The Tyrant's Novel (6 page)

Parenthood had changed Mrs. Carter, and loss of her son, Private Hugo Carter, had transformed her too. Her eyes were full of an unreliable glitter as she greeted us at her door, and sullen as a teenager visiting an aunt I stepped across the threshold. You both look so well, said Mrs. Carter, but to me that sounded like a reproach.

Leading us into her living room, she chattered about the honey cake she had bought at the market, and the fig pie. There was enthusiasm in her voice, as if she had hopes of sweetening the entire earth. Then, stepping back from the table set for afternoon coffee, she examined me head to toe. When I see you, she told me, I feel as if Hugo is closer to home than ever.

I could only nod and accept that role.

I feel it can't go on forever, she said. They're holding our men out of pure spite. But please, you must be so thirsty and hungry.

That was one of the poor thing's tricks—to build up the weight of this reunion by pretending that it was such a trek from our place to hers. In a psychological sense, she was right. It was too much of a journey there and back for me. Maybe it had been my earlier tension which had given Sarah her spasm of headache. It had certainly made me a sot for the day.

Mrs. Carter indicated we should sit at the table, with its tablecloth, cakes, oranges. My gorge rose when I faced this little feast. Mrs. Carter lived on the pension of her late husband and, a victim of inflation, no longer had unlimited means. Yet all this was painfully and expensively assembled. Faced with the imminent duty of tasting it all, my throat was stung by the returning acid of vodka.

She sat us down and mercilessly plied us with good things, and poured hot coffee from a silver pot, and stared, feeding on us, devouring our presence. I was sure that she daydreamed it was her thin son, returned from imprisonment and ready now for life's full flow, whom she was feeding in feeding us—that was her fantasy, an understandable one which nonetheless filled me with panic.

Let me show you, she said.

We were already chewing sweet things, and she had not had a mouthful of anything, or even a sip of coffee. This seemed to me unjust. I would have crossed to the other side of the table and urged a plate of pastries on her, except she was away too quickly. She went to a drawer in a cabinet, opened it, and took out a familiar file, one I knew well. I had been shown it many times. It was years old, brown and worn, and full of her letters of hope—to the Secretary General of the United Nations, to the Ministry of War of the Others, to the Secretary of State of Sweden, and ministers from every honest-broker government on earth. The Scandinavians and Canadians in particular seemed to be the world's honest brokers—at least, Mrs. Carter had spent a long time writing to them.

She opened the file and brought a fresh, obviously cherished page to me. I wiped my hands on a table napkin in preparation to receive her latest attempt to liberate Private Hugo Carter. It was a copy of a letter addressed to the Director of Prisoner of War Repatriation, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva.

Dear Sir,

I ask as a mother for the considerate attention of the Director to the case of Private Hugo Carter, 53rd Infantry Battalion, captured in the Summer Island battles in the Hordern Straits. Private Carter has now been held prisoner for six years, since the spring of 1992.

It had come to her knowledge, she continued, that the repatriation of prisoners of war was supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and she had heard that it was sometimes possible for them to bring the attention of the holding nation to the case of a particular captive, and to seek his repatriation on compassionate grounds. She had been told by her own ministry that her son was held in a prison somewhere in Dona Province. As a sufferer of osteoporosis and hip-joint impairment, doctor's certificates regarding which she attached, she referred her earnest request to him that he would do everything he could . . .

She signed the letter,
Yours sincerely, Emma Carter.

I looked up to see that haunted glow on her face. Good, I conceded, a very fine letter.

He would have no reason not to listen to me, would he? she asked. I mean, there's no international agenda that would make it hard for the Red Cross to do their work fairly and earnestly. There wouldn't be, would there, Alan?

I couldn't see why there would be, I told her, but then tried gently to build up an idea of the difficulties involved. The Others do make it hard for the repatriators. They move prisoners around. Sometimes they assign them in groups to farmers to work on the harvest. There were even rumors they've changed prisoners' names to make them harder to find.

I know, Mrs. Carter insisted, her faith remaining unshaken and expressing itself in a wan, determined smile. But after six years, she continued, the Red Cross must have sorted out all their little tricks.

The crease running between her eyes like a threat of coming pain, Sarah said, I hope they listen to you this time, Mrs. Carter. I can't see why it's taken so long.

No knowledge of the reality, however, haunted Sarah. She, like everyone else, thought I had put the whole truth of Summer Island in my short stories. I had a second cup of coffee and ate two pastries as quickly as I could—the sooner I made the gesture, the sooner we could get home. At last, to Sarah's relief as well, I suggested we had to go—we had an appointment at six o'clock at a fish restaurant on the river.

Soon Hugo will be back, murmured Mrs. Carter, saying such things as that. He'll be saying, I just called in for a moment, because I have an appointment . . .

Without having intended to, I found myself babbling the old story, the story which was a mere gesture to the truth but which I uttered with a genuine guilt. Hugo had been forward at the outpost that morning, the second day of the battle. I had been up there the morning before, when it all started. But I was resting that second dawn in a bunker farther back. Stupid luck meant that Hugo was overrun, and I had time to take part in a reasonably organized consolidation. How unfortunate for Hugo to be captured during a temporary tactical emergency of a won battle. Hugo
would
be going to a fish restaurant, instead of me, had the Others started the Summer Island offensive one day earlier. It's so stupid, I said. It's so stupid.

That was at least a proposition I could believe in thoroughly.

I saw Sarah staring at me. Mrs. Carter's face had become somber, not before time. I know, Alan, she said. I know. I don't ask you here to explain these cruel things. Just to bring me the scent of my son. It's selfish of me.

Never, I asserted, and I hugged her like a mother.

Then, thank God, we were on the stairs. The line of pain between Sarah's eyes was now very evident, but I was still tipsy. And so she had to drive.

We were lucky not to be dependent for health care upon the chaotic public clinics. On top of that, Sarah's uncle, a renowned cardiac surgeon, had a neurosurgeon friend to whom Sarah went with her head pain the following week. She told me afterwards that she was to have a CT scan at Mount Mediation Hospital, the hospital of the privileged and the home of a set of all the earth's advanced medical machines.

Do they think it's cancer? I asked in unheeding panic. A brain tumor? Surely not.

She laughed at my fears. They want to have a look at the vessels at the back of the brain, she said, the ones that have been seizing up on me.

On the eve of her scan, we went to the very fish restaurant we had used as an excuse with Mrs. Carter. I was buoyant. My novel was as good as finished, and as I'd gone I had proudly done a translation into English, though American editors sometimes said they found my usages odd. I wanted to hang on to the thing for another month and look at it calmly, a little at a time, before sending it to Haddow and Sons, the national publishers, and to my American publisher, Random House, who might then give me a further eighty thousand dollars or more for a new book, ensuring our future.

My late mother had been in her way a less star-crossed version of Mrs. Carter. It was not so much due to her, though, but because of Sarah, who was so courageous in her choices, and who now survived on small payments from the films she had made in her late adolescence rather than act to the tyrant's script, that I had a taste for heroic women. I had spent a lot of time researching the families who lived on the far slope of Beaumont, above the oil pipes running down to the great crude oil terminal of Ibis Bay, a sentimentally named but utterly dingy and polluted stretch where no birds flew or dared land, ibis or otherwise.

My novel began with a Mother Courage figure, Rose Clancy, wife of a former naval officer and activist.

Carrying her pitcher, Rose advanced in sandaled feet to the pump at the end of the street. She stepped across the clods of rubble which proved that the adobe houses were falling inwards upon themselves, and met Mrs. McPherson, a young mother of two, already standing by the pump with an empty pitcher. No water, said Mrs. McPherson.

No water, really? asked Rose.

Mrs. McPherson, who was of strong Intercessionist stock from the southern farmlands, grasped the handle of the pump in a no-nonsense way and began to work it. Again, from the pipe's mouth, nothing emerged.

In the meantime, her husband, now on a pension and the head of his street committee, is reduced to selling black-market cigarettes in the Eastside markets to raise money for pharmaceuticals, a gesture against the grotesque sanctions which the West somehow thought would make the people aggrieved enough to overthrow Great Uncle. The truth being, of course, that they cemented Great Uncle in place, gave him an outside force to blame for the country's condition, and compelled the brave endeavors of Mr. Clancy.

I knew my manuscript was not
Ulysses,
that it belonged to the school of social realism which would be more tolerated in me than in a Western writer. But when I daydreamed, I daydreamed that my book would remind the
New York Times
of Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not,
or of Steinbeck.

Sarah and I had our meal at the fish restaurant. She seemed to eat better than normally, and to be free of discomfort. The CT scan, she said, would probably prove unnecessary. We left the restaurant by eight-thirty, since at nine our friend Andrew Kennedy was programming on national television the final of the European Cup between Italy and France, which meant too that he would have an indulgence from Great Uncle for cutting the
Hour of Devotion,
the reading of tributes to Great Uncle, to half an hour.

As we ascended the stairs to our apartment, we heard howling from within Mrs. Douglas's place, and knew that our neighbor was nursing her demented sister. In that wail, Great Uncle's potency was recalled to our memory. Surely the remains had been removed by now from the stone walls of Wolfmount. Surely the birds had taken the nephew's eyes, and he had gone blinded into the netherworld.

Come on, I told Sarah, taking her by the arm.

Home, she was in the kitchen making tea as I tuned the set to the football match. I heard a cup fall, and a squeal from her, as if she had been cut.

Thus began the worst enduring moment of my life. I found Sarah on the kitchen floor in a swoon, and carried her in to the bed, believing absolutely in her surviving this faint. Even Mrs. Douglas, who was fast becoming a professional comforter, came upstairs, leaving her demented sister, and made me tea, stoking it with sugar for what she already knew to be my loss. Our general practitioner, Dr. Colless, turned up with the police medical examiner. They asked would I leave the room a moment. I stood up as they emerged from visiting her. What is it? I asked them. Did she have access to any poison? asked the medical examiner. Are there any pills in the house? Could I please see the bathroom?

I denied poisons, and any particular pills except her painkillers. But yes, he should feel free to go to the bathroom. I realize now I was grateful to him for introducing the possibility of human culpability into what had happened. Not that I believed she was gone. Oh no. She would be up again at any second, squeezing the line of pain between her eyes with forefinger and thumb, before directing her eyes in my direction. Dr. Colless lowered his voice, comforting me. It was probably an aneurysm, I'd say, Alan. There'll have to be an autopsy to find out one way or the other.

She was having a CT scan tomorrow, I suggested hopefully.

Well, the autopsy will show any problem in that regard.

Does that mean they'll take her brain out of her skull? I asked, my voice rising, I knew, to the level of primal hysteria Sarah and I had both heard on the stairs only an hour or so ago.

Alan, said Dr. Colless. You'd want to know, wouldn't you?

I shook my head. I did not choose to know cause of death, since I had not yet accepted death. If they were just to let her lie, she would recover. I do not need to detail, from this distance of time, the craziness of my bereaved ideas.

With Sarah, there had been that strange business by which she occupied the place in my emotional landscape previously taken up by the entire variegated tribe of women. I forgot my few army experiences with prostitutes, and Louise James and other failures of flirtation at university. This was surely what marriage was meant to be, a profound and exclusive reliance underpinning the occasional physical frenzy. In a confused way, I had always understood my good luck. Now she had made a noise no more than as if the pad of her thumb was pierced by a little shard of china, or a small knife for cutting oranges. Foreseeable and acceptable minor harm had been overtaken, outswamped a billion times, by something more gross and world-devouring, some accident under her skull. I could not have been more awfully dismayed if the dropping of a cup had destroyed her by causing nuclear fission. I possessed the normal craziness of someone whose love is taken in a banal second, with the television warming up to the postkickoff argy-bargy of a European championship final. By some terrible means, I suspected, the blowing of a referee's whistle in Lyons of itself produced this prodigious result in
our
hemisphere, in
our
kitchen.