Fictional Lives (12 page)

‘But do I,’ Walter asked, ‘pay you enough to live on, even with your raise?’

No, of course not, Mrs Stein said. But she did one or two other things….

‘How old was Mr Stein when he died?’ Walter asked; hoping thereby to pin the widow down on the subject of her own age.

‘He was old enough,’ Mrs Stein said.

‘What,’ Walter asked, lowering his voice, and attempting with his manner to pour balm on a wound even as he poked it, ‘did Mr Stein die of?’

‘Hatred,’ Mrs Stein said, as she broke a flower off an oleander bush, and sniffed at it.

Walter thought that would be the woman’s only comment on her husband’s decease. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t. For having given the poisonous bloom another sniff, she looked at the grave youngish man she worked for, shook her head, and murmured, ‘He could never forgive the Fools.’

That she had said Fools, and not mere fools, Walter was instantly certain; as he was certain that, though he had never spoken of his beliefs to Mrs Stein, what she meant by the word Fool was precisely what he meant by it.

For a second, sitting in that overgrown garden, with the bees buzzing about him, and the planes flying overhead, Walter was tempted to stand up, go over to the angular woman in front of him, and embrace her. He found her, suddenly,
beautiful
.
And even when that second had passed—for of course he couldn’t embrace her; not because he was afraid she would have rejected him (indeed he was strangely sure she wouldn’t have) but because to have done so might have changed the course of his life—he continued to gaze at her in gratitude and admiration, and continued to find her beautiful. Oh, he told himself, he
had
been right. She understood him. She
understood
him!

Though he didn’t, for a while thereafter, stop having the occasional brief affair, Walter did, from that day on, make sure that Anna Stein never knew about it; and he did, too, whenever he embraced some other woman, feel that he was betraying his thin, harsh housekeeper….

Why he believed that the woman wouldn’t have rejected his advances if he’d made them, was a question he was to ask himself as frequently in the following years as he had formerly wondered how she gave him warmth; and to ask himself with special urgency when, as happened every two or three months, he was tempted not only to put his arms around her, but to ask her to marry him. Yet though he was no more able to find an answer to this question than he had been to that other, and though he often tried to convince himself it was mere wishful thinking on his part, he could never rid himself of his belief. There was just something about the way Mrs Stein looked at him—scornfully, but humorously—something about the way she spoke to him—dismissively, but kindly—and above all something about the way she always called him Mr Drake—he had asked her to call him Walter several times, but she had invariably given a kind of shrug, as if he were asking the impossible of her—that made him feel that for all the difference, whatever it was, in their ages, for all the difference in their characters, and for all their lack of common interests, Mrs Stein both reciprocated his affection, and held him as essential to her life as he held her essential to his.

(They really did have nothing in common, however. He was a quiet retiring man whose considerable passion was entirely directed to his work; she was an acid, rather aggressive woman whose passion, if any, was directed to the dyeing of her hair and the sharpening of her tongue. He liked Mozart; she liked ‘light music’. He hated television; she professed to adore it; especially westerns, and soap operas. He, of course, loved nature; she—going almost as far as Miss Stein—told him, when he pointed out a laburnum in the garden one day, ‘A tree is a tree, Mr Drake,’ and scarcely glanced at the beautiful flowering thing.)

They would have made an odd couple if they had married; and Walter had difficulty in imagining them lying in bed together, going out together, or going on holiday together. (Though maybe they wouldn’t have gone on holiday together, since Mrs Stein didn’t like leaving London; or even West London.) But for all his difficulty he was convinced that they would have made, nevertheless, a happy couple. Indeed, he told himself, they would have made an ideal couple….

Their relationship continued then, more or less unchanged, for twelve years; until, that is, Walter’s great gloom settled over him. When it did, two things happened. One was that the author, who hadn’t had any sort of affair, or even sex, for the previous three years, suddenly found his physical attraction to Anna Stein becoming overwhelming—every time he saw her, or just smelled the scent of the soap she used, he wanted not only to embrace her, but to cling to her, to kiss her, and to hold her thin body against his own—and the other was that having despaired of his career, and conceded the field to fools, though he did so want his red-haired housekeeper, he also despaired of his love; and realized that the prospect of individual contentment was barred to him forever.

He made, therefore, at the instant of deciding to write his autobiography, another decision; which was that for the time
it took him to complete the book, he would see as little of Mrs Stein as possible.

He locked his study door; he left notes for her; and he ignored, when he did see her, the expression on her face; which was either one of irritation for what she considered his preciousness (‘What are you writing, Mr Drake?’ she asked mockingly one day. ‘A masterpiece?’)—or one of deep hurt. (‘It’s a bit late to decide I disturb you,’ she told him, with an attempt at mockery, another day; after she had rattled at his study door for five minutes, and demanded to be let in on the excuse that she had to clean the windows.) He wasn’t certain which that expression was; and he tried not to think about it.

The day he finished the first draft of his book—three months ago now—he also went to see his solicitor, and made a will leaving all he possessed to Mrs Stein.

Which would, in some small way, he hoped—as he got to the post-office, and handed over the neatly wrapped manuscript—make up for his having so neglected her in his Life. For his having hardly mentioned her at all—just making the occasional passing reference—and worse, for his having passed over entirely the love he had always felt for her.

Though, he told himself, as he started to walk, for the last time, back towards his house, she probably wouldn’t mind his dishonesty—his not having made her one of the facts of his life—too much. For even assuming she read the book—which was a large assumption—she would understand why he had made the omission. She had always understood him….

It was a quarter to five when he reached home; and at five o’clock he was ready for the final deed.

He had hoped, when he was younger, that before he died he would have time to destroy not only all his personal papers, his manuscripts, and his letters, but everything he owned; so that after his death the only thing that remained of him would be his life—his novels. When he had decided to kill himself, and
write the autobiography, he had—by leaving behind both his real, unrecognized life, and that other book, which people would take for his real life—modified his ideas a little. But he had modified them in no other way, and his intention of destroying all the rest of the so-called evidence of his existence was as firm as ever.

Which had led him to the conclusion that the best way to end his time on earth was to burn down the house, with himself inside it. This did of course mean that Anna Stein would inherit, in the way of real estate, only a large garden and a pile of ashes; but that, he was afraid, was just one of those things. Besides, the land by itself would be worth a fair amount.

He hoped, when thinking of the precise details of his death, that he would—as he believed was generally the case—be overcome and killed by smoke and fumes, rather than actually burned alive. But even were the worst to happen, he told himself as he went into his study, walked over to the fireplace, and deliberately kicked two large flaming logs on to the
hearth-rug
—on which he had stacked a number of manuscripts—his agony wouldn’t last very long. No more than a couple of minutes, surely….

He left his study, walked out into the wood-panelled hallway, up the staircase to the first floor, and into his bedroom. He lay down on his bed.

He tried, stretched out there, to think of his past; of his parents, of his childhood, of boat rides taken on summer lakes, of walks through the Black Forest. But either because he was too intent on catching the first whiff of smoke from downstairs, or because he had spent the whole day—not to say most of the last nine months—reviewing his past, and had had enough of it, none of the images he sought came to him; and he eventually settled first—as his eyes began to water, and he did at last catch the scent of burning wool, and paper—on a contemplation of the world that he was leaving—the world
that had not heeded a voice crying ‘There is a way’, and was controlled by Fools who were victims, and who made others victims, of their fear and egoism—and after that, on a final but longer contemplation of his feelings for Anna Stein. Why
had
he cared so much for that odd woman? Was it only because he felt that they were each of them, in their different ways, refugees from the reality they had been born into? Or was it because she, so totally different from him in background, temperament, beliefs, was, nevertheless, a kind of physical manifestation of what he felt within? He didn’t know. Possibly both these explanations were valid; or possibly neither. Possibly it was just a matter of his being sexually attracted, for whatever reason, to a thin harsh woman somewhat older than himself; or possibly, even—though this was the least pleasant of all the alternatives—that he hadn’t actually loved or wanted Mrs Stein at all, and had simply used her idealized presence as an excuse for not committing himself to anyone….

That anything, at this point, could have made him change his mind about what he was doing—or have taken his mind off Anna Stein; whose image, regardless of the explanation of his feelings for her, had the effect on him, as his eyes, throat and nose really began to hurt, of a tranquillizer, or of a gentle calming guide who supported him as he ascended his funeral pyre—never, for a moment, occurred to him. Yet, a very short time later, something did make him change his mind. Though it made him think more than ever of Mrs Stein….

He was, as he had hoped, on the point of losing consciousness. The house, with all its wood, and carpets, and draughts, had really caught. His room was full of smoke, and was very hot. He was coughing, choking. He heard a great noise of cracking and breaking, and of things exploding; and he realized that something peculiar had taken place; the flames had leapt up the stair well, and the top of the house was burning as fiercely as the ground floor. More fiercely, for the moment, than his
own floor. Maybe, he thought, as he felt himself sinking into a thick, foul cloud—a cloud that seemed to be emanating from inside him—and as he gasped for the last remaining traces of oxygen in the room, before the floor collapsed, or his bed caught fire, the ceiling would fall on him…. It was at this moment that he heard the scream. For just a second he thought he was imagining things—or that the noise had come from outside. But then, as he heard it again, he knew that he hadn’t imagined it, that it wasn’t coming from outside—and that it was the scream of Anna Stein.

He didn’t think; he didn’t have to. Mrs Stein, his beloved Mrs Stein, was in the house. She must have come for some reason, though she had told him yesterday that she wouldn’t be in today, while he was at the post-office. She must have gone up to the little room on the top floor where she did her sewing and ironing—a little room at the back of the house whose light he wouldn’t have seen when he returned. And now she was trapped up there and was, because of him, in danger of being burned to death. Which mustn’t happen; which couldn’t happen. He had wanted to kill himself, not anyone else. And above all not her. He had to save her….

He didn’t know how he got to the window. Nor how, having somehow found it in the smoke, he had the strength—having tried and failed to open it—to smash it with his bare hands, to knock out the jagged pieces of glass, and to climb onto the window ledge. He knew even less how, as he was about to jump from that window ledge, praying that he didn’t kill himself in the process, and that the big hydrangea bush beneath would break his fall, he remembered, or saw, that there was a drainpipe running down the side of the house, and he managed to grab it and climb, slide down into the garden. All he did know was that he had to get the ladder that was kept in the garden shed, that he had to put it up against the side of
the house, and that he had to save Mrs Stein. He had to save her….

He became aware, as he pulled himself out of the bush, of a number of people standing in the garden, their faces lit by the flames. Some were shouting, some pointing, and one was holding a camera. He became aware of himself shrieking hysterically, though he could hardly form the words, ‘Call the fire brigade,’ and of someone yelling back ‘We have.’ He became aware of his rushing, stumbling, staggering to the shed, of his finding other people there already pulling out the ladder, and of their all dragging it to the back of the house; on the top floor of which, leaning out of a small window, screaming and screaming and screaming—Walter hadn’t known it was possible to scream in such a way—was Anna Stein. And finally he was aware, after his helpers had extended the ladder, leant it against the house, and been pushed violently aside by him, of his being half, or more than half way up that ladder when above him Mrs Stein, her hair literally flaming now—and her dress too—leaning right out of the window, and giving one more terrible scream, seemed to stretch out a hand towards him—and fell. Or maybe she jumped….

He wasn’t sure, when he awoke in hospital next morning with his hands bandaged, what Mrs Stein had done. Nor did the spectacular photograph, that was in every daily newspaper, and on the front page of most—a photograph that showed a middle-aged man, dressed in a grey suit, standing on a ladder with blood running from his hands, reaching out in vain for a thin blazing body, its face contorted with terror, that was falling past him—make the matter any clearer. All he was sure of—and it made the precise nature of the fall unimportant—was that Anna Stein was dead; and that he had killed her.