Charlotte Gray (66 page)

At tea-time on the third day of her visit she returned from her walk and went to the kitchen, where her mother was taking a tray of scones from the oven. Amelia Gray gave her usual friendly, slightly startled smile of welcome.

"You're just in time," she said, as she poured tea from the pot on the scrubbed table.

"Let's have it in here, shall we, as it's just the two of us?" Perhaps her mother could help, thought Charlotte; perhaps this was the time to enlist her confidence. Somehow, the very thought of it was discouraging to Charlotte: her mother would turn her face from intimacy of this kind, she would run for some domestic cover.

In her state of heightened introspection this, too, seemed suggestive to Charlotte. Was this another aspect of the problem? Or was she now turning in such tight circles that she could no longer distinguish between the trivial and the significant?

She put her elbows on the table and sighed, holding her face between her hands, the restored colours of her hair tumbling down over her fingers. Amelia Gray was looking at her daughter with anxious concern when the telephone rang.

"Oh, drat," she said.

"Who can that be?"

She went into the sitting room to answer it.

"Charlotte," she called out a few moments later.

"It's for you."

"For me?" Charlotte was dragged out of her reverie.

"Who is it?"

"He didn't say," said her mother, as she came back into the kitchen. In the sitting room Charlotte picked up the big receiver from the polished occasional table where it lay on its side.

"Hello?"

"Is that Charlotte?"

"Yes, it is."

"Charlotte, you may not remember me. It's a voice from long ago. This is Peter Gregory."

"Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

"Charlotte?"

"Oh, my God."

At the end of their conversation, Gregory had to inhale deeply. He was sitting in the office of the convalescent home near Godalming, to which he had been sent on his return from North Africa. There had been a wait of two days before Daisy could contact her mother to find out the telephone number of Charlotte's parents, and he feared that she might already be on her way back to London by the time he got through.

Gregory was not by nature a timorous man, but on board the ship from Genoa he had run this conversation through his mind several times. At various points he had convinced himself that he should not contact Charlotte.

He could not offer her what she was worth; all he could bring was this absurd passion that he had conceived for her almost in the moment of their separation, then kept doggedly alive in the months of his absence.

He knew that it was this feeling alone that had brought him through the agony of his untended injuries and through the pain of his reconnection with the world.

He valued it accordingly, but was not convinced it was worth offering. Only when he heard her stunned and gasping reaction to his voice did he fully register the depth of his passion for her. There was such struggle and humility in her tone, the sense of something so long and terribly desired, that he felt crushed by it. But for the first time since he had known Charlotte he no longer felt intimidated, and he understood that the complexity of her feelings was not for her the source of any sense of superiority but, on the contrary, the cause of awful anguish. For the first time he believed that his own life, however tarnished in his eyes, was what was necessary for the redemption of hers.

Charlotte put down the telephone and walked out of the house, down to the end of the garden. She sat on a wooden bench in an area of lawn surrounded by rhododendron bushes and tried to control her feelings.

She could not at first think of Gregory as a person, as a man with a voice and hands and things of his own to say; his return seemed only a disembodied vindication of her long and solitary refusal to give up hope.

She felt stunned by gratitude, because that hope had never amounted to belief.

In the evening, over dinner with her parents, her trance-like incredulity began to be penetrated by the first movements of joy.

What would he look like? What would he say?

"You're in a world of your own tonight. Charlotte," said her father.

"I'm sorry." She smiled at him.

She tried to hold his eye and in some way to encourage him. She felt the return of Gregory had a bearing on her father, too, and that there might yet be some way out of their impasse.

That night, sleeping deeply beneath her old quilted eiderdown, she had a sequence of dreams. They were mostly of the intensely realised but inconsequential kind that her father's friend had characterised as 'neural waste'. She dreamed she was a nurse at war, and that Levade came to her with the wound on his shoulder gaping. She was on a ship, and had to organise interminable games among unruly children who would not listen to her orders. Finally, she dreamed she was herself a child. She was on the deck of the ship, surrounded by her dolls and by her books, and, from a door down to a lower deck, her father emerged.

Instinctively, she recoiled as he came and knelt beside her. He opened his arms and hugged her, hard, against his chest, then laid his face on her shoulder. Looking down, expecting to see his cruelty or rage, she saw instead that he was weeping. She brushed away the tears with her fingers; she soothed him and stroked his white hair.

All the next morning she paced round the house and garden. She had the feeling that the blocks of frozen memory were melting, that movement was coming back into these long-locked regions. There was nothing she could do to speed it up or clarify it, but she felt that physical activity would in some way help. After lunch, she went for another walk, and, as she sat on a hill looking back towards the city of Edinburgh, she began to think of Levade's death. The rooms of the Domaine her bedroom and, in particular, his studio seemed very clear in her mind: she could smell the lime wood of the back staircase, the oil paints, the dusty air.

She mourned her dead friend at last, thinking of his undignified death in that half-built place among strangers. She cried for his lonely end and for his defeated struggle, and she cried, if she was honest, a little for herself as well, and a suspicion that, whatever the degree of anxiety in which she had lived those days in the Domaine, she might never again exist at such a level of intensity. Later, when she was walking home, she felt an uplifting gratitude towards Levade. Perhaps a dozen times in his life he had painted pictures in which he had been able to pierce the deceptive layer of appearances that clothed the world, to go beyond it and re-imagine a deeper existence that lay beneath. Then he had become a prisoner of his sensual desires, and of his mind's refusal to unlock itself, with the result that the last ten years of his life had passed with a vain hammering at the gates of his memory. Yet, Charlotte thought, as her quickening steps carried her toward the lights of the village below, that dreaming process he had so passionately desired had worked instead for her: what had long imprisoned him had set her free. The next day was a Saturday, the last but one of Charlotte's intended visit. Her mother went into Edinburgh to do some shopping. Charlotte said she would stay and cook lunch for her father. Both her parents looked surprised, and her mother talked temptingly of Princes Street and new clothes.

Charlotte remained firm and, when they had had lunch and cleared the plates away, forced herself to confront her father once more.

"You know what we were saying the other night? About ... you and me, being a father and so on."

"Yes." Gray sounded uneasy.

They were in the sitting room, either side of the fire, on which he now selfconsciously threw another log. Charlotte folded her hands in her lap.

"I've been thinking. I think I must apologise."

"Oh, yes?" Gray was at his most discouraging. His tone suggested that not only was what Charlotte was trying to say intrusively personal, but that it was also likely to be misguided.

Very slowly, and picking the words she felt were as gentle as possible while still being truthful. Charlotte said, "All my life I've believed that when I was young, perhaps seven or eight, you did something to me.

You hurt me. I've never known exactly how. All I knew for sure was the result. I felt as though my childhood had ended. As though something had been prematurely and cruelly taken from me."

Gray looked appalled.

"What did I do?"

Still speaking with slow precision, despite a constricting pressure in her lungs. Charlotte said, "My memory is of some physical contact that went too far. Later on, I came to believe that it might have been something sexual. I don't believe that now, but only something like that could have explained the depth of the wound you inflicted."

She found her cheeks and forehead were burning.

Gray swallowed. For a moment his devastation at what his daughter had said appeared to overwhelm him; then some professional curiosity steadied him.

"I'm glad you've told me, I'm glad it's out at last."

His shattered voice sounded anything but glad, but Charlotte was reassured by his response. There was no trace of guilty recollection, and his attitude meant she might now carry on.

"Since I've been here, in these last few days," she said, "I feel as though I've somehow come to grips with it. This thing, this terrible thing that has been in my mind all my life ..." She began to sob, then controlled herself. "By a complicated process, too much to explain, I think I may have understood." Gray was nodding, but did not speak.

"Do you remember anything?" said Charlotte.

"Any incident?"

Gray stood up.

"Before you tell me what you think, would it help if I told you what I had thought? Then if we think the same, at least you won't think I'm just agreeing with you to bring it all to a close?"

"All right."

Gray chose his words with equal care.

"What you must understand first is that you were a miracle to me. At that time of war. To return from the scenes I'd witnessed, and to see this girl child ... To look at my hands, know what they had done, what my eyes had seen and then to think that from inside my own body I had created this female flesh. He shook his head and breathed in tightly for a moment.

"That's what a father feels about a girl this otherness this innocence, when I myself felt so terribly old and filthy and corrupted by experience. And as a little girl, you did love me. Then I was aware that something was wrong. You weren't an easy child. Charlotte."

"I know."

"You turned into such a bluestocking. You were so ferocious with your studies, so good at them. But I felt I couldn't reach you. And then those awful depressions. I felt powerless. This was my profession, and I couldn't help you. Of course, I strongly suspected that I was the problem, or part of it. It was agonising to watch. Can you imagine?

Because, still, for me you were the hope of life and femininity."

"I can imagine."

"Your mother was ... a wonderful woman, but she was not comforting in any physical sense. I don't mean like that, but ' " I understand."

"Perhaps there was a time, a particular incident." Gray spoke very slowly.

"Perhaps there was. I can honestly say I don't remember, but perhaps at some level I was determined not to. And this cruelty I forced on you. Do you know what it was?"

"I think so," said Charlotte, very softly.

"War. The memory of war."

There was a long silence in the room. Eventually, Gray said, "Better men than I were destroyed by it."

"I'm sorry I was no comfort to you."

"I must have asked too much. I asked a child to bear the weight of those unspeakable things, a weight that drove grown men mad."

"And do you think there was a time, an incident?"

Gray breathed in deeply.

"I do remember crying once. I was suddenly caught by this frightening emotion I had so long held in check. I remember it was triggered by something trivial, then it came up out of me with these terrible noises, a sort of primeval howling. I think you came to me. Perhaps you were worried by the noise. Perhaps I shouted at you to go away because I didn't want you to stay."

"No. You did want me to stay. You held me, and you held me so hard it almost crushed me. But I don't think it was that pain that remained with me. It was the sight and the sound of your grief. Somehow you must have conveyed to me the horror of what you had seen. You told me about it. The millions of dead."

Gray's voice was scarcely audible.

"I was so alone."

"And is it possible that I would remember it as physical pain?"

"It's possible." He lifted his head.

"Your memory may have been trying to protect you. To lay a screen across something worse. A child would find it easier to think of being hurt in some way, crushed or beaten, than to look on the misery I had somehow opened up to you." Charlotte was very calm.

"I think that's right, I think that may be right." Her father, meanwhile, was distraught.

"But my dear Charlotte, to think that I did this to you. That I couldn't face it on my own. That I had to take away all your poor childish innocence to help me bear it." He began to weep.

"The faces of those young men at dawn ... All that joy that should have been yours."

Charlotte stood up and went to her father. She held out her arms.

Gray came into her embrace and laid his head on her shoulder. He was howling.

"All that innocence. From my own daughter."

"It doesn't matter," said Charlotte, as she held her father in her arms and stroked his face. She felt love erupt in her.

"It doesn't matter now, it doesn't matter any more."

By the time Charlotte returned to London, Peter Gregory had been moved from the convalescent home and sent to an airfield in Suffolk to be debriefed by the R.A.F. Both of them used Daisy's flat as a place to leave messages, but there followed a frustrating three days' delay before he would be free to come back to the capital.