced fealty to the common good, workers without protection, rivers bubbling with privatised sewage.
He was just an old Labour hack. He was trying too hard with “fingerprints all over the present.” For all he knew, it was a cliché or a steal. He needed some jokes. On the positive side? Brought down the fascist dictatorship in Argentina, rescued the ozone layer and briefly, before she turned her back on the subject, spoke to the world about climate change. Also, opened shops on Sunday, reformed the Labour Party, lowered inflation and taxes, helped Reagan face down the Soviet Empire, busted some corrupt unions, granted homeownership to the many, showed women how to cow overbearing men in their pomp and entitlement. Equally unfunny.
Such striving for even-handedness must have disturbed his sense of balance. He was two steps from the bottom and in that he was lucky. The transition was instant. He felt the pitiless steel lasso tighten around his chest then a meteorite flare of pain streaked to the left of his sternum. His unlucky shooting star. He clutched at himself and tipped forwards. The wondrous automatic routine kicked in and his hands flew out from his body to protect his head as he landed with a thump and sprawled unhurt across the hallway tiles. When he sat up pinpricks of starry light floated across the view but the pain had gone. Not even an after-touch. Not a thing. He got to his feet slowly, stood with his back against the wall, leaning forwards, knees slightly bent, and waited to see what would happen next. Nothing. It was nothing.
He brushed the dustballs off his trousers and continued into the kitchen. As usual he had left the radio on. A man was shouting in fury at a weeping woman. The Archers. Unbearable. He snapped it off and set about his preparations. It was serious work, not for the weak, pulling on the ring that would peel back the tin lid and let the light into his neat array of three sardines topped and tailed as if for a kids’ sleepover. He could have broken his neck. But only a fool would show up in hospital at the emergency department, complaining about his heart. And go down with the plague inhaled from some unmasked moron wandering about the waiting room. Then days later taste the ventilator’s cold nozzle on his tongue before the induced coma, and accept a one-in-two chance of return. Besides, it was not his heart. He was sure it was his ribs, a piece of bone somewhere poking into muscle tissue like a cocktail stick though an anchovy. The X-ray had shown only hairline fractures, which were supposed to repair themselves. But he was the patient and he knew his theory was sound. A microscopic splinter of bone was skewering a nerve end. When he moved in a certain way, pain and a sensation of tightness radiated across his chest, though never as severely as just then. Gerald, backed up by Lawrence, wanted to send him to a heart specialist. But Gerald was in paediatrics. Children’s hearts were different.
Roland took his tea into the front sitting room, unchanged since Daphne’s day but for the dust and a few thousand photographs spread across the carpet and three cardboard boxes with more pictures stacked inside. Inspired by her, one of his lockdown projects was to annotate and arrange the random heaps by date. Not easy. His progress was slow. Too many photos set off memories and sessions of wondering about dead or long-lost friends or prolonged struggles to remember names and places. He wasted much time envying his youth. Too many shots from the time of his lost decade showed him with a backpack looking strong and cheerful against gorgeous backgrounds of mountains or desert, wildflowers or lakes. Where was that, who pressed the button, what year? He was a stranger to himself, a stranger he envied. Now it looked precious, perhaps the best thing he ever did. After childhood and boarding school, before tennis coaching, munch music and greeting cards, when had he ever been so free, so intent on celebrating life itself? Relax, he wanted to tell the young man staring up at him. Wandering among Indian paintbrush flowers across meadows, along streams, 2,000 metres up in the Cascade mountains, high and dreamily joyous on mescaline in the company of good friends, the base camp five miles behind—it had to be accounted as success.
From 2004 for ten years his photography came by way of digital cameras. After that it had come by digital phones. Cameras for non-specialists were now defunct, like typewriters and alarm clocks, and soon to be extinct, like valve radios and bathing machines. He had emailed large selections of his JPEG files to a company in Swansea to be printed up at some expense, ready for his annotations. Then he realised that he should have worked the other way round and digitalised a selection of his pre-2004 prints. Then he could have handed or emailed to his family the entire production, easily replicated.
He was plausible within the digital age, like a man in cunning disguise, but he remained a citizen of the analogue world. That single starting error was undermining his sense of purpose and slowing him down. Too late, too expensive to go back, boring to continue. He lacked Daphne’s discipline. But she had worked to the ultimate deadline. His was softer. Therefore he would never come near to finishing. Occasionally he went into the front room, picked up a photograph off the floor, gazed into it and faded into a reverie. When he came out of it he jotted down a few lines on the reverse. Since the beginning of the first lockdown he had written on the backs of fifty-eight photographs. A ridiculous way to proceed.
These days he ate less, drank more and thought a lot. He had a chair, a view, a certain glass he favoured. Among his subjects were other single starting errors that multiplied through time into a fan-shaped array. On close examination the errors dissolved into questions, hypotheticals, even into solid gains. On this last he may have been deluding himself. But in surveying a life it was inadvisable to acknowledge too much defeat. Marrying Alissa? Without Lawrence there would have been no joy, no Stefanie, Roland’s new best friend. If Alissa had stayed? He had reread The Journey in February and early March when he and most of the people he knew locked themselves down three weeks ahead of the government. Her novel remained exquisite. Leaving school early? If he had stayed, Miriam, by her own admission, would have hauled him from the classroom and he would have been sunk. Even now that thought, as if in prospect, stirred him just a little. Abandoning classical piano and the chance of becoming a concert pianist? Then he would never have discovered jazz, would never have run free in his twenties or learned to respect manual labour or developed a snappy backhand. He would have been bound to five hours a day practice for the rest of his life. Not sending Miriam to prison? For as long as she was inside, the connection between them would have remained bleak and strong. That was one reason. There were others.
Marrying Daphne just as she started to die he understood as inevitable, necessary, perhaps the best thing he ever did. Should he have stayed in the Labour Party to argue for its liberal and centrist traditions? He would have been driven miserable and mad after four consecutive defeats. So his life was an unbroken succession of correct decisions? Clearly not. Finally he came to the true turning point, the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail: the boy mounting his bike, mid–Cuban Missile Crisis, to present himself to Miriam for a two-year erotic and sentimental education with its ludicrous finale, the pyjama week, that terminated his schooling and distorted his relations with women. This was difficult. When he asked himself if he wished none of it had happened he did not have a ready answer. That was the nature of the harm. Almost seventy-two and not quite cured. The experience remained with him and he could not part with it.
Confined to quarters by a pandemic, grounded by fear of dying on a ventilator while fighting for air, sitting through the winter’s late afternoons in the rocking chair—he had brought it from the Clapham house, a chair for old folk and nursing mothers—wondering how soon he could honourably pour himself the first drink of the day, he thought back often to his confrontation with Miriam Cornell in her Balham house, in her bare music room. Just as he had in the Old Town, he took up a position in front of French windows that faced onto a garden. Five years ago, he had planted an apple tree on Daphne’s lawn to make up for the one he chopped down in Clapham. It had not grown much but it was alive.
Miriam Cornell’s place had grander French windows looking onto a lush designer planting. He remembered how weary he was by the end, desperate to leave. There was a hollowness, a void, a lie in which they were complicit. By silent agreement there were two subjects they would not touch. The easier one first. They could not refer to the delight they shared in music, in playing the Mozart four-handers in her cottage or the thrill of performing on concert grands the Schubert Fantasia in the Norwich assembly rooms, or the rowdy applause at the school concert when the mouse-child brought onstage a flower and chocolate.
Then the hard one. During that confrontation they dared not speak of what bound them, the obsessive engulfing limitless repeated joy that was also illegal, immoral, destructive. They had been naked long ago, face to face in bed in the little sunlit room that looked towards the River Stour. She wouldn’t let him go and he did not want her to. A lifetime later, a stout gent turned up at her splendid house to accuse her. She was a different person too. Fully clothed in all that they had become they denied the real story even as they discussed it. They didn’t touch, didn’t shake hands, as far as he could remember. He played the cool interrogator. She stood on her cold dignity at first and wanted to throw him out, then she confessed. Oh yes, he was a child and it was a crime, but it was something else besides and this was the problem. She couldn’t have said it, and he wouldn’t have listened. They lied by omission. She had loved him and made him love her. The hostage fell in love with his captor—the Stockholm Syndrome. On the rainy evening he made his escape with his trench-digging wages in his back pocket, he dragged the trunk containing all his possessions across her lawn, but he never got far. That was the damage, the forbidden matter—the attraction. The memory of the love remained inseparable from the crime. He could not go to the police.
He stood and gazed at the photographs that covered three-quarters of Daphne’s broad green Iranian carpet. Sorting them into chronological order, once a vital tidying project appropriate to a lockdown, now seemed pointless. Everyone knew memory was not like that, it was not in order. Here by his left foot was an old Polaroid, probably from 1976. He picked it up. It was a smudged unexceptional picture of a round muddy pond. It was laughable how remote it was from what he and his old friend John Weaver had seen at the time, a natural pond set in a clifftop and beyond it the Pacific Ocean. Seen from thirty feet away, from its boggy fringes and right across its few inches of water, the pond appeared to be boiling, seething and writhing with motion. As they went closer they saw thousands of tiny frogs. All seemed to have emerged from their tadpole existence at the same moment. More frog than water. They slithered and wound themselves across each other, a great feast for the right kind of predatory bird. Behind the pond the sun was beginning to lower itself towards an immense plain of reddening cloud, lower than the cliffs and stretching to the horizon. They were still three miles from their camp on the Big Sur River and they set off towards it at an easy run. At the age of twenty-eight it was possible to lope for miles that way without effort. Their path through the Californian chaparral was hard and smooth and gently downhill. What a glorious half-hour that was, gliding through the warm scented air, bare-chested in the weak sun.
