One More River, page 6
“Not a damned thing, I’d say. Isn’t that very lucky, and at my age.”
“Am I following?—you mean that when young one can replace it all but when old there’s nothing one really has to replace?”
“I suppose so, roughly, but Alan—who wants to kill me? Who’d want to burn my house down? Who wishes to hurt me?”
“Is it certain that there’s no coincidence? The police say they’ve no good conclusive pointer. One never will, I dare say—but be grateful perhaps. Pity about the Peartrees, but weren’t you rather too comfortable, rather too well dug in? I shouldn’t have said you were finished, as an artist. But isn’t this something to be glad of? Get a little flat, maybe in London, very small and simple.”
“Negation of all principle.”
“Oh, you still have principles. At your age, what a horrible surprise. Let’s have some coffee, shall we?”
One hadn’t needed to run out to buy a toothbrush. There are clothes of which one will always say that it’s impossible to find anything that comfortable now. Or the preposterous collection of silk dressing-gowns that from a mania when the children were small had petrified into a tradition lasting ten or twelve years. His suitcase in the car held temperate European clothes and he wasn’t about to set sail for the tropics; nor the Arctic.
The books drift into every room, inexorably; the tides lap round them. Now and again one thinks of a purge; one will not endure this squalor. Yet every book, however bad, has devotion in it; love and faith, sweat and torment. Who am I to throw it away? This encrustation of yellowed paper, rotting gently down with the passing moons, is myself. I can say that it is worthless, that I do not miss it. In vain.
In the car I found a forgotten paperback. Like a tatty package of Kleenex, sordid as screwed-up sandwich wrappings, brought along for lonely restaurant tables, solitary hotel rooms. Blessed, now, for being the sole-survivor. It is also a good book, well-written by a good man.
Venture into the Interior, and through this sour smell of burning I embark on a journey into my own withinness.
Journalists have invented the cutting phrase, the ‘Kleenex writer’ to be read and thrown away, leaving no trace. Just so have I picked to pass an hour from the tidewrack, content for it to be as though ‘never before seen’. Mister Charles is not this sort of writer, has an honest pride in the knowledge that work of his has been kept, honoured, reread. In the long years since Sibylle left him, there was little other reason for survival.
A good house this had been, for the writer, full of quiet, a heaven after rackety voyaging; the fruit, too, of the romantic imagining, the vulnerable longings of childhood. Since Sibylle left, an empty, worthless shell.
Here in the hills are sudden violent storms. Lightning knocks out a transformer station. Electricity here was rambling and antiquated, far removed from the nuclear power they boast of, often indeed an improbable patchwork, local peculations straitening regional parsimony, and all dating from the years between the wars. One was reminded that this is a Latin country: we often waited for twenty-four hours before the thing flickered and restarted. The modern toys, mixer or razor or calculator (we opened cans of ground coffee with the tools of the twenties), could be set aside without pain. A fire of birch logs reminded us that for a hundred years this house had existed comfortably without central heating. We rested our eyes, and reposed our spirits, we remembered the region’s painters—like Georges de la Tour—lit kerosene lanterns (Aladdin lamps are a focal point of John’s English childhood, and Jewishly seven-branched candlesticks of Sibylle’s; under English bombs, no German could complain of Semitic Sabbateves). We forget, now, the power and the meaning of Light.
So, too, Colonel van der Post, upon an African mountain, fifty years ago. Mlanje, an extraordinary mountain, populated by extraordinary trees; nowhere else found … he thinks, and writes, about light, and living among trees; about the young forester who lives on this mountain, alone with his wife and a small baby, in innocence and in happiness because the trees are not like human beings; they are not abject; they are sinister, but not evil: and who will be killed, in the stupidest of accidents, under the writer’s eye. A prolonged, a profound meditation upon the nature of good and evil, and upon the rift—deep, uncrossable—within the human being.
Looking at the burned blackened walls John felt relief from a burden; something akin to joy. He was free of this house. Without Sibylle it was nothing, it was a trap, he was well rid of it. Alan, he suspected, had known this, instinctively, already.
The Colonel, and I take off my hat to him because he was a quarter century ahead of his time, found in the landscapes of Africa (the word must include everything that is marvellous; the peoples, the wonderful animals, the skies by day and by night) a quickening in himself, an alertness and sensitivity most impressive to a reader fifty years later. To be sure, he sees an Africa now barely imaginable, almost intact (the planes of 1950 took three days to get from Cairo to the Cape). He has fought, the Colonel, through the war in the far east; he has been a prisoner of the Japanese; he has seen terrible things. Now he is quickened further still, for this Africa is not as far distant as he had thought from the pristine and magical Africa of his childhood.
His prose too quickens, becomes lyrical, in a way to make one smile for he is a fairly pedestrian writer, but his thinking is good; the more impressive since the Colonel is still both highly military and extremely British in his viewpoints: he is filled for instance with an awestruck, stunned respect for the gentlemen of the colonial administration, all still behaving as though sanctified by the shadow of the great white queen, and every one still the sweet, just, boyish master.
I’m awestruck too; one hadn’t expected him to have long-range, condor’s eyes able to see far across and over mountain ranges. He sees murder about and everywhere present, in our hearts and in our deepest selves. The murderer is powerful and respectable. He has a clean morning face, is well-spoken, has good manners and fine clothes. He sits with the judges, and our laws are for him.
When I first read this book, which must have been towards 1960 and close to the beginnings of my own early efforts as a writer, I was struck by what then seemed a minor point. The murder is within us, and ‘vicarious adventures in the footsteps of Holmes, Wimsey and Poirot’ cannot lessen the awareness. He is making the point that murder, tidied up and titivated, could be trivialised. ‘Real’ murders were written up in the News of the World, in the language thought suitable for the servants; ‘intimacy then took place’. For the ‘educated’ class there weren’t enough real ones and those sordid: altogether too much squalor even when passion had been bowdlerised into boredom. But fiction supplied the demand. You could have two or three new ones a week; earnest and humourless with clues like a crossword, and guess-the-villain before the obligatory disclosure on the last page, or giggly and fluffy with little sudden shrieks amidst the endless tittering.
Publishers loved this stuff; the market for it was insatiable; it could masquerade as naturalism, even realism; even as art. Some pretty good writers got caught up in this, and some pretty bad ones did very well. Write about a crime, preferably a murder, and it took much brassy self-advertisement as well as plenty of talent to escape triviality. I ought to know something myself of the musical-chairs game, and of finding oneself sitting between two of them. I have now of course for many years enjoyed the pleasant existence of the minor man-of-letters; never rich, and never obliged to chew up and swallow smelly old bits of alligator either. I should hope that I never got too pleased with myself.
I should think now that I have equally an obligation not to be sorry for myself. Salutary to be given a jolt, the more when one doesn’t know where the jolt comes from, nor why.
The much bigger jolt, of seeing a man I don’t know from Adam, whose misfortune was to resemble me vaguely in appearance and to cross my path at just the wrong moment, knocked over, badly injured—will he recover? How long will it take? May he be even obliged to carry a handicap, for all his days? I fell into a panic, I ran away, my behaviour was abject.
But now; this is interesting too. Abruptly, a large area of my certainties and comforts have been kicked out here from underneath my feet. Another game of musical chairs?—bump, I find myself sitting on a hard, cold, and draughty floor and without the accustomed cushions under my bottom—who the hell is playing a game with me? One thinks of the phrase that made Hardy famous, about the President of the Immortals finishing his sport with Tess. There are several good jokes concealed here. Who says that burning my house down has anything to do with Hardy (better at poetry than at prose to my thinking) being a Grand Literary Figure rather than a scribbler of murder stories? A lot of books burn. A foxy old paperback survives (I had taken it to read in bed with some vague notion of Africa seen with a strong, vivid eye, an eye accustomed to the distances being all wrong in this clear mountain air, to looking over the sights of a rifle …) And finding myself being told off, by the Colonel, for writing trivial little murder stories masquerading as art.
Oh yes, I have a lot to think about. Grateful for having here a comfortable room, a warm bed, plenty to drink, Alan’s company.
So that he got up and went downstairs undaunted by the dingy mustiness of a French provincial ostlery at breakfast time, by the dispirited somnolence with which the breakfast is brought; by the nastiness of this which is passing as suitable and pleasant at the breaking of a fast. What will be the point of saying a word? People are permeated by the certainty of their own excellence. They may listen, more or less politely, but they’ll never do anything about it. No iconoclasm can shake the impacted clichés of the ‘full English breakfast’ or ‘les croissants bien chauds’.
“I say, you’re in rather good form.” Alan, refreshed by overhearing the thought spoken.,
“True, true. Resolutions were taken. Not just to sit. Sit up, perhaps, crack the whip a little, look around and take an interest instead of falling into a light doze.”
“As though his only plot
To plant the bergamot.”
“Precisely. And then this whatever it is, that’s pursuing me—is it a meteor? Corbleu, let us confront the meteor.”
“A great improvement on seeing you palely loitering, I was getting quite worried.”
“Yes, well, might not last.”
“Nothing does. I can go home, tell Lettice, she was worrying.” Letizia is Venetian; a.k.a. Tiziana. Alan may well be very proud of her; we all are. Yes, she is pretty and she’s this and she’s that and all of it at high power, and funnily, Sibylle who came out of the Ruhrgebiet looked a lot more Titianesque with her lovely curvy nose, a great deal more Venetian.
“One thing, Alan, that embarasses me. I’ve got this huge great pistol in the car, exactly like the French.”
“Good God, can’t leave it there.”
“Right, I was creeping about being intimidated, in fact much worse, trembling you know and terrified and telling myself that this would make me Feel Braver and now knowing the thing’s there makes one feel a perfect fool, perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking it.”
“What would I do with a thing like that—throw it over the bridge.”
“Risky, that; pity, too.”
“Give it to the gendarmerie. I take it they don’t know you have it? Tell them you found it in the garden, anything a bit mysterious, capture the imagination, stimulate their zeal a bit.”
“Alan, this is perhaps an idea. Pity though, rather a good one, they’ll freeze on to it.”
“Better than being frozen on to it yourself.”
“There’s that. I’ll be living out of the car too, in the foreseeable future. Look, you’ll give my best love to Lettice, not going to come and Squat on her, she’ll be relieved. And will you ring Cathy for me?”
“Spanish newspapers full of the hot news, you think? Famous writer’s house burns down, the Ayatollah strikes again? Boy, you Old, you but definitely not Newsworthy.”
“No, but she might try to ring me feeling kind, that it’s my birthday or something.”
“All right; I like myself to have a chat with ol’ Cath.” He will talk about his sister. Of whom he is fond; good that his father should be reminded. Alan does not mention his mother. Of whom he is not just fond. But he was always like this. Kindly, gentle, patient, and very, very tactful. Oneself, one doesn’t even know where Sibylle is to be found. He does, though.
“Where are you heading for, any firm ideas?”
“No, I don’t know. Somewhere frivolous for a start. This is still an address, right? In Who’s Who or wherever. I’ll have Poirier hold any mail. I’ll give an instruction to the bank. I’ll have business held in London or New York by the agency. I’ll give you a ring from Helsinki or somewhere. Lettice, let me hold you. Say nothing, let me cuddle between your bare breasts.”
“Costs a magnum of Krug, that,” said Alan. “Man—taking Lettice’s top off—that’s the Pont de Normandie.”
John laughs, thought Alan. (One would like some more coffee. Not in this dump, though.) Feeling a strong inclination towards a quiet day, even a lazy day; Letty would quite certainly not be expecting one before nightfall. It is, yes, a goodish distance to home (Alan lives near Versailles). Now there is one of the things that the old man has never understood, doing whatever he damned well likes and refusing anything that might risk boring him. Some people will call that unselfconscious but others will call it self-indulgent. I’ll drive back in the Porsche and it will be easy. The old man would be grumbling and making heavy weather all the way to Paris. This act of wearing dirty old clothes, driving a dirty old car, saying you don’t give a damn for anyone—isn’t that just as bogus as appearing in a Ferrari when you should be in a Volkswagen. Other side of the same penny is how that strikes me. Getting very miserly too in his old age.
But he laughs, still. Full-hearted, full-throated. Whereas how seriously all the geniuses take themselves. Now this idea of someone wanting, or trying, or maybe just threatening to assassinate him. Paranoid fantasies of elderly writers, what! House burned down? Good thing too, give old dad a jolt. Incidentally, there were some good things in the garden. Besides a talk with Peartree, be an idea to have a word with a local nurseryman.
That Ol’Dad should start enjoying himself again … never been good at enjoying himself; always preferred being miserable, really. Had a lousy childhood, of course. And Sibylle—we love her dearly but what a Calvinist.
One day in Alan’s house (a suitable venue, it had been felt) the old man had been interviewed; bright young woman from some Sunday supplement. He’d been quite funny.
‘Now, Mr Charles …’
‘Not Mr Charles. Real name is John Charles McQuaid.’
Letty pokerfaced, plying everyone with drinks. The young woman unwisely seeing an imaginary opening, starting in on his childhood, finding him unresponsive.
‘Yerss. Yerss.’ Sounding just like Ingmar Bergman: indeed Alan did (and Cathy would) recognise what they called his magic-lantern voice, often a sign of something that unexpectedly moved or upset him.
“‘Tom fell out and hurt his knee
And then there was no one left but me.”‘
“Oh. Stevenson, isn’t it?”
“It is,” in a deep doom-laden voice. “The Child’s Garden. Would one rather the false commercial jollity, the coy intolerable tweeness of Winnie the Pooh?”
Because he’d seen at once his mistake. The desolation of his childhood was not going to be discussed with the Sunday Thingummy.
You’ve lots of money, you tight-fisted old bugger. Move it about a bit, enjoy yourself. Living out of suitcases awhile won’t hurt you, quite the contrary. There’s plenty left in you (Alan’s view; Cathy agrees). Got all shut in and dried out. Needs sun and air, wind and rain, a bit of scenery to fertilise.
For who of us (wondered Alan) couldn’t find ghastly childhood experiences to put forward in mitigation of enormities, explanation of eccentricities? Who has eaten their porridge in bland and blameless equilibrium? Being yelled at or whacked—indifference is surely far more damaging, but isn’t this the most banal of truisms? Really, Alan—he’d say—I had no idea I’d brought you all up so well. Oh well—fire and ice, anyhow preferable to a bath of lukewarm toffee.
PART THREE
A Winter Journey
An-on-ym-ity. Or as far as I know, as far as I can see. No one appears to have followed me, no one takes the faintest interest that one could tell; I am pleased even if it could disconcert me and perhaps it does. The name Charles is colourless, recalls no musician or footballer popular with the young, and it is useful that I have made no television appearances in recent years; nobody is going to look across a room, do a double take, whisper to a companion. Great advantages there are to being old and a back number.
This of course is a capital city. There’s never been anything provincial about Amsterdam; only tourists look out for celebrities or gawk when they’re to be seen doing their shopping. Good, I don’t want to get shot at, and please, don’t anyone else get shot on my account. (I phoned the hospital to ask the news of that man. I had the greatest difficulty in getting a bored secretary to grasp what I was talking about: when at last she did—’Oh yes, him, uh, they did some surgery and that went quite well, I believe, because they airlifted him back to England to a hospital there, I don’t know the name of the town but I suppose I could look it up for you if it’s important.’ She’s no worse than any of us. They’d be interested if they were looking after him still. Off their hands and there’s no further interest at all. I’d be the same. Too much clamours for our attention.)
