The Drowning People (31 page)
I remember the day she came. I remember standing in the hall, waiting to submit to her inspection and to her two, efficient Christmas kisses; and I remember thinking that Julia’s visit might divert me from myself; that she might take the attention of the household from me and allow me some of the space I needed, without resorting to the emotional intrusion I so dreaded from my parents. It was by Julia, you see, that I hoped to be removed from the immediacy of Eric’s death. I looked forward to the unquestioned authority of her conversation and to the way in which she assumed control of my Christmas entertainment. I wanted her to protect me from myself in a way in which my parents, who knew me better, were powerless to do; and I felt that her protection, like mine in the beginning for Ella, would come at a time when it was sorely needed.
It was my mother who suggested I take Jep on his daily walks; and the privilege was graciously bestowed on me by Julia, who thought no honor higher than that which came with the entrustment of his care. He was a happy, self-important little dog, with the shiny coat and benevolent eyes of the well-loved basset hound; and his impatience for his daily exercise gave me the opportunity and excuse for solitude, for I pretended to be jealous of Jep’s affection and would allow no one to accompany us on our excursions together.
It’s strange, you know: strange that those few walks through the windy drizzle of an English December should have been so important to me; strange that now, from a distance of fifty years, they should recur to me with such vividness. I wonder why they do. Perhaps already I was tired of drama; perhaps already my hopes and dreams were shrinking, or had shrunk, and my desires were tilting towards the secure mediocrity of a warm bed and a quiet life. I don’t know. I know only that I found something reassuring in the uncalculating, uncomplicated affection of Jep; something endearing in his long ears and waddling gait. The trust of animals is easy to keep, easier than that of humans: for it carries with it no real burdens; no real temptations. It is a bond that ties us to reality, to the limitations of the everyday; and that was precisely the sort of bond I most needed then. Even through my grief I was human enough to be grateful for Jep’s companionship, and I showed my gratitude in an endless affection which he accepted complacently as his right.
The solitude of those walks was a welcome release for me too, for at home I had no time to myself. The house was filled with a constant stream of guests whose coats I had to take, whose glasses I had to fill; and whose conversation, smooth with the practiced fluency of countless Christmas drinks parties, I had to listen to and smile at. In only one room could I be sure of privacy, and that was the tiny one at the top of the house in which I’d spent long summer afternoons playing to Ella. But it, of all places, held no peace for me. Her laugh rang there continually, I could not go near its door.
And so, with an irony I didn’t appreciate then, I sought solitude amongst the pavement crowds of a large city; and amongst faces I did not know, faces which held no memories for me, I found some release from memory and some, very fleeting, peace. With Jep the basset hound by my side, I walked through the stream of shoppers making hasty purchases on Christmas Eve and the days immediately before it; I listened to frenzied discussions about food and gifts and clothes and lovers and holidays; saw friends laughing loudly at bus stops and couples arguing quietly about nothing, their faces pinched from cold and irritation. I walked through these vignettes of other people’s lives and listened with the frightened enthusiasm of one who is no longer interested in his own life. I tried to care about the nameless faces I saw; about the passions and desires which fueled their smiles and gave an edge to their angers. I tried to wonder about the resolution of their conflicts; about the continuance of their friendships and the futures of their loves. I tried even to envy them. For I felt then that I had lost such things forever; that my own life had lost the power to move me; and I dreaded the cold blandness of a spiritual divorce from oneself.
I was not yet ready to face what I had done; to return even mentally to the scene of Eric’s death or to the events which had preceded it. I lived in constant terror of my own memory, for I knew what pain it could inflict; and so I tried to interest myself in the lives of people I did not know, hoping thus to escape from myself and to reestablish some kind of emotional reality in my own life, vicarious though it might be.
Christmas came and went and I ate and drank and tried to laugh as I was meant to, watching my mother’s concealed irritation as Julia lit cigars at the dinner table land fed Jep bits of turkey and called my father an old dog. The vicar’s wife came alone to lunch on Boxing Day—her husband being “terribly run down with flu”—and held forth on the subject of the church bazaar while Julia asked whatever anyone saw in antimacassars. I took Jep out twice a day: hour-long oases of time alone to which I looked forward with an eagerness I could not quite hide and from which I returned, cheeks flushed, to face the social obligations of life in my mother’s house with renewed energy.
It was from one of these expeditions, made on the eve of Julia’s departure, that I returned, at six o’clock, to find no guests present and Julia in full flow on the subject of the vicar’s wife.
“Bloody awful dress, I thought,” she was saying as I came in. “I for one see no reason why ugliness should be next to godliness, do you?”
“None whatever,” replied my father, handing her a glass of water.
Julia was sitting bolt upright in her favorite chair by the fire, a cigar in one hand, her iron gray hair scraped back from her face. Helping myself to a gin and tonic from the drinks table, I sat down in a dark corner by the window, a corner from which I could watch my father laughing and listen to the conversation without necessarily having to contribute to it myself.
“Damned cheek, dressing so badly,” Aunt Julia continued. “It must be an awful embarrassment to her husband.”
And I thought with pity of the vicar’s dowdy wife and of what she must have suffered at Julia’s hands over lunch, a pity which did not prevent me from laughing at her misfortunes and at the good-humored malice with which her character and tastes were systematically assassinated before me. Sitting with Jep on my lap I felt with relief that the cold flagstones and peeling shutters of Ella’s house in France were very far away; that the events which had taken place under its blackened beams and in the unloved decay of its gardens had taken on the quality of a nightmare; that they belonged to a different world from the one to which I had returned, and in which I was safe once again.
Surely the cozy domesticity of the scene before me was my reality now, I thought. Surely I could come to accept it, in any case, as the only reality that mattered; and perhaps if I did so I might find in its warmth a refuge from the pain of recollection. Surely…. But what is the use of my remembering my early hopes of self-delusion? I might have seen safety in self-deception even then, but I was powerless really to overcome my guilt or to forget what I had done. Only years of expert training could show me how to sever myself from my past and to forget even the most rudimentary tools of emotional analysis; and I had had no such training. I was a child, trying in a child’s way to deal with the consequences of actions committed with an adult’s strength. My instincts were to regress: to seek the safety of my earliest world, the world I looked at from my dark corner on that cold evening. I wanted a world of family and familiar faces, of warm conversation beside blazing fires in rooms I had known all my life. I derived comfort from the very presence of childhood figures like Aunt Julia. I needed security and stability and affection, the last of these so badly that even the unthinking devotion of a basset hound could move me.
I tried not to think of the details of Eric’s death, not to ask myself why I had not confessed to my part in it when I had had the chance. I tried not to think of the Vaugirards’ Christmas: of Eric
père
and Louise and Sylvie; of the forlorn group which they would make beside the Christmas tree in their narrow, rambling house with its croquet lawn behind. I tried not to think of Eric’s shoes; of the way he had laughed at our long search for a bed in Madame Mocsáry’s apartment; of the woman with the severe nose at Florian’s with whom he had argued. I tried not to think of him playing the piano in the impromptu music room at Sokolska 21; of the way his eyes used to flash when we played together well; of the smell of aftershave and sweat which had lingered in his bedroom at Ella’s. I tried to focus on the group before me, to listen to Aunt Julia’s acerbic wit, to smile at my mother’s irritation when a stray piece of cigar ash found its way onto the carpet. But the room swam before my eyes and all I could hear, listen though I might, was Eric’s voice telling me that he loved me completely; all I could see was his swollen body laid out on the hard ground by the quarry with Dr. Pétin bending over it in tears.
“My God, the boy’s crying.” It was Julia’s voice that spoke; and it was her thin arms that circled my shoulders; her cracked voice that told me, with a soft sympathy far from her usual tone, that I should get a grip at once and stop being so silly.
I
DID RECOVER
. O
NE DOES
. And the recovery I made, though never more than partial, was remarkable; I see that now. I see what Sarah did for me; can appreciate the skill with which she taught her chill lessons of self-delusion and deceit. But as I stood with Julia’s arms around me on that cold December night, trying to avoid my parents’ worried eyes, I had no idea what lay before me; no real suspicion of how difficult the path ahead would prove to be. The worries of children never endure; their fleetingness is one of the compensations of childhood. And child that I was, I did not suspect then, as I told my family that I was tired and that they should take no notice of me, that I had been initiated into a harsher world. I did not realize that those few weeks in Prague and France had taken me forever from the cheerful confines of previous feeling; that Ella’s love and Eric’s death had raised me to a colder, more adult plane of experience; that suffering in this new world could be lasting and real. I did not suspect because I had not yet tasted the bitterness of unresolved grief; and my lesson, soon to come, was protracted and painful in a way it has taken me years to forget.
But the pain of those first weeks could not prolong itself indefinitely; and the fires burned themselves out in the end, as all fires do, though they left smouldering coals which destroyed my hopes of peace. At last the Guildhall term began and I was thrown into a busy round of classes and private practice which took some of the immediacy from my misery, for routine is a great palliative. And in devoted industry I found some relief. I found it too in the comforting presence of people and of places I knew; and so I learned, little by little, to live with what I had done.
People who think they understand say that life goes on; that time heals. And bland though they are, there is some truth in such platitudes. My life
did
go on after Eric’s death; without my actively ending it, I suppose, it could not have done otherwise. And slowly I learned to laugh at people’s jokes again; to listen to their troubles; to hear of their loves and their plans with something approaching enthusiasm. I learned to get through the days; and gradually, with time, they became bearable. No more than bearable, I know that now; perhaps I suspected it even then. But I was grateful for the smallest mercies.
My practice room at the Guildhall, a tatty little space that held no memories, became the center of my life; and as I talk I see again its cheaply varnished upright piano; the lime linoleum of its small square floor; the steel music stand that stood beside its dirty windows of frosted glass. I remember the mustiness of its smell; the cigarette burns on its small table; the faded prints of original scores and Viennese waltzers which were all that enlivened its four brown walls. Nothing could have been further from the splendors of Madame Mocsáry’s apartment, that is certain; but I rejoiced in the anonymity of its ugliness. In Room 32 I was safe, you see; and I spent many hours playing in it, undisturbed and alone.
My violin was my chief comfort in those dark days. And sometimes, when I played, Eric faded from my mind as the music filled it; sometimes, for an hour or two, seldom longer, I was free from the memory of what I had done to him. But I could never be so for long. My guilt always returned; and with it came the sound of my friend’s laugh and the sightless gaze of his open eyes as his body was laid out by the quarry. For weeks such sights never left my mind, whichever way I looked for distraction. But it was when I did not play that Eric was with me most frequently: a haunting presence with wild hair and dull eyes; a silent apparition with words of love on his lips. He lived in my dreams and sleep ceased to be a refuge; instead it became a frightening cacophony of sight and sound and smell, of tears and yells and long, steep falls into darkness. I began to lie awake in bed, willing the morning to come; telling myself that nothing is ever so awful by daylight; that even Eric’s laugh would not outlast the coming of morning and the chasing of the shadows. With no one to confide in I was alone. And I learned the hard truth that isolation has little to do with the number of people who fill your days; that solitude follows you everywhere; that the mind itself is our keenest jailer.
I did not see Ella, though I read of her in the newspapers and magazines which chronicled her return to England a week after my own; and with disgust I saw the lurid headlines which screamed stories of insanity above close-up photographs of her white face, pale with exhaustion, as she walked out of customs at Heathrow. I read the florid stories of the Harcourt curse; read also how it had claimed a new victim, a young and promising French pianist, one of the family’s guests at their “picturesque villa in northwestern France.”
On such nonsense does the popular imagination feed.