Absolution (5 page)

Bernard and the two policemen were laughing because they were so close to being sick from the smell and then they were done and Bernard was still laughing when he closed the doors of the truck and bolted them and the policemen folded up the tarpaulin and began to hose down the forecourt, washing everything left into the drains. The smell didn’t bother the boy so much. He had smelled it before and this was just another thing that smelled and looked like things he had tried to forget. Bernard went to the bathroom and was there for a long time and when he came back he looked greyer than he usually did and his teeth were yellower and he didn’t even hit the boy, he just mumbled something and told him to get in the cab because it was time to go and they had a long trip ahead of them.

They drove out of the city across the flats and past the airport, turning east and going up and over the pass and then through the orchards where the lights on barns were orange against the dark and insects flamed in little explosions of fire when they hit the electric fencing. Bernard had forgotten to pack anything to eat and when the boy said he was hungry Bernard just said,
We’ll stop in the morning, hey
.

But even Bernard, who only ate once a day, finally got hungry and about ten he pulled off the road and they went in to a petrol station for sandwiches. Bernard ate two and the boy ate one even though he was hungry enough for two. He’d learned not to ask for anything beyond what Bernard gave him. His mother had read him the book and he knew what happened to orphans if they asked for more.

Sam

Because of Clare’s antipathy for the press and for interviews in particular, I come to these sessions knowing only the barest facts of her life. When approached, all of her family members refused to cooperate, as did her friends and former colleagues. A few people – academics with whom she’s disagreed and other writers whose work she’s savaged in reviews or essays – have clamoured to provide me with gossip: she blocked the appointment of an esteemed Renaissance scholar because the woman was both right-wing and a lesbian. Lesbianism and conservative politics were, Clare said, irreconcilable. She once berated a colleague in front of a lecture hall full of students for failing to recognize what to her seemed an obvious allusion to Petrarch in the text under discussion.

As always with successful or powerful women, there are rumours about her sex life. I dismissed most of these out of hand: she was promiscuous in her student days; she aborted several pregnancies; she frequented sex clubs in Paris during her wild years abroad; she spent a year as a kept woman in West Berlin; she had an affair with a Soviet double-agent in London, betrayed him to the Soviets or the British or the Americans or to his wife or didn’t betray him but was recruited by him and his wife to the KGB and served as an agent in the pay of Moscow from the late 1950s until 1989. There were many contradictory versions of that particular story. Even if such stories are true, they don’t interest me, if only because they have so little relevance to her body of work. They tell me nothing about what I most want to know.

‘You have one child.’

‘Two,’ she snaps.

‘But your daughter, Laura–’

‘If you are waiting for me to flesh out the scene, I will not. I cannot. As with my sister, the newspapers will give you the facts as they were reported.’

‘Several years after she allegedly died, you published
Changed to Trees
, a historical novel about a vicar in Georgian England whose young daughter drowns during a family picnic.’

‘Let me say one thing: I have never been provided with incontrovertible proof of my daughter’s death.’ Her voice is strangled. Not with sadness, I think, but with something closer to rage. I don’t know where to look or what to say.

‘So you believe she’s still alive?’

‘Believing her to be alive and feeling uncertain about whether or not she is dead are two distinct states of mind.’

‘Would you care to elaborate?’

‘No,’ she almost shouts. I hear a door open somewhere in the house: the assistant coming or going. I page through my notes to buy time and give Clare a chance to recover her composure.

‘Going back to the book, then,
Changed to Trees
. It was seen by many international critics – particularly those in America and Britain, who were possibly unaware of the context of its writing – as an odd change of direction for you, towards a more personalized narrative, after a succession of acclaimed allegorical and resolutely secular novels.’

‘You are saying it was seen as an artistic failure or a failure of imagination?’

‘I think it was misread by some as indicative of a certain creative loss of direction.’

‘It did not help that it was published so soon after the fall of the old government and the first democratic elections. My critics thought,
Aha! She has lost her natural enemy, she has nothing to criticize, so she turns to the past, and another country, and loses her way
. They all wanted me to attack or prophesy the failures of the new democracy, or else they wanted celebrations of it,
something like hopeful propaganda, encomia to the Rainbow Nation. But I do not work programmatically. I write what I am compelled to write – and by compulsion I refer to interior compulsion of course,’ she says, on a roll again, as if I had never made any reference to her daughter. I don’t know how to get us back to that territory, or what map to follow if we get there. ‘One of my many parts, call her the governor of my internal nation, says to the clerks in her government,
This is what you will write today
, and so it is. Most of writing is secretarial drudgery, hard work looking for the right word. You are correct, I don’t think the international critics knew then about Laura’s disappearance, which was not reported outside this country (it hardly made news here), and they thought I was changing tack or aiming for a broader audience. I should say as a side note that I have never been concerned with money. I would have become a lawyer like my father if I had been worried about that. Any of the critics who thought I was suffering financially need only have come to visit to know that was not the case.’

‘You are divorced.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your husband was a lawyer. Like your father.’

‘Yes. Are you interviewing him?’

‘I was unable to contact him.’

‘Which means he hasn’t returned your calls. He won’t. He is an even more intensely private person than I am.’

‘And your son?’

‘My son can speak for himself.’

‘He has also declined to be interviewed.’

‘Yes. He would. He leads an unexceptional, unimpeachable life.’

‘And his politics?’

‘He’s what we might call fractionally left of centre.’

‘And your daughter, Laura?’

‘Yes, my daughter. A radical. A revolutionary.’

‘What did she do?’

‘I thought we covered her already. She was mostly a journalist, until she became wholly invested in the armed struggle. But I won’t speak about that.’

I decide to leave Laura for the moment, hoping, I suppose, to keep Clare unsure where the questions might be going.

‘You wrote your first published novel not long after the birth of your son.’

‘Yes. It was bad.’

‘You described it once as a “deconstruction of the feminist protest novel”.’

‘It succeeds on its own terms, but I have never given permission for it to be reprinted. It was very much a first novel, even though it was the third I’d then written. The real first two are languishing in my safe and no doubt one day they will go to Texas or be published after my death, undermining every assault I’ve made on the canon. But the first published book,
Landing
, was about the culture of my childhood. I was struggling to make sense of my own past, and the country to which I had decided very consciously to return.’

‘You mentioned earlier that your books were never banned, and unlike some of your peers, who were forced into exile, you were left relatively unmolested by the old government.’

‘Relatively unmolested. What a careful construction.’

‘Would you say that’s an accurate description?’

She pauses and looks past me, and then without saying anything stands and walks out of the room. I can’t tell if this signals the end of the interview or if she’s only going to get something, or perhaps going to the bathroom. I’m hungry and thirsty, and forgot to bring anything to eat or drink today. After ten minutes she comes back with a notepad and sits down without comment.

‘Would you–?’ I begin. She raises a hand to silence me, glances down at the pad, and begins to speak.

‘Compared to five or six others I can think of, who were proscribed, whose work was banned, who could not even smuggle their manuscripts out of the country without paying huge bribes
they could ill afford, who were forced to flee and live abroad for many years, I was, as you put it, relatively unmolested. But for a writer trying to work in the conditions of repression and censorship that existed in this country under the old government, every moment, waking and sleeping, was a form of intellectual and artistic molestation. It is like the abused wife who chooses to remain with the battering husband, or believes that she cannot escape without risking her life or the lives of her children. She will cower and supplicate, plan every word and action, knowing – because she knows her batterer intimately – the effect of everything she does and says, so she can speak and do for calculated effect, or for no effect at all. She knows the reaction of her assailant better (and before) he does.’

She is paler, fiercer. Her words come in a staccato beat, half-read, half-improvised from the notes she holds before her. I look at her long ankles, gnarled sticks protruding from the cuffs of her linen slacks. She turns the page of the notebook and continues.

‘This kind of knowledge requires missteps and bad bruising, even broken limbs. Some are not so quick to adapt, or refuse to do so, and when the battering becomes too severe’–she pauses for a moment, makes a change with her pen, then continues – ‘when their lives (or in the case of these writers, the
life of their work
) is placed in mortal jeopardy, then they must flee, go to a shelter, hide themselves away, take on an assumed identity, travel under false papers. I adapted. I came to know my molester as intimately as I knew my husband – perhaps more so. I chose to adapt, to keep my children and myself alive. At least that was the rationalization on which I built my career very specifically as a writer in this country in that historic moment.’

‘Just before the old government was overthrown, you published “Black Tongue”, an essay about censorship.’

‘I think I am too tired to continue today. You will come back tomorrow at the same time?’ She looks up from the notebook, her face somewhere else.

‘Yes, if you wish.’

‘I do not wish. But I fear that now this has started, I cannot stop you.’

Marie appears from another room. She’s been listening and leads me to the front door. She opens the gate at the end of the drive, waits until I’ve reversed the car into the street, and closes it again.

When I arrive back at Greg’s, I find an email waiting for me:

Dear Dr Leroux,

Further to your previous message, I do entirely understand that my mother has, quite unwisely, given her consent for you to write her official biography. I do not know whether this was her idea or yours or her publisher’s, but that is irrelevant anyway. Why you in particular have been contracted to carry out this ill-conceived project is my real concern. Perhaps I know more of your reputation for exaggeration and character assassination than my mother or her representatives do.

I can do nothing to stop you telling the story of her life so long as she cooperates, but I counsel you in the strongest possible terms to attempt no depiction of my father, my sister or myself. I speak in an official capacity for my father, Professor William Wald, and can only assume to speak for what my sister Laura would wish. My mother is a duplicitous and self-serving woman who says whatever she thinks will make her appear in the best light. She is vain of person and vainer still of reputation. Her statements about her children – myself in particular – are not to be trusted. I hope I make myself clear.

I categorically deny you permission to publish this letter in any form or to forward it to any third party.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Wald

*

Next day. Every time that I’ve arrived at Clare’s house, Marie has said nothing to me. Today, however, she makes a sound, a grunt of irritation, and leads me down the corridor past the reception room where the first interviews were conducted to a door at the back of the house. There isn’t anything remarkable about the rooms we pass. They don’t suggest the daily haunts of a writer. Everything is antiseptically clean. It looks too uncluttered to be the home of a mind as complicated as Clare’s. I was expecting random collections of books and ornaments, stacks of newspapers and ephemera, as in the over-stuffed apartments of bohemian academics I’ve known in New York. Instead, this house looks like it came to life out of a design magazine.

Marie knocks twice. She looks at her watch. Thirty seconds pass, and then she opens the door to a bright room. Two of the walls are glass. They meet in the corner opposite the door, giving views of the garden, and the high rocky slopes rising precipitously behind the house. The other walls are lined with bookshelves, the volumes all flush in a line. Marie gestures towards a couch where I sit as she leaves, closing the door behind her. I’m tempted to examine the bookshelves, but guess that this – being left alone in what is obviously Clare’s study – is a test of my trustworthiness. A moment later one set of bookshelves swivels across the floor and Clare emerges from an adjoining room.

She looks more relaxed today, dressed in a long white smock and blue slacks, her hair loose around her face, feet bare. She sits behind her desk. Intimacy, but mediated. Without looking at me, she pages through her desk diary. After a moment she says, ‘Yes? All right.’ I turn on the voice recorder, uncap my pen, and open my notebook.