Latecomers Read online

  He grew immensely tall and very handsome, a condition of which he was unaware. He remained miserable and ashamed, largely on account of his appetite which continued to torment him. He saw himself marooned forever in Aunt’s spare room, to which he would smuggle jars of peanut butter or packets of Lyons cup cakes. Aunt took less and less interest in maintaining the household, and in desperation Fibich learned to cook. The girl, Christine Hardy, still visited occasionally, and she taught him the rudiments: soon he was able to make a good clear soup and a dish of savoury rice and a compote of dried fruits, all of which Aunt greeted with enthusiasm. His cuisine was tailored to her taste. He saw that he was to be responsible for her for the rest of her life, or possibly his, and indeed he knew that Hartmann, still absent, relied on him to keep some sort of home for them both. Fibich, with his anxious mournful temperament, had nurturing instincts, although what he longed for was to be in receipt of those instincts from someone else. Yet it seemed that this could never be. As he loped home from the printing works in his dirty shirt, a precious shin bone and a pound of carrots in his shopping bag, he had nothing to which he could look forward except Hartmann’s return. When the letter came from the Red Cross, informing him of his parents’ death (but he had always known that they were dead) and of the instructions they had given and of the money waiting for him in Switzerland, he did not immediately register that he need no longer lead such a menial existence. He continued to go to the printing works, postponing all decisions until Hartmann came home. As far as he was concerned, nothing had changed. He did not see the admiring glances that some girls directed at him, or if he did he was too shy to acknowledge them let alone interpret them. He rarely greeted people, for he was afraid of revealing his bad teeth. He was tolerated at the works, but had few friends. He asked nobody home: it was not the sort of home to which one asked friends. He and Aunt drifted on together, in the dim rooms, listening to the wireless, talking only very occasionally, retiring early. Sleep, which in early life never failed Fibich, was his enduring treat, and was to remain so until its dramatic interruption by dreams, just when he thought he was old enough to relax.

  When Fibich was nineteen, Aunt entered on to her last illness. A feebleness overtook her, and she frequently leaned her head back in her chair and closed her eyes: Fibich did not know whether she slept or fainted. He consulted the girl, Christine, and they both agreed that one of them would always stay with her, so that when Fibich went to work Christine would move in. He would find her there in the evenings, and had the rare experience of coming home to a cooked meal. Aunt was silent but seemed serene: she smiled at them in her intervals of lucidity, bore no grudges, was visited by no urgencies or recriminations, put her entire trust in her unlikely helpers. The doctor left pills, which Fibich threw away. He knew quite well what was happening, and hoped he would be equal to the task. He was grateful to Aunt for the good manners with which she had conducted her life and was now conducting her last days. In all the years he had lived with her he had learned nothing about her, and now it was too late to ask the questions which he should have asked before. Perhaps, he thought, she might have liked to talk about her life before they met, about Jessop, and the friends, and the adventure that had brought her to this part of the world. He was grateful to her for not ever having burdened him with her own feelings, for now he realized how importunate the presence of two frightened boys must have been. Every evening he supported, half-carried, her to her room, and helped to settle her in her high walnut bed. He left both their doors open, so that he could hear her if she called in the night.

  When he came home one late November evening he heard a low unconscious moaning sound and saw that Christine’s face was white and frightened. The sound swelled and faded, sometimes developing into a hoarse one-sided conversation. ‘She has been like this all the afternoon,’ said Christine. ‘It is the end,’ replied Fibich. Together they dragged Aunt into her room, for she was now a dead weight, and too absorbed in her internal monologue to pay them any attention. Her feet trailed on the floor, and Christine had to go back and pick up her discarded slippers. Once she was installed in her bed her talking stopped; soon the moans began again, and in the short intervals between them her face would be contorted by frowns, as if someone or something were giving her intense displeasure. Fibich urged Christine to go home, for he knew that the task belonged to him. She was reluctant to leave; however he impressed upon her that he would need her the following day, and finally she left. Fibich knew that Aunt would not last the night. He sat by her bed, scrutinizing the animated face with its closed eyes, occasionally holding the hand that twitched rhythmically on the coverlet. Time swept by, not with agonizing slowness, as he had half feared, but with a species of exultation; every time he looked at the clock it was to notice, amazed, that another hour had passed. In the street outside the sound of the final car died away, and then everything was silent. At two in the morning Aunt opened her eyes, seemed on the verge of saying something, struggled with what seemed increasing excitement, looked him full in the face, then fell back, dead. Fibich pulled the sheet over her face, and sat with her until it was light.

  Christine, when she came, shed a few tears; then she calmed herself and went into the kitchen to put on a kettle for tea. That seemed to be the appropriate thing to do. Fibich telephoned the doctor, and was told what arrangements would have to be made. He felt a distaste, a weariness, as if he had encountered death many times before. Midway through the morning hunger possessed him, and with this sign of normality he knew that he would survive the ordeal, as he had survived everything else. The presence of Christine, a silent girl at the best of times, and these were not the best, helped him to play his part. When the doorbell rang he got up to let the doctor in, but there stood Hartmann, jovial, in his khaki, at last released from the army. It was then that Fibich wept.

  Since then he had let himself be guided by Hartmann. It was Hartmann who set up the idea of the business, with a gambler’s confidence that had won over Fibich. In time the idea that their monies might have been used separately disappeared, and they genuinely had all things in common. Their early experiences had given them the identity they needed, and as long as they stayed together this identity became more reassuring, so that in middle age they seemed to have as substantial a life as anyone else of their acquaintance. And it had to be said that Hartmann’s sunny and insouciant attitude was marvellously attractive to have around, and that it preserved Fibich from his worst excesses of melancholy. The melancholy was still there, of course; it was never to disappear. But for the years of their young manhood, with their ridiculous business established and even prospering, he knew some lightness of heart. With their wives, the two men would go on holiday together, hiring villas in Normandy, buying cars, briefly acting as bons viveurs. Hartmann acted this way as if he had been born to it: Fibich did it as an act of daring, to see if he would be either stopped or arrested. The habit of caution, of self-effacement, was too deeply engrained in him to be entirely vanquished. But no one seemed to think he should not be enjoying himself; he was never summoned to the headmaster’s study. Briefly, he put on weight, and his appetite settled down to near normal. When he saw the sun at his window he was nearly a happy man.

  Yet in his mind he never entirely left the flat in Compayne Gardens, where he had stayed for five years after Aunt Marie’s death, until Hartmann, who was the first to marry, found the two homes where they could be as nearly together as was compatible with their married state. Hartmann, who could not wait to leave lugubrious Compayne Gardens, the red-brick houses, the untidily winding streets, moved out as soon as he seriously contemplated marriage to Yvette. He had brought her home to Compayne Gardens, where Fibich had behaved impeccably: he treated her with respect, as Hartmann did not, and would listen to her for hours. However, Hartmann had a more active courtship in mind, and secured the flat in Ashley Gardens after no more than a brief search: his pleasures had always inspired his most effective actions. He then set about
enquiring of his neighbours whether they had plans to move on, and asked them to warn him if and when they found somewhere else to their liking. Fibich lived on soberly in Compayne Gardens, still carrying his shopping bag, with its shin bone and its pound of carrots. He was still strikingly handsome, and still unaware of it. He was beginning, slowly, to come alive, but it was taking a very long time. As if he dared not trust the sun which reappeared at his window, as if he dared not believe that he was now free to invent his own life, he regularly dusted the Gothic furniture, kept Aunt Marie’s bedroom aired, and sat quietly in the evenings, listening to the wireless. He threw out the Dürer reproduction, though, and managed to offload many of Jessop’s paintings at one of the new junk shops that were springing up in the district. He was happy to visit Hartmann and Yvette, and not made envious by their comfort. He was an abstracted and uncommunicative man, active only when he was at work, more often than not sunk into what passed in him for reverie when at home. He turned out to be trustworthy, simple, honourable, the serious element in an enterprise that Hartmann continued to consider something of a joke. Only the neighbours found him slightly odd, curiously unwilling to join them. For Fibich needed all his spare time to himself, as if the task of discovering himself required all his best energies. But now sleep, in which he placed his faith as the element that would restore him to himself, and which for so long had been his infinite resource, began to fail him. The night that sleep failed him for the first time, and the following nights when the same thing happened again, alerted him to the fact that his troubles were not yet over. He had been lucky for a while, that was all. It could not last. He had always known that it could not and would not last. So that, ironically, when the spectre of childhood might at last seem to have been laid to rest, he began to be the old Fibich again. With his connections in Hampstead, he had no difficulty in finding an analyst.

  4

  Christine Fibich, who had been born Christine Hardy, had always known that she would marry Fibich, although he had not always known it himself. From her first sight of him, pale, teary, but oddly glamorous with his long elegant legs and dark hair, she had thought, ‘I can make you better.’ But for a very long time he had not seemed to notice her. It was only when Aunt Marie became ill that he began to take her presence for granted, even to rely on it. She was aware that her connection with this strange household was tenuous, but she felt at home there, much more so than in the tragic flat in West End Lane, where her father and her stepmother always seemed to be returning to darkened rooms after another pointless quarrel. Her mother had been sister to Mr Jessop and had thus been a Jessop herself before marrying Mr Hardy, a morose widower, and dying shortly after Christine’s birth, presumably of disappointment. Mr Hardy, a widower once more, had been much in demand among the ladies of the Bridge Club, despite his lack of obvious attractions: he was unmarried, that was enough, and to women of a certain age he possessed advantages. He seemed to be independently wealthy, for he did no work and was to be seen reading the financial pages of the worthier newspapers. He was in fact a retired businessman: in his heyday he had owned a chain of florists’ shops, had sold out when they were doing well, and had subsequently invested his money wisely. His days passed in calculations of a financial nature, although his wealth, which was modest but real enough, did not seem to benefit him. No flower graced the interior of his gloomy apartment, which was decorated in shades of brown and illuminated by the weakest of lights. Government restrictions were seized on by him as an excuse not to replace the heavy walnut furniture, which seemed to be covered by a fine spray of dust and cigarette ash. The fringes of the Turkey carpets were swollen with dirt, and stood up like the epaulettes on the uniform of a Napoleonic soldier. Brown velvet curtains hung lifelessly at every window and when pulled for the blackout released more dust into the stagnant air. Windows were never, or rarely, opened. He insisted on an even temperature, not noticing the smell, which was compounded of ancient cooking and unwashed ashtrays.

  Rita Gifford was the divorcée who won his hand. Initially energetic, a characteristic which was held over from her original employment as a hospital sister, she too was living on a small capital and was determined never to work again. She was a highly-coloured woman with a heavy body which tapered down to elegant legs and feet; after a few games of bridge she inveigled Mr Hardy to a tea dance, at which she knew she could be seen to her best advantage. She was a woman who liked being married, or rather who liked the status of marriage, for she did not care much for men. What was initially perceived as vivacity was in reality an argumentative disposition, which she managed to keep in check until after the wedding. She had, in fact, over-estimated Mr Hardy’s assets, and although she did not care for children any more than she cared for men, she thought that the girl, Christine, could just be tolerated as part of the bargain. There was no love lost between herself and Mr Hardy: there was no love at all, not even affection, but Mr Hardy, who was too out of sympathy with women in general to understand his daughter, thought that he was making a move in the right direction by getting a woman into the house to look after her. Having done this he could legitimately take no further interest. If he thought of his third marriage at all in philosophical terms, which he did not, it would have been seen as a benevolent provision for his only child. Further than this he did not seem to want to look. Nor was he much interested in how he and Mrs Gifford would spend their time together. He probably calculated on a number of bridge evenings, which would be convenient, as he hated going out. He thought that that should be enough. The rest of the time she could devote to his comfort, or rather to the preservation of those maniacal habits which were the rule by which he lived.

  But once installed, Rita Gifford, or Rita Hardy, as she now was, discovered that she rather disliked him. The necessities of her life once guaranteed, she began to crave the superfluous, and when that was not forthcoming to decline into headaches, moods, petty clashes of opinion which charged the atmosphere and were resolved by a banging of doors when she retired into the bedroom for one of those mysterious siestas which kept the flat under permanent curfew. Mr Hardy preferred to take his rest in the drawing-room, which was soon filled with loud snoring noises. When Christine came home from school she would find them both asleep, discordantly, and she soon learned to make herself a sandwich and to take it to her room, which she would not leave until much later in the evening, when people arrived to play cards. Her after-image of her father was of a stout figure, head thrown back, legs thrust out, fast asleep and snoring loudly. She soon learned to read with her fingers in her ears to drown out the noise.

  She was a modest girl, who did not even presume to be unhappy, although she was often accused of upsetting her stepmother. Indeed she came to be used as a bone of contention for the obscure resentments which now bound Mr and Mrs Hardy together. However self-effacing she tried, and managed, to be she was blamed for everything, for coming in, for going out, for having a long face, for not playing bridge (she was fourteen at the time), for reading too much, for not having any friends. For she had the wit to know that she could never bring anyone home. Children know that their peers are both cruel and honest and will judge each other’s parents without mercy: it is their first experience of adult anxiety. She also had the wit to know that she would learn nothing at home that could prepare her for another life. She therefore got into the habit of visiting her aunt, Mrs Jessop, her dead mother’s sister-in-law, who was conveniently situated a few minutes away. Marie, absent-minded but well-meaning, took her presence for granted, and when Christine timidly asked if she might learn to cook, responded gallantly and with some relief, glad of the help and of the opportunity to teach, in equal measure. Thus Christine learned the rudiments of home-making. It was her only act of independence. Trained to keep silent, she saw her only chance as being allowed to remain silent in a more harmonious environment. She wondered if anyone would have her as a nun, but as she did not believe in God was forced to dismiss this idea as unrealistic.

/>   Gradually she allowed herself to think of Aunt Marie’s household as her real home. Nobody noticed her absence at West End Lane, and she knew instinctively that she was wise to keep out of her stepmother’s way. ‘Always under my feet,’ she had overheard that lady say to her father, and, more meanly, to her face, ‘A girl your age could be earning her living. It’s not as if you had looks on your side.’ Yet she was not the original wicked stepmother for she seemed too often to be incapacitated, moaning with ‘one of my heads’, and spending little time in the kitchen except to make numerous cups of tea which she would carry off to her room. Soon Christine was putting her new-found expertise to work at home. Thus she cooked in both houses, thinking and hoping that she was practising for the life ahead, but not knowing what that would be. In the evenings Mrs Hardy would step forth momentarily refreshed, her face newly made-up, to prepare for the card-playing guests. Having slept all the afternoon, both Mr and Mrs Hardy liked to retire late. Often Christine would return from Compayne Gardens to a flat full of biscuit crumbs and cigarette smoke. She soon learned to clear up the next morning before going to school.

  She was timidly aware of being an anachronism. She tried to love her father but was baulked in the attempt, for he was not at home with children and thought that his obligation to her ended when he had introduced the new Mrs Hardy into her life. Mrs Hardy, for her part, though generally antagonistic to Mr Hardy, was possessive. ‘Your father and I would like to be alone, Christine’, was one of her commonest remarks, as a door was once more closed in Christine’s face. Murmurings behind these closed doors gave some hint of an amorous exchange, although it was hard and even disgusting to imagine this. Christine preferred to leave for the aseptic atmosphere of the Jessop household, where she was learning to master Aunt Marie’s braised tongue à l’orientale. She liked the boys too. She liked Hartmann, who was good-natured and who never teased her. She particularly liked Fibich, whom she saw as one of her own kind. He was her reassurance that she was not entirely alone.