Goodbye Again (23 page)
Authors: Joseph Hone
‘You wouldn’t need me in the way you need me now, as a sitter. You could do it from memory.’
‘Yes, I know, but the painting won’t take long, a day or two more, and I can fill in the rest from memory.’
I saw now how my position was the reverse of Penelope’s, unravelling her weaving at night to keep her suitors at bay. I could only keep Elsa here in the barn as long as I was painting her. I hadn’t much time to set her to rights.
I said, trying to lighten things, ‘I’d call the book
The Two Musketeers.
’
‘No. Only one musketeer.’
‘Oh, no. You were a musketeer as well. That headscarf woman – when you bashed her with that Roman broadsword in the museum: completely musketeerish.’
‘I wasn’t swashbuckling though. I was running away all the time, you know that.’
‘No. You did some swashbuckling, too. And you didn’t run away in the end.’
‘I did. I have.’
We were on dangerous ground. ‘No you didn’t, you haven’t,’ I said emphatically.
‘You’re a tough, true, marvellously attractive good woman. I’ll tell you what,’ I went on quickly, ‘When I go to the hospital to get the wound dressed, we could go on afterwards – the Welsh National Opera are doing
Un Ballo in Maschera.’
‘Yes, all right. Of course, you are an opera fan.’
‘Oh, yes. Verdi especially. I’d love to paint like Verdi: that lavish musical colour, extremes of mood, the body’s sex and death – but the life force, the need to win! He gets it all together, every damned thing on heaven and earth. No footling around, everyone goes for bust. Honesty of emotion. Opera, like sex, is as salvation. All the voices in the world are there.’
‘The need to win?’
‘Yes, to spite death and win against all the odds. Look at Ricardo, in
Ballo
, in the graveyard scene when he spits death in the face.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, like you. You’ve done quite a bit of going for bust and spitting death in the face these last six weeks.’
‘Only because I had to.’
‘No, it’s you. You’re quieter now. But the life force, going for it against all the odds, spitting at death – that’s the real you.’
She seemed to hold this against me. I changed my brush and the paint. I was doing her feet, always difficult, like hands, but I wanted to be sure of the right colour first. Peachy white? Something in that direction. I mixed the paints, tried it out first on an old canvas on the table beside me.
She said, ‘If that wasn’t the real you you’d not have saved our lives. Several times. Of course you could have had us killed just as often.’
She seemed to hold this against me, too.
That afternoon we drove to the Cotswold Wildlife Park and looked at the animals, and had cream teas in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe in Burford, and she bought me a Barbour waterproof jacket in one of the trendy shops afterwards. ‘For the winter,’ she said. ‘It rains all winter in the Cotswolds, doesn’t it? So you’ll need something really good for your winter walks.’
I didn’t want to be reminded of the coming winter, at least not if I was to spend it alone in the barn, and she seemed to be hinting this would be the case. But I held my tongue, except to say, ‘Why didn’t you get one as well?’
She said, ‘I wouldn’t need it in New York.’
Next morning I resumed painting again, but found myself working almost by rote now, without enthusiasm. Oh, the painting was all right: the body was good, the pose, the background. But the face – there was nothing there. And it’s the face that confirms the body in a nude painting. Elsa’s face gave nothing to her body. It was just a body, flesh, not attached to her mind.
We went to the hospital in Oxford the next afternoon. The wound was healing well. Afterwards Elsa went into a travel agent to book a flight to New York. I thought of staying outside, and so not knowing whether she was booking a single or a return, but I couldn’t resist going in with her, hovering, and I heard her say quite clearly to the agent, ‘An open return, please.’
‘That’s twice the price,’ I said lightly, back in the street.
‘I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back. And I have money now. The Killiney house is worth a million or more, I’m sure.’
Since money was no object, had she had made a neat move in buying an open return just to reassure me? She might return. She might not. She hadn’t reassured me at all. I tried not to show my worries and we went to the covered market where she bought provisions for the meal she’d promised to cook for us before she left. Then she suggested we have an early supper at the Randolph Hotel.
I said ‘It’s rather pricey.’
She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s a treat.’
We had smoked salmon and a half-bottle of champagne.
She had bought the best seats at the opera. It was well done, vibrant, passionate, tragic. I forgot my own problems until the graveyard scene, Ricardo spitting at death, when I remembered there were real deaths in the midst of life.
The next evening she cooked her promised meal, a Georgian mountain recipe: strips of venison marinated in dry white wine, a touch of crushed garlic, lemon and wild honey, black pepper but no salt, all sealed quickly in a sizzling pan of extra virgin, then into a casserole with sun-dried tomatoes, shallots and red peppers, cooked slowly in a casserole for an hour. A bottle of Rioja Reserva.
We ate outside, on a rough table, behind the barn. It was still warm. I said easily, halfway through the meal, ‘Well, there you are, off tomorrow. I’d drive you to the airport, but the arm …’
‘No, of course not. I’ll take a taxi to the train.’
‘But I’ll come with you on the train.’
‘No, there’s no need.’
‘Of course there’s need. I’m not doing anything else. And for God’s sake, Elsa, why wouldn’t I come with you?’
‘I don’t know. I mean …’
‘Elsa, I love you. We love each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said in a tone that I couldn’t identify as being one of confirmation, regret or falsehood.
‘So there’ll be – some kind of future.’
‘Yes. There’s always some kind of future,’ she said, and this seemed as good answer as I was going to get, so I left it at that, apart from repeating that of course I’d come to the airport with her.
‘It’s not that I wouldn’t want that, just that I’m bad at goodbyes, airports, trains. Really. See me off in a taxi here. Please. I promise you …’ She stopped.
‘What?’
‘Of course I’ll come back, when I’ve settled things in New York. I’ve got an open return ticket to come back to England. You saw me buy it.’
‘We’ll keep in touch in any case, won’t we?’
‘Of course we will,’ she said, and again I heard the placatory tone in her voice. No certainty.
Twilight closed over the great beech tree by the privy, and pinprick stars came out in the clear velvet sky, and now there was a chill in the air.
I lit the fire when we got in, and later we went to bed, naked on the sheet, no need of anything over us in the heat, and seeing her limbs move – red and yellow and ochre in the dancing shadows of the fire – we made love, she made love, with such abandon, such vehement pleasure, as if there was no tomorrow. So that afterwards I thought happily we cannot but be together, in all our tomorrows.
Almost as soon as Elsa left in the taxi early next morning, driving along the track between the flax stubble and past Katie’s tree, I wanted to follow her in the car. I wanted to follow her to the airport, fly with her to New York – anything to be with her. I would have done that if I could have driven, or had any money. As it was I only had a few hundred pounds she’d given me from her AmEx card to tide me over until I came into my own money with Harry. Still, I’d call her that night from the Phillips’ house, to see that she’d got home safely.
I spent the day on tenterhooks, and up at the farmhouse much later that evening I called her in New York. No reply. Only the answer phone – ‘I am not available at the moment. Please leave a message.’
I left an encouraging message. ‘Dear Elsa,’ I said. ‘I hope you got home okay. I’ll call you later. I love you.’ I stayed on with the
Phillips’ to watch the late evening news, I hadn’t followed the news since getting back.
And there it was, ten minutes in, the latest on what had clearly been a big story over the last week from Italy – the Carrara story. The discovery of a huge hoard of Nazi looted art in a cave up the mountains. There were clips of the quarry cave and of the paintings and gold chalices and jewelled reliquaries, and the identification of two of the perpetrators of this vast wartime theft, SS Major Helmuth Pfaffenroth, alias ‘Joseph Bergen’, responsible, with Dr Hans Frank, for the death of several million Polish Jews, and an Italian marble-quarry owner, Luchino Contini. Both men had gone undercover in Dublin after the war and were now dead. But it had been discovered that ‘Joseph Bergen’ had a daughter, the well-known cookbook writer Elsa Bergen – there were shots of her from the dust jacket of one of her books.
Tom Phillips had dozed off on the sofa and so saw nothing. Margery had seen it. I was about to make some explanation when she put a finger to her lips, looking over at Tom. Neither of us made any further comment.
Afterwards I went into the kitchen and called Elsa in New York again. Still just the answer phone. I drove home, the boot filled with winter logs, opened a bottle of the Rioja, and tried to distract myself with
Pinafore
. I slept very badly that night.
I drove the car, practically one-handed, to Chipping Norton the next morning, I bought three or four papers and took them to The Chequers, the pub on the market square. They were full of the Carrara find: and there was a photograph of Elsa arriving at Kennedy airport, trying to hide her frightened, horrified face with her arm, among a jostle of pushy photographers and journalists, with the caption ‘Famous Cookbook Daughter of Nazi Jew Killer Arrives Home’, and another old photograph beside it, of Pfaffenroth in his SS uniform. Shit, I thought.
‘Shit,’ I said out loud.
I left the pub, bought a phone card at the post office, and called Elsa again. The same answer-phone message. I left a message, saying I’d read the papers, that I was coming over to New York at once. I drove home. Turning into the lane by the Phillips’ farmhouse, Tom was in the yard. He flagged me down.
‘There’s been a message for you, Ben.’
I went into the kitchen. Margery handed me a piece of paper. ‘A woman phoned from New York, about half an hour ago. Asked if you’d call back.’ My heart leapt. It could have only been Elsa.
It wasn’t. It was Martha, Elsa’s old girlfriend. What could she want? I called the number, prepared to hear her admit they were lovers once more, but by the time the edgy, brittle voice answered, I knew I was about to hear the worst.
Elsa was dead. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m truly sorry. There was a note beside her in her apartment, giving my name and phone number, and yours in England. Asking whoever found her to call us. I found her.’
I barely took in the rest, but I got the gist of it. Martha, seeing the morning TV news in New York and the clips of Elsa’s arrival among the media crowd at the airport the previous day, had phoned her at once, several times, that same morning. Just the answer-phone message, each time. So she’d gone to her apartment. No answer from the buzzer. She’d called the police. Broke the door down. Elsa was lying on the kitchen floor, her sanctum; an empty bottle of pills and the two messages, to Martha and me, on the kitchen table.
‘Was there nothing else to the message?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Martha said, ‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll call you back,’ I said.
I wept.
Since I was the only person who knew what Elsa had heard about her father in Carrara, I was the only one who could have prevented her suicide. I’d seen the depression she had been slipping into, and failed her by not insisting on accompanying her back to New York.
And then again I never should have goaded her into this Nazi hunting in the first place, never have encouraged her on our trip across Europe, in search of our fathers, to Dachau, to that end in the Michelangelo Hotel. I was responsible for Elsa’s death.
I had murdered her with this drive for truth and honesty. My ‘principles’ had killed her. I’d thought it was a joint battle we were fighting, against the liars, the smug, the hypocrites, the crooks and Nazis. She and I, birds of a feather – it had seemed natural that we should fight this battle together.
But I should have seen how there were exceptions in this fight for truth and principles. In some circumstances you should throw them away. Even Elsa had told me how she would have given up her principles in return for holding Martha again.
But for Elsa to discover who her father really was, and the terrible things he’d done in the war, together with the ghoulish publicity in the media on her return to New York, had been too much for her.
Truth and principles? I’d followed mine to the end and lost Elsa by them. And when I saw Katie’s diary on the shelf where I’d left it, I picked it up to throw it on the fire. The truth, whatever Katie had hidden from me, had killed her as well, I was sure.
I didn’t throw it on the fire. Before I could, several sheets of paper fell out; they had been roughly taped in between the pages and had come adrift. I’d never seen them before. On the first was a map, drawn in what must have been her father’s hand, with writing on the top.
Here is the Glastonbury and Avebury area map I’ve made, and you can clearly see how Glastonbury Tor was the Sacred Mount Tabor, the ‘Hill of God’ and the scene of the Transfiguration, and what the other places were called by the original Britons. And I’ve put notes about it all on the back of the page.
The map showed two different place names in each case. Avebury was the ‘Egyptian Abaris’, Hackpen Hill was the ‘Mountains of Abraham’, Silbury Hill was ‘Shiloh’, Marlborough was ‘The Pyramid Mound’. And so on.
I turned the map over. On the back, in his small neat handwriting, was a continuation of earlier notes he’d sent her.
So you see, from my previous notes and our trips to the long barrows and hill forts all round here, how Britain was civilized from the earliest times, and was undoubtedly the cradle, the earth mother, of our civilization. And that the drowned island-continent of Plato’s Atlantis was not myth, but a fact – and that Atlantis was the British Isles, drowned in a catastrophic flood (Noah’s flood), but not permanently submerged, that these islands rose again after the flood to become the Happy Isles, the real Hesperides, inhabited from
the earliest Palaeolithic times by the sons of Adam, who were the Titans of classic fame, as well as being the Atlantians of Plato. So the research I’ve been doing all these years shows conclusively that the British were the original master race, the ‘onlie begetters’ as it were of our whole civilization. The master race, where you can trace their subsequent civilizing journeys all over the world, into the Middle East, which became the Holy Land of Abraham, where the Britons were one of the two lost tribes of Israel, the British Israelites, and from there elsewhere – as the Persian Aryans, for example, into India and so on. The British race, from whom all intelligent races stemmed and the others depended on. It’s a wonderful story, full of what seems myth and legend but which are in fact truths.
These myths are truths. The very roots of our being. That’s the whole point. Myth is vision, holiness, wholeness. And without these we perish. As we very nearly have in this century, where, apart from some German thinkers and leaders we’ve come to see these Nordic myth-truths as nonsense, or as evil and malignant. Whereas they are the true well-spring, the real life force. And those who see this are our real masters. As the British race once was, because they first expressed this vision, this life force.
So here at last, in this confused farrago of master-race rubbish, was the answer to the Katie mysteries. Here was the matter that had so attracted Katie to her father on his return and had taken her away from me. I read her diary now, on the page opposite where the map had been taped in.
That trip we made, picnicking at the Avebury Circle – Pa and I talked so well of the far distant origins of these circles, and the myths behind them, which we think of as fairy tales but which are truths …
I stopped. I was shaking. What I’d thought were innocent archaeological trips hadn’t been innocent. He’d been seducing her with his pre-history, master-race fantasies.
Katie had been taken in. I wouldn’t have been, which was why she had never mentioned this shared interest of theirs to me. In her next paragraph she gave her reasons for this.
One of the problems with Ben is I can’t talk to him about these things. He hasn’t an interest in the past, in myths as truths, in the wholeness and holiness to be found in legend and myth. For him it’s always the here and now. He’s so literal. ‘The touch of a woman’s body is the only true loss,’ he once said to me. He lacks the spiritual dimension, and of course he doesn’t have the archaeological and linguistic knowledge that Pa has, his skill in linking them up, sorting out the mistakes of history, setting history to rights. And I need that real heart of excitement. I feel that so much with Pa – the search for the truth and the ideal, and there isn’t a future with Ben in that way. Pa’s historical creativity appeals to me, as Ben’s painting doesn’t, in that I’m not involved, just the obsessive subject of it. And besides, Pa needs me for his work, as a helpmeet and sounding board, and Ben doesn’t. There’s nothing I can share with him in his painting. With Pa I have real involvement. I feel I’m necessary to his work, that I have some control in what he’s doing.
Indeed, I thought – control over him, as she sensed she could never have with me.
I feel all this now, since Pa has returned, the company and stimulation I have from him. Ben’s life, his love for me – it’s the body love, not me the spirit. We could never be soul mates as I am with Pa. Ben cuts corners, lacks true principles. Pa has them, and sticks to them against every criticism and setback.
Well, here it all was, the real reason why Katie had dropped me: she had found a reciprocated love with her father. Though she was right about me in one way. I was a here-and-now man, a believer in the visible. That was where I found the wholeness and holiness.
And most of all I’d found this with Katie. And to have dropped fidelity to me for the sake of a philandering madman who believed the British were the children of Adam and Atlantis – this was madness indeed. There was more in this part of his notes, mostly along the same lines – Katie setting her father’s inspired sleuthing against my limited mind.
I couldn’t read any more. Whatever the confusions in it for Katie, the message for me was clear. I’d banked everything on her, and lost. Like her father I was always one to defy reason. The big difference was that I did this with life in hand, not with crazy dreams of a British master race and myths of Atlantis. I suppose, in biblical terms that her father would no doubt have acknowledged, Katie had ‘risen to the Father’. Her suicide was her way of joining him.
But why in the living Christ, dear Katie, did you not rise with me? I’m not the grail you sought and thought you’d found with the return of your father. Better the urgent sex in fields of flax and clover than the dry bones in hill forts and long barrows. Better the naked sinner than a crazy knight in shining armour.
I opened a bottle of the Rioja Reserva.
Always take long odds on a woman, or set her on a canvas in a splash of colour – the body was the ultimate honesty. This had saved me – as Katie’s crazy confusions had condemned her, just as Elsa’s conscience, faced with the horrifying truth about her father, had killed her. They’d still be alive if they could have taken just a leaf or two out of my corner-cutting book – the book of laughter and the half-litre.
More practically, if I wasn’t to sink in the swamps of drink and muddy self-justifications, there were things to do. I had to keep occupied. I called Martha in New York the next day. She hadn’t much more to tell me, she said, only adding by way of rather sour comment here, ‘I’m sure you must know about Elsa and me already.’
‘Yes, she told me quite a bit about you,’ I said, returning the sourness in my voice.
But her next words and tones were conciliatory. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just her death … I feel somehow responsible.’
‘Maybe. But I was much more responsible. It was more finding out about her father that killed her. And you know all about that now.’
‘I’d no idea about who her father really was.’
‘I did. And I shouldn’t have driven her to finding out about him, as I did.’ And I gave her a précis about the Modi nude and about our trip through Europe. But I didn’t want to go on with it over the phone. ‘Maybe another time,’ I said to her, ‘I can tell you things in more detail.’
‘Yes. I’d like that.’
‘What about the other details with Elsa? She had no family. The funeral, her apartment, her estate – and she had this big house in Dublin.’
‘I know about the house. I can see to everything. She made me executor in her will, some time back. I’m an attorney.’
‘She told me.’
‘Do you want to come over? The funeral is at the crematorium in Brooklyn.’ She was literal, business-like, the sort of person Elsa had unhappily described to me, a woman with chilly undertones, an eye for tidiness and survival, as much in practical affairs as those of the heart.
‘I don’t think so. Maybe one ex-lover’s enough,’ I added, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice again. There was jealousy beyond death. Elsa had loved Martha better.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Her death, it’s very difficult …’
I stifled the urge to scream ‘But no! She’s not dead!’ Just as it had been with Katie, when I couldn’t believe that she had incinerated herself in the oven of the flaming car, so I couldn’t accept
Elsa’s death – that this whole life, this body that I had loved was soon to be ash in the wind.
And then I understood – that which you loved most you were going to lose twice over, as I had lost each of them, the good in one, the faults in the other. I’d loved Katie’s flaws just as much as I’d loved Elsa’s virtues. Jekyll and Hyde were the same person after all.
There was a charged silence on the phone, as if Martha and I both had a lot more to say, as indeed we had. But we didn’t. It wasn’t the moment.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ I said at last, not believing this.
‘Yes, we’ll be in touch,’ she said, in a tone that didn’t make me believe she meant it either. No doubt she was jealous of me as well.
My God, with this sort of thought starting to haunt me, I have to keep busy, I thought: make plans, see Harry in Paris. I needed a future more than ever. I knew I certainly couldn’t face another winter in the barn alone. I had enough of Elsa’s money left to get to Paris, and Harry would advance me some real cash on the strength of selling the boat. I called him at once, took an early train to London next morning and got a Eurostar standby ticket over to Paris at midday, taking the Modi nude with me.
It was crisp and sunny that afternoon rolling down the boulevards to the Marais, a day between seasons, a stillness in the weather, when a long time of heat is over and winter is no more than a hint on the calendar. Bright with a fine sharpness, a little crackle in the air of an Indian summer.
Harry opened the door, taking me into the large salon looking over the neat little square.
‘Well, home is the hero,’ he said, laconic as ever. ‘From the wars, I see,’ he added, looking at my arm, still in a sling. I could now use it to eat with, at least. He noticed the bubble-wrapped picture under my arm. ‘One of yours – or Modi’s?’ he asked.
‘His,’ I said.
‘Good. You managed to hold onto it through your adventures.’ He gestured to a pile of newspapers on the sofa. ‘It’s been everywhere, your Carrara story.’
‘Yes. More’s the pity.’
‘What d’ya mean? Wasn’t that what you wanted? To prove your father a crook? And you nailed his partner, too – that guy Pfaffenroth, the real war criminal.’
‘Yes, I nailed them all.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Pfaffenroth turned out to be the father of the girl I was with, who looked so like Katie – Elsa Bergen. When she found out who her father really was she killed herself. Didn’t you read that in the papers, too?’
‘Yes. But I didn’t think … I never met her. I didn’t associate her with the girl who was with you here, when you came to see me that morning. Christ, I’m sorry.’
‘You were right. I shouldn’t have turned over old stones.’
I rolled a cigarette. He said, ‘Sit down, Ben, have some coffee, or a vodka, and start from the beginning.’
