A Man Over Forty (18 page)

They had lunch at the Caprice, where eighteen or twenty people came to their table to congratulate Balintore on his return to health and England; and Polly Newton was pleased to meet celebrities whom she had previously known only from the great distance of the upper circle or the infinite remoteness of the television-box. She ate a hearty meal, but their conversation, interrupted by so many visitors, was disjointed and added nothing to a solution of the problem of autobiography. Then, when the restaurant began to empty, Balintore called for more brandy and said, ‘I depend on you! Utterly and entirely on you. Come again tomorrow —'

‘Of course. So long as Mr Evershrub doesn't want me, I'll come every day.'

‘But not till the afternoon. I'll take you to your hotel, and then I'm going back to Albany to work. What I have to decide – and perhaps this can only be done in solitude – is what I'm going to say, before I think about how I'm going to say it. I'll make a chart and a programme: a chart in time, a programme of events, and then, as I said before, you'll have to be patient. Patient while I improvise and try to find the proper key. I shall probably work all night, so don't come till the afternoon. About three o'clock.'

She was late again – it was a quarter-past three when she arrived – but Balintore was hardly ready for her. Mrs Bint had wakened him at half-past ten with a cup of tea but he had fallen asleep again and slept till two. Then he had lain for twenty minutes in a hot bath before shaving, dressing, and eating the lunch which Mrs Bint had left for him: cold salmon, a salad and cheese, half a bottle of Montrachet in the frigidaire, and magnificent on the sideboard a luscious chocolate cake. Mrs Bint had a sweet tooth.

Polly Newton came in when Balintore was drinking coffee in his small dining-room, and it became evident that she too was fond of chocolate cake. She sat opposite him and ate a large slice while Balintore spoke of the work he had done – ‘It was five o'clock before I went to bed' – and showed her a dozen closely written pages.

‘There's my chart and programme,' he said. ‘I want you to make a copy of it.'

She read the first paragraph and said with surprise, ‘I didn't know you were Scotch.'

‘I don't know that I am.'

‘But your father was.'

‘Look at the next paragraph, and you'll see the circumstances, not of my birth, but of my adoption.'

‘You were an orphan?'

‘I don't even know that. I may have been. I may have been a derelict left by a dead mother, whose male parent was also dead. I may have been the unwanted child of a shiftless couple who were unwilling or unable to support a son who may have
been legitimate or illegitimate. I know nothing about my origin. Nothing at all. But I was adopted by Alexander Balintore, of the Chair of Scottish History at Edinburgh University, and Isabella his wife, when I was apparently one year and five months old.'

Moulding in her fingers a little heap of chocolate icing, Polly Newton looked at him with a stricken expression, and said, ‘A foundling!'

‘Is that how I should start?'

He wore an exhausted look, and his healthy Caribbean tan was reduced to a yellowish pallor. His eyes were lack-lustre and a little bloodshot; and the curving lines that forty years had scored on his face, from nostrils to the outer corners of his mouth, were deepened by melancholy. Much of what he had written, during the night, had been extorted from a memory unwilling to release it; and he had been aware, as he wrote, that his motives for writing were not simple.

He was, by now, obsessed by a physical desire that was still warmly coated with sentiment. Polly Newton, looking lost and tearful at London Airport, had touched his imagination, and he still wanted to cherish and protect her; but the alchemy that turns pity to sensuality had persuaded him that it was impossible to do any such thing without taking her to bed. He knew, or thought he knew, that material or superficial inducements would fail to serve his purpose; but he guessed, or intuitively realized, that an appeal for sympathy might open her arms and release a guarded affection. To that end he had sacrificed something of his dignity and set down on paper some fragments of a truth he still felt to be deeply wounding.

But while he wrote – while he wrote and burnt what he had written, and wrote again – another thought entered his mind, and though he recognized its vanity, he did not repel it. He, in the contemporary world, on a contemporary scale of values, had become a figure of recognized importance, and if he confessed the obscurity – indeed the nullity – of his origin, his achievement might well seem the greater.

Such a confession, he realized, would upset an established image. He had posed, successfully, as a person of consequence who had not had to create his authority, but had been born to
it. The escapades and transient poverty of his youth were no more than the accidents which would befall any high-spirited boy who chose to flout convention and try his strength against the world. He had never complained of early hardship or identified himself with a majority born to hardship. He had, on the contrary, pretended or let it be assumed that a tone of authority had come to him by right of birth, and his opinions, which were sometimes reactionary – opinions which had involved him in so many public quarrels, and perversely increased his popularity – were the natural issue of a mind accustomed to offend and command.

That was the image he would have to discard, and would the new image built on confession of the truth – or some part of the truth – fill the place of its predecessor, throw a yet longer shadow, and suggest a still larger personality? In the temper of the time, it was possible, it was even probable. It would be a painful experience, but it might earn rewards. It would surely move Polly Newton to pity and compliance.

‘You are the first person,' he said, ‘to whom I have ever told my secret story, and I'm still doubtful – very doubtful – if it should be told in public.'

‘But you have nothing to be ashamed of! It wasn't your fault —'

‘It's my misfortune, and misfortune is often judged more severely than a fault.'

‘How long have you known – I mean, how old were you —'

‘When I was told the truth?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's a sore point,' he said, ‘and when you read what I've written there, you may be upset by what I've said about my mother: my adoptive mother. I never liked her – I think that's true, though one can't be sure, of course: memory's not honest enough, memory plays politics and tries to please – but I've no recollection of her that isn't coloured by dislike, and dislike certainly changed to hatred when she told me I wasn't her son in fact, but only a waif whom she'd chosen to feed and clothe. That was after my father died: my adoptive father.

‘He was a Professor of History – Scotch history – but he made no parade of learning, he wasn't remote or pompous.
Perhaps he wasn't a good historian, but he was an excellent father: or pseudo-father. He was serious about golf and fishing and claret, but not much else, and he used to infuriate my mother by saying that history was only a record of crimes committed by the upper classes. There would be no such thing as history, he would say, if the world had had an efficient police force. And when he was in that sort of mood, which was pretty often, I've seen my mother turn white with anger, and get up and leave the table. She thought a professor should be serious – perhaps she was right: I don't know – and every time he made a joke she felt he was undermining his dignity, and threatening hers.'

Balintore poured himself another glass of wine, and Polly refused – but then accepted – another slice of cake.

‘And then he died,' he said, ‘and I felt as if the house had lost its roof. He was playing golf at Muirfield, on a Sunday in February: a bitterly cold day, and perhaps he had done himself too well at lunch. He collapsed halfway through the second round. But I got it into my head – I was only twelve –that in some mysterious way he had been “done to death” – that's how I put it – by his partner: a man called Patch, a retired Commander, Royal Navy, who was, as I thought, my mother's paramour.

‘There was, of course, no substance – no substance at all – in that notion; and till a few weeks before I hadn't known the existence of such a word, let alone its meaning. It was a school friend of mine, a rather precocious boy called Ricci – Italian by origin: his grandfather came to Scotland with a pack on his back and made a great deal of money selling ice-cream – well, anyway, Ricci knew how I disliked my mother, and when I told him she had gone to a concert with Commander Patch, whom I disliked almost as much, he had said, “I expect he's her paramour.” He explained what it meant, but if he was precocious, I was the opposite, and I don't think it meant very much – except, as I thought, that they had formed some sort of league against my father. And when he died, playing golf with Patch, the inference was obvious: to me, that is, and to Peter Ricci when I told him.

‘We had long discussions, I remember, about whether it was
our duty to revenge him, and one day we climbed to the top of Arthur's Seat and solemnly pronounced sentence of death on both my mother and her supposed paramour. We went so far as to concoct a plan to murder her —'

‘But you didn't —'

‘No,' he said. ‘At that age, your plans never come to anything. What did happen, however, was that we quarrelled more often, and more violently, and a dreadful evening came when I fell into a passion of tears – why, I can't remember – and told her that I had never had a happy day since my father died.

‘And then she told me the truth. Whether it was deliberate, intentional cruelty, or whether I had tormented her past endurance – tormented her till she lost all self-control, and against her will blurted out what she had never meant to say – I don't know. But the cruelty of it was beyond doubt, and what I suffered – no, it's not possible to describe, and I don't want to remember.'

Polly Newton's eyes were full of tears, and when Balintore got up and stooped to kiss her, her lips met his in quick response.

‘That's the beginning of the story,' he said, ‘and no one but you has ever heard it.'

‘I'll never forget it,' she said, and the tears ran down her cheeks.

He kissed her again, and asked, ‘Is it a story that everyone should hear, or would it be better to burn those pages – I burnt a good many last night – and give up the whole idea?'

‘I want to hear more,' she said.

‘Come into the sitting-room, we'll be more comfortable there. And forget your notebook. I've talked enough about myself, I want to listen to you.'

But in the sitting-room he ignored her. He went to the window, and for a long time stood looking out at the Rope Walk; where there was nothing to see.

Deeply moved by his recital, he was not conscious of having lied to her when he said that she was the only person ever to have heard the melancholy story. He had told it to his school-friend Peter Ricci, to a companion of his adventure in Spain, to his first wife, to Guy Palladis, and possibly others; but in
the emotion wakened by yet another revelation he had forgotten those earlier occasions, and to give confession its proper effect – to make it as memorable as it deserved to be – it had seemed necessary to describe it as unique. He had had no wish to deceive her; he had wanted only to ensure that she listened with a sense of privilege.

In that he had been successful. She too had been deeply moved. He turned and saw her sitting, upright in a large chair, with the look of one who contemplated, far off, a sorrow that she shared.

It would be a mistake, he decided, to take advantage of her sympathy. There was no need for hurry – and it would spoil the picture. He lighted a cigarette and went to a chair on the other side of the fireplace.

‘Don't brood,' he said. ‘It happened a long time ago, and I didn't tell you the story to make you unhappy.'

‘My own life hasn't been so very different,' she said; and was too busy with her thoughts to see Balintore's look of resentment at this unexpected intrusion into the loneliness of his misfortune. He listened to her with some impatience.

‘Like you,' she said, ‘I never saw my father. He was a sergeant in the 8th Hussars, and went out to the Western Desert before I was born. He was killed at a place called the Trigh Capuzzo on the 19th of November 1941.'

‘You knew who your father was,' said Balintore, ‘and that's a consolation denied to me.'

‘But I never saw him,' she repeated, ‘and when my mother married again, I got a step-father I couldn't stand.'

‘Did he ill-treat you?'

Oh, no! He's never ill-treated anyone in his life. He wouldn't dare.'

‘My poor child!' said Balintore, making an effort to show sympathy. ‘We had no luck to begin with – neither of us – but luck may change —'

‘I don't complain of bad luck! I've been lucky in lots of ways. I've been to New York —'

‘Yes, tell me about New York. What did you do there?'

Her expression changed, and her eyes lighted as if with the glow of radiant memories.

‘What didn't I do?' she said, and laughed happily. ‘Oh, I could talk for ever about New York!'

She grew animated, and did indeed talk for nearly half an hour, much to Balintore's surprise; for her letters had given no sign of any talent for observation. But now it became evident that as everything had been new to her, so she had looked at everything with a childish fascination that still showed through the enthusiasm of her
reportage
. She had a remarkable memory. She could describe minutely the appearance of a room, or what she had seen in a shop; and repeat with lively exactitude a cab-driver's talk, dialogue from a play, or Mrs Evershrub's repeated warnings against the dangers that surrounded a young girl in the turbulent great city.