Enduring Love (16 page)

So when I turned in my chair to meet the stare of the Logan children, I saw myself configured in their eyes—yet one more dull stranger in the procession lately filing through their home, a large man in a creased blue linen suit, the coin of baldness on his crown visible from where they stood. His purpose here would be unintelligible, beyond consideration. Above all, he was yet another man who was not their father. The girl was about ten, and the boy must have been two years younger. Standing behind them, just out of the room, was the nanny, a cheerful-looking young woman in a track suit. The children looked at me and I returned their stare while their mother uttered her death threat. They both wore jeans, trainers, and sweaters with Disney motifs. There was an appealing scruffiness about them, and they didn’t look crushed to me.

The boy did not take his eyes off me as he said, “It’s completely wrong to kill people.” His sister smiled tolerantly, and since Jean Logan was now giving instructions to the nanny, I said to the boy, “It’s just a way of speaking. It’s what you say when you really don’t like someone.”

“If it’s wrong to do it,” the boy said, “it’s wrong to say you’re going to do it.”

I said, “Have you ever heard someone say, ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’?”

He gave this honest consideration. “I’ve said that,” he admitted.

“Isn’t it wrong to eat horses?”

“It’s wrong here,” the girl said. “But it isn’t wrong in France. They eat them all the time.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But if something’s wrong, I don’t see why crossing the Channel should make it right.”

Still standing shoulder to shoulder, the children came closer. After what had gone before, a discussion of moral relativism was pure relief.

The girl said, “People in different countries have different ideas. In China it’s polite to burp after a meal.”

“It’s true,” I said. “When I was in Morocco I was told that I should never pat children on the head.”

“I hate people who do that,” the girl said, and her brother spoke over her excitedly. “My dad saw them cut off a goat’s head in India.”

“And they were
priests
,” the girl added. The mention of the father brought no outward change, no remorse. He was still a living presence.

“So,” I said. “Aren’t there any rules the whole world can agree on?”

The boy was triumphant. “Killing people.”

I looked at the girl and she nodded, and at the sound of the door closing we all turned to look at their mother, who had just finished with the nanny.

“This is Rachael and Leo. And this is Mr.—”

“Joe,” I said.

Leo went and sat on his mother’s lap. She locked her hands firmly
around his waist. Rachael crossed to the window and stared out at the garden. “That tent,” she said quietly to herself.

“I have to find her.” Jean Logan resumed our conversation in a businesslike way. “If you didn’t see her, that’s too bad. But perhaps you can still help me. The police are completely useless. One of the others might have seen something. I can’t speak to them myself, but if you wouldn’t mind …”

“What are you talking about, Mummy?” Rachael asked from the window. I caught the anxious, protective tone of her hesitant question, and with it a glimpse of her ordeal. There must have been scenes whose repetition the girl dreaded and had to head off.

“Nothing, darling. Nothing that concerns you.”

I could not think of a way of refusing, much as I wanted to. Was my life to be entirely subordinate to other people’s obsessions?

“I’ve got the phone numbers of the farm people,” she said. “That young man’s number won’t be difficult to find. I’ve got his address. His name is Parry. Three phone calls, that’s all I’m asking.”

It was too complicated to refuse. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” Even as I agreed, I realized that I would be in a position to censor the information and perhaps save the family some misery. Wouldn’t Rachael and Leo agree, there were times when it was right to lie?

The boy slid from his mother’s lap and went over to his sister. Jean Logan, having smiled her thanks, straightened her skirt with a smoothing movement of her palms, a gesture that suggested she was ready now for me to leave. “I’ll write the phone numbers down for you.”

I nodded and said, “Look, Mrs. Logan. Your husband was a very determined and courageous man. You mustn’t lose sight of that.” Rachael and Leo were fooling about by the window, and I was obliged to raise my voice. “He was determined to save that boy, and he hung on to the end. The power lines were a real danger. The kid
could easily have died. Your husband just wouldn’t let go of that rope, and he put the rest of us to shame.”

“The rest of you are alive,” she said, and then paused and frowned as Leo squealed from behind the long curtains that framed the french windows. His sister was tickling him through the fabric. Their mother seemed about to tell them to pipe down, but she changed her mind. Like me, she had to speak louder. “Don’t think this isn’t going round in my mind all the time. John was a mountaineer and a good sailor. But he was also a doctor. He was on rescue teams, and he was a very, very cautious man.” On each
very
she clenched her fist tighter. “He never took stupid chances. They used to make fun of him on the climbs because he was always weighing up the possibilities of a change in weather, or loose rock or hazards that no one else would think about. He was the group’s pessimist. Some people even thought he was timid. But he didn’t care. He never took unnecessary risks. As soon as Rachael was born he gave up serious climbing. And that’s why this story doesn’t make sense.” She half turned to speak to the children, who were making even more noise now, but she was intent on finishing what she had to tell me, and she had more privacy behind their din. She turned back. “This business of holding on to the rope … You see, I’ve thought about it, and I know what killed him.”

At last we were at the center of the story. I was about to be accused, and I had to interrupt her. I wanted my own account in first. There came to me, as encouragement, an image of something, someone, dropping away in the instant before I let go. But I also knew the old cautionary tag from my distant laboratory days: believing is seeing. “Mrs. Logan,” I said, “you might have heard something from one of the others, I don’t know. But I can honestly say—”

She was shaking her head as I spoke. “No, no. You’ve got to listen to me. You were there, but I know more about this than you.

There was another side to John, you see. He always wanted to be the best, but he was no longer the all-round athlete he once was. He was forty-two. It hurt. He couldn’t accept it. And when men start to feel like that … I knew nothing about this woman. I suspected nothing, it didn’t occur to me, I don’t even know if she was the first, but I know this. She was watching him, and he knew she was watching, and he had to show her, he had to prove himself to her. He had to run right into the middle of the scene, he had to be the first to take the rope and the last to let go, instead of doing what he usually would—hanging back and seeing what was best. That’s what he would have done without her, and it’s pathetic. He was showing off to a girl, Mr. Rose, and we’re all suffering for it now.”

This was a theory, a narrative that only grief, the dementia of pain, could devise. “But you can’t know this,” I protested. “It’s so particular, so elaborate. It’s just a hypothesis. You can’t let yourself believe in it.”

She gave me a pitying look before turning to the children. “This really is too much noise. We can’t hear ourselves speak.” Then she stood impatiently. Leo had wound himself up in the curtain until only his feet were visible. Rachael had been prancing around him, chanting something and poking him and eliciting in return a chanted response. Now she stood back as her mother unwound the boy. Jean Logan’s tone was hardly scolding, more a gentle reminder. “You’ll bring the curtain rail down again. I told you yesterday, and you promised me.”

Leo emerged flushed and happy. He caught his sister’s eye and she began to giggle. Then he remembered me and squared up to his mother for my benefit. “But this is our palace and I’m the king and she’s the queen and I only come out when she gives the signal.”

There was more from Leo, and the mildest of censure from his mother, but I heard none of it. It was as though delicate lacework were repairing its own torn fabric by the power of its intricacy alone.

It all came at once, and it seemed impossible that I could have forgotten. The palace was Buckingham Palace, the king was King George the Fifth, the woman outside the palace was French, and the time was shortly after the Great War. She had traveled to England on a number of occasions and wanted nothing more than to stand outside the palace gates in the hope of catching sight of the king, with whom she was in love. She had never met him and never would, but her every waking thought was of him.

I was on my feet and Rachael was saying something to me, which I did not hear, but I nodded all the same.

This woman was convinced that all of London society was talking of her affair with the king and that he was deeply perturbed. On one visit, when she could not find a hotel room, she felt the king had used his influence to prevent her from staying in London. The one thing she knew for certain was that the king loved her. She loved him in return, but she resented him bitterly. He turned her away, and yet he never stopped giving her hope. He sent her signals that she alone could read, and he let her know that however inconvenient it was, however embarrassing and inappropriate, he loved her and always would. He used the curtains in the windows of Buckingham Palace to communicate with her. She lived her life in the prison gloom of this delusion. Her forlorn and embittered love was identified as a syndrome by the French psychiatrist who treated her, and who gave his name to her morbid passion. De Clerambault.

When Jean Logan saw me stand up, she assumed I was about to leave. She had gone over to a desk and was scrawling names and numbers down.

The children approached again and Rachael said, “I’ve thought of another one.”

“Really?” It was difficult to concentrate on her.

“Our teacher said that in most of the world they don’t have
hankies and it’s okay to blow your nose like this.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb, with the other fingers lifted clear of the nostrils, and blew a raspberry at me. Her brother yelped in glee. I took the folded piece of paper from Jean Logan, and together we left the room and went down the brown hall to the front door. Even before we reached it, I was back with de Clerambault. De Clerambault’s syndrome. The name was like a fanfare, a clear trumpet sound recalling me to my own obsessions. There was research to follow through now, and I knew exactly where to start. A syndrome was a framework of prediction, and it offered a kind of comfort. I was almost happy as she opened the front door for me and the four of us crowded out onto the brick path to say our goodbyes. It was as if I had at last been offered that research post with my old professor.

Jean Logan thanked me for coming, and I told her I would phone as soon as I had made the calls. Now that I was leaving, the children hung back. I was a stranger again. I pinched my nose and made a politer version of Rachael’s sound. They indulged me with forced smiles. I made them shake my hand. I couldn’t help feeling as I went up the path that my leaving would return them to their father’s absence. The family was grouped by the front door, the mother’s hands resting on her children’s shoulders. When I reached my car and unlocked the door, I turned to call out one last goodbye, but all three had gone back inside the house.

On the
way home I turned south off the motorway where the Chilterns rise and drove to the field. I parked exactly where Logan had, with the car banked on the grass verge. Standing by the passenger door, she would have had a clear view of the whole drama, from the balloon and its basket dragging across the field to the struggle with the ropes and the fall. She wouldn’t have been able to see where he landed. I imagined her, pretty, in her early twenties, frantic in distress, running back up the road to the nearest village. Or she might have gone the other way, down the hill toward Watlington. I stood there in her place and daydreamed of the secret phone calls or notes that might have preceded their picnic. Perhaps they were in love. Did he suffer tortures of guilt and indecision, the honorable family man? And what violent transformation for her, from the anticipated idyll with the man she adored to the nightmare, the moment round which the rest of her life would pivot. Even in her terror she would have remembered to snatch her things from the car—her coat and bag, perhaps, but not the picnic and her scarf—and she would have started
running. It made sense to me that she did not come forward. She stayed at home and read the newspapers and lay whimpering on her bed.

With no particular aim, I set off across the field. Everything looked different. In less than two weeks the hedgerows and surrounding trees had thickened with the first spring growth, and the grass underfoot gave a hint of the extravagance to come. As though walking through a police reconstruction, I picked up the path Clarissa and I had taken and followed it to the patch where we had sheltered from the wind. It seemed like a half-remembered place from childhood. We were so happy in our reunion, so easy with each other, and now I could not quite imagine a route back into that innocence.

From here I walked slowly into the center of the field, along the direction of my sprint, to the point where our fates converged, and then along the route the wind had driven us, right to the edge of the escarpment. There, traversing the field, was the footpath that brought Parry into my life. Back there, where my car was now, was where Logan had stopped. This was where we stood and watched him fall from the sky; it was also where Parry caught my glance and became stricken with a love whose morbidity I was now impatient to research.

These were my stations of the cross. I went down the hill, into the field, and toward the next place. The sheep were gone, and the minor road beyond the hedge was closer than I remembered. I looked for an indentation in the ground, but there was only the beginning of a nettle patch that extended almost to the gate the policemen had climbed. This was where Parry had wanted to pray, and it was from here that I had walked away. I walked away now, trying to imagine how he could have read rejection in my posture.