Lessons, page 49
Through February and March he began and concluded the reading of all his journals, usually one a day, forty in all. He heaped them on a bench in the kitchen. That evening he glumly watched a tennis tournament whose contestants were elderly stars of thirty, forty, even fifty years ago. From a distance these men and women looked lean and strong. The eldest was eighty-one. They played doubles, from the baseline mostly and a few steps in, but their strokes, smoothly tooled over a lifetime, were fast and low. They loved life and therefore still minded about losing. There were tantrums around the umpire’s chair. By modern standards, as Roland knew, he was old before his time. There was nothing he could do about it.
This time round he felt part of the locked-down communality. He did what everybody did: noted that the days were passing too fast, went online to book a holiday he thought he would never take, made resolutions he did not keep, was in touch with family by phone or Internet video. Alone in the house he led a crowded social life. Daphne’s side of the family, regular exchanges with Lawrence and Ingrid in Potsdam then separately with Stefanie. He bubbled-up with Nancy, who drove over from Stoke Newington, usually without her three boisterous sons, at which he expressed routine disappointment but felt relief. In voice, mannerisms, looks, Nancy closely resembled Daphne youthfully risen from the dead. The virus had brought his past to life. He was in touch at last with Diana, who ran a maternity clinic on Grenada, in St. George’s, and refused to be pensioned off. Carol had been head of a vast fiefdom within the BBC until she retired. Mireille had followed her father into the French diplomatic service and she also was retired. They mostly talked about children, grandchildren and the pandemic.
He suffered a hot-knife pain in his knees when he took his daily walk. The knock-on effect of arthritis in his knees was weight-gain through lack of exercise. Alissa was right—his paunch was ludicrous. There was one minor recurrence of the chest pain but nothing like the attack that had thrown him down the stairs. He thought about replacing the cat that had wandered off and was still wondering about it when restrictions were lifted in mid-May. He chatted once a week from behind his mask with the merry Sikh lad who delivered the Internet groceries. But Roland occasionally entered a state of catatonia, a black and white world of emotional neutrality that could last an hour or even two. Then, if he had been told he would never see or speak to another human again, he would have been neither sad nor happy. In this state—it was after several weeks—he managed what he’d always considered impossible, except for yogis in a state of grace: to sit in a chair for half an hour and think about nothing.
Those were the hardest times, returning to his shrunken state. Silence, solitude, pointlessness, perpetual dusk. The names of the days of the week meant nothing. Nor did modern medicine, even after his first shot. We are all one with history now, subject to its whims. His London was of the plague year, 1665, of the diseased wooden town of 1349. He felt old, dependent on his family. To stay alive he had to shun them all. And they him. To resume his small existence he would force himself to some trivial act, like standing to return to the fridge a bottle of milk before the central heating soured it.
Somehow he had carelessly let slip, probably to Lawrence, a reference to the pain in his chest. In late February the entire family was on to him, Lawrence constantly, Ingrid gently and from time to time. On one visit Nancy gripped his hand while they were standing in the garden. She was urging him, like the others, to see a doctor. It was as if Daphne was speaking to him. On another occasion Nancy brought Greta along, illegally, and the sisters made their case together. He reminded them of the tumble he had suffered in the Lake District and how he had never been the same since. It was his ribs. One lunchtime Gerald phoned from Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. He had a ten-minute break. As he spoke Roland could hear the rustle of his plastic protection suit. His voice was flat with exhaustion. “Look, I don’t have much time. A man in his seventies with chest pains who doesn’t get it checked out is an idiot.”
“Thanks Gerald. Awfully kind. But I know exactly what it is. I took that fall walking in the Lakes and—”
“I’m not going to say any more. We’ve just lost another kid on the ward to Covid. Twelve-year-old boy from Bolton. In a minute I have to go down and break the news to the parents. If you can’t look after your own health, well, that’s too bad.” He hung up.
Chastened, Roland stood in the kitchen by his half-eaten lunch, the receiver in his hand, the embodiment of an old fool. Upstairs in his study he wrote Gerald an email apologising for his frivolous attitude in dire times and praised the young man’s courage and dedication. Yes, he promised, he would see a heart specialist as soon as lockdown ended.
He followed the pandemic news and daily consulted the Johns Hopkins dashboard and the gov.uk sites to watch the rising numbers of the third wave. Among those tested for Covid in the previous twenty-eight days, deaths peaked at 1,400 a day. Then there were those who died without a test. Everyone said, even the right-leaning tabloids, that Johnson should have gone for the September lockdown. Roland believed the figures. How common was that around the world, to trust official data? Then it could not be so bad, he told himself in better moments. The instruments of state, its institutions were greater than the government of the day.
He and everyone else who was interested had already learned the pandemic lexicon, “R,” the fomites, viral loads, the furin cleavage site, heterologous prime-boost trials, vaccine escape variants, case rate/hospitalisation uncoupling and, most resonant and sinister of all, original antigenic sin. There was nothing novel in another lockdown, nothing to hope for but the lowering of the figures and the lengthening of the days when the clocks leaped forward the week after the spring equinox. What sustained him was his discovery during the first lockdown that he did not mind a little housework. Physical movement was good for him and keeping his cage in order made it seem larger. Holding entropy at bay pleasantly emptied the mind, though there was often little in his. By extension, he began to find pleasure in throwing things out. He started with clothes, armfuls of sweaters, many with moth holes, jeans that chafed and chided him for his change of shape, shirts of bilious colour. He did not need more than ten pairs of socks and did not think he would ever wear a suit or a tie again. He lingered over his hiking gear then left it intact. Books he would never read or read again, old tax papers, old invoices, irrelevant charging cables…It was hard to stop. He filled a spare room with bin liners and boxes. He felt lighter, even younger. People with eating disorders, he thought, must be aiming for this giddy feeling as they cast off weight to lift from the ground of their existence, float away, freed from themselves, from the burdens of past and future, reduced or elevated to pure being, happily unencumbered like small children.
The process of purification brought him to the forty journals. His most recent entry was the previous September, a 1,000-word account of his hours with Alissa. There, he had decided, it must end. They had exchanged a few emails but both his and hers lacked—what exactly?—energy, invention, purpose. A future. Their business with each other was concluded. She did not mention her health but Rüdiger let him know that her decline was steady.
Reading back since 1986 did not bring him any fresh understanding of his life. There were no obvious themes, no undercurrents he had not noticed at the time, nothing learned. A grand mass of detail was what he found and events, conversations, even people that he could not remember. In those sections it was as if he was reading of someone else’s past. He disliked himself for complaining onto the page—about living hand to mouth, not having the right kind of work, not making a long and successful marriage. Boring, no insight, passive. He had read many books. His summaries were hasty, without interest. How weak compared to Jane Farmer’s journal. She had something to write about: European civilisation in ruins, heroic young idealists beheaded, while he was a child of a long peace. He remembered the lift and twist in her prose. Hers, like his, was unrevised last-thing-at-night stuff. Her way of setting or unfolding a scene was far superior, so were the logic and tension that lay between one sentence and the next. Her knack of knowing how one good detail could illuminate the whole had the gleam of vital intelligence. This was also the way of Alissa’s prose. Where he simply listed experiences, mother and daughter gave them life.
That was one good reason to act. When he thought of Lawrence or a remote descendant reading his journals he knew what he must do. Nancy and her family had given him a fire bowl at Christmas. On a dull mid-afternoon in late March, he filled it with kindling, slender logs and barbecue charcoal. When it was burning he sat close in long overcoat and woolly hat and, with a mug of tea in one hand, fed the poorly rendered second half of his life to the flames, one volume at a time. It came back to him then how he had thrown school copies of Camus, Goethe and the rest onto a bonfire in Susan’s garden. Fifty-seven years ago. Bookends, the end of books, to frame a life. Had John Dryden’s All for Love really burned quicker, brighter than the rest? On that his memory was poor. He hoped it had.
When the fire bowl held only dying embers the cold drove him indoors to his usual chair. He held more in memory and reflection than he could have found in his journals. There were currents, plot lines, developments that no one could have predicted but in those vanished pages he had not even posed the questions. By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol? He had thought 1989 was a portal, a wide opening to the future, with everyone streaming through. It was merely a peak. Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years. Or a portal to a new kind of America, the present administration just an interregnum, a variant of Weimar. Meet me on the Avenue of the Heroes of January Sixth. From peak to midden in thirty years. Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.
One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out. The book he required had a hundred chapters, one for each year—a history of the twenty-first century. As things stood he might not get a quarter of the way through. A glimpse of the contents page would be enough. Would a catastrophic global overheating be headed off? Was a Sino-American war woven into the pattern of history? Would the global rash of racist nationalism yield to something more generous, more constructive? Might we reverse the current great extinction of species? Could the open society find new and fairer ways to flourish? Would artificial intelligence make us wise or mad or irrelevant? Could we manage the century without an exchange of nuclear missiles? As he saw it, simply getting through intact to the last day of the twenty-first century, to the end of the book, would be a triumph.
The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense. He accepted that pessimism was the good companion of thought and study, that optimism was the business of politicians, and no one believed them. He knew about the reasons to be cheerful and had sometimes cited the indices, the literacy rates and so on. But they were relative to a wretched past. He couldn’t help himself, there was a novel ugliness about. There were nations run by well-dressed criminal gangs intent on self-enrichment, kept in place by security services, by the rewriting of history and passionate nationalism. Russia was just one. The USA, in a delirium of anger, delusional conspiracies and white supremacy, could yet become another. China had refuted the claim that trade with outsiders opened minds and societies. Now the technology was on hand, it might perfect the totalitarian state and offer a new model of social organisation to compete with or replace liberal democracies—a dictatorship sustained by a reliable flow of consumer goods and a degree of targeted genocide. Roland’s bad dream was of freedom of expression, a shrinking privilege, vanishing for a thousand years. Christian medieval Europe did without it that long. Islam had never much cared for it.
But each of these problems was parochial, local to a mere human timescale. They shrank and tightened into a bitter kernel contained within the shell of the greater matter, the earth’s heating, the disappearing animals and plants, the disrupted interwoven systems of oceans, land, air and life, beautiful and sustaining entanglements barely understood as we forced change upon them.
From Daphne’s living room—the house would always be hers—he watched the dusk descend on London. If, by some stroke of epiphenomenal luck, he could get his hands on the phantom book he might or might not be reassured. At the least, his curiosity could be satisfied. How soothing it would be, to read that his pessimism was out of control. There was one emollient nostrum he liked: things will never be as good as we hoped or as bad as we feared. But imagine showing a well-meaning Edwardian gent a history of the twentieth century’s first sixty years. The combined mega-deaths of Europe, Russia and China would cause him to buckle and weep.
Enough! Those angry or disappointed gods in modern form, Hitler, Nasser, Khrushchev, Kennedy and Gorbachev may have shaped his life but that gave Roland no insight into international affairs. Who cared what an obscure Mr. Baines of Lloyd Square thought about the future of the open society or the planet’s fate? He was powerless. On a table at his side was a postcard from Lawrence and Ingrid. The picture showed a luminous yellow beach backed by sand dunes and sparta grass. The family was taking “a cold and windy break” on the Baltic coast. The handwriting was Ingrid’s. Just before the joint sign-off, she told him they would come to visit him as soon as restrictions were lifted, which they hoped would be May. This was good news. Roland closed his eyes. Between himself and his son there was an unresolved matter. No unfriendliness, but they needed to talk.
It began last year in September when Roland had been back a week from Alissa’s. He phoned Potsdam and Lawrence picked up. Roland gave an account, entirely benign, of his time with her. He said, “I think you should go and see her. I know she’d like you to.”
There was silence. Then Lawrence said, “Rüdiger gave her my email. She wrote to invite me.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing yet. I might not reply.”
Roland realised how much he wanted his son to visit. He needed to proceed carefully. “You know she’s ill.”
“Yes.”
Roland could hear in the background Paul and his mother chanting, “Es war einmal ein Mann, der hatte einen Schwamm.” Alissa used to sing it to baby Lawrence. Once there was a man who had a sponge.
“Could be important for you. Otherwise, you might always regret it.”
“She wants us to make everything OK. It never was and it can’t be now.”
“You sound bitter. Going could be a way of dealing with that.”
“Honestly, Dad. I’m not. She never crosses my mind. I’m sorry she’s ill or whatever. So are lots of people I don’t know. Why should I care about her?”
Roland said the obvious stupid thing. “Because she’s your mother.”
Rightly, Lawrence did not reply and nor did he when his father added, “She’s Europe’s greatest novelist.”
They talked of other things. In a later conversation Roland said, “At least reply to her.”
“I might.”
When the family came in May three days after the general lockdown ended, his impression was that Lawrence still had not written. In her hesitant lilting tone Ingrid had told her father-in-law on the phone that she thought he should let the matter drop. He said he would. But later he considered it his duty to try one last time. Pushed, he would have found it difficult to explain why this business mattered to him. His own visit had settled something. His son thought he had nothing to settle.
The family arrived and quarantined in the house while Roland kept apart in the basement flat. When the ten days were up Lawrence borrowed a car from Gerald and drove Roland to his appointment at a dedicated heart clinic south of St. Albans. A semi-retired consultant there was a former mentor of Gerald returning a favour. Roland disapproved of private medicine but was assured, as if it made any difference, that no money had changed hands.
On the journey, assuming it was his last chance, Roland raised the subject of Alissa.
“I guessed you’d bring it up so I wrote to her. Told her to get lost.”
“You didn’t!”
“No. I was very polite. I said I saw no purpose in our meeting now and wished her better health. I attached a picture of her grandchildren.”
“Ah well.”
“I also asked her not to write again.”
