One More River, page 17
“Burningly so, thank you. Does your father live here too?”
“No.” Flat.
“A pity. I wish I knew him.”
“You aren’t likely to, now.” (What does that mean?) ‘You were the English officer. You made a child, and abandoned it.” What has Barbara told them? Surely Gunther would never—
“That’s not quite true, you know. Did your mother—”
“I never knew my mother.”
“That is curious. We have that in common; neither did I.”
“I’m not going to talk about it. My father is dead.”
“I’m very sorry indeed. I couldn’t have known. Maybe I should have. That is a great shock.”
“I mustn’t stop.”
I had planned for a remark like this. I was going to try a bit of gentle irony. ‘Nobody’s going to think I’ve overpowered you.’ Putting some comic emphasis to sting him into staying awhile. And this overpowered me. I sat there looking at my hardly touched soup, at a half-eaten piece of bread and butter, a fine appetite I had now for all that. Slices of sausage, jam on a saucer, a glass of milk. I wanted a bloody great jolt of malt whisky. I needed a cigarette, very badly. I needed to scream and shout. Hadn’t the stomach even for that. After a long time I got up and put the tray with the cold soup down by the door. Stick to routine. Leek and potato too, very good and a favourite of mine. Sibylle would know that, she who never forgot anything. It wasn’t likely to have been in the forefront of her mind.
I lay on the bed. The bed was too soft. I lay on the floor instead. Stretched straight out, hands behind my head. Put you in a coffin, they’ll give you a little pillow. Pious people put a crucifix in your folded hands. The more classically minded, a copper coin. To pay the ferryman. It is time for me too, to take the ferry. That was a phrase of Robert’s, current in his time. So-and-so died, one said he’d ‘taken the ferry’. Strange, I used to do this often in younger days. Didn’t like divans, sofas. The straight floor rested me, and was quite soft enough. Tired. I haven’t done this for many years. After a hard day, once one began to unwind, would turn on my front. Get one of the children to ‘do my back’. Jaimie, the bugger, would always demand a bribe. Sixpence for ten minutes—would stop on the dot, too. The little ones were kinder-hearted. Alan was good at it. Cathy in her girl’s way, less strength in the fingers but made up by her own special technique. One gave them the sixpence anyhow, naturally. Sibylle had long, strong, finely formed hands; still has them. No good for creature-comforts. Too hard; too insensitive. Too impatient perhaps, always in a hurry. Skilled, in their way; like any German girl of that generation trained to be careful, meticulous with a needle and thread. Wasn’t so much that we were poor but one did not allow waste. Children tore off buttons, ripped their shirts. She knitted too, skilfully but badly because always in a hurry. Forever having to rip three rows to get back to the fault. Like Penelope. It would take a long time before anything got finished.
Not true, to say ‘insensitive’. When I was very tired, and unless they have known and lived with writers, no one ever realises, they think it’s ‘easy’; they don’t know, and cannot see, that it’s identical to a day down the mine. One comes up at the end of the shift, blinking at the daylight, black from head to foot, thinking only of a shower and clean things, and getting back to a wife, and the children. And soup, and bread-and-butter. One picks up then, enough to look at the children’s homework. And when they are quiet at last, washed and in their pyjamas, to read to them.
I would be too tired, sometimes, even to stand under the shower. Lie there, feeling beaten, aching. Sibylle would come quietly and sit by me. Her fingers would press gently upon my closed eyes. Between, on the congested sinus, on the pressure point at the top of the skull, above the fontanelle. She had never been taught but instinct told her. After a while—’I must go and make the supper,’ but sometimes (were the children out? or late back from school? what?) as I unwound, my hand might well have strayed up her skirt. One hadn’t ‘thought of anything’. Aren’t those the best moments, when energy suddenly slides back into one? I sat up, began to unbutton her blouse.
She might laugh, in self-conscious, irritated embarrassment. ‘No; they’ll come in, at any moment.’ But she could, and luxuriously, want very badly indeed to be undressed.
Lying here on the floor, looking at the ceiling; as Pamela Widmerpool said in the same position, she is looking at a Tiepolo ceiling-painting of the Gyges legend, “Who’s the naked man with the stand?” One does also have to say it’s a pleasure not to find oneself impotent. I was not reminded of Daffodil; that’s not a good comparison. Knowing that this corrupt little schoolgirl was in reality an accomplished porn-pro did not alter enjoyment: as one pretended, so she became. One cannot do that with real women like Sibylle.
It has cleared up to be a nice spring evening; what one can see of it from a skylight. English people hurrying home will say to one another, ‘The days are drawing out,’ with joy in the voices; This spring is going to be different; better than the others we have known. Jacques Brel could sing, C’est dur, de mourir au printemps, tu sais. Quite slowly it faded into night, and with night came quiet.
The third day of imprisonment.
The day comes too; this one clear and cloudless. I needed no clock. I was up, shaved, dressed, right on time. As I was cleaning toothpaste off the washbasin I heard the bolts drawn; puts one ‘in a good mood’. Lovely smell of coffee. It was fresh, strong, very hot. Sibylle too looked trim, springy, clear-eyed. Her body has dried out with age. One notices the cords in her throat, between the points of a clean shirt-collar, but she was never one to get fat, despite complaints that eating cream cake put inches on her bottom. I’m much the same and glad of it; one would rather be stringy than cushiony. She is much gaunted but that brings her good bones into relief. The fine bridge of her splendid nose which Cathy has inherited, though hers is Roman rather than aquiline (both faces have distinction) was shiny; she has never used much make-up. A little round the eyes, a slash of lipstick on a wide thinnish mouth.
“Good morning, Sibylle,” so that she had to smile at this cheerful voice even if it were the smile the teacher uses when putting a question to the backward child. Encouraging, expectant.
“You see, beginning to do you good, instead of all that drinking and those awful cigars you begin to think. You were disciplined enough about work until you got so self-indulgent.”
Irritation wriggles in the grip of patience. I have so often heard this tirade, and invariably she got her timing wrong just as when imprudently one switches on the television while drinking coffee in the kitchen: the physical-fitness girls with their merciless clean teeth going, ‘Higher, ladies, higher,’ and never out of breath, so smugly disintoxicated.
“I’ve worked a few things out. Need more basic information. Is this your house?”
“Barbara’s, after Father died. She didn’t last much longer, alas. She got a cancer. We were like sisters. I’d promised that there’d always be a home, for the boys.”
“And their father, what did he have to say about all this? Since you weren’t, let’s call it, Gunther’s only child?”
“Yes, it’s time you knew. Rainer—I’m always sad that I never knew him. He went away. What the village would call ‘went to the bad’. I don’t use such phrases,” angrily. “And Father didn’t either. Loyalty, support, exactly as one would expect, he was what the Jews call a Just—you know that?”
“I always liked him. You’d better tell me what happened.”
“It’s years ago. I wasn’t around,” giving me rather a look. “Father didn’t speak of it. I gathered from Barbara what little I know. That he racketed about from one dodgy job to another. He had great charm … used up great energy in getting a job, and bored once they have it.” One couldn’t call her tone spiteful. Cutting it was, and it hurt.
“That he fathered two children on a girl none of us knew. In France it’s legal for her to hide her identity. He deserted her of course. Father took the responsibility, to bring the children up in return for her surrendering her rights, and he would never say more.”
“Except what happened to Rainer.”
“Gunther”, bleak, “decided it would be wrong to give you needless pain. Saying that if it were anyone’s fault it was his own.”
So I have written that down. If there’s a hero, anywhere round here, Gunther is his name. So easy to go about muttering, ‘Bad blood in that boy.’ Like Robert’s beastly sisters.
“He killed himself.” Sibylle equally determined to stick to the facts. “As alas so many German boys do. Now that Barbara has gone too these boys see me as their mother. It’s the least I can do. How many broken families are there in this sad country?”
“Not all of them my doing.” Which I should not have said, though perhaps pain forced it out of me, and for once Sibylle kept her tongue. “Yes, Gunther was like that,” I concluded, feebly.
“But it hardly explains why I should get shot at. Or why a man, who as far as I could see had the misfortune to look like me, was nearly killed.”
Her expression did not change at all.
“As far as I know,” slowly, “Barbara told them no more than that their father was your son. They know to be sure that I was—am—your wife.”
“Barbara did not hate me.”
“And nor do I. Nor do I. You must grasp that I came late on the scene. Eight years ago they were just out of their teens. One doesn’t know, ever, what children get in their heads. I can promise you that I haven’t filled them with anger against you.”
I felt sure that this was true. “In all justice, I suppose that your appearance in their midst would only harden whatever grievance towards me they imagine. There’s a sort of fatality at work. But why this, this violence, this absurd kidnapping?”
“I was trying to make them see that what started, I believe, as an elaborate trick—it would be comic to make you frightened—was altogether wrong and bad.”
I should have gone on, patiently disentangling. I made a bad mistake; I began to get angry. Is it my unhappy gift or hers? Some such phrase as ‘flicked on the raw’? One had so often the sensation with her of salt rubbed in.
“So now they can see for themselves what kind of beast I am. Brit, into the bargain. Germans can live in peace with the French whom we invaded three times within a hundred years; with the Poles whom we’ve been invading for a thousand. But the eternal enemy goes on slipping the knife in, wittering on about us being still all nazis, these aphorisms they think profound, that we’re either at their feet or their throats. Brits boasting, as they always do, at their most abject. Can anyone be surprised at what these young Germans feel when this shit is forever being poured in their ears? I have to suffer for it, I was the arrogant young filth who raped their grandmother. Gunther knew better, but what could he do, an old man, after you came here telling everyone I’m such a shit you left me.”
She didn’t give way to anger.
“I have never told them anything. You are not a bad man even when you are a weak one. They’ll get to know you, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to explain yourself.”
So write this down too, will you. Instead of correcting my mistakes I make them worse still. Isn’t that the fatality of so many couples, the infernal getting one’s own back, like a lot of stupid Corsicans. I could watch myself—could see John back-sliding …
“So you can justify all this to yourself as you always do. You always were good at coming out the injured party. So you encouraged them to burn my house, little miss Never-in-the-wrong.”
Her eyes got larger; that’s all. “What distorted notions, unhappily unfair, their father and, I must suppose, their mother too put into their heads is none of my doing. Gunther marrying Barbara was right and good and so I thought at the time and my marrying you would be right too. I was a young girl and totally innocent. I did not know what you would do to me.”
She was always quick-tempered. An absurd memory—that horrible English habit of teasing, while claiming that nobody else ever has any sense of humour … Long ago; her first baby, yes, Jaimie, had some small childish ailment. I forget what; nothing to worry about, touch of infantile diarrhoea? Really it was to take the drama out; she was fussing needlessly and I wanted to make her laugh. ‘Your baby’s gone down the plughole.’ In Cockney. She thought it was mockery. ‘Poor little thing, so nasty and thin’ … Burst into a flood of tears and I was awkwardly taken aback.
‘You shit, you awful shit.’ Only a stupid joke and she never forgot it. ‘Tu es dégueulasse,’—commonplace phrase, ‘you make me throw up.’ She meant it literally; she did throw up, poor girl.
What I did to her; this tirade I have heard a hundred times. My Englishness, the snobberies and superiorities. That I had contempt for her unformed mind, for her Germanness, for countrified ways, provincialities, homely ways and traditions. True, alas, such a lot of it. I am greatly ashamed to think of the contemptuous arrogance I brought to so much of our early life, the efforts to prop my self-esteem; I had little enough confidence in my strength and capacities. It is certain that Sibylle suffered for this.
The Paris of those days—the city was as full as ever it had been of the ferment of the entire world, the artists and intelligentsia, the Poles and Czechs, the Russians and Hungarians, all of whom had lost so much to the invading devouring sterilising maw of the Third Reich. We aren’t talking about Jews here, but about families broken and possessions lost, homes destroyed and jobs snapped off, careers and hopes and ambitions. Whatever had happened it was simpler and more consoling, and more understandable, that Germans should bear the blame. The French were sore and ashamed at themselves. So many had welcomed the occupier and fallen over their own feet collaborating. Clouds of intensely complicated philosophical explanation went into whitewashing the ignoble. The English had at least stood up and fought for themselves. The old bloody-minded obstinacy stood us in good stead there. We did it for the worst reasons very often—when indeed there were any reasons; most the familiar isolationist instinct, ‘No Popery’ all over again. None of this was of any help to Sibylle. Wherever we went she felt that fingers were pointing at her and very often she was right. In those years I did not mention my own German mother.
Far too long and too often I nourished myself with prejudice and propaganda. When it came to the early years of the European concept it was the vision and courage of Monnet and Robert Schuman we admired; it was fashionable to dismiss Adenauer as a ‘provincial mayor’. My personal cowardice went deeper still. I didn’t want Sibylle ‘going home’ even on brief visits, and invented every pretext to raise difficulties, and she gave in, poor girl: the stubbornness and sullenness of later years had their roots here in the time of my being ‘Parisian’, when too the children were small and Sibylle stayed at home and did her own scrubbing, refusing often to set foot in houses where Germany would be denigrated, and all things German dismissed with contempt in which I so often acquiesced.
The tirade now was so familiar, I didn’t even listen. Can’t you invent something new, I used to sigh. We tried very hard, both of us, to clean the sticky treacle off our wings. Here and now I had nothing but silence to offer. All the words had been said so often and to so little purpose. Jaimie has never forgiven me of course. Alan, Cathy—they were younger, and had more sense of humour as well as objectivity.
She walked out finally, and slammed the door. It left me bitter and confused. Had neither of us then learned any better, even now?
That bloodshot Joachim brought the lunch tray, glowering; no doubt had seen Sibylle ‘upset’, which wouldn’t improve his feelings towards me. I dropped a few conversational seeds, but that is stony ground.
And there is still that something more, which nags at me and which I cannot bring home. Is the little bugger—he isn’t above fifteen centimetres taller than I am—on some kind of dope? Setting down what I know, and that’s precious little, I’d doubt the classic heavy stuff. Needles, flames, messing with spoons; big innocent though Sibylle is, she’d know, the brother would be bound to know. There’s cannabis, smoked it myself in the old days, we used only to get three per cent and the Dutch, a clever folk with plants, are said now to get ten. Which would give a powerful impetus—can’t rule that out but would it make one aggressive and unpredictable in this sort of way? Speed sounds to me much more likely. Last time I was in the States, the West Coast—metamphetamines were a big worry, more than the sinsemilla, one gets these appalling reactions—is there a lot of that here?
There’s that stuff in England with a name like marzipan, legally prescribed but a flourishing black market, creating ravages among teenagers in Glasgow. And to be sure there’s ecstasy, another Dutch speciality and that might be likeliest since we’re not at all far from the Dutch border. My cop friends tell me it’s less dangerous; it’s also widespread, being fairly cheap—a synthetic, and the chemistry is not all that tricky.
I can sound learned with this jargon—THC and MDMA. The fact is that I know very little indeed about it. I have never used this flashy kind of detail in a book. It sounds good at the time and a year later it’s out of date. From what I do know, the ephedrine derivatives which, very loosely, we’ve been calling ‘speed’ these last twenty years, sound to me a likely sort of explanation. An all-too-frequent pathology, about which the police, the legal authority, and all social workers, are pretty tight-lipped. The habit of all politicians, to treat anything in the least serious as though not to be mentioned in front of the children, finally getting an effect the exact opposite of that intended, since anything mysterious, dangerous or forbidden creates an attraction.
It has been another lovely day. I am suffering. How long do I have to stay barred into this minute space, subject to this crippled, malformed—here, too, the effect will be the opposite of that ‘intended’. Crouching here, I do not get bigger but smaller, I do not become better but more evil. I see nothing but sky, cloud, the passage of day towards night. I hear little. Sounds of traffic not far away, the odd plane or helicopter, the occasional mumble of indistinct voices, a car door slamming, meaningless clashes or jangles. Outside is Germany. The beautiful German spring. In the morning, standing by the skylight, I can smell the spring, it is April. I tried to stand on the exercise bike, to see out. One foot on the saddle and one of the handlebar, I gave it up, it was too difficult, I was too afraid of falling and breaking a bone. I am old and my sense of balance is not good.
