Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart (36 page)

And then I did the unforgivable. It was shocked out of me. I'd suddenly remembered; or suddenly made the connection. I wasn't on my guard.

“My God! That's not Jean-Paul?”

She had often told me that Jean-Paul was the most persistent of her suitors, would never take no for a final answer. Sometimes she had said she ought to have accepted him; and less and less had there been any air of jokiness about the manner of her saying it. Jean-Paul had not only been handsome but he had become rich and had acquired the reputation of being an excellent father to his six children.

Now she had taken a couple of paces backward and was gazing practically openmouthed.

“How do you know about Jean-Paul?”

“I…”

“How do you know?”

“You see, we've met before—you and I—in a previous incarnation.”

“No,” she said, “seriously.”

“And we got married and you were always throwing Jean-Paul in my face. You told me how he was forever asking you to marry him and how you should have done so because he was very handsome and became rich and, besides all that, was a wonderful father to his six children. It was a sort of family joke—well, not really such a joke, to be honest. You used to taunt me with it, rather. You see, we weren't very happy.”

I spoke quickly but she was still staring—although now, to my inexpressible relief, she was starting to laugh again. “Oh, what a fool you are! Do many of the English behave like this? I always understood the English to be stuffy. No sense of humour.”

“It's all that jam they have to spread on their boiled meat. Could you do that and retain your sense of humour?”

“No, probably not. But, monsieur, I am intrigued. If we've been married before—and yet weren't very happy—and I was beastly to you—then why do you want to marry me again?”

“Oh, because this time it will be different. Enormously different. I shall cherish you. You'll never experience a single moment of regret.”

“Ah, my!
That
's very comforting! I may have to accept.”

“And you were only beastly to me because I was beastly to you. In fact, I'm sure I was the beastlier.”

“You have an unusual way of putting yourself across.”

“I can afford to tell the truth. You see, I'm a reformed character. And in future I shall make you a fine husband.”

“I don't believe you can ever have been that beastly.” Fleetingly she touched my sleeve. “How many children did we have?”

“Only one. That was a sadness. I don't know why we didn't have a dozen. This time, however, we'll make up for it.”

The dance floor was deserted; had been, maybe, for some minutes. Abruptly becoming aware of this and abruptly becoming aware that I should take her back to her table and so risk losing her for the present I said something that must have seemed a little out of tune.

“My Geneviève—but we shall be so very happy!”

I immediately tried to give it a lighter touch, yet it had come out sounding like what it was: a
cri de coeur
: and for the moment she was disconcerted.

I said: “Don't worry. That wasn't me. That was David Garrick, impersonating me. An instant of deathless drama but I'm afraid I forgot to warn you.”

“Ah, then, were we married in the time of David Garrick, too?”

I shrugged. “Oh, as to that…well, who can say with any certainty?” It seemed all right again.

But the next second it wasn't so all right. We had been joined by Jean-Paul and Jean-Paul wasn't happy. His fair skin was suffused by a flush of—at best—impatience. “Ah,
chéri
,” said Geneviève. “Meet the gentleman from England. Monsieur Gérald, Monsieur Hart. Monsieur Hart claims to be my long-lost husband.”

He shook my hand and muttered a conventional greeting, yet he didn't respond to this statement with the slightest air of interest, let alone amusement.

“There is some evidence in support of it,” Geneviève persisted, wide-eyed and meaning to impress. “He knew your name, Jean-Paul! So how do you account for that?”

“No doubt he overheard someone using it as we were making our way to the table.”

This was an explanation which happened to suit me, even if it did carry certain undertones. To wit, I was a spy. A grubby opportunist.

“Oh, Jean-Paul,” she said, “how prosaic you are! Even on New Year's Eve. How unpoetic! How practical! How typically French!”

“Geneviève, you are wanted back at the table. Besides, it seems odd, your continuing to stand here in this way. You are drawing attention to yourself.”

Geneviève gave me her hand. “But we can't help that, can we, Monsieur Hart? Not if while standing here we make such a very handsome couple?” She was obviously annoyed with Jean-Paul, a little unfairly, on account of his failure to enter into the spirit of her game. “Ah, well, monsieur. It has been nice. I shall remember this encounter.”

I kept hold of her hand for several seconds longer than was needed—or even proper—and looked her in the eye as I did so. “
Au revoir
, Geneviève.
Bonne année
!
A la prochaine
.”

Jean-Paul gave a little
tst
of irritation. He took Geneviève's arm and firmly led her away. I myself returned to Johnny.

“Well done,” he said. “I watched you both. It looked as though you were really…I don't know…getting through to her. Smarmy devil.”

He had risen, expressly to shake my hand and clap me on the back.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

“I know her address. Tomorrow I go and sing ‘On the street where you live' on the street where she lives.”

“You do, do you? So I have to play the abandoned tourist?”

“Johnny, it's for your own good. Remember that. But let's not think about tomorrow. Right now I'm going to order some champagne. This is an occasion which I feel demands it.”

“In a place like this, champagne is going to knock you back a bob or two.”

“So much the better,” I said. And actually I meant it. One of my constant small battles was against meanness. When for fifty years or more you've been a little tight with your money, the defect isn't one you can easily eradicate, just because you want to.

“Hope you won't regret it when you see your bill! Hope you won't regret it in the morning!”

He obviously didn't intend it but his tone was faintly taunting. This implicit reminder that the crest of the wave descends into the trough was no doubt timely yet I could have done without it. For some reason it made me think of the last New Year's Eve on which I'd seen Ginette; and suddenly a chill passed through me. It was impossible to imagine Geneviève as the same woman. Impossible—and yet only too possible as well—to imagine me as the same man. We hadn't even stayed up until midnight. We'd had a glass or two of sherry, yes, watched some television, spoken as little as we usually did, gone upstairs about eleven—upstairs and to our separate rooms. But it wasn't as if we hadn't started out, then too, as lively, decent, well-intentioned people, both of us. It wasn't even as if, fundamentally, we hadn't each
remained
decent and well-intentioned, although certainly not lively.

No wonder that I shuddered.

18

We got married in Paris, in June 1960; and in the following September Johnny enrolled at the City of Westminster College in Victoria to study four ‘A' levels. Less than a year later he passed them all and—having applied to Durham to read for a degree in music—he never met Sandra and was never lucky enough to have Geneviève for a colleague. In fact, Geneviève never went to Air France. Apart from all else, she was too busy bringing up babies. Anne came in 1961, Jacqueline in '62. After a two-month honeymoon in France we had returned to live in Lincoln: a rented house in Steep Hill, quite close to the cathedral. There I studied for three years at the Theological College, which I could scarcely have managed if my parents-in-law, bless them, hadn't been helping out financially. Life was good. Life was terrific. My wife and my daughters were as lovely as any man's wife and daughters possibly could be. And I had very much chosen a career which suited me. My studies weren't purely academic, either. Far from it. I spent a lot of my time getting out into the villages around Lincoln, being inducted into preaching and pastoral work, hospital-visiting, school-teaching, learning about mental health and psychiatric care—I mean, learning about them as much on the job as in the classroom. And then towards the end of my course the college found me a position in the one city which I'd been holding out for. At Petertide I was ordained as deacon in Southwell Minster and having been licensed to St Andrew's in Nottingham I then began life as a curate. My curacy and Geneviève's new pregnancy roughly coincided. The following year I would be twenty-seven. I wanted the baby to be born on my birthday and I prayed that it would be a boy.

Obviously I knew I must be grateful for whatever God sent, but to have a son born in Nottingham on my twenty-seventh birthday had been an overriding ambition since my late teens. More than an ambition. A necessity.

And he had to be called Arthur.

“
Zut
! What kind of crazy British name is that? In France they would just laugh at it. This isn't Camelot, it's not the Middle Ages.” Geneviève ran her finger round my ear enticingly—along the nape and round my other ear. “Darling, why can't we have Philipe? Even Philip? I know you like Philip, you've already told me so.” I promised her that Philip would be the name of our next son and remained adamant on the choice of Arthur. Since, for the girls, I had wanted Sally and Rebecca, but had prudently given in to her on each occasion, she knew she wasn't justified in denying me the name I wanted now. “
Merde
!” she said. “I hope that it will be a girl!” But her pout turned—as I had known it would—to giggles when I told her that even the crazy British might consider this a touch eccentric: a little girl named Arthur. It also helped that I had deliberately brought the topic up in bed and that I knew her ticklish spots and had most shamelessly exploited my knowledge.

However, I still realized there was something virtually unbalanced about the way I felt. I was objective enough to know that if I'd met anyone who had advocated a similar scenario, or even smilingly encouraged mine, I should have given them a pretty wide berth. And yet the thing was in my blood. I lived it, breathed it, thought about it as I went to sleep, thought about it when I woke.

For Arthur—of course—was to be my means of recompense to Brian Douglas: the son he'd never had, never could have had, but who was going to make his dream come true—as literally, that is, as lay within my grasp and within Arthur's own predisposition and abilities. A senseless vow maybe, made to myself, not even to the man whom I had so finally, if ambivalently, sinned against…or in any case not made to him directly. Senseless and perhaps inordinately presumptuous.

Yet wholly inescapable.

Or so it had seemed.

But also… Wasn't it significant that from the time I'd made my vow I hadn't once been troubled by that nightmare? A nightmare hitherto relentless?

Okay, this could well have been psychological. Yet, even so, I saw it as a sign.

Though again I agree: I was always fairly good at spotting signs.

On the 20
^th
of March 1964 I wrote a letter to my former English master and sent it via his publishers. It was a short letter in which I simply told him I had read his poems and how very much some of them had meant to me—and in which I asked if we might meet, possibly in London. I don't know which was dominant, my sadness or my guilt, when two days later I received an answer not from him but from his editor, to the effect that Humphrey Hawk-Genn had “very tragically passed away on March 9
^th
,” barely a fortnight earlier, “just when he seemed to be getting fully into his stride, potentially a most tremendous loss to the world of English letters.” I was shaken, and castigated myself for days because I hadn't written sooner. There wouldn't have been a thing to stop me. But I'd thought I still had plenty of opportunity and hadn't made allowance for the fact that time so often caught me out: either by the sheer rapidity of its passing or, indeed, by the exact opposite. Still. Since my feelings of shame and inadequacy, which even prayer apparently could do little to exorcise, were obviously of no value to anyone, it was as well that by then my birthday was approaching and that things about the house were hectic: Geneviève was expecting to go into labour at literally any moment.

And she did so—most wonderfully—at 9pm on March 27
^th
; and our child was born a little under six hours later. And he was our first boy and when he was merely minutes old Geneviève held him to her with tears in her eyes and whispered, “
Oh, mon petit mignon, que tu es beau! Tu es tellement beau, mon chéri, que je te pardonne immédiatement que tu t'appelle Arthur
.”

19

Nottingham in the middle sixties was a lot pleasanter than in the early nineties—even though the mystifying vandalism that could tear down acres of fine Georgian housing in order to replace them with unmitigated ugliness was by then well under way. We lived in Forest Road, which was peaceful and tree-lined, in a late-Victorian house that belonged to the Church and was not only about the same age as our old one in Park Avenue, but likewise had three floors and knew all about rattling window frames and irrepressible, frequently icy, draughts. (And
here
we had no central heating.) St Andrew's was roughly equidistant between the two. Sometimes I used to cycle up the hill expressly to have a look at No 17—which was now let out to students—and to remind myself of how extraordinarily blest I was; and that I should never, ever, start to take for granted a life so cram-full of miracles. Park Avenue represented deadness; or, at best, limbo. Forest Road, on the other hand, seemed practically in paradise.