Latecomers Read online

  When Toto was five he would get out of his bed and enter the drawing-room when Fibich and Christine had friends to dinner. Excited by the company, he would run round, humming to himself, cannoning into the guests, drinking from their glasses. If his parents were watching television he would stand in front of it, wagging his head from side to side. Remonstrances, reprobations would be greeted with a storm of tears. Hartmann, softened by the sight of Toto’s rough little hand, with its rim of black under one of the nails, would try to comfort him. Only Yvette could succeed. From the safe haven of Yvette’s arms Toto would stare resentfully at his mother.

  Where had they found the strength to produce such an unnatural child? For they felt him to be a foundling, a visitant who showed them nothing of their own true natures. It was almost as if their weaknesses were being punished rather than rewarded. Obscurely they felt themselves to be in the wrong. Christine in particular was alarmed at the antipathy she aroused in the boy and recognized reluctantly that she was beginning to feel something of the same emotion: distaste. Fibich was more divided. He adored the child, adored in particular that brutal strength, an instinct that he had been denied. But he thought the boy might turn into a bully if not curbed and, reluctantly, despite his own experience, decided to contact a famous school on his son’s behalf. This decision caused a great crisis in his soul, a feeling of betrayal. Yet at ten Toto was almost beyond them both. Christine in particular had many occasions on which to remember her earlier glow of confidence, of carelessness, of belle indifférence. Though they were united in their uneasiness, both continued to glory in the boy’s robust health and strength, his ability to eat anything, his tirelessness. Seeing his son finally collapse into sleep after a day of superhuman activity, Fibich would think, ‘That is how bodies are supposed to behave!’ He knew that after his brief and intense periods of rest – of total unconsciousness for five or at the most six hours – Toto would be up, instantly restless, roaming the kitchen in search of his breakfast, shaming his parents who liked to emerge cautiously from the world of the night, weakened by the information they had brought back with them from the kingdom of the shades. His activities on the bicycle he had forced them to buy him terrified them. Fibich, seeing him ride down Victoria Street with his arms folded, nearly had a heart attack. The boy was fearless, superb. But they failed to solve the enigma of his personality.

  ‘He will be a lady-killer,’ said Yvette, admiring his fine brown skin, his dark brown, almost black, hair, the easy lines of his rapidly growing frame. He had inherited Fibich’s build, or rather his outline, and seemed to have improved on the original model, rather as if Fibich, to whom his height and thinness were problematic, had been the unsuccessful prototype for the final production. ‘We are thinking of sending him away to school,’ said Christine awkwardly, expecting censure. But, ‘Of course, you must. There is nothing for him to do around here,’ and the matter was dismissed. Fibich, as was his habit, consulted Hartmann, who, with a shrug, agreed. ‘He is not like we were,’ he assured Fibich. ‘He is naturally tough. And, anyway, the circumstances are different.’ For a moment ghosts walked on their graves. ‘It is important that he makes friends,’ said Fibich, by way of excuse. For the only other child they knew well was Marianne, and she did not seem to like Toto very much, fearing his rough hands on her hair. Once, unknown to both sets of parents, he had tried to push her against a window. She had easily recovered herself – it was no more than a kind of insistent nudge, after all – but she avoided him. Although she paid him little attention she sensed in him something threatening in a way she could not identify. He would do things, she seemed to feel, or thought she felt, out of boredom, without motive, just to pass the time, fill up the emptiness. His perpetual preparedness for deeds as yet unperformed made her wary. She blamed herself as much as she did Toto. She knew herself to be something of a coward, self-effacing, too quiet and passive to win her mother’s whole-hearted approval. Sometimes she felt more at home with Christine, who did not urge her to be other than she was. Nevertheless she took the opportunity of visiting Christine when she knew Toto to be out of the house.

  On the day they took him to boarding school they were both nervous, but, it seemed, without reason. Toto darted away from them as soon as he decently could. Had they but known it, he was ashamed of them, ashamed in particular of their grey hair, as if they showed by this very fact that they were not normal parents, had in secret been indecently engaged in activities reserved for the young and beautiful. He had become sexually aware at a very young age: they sensed this and understood that their modesty, or, more properly, their shame, would do him no favours. They hoped to have him returned to them tamed and civilized, what Fibich secretly thought of as ‘a little gentleman’. This was his favourite term of approbation: he would not employ anyone whom he did not think of as a little gentleman. They handed him over to stronger spirits than themselves with a feeling of relief.

  Nevertheless the day of his departure affected Fibich badly. He went straight back to the office, where Goodman and Myers, both little gentlemen, greeted him with their usual deference. Everything unsettled him, including their good manners. Goodman, in particular, moist-eyed with the effort to express his assiduity, got on his nerves.

  ‘That fellow embarrasses me,’ he said to Hartmann. ‘He is too eager.’

  Hartmann waved a dismissive hand. ‘So let him be eager. Embarrassment will not kill you.’

  Fibich left the office late and returned to a strangely empty flat, ignoring or trying to ignore the fact that Christine had been crying. He tried to adopt a robust attitude, pretending to himself that all was in order. But that night he had a worrying dream. He dreamed that he was looking out of his window, across their strip of garden, and saw to his horror that a huge tower was being erected about three feet from his gaze. This tower, a rough Brueghel-ish creation which he recognized as Broadcasting House, completely blocked his view. With the speed and ingenuity which he could command in dreams, he immediately negotiated to buy another flat, one with a different aspect, in which the tower could not possibly annoy him, could not even be glimpsed on the horizon. But when he leaned proprietorially on his window-sill and looked out on his new landscape he saw to his horror that the view was precisely the view from the flat in Compayne Gardens, and that he himself, shrunken in size to that of a ten-year-old boy, was returned to the self he thought he had outgrown.

  He took this dream as an omen, although he did not immediately understand what it was an omen of. He began to watch himself again, to take note of his progress, even to keep a journal of his dreams. It was as if, by sending the boy away to school, he had re-entered the time machine. Christine noted this, but in her sadness said nothing.

  6

  The gift of beauty may not necessarily be fatal; on the other hand it may distort the prospects of those who possess it. Women who have been beautiful in their heyday have been accustomed to a position of dominance which may be unearned in any other respect. Early in life they have been entranced by their own euphoric ability to wield influence, first in small matters, then, when they are at the height of their powers, in matters not so small. They become disconcerted and then inconsolable when the beauty fades, and with it the power and the influence. Never reconciled to the stoicism that may be the lot of those less headily endowed, such women may become bad companions in later years, aggrieved at the sudden restrictions imposed by age and with no resource but reminiscence. In the fire of youth, with the beauty still intact and seemingly acquired for ever, the confidence is unimpaired, for the gift appears to others like a sign of superiority, in comparison with which all other accomplishments are counted as negligible. There are many children who have been told, ‘Never mind. You are the clever one’, and who have never got over it. In men the gift is even more alarming, for it lasts appreciably longer, thus prompting wistfulness and envy rather than true friendship. In the wrong hands a possession such as this can ruin several lives. Only a capacity for hard work c
an outlast its many temptations.

  Toto Fibich was so astonishingly handsome that his parents often wished for a more ordinary-looking son, one who would talk to them more easily, be less in demand, be more familiar, more humble, less of a star. He had Fibich’s height and leanness, his mother’s formerly brown hair and still startling eyes, and, from nowhere they could think of, a fine burnished skin which gave him an air of perpetual summer. He looked extremely English, but it was the kind of Englishness that has something legendary about it, that cannot be matched up with known prototype, which flatters fantasies with an aura of ancestral perfection. This entirely factitious image had nothing to do with the realities of Toto’s ancestry, a disjunction which caused Fibich to marvel, half in pleasure, half in regret. Perhaps he would have liked to see more reminiscence of his past in his son’s attitudes, some ghost of what had been lost in an expression, a gesture, even a turn of the head. He was, on the other hand, overjoyed to find in Toto no echo of his own former self, whom he remembered as a miserable shambling figure, perpetually bent under a weight of anxiety, perpetually carrying a shopping bag up the steep streets of West Hampstead. That he no longer looked like or in fact was this figure was a piece of information which he would have dismissed as irrelevant, for although these days he was expensively barbered and tailored, and looked every inch the successful business man, he still tended to behave with caution, even with fear, and thus lacked the ability to bring his new persona to life. The confidence that such a transformation should have conferred on him eluded him perpetually. He suspected that his son despised him, hated in particular his countless nervous turns of the head, his pursed lips, his hesitations. To his son, he knew, he would never be a hero. The best gift that he could have conferred on Toto would have been, oddly enough, an equal form of contempt, masking as amusement or superior experience. In that way respect could have grown. It would not have been an ideal form of respect, but they would have recognized and used it for what it could have been: a modus vivendi adopted in default of anything better. Fibich was yearning, brooding, fearful of having such a treasure in his charge, unequal to the task of guiding him, and experiencing at every turn the feeling that in the important matters of life – always excepting the matter of survival – his son had already outstripped him.

  Christine too entertained confused feelings towards her son. She felt, in particular, a premonitory sense of loss, for it became quite evident, when Toto went up to Oxford, that he would only ever return home as a visitor or on a temporary basis. In addition to this physical loss of the boy’s presence, she remembered how he had repudiated her as a baby, and she forced herself to acknowledge the fact that he did not have much use for her. His health had always been excellent, his appetite indiscriminate, and whereas his father had tended him devotedly through the few childhood illnesses he had suffered, his mother had hung back, conscious of the grey hair that so offended him, conscious too that maternal concern would have had to struggle through a reserve which had now become habitual. She found it necessary to treat her son with a certain formality: overt affection on her side, she felt, would be seen as tactless, out of character, almost an error of taste. She knew, as Fibich did not, of the boy’s decision to dispense with his parents as soon as he was physically and financially able to do so. If Fibich had known this, she thought, he might not have made so much money so freely available to him. In this she understood Fibich’s helpless pride that his son had turned out to be so magnificent a specimen. Thus Fibich succumbed to the power of beauty as if it were a shrine before which he could only pay tribute.

  The only person for whom Toto seemed to have real affection was Yvette, possibly because both shared a vivid sense of their own importance. Indeed, Toto might have adopted for his devise Yvette’s early formed conviction: ‘I am the best.’ He found her preoccupation with herself quite fascinating, and colluded willingly with her need for an audience. Out of his careless ability to please and his natural ability with women he would keep her company for hours. As a boy he loved to see her at her dressing-table, applying a delicate pink flush to her cheekbones, a silvery pink streak to her thin lips. He would watch, entranced, as she touched the pearls at her throat, eyeing her reflection critically, but also as if it were a large audience. And this was not the fascination a child might feel; it increased as he grew older. As Yvette’s skin grew finer and less lustrous, Toto noted the moment at which it had to be artificially enhanced; he saw the creases and folds in the neck beneath the pearls, the rounding and thickening of the shoulders. He felt no estrangement when he witnessed this procedure, rather the contrary. Estrangement he reserved for his mother, a woman of reticent demeanour whom he regarded, quite simply, as inexpert.

  This ardent appreciation of women, or rather of the sort of woman who is part glutton and part coquette, had nothing to do with the facsimile Englishman whom Toto so closely resembled, and harked back to some more distant ancestry and to a period when men were allowed to witness the performance of women preparing for the day. Yvette loved it. She saw nothing incongruous in these attentions of Toto’s, for she was so devoid of native sexual instincts that she found it entirely natural that a process which habitually absorbed and entertained her should afford the same amount of entertainment to someone else. ‘I understand him,’ she would say in the face of Christine’s misgivings. ‘We are very much alike in some ways.’ She spoke the truth, although she did not know, nor was she ever to know, just how alike they were. It was not that Toto was in any way effeminate: the matter was more subtle than that. He seemed to have an instinct for the refinement of women which, allied to his superior looks, made him more complex an amalgam than the young men who were his physical contemporaries. As a boy he had liked to nuzzle round Yvette’s neck, inhaling voluptuously the bouquet of scents that rose from her warm body. Nor was there any suspicion of vice between them. Rather they were like two actors in the same company, chatting in the dressing-room, both aware, as their profession demanded, of every corporeal action and intention. They would examine themselves quite unselfconsciously in Yvette’s mirror, anxious to appear to their best advantage, for their lives depended on it. At home Toto guarded his beauty jealously from his mother, would never let her see him undressed, would wrench his head away if she tried to examine him. ‘Don’t fuss, Ma,’ he would say, as if she were irredeemably tiresome. He sensed disapproval and would not therefore reveal himself to her.

  He was otherwise devastating to women, or rather to the girls whom he dazzled and left thoughtful. From his father’s fear of total physical relaxation, of accessibility to his most primitive and therefore most dangerous impulses, Toto derived his strange power, for his strength lay precisely in his ability to withhold. No matter how much he protested that he was in love with a girl – and by the time he was nineteen there had been many – he would never surrender his reserve. He might deliver himself to her desire on one occasion, an occasion she would vainly try to repeat, but usually he would regret that moment of what he considered to be weakness, would in fact be irritated and disaffected by it, antagonistic to the cause of it, and would drift away to another woman to start the manoeuvre all over again. He hated to see longing in a girl’s eyes, submission, humility. He thought such emotions derogated from a woman’s dignity, although he had precious little use for that dignity as such. He preferred to anger and to antagonize, thinking thereby to safeguard a woman’s pride. His reputation with women was gigantic and flattering for that very reason, although all that he accomplished was a kind of spoiling. His trace was troubling, puzzling: every girl with whom he had fancied himself in love was forced to ask herself, ‘Why did I lose him? Where did I go wrong?’

  Such a man was Toto, and at nineteen he was adult and fully armed. Sustained by his beauty, and by those tearing spirits which had so surprised and disconcerted his parents, he attacked the girls who were drawn to him as if they were so many meals to be enjoyed, and forgotten. He became a prize that every girl thought she could win
, and for that reason he set up dissension between friends who had previously been innocent confidantes. Boasting became a commonplace, where truth had been the norm, and the truth inevitably suffered. Through Toto, and through his disappearances, girls learned to rewrite their amorous history, to imply a dismissal where there had in fact been an absence, to hide disappointment in the enterprise of saving face. In this way they became adult women, holding their secrets to themselves, abandoning honesty as too costly a procedure, a tactic only to be indulged in where circumstances promised eternal security, and thus rarely. Their collective memory of Toto was of a laughing mask as he ran off into the distance, one arm through the sleeve of his coat, the other waving in his eagerness to be gone. Abandonment, flight, eclipse was his strangely alluring tactic.