Running to Paradise (29 page)

‘
Do as you damn well like,’ she said. ‘You’re not the most scintillating of companions anyway.’

‘
Thanks,’ I said. I could have hit her. ‘I’ll remember that.’ I bent down to kiss her goodbye.

‘
Don’t bother,’ she said and turned her face away. Without a backward glance, I walked out of the room. I never saw her alive again and it was the first time in all the years I’d known her that we’d parted in anger.

A
too bright sun appeared from behind scurrying clouds, for a moment blinding my vision of the road ahead, then disappeared. There was more traffic now; London Airport loomed on my right.

Was
that why Char gave up the fight those last few days before she died, because of our stupid quarrel? Was my walking out on her that stifling afternoon, simply the last straw; the rat leaving the sinking ship; the final defection? I faced the thought, cringing a little under the harshness of it. Then suddenly I knew with complete certainty that as a premise, it was false. Char was a fighter, she had been all her life. Wrong-headed, yes; an espouser of lost causes, of ideals long past their prime and therefore tarnished, yes. But more than any of those things, even taking into account that self-destructive streak in her — somehow the latter didn’t count for much, though; she was self-destructive in doing rather than being — she was a fighter, and above all a survivor. No, she must have given up the fight, then, because she knew the time had come for her to do so. To linger on increasingly enfeebled in mind and body, she couldn’t have borne that, so she just let go.

Perhaps
that silly row we had was the only way she could bring herself to say goodbye...

I
felt a sob rise in my throat, then remembered, and pressing my foot hard down on the accelerator, I moved into the fast lane to overtake a speeding lorry. As I raced past him, the driver leaned out of the cab window and made a two-fingered salute. I smiled: Char would have loved that. Never hark back...

18

So easy to tell a person ‘write about your mother’, but to do so quite another matter, especially as the more Guy, the conjurer, produces from his Pandora’s Box, the less reality my mother seems to have for me...

I
arranged the neatly typed pages on my blotter in front of me; they’d arrived by post at home that morning with a scrawled note from Sophia:

Guy, you wanted my view of Mum. Here it is; pretty inadequate
stuff, I’m afraid, and totally subjective, but all I can produce at the moment.

See you soon?

Love

S

I looked at my watch. I had half an hour before Mrs Beaumont would be in with the mail. I started to read.

*

...the less reality my mother seems to have for me. The girl who sat by the roadside on a heap of stones and fell in love with the boy that was Algy Charterhouse and the woman who slept with my father in the freezing back bedroom of a house in Jarrow, are to me complete strangers; I simply cannot equate either of them with my mother.

And
yet, whether I like it or no, a tenuous thread remains linking the two of us, my mother and I. Not just the tie of blood, but in the way we respond to, say, art, bad manners, ugliness, oh, lots of things: our desire to create (usually unsuccessfully) anything from a jersey to a garden, to a full-length novel, our sense of humour, of history. The list is endless. The people and events that influenced her, my father’s Socialism, Dave Brent’s death, George: because they affected her deeply they were,
ipso
facto
, instrumental in helping shape the person I have become. (Though I like to think there is a little piece of just me in me.) For, paradoxically, despite the fact I had, in all, four fathers, in reality I had none; any influence there was came from my mother.

Mum
was not, I think, a very affectionate woman. She never ‘cuddled’ her children. She would kiss us goodnight or goodbye, but it was a formal kiss, never one of exuberance or simple affection. Kissing and the like, for her, were confined to the act of sex or to her treatment of animals, especially dogs. Nevertheless, we, her children, were all important to her and we knew it. We were the human barrier she had created between herself and the rest of the world. She owed us nothing; we owed her everything. We were her playmates, her protectors, her toys. Later on, as we grew up, we girls became potential rivals and poor old Perry a potential lover, but through all the rows and pain we remained until her death her corporate
alter
ego
.

My
first memory of her is of her leaning over my cot — where this was I don’t know, but probably the house in Hammersmith. She was wearing a pink evening dress of some sort of shiny material and her dark, curly hair just brushed my cheek as she bent over me. Someone was with her, but I don’t know who, and she told me that if I wasn’t careful I would receive a raspberry: I, in my innocence, took this to mean the promise of a treat.

My
last memory of her was a week before she died. It was I who bent over her now and kissed her cold cheek, as she sat huddled in her blue tweed overcoat, waiting for a sulky George to drive her back to St Hilda’s. Her walking frame stood beside her chair, its bag bursting with forgotten pieces of knitting, books, letters and packets of cigarettes. Her small hands, the fingers swollen with arthritis, played with the green chiffon scarf on her lap.

‘
Goodbye, Mum,’ I said falsely cheerful. ‘See you soon; I’ll write.’

‘
I feel so tired,’ she said, ‘so terribly, terribly tired.’

‘Guy, a quick word if you’ve a minute.’ I jumped guiltily. My boss, his customary aura of efficient well-being and positive thinking so pronounced, one could practically touch it, poked his head round the castor oil plant that served to divide me from the remainder of my section. Hastily I pushed Sophia’s notes under a pile of files.

‘
Certainly, Bernard. What’s the problem?’ The day’ s work had begun.

That
evening I rang Sophia, but there was no reply, so I wrote her a note of thanks for her contribution instead. Oddly enough, I was rather relieved she wasn’t at home. Since Char’d returned to me, my desire to delve into the past had, for the time being anyway, receded. And Char had returned all right, no doubt of that. Wherever I went, whatever I did, her presence was with me: her caustic, maddening, mocking self egging me on, making me say and do things with such an air of uncharacteristic self assertion, I found colleagues at work looking at me in surprise. My boss even commented that he was glad I’d decided at last to adopt a more positive attitude to my work, and perhaps I’d like to come over one weekend, it seemed ages since we’d had a game of golf.

By
all this I don’t mean that I’d become a sort of haunted Jamesian figure, peering over his shoulder all the time at the spectre of a lost love; far from it. It was simply that I had emerged from that ghastly state of limbo so many people who have loved long and deeply and are suddenly bereft are forced to endure. A state in which the beloved not only leaves you in body, but in mind as well and, like me, you can’t even remember the sound of their voice. My particular torment was made much worse, I think — yet one more red hot cinder piled on the slow burning fire that is the agony of loss — because not only had I lost Char, but I no longer believed that she had ever loved me. The reasons seemed so cogent: I’d met her too late; there were too many years between us; she’d loved too many times before. In fact, the whole, damned, idiotic idyll without her presence to revitalise it, had begun to seem quite simply impossible: without credibility; a fantasy of my own making, and yet for it I had broken my marriage, and allowed my life to disintegrate into some kind of barren, wasted, shell.

Then
the other night on my own, particular road to Damascus, Char had come back: her own, abrasive, heart-breaking self and called me to order. And I’d known again, without any doubt at all, she had indeed loved me, of course she had, and that was all that mattered.

But
for all that, there was a long way to go yet. I was still one of the walking wounded; perhaps, I don’t know, I always had been. Beth certainly thought so, although the wounds I was alleged to be suffering from varied with the mood she was in, or the latest book on the subject. Char, of course, refused to acknowledge the existence of such a condition. Be all that as it may, I did not yet feel ready to cope with Sophia’s particular brand of robust honesty, and was glad of the breathing space her absence gave me.

Providentially,
perhaps, from the point of view of my convalescence, Christmas was already looming and with it the usual round of office parties I couldn’t get out of, late-night shopping and cards from people whose names weren’t on my list. Amongst my cards were a rather alcoholic-looking robin from George and Bronwen, and a splendidly vulgar nude from Natasha, the latter sending me scurrying to the nearest florist to order, at vast expense, a dozen red roses.

A
few days before Christmas, I paid a call on Aunty Phyll. The house in Peel Street seemed shabbier than ever and Aunty Phyll, herself, frail and rather querulous. Her eyes remained blank throughout my visit: shuttered windows in a house that patiently awaits the arrival of the demolition squad. Jolly Phyllis Pratt, it seemed, had already departed.

‘
Happy Christmas, Aunty Phyll.’

‘
Is it Christmas?’ she said. ‘Are you quite sure? No one’s bothered to tell me...’

‘
She’s not with us most of the time now, Mr Horton,’ the home help said. ‘She knows quite well it’s Christmas.’

‘
I suppose,’ I said, ‘if you’ve lived through as many as she has, it doesn’t matter much either way.’

My
Christmas was spent in Brussels with business friends: alcoholic and, surprisingly, rather enjoyable. I even managed a brief fling with an attractive French girl half my age who, to my considerable surprise, evinced genuine interest.

‘
I come to London in July,’ she said. ‘A four-week course in business studies. I can stay with you in your flat — no?’

‘
I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I may be away...’

All
the same, it was good for the morale.

Two days before the end of the old year, I finally managed to bring myself to tackle, once again, the spare room, untouched since that last evening with Sophia. The room where year by year, in neat piles bound tidily together with pink tape from the office, Char’s past awaited me. I had decided, after careful consideration, I would make one grand, symbolic gesture and destroy the lot: diaries, letters, photographs — everything. I would simply put all the stuff back in the green trunk, load the thing on to my car and sling it on some convenient rubbish tip. The trunk and its contents belonged to me, didn’t they, to do what I liked with? Because now that Char had returned to me I had no wish, I told myself, to be reminded of that all too vivid past before I met her. I no longer wanted to know about Hubert Stokes and Piers Gurney and Algy; about that cold churchyard in the City where she and Barny Elliott had first made love amongst the crumbling gravestones; about those enchanted days in the middle of the War that she and Dave Brent, safely cocooned in their mutual passion, had spent in that opulent, over-heated, Savoy Hotel bedroom, whilst the snow fell gently on the freezing river outside; about George; about...

I
only wanted to remember us, Char and me together: the way we’d made love that first time under the cedar tree at Maple, and all the other times that came afterwards, and how she’d come back to me.

The
spare room smelt of damp and stale cigarettes. On the bedside table an unemptied ashtray bore witness to Sophia’s last visit. I drew back the curtains and opened the window. The green trunk squatted in front of the fireplace, my notes stacked neatly on top. Something rustled amongst the papers and a black beetle crawled slowly across the lid of the trunk and disappeared over the edge. An old brown label, tied to the handle, fluttered in the faint breeze from the open window: ‘Mrs D. Brent, 4 Riverside Road, Hammersmith, London.’

I
decided I needed a drink before I could go any further. A few minutes later, suitably fortified, having carefully placed my glass on the dressing table, I opened the lid of the trunk, then picked up a pile of papers from the bed labelled ‘1925’, took careful aim and flung it across the room into the open trunk.

After
a bit I began to enjoy myself. Each bundle became a missile, thrown with such force the tape binding it burst open, scattering the contents in such a way that the years, once more, became inextricably mingled. Then in my mounting excitement, I missed my aim, and a bundle, instead of landing in the trunk, hit the outside with such impact that the contents were scattered all over the carpet. This stopped me in my tracks: suddenly I felt silly and rather childish. A photograph lay face-upwards at my feet, and I bent down and picked it up.

A
girl stood in a doorway, grinning wickedly into the camera. She looked around ten years old. Her dark, curly hair was tied back with a large bow. She was dressed in a white blouse with a sailor collar, a full, tweed skirt and buttoned boots, and in her arms she held on firmly to a patently cheesed-off, patently wriggling, fox terrier. Underneath was written in Aunt Beth’s bold, generous hand: ‘Dear Char with “Rags”, Christmas 1912.’

I
stood quite still looking at the thing: it was so quiet I could hear my watch ticking. Then suddenly I knew I could never destroy those papers, never in a thousand years. They represented, however inadequately, all of Char. OK, she’d been mine for perhaps a third of her long life. No, that was an appalling conceit — Char could never have belonged to anybody — I’ll start again. I loved Char for perhaps a third of her long life, and just because I hadn’t been around for the rest of it, it was patently absurd for me to claim like Henry Ford, that all history was bunk and I for one would have no part of it. Char
was
the sum total of her experience and there was no escaping the fact. I walked over to the window, for a moment flooded with bright, winter sunshine, and held the picture up to the light. The young face looking at me across a chasm of over seventy years, was recognisably the same face I’d turned my back on that summer afternoon at St Hilda’s a few days before its owner’s death.

Even
at ten years old it had been an indomitable face: quirky, funny, alive, already compellingly attractive; full of life and curiosity, but above all there was an air of innocence about it; perhaps simplicity would be a better word. And it was this latter quality that had remained with Char throughout her life. She simply never grew up; never really grasped what people expected of her; never understood what they meant when they spoke glibly of such things as moral responsibilities and the like. An eternal Alice, she fought her way as best she could through what must have seemed to her an increasingly upside-down, looking-glass world, a world which, in her egotistical simplicity, she considered had turned its face against her.

It
was only those people who recognised this quality in her — her mother, Sophia, possibly Barny Elliott and, I liked to think, myself — who were able to reach her. The rest spent their time imbuing her with motives she didn’t even know existed, and in so doing accusing her of every crime in the book from sadism and moral exploitation to emotional blackmail. And in the end, she could take no more and escaped into madness. It was true she had made a hell of a lot of people unhappy, but she had also, simply by being in some extraordinary way, so utterly herself, given life, love and laughter to a great many others. She was not, no matter how hard you tried, a person you could forget, although during her life there were a thousand moments when you might have wished her dead.