Past Imperfect (3 page)

'Meaning?'

'I have, as you point out, been very fortunate. I've lived well. I've travelled. And there's nothing left in my work that I still want to do, so that's something. Do you know what I've been up to?'

'Not really.'

'I built up a company in computer software. We were among the first to see the potential of the whole thing.'

'How clever of you.'

'You're right. It does sound dull, but I enjoyed it. Anyway, I've sold the business and I will not start another.'

'You don't know that.' I can't think why I said this, because of course he did know exactly that.

'I'm not complaining. I sold out to a nice, big American company and they gave me enough money to put Malawi back on its feet.'

'But that's not what you're going to do with it.'

'I don't think so, no.'

He hesitated. I was fairly sure we were approaching what they call the 'nub' of why I was here, but he didn't seem able to progress things. I thought I might as well have a shot at moving us along. 'What about your private life?' I ventured pleasantly.

He thought for a moment. 'I don't really have one. Nothing worthy of the name. The odd arrangement for my comfort, but nothing more than that for many years now. I'm not at all social.'

'You were when I knew you,' I said. I was still transfixed by the thought of the 'odd arrangement for my comfort.' Golly. I resolved to steer clear of any attempt at clarification.

There was no further need to keep things moving. Damian had got started. 'I did not like the world you took me into, as you know.' He looked at me challengingly but I had no comment to make so he continued, 'but, paradoxically, when I left it, I found I didn't care for the entertainments of my old world either. After a while I gave up "parties" altogether.'

'Did you marry?'

'Once. It didn't last very long.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be. I only married because I'd got to that age when it starts to feel odd not to have married. I was thirty-six or -seven and curious eyebrows were beginning to be raised. Of course, I was a fool. If I'd waited another five years, my friends would have started to divorce and I wouldn't have been the only freak in the circus.'

Was she anyone I knew?'

'Oh, no. I'd escaped from your crowd by then and I had no desire to return to it, I can assure you.'

'Any more than we had the smallest desire to see you,' I said. There was something relieving in this. A trace of our mutual dislike had surfaced and it felt more comfortable than the pseudo-friendship we had been playing at all evening. 'Besides, you don't know what my crowd is. You don't know anything about my life. It changed that night as much as yours. And there is more than one way of moving on from a London Season of forty years ago.'

He accepted this without querying it. 'Quite right. I apologise. But, truly, you would not have known Suzanne. When I met her she was running a fitness centre near Leatherhead.' Inwardly I agreed that it was unlikely my path had crossed with the ex-Mrs Baxter's so I was silent. He sighed wearily. 'She tried her best. I don't want to speak ill of her. But we had nothing at all to hold us together.' He paused. 'You never married in the end, did you?'

'No. I didn't. Not in the end.' The words came out more harshly than I intended but he did not seem to wonder at it. The subject was painful for me and uncomfortable for him. At least, it bloody well should have been. I decided to return to a safer place. 'What happened to your wife?'

'Oh, she married again. Rather a nice chap. He has a business selling sportsware, so I suppose they had more to build on than we did.'

'Were there any children?'

'Two boys and a girl. Though I don't know what happened to them.'

'I meant with you.'

He shook his head. 'No, there weren't.' This time his silence seemed very profound. After a moment he completed the thought. 'I can't have children,' he said. Despite the apparent finality of this statement there was something oddly unfinal in the tone of his voice, almost like that strange and unnecessary question mark that the young have imported from Australia, to finish every sentence. He continued, 'that is to say, I could not have children by the time that I married.'

He stopped, as if to allow me a moment to digest this peculiar sentence. What could he possibly mean? I assumed he had not been castrated shortly before proposing to the fitness centre manageress. Since he had introduced the topic, I didn't feel guilty in wanting to make a few enquiries, but in the event he answered before I had voiced them. 'We went to various doctors and they told me my sperm count was zero.'

Even in our disjointed, modern society, this is quite a taxing observation to counter with something meaningful. 'How disappointing,' I said.

'Yes. It was. Very
disappointing.'

Obviously I'd chosen badly. 'Couldn't they do something about it?'

'Not really. They suggested reasons as to why it might have happened, but no one thought it could be reversed. So that was that.'

'You could have tried other ways. They're so clever now.' I couldn't bring myself to be more specific.

He shook his head. 'I'd never have brought up someone else's child. Suzanne had a go at persuading me but I couldn't allow it. I just didn't see the point. Once the child isn't yours, aren't you just playing with dolls? Living dolls, maybe. But dolls.'

'A lot of people would disagree with you.'

He nodded. 'I know. Suzanne was one of them. She didn't see why she had to be barren when it wasn't her fault, which was reasonable enough. I suppose we knew we'd break up from the moment we left the surgery.' He stood to fetch himself another drink. He'd earned it.

'I see,' I said, to fill the silence, rather dreading what was coming.

Sure enough, when he spoke again his tone was more determined than ever. 'Two specialists believed it might have been the result of adult mumps.'

'I thought that was a myth, used to frighten nervous, young men.'

'It's very rare. But it can happen. It's a condition called orchitis, which affects the testicles. Usually it goes away and everything's fine, but sometimes, very occasionally, it doesn't. I didn't have mumps as a boy and I wasn't aware I'd ever caught it, but when I thought it over, I was struck down with a very sore throat a few days after I got back from Portugal, in July of nineteen seventy. I was in bed for a couple of weeks and my glands certainly swelled up, so maybe they were right.'

I shifted slightly in my chair and took another sip of my drink. My presence here was beginning to make a kind of uncomfortable sense. In a way I had invited Damian to Portugal, to join a group of friends. God knows, in the event it was more complicated than that but the excuse had been the party was short of men and our hostess had got me to ask him. With disastrous results, as it happens. So, was he now trying to blame me for being sterile? Had I been invited here to acknowledge my fault? That as much harm as he had done to me on that holiday, so had I done to him? 'I don't remember anyone being ill,' I said.

He did, apparently. 'That girlfriend of the guy who had the villa. The neurotic American with the pale hair. What was her name? Alice? Alix? She kept complaining about her throat, the whole time we were there.'

'You have wonderfully perfect recall.'

'I've had a lot of time to think.'

The image of that sun whitened villa in Estoril, banished from my conscious mind for nearly four decades, suddenly filled my mind. The hot, blond beach below the terrace, drunken dinners resonating with sex and subtext, climbing the hill to the haunted castle at Cintra, swimming in the whispering, blue waters, waiting in the great square before Lisbon Cathedral to walk past the body of Salazar . . . The whole experience sprang back into vivid, technicoloured life, one of those holidays that bridge the gap between adolescence and maturity, with all the attendant dangers of that journey, where you come home quite different from when you set out. A holiday, in fact, that changed my life. I nodded. 'Yes. Well, you would have done.'

'Of course, if that were the reason, then I could have had a child before.'

Despite his seriousness I couldn't match it. 'Even you wouldn't have had much time. We were only twenty-one. These days every girl on a housing estate may be pregnant by the time she's thirteen, but it was different then.' I smiled reassuringly, but he wasn't watching. Instead, he was busy opening a drawer in a handsome
bureau plat
beneath the Lawrence. He took out an envelope and gave it to me. It wasn't new. I could just make out the postmark. It looked like 'Chelsea. 23rd December 1990.'

'Please read it.'

I unfolded the paper gingerly. The letter was entirely typed, with neither opening greeting nor final signature written by hand. 'Dear Shit,' it began. How charming. I looked up with raised eyebrows.

'Go on.'

Dear Shit, It is almost Christmas. It is also late and I am drunk and so I have found the nerve to say that you have made my life a living lie for nineteen years. I stare at my living lie each day and all because of you. No one will ever know the truth and I will probably burn this rather than send it, but you ought to realise where your deceit and my weakness have led me. I do not quite curse you, I could not do that, but I don't forgive you, either, for the course my life has taken. I did not deserve it.

At the end, below the body of the text, the author had typed: 'A fool.'

I stared at it. 'Well, she did send it,' I said. 'I wonder if she meant to.'

'Perhaps someone else picked it up from the hall table and posted it, without her knowledge.'

This seemed highly likely to me. 'That would have given her a turn.'

'You are sure it is a "her"?'

I nodded. 'Aren't you? "My life has been a living lie." "Your deceit and my weakness." None of it sounds very butch to me. I rather like her signing it "a fool." It reminds me of the pop lyrics of our younger days. Anyway, I assume the base deceit to which she refers comes under the heading of romance. It doesn't sound like someone feeling let down over a bad investment. That would make the writer female, wouldn't it? Or has your life steered you along new and previously untried routes?'

'It would make her female.'

'There we are, then.' I smiled. 'I like the way she cannot curse you. It's quite Keatsian. Like a verse from 'Isabella, or The Pot of Basil': "She weeps alone for pleasures not to be."'

'What do you think it means?'

I wasn't clear how there could be any doubt. 'It's not very mysterious,' I said. But he waited, so I put it into words. 'It sounds as if you have made somebody pregnant.'

'Yes.'

'I assume the deceit she refers to must be some avowal of a forever kind of love, which you made in order to get her to remove her clothing.'

'You sound very harsh.'

'Do I? I don't mean to. Like all of us boys in those days, I tried it often enough myself. Her "weakness" implies you were, in this instance, successful.' But I thought over Damian's original question about the letter's meaning. Did it indicate that he thought things were not quite so straightforward? 'Why? Is there another interpretation? I suppose this woman could have been in love with you and her life since then has been a lie because she married someone else when she'd rather have been with you. Is that what you think it is?'

'No. Not really. If that's all she meant, would she be writing about it twenty years later?'

'Some people take longer than others to get over these things.'

'"I stare at my living lie each day." "No one will ever know." No one will ever know what?' He asked the question as if there could be no doubt as to the answer. Which I agreed with.

I nodded. 'As I said, you made her pregnant.'

He seemed almost reassured that there was no other possible meaning, as if he had been testing me. He nodded. 'And she had the baby.'

'Sounds like it. Though that in itself makes the whole affair something of a period piece. I wonder why she didn't get rid of it.'

At this, Damian gave his unique blend of haughty look and dismissive snort. How well I remembered it. 'I imagine abortion was against her principles. Some people do have principles.'

Now it was my turn to snort. 'I'm not prepared to take instruction from you on that score,' I said, which he let pass, as well he might. The whole thing was beginning to irritate me. Why were we making such a meal of it? 'Very well, then. She had the baby. And nobody knows that you are the father. End of story.' I stared at the envelope, so carefully preserved. 'At least, was it the end? Or was there some more? After this?'

He nodded. 'That's exactly what I thought at the time. That it was the start of some kind of . . . I don't know . . . extortion.'

'Extortion?'

'My lawyer's word. I went to see him. He took a copy and told me to wait for the next approach. He said that clearly she was building up to a demand for money and we should be ready with a plan. I was in the papers a bit in those days and I'd already had some luck. It seemed likely that she'd suddenly understood her baby's father was rich, and so now might be the moment for a killing. My offspring would have been about twenty then--'

'Nineteen,' I said. 'Her life was a living lie for nineteen years.'

He looked puzzled for a moment, then he nodded. 'Nineteen and just starting out. Cash would have come in very useful.' He looked at me. I didn't have anything to add since, like the lawyer, I thought this all made sense. 'I would have given her something.' He was quite defensive. 'I was perfectly prepared to.'

'But she didn't write again.'

'No.'

'Perhaps she died.'

'Perhaps. Although it seems rather melodramatic. Perhaps, as you say, the letter got posted by accident. Anyway, we heard nothing more and gradually the thing drifted away.'

'So why are we discussing it now?'

He did not answer me immediately. Instead, he stood up and crossed to the chimneypiece. A log had rolled forward on to the hearth and he took up the tools to rectify it, doing so with a kind of deadly intensity. 'The thing is,' he said at last, speaking into the flames but presumably addressing me, 'I want to find the child.'