Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart (37 page)

20

Arthur grew up against a background of classical music. I'd put a record-player in his nursery and from the very start kept it softly on the go, or as much as was feasible—at least it had an auto-changer. But oh, I thought, for a tape deck complete with auto-reverse or an eight-track cartridge player! Or what about, just possibly, an endless loop? Anyhow, I was doing my best to be inventive in that region, and, more practically, to inspire Johnny to be inventive in it, too. At all events Arthur, when awake, was seldom without good music for any appreciable length of time; and even when he was asleep wouldn't some part of his brain, or soul, still be receptive to it? Both the girls had been breastfed and at first I felt disappointed that on this occasion Geneviève had dried up, but in one respect I came to look upon it as a blessing: that I myself could spend time with him during the night, either for one feed or for two, and thus provide not only more music but poetry as well—including passages from Shakespeare and Chaucer—while my son sucked, pausingly, upon his gently sloshing Cow & Gate. Under this general heading of poetry there also figured occasional readings from the King James Bible. Both Testaments.

All right, you may laugh. I admit that on one level it was ludicrous, the idea of a month-old baby being subjected to Middle English. But on the other hand…what harm? There weren't going to be any end-of-term tests, I would fight against unacceptable pressures being imposed by a too-demanding father. At the worst, perhaps, he would get a bit muddled. But if he started speaking in Tennysonian verse or soaring biblical cadences while clamouring for his potty, or for Marmite on his bread, all this could be sorted out when it happened. Surely it was worth an element of risk?

Geneviève didn't know at first about our son's early exposure to literature, for although she wasn't disapproving of the music—well, not exactly—there was one aspect of it that worried her.

“Why now? It may be good or it may be…
inutile
, but why didn't you do any of this for Anne or Jacqueline?” Hairbrush poised, she watched me in the mirror.

“I should have done. I didn't think.”

I should have done. I hadn't thought.

“Then why didn't you think? Experiments are fine but—do the girls mean less to you than Arthur?”

“No, of course not.” Nor did they—considered purely as persons and personalities. “Surely you know how much I love them. Have I ever left you in any doubt of that?”

“Not until now.”

“Sweetheart, I can only say I had my studies to contend with when the girls were Arthur's age—so much was going on—everything, everything, was new to us…” I spread my hands and hoped for understanding. We both watched our reflections.

“Then it isn't just because they were girls but now you have the boy you always wanted? Oh, I remember how everything had to be so completely right from the very first minute you knew I was pregnant. Even the name…”

“And didn't everything have to be so completely right from the minute I knew you were pregnant with Anne, and then with Jacqueline? Didn't it?”

“Yes, but not quite in the same way. And you were never so concerned before with—oh, I don't know—with whether they were warm enough…or too quiet…or lying in the right position… You never once mentioned
ce cauchemar effroyable
, this thing you call the cot death.”

I should plainly have foreseen all this.

“So I ask again. It isn't because, deep down, you think that girls are somehow less important than boys?”

“Darling, I swear it.”

“You're sure?”

“I promise you I couldn't be more sure.” It was at times like this that I got glimpses of the woman I had left at an earlier dressing table, a mere mile from the dressing table at which she now sat. Such glimpses were a little frightening but in some way reassuring. Ginette was integral to Geneviève; Geneviève was integral to Ginette. There was no fear that, over the years, the two would grow apart.

She allowed herself to be convinced. And in the circumstances I decided not to pick her up on that statement she had made: ‘the boy you always wanted'. It was a complete misreading of the case. If we had to speak in those terms at all, then Philip was the boy I'd always wanted. It was partly for Philip—very much for Philip—that I had gone through all of this in the first place. Although I was now indescribably happy to have gone through all of this in the first place, there was a strong chance that if it hadn't been for Philip, Arthur wouldn't even be here. Nor would Anne. Nor Jacqueline.

The situation developed one night when Geneviève, happening to wake and go out to the loo whilst I was feeding Arthur, heard me reciting to him.

“‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I

In a cowslip's bell I lie…'”

“Oh, darling!” she remonstrated. “What are you doing to him? My poor little pet!
The Tempest
? He's barely five months old!”

Irrelevantly, I was impressed she knew it was
The Tempest
. But then I remembered we'd seen a production of it at the Theatre Royal only the previous year. I made a stupid joke.

“You're lucky it wasn't
Titus Andronicus
.”

She looked at me angrily. “
Assez de faux-fuyants
!” She came and gathered up our bright little son in his Babygro suit and took the bottle from me and the wooden chair. Arthur looked surprised but interested. Geneviève kissed him under his chin and made him chuckle. “
Ah, ton coquin papa! Que fait-il? Mon petit chou, mon pauvre petit! Where the bee sucks, there suck I
.
Ma foi
!”

Arthur renewed his chuckle.

I'd felt tempted to say I'd been entertaining myself rather than him. But the pause had given me time to realize I mustn't.

“You go back to bed,” she ordered, in a harsh tone. I was clearly in disgrace; Arthur hadn't saved me. “If you must feed him poetry, what's wrong with Jack and Jill or Baa-Baa Black Sheep?” What indeed? In my zeal I had wholly overlooked the nursery rhymes, perhaps on the assumption that he'd soon enough get to know those anyway. And as Geneviève now pointed out: I had told them often enough to his sisters. “And why must it always be Mozart or Vivaldi or Purcell? Why not Piaf or Trenet or Aznavour? And turn off that machine please,
whoever
it is.
I
am going to sing my son a lullaby…in French. I am going to have a whole long conversation with him, about silly, unimportant things…in French. So there!”

I laughed and put my arms about her shoulders and kissed the crown of her head. “Oh, I'm all in favour of his learning French! You know I am.”

Then I went back to bed grinning, having given Arthur, too, a kiss on the crown of his head. But since I was no longer sleepy I read a short story and waited for Geneviève's return. I didn't want the day, or at least the dawn, to go down on her resentment.

Yet, following this confrontation, there was something which now nagged at me. It wasn't that I thought Geneviève capable of sabotage—she wasn't at all, not on a conscious level—but she was a person who very much went to extremes, and I could imagine her thinking that if Arthur had to be force-fed on music, he also needed to know about Gershwin and Kern and
Oklahoma
! Again, I had no real quarrel with this, only believed he didn't require a
grounding
in it. So I took to popping home a little more often than I had, and began to worry that my parish duties might suffer on account of it. For the first time it struck me that if I wanted to take a more active part in my son's upbringing—in my children's upbringing—I might have to think about giving up church work and looking for some sort of evening job instead. Or night position. On a temporary basis anyhow.

About five months later there arose a further contretemps.

I had offered to take the girls to the local swimming pool—Geneviève herself didn't care for swimming—and I'd automatically assumed I should also be taking Arthur.

“What! Are you crazy? What would you do with him?”

“How do you mean?”

“Clearly you can't have him in the water with you.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because he's still a baby. Because he can't even walk. Or perhaps you hadn't noticed?”

“It's catching on in America that it's easier for babies to learn to swim before they can walk.”

“Ethan, I don't care what is catching on in America. You are not taking Arthur to the swimming pool.”

“I only wanted him to get used to the feel of the water. To realize how much
fun
it is.”

“He can do that in his bath, thank you.”

“I wasn't going to say, ‘Go on, swim three lengths.'”

“I wouldn't put it past you. With that poor little baby I wouldn't put anything past you.”

“Oh, darling!”

“Sometimes I think you're not safe to leave him with.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“And what about your daughters? You have daughters, you know. Little girls of three and four years old! And a lot of fun
they
're going to have with their daddy if he's spending every minute looking after the baby he's carrying! A fat lot of help with
their
swimming they're going to get!”

“Dammit, they've got water-wings. I could easily give them a hand under the chin.
Just
as easily as if I wasn't holding Arthur.”

“Oh, treats! What little girl ever wants to splash and race and ride upon the shoulders? But you can still do all that, of course, holding Arthur? Or have you perhaps left him by this time—how do you put it—to sink or swim? Sent him off on his fifty or sixty lengths?”

“All right, let's forget it. It obviously wasn't a good idea. I'm sorry.”

“And suppose that one of the girls got into difficulties? What then? You make me sound unreasonable but I wouldn't have a moment's peace. I didn't raise my children to let them all be drowned.” She was beginning to cry. “Not by you nor anyone.”

I slammed out of the room. It was the first time I'd really lost my temper with her. I was angrier than I'd been in years.

It was the angriest I'd been since before I met Zack…originally met Zack.

But, of course, we were fairly soon reconciled and I took Anne and Jacqueline to the pool and it was fine—Geneviève was right—Arthur
would
have been in the way.

Yet our quarrel left me miserable. For many days I kept returning to it in my thoughts, wasting time and energy by wishing I'd avoided it, wishing I hadn't lost control, wishing I'd stayed to comfort her when she had cried. Such behaviour seriously dented my image of the perfect husband I was trying to be…an event possibly overdue and very necessary. The only clearly positive things which resulted from it, apart from the relief and pleasure of our making up, was that it reminded me of how careful I should always have to be, and that when a month or so later I asked to take Arthur to the pool on his own, Geneviève agreed without any fuss, even though he still couldn't walk, the lazy little brat.

At eleven months my unconcerned son may have been a lazy little brat; at almost twenty-eight his deeply concerned father was getting ever more industrious. Once Arthur was finally sleeping through, I began to get up two hours earlier every morning and go down to the kitchen, the warmest place in the house, to make myself a pot of strong black coffee and spread my books all over the table and start to study. I studied world history—the word ‘world' now figured a lot in my endeavours—world politics, world religion, world mythology, world geography. I rotated and integrated and imposed on myself no deadlines, as I had while learning French, because on all such subjects it was clearly absurd to set limits. Gradually I would try to add at least the rudiments of all the major ideas and beliefs which people had at various times held, as well as the rudiments of philosophy and psychology and astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology…well, in short I wanted to become as well-informed as it was possible for any layman to be, not for the sake of my own education but for the sake of my son's.
Yet please—please
!
—don't ever let me pontificate
. This was a prayer I now added to my many others.
I want to teach
,
but don't let it appear like teaching
. Let me be lively and stimulating and funny and relaxed. Endlessly patient. Tolerant and understanding.

Save me from solemnity.

I began my course of studies, appropriately enough, by reading about King Arthur; both the Celtic warrior
and
the creator of the Knights of the Round Table. It was strange I hadn't thought of doing this before. Right at the beginning I didn't even know which of them was spoken of as being the one who would return.

The Once and Future King.

21

“Death to the infidels!”… “Enemies of Christ!”… “Child killers!”

Oh, how they hated us. A lot of them regularly came to borrow money and I don't know how they'd ever have got on without us, but oh how they hated us, these solid citizens of York. Often they didn't pay the money back—so then we'd have to take them into court; and often too, for no reason at all, they'd spit on us in passing, or even assault us…sometimes, for a great joke, corner one of us and force him to eat pork, at other times beat us up so cruelly our blood would run between the cobblestones. Somehow those robes of ours seemed always an affront. We tried to make them look less costly and occasionally risked taking off our yellow badges. But our swarthy skins and Semitic features invariably betrayed us and so invited trouble; and there'd have been fines to pay, perhaps imprisonment, if the papal authorities had ever heard we were defying regulations. Besides, it appeared to most of us dishonourable: we aimed to wear our badges with distinction. With pride.