Latecomers Page 2

  In that unexamined area that informed their first beginnings Hartmann was aware of much that he had decided to forget or to overlook: those years at the print works which had been the final discomfort of their anxiety-ridden adolescence. Indeed, with his customary fleetness, Hartmann was able to turn even this memory to good account. I have come through, he said to himself. What he meant by this was that he was no longer an apprentice, nor would he ever be one again. And even the print shop had been a welcome release after the horrors of school: if Hartmann ever thought to congratulate himself, and he did frequently, it was because he was no longer at school. Sent to London as a frightened boy to live with his father’s sister, Marie, who had providently married an Englishman named Jessop, and staring from the window of the taxi at the huge red-brick cottage in Compayne Gardens which he did not recognize as an apartment house, he struggled with his tears and the incomprehensible language until the ultimate betrayal took place, and he was sent away to school. Here, unfortunately, the memories were vivid and would not always go away. Doubly, even trebly an outsider, he knew, even on his first day, that he was doomed. Had it not been for the accident of being paired with Fibich – but both were forbidden to speak German – he would have died or killed himself. Only the knowledge that someone else’s experience reflected his own reality saved him, although Fibich was arguably worse off even than Hartmann, for he knew no one. Aunt Marie, visiting one weekend and arousing much ribald attention from the other boys with her tweed cape and the pheasant feathers in the band of her brown felt hat, immediately said that Hartmann must bring Fibich home with him, meaning to her gloomy flat in Compayne Gardens, and the winding hilly streets so unlike home. And so they had been together since childhood and could no more think of living apart than they could of divorcing their wives, although their temperaments were diametrically opposed and they rarely thought alike on any matter. It was even natural to them to live separated by no more than a single storey: two apartments in Ashley Gardens, near Victoria, had attracted them, not because they particularly liked the district, but because each would feel the other near at hand. They had retained the habit of closeness, of being allies: everything was called in to reinforce their bond. They were both called Thomas, and turned as one whenever the name was spoken. For this reason their wives addressed them as Hartmann and Fibich, as they addressed each other, and always had.

  Hartmann, waiting for the bill, frowned. He felt discomfort at the insistence of such memories, which were no longer relevant to anything that crossed his amiable mind in the sunshine of his deliverance. This ritual of lunch, which he enacted so often and so regularly, bore somewhere in its train the memory of meals unspeakable, eaten in fear, never properly digested. Those school meals were, in effect, the source of all the loving little luxuries with which he surrounded his present life, just as the aromatic dormitories proclaimed his future need for sybaritic comfort. The bleak wet Surrey countryside in winter, and the incomprehensible hours spent running up and down a muddy field, ensured his devotion to London, its soft mornings, its stony heart, the inexorable streets in which the doctors and the dentists plied their trades, and the suburbs with their flowering trees and the motor bicycles on the pavements. Everything amused him now, all prospects were viewed with indulgence. He was a sophisticated man, sophisticated enough to know that fond recollection of the past was mere sentimentality; this, as it were, intellectual attitude reinforced his active physical discomfort whenever schooldays were discussed. He was apt to turn away questions about his early life, which, now that he was middle-aged, or old, depending how he felt, and successful, were often forthcoming. It was Fibich, who, with a groan, alluded to past ordeals, until silenced by a nod from Hartmann. The past still worked actively in Fibich, seemed from time to time almost to take him over. Hartmann acted as his censor, bringing him forcibly back to the present. ‘It is over,’ he would say, simply. On his face, when he spoke these words, there would pass, unknown to himself, an air of great weariness that was at odds with his dismissal of times long gone. Of course, he remembered them perfectly, or would have done had he allowed himself to dwell on them. He even remembered them better than Fibich, whose obsessional examination of these memories had led him for a short time to a psychoanalyst. When he read Oliver Twist Hartmann marvelled that Dickens had had such an acute understanding of the misery of boys. Girls, he thought, did not, could not, suffer so much. He thanked Heaven that his only child was a daughter.

  He sat back with a sigh. Since, in this context, reminiscence was safe, permitted, he cast a selective look back to his beginnings. Schooldays still loomed large: he took this to be a sign of his assimilation, since schooldays figured so impressively in the accounts that Englishmen gave of themselves. His school, their school, in fact, had been one of those decrepit but expensive establishments created and run by an ex-army officer and his harassed wife that proliferated in England in the years before the Second World War. The masters were incompetent, irascible, lacking all faith in what they were doing, lurching from one expedient to another, aware that what little luck they possessed was running out. Hartmann and Fibich, metaphorically and almost physically twin souls, marvelled at the bad but fattening food, the indifferent hygiene, the rudeness of the servants, all of whom were emboldened by the increasing haplessness of the headmaster and his wife to indulge in forms of self-expression that both Hartmann and Fibich found to be unacceptable. The Matron, in particular, caused them acute discomfort. She was a youngish woman called Joy, thick-legged, red-cheeked, apparently quite at home in this community of half-grown men. Hartmann, even at the age of fifteen, found something retarded in her make-up. Fibich, the younger and more agonized of the two, winced at her jovial enquiries into the state of his bowels, information that he could not bear to disclose to another living soul, particularly when it was required of him in a loud and cheerful voice which, he felt, demanded his collusion in urgent and unwelcome terms. His frightened modesty often spurred her to excessive attention. She had a way of cross-questioning him while rolling up pairs of socks with swift thick fingers, pretending to be not very interested in his answers but studying his long lowered eyelashes in repeated sidelong glances. There was something menacing as well as flirtatious about these interviews. Fibich heroically fought back the symptoms of genuine maladies in order not to be ministered to by her, and carried on with a fearful toothache, which he hoped to have the courage to endure until he could take it back with him to Compayne Gardens and there ask for help.

  The man who looked after the boiler and was supposed to be responsible for maintenance – the lukewarm water, the damp slimy towels in the downstairs cloakrooms, the windows that were never quite open enough to dispel the smell of boys – lived in the basement surrounded by tins of dried-up paint, his radio permanently tuned to a foreign station playing nostalgic tea-time music. Although it was said of this man, Henderson by name, that he had a taste for small boys, inducing them into his malodorous quarters with offers of tea and biscuits, Hartmann and Fibich found themselves lingering in the passage outside his rooms just in order to listen to the music. The announcer’s voice, which they strained to hear, would be abruptly eclipsed, as if Henderson were angry at such alien intrusion into his domain. Seconds later the music would be resurrected, all too faint echo of the life they had left behind, too careless of its existence to have studied it more closely. Some genetic trace kept them yearning for its sweetness, its suavity, even its falseness, while their stomachs suffered from the weight of potatoes, sausages and custard they were forced to ingest.

  Since he had come to this country at the age of twelve, this ordeal had lasted a long time. Then came apprenticeship to the printer, until the order of release came in the form of a letter from Switzerland informing them of the deaths of both their parents. Certain monies had been put aside for them, and these, together with reparations after the war, had enabled them to set up on their own. The day they had both installed themselves in their first little office
in the Farringdon Road had been one of deep emotion for them both. Nothing, perhaps, would ever affect them so again, apart from the birth, health, and destiny of their children.

  Since that time Hartmann had been blithe. He was modest about his good spirits, was not foolish enough to think that he had earned them. Luck, quite simply, had come his way, that was all. Throughout his adolescence he had been frightened. The first step towards emancipation had been his ability to master the language. This had come with a rush, as he was about to leave school; it was as if the prospect of freedom had released something in him, had suddenly induced ability where there was none before. The second step, oddly enough, had been his National Service, which had been an unexpected introduction to conviviality. Sent to mind stores in Wiltshire, there was little for him to do except check deliveries, and he was much in demand as a source of supplies. Fibich, whose stoicism in the face of toothache had left him with a legacy of migraines, was not accepted for the army. He remained in London, at the printing works, lodging with Aunt Marie, whom he now considered to be an authentic relation. It was the first time the two had been separated. Fibich sent his cigarette ration to Hartmann who was gradually discovering the delights of generosity. Open-handed among the boxes of dried bananas and the sacks of dried egg, Hartmann marvelled at the ease of friendships based on mutual interest. He found his fellow conscripts charming (his favourite adjective), and, as he listened to their plans for the future, he began to dwell on the possibility of making plans of his own. Fibich had been keen on the idea of publishing – he was the more learned, the more serious of the two of them – but Hartmann saw that they must attack from the flank. They would never know enough to be insiders, that was clear. The trick, therefore, was to find a trade which was in a sense superfluous but also gratifying. That was how the greetings cards had been conceived. In the beginning the cards had been sentimental. A Happy Birthday to my dear Wife, they proclaimed. Or, Baby is One Today! Gradually they allowed realism to creep in, and found that the more outrageous the message the more eagerly it was bought. Get Well cards soon topped their sales, particularly lugubrious or insensitively cheerful greetings for the post-operative patient. They had never looked back.

  The odious feel of rough khaki on the backs of his knees and of his neck also inspired in Hartmann at this time his love of luxury. In this he was aided by the sight of his fellow conscripts sprucing themselves up for a night out. Such applications of grease and water, such furious polishing of boots! Hartmann had tried to emulate this activity when they kindly included him in their invitations to spend the evening in a pub, but such exercises were not for him, any more than the flat beer and the dark and aromatic room in which it was consumed were for him. Instead he took advantage of their absence to strip wash himself, writing to Fibich to send him bars of scented soap. And ever since those days he had been a devotee of his morning toilet, and his bathroom was filled with scented essences, with rose-flavoured mouth-wash, and with colognes which he would pat into the skin of his face, so that his wife, on kissing him goodbye, would say to him, ‘You smell better than I do.’

  Now he had reached the age when the odours of the body are more insistent and more difficult to dispel, when the day’s work, minimal though it was, felt like a more serious operation than in the early days when there had been so much more to do, when waking from sleep was a more lengthy process. These days his wife enlivened her hitherto flawless complexion with a geranium flush. He had no feelings of resentment against the passing years, counting each day a triumph, particularly when the winter sun shone strongly, as it did today. Rather he welcomed old age, or what he supposed was old age, having done too well, spent his time too fruitfully, to wish it all back again. Certain attitudes of mind and body were no longer available to him, or if available no longer becoming. The young men at the adjoining tables (and he was forced to revise their status upwards, hearing one of them remark that he had passed the previous evening at Annabel’s) aroused no feelings of envy, that mean-minded desire that he occasionally noted among his contemporaries to deplore young people’s lack of style, or what was considered their lack of style. Silver-haired now, and with a slightly more prominent stomach, Hartmann was still recognizable to himself, as was Fibich, as gaunt as ever, but with expensively rearranged teeth. The skin of Hartmann’s face was still dry and glossy, although the body was more capacious: dressed, he managed to mask from himself the sight of the unwieldy forked animal that had earlier emerged from the bed. Upright, bathed, burnished, he still evoked a smile from the face in the mirror; his wedding ring was still loose on his finger. And after his lunch, which he preferred to take alone, he could now afford to wander a little in the sun, a pleasure denied to him in those days when the sun had never seemed to shine at all, when the only refuge from the hard-packed dirty snow was the single bar of Aunt Marie’s electric fire. Stoical, she had refused to ‘give in’, as she put it, to the cold, although her own early years had been warmed by district central heating. Now both Fibich and Hartmann insisted on almost tropical heat, and the air inside their homes was soothed by scents of cigars, lavender polish, and rich cooking that never entirely dispersed. He vaguely remembered such scents from the parental home, which he otherwise did not remember at all, or did not try to. It was Fibich, at the suggestion of his analyst, who longed to return, but was fearful of doing so, and thus existed on the horns of a dilemma that would never be resolved. Hartmann’s solution to this problem had been breathtaking in its simplicity: get rid of the analyst. ‘A meddler,’ Hartmann had said. And, ‘Psychiatrists! What do they know?’ Hartmann understood that Fibich was still unhappy, and occasionally, but only occasionally, acknowledged the reason. But why dwell on the past, particularly when the past was so uncongenial? Better to eat a good lunch, rejoicing in prosperity, and then to select a piece of Brie, a piece of Cantal, perhaps to point to a fine pineapple, in preparation for his evening meal. Television was marvellous at keeping one in the present. He loved the American soap operas, rejoicing in the extravagance.

  The head waiter came up to bid him good-day: Hartmann was a customer of long standing.

  ‘The family well?’ Hartmann asked, genuine in his enquiry.

  ‘Very well, sir, thank you. We saw Mr Fibich the other day.’

  ‘And the account for Mr Goodman and Mr Myers is up-to-date?’

  ‘Yes, sir, all taken care of.’

  ‘Good-day then, Monsieur Pierre. Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  They appreciated each other wonderfully.

  Out in the street the winter sun was at its zenith, soon to retire its light and its shadows. Hartmann waved his hand to the woman arranging a jacket in the window of the dress-shop – he had known her for thirty years – and strolled in the direction of Selfridges. A little shopping, the purchase of the evening paper, and he would be back at the office in time for a second cup of coffee. Very civilized, he thought. Well, he had earned it. And this evening his daughter was coming round, an occasion for great rejoicing. He would ask Fibich and his wife to join them, since they both loved her. And their boy doing so well: a miracle. It was an uncertain profession, of course, and nothing was guaranteed, but it seemed that he had the gift. This, he was aware, was an attitude of indulgence in him for this particular young man, for the idleness of which he approved in women was, generally speaking, anathema to him in men. (He ignored his own, which was in any case ornamented with much ceremony of a business-like nature.) But enough of that. Today was another blessed day, like so many. Had he been a praying man, but of course he wasn’t, he would have given thanks. Instead he settled the collar of his coat more closely round his neck, and stepped devoutly towards Selfridges.

  2

  Hartmann’s wife, Yvette, had been attractive as a girl and had managed to preserve her appeal into middle age. Although younger than Hartmann she had always had a grown-up air, based largely on a set of mannerisms which belonged, or seemed to belong, to the generation that had
gone before her. Apart from fleeting expressions of blankness or loss, she breezily broadcast an air of established and traditional womanhood, which nevertheless managed to sidestep the essential business of being female. Her particular attraction was based not on looks so much as on various forms of self-advertisement. She still entered a room with a sort of pre-emptive bustle, as if drawing on herself the attention of a crowd: she always assumed an audience, and frequently got one. She liked to imagine people saying ‘Who is she? Who is that beautifully groomed woman with the blonde hair?’ When she had first started work, in the far off days when she was in her early twenties, she had always managed to give the impression that she was chairing the committee of a charity ball. She bestowed her activity, rather than letting it be harnessed to anyone else’s needs, or even to the needs of the occasion. She was a typist in the company run by Hartmann and Fibich, and not a particularly good one, but although they were irritated by her lack of attention and her dubious punctuality, her altogether sunny indifference to the demands of the work they politely asked her to do, they both found themselves hypnotized by her self-importance and waited with genuine interest for her appearance at the office. However late she happened to be, Yvette regarded her arrival at work, or what she thought of as her entrance, as the high point of the day. After that had been registered (and she knew the importance of first impressions) she tended to let her attention lapse from what followed. She shed about her an aura of femininity which made men thoughtful because it did not seem aimed in their direction: on the contrary, it seemed to exclude them, as if she herself belonged to a sect which considered them to be of little importance. She was faultlessly put together, wore her carefully varied blouses and skirts as if they came from couture houses, and gave off waves of a scent which, though inexpensive, nevertheless created trails which insinuated themselves into the hallway and the corridors.