One More River, page 11
Also because Cathy is my favourite child. Possibly it would be said that any father has a special relationship with the (only) daughter. Perhaps Cathy is my favourite girl, for all she’s the spitting image of her mother. What odds? I loved Sibylle. I still do …
I can think of another reason. Of all my children Cathy is the only one who cares about books. Jaimie, while not exactly a fanatic bridge addict, has a strangely mathematical mind: we see each other seldom. We aren’t hostile, but there’s an unspoken agreement that we have little to say to one another. It’s not even unfair to suggest that he’s a bit ashamed of me. Alan is a delight, not least because he’s so unfailingly kind. And we laugh at the same things. And I get on excellently with his lovely, sharp, and kind Laetitia. Further she does not look, Ever, like an Imperial Airways stew. Still less, one is tempted to say, like the Air France version. (I am high, on a sparkling day, over the North Sea. At least I think so; does one ever know what corridors the toothpaste tubes follow in flight?)
Now Alan is a highly cultivated chap, sharpened and sophisticated—a theatre-goer in three capitals, a picture buyer and a concert fan, the man artists everywhere depend upon. His house is full of books. But a book lover? Not really. Cathy is, though.
(England, bless it, is also full of book lovers. I didn’t meet any, alas. We were very professional throughout and talked about marketing the whole time.)
It is another parenthesis, really, but I cannot help thinking of two famous French politicians, both the most terrible crooks, dreadful by any standard of judgment but these; both were most sincerely loved by a great many women, and both were book lovers. One can, and one will, forgive a great deal to both Monsieur de Talleyrand (the family were dukes) and Monsieur Mitterrand (they were the smallest of provincial shopkeepers; have you ever been in Jarnac?). There is a wonderful witness to old Tally in a library. ‘He talks to books as though they were alive.’ Which of course they are, and Mitterrand did too. That magnificent face, the personification of dishonesty, is also filled with nobility. Tally was just the same.
The thoughts of this nature occupied me; I am skipping of course; my (Lufthansa) plane was skimming in to land near enough to Barcelona. Cathy, who lives and works hereabout, will be here to meet me. She won’t let me down; she ‘gave me her word’. Like Sibylle, she keeps it. I can rely upon her utterly. I had phoned her from London. ‘It’s not particularly convenient,’ said that clear, low voice, both softer and harsher than Sibylle’s, ‘but I’ll manage, and of course I can put you up.’ Cold isn’t the right word. Water may seem arctic, but there are fissures far below, from which the earth’s heat escapes. This water will be very clear, very pure; yet unexpectedly fertile. Cathy is not married. She has, it is certain, a man. He doesn’t live with her. There will be traces of him in the flat, and she will have obliterated them; they are none of my business. Cathy is of course a teacher; dispenses English letters to secondary-school children.
“Hallo.”
“Hallo.” A small kiss. She is not ‘emotional’, especially in public. As a little girl she was pretty, vivacious. She fluttered. ‘Mariposa’—I was learning Spanish at the time. The last learned, it has been the first to go; sign I’m getting old. My few remaining words will be enough, I thought, listening to the exchange, in Catalan too fast for me to follow, with a policeman discontented with where she’d left the car. I should like to believe I was like Dumas’ d’Artagnan—formerly he always wanted to know everything; nowadays he always knew enough. In Cathy’s town the cathedral bell was tolling, reminding one of Hemingway, that third-rate fellow (the French admire him; they would …) ‘Oyó campanas,’ said the tart Spanish critic, ‘pero no supo de donde’—he heard bells but didn’t know where from. Cathy is not like Mister Hemingway.
“You’ll want a drink.” She poured out some fairly flinty cava, coloured it with a drop of blackcurrant, unsugary, there are people who put in Ribena, don’t see the difference but Cathy likes her drinks too to be dry. She sat opposite me in a big cane chair and gave me at last her brilliant smile, stretching her long legs. She is like her mother but leaner, a face of sculpted planes and hollows. Her hair is tawny, a lion colour, cut short but long enough to soften that fine head. The striking feature is the Roman nose. Few people find her beautiful but those that do are emphatic about it and I am among them. Were it merely aquiline she would be distinguished but plain. For the rest, that long figure looks trained and ready, and she has excellent legs. You will gather that I am very proud of my daughter. Spain suits her and she suits Spain. Her balcony looks out upon the landscape of the usual Spanish town, half mediaeval and half cheap barrack. As usual there aren’t enough trees. I don’t know that I much admire the Visigothic cathedral, with much Jesuitry inside. Franco’s troops cannonaded the place, and then they all had a Te Deum Laudamus in the church. It is already warm. Almond blossom is out. We are quite high here in the hills and the air is fresh. Looking at Cathy one understands simple values; that air, earth, water are rare and precious things, which we must fight for. I like Spain much, even if it is too hot for me and there are too few trees. A pity because I like above all this people. I suppose I’m too much of a northerner. I like it that she is happy here. And Barcelona isn’t even an hour on the autoroute, and that is not a provincial place.
In the evening sun we stretched, drank our wine, smiled and didn’t talk much. I began to unwind.
In England there had been a snobbish, arrogant, intolerant man, full of prejudices, worse, of foibles. Things were very different here. He did not need all those efforts to stay in front, to be English, to be Superior. They have to face humiliations, and his generation has still not got accustomed to these: to being found wanting, in a hundred ways; then they get very petulant. Being condemned, by the Court in Strasbourg; being told off by the neighbours for polluting the sea or not having any social legislation. So many blows to our pride, it’s like losing all the Test Matches to a pack of Wogs. So we wrap ourselves in a fit of the dignities, turn still further inward, start yattering about that moth-eaten sovereignty. I am just the same.
Here the himself was a simpler man, and he hoped a better one. Getting to be old, he hoped not too smelly. Getting weary. Catherine’s look is full of affection, for her father whom she knows, likes, loves. And respects. This gives her the right to be cutting, where it is needed. And Cathy-Booklover, a widely read one, a good judge. Jaimie would say, ‘Haven’t read it. Sorry, don’t intend to. A goodish writer, leastways I’ve always supposed so.’ Ashamed of his father, but not on that account. Alan would have taken a quick look, enough for an intelligent comment, enough to mask the not-caring-much. His father is a writer, that’s good—if it comes to that a good enough writer to be proud of if pushed. Socially acceptable; it’s an honourable trade. But Cathy reads them. Has a shelf of them there, if he didn’t send her a complimentary copy she’d go out and buy it. She’ll say, ‘This is good; that isn’t.’ With her he is at ease. (Sibylle took on the whole a poor view of writers, and that included him.)
“Do you want a shower, while I’m cooking? Give me your underthings and I’ll throw them in the machine with mine.” I had forgotten that she can be tryingly managerial.
“What’s this? Mr Pepys—I’ve never read him.”
“Immensely civilised. ‘Lord, to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.’ Lovely man.”
“Can I have him to take to bed with me?”
“He’d have enjoyed that.” In her bathroom one is conscious of her femaleness; cosmetics, tampons and things lying about. I had never seen her in this light, even when she has stayed with me. I am not calmed in a sedation sense; I feel a serenity through my whole being. What is that place?—where Luther came from—is it Fulda? They have a fine church. Outside it has a massive, fortress-looking tower and written round this in huge red letters ‘EIN FESTE BURG.’ What I need.
And in my honour—”I don’t cook much as a rule; bit of fish, y’know, with risibisi”—she had a real Spanish stew, cocido with beef and beans and cabbage, and lots of potatoes, lots of juice from a marrowbone; did me good; ‘me too, change from all that salad’ and a thirty-year-old Rioja ‘from my man’, she said equably.
Her ‘advice’ is the same, oddly enough (why odd?—nothing odd about it), as Brigitta’s was. If this is your fate accept it. The northern woman had seen a winter journey, through the medium of Schubert’s song cycle. These mountains, these frozen rivers; the journey is through oneself. Cathy nodded, added a half-forgotten fragment from the poem by Hardy about Napoleon in Russia.
“‘This snow, this sky,
Soldiers, it is I’
“Something like that. You know, I’m on your side. While of course I’m not on anyone’s side.”
It was his turn to nod. She had also been on her mother’s side.
“You were harsh. Cruel even. Oh, I don’t mean to us children.” Like Alan, she added, “We had, I think, a balanced, a happy childhood. But to Sibylle, needlessly so. You could be so cutting, so wounding. Artists are like that. I know. They’ll stop at nothing in defence of their essential central being. Makes them impossible to live with. I should know.” Was it a corner lifted on her own past, or was it just being his daughter?
“You were shockingly demanding. She was very patient, you know.”
“She could be shocking herself. A nice line in insult. You’ll agree that she was exasperating. Provoked one past endurance. One day driven bats I said, Oh, Fuck Off, and quite coolly she said, ‘I wouldn’t mind being fucked by someone who knew how to do it’—I was really taken aback.”
Cathy was quite unmoved. “You ought to know, or you’re a poorer psychologist than I take you for, how adaptable women are, how quick and skilful at using a man’s vocabulary and turning his own arguments against him.”
“I do know. But it was so unlike her.”
“She learned from you.”
“Look—do you know of anyone who wants to assassinate me?”
“I hardly think it would be my mother.” Unsmiling and indeed unhumorous. “Some instinct, nothing more, tells me that there’s a woman behind this. That’s all.”
“I’ll have to search further then. I haven’t all that wide a past acquaintance.”
“Do so,” woodenly. The jungle, as the fellow said, is neutral.
At breakfast, wonderful and his best time of day, Cathy had gone out for fresh rolls, and giggling—’Something I don’t know what to do with’—put on the table a twee little wooden shelf with six dainty pots of jam.
“Up came the minesweepers—’Claribel, Assyrian, and Golden Gain.’ Happily; to have slept very well is rare enough now to be a win.
“Really they are awful.” She was ‘ashamed’.
“Russian-roulette jam, five will be inoffensive and the last contains a mortal dose of cyanide.”
She has to go to work, and he—he’s on holiday; what a nice thought. He has been told to do nothing, but he will enjoy this scrap of housekeeping: the unpacking of the dishwasher, the polishing and putting-away of glasses, the making-up of aired bedclothes, a little languid dusting, chasing crumbs with the vacuum-cleaner—it’s like being married to her. One will then sit, with as good a conscience as though he had been working … a fourth cup of coffee and Read the Paper. Turning the political pages of Vanguardia in a lordly awareness of not having to bother; one knows all that already.
An amused comment on petty-doings; the tenor Pavarotti (who is sixty if a day and not known for nothing as Fat-Lucy) has been asinine enough to play with young girls, and his wife has had to choose her wording with some care when interviewed.
‘When the evening of one’s life arrives,’ the Italian put into Spanish is coming out in a stiff and pompous English, ‘the sensation of solitude which overcomes successful men needs to be fought with the help of long-lasting, rooted, confirmed sentiments.’ A dignified statement, and in Italian better still. He put down the paper.
Weren’t these his sentiments, expressed often and sometimes at much greater length towards a stubbornly stone-faced wife? In English mostly since this had been from the start the language of their life together. Defensible; it was the language of his working existence. But it could be in French: ‘Quand vient le crépuscule …’ Or in German, for when she got at all worked up, it was in her native, supple and vigorous tongue that she … and of course he can speak German; competent enough, even quite workmanlike. ‘Wenn das Abend …’ He’d never progressed beyond his original level—never had learned genders; three like in Latin but that’s at least one too many. A fair vocabulary; Abendrot, a sunset, Dämmerung, the twilight. Germans tended always to rock with laughter, whereas he’d spoken French since childhood. In any language the accent—but so what? ‘Would it sound better if I talked with a Corsican accent? Or plat-Bayerisch?’ Sibylle, with her Rheinland voice, always made it sound pretty.
Look, girl, these thirty years and more. Repeating it hadn’t made it the more convincing. We have had bad times but we have always maintained. Isn’t that worth something, even a lot? We have held to fidelity, loyalty, honour; we have brought up three children, and not badly either.
He had found it convincing; she had not. Pious Christian sentiments, she had said in a cool unemotional voice.
As placidly immovable he found Cathy now.
“Having the same squaw for thirty years isn’t a medal to pin on your chest. You wanted—you needed, it wasn’t your fault—a squaw and you got a very good one. She then decided there had to be more than that in her life, and she was quite right. I had to admire you at the time because you saw the basic justice of it and you didn’t complain. Don’t do so now.”
“Do you see something of her?”
“Those are my affairs, and I see no need to discuss them. Would it be nice if I made some soup?”
“Let’s go into the town together. Let me take you out and give you dinner; allow me to be proud of my pretty daughter.”
“I’ll put on a frock. I smell of unwashed teenagers.”
That night he did not sleep well.
Cathy brought him to the plane, ‘being kind’ all the way, insisting upon carrying his little case (all his things washed and ironed), kissing him affectionately at the barrier, saying how lovely it had been, waving energetically like a mother with a little boy setting out for school; why had he this sinking feeling? As though sure that he would never see her again, any more. In a plane (even this early full of German tourists scratching their sunburn, breath laden with alcohol and offensively jolly) with a nun next door to him saying her rosary, the boarding-school feeling remained strong.
A night of waking and sleeping, neither to be distinguished from the other, and the dream in the last five minutes, telling oneself to get up, for otherwise one will be late for school.
They told me I was going to be shot. I was alone, far from help; sitting, perhaps lying?, on a bare stone floor. I was resigned to it; I do not remember being frightened. Some vague curiosity; was it to be Chinese, that economical method of bringing one out into the crowd (edifying spectacle) between two soldiers, quite friendly, supporting one rather than brutal, fumbling then for the pistol, cocking it, did one feel the cold metal of the muzzle on the nape of the neck? The inventive touch is to send the bill for the bullet to the family; I pictured Cathy tearing open the envelope, making a face, tax-collector again.
No, it was Spanish, a bare yard between walls of massive, mediaeval masonry; more casual, a chore to be done like polishing one’s boots. A few soldiers sitting on steps cleaning their equipment, smoking; one shambled across with the fag still in his mouth to where a machinegun stood on a tripod; he went down on one knee, swung it to aim, closing one eye as though to wink at me. I can remember the shock of the bullets hitting my chest, having time to think, ‘That’s it,’ before blacking out—it was not dreadful. I remember even thinking, ‘Sloppy, wasteful—more than half those bullets will hit the wall and I hope they don’t send the bill to Cathy.’ All easy-going, quiet and businesslike. They said nothing that I recall. I had a moment to recollect myself. Didn’t shout or wave my arms, like in the Goya picture. Nor take my hat off and say ‘Soldiers!’ like Marshal Ney. Just stood there, shambling and idiotic.
Firing-squads cost too much money—the Administration sent an instruction that they be stopped.
Dreams fade quickly as a rule: why did this linger, disagreeably? To quieten it he took Mr Pepys from his pocket. 1664, honesty, lechery, hypochondria.
In the seat behind him two biddies with penetrating voices Germanly discussed the merits of their respective diarrhoea remedies. The trouble seemed to be that you know how it is, dear, you’re taking your usual pills, not to speak of indigestion, hangover, and the damn Spaniards making such a racket all night, and taking pills for everything, I mean to say, dear, where d’you stop? The holy nun, eyes placidly closed, knew also how to close her ears. He began to compose a schoolboy rhyme.
Mr Pepys said, What rot!
I can fart terrifically,
Piss prolifically.
Poop can I not!
But once placed upon the pot,
Well stuffed with pease-porridge hot
(or cold, I wot)
One should hope to begin to trot.
A prim voice said, “We are now beginning our descent upon Köln.”
And now here it was fearfully hot. Gott! After months of ghastly blasting polar wind out of the north, snow everywhere, Glatteis on all the roads, the spring was bloody beaming down inexorably, and a great deal of dusty particles floating in every bloody beam. Lot of road-drilling much as usual, shrill stink of cement, car miles away, also as usual, a long hunt. Where he had left it, above ground (like the poppy just-a-little-white-with-the-dust), impossibly hot and smelly. He sat in it for some time. Tired, aching. Loose too around the bowels. Frightened. Here he was, back in Germany, and for no reason at all suddenly again frightened.
