Undue Influence (10 page)

Cynthia’s suspicions would have been justified by such artless
outpourings. Her antennae were so finely adjusted that she could see how the land lay. She could see temptation where none existed. She would have known by then that her husband was afraid of women, and would therefore have been extremely circumspect. She would have told him repeatedly that he was working too hard, would have interrupted his reading with all manner of winsome requests, would have made much of tiredness, retiring to bed, but hailing him from the bedroom. By a process of erosion she would have divested him of many pleasant evening duties … Had her famous illness dated from here? And since her splendid body harboured a genuine weakness had it not seemed more urgent to take care of Cynthia rather than of those healthy young people, and all those dead authors?

But why had he married her in the first place? I could see that he must have been woefully inexperienced, easily impressed, and fatally subject to wills other than his own. How had they met? Here my imagination supplied the details. Cynthia’s father, in his capacity of benefactor of the college, would have attended an official dinner, one of those dinners which are a form of flattery, in the pious hope of receiving further donations. Financial difficulties would have been invoked in the President’s speech. Everything would have been made perfectly clear. In America, I believe, such donations are sometimes rewarded with an honorary doctorate. But Cynthia’s father—what was his name?—would not have been after a doctorate but after a husband for his daughter, whose volatile temperament was beginning to generate tiresome fusses at home. The young lecturer would have seemed to him to fit the bill. It would have been easy enough to strike up an acquaintance, to seek his advice on what was needed for the Romance Language department, child’s play to invite him home
(one of those flats in Orchard Street, I decided). From that point his wife could take over. And his daughter, of course.

That was my construction, and it pleased me. But what if he had genuinely fallen in love? Cynthia was a capricious woman, her caprices visited on women as well as men. What if
she
had genuinely fallen in love? I had observed the remnants of a certain passion there, the imperiousness on her side, his sombre commitment to her well-being. Was there an incompatibility which still tormented them? What I thought I had picked up from her signals was a heartfelt disappointment that had turned to rancour, and on his side an awareness of his own incapacity. He would have felt impotent, as he had under his mother’s scolding, unable to rectify a fault which stretched back into childhood. He would have persuaded himself that he must strive mightily in order to be readmitted into favour.

Normally I sympathize with women. I know from my admirable mother how lowering it is to tolerate—and to have to tolerate—an inadequate man. Yet Cynthia did not appear to me to be entirely exonerated from blame herself. I disliked what I thought of as her frivolity, which seems a strange charge when she was confined to bed with an illness about which I was sceptical. I felt that she should have made more of an effort, rather than display herself to her own advantage in a pathetic situation. I felt indignant that her husband had lost his freedom. I suspected that he still worked, surreptitiously, that he spent his days in some library, wondering if he could confide to paper those ideas he had once had, when he had thought that his life would be a life of study. A book, perhaps, which would vindicate his ruined present. He would know that it had been ruined. Yet that knowledge would goad him into further zealousness, so that the path that had been chosen for him, or rather that he had chosen to follow, for better
or worse, now had the force of a duty, or rather a commandment. And whatever disappointment he now felt would be as nothing to the disappointment of his wife, that disappointment he was now bound to palliate by his devotion, even by his love. It would be an affair of honour. And I could see that he was an honourable man.

All the same I felt a distaste for the situation which was entirely on my own account. Why had I been tricked into a show of niceness which was not in my nature? What business did I have with these people who, I reminded myself, knew nothing about my circumstances, and worse, showed no desire to know? I had been privy to Cynthia’s allusions and to Martin’s guarded confession, yet at no point had any information been sought in return. This bewildered me; it seemed a kind of wilful obtuseness, the kind that should be disclaimed. Either that or a genuine indifference. But I did not think it was indifference. What it was, I decided, was a terrible kind of urgency, as if the Gibsons’ case was so strong that it must be put at all times. This was their secret, I decided: they had both decreed, with some justification, that they were tragic figures, whose pleas must be heard at a higher court. They were not simply solipsists, they were soliloquists, drawn together in a fateful bond which demanded witnesses. There was no room, there was no
place
, for outsiders, for third parties. My role was to register their predicament, in which they were so far gone that nobody but themselves could understand it. They had attained to a higher collusion than that which I imagined existed between married couples. This was truly a remarkable union.

I said some of this to Wiggy, who merely remarked, ‘You find him attractive, don’t you?’ This irritated me. Of course I found him attractive; his attractiveness was not in doubt. But in an awful way neither was Cynthia’s. I could not see her, as
Wiggy saw her, as a simple unfortunate, whom we were bound to visit in the spirit of nineteenth-century ladies visiting stricken cottagers. To begin with the Gibsons were too rich, or rather Cynthia was. It was for them, for people in their position, to extend patronage. It was their determined refusal to perform this task that I found both rebarbative and exciting. I was determined to extract some sign of reciprocity before I was done with them. It would be hard, I knew; their monumental selfishness, which I saw as a tragic selfishness, like King Lear’s, would be difficult to crack. Lear, of course, was fully persuaded of his rectitude; he absolved himself throughout. I loathed the play, had done so ever since I had seen it on a cultural outing from school. But I had to admit that it made for good stagecraft.

I was waiting for Martin to materialize in my basement, as he had done before. I did not really expect him to telephone: the telephone was far too direct, too confrontational an instrument for him to use. I had given him my home number, but for several days there was no message on my machine. This meant that I passed my days in a state of semi-alertness, listening for his steps on the stairs. This also meant that I could not quite give full attention to my work. In this I was aided by St John Collier, whose notebooks were proving a bit of a let-down. I could detect no real enthusiasm for the passing scene in his wanderings; he probably just wanted to get out of the house. Yet having decided that he would walk on Sunday afternoons he found himself bound to do so. He would have been aware of the girls at home, waiting for the wanderer to return and perhaps to reward them with a choice of anecdote. In fact he had nothing to say, and the notebooks merely recycled his earlier material. Thus he would note: ‘Parsons Green. Dead squirrel by side of road; closed eyes, thin downturned
mouth.” And then, with an effort, ‘How often do we reflect on those who have gone before, and to whom we feel indebted!’ This seemed to me to be a failure of nerve; St John was the victim of his own mellifluous method. That
Walks with Myself
would never amount to anything must have been obvious to him. It certainly was to me.

And yet the project had my full backing. This seemed to me the sort of book anyone could write, and therefore should write. But at the end of his life, and these fragments struck a valedictory note, St John Collier must have registered the melancholy fact that he had amounted to very little, that his daughters were his most fervent admirers, and—who knows?—that he was a little tired of their reverence and might have preferred something more robust in the way of appreciation. He would have been tired in every sense, tired of his loneliness and his life of duty, tired even of his Sunday walks, tired especially of the obligation to maintain a professional persona, when he had nothing, or very little more to deliver. There was one note of enthusiasm: he had seen a rainbow when he was walking on Primrose Hill. Naturally he had taken this as a sign of benevolence, that same benevolence that he now ascribed to Nature rather than to God, unless, as was likely, he saw the two of them in collusion. Only a very sweet disposition can square that particular circle.

I therefore vowed to do my best for St John Collier, although this might involve creative editing on my part. In all conscience I thought of myself as his humble biographer. I would ask Muriel more about her father’s life and interpolate some details between the passages of his own writing. I had been impressed by Muriel’s still verdant devotion, by her account of those solemn Sundays, the fruit cake, the tap dripping into the enamel bowl (although this last was my own invention). I thought of them as a family of saintly celibates,
the flesh subdued by the spirit. Yet there must have been moments of regret, perhaps of curiosity, which would have been instantly repressed. That was why I detected a heavy-heartedness somewhere in the notebooks. I felt disturbed that such a good man should have known unhappiness, or perhaps only stirrings of unhappiness, at the end of his life. ‘Hampstead Pond,’ he wrote. ‘Skein of geese. Winter coming.’

The temptation to take a walk on my own account was very great. It was now high summer, and the basement, of which I was fond, had come to seem intolerably confining. I took to going out at lunchtime, not to eat—a sandwich would do—so much as to stroll and satisfy my hunger for faces. The city was now filling up with tourists, who reminded me that I could soon be a tourist myself, if I chose to. But there seemed to be no future in this idea, at least not one that I could see. It was on my return from one of these lunchtime excursions that I found a note propped up on my typewriter. ‘We should be very happy to see you both on Saturday, if convenient. Kind regards. M. G. Please forgive note.’

I informed Wiggy of this. Her enthusiasm seemed to have diminished, as had her sympathy. My own sympathy had never been very active in the first place. I therefore decided to be as pleasant as possible in these strange circumstances. This proved to be a wise decision. ‘It’s my birthday!’ was her greeting to us as we were admitted to the bedroom. This was all but shouted, as a champagne glass was waved in our direction. ‘And my silly husband says I shouldn’t be drinking. I
always
have champagne on my birthday. What have you brought me?’ she said, as Wiggy withdrew her sketch pad from its plastic bag.

‘I thought I’d do a drawing of you.’

‘Wiggy is a professional artist,’ I supplied.

‘Oh, not now. This is a celebration! Martin, give the girls a glass of champagne. Did he tell you that that silly girl wanted
to go off on holiday? The idea! As if either of us could take a holiday! Still, we talked her out of it, didn’t we, darling? Now, what have you two been up to?’

As usual she did not wait for an answer. Our lame recitals seemed to die on the scented air. They were interrupted from time to time by a repeated, ‘It’s my birthday!’ These threatened to dwindle in conviction but were quickly resuscitated. All we could do was smile and congratulate her all over again. But then that was what she wanted us to do.

I have always felt slightly embarrassed by birthday celebrations, because the onus is always on the bringer of gifts. We had brought nothing, not even flowers. But even flowers can go wrong, arrive on the wrong day, or find no one in to receive them. I remember my mother telling me of her confusion on going into a shop to order some birthday flowers to be sent to an acquaintance, to be told that her credit card had expired. Although she had her chequebook in her bag she had felt rebuffed. ‘And Janet would have been so disappointed,’ she told me as if the shop had refused to serve her. The incident had seemed so redolent of failure that she was quite surprised when her friend telephoned on the following day to thank her. The uncertainty seemed stronger than the relief. Of course we had not known that Cynthia was celebrating her birthday. What am I saying? We hardly knew Cynthia, who was now reminiscing about birthdays gone by. There had always been parties, she observed. She was the sort of woman who marked all rites of passage in an exceedingly public manner. Two spots of colour burned in her cheeks, yet the atmosphere in the room was glum.

All at once she stopped in mid-sentence and her face froze in a puzzled expression. ‘Martin?’ she said. He bounded from his corner. ‘I think perhaps …’ he said.

‘Yes, of course. We must have tired you, Cynthia. You must rest now and many more happy returns,’ we wished heartily, as if to cover the uneasiness of the moment with the fervour of our goodbyes. ‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ we told Martin, anxious now only to leave. ‘Thank you so much,’ he said. He looked up from the bed, his eyes haggard. ‘So nice to have seen you. We enjoyed your visit, didn’t we, darling?’ But Cynthia, looking bewildered, did not reply.

‘What did you make of that?’ asked Wiggy, when we were safely out in the street.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘You mean …’

‘Quite.’

‘Poor old thing,’ said Wiggy. ‘I don’t think I feel like dinner, do you?’

We were both shaken by the impropriety of the episode, myself more than Wiggy. Until then I had not really considered Cynthia to be ill, ill that is as my father, my mother had been ill. Her illness had seemed essentially decorative, tricked out as it was by her soft pillows and her immaculate appearance. Now I saw these accessories as a last resort, a form of dandyish wilfulness, of defiance. She was no stoic, but she had perfected a stoic’s defences. This again was evidence of the power of her instincts. Had she used her mind to perfect the same strategy she would have been admirable. As it was she was profoundly pathetic.