Latecomers Page 4

  In the early days, when he discovered that the splendour of that body was in fact limited to what could be displayed rather than enjoyed, Hartmann took a mistress. His attitude towards this woman was ambiguous. On the one hand he found in her all the passion that was lacking in his marriage, but on the other hand he disliked her. He disliked her for reasons which had to do entirely with himself. She was a quiet woman, not bad looking, but certainly not remarkable, shrewd, cool, and tactful. He could be sure of her discretion, and yet he felt uneasy with her. He felt that he could only have relaxed with a woman of a coarser disposition, a dangerous, frankly downmarket sort of woman, the sort of woman with whom he need not mind his manners. Whereas Elizabeth – a cool discreet sort of name – treated him with an amiable respect that forced his respect in return. Her deportment, in fact, was entirely appropriate in a wife but not in a mistress. Since Yvette remained disconcertingly innocent of her physical shortcomings, and found it impossible, and uninteresting to speculate about the capacities of other women, there was certainly nothing in Hartmann’s conduct that robbed her of her status.

  And yet it was precisely a matter of status that created such discomfort between Hartmann and his mistress. If anything, Elizabeth was slightly superior in breeding to Yvette, whose touching childhood, the half-remembered episode of her mother urging her to eat in the train to Bordeaux – an episode which so moved him when he first heard it – seemed to clothe her in a vulnerability of which she remained unaccountably unaware. In short, when he was in bed with Elizabeth, he felt guilty; she had the effect of reinforcing his fidelity to his wife. She continued to receive him with the same thoughtful deference, pretending not to notice the studious lack of love, the absence of endearments, his very reluctance to call her by her name, as if literally distancing her from his real, authentic life. It was as if he sent his doppelgänger to make love to her. And the love-making itself, the necessary quantity of their association, had a brutality, a facelessness, that excited them both but did not compensate for all that was missing on both sides. She could have loved him, but would not allow herself to do so, for she understood him rather well. Thus, through each other they came into contact with their lesser selves. When he left her Hartmann was astonished to feel such melancholy.

  On the evenings of the days on which he visited his mistress he was more than ever affectionate towards his wife. He appreciated anew his handsome drawing-room, on which Yvette had lavished such care; he even appreciated his wife’s little fussy self-regarding ceremonies. Safely back in the land of husbands and wives, on whom society smiles, he would vow to put an end to it. And one day he had. Elizabeth had behaved perfectly, and there were no harsh words. What she had felt he never knew. These days he greeted her through the window of the dress shop she owned, and she would always smile back.

  It amazed Yvette that married women could have flirtations. Why did they need to, when the business of flirting had already been brought to an honourable conclusion? In that sense she was virtuous. Her days passed in relative but nonetheless real innocence, shopping, rearranging her linen cupboard or her wardrobe, lunching with friends, strolling down Bond Street. Recently she had begun to imagine herself a little too hard-worked, a little too tied to the house (for the women’s movement had caught up with her): she had declared that she would not cook dinner, would in fact go to evening classes. She was aware of the impact that this declaration made. In reality nothing much interested her, but she found a group that discussed great works of French literature, and she decided that, with her fine accent, she would make a good impression there. Rather touchingly, to Hartmann, she was set to reading La Princesse de Clèves, the first book on the list, which she found puzzling but to which she was attracted. She would come home momentarily thoughtful, as if pondering matters which had not previously engaged her attention. But once in the flat, where Hartmann would be sitting in front of the television, she would find the ideas that had suggested themselves, had indeed been eagerly discussed by the group, ridiculous, and would retire to pamper herself with a leisurely bath and a flattering nightgown. Every night she virtually dressed up to go to bed, comfortable in the knowledge that she could at last sleep undisturbed.

  These days the splendid body was more voluminous, the hair dyed to an uncompromising shade of gold. With her new amplitude her bustling demeanour made a more genuine impression. Although still inclined not to take her seriously, Hartmann trusted her absolutely. He realized that she too would soon be old, that they would be old together. A vein in her left leg occasioned her some discomfort, and once, when he went into the bedroom before she had finished undressing, he saw that between the black satin straps of her ambitious underwear the flesh of her back had become turgid, the back itself slightly but noticeably rounded. She had never complained, but remained happy with the original bargain. She was still, despite La Princesse de Clèves, an old-fashioned woman. She still kissed him goodnight before turning over resolutely on her side. And she was there every morning to ask him how he had slept (for sleep was becoming important to them both), to serve him his coffee in his special cup, and to reassure him that, in spite of age, nothing had really changed.

  3

  Fibich remembered. Fibich remembered Aunt Marie, whom he called ‘Aunt’, and the flat filled with implacable Gothic furniture where he had spent so many years wondering if his bewilderment would ever end. He remembered blundering through his life, never knowing or indeed discovering whether his actions were acceptable or whether they were as futile as he believed them to be. The years before his arrival were lost, and it was their loss that had sent him to the analyst. And no momentous retrieval had taken place, nothing that he thought might at last supply him with an identity. All that remained of that enterprise, apart from the agonizing possibility of a deliberate return to his birthplace, in itself an exercise in human archaeology and therefore in a sense hedged about with superstition, was the odd fragment, the odd image, extracted under kindly coercion from a mass of fear which was very slow to abate. He had, for example, an image of himself as a very small, very plump boy, engulfed in a large wing chair which he knew to be called the Voltaire, feeling lazy, replete, and secure in the dying light of a winter afternoon. He deduced that he must have been put there to rest after a family meal, perhaps a Sunday lunch, but he could not reach back and discover who had been present, nor could he remember the room or rooms in which these activities had taken place.

  But he knew that he could not have invented this image, which returned to him quite clearly from time to time. The fact that he saw himself as fat was crucial, since for all of his adult life he had been laughably, cadaverously thin. For as long as he could remember his mind had been occupied with thoughts of food, of which there never seemed to be enough; at the school he did not even mind that the food had been disgusting, for all that mattered was that the food should be there. He was never to be fully secure in the knowledge that there would be another meal, not even as a married man, with a wife who knew all his needs. Much as he had loved his infant son, he had felt an involuntary pang when his wife had first turned to the child and occupied herself with cutting up the food in his little dish. He had felt a sadness then, and a terrible shame, that his wants were to be subordinated to those of the child, and that he still minded. The analyst had been very keen on that episode.

  He feared the future. For as long as he could remember he had feared the future. He was plagued by dreams that had no connecting thread apart from the incongruousness of their settings, and the fact that a great deal of cleaning, of housework, seemed to be involved. He dreamed of being approached, amiably, by notable men, men in public life – a government minister, a newspaper tycoon – all of whom seemed to be well disposed towards him. In these dreams some sort of rendezvous was proposed, one which he knew would be to his advantage, but before this could take place he would have to scrub out a derelict kitchen or an obscure bathroom, while outside the sun shone and crowds strolled by on ample paveme
nts. He was troubled, too, by tiny jealousies, envying Hartmann’s easy acceptance of the world as it was, not reaching back towards a past which he had never properly possessed. He was five years younger than Hartmann, had left home at the age of seven, and therefore could hardly hope to recapture his lost life, particularly as advancing age was affecting him more quickly, so that these days he hardly knew himself, with his distinguished grey hair, his hesitant walk, and his habitually anxious face, from which his renewed teeth beamed forth a message of sturdiness which he himself could not believe. Often his tongue would creep cautiously round his mouth to make sure that his teeth were still there.

  He would retire, he sometimes thought, and devote his time to sorting out these matters before it was too late, and he would do this without the benefit of outside interference, by which he meant the analyst, Mrs Gebhardt, with her transfixing but fallacious maternal aura and the kindly smile built on a foundation of indifference. In the meantime, part of the past, the most expendable part, was still with him, so that he seemed still to be possessed by the tedium and the incomprehensibility of that segment of his life which was of no value to him, while the essential part, the part that would have explained his character and would have furnished him with a lineage was irrevocably missing. Quite simply, there had been no one to tell him about it. He felt, alarmingly, that he was only alive by the skin of his teeth.

  Of his curious life since his arrival at the school, and then at Aunt Marie’s flat in Compayne Gardens, he remembered a great deal, but the memory was uninteresting, tedious, and he was even a little annoyed at its tenacity. Aunt had been kind, but being childless herself was devoid of that instinctive warmth that Fibich craved. She had been kind through inadvertence, through absent-mindedness, never quite realizing that children need to know that they are the object of constant attention rather than of haphazard and lightning sallies into their conversation or their activities. The flat in Compayne Gardens had been filled with black furniture of a convoluted nature, so that every bureau and credenza, of which there had been several, looked as if they had been designed by the Brothers Grimm. Paintings, in an amateurish and discordant style, hung on every wall, for Aunt’s late husband, Mr Jessop, had been an artist, of a kind that had congregated in Hampstead in the years before the war, blessed with an income that had allowed him to go on turning out his orange and green abstracts without much care that nobody ever bought them. They were frequently given away to friends as wedding or anniversary presents: the friends would nod thoughtfully and remark that he was ‘evolving’. Nevertheless many remained, stacked two or three deep in the small room that was destined to receive Fibich, so that to the nightmare of the furniture was added the constant awareness of cruel landscapes in the style of the early Derain, Provence under a Hampstead sky, or alternately, Hampstead as it might be on the outskirts of Avignon. ‘My husband was a Fauve,’ Aunt had said, showing him to his room, by which Fibich had slowly come to understand that the late Jessop had had carnivorous instincts. He had shuddered and turned the pictures to the wall. Aunt’s kindness showed through in the fact that she had not noticed this, or had not objected to it if she had noticed it. Or perhaps she was as tired of the pictures as he would have been had he had to live with them all his married life.

  Aunt had come to England as a girl, to marry Mr Jessop, and in deference to his calling had dressed artistically, with amber beads and flying hair and the tweed cape that had caused so much mirth when she visited the boys at their school. The tweed cape had been purchased before she left home, and was of so excellent a quality that it never wore out, and was quite in fashion when the style came round again in the fifties. La vie de bohème had left Aunt with a more secure knowledge of how to provide mulled wine for fifteen or twenty friends who might drop in of an evening to discuss the Marxist interpretation of history than an understanding of how to feed starving boys on inadequate rations every day during their holidays from school. She tended to cook everything at once, usually on a Friday evening, so that they could count on one meal of a certain splendour, while the rest of the week was given over to unappetizing expedients. It was to Aunt’s credit that she invested this one meal with considerable ceremony, lighting candles, spreading a damask cloth. A shadowy girl, a niece of her late husband, was invited, and came early on Friday afternoons to help with the preparations. The meal was invariable: braised tongue à l’orientale, followed by baked apples. Sometimes there were Kentish cobnuts to follow, and Fibich was given the task of cracking them. He remembered passing the shelled nuts to the shadowy girl, whose name was Christine Hardy. Later in the evening she would disappear silently to do the washing-up.

  An ache, which he was not old enough or bold enough to recognize as boredom, would seize him as soon as the cloth was once more gathered into its folds, and the rest of the weekend had to be endured. Walks were encouraged, for Aunt had not felt the cold, and the single bar of the electric fire was not switched on until evening, and then only reluctantly. Traversing the Heath with Hartmann, who was the only other person he knew, Fibich would wonder if this life would ever end, since he knew he could not go home again. His terror and despair were without measure. Sometimes, in the evenings, he would forfeit his place in front of the electric fire and disappear to be sick. Aunt knew this, although it was never mentioned. It was Hartmann who took care of him, although Fibich was adept at being sick without anyone noticing. ‘Sit here, Thomas,’ Aunt would say, as he came back, white-faced, into the drawing-room. ‘Sit down and get warm. You are quite safe here, you know.’ She was good in that way, never got alarmed or hysterical, so that the symptom passed as he grew older, although he always had a sensitive stomach and loathed unusual food, regarding it with suspicion and the fatal knowledge that it was sure to upset him. With that, a tremendous appetite for farinaceous material, as much bread and starch as could be obtained. He grew rapidly, but it was hard for him to believe that he had ever been that fat child who sat so replete, his digestive system becalmed, in the chair called the Voltaire. ‘Not the Voltaire, a Voltaire,’ Aunt had explained to him much later. ‘It is a chair with a high back and wings. Very comfortable. We had them at home.’ In her drawing-room one sat on springy sofas with bulging arms that were too low, relics of the days when she had set up house. The more substantial objects she had somehow brought with her, as she had the green and white plates, elaborately scrolled, from which they had eaten their baked apples. In the bathroom a rust stain crept down the inside of the old-fashioned claw-footed tub, under the taps. The water was hot, but they were enjoined not to waste it. ‘The King of England uses only five inches of bath water,’ Aunt would tell them. ‘See that you do the same.’

  Through the tears occasioned by his recent bouts of vomiting Fibich saw the haze of girandoles twinkling sadly against the beige walls. With the blackout curtains drawn the room was dim, but no dimmer than it was during the daytime, when the intrusive furniture loomed. The washing-up done, the shadowy girl would come in with a tray of tea. ‘Thank you, dear,’ Aunt would say, and would put extra sugar from her ration into Fibich’s cup. Such kindnesses he remembered.

  Occasionally friends from the old days would drop in, fat men in stained tweed suits, women with unadorned faces. Aunt herself was handsome, ramrod-backed, even elegant. The flyaway hair of her early days had long been disciplined into a kind of scroll that was cleverly tucked round her head. Her eyes were not good, and sometimes she would don a pair of tinted glasses. She looked curiously out of place as she sat among her husband’s erstwhile companions, and, had she known it, remarks were occasionally passed in the neighbourhood. But she did not know it, or if she did she ignored it: she was not without a certain grandeur. And her efforts were commendable. She spent her days collecting unglamorous material for salvage, or knitting (badly) for men in the services. The Vicar called, largely to show his broadmindedness, for she told him with a ringing laugh that she was a free-thinker. She was particularly good with bombed-out families, whom she
tirelessly strove to see rehoused. She was never ill, or lazy, or negligent. On the whole, she was a distinguished woman, although her presence remained uncomfortable. She was their only relative, so that in later life Hartmann and Fibich and the girl, Christine, had communal memories of her. Once she had taken all three of them to hear Myra Hess play Bach at the National Gallery.

  When Hartmann went into the army Fibich stayed with Aunt, paying her a small sum out of his wages at the print works. She aged quickly after the war, seemed to lose her iron nerve and her equable spirits. Perhaps the strain of having the boys in her flat had at last begun to tell. She had never wanted children, and would have been quite happy on her own, with her numerous activities to fill up her spare time. But now she began to rely on Fibich to keep her company in the evenings, to mend things about the flat, to carry the shopping. Her eyesight had deteriorated quite rapidly, and she no longer read. Together they would listen to the wireless, silently united for the Brains Trust or the play on Saturday evening, the highlight of the week. Aunt particularly liked plays with detectives in them or criminals pretending to be decent members of society. ‘Ha, I see your game,’ she would cry. With hair still dark, back still straight, but colour haphazardly applied to her cheeks, she suddenly looked bizarrely foreign. Yet she still never left her bedroom without being fully dressed and groomed, accountable to the world.

  With his first meagre stipend Fibich bought her a bunch of violets, which she held to her cheek for a moment before laying them aside. Fibich put them in a fish-paste jar, thinking them too humble for a vase. With his second stipend he bought a reproduction of Dürer’s Praying Hands, out of some obscure religious and national impulse. ‘What a horror,’ said Aunt, gazing at it severely through narrowed eyes. ‘I hate that finicky style.’ ‘But he is a great Renaissance master,’ objected Fibich, who was rapidly losing faith in his purchase. ‘Hardly,’ said Aunt. ‘A most unhealthy mind. No trace of your Latin exuberance there. A crabbed soul. Still, if you like it, I can hardly discourage you.’ Fibich had, in buying it, aspired to nobility. Now he was disappointed. It stayed on the wall of his room until its piety began to irritate him, after which he took it down.