Remedy is None (7 page)

He thought of his father nursing the broken pieces of himself and being jocular. Even when he talked of himself as he did sometimes, perhaps sitting by the fire with Charlie, he would talk mainly of times far in the past, as if at some point something had happened that negated himself and he had only those things to remember from a better time. When he talked like that it was like a ritual. The same stories recurred and Charlie came to learn them, his father’s private mythology, the accidental debris of a man that he took out from time to time to look at and be nostalgic over. They were pathetic in their motley variety of the funny and the ridiculous and the gently sad. He might recite the one about Lubey’s fabled methods of obtaining drink. How he once told
a barman that for a half of whisky he could rid him of the flies which came in plagues from a rubbish-dump behind the pub. The barman, like most figures of authority in legend, must have been somewhat gullible, for he duly set up a half. Lubey downed it, jumped back, put up his dukes, and said, ‘Send the buggers out one by one’. There was the series about Alec Nine-toes, whose boyhood must have been like a sort of re-enactment of the plagues of Egypt. He was a walking monument to human vulnerability. He broke limbs as casually as matches. He once broke both legs simultaneously, jumping a wall to evade the police. He got his nickname from the time when he was looking down a pen for frogs and the grid fell and consigned a fair proportion of his big toe to the sewers. He went on from boyhood to manhood, living always between the plaster and the poultice, weaving uncertainly along his private zodiac, until one night, when he was drunk on the money from a modest pools win, he and a double-decker bus converged on King Street and it was as if all his past life had only been a rehearsal for that moment. He was the incarnation of the god of chance in the private pantheon of Charlie’s father, and the evocation of his image was always accompanied by reverential shakings of the head, as if to appease his spirit.

But the part of the past Charlie’s father returned to most frequently was properly not one story at all. It was rather a small plexus of memory, and to touch any part of it would stir a series of connected responses. It concerned Sanny, the younger brother of Charlie’s father, and it was sensitive to a variety of pressures. You might touch upon it by an incidental reference to the past or by reiterating a saying which for Charlie’s father belonged essentially to his brother’s canon or by mentioning the war. The war was the commonest point of contact. Sanny had been killed at Monte Cassino and Charlie’s father still kept the last letter he had written – a letter Charlie had seen many times himself-on thin, unlined paper fraying along the folds so that you had to open it very carefully, in pencilled words that the years since the war had all
but erased, in illegible handwriting,"/>but erased, in illegible handwriting, with wrong spellings, and with almost no punctuation, but suffused with a courageous unconcern that made it for Charlie’s father like an illuminated manuscript. Usually when he spoke of it he would rise at some point to fetch it from the drawer that held the photographs, bringing as illustrations to its text a dun photograph, scarred with handling, that showed Sanny in battledress, flanked by two anonymous comrades, all three grinning determinedly out from a frame of flags. He would hand you the letter as if it were an undiscovered manuscript of the Apocrypha. When you had read it for yourself, he would read it to you. And when he came towards the end where it said not to worry because Sanny didn’t think the German was born that could kill him, Charlie’s father always commented that that was right enough because he had been killed when the British mortar he was loading backfired and exploded in his face. There was no sense of bathos or ludicrous irony in it for him. It was simply a vaunt fulfilled.

Charlie had often enjoyed listening to his father talking about these things. Taken together, these anecdotes of his father and those Charlie had garnered for himself had formed a sort of composite picture of his father for him, had provided a fixed point from which to see him and understand him. But listening to his father as he died had pulled the pin away on that image, had somehow shattered it. Now when he drew these thoughts from his memory it was like picking bits of shrapnel from himself. Their familiar composition had been destroyed in the explosive experience of sitting in that death-room with his father. They had shifted into unfamiliar positions, no longer rested comfortably in his mind but rubbed and irritated there, barking against each thought, suppurating in his subconscious. Their former levity and ease of acceptance were the very things that made them seem alien now that their coherence had given way to a tunnel of doubt, to the dark hole blown in them by his father’s death. It was this dark void that Charlie was aware of facing him when he
thought of his father’s life. It was this void he was concerned to penetrate, to follow wherever it led.

Did his father’s suffering have no meaning? It could have no meaning if everything else was to continue exactly as it had done. Was it simply to be accepted with the reflection that this was the way things were? Did a man’s life mean so little that it was not even to be acknowledged? A man had been destroyed through no fault of his own. He had been made to believe devoutly in his own worthlessness, in his personal failure, and he had been made to believe in it simply because he could not conform to the rules which had been set for him. Because he could not succeed in terms which were not his terms at all, the only terms allowed him had been those of utter failure. If this injustice was final, if nothing could be done to right it, then nothing was meaningful, nothing was worth while. Was that truly all there was to life, circuitous conversations, the fragments of gossip chapped into a pallid fleeting flame, people dying word by word, aimlessly, casually, in communal loneliness, while the canary chirped, and more coal was needed for the fire, and someone went out to the van for the wafers? Was there nothing more dynamic than this to connect those two images that haunted Charlies’ imagination: the image of one man peeled of flesh and illusions, a skeleton of bitter hopelessness, lying in a lonely room; and the image of two people somewhere in another room living in quiet content? For he knew that for anything to matter these two images must be made to meet, must fuse to one.

For anything to be worth while, for all of their lives to have any meaning, there must be something more to connect those two images than casual trivia. Their lives were somehow insufficient. Something different was needed, something that would acknowledge what had happened and transform their trivial lives into an expression of it.

Somehow, he did not know how, it had to happen. And it had to happen through him. For where else had his father’s suffering been registered except in himself? The mourners
had come and gone, the obsequies were said and there had been no attempt to recognize the injustice his father had suffered. It might as well have been buried with him except that it had transmigrated to Charlie, now lived pent up in him as it had dwelt unrealized in his father. Only he could bring it into being.

He felt himself vaguely dangerous with its potential. As yet he could form no intention. The feeling was too vast and amorphous to admit of anything as finite as an aim.

He felt unknowingly that still desolation that each feels at some times in his life when he turns from pretending, evades the eyes of others and meets himself. It is as if you have passed through one of the strange concyclic circles of living, one of the secret doorways of the self, moss-grown with trivia so that the legend on the lintel is concealed and the chiselled enduring arch is hidden totally under the personal excrescences of your life so that you do not realize that this is a door through which all men must pass, a door made for all men to come to, mortared out of what all men are, and through which they may pass only one at a time. It may be much later before you realize that you are in a new place, have passed through many gates, and are come nearer to the final door behind which you wait with cup or knife to greet yourself. But from time to time in the press of hurrying intentions and talking friends and intermingling ambitions you glimpse yourself alone, fleshed in a private mystery, set out on a lonely road that none can travel with you. It is the same for all and different for each. In railway waiting-rooms, on late last buses, playing with their children, walking in the street, men find again the knowledge that was lost, hear news, come home to themselves alone. Commitments, demands, intentions, turn, grow, enfold, shut out the light, break suddenly and show, back-turned and deaf to your cries, the distant self, whose face you will only find at the final door. Voices of friend, brother, lover, call, here, there, near, far, this way, that, and suddenly fall silent. And you’re alone, where one footstep makes thunder in the dark.

Chapter 7

MRS WHITMORE GLIMPSED HERSELF IN THE FULL-LENGTH
mirror as she passed. She paused automatically, making the ritual gestures of arranging her hair while at the same time being careful not to disturb its lacquered elegance. She noticed a wrinkle in her stocking that was like an omen of age. Putting down the small folder she was carrying, she eased up her dress, held it with her elbows, deftly damped her fingertips, and smoothed her left leg back to nylon youth. She shimmied her dress back into order, strafed herself with a last expert glance, and was about to turn away when she suddenly stopped, staring.

Something about herself arrested her, something indefinable. It was a feeling comparable to knowing that there was something fractionally out of place in her appearance. But she knew that her make-up was immaculate, her clothes in good taste, her jewellery in keeping. Her eyes looked back at her, echoing their own question. Slowly, faced with herself, she came to face the feeling. It had been with her for some time now, prowling the edges of her consciousness, as if waiting for her to admit it. Doing her household duties, she had sensed its presence on the other side of each activity, and she had kept it at bay with preoccupation. But it haunted the small, still moments of her daily life like a patient ghost that longed to be incarnated. It constantly threatened to intrude more positively into her awareness. It was like something she had neglected to do or had mislaid, or like an unlatched window rattling quietly in the night. She might refuse to acknowledge it or to do anything about it, but she could not dismiss it.

Now, sensing its imminence again, she wavered on the verge of trying to force it into consciousness, to see if she could exorcize the ghost by giving it flesh. But she was a little frightened
of admitting it fully to herself because she knew that the substance of its shadow derived somehow from a lack in her life, and she dreaded the extent to which its acknowledgement might undermine her security. And yet, how could anything undermine her security? What was there that she lacked? She looked around the well-furnished bedroom, dwelling on the rich curtains, the plush carpet, the expensive furniture that reflected the light in polished patches. This was hers. And Peter’s. This was their house. A bungalow. Her mind inventoried its rooms smugly, emphasizing special features as if for an advertisement, refrigerator, stainless steel sink-unit, garage with room for two cars. She was very fortunate. Peter was good to her. What cause did she have to feel dissatisfied? One closed door away, Peter was sitting in the lounge, talking with Raymond and Eleanor, their guests. What was there to trouble her? Unless it was the past.

She shied away from the thought. She had got over everything by now, she told herself. She had known that there were things she would miss terribly. She had known she would have to adjust. And she had adjusted. She had lived with herself for a long time by compromise, by a tacit and gentle self-deception, the studied exclusion of certain thoughts. She knew that you could only gain certain things by forfeiting others, that, where the achievement of one desire precluded another, you had to choose, that to possess was to relinquish. That had been her lesson, a hard lesson. Surely she had learned it by now. She had thought she had. She had tried, certainly. She owed Peter such an effort. It seemed unjust that old longings she had ascetically starved to death should resurrect their hunger in her heart. After so long. After so very long.

Yet something of those longings had survived. She knew it had. She knew that what troubled her was a gap that remained from the past, a need that the years between had not fulfilled. They had been good enough years and they had brought everything she had hoped for, except their own self-sufficiency. She had hoped that her life with Peter would absorb her entirely, leave nothing of her over to be a prey to
nostalgia or regret. There had been times when nostalgia had almost incapacitated her, like a recurring illness. Sometimes she had lived through a whole week in which every day seemed to focus exclusively on the past, and it was like being in a house which had windows at the back only. But she had learned to live with this, and she could cope with it when it came. She simply administered to herself gradually increasing doses of hard work and altruism until immunity had been re-established.

But the feeling as it affected her now no longer responded to such treatment. Perhaps it was just that her complaint had reached its secondary stage. It was more tenacious than it had been, and it had assumed a subtly different nature. Before, she had recognized it simply as an intensified form of the nostalgia that becomes a part of all people as they grow older and the past begins to outweigh the future. She had thought of her own feeling as merely a highly particularized species of that general tendency, intenser for her because it was localized in one particular place and personalized into a few particular people. But now that no longer adequately accounted for it. Now it was not properly nostalgia at all. It was not a retrospective look at an irrecoverable past, something made poignant by the very fact of its being irredeemable. It was no longer content to have that pittance of time with which the present pensions off the past. It seemed determined to encroach upon the future. She had found herself lately seriously considering the possibility of making some sort of vague undefined contact with that part of her past that she had foresworn. Every time the realization of what she was doing came upon her she felt shocked at herself and determined not to do it again. What did she hope to gain from it? Even if she did reopen that door, what did she expect to find there that belonged to her? There was nothing for her there. She had seen to that. This was where she belonged. In this house with Peter. Everything that she had any right to was here. There was nothing for her anywhere else. Then why was she not content? What was it that she wanted?