A Garden of Trees (26 page)

I thought: Perhaps there is a life as it is intended as well as a life as it happens, and it is only in memory that one can know if they are the same.

The taxi stopped. Flowers, scent, the wealth of carpets. We squeezed into the lift like an upright coffin. I thought: If the scene that is about to happen is already in my memory should I not feel more sad or more excited rather than wishing to escape? The lift carried us.

Peter opened the door. I followed him. There was a small man sitting on top of a step-ladder. “This is my father,” Peter said.

“How do you do,” the man said. “I am sorry I cannot get down. This machine folds up on me like a mousetrap.”

“How do you do,” I said.

“I am trying to remove these curtains. If you would kindly hold on to the ladder I should feel more secure.”

“Yes,” I said.

Peter had gone. Annabelle was not there. If this has ever happened to me before, I thought, I am sure I should remember. I clung to the ladder.

“Spring cleaning is a ritual to which I am addicted. My wife and daughter are not. My wife is three thousand miles away. My daughter is making tea. Will you stay to tea?”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I find that now it is not the custom to invite people to tea. My children are consistently rude. Peter, for instance, has not mentioned tea?”

“No,” I said.

“In my day it was natural to mention tea. It appears that now it is taken as an insult. People imagine that one is accusing them of greed. I fear that soon one will not be able to offer a bed to a visitor without it being taken as an improper remark.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don't know how people can think of what to say without manners. I am supposed to be a very rude man, but I am not, I simply can't think of what to say. Now you, I can see, have good manners. Would you be good enough to hand me the scissors?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you. It is the same with spring cleaning. People despise it now. And soon they will despise eating, and sleeping, and breathing, and then they will die. They simply won't think it worth while.”

“No,” I said.

“You are a young man of great equanimity. The prospect does not disturb you?”

“No,” I said.

“I find that most remarkable. I, I fear, was upset even by these curtains. My daughter says she never drew them because she liked looking at the night. I myself can never find anything to see in the night. It appears to me to be quite dark.”

I began to laugh. He descended the ladder. He had pale smoky eyes and hair that was brushed with great precision. A small, dapper man with a face like a nut. He folded the curtain and placed it on a chair. “Annabelle,” he called, “your friend is laughing at me.”

“Tea is nearly ready,” replied Annabelle from the kitchen.

I wanted to go and see her, but I did not know what to do. Pale eyes watched me courteously. This was something that could never have happened to me before, even the room was not the same when he was in it. I had the impression that he did not want to be in it, that he had talked to excuse his presence and make light of the change he had wrought. Annabelle remained in the kitchen. He took a cigarette and fitted it into a holder and began talking again. He spoke of London in the spring. I could not hear him. Annabelle was in the kitchen. If he stopped talking I felt that I should die. Stop sleeping stop breathing and die. His voice was necessary to me and he knew it.

When Annabelle came in from the kitchen she was carrying a tray in front of her and I did not see. “Hullo,” she said. She put the tray down with her back to me and I still did not see. Then she turned round and for a moment I did not think that it was her at all, and then I saw that she was going to have a child.

“Hullo,” I said.

Her father was saying, “The dreadful thing about living in a tropical climate is that one cannot believe in the seasons. Returning to England is a return to nature. Elsewhere climate is geography.”

She looked at me calmly. I was sure she did not mind. It was I who turned my eyes away because I was so glad to see her.

Peter came in and we sat down to tea. Peter did not speak. Men in foreign cities come no farther than the door.

I said, “But living with the seasons makes people callous, don't you think, in the country one is of no importance until one has been destroyed by a bicycle or a pig, and then one is only a joke that holds its own for a moment with the seriousness of vegetables.”

He said, “But I like vegetables, I like them much better than people, I know exactly what to do with them and I don't know what to do with people at all.”

We talked like this. We talked for a quarter of an hour. He did it naturally, I think, for he was an expert talker: and I followed him better than I could normally have done because I needed this flow of nonsense to conceal an emotion that I did not understand. We sat in a small square around the tea-table, the four of us, while Peter's scowl deepened as our chatter increased (“You can't really love vegetables.” “Indeed I can, yes, the aubergines at Toulon those I really love.”) and Annabelle sat back holding her saucer in front of her as if waiting for birds to perch on it from the sky. I do not remember looking at her but I know exactly how she seemed, calmly and monumentally waiting for some great joke to burst about our heads that would confound us, to be sure, but never her, because she had heard the joke, and knew it, and would be pleased only to notice the reactions of our eyes. And for me, too, the emotion was one of laughter: for her sake I would enjoy the joke, for her sake I would smile. It was she, after all, who was having the child: and if she was pleased to be benign about it with her saucer held out to receive pennies or crumbs, I swore that it would not be me who would pass her by without giving what I had.

“If you loved food, really, long enough, you would turn into a vegetable yourself.”

Her composure, in profile, was that of a shuttered house on a burning day, the lids of her eyes heavy with a suggestion of sleep, her breathing like the heat of a lazy mimosa. Around her was an air of preternatural stillness like the echoless calm that precedes a thunderstorm. She awaited our laughter with the tranquility of flowers: and after the storm had passed, I thought, there she would be with the rain untouched on her lashes.

“I have noticed, certainly, a tendency among gourmets to resemble their favourite dish. There is an earl, for instance, who is probably
bouchées à la reine
.”

Being near her, keeping the nonsense moving, I felt myself, or what I hoped to be myself, return to inhabit the body it had left. This was a sensation similar to that of a limb that has gone to sleep, the removal of the pressure that had stopped the blood from flowing and then the slow creeping pain of renewed belonging and the pleasure of waiting till the limb was whole. While feeling encroaches there is a terror of moving, a concentration or stillness till the blood is there. I waited cautiously while old love and old joy crept through me and then it was there, suddenly, Annabelle was close to me and was impervious to damage, and I laughed, hugely, while the table rocked and a spoon fell abruptly on the floor.

Peter got up and left the room. I laughed with the tears coming into my eyes and my lungs aching until I choked upon a crumb and lost my breath. Annabelle gazed at me. Her father, with mock concern, removed his tea-cup from the table. I turned aside and buried my face in a handkerchief and Annabelle came quietly and patted my back. Then it was over. I wiped my eyes and apologized. “I trust it was something other than my wit,” her father said, “to have so alarmed you.”

“To-morrow,” I said to Annabelle, “will you have tea with me?”

“I have to do the cooking,” she said, “but I will walk with you in the park.”

“Annabelle is a tough nut,” her father said, “A very tough nut.”

“Do you still do the cooking?” I said. “Do you sow and knit and take dogs for walks?”

“And have children,” she said, beginning to pile the crockery.

I left her soon. I did not want to stay. We had said what was required and I made my excuses. Her father came with me to the lift. “Perhaps I can drop you somewhere,” he said. “I have an appointment myself.”

“Thank you,” I said.

We sat in a very small car. I felt once more that I had work to do. He drove fast smoking a cigarette in his holder. “How do you think Peter is looking?” he said.

“Not very well,” I said.

“No.” He stopped at some traffic lights. We sat staring in front of us, a small impassive man in a Foreign Office hat and I who admired him. “He seems to be suffering from a disease that is quite common nowadays,” he said; “A lack of purpose.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And a very understandable one.”

“Do you think so?”

“I hope I understand. I know that if I were a young man now I should find it difficult to know what to do.”

“What would you try to do?”

“The same as before, probably. But that is no good for Peter.”

“No,” I said. The traffic lights changed and we proceeded sharply.

“I think that in many ways it is my fault,” he said. “I tried to bring up my children on the theory that it is best for them to be left alone.”

“Surely you were right,” I said.

“Was I? I don't know. When you reach my age you will realize that it is a highly dangerous position to be left alone.”

“But it is like free will, you have got to risk it.”

“Well,” he said. We shot across Bond Street. The road was thick with American limousines. “About free will, you know, I have a suspicion that we deceive ourselves.”

“There are instructions?”

“More than that. I feel that perhaps some canvassing goes on behind the scenes. String-pulling. Fiddling. To be a good father one must be as crafty as the devil.”

“I don't think that's possible,” I said.

He turned to me so that his cigarette-holder jutted straight towards my nose. “Tell me,” he said, “are you in the habit of despising the older generation?”

I laughed foolishly. “That was a bad habit,” I said.

“Ah!” he said. We brushed remorselessly through a curtain of pedestrians. “A habit that goes with the complaint. And you believe in freedom. Freedom from conventions, controls, and the claims of parental authority.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And the claims of love?”

“The claims,” I said, “yes.”

“Rubbish!” he said. We sped down Regent Street. “I don't believe you for a minute.” I laughed again. “But I know that that is what Peter believes,” he said.

He pulled up near Piccadilly Circus. “Look here,” he said, “are you doing anything for half an hour?”

“No,” I said.

“Then would you like to have a drink at my club? It is only just across the road.”

“I should like it very much,” I said.

“Right,” he said. We swerved out from the pavement and a bus shrieked to a standstill. “You see how crafty I am. I have no appointment.” We dodged the cursing traffic. “Another intolerable deceit of the older generation. But then, of course, you did not have an appointment either.”

In the club there was a room like a railway station. We sat in ageless leather chairs. “It is true,” he said, “that this place is rather appalling. Is that why you despise us?”

“I don't,” I said.

“That's cheating.” He nodded as an old man passed him. “I gather you think us mad.” The old man came up to him and they whispered at each other fiercely. Their heads pecked strangely like puppet birds. When they had finished he said, “It is interesting talking to you. Peter won't talk.”

“I don't think you're mad,” I said.

“That is because you are older than Peter, then. When you are older still you will realize why we act like we do. Not all of us, of course. But you will see that it is difficult to do any better.”

“Do you despise us then?”

“Oh no. I only look on you with slight alarm. It seems to me that you are obsessed with the Garden of Eden. You insist on trying to recreate it and at the same time insist on making the original mistakes. I do find that alarming. But despicable, no.”

“Can we help making the original mistake?”

“I don't think you can. I think it goes inevitably with Gardens of Eden.”

“Then what should we do?”

“I think, since we are talking in these terms, that you should read your bible. Isn't it something about getting it within you? You mustn't despise the bible, you know, although it may strike you as peculiar.”

“It does,” I said.

“Yes, but still, you must translate it. It is, after all, not a text-book. You have to learn the language before you can understand what it means. The trouble with Peter is that he either translates it into someone else's terms or else he despises it. He will not trouble to learn the language.”

“It is very difficult to have faith,” I said.

“Why yes, of course.”

“You agree then?”

“If you say so. If you don't want it.”

“But that's what Peter wants.”

“And he can't get it. So that's that.”

“He thinks that you want to have him psychoanalysed,” I said.

“Does he? That was a chance remark of his mother's, which resulted in a slight misunderstanding. It is no good being psychoanalysed, either, unless one wants to be.”

There was a silence for a while. I began to imagine what he wanted. “In fact,” I said, “in order to get results, someone has to be as crafty as the devil.”

“As many people as possible,” he said.

“I don't trust that,” I said. “Not unless the people are very sure of what they are doing.”

“There can be, so to speak, limited objectives. It can do no harm, I am sure, to act simply upon what of course must be a genuine regard.”