Ever After (21 page)

“I mean they don’t
do
it, do they, pal? Not in real life. Why do you think your pa did it? Because he found out about Sylvie and me, and it was all too much for him, and he couldn’t bear to go on living? If he cared that much, why didn’t he take me aside and kick the shit out of me? Why didn’t he point that goddam gun at
me
? And let me tell you, if he
had
, I’d’ve
run
, I’d’ve got the hell out of there fast. You wouldn’t have seen me for dust. You wouldn’t be talking to me now. It was just a fling—Sylvie and me. If it wasn’t for— You think your Ma and me were
made
for each other? You think I wanted the old guy out of the way so I could pick up the winnings? That’s what you’ve always thought, isn’t it? But you’re wrong. It was just a fling.
It just happened to end up lasting forty years. You see, pal, some people are just flingers. Just flingers. You see, I don’t believe in this there’s-a-girl-for-every-boy-and-a-boy-for-every-girl stuff. It’s just who you get thrown against in the trolley-car, and there’s more than one trolley-car and more than one ride. Hell—I haven’t even got to the main item. You haven’t heard anything yet.”

He looks around at the sun-filled garden, as if it’s in his power to bring a shutter down on all that he sees. He gulps for air.

“I don’t have to tell you this. I know that’s what you’re going to say: ‘You didn’t have to tell me this.’ But I’m going to tell you this. You see, I figured it was up to her. And I figured if she told you, I’d soon know about it. Then, after she died, I figured I’d give it time, in case you found something among the stuff she left you. Yeah, yeah, you found those notebooks you told me about. I’m glad you found those notebooks.” He gives me a soft, solicitous look. “Well, I’ve given it time. You see, I figured she might have meant to tell you. But she couldn’t
speak
, could she? She couldn’t damn well speak. So I figured it was up to me. It was damn well up to me. And don’t think I haven’t thought, over and over: I don’t have to tell him this, the kid need never know. But I’m going to tell you, because it’s the truth. The truth. And you have to tell the truth, don’t you, pal? You see, he found out. Your pa found out. Of course he found out. Were we
careful
? And there was this helluva bust-up between him and Sylvie, and in the middle of it Sylvie tells him—and afterwards she tells me she’s told him—that you weren’t—that you weren’t his son. She tells him that to his face. And two days later your pa—who isn’t your pa, who never was your pa—well, you know this, pal—he goes and shoots himself.”

I stare hard at Sam, whose face has the dissolved, transparent
look that people have when they wish they had the power of disappearance, or when they would be very grateful if, for a few minutes at least, they could be someone other than they are. I suppose, in a different way, this is my look too.

The first thought I register on receiving Sam’s words is a perfectly empirical observation of the state of the world around me. It hasn’t altered. Spring sunshine, with a little flutter of a breeze, caresses the flower beds. A pigeon waddles nonchalantly on the lawn.

The second is the sudden, headlong, insane thought that the blenching, familiar but transmogrified face I see before me is the face—of my father. But this, of course, is impossible; this would be entirely irrational.

So I say, in a voice that surprises me with its rationality, its steadiness, its cool, unpanicking pertinence: “So, if my father wasn’t— Who—?”

“It’s okay. It’s all right. He’s dead. He was dead when Sylvie told him. He was killed in the war. He’s dead.”

I stare at him, not comprehending his propitiating tone. He can’t refuse me more information.

“I think she said he came from Aldermaston. But I guess he was always on the move.… He was an engine-driver, pal. Would you believe it? She had this thing going, back in the Thirties, with an engine-driver. On the main line west.”

13
 

The word “innocence” lodges in my mind. A teasing, a fugitive notion, easiest to gauge by its loss. In this metamorphosed condition in which I find myself, in this state of stunned divorce from my former self, it sometimes seems to me that innocence is the very quality of which I have been entirely drained. Self-slaughter, even bungled self-slaughter, is, I believe, a sin. A mortal sin. And yet, as I sit in these paradisiacal surroundings, it seems to me, equally, that innocence is precisely what has been rendered unto me, as if my return to life—if I can call it that—has restored me, but without expunging my memories, to a condition prior to experience.

Innocence. So insidiously close, in sound and sense, to “ignorance.” Not knowing something, we are “innocent of it”—so we say. Yet, from another point of view, only the truth is, truly, innocent. So when Matthew determined to know the truth, was it Matthew who was the foolish innocent, or was it the rest of the world, happy in its worldly credulity? And what of this place right here—this hub, this Mecca of knowledge? Are we innocent other-worldlings, cut off in our cloistered confines from mundane erroneousness, or are we really the arch-villains of the piece? A proper little gang of Fausts? Are we the ones
to blame
?

I told myself, of course: it doesn’t matter. What should I do? Nothing. What should I say? Nothing. How am I changed? In no way. The fiction of my life (if that is what it is) may as well serve as the fact. I am my father’s son,
meaning my father-whom-I-once-knew-as-my-father’s son, by whose death my life has been so irreversibly moulded. I am who I am. I am Bill Unwin (there, I declare myself!). I am Hamlet the Dane.

Innocence. Innocence.

What I am about to relate occurred only three days after Sam’s annunciatory visit. Yet I don’t think that on that Tuesday morning I was in any particular way altered. Three days had passed, it might be said, since the passing of my innocence. But against this, I maintain, I actually
felt
more innocent. To discover that for fifty years of your life you have been labouring under a massive misapprehension is a fair enough reminder at least of your
capacity
for innocence. It puts a sort of childlike hesitancy into your step and a dazed, receptive smile on your face. It makes you feel—as though you have swallowed some initially tranquillizing drug—really quite
good
.

It was another fine spring day, though there had been rain and, in contrast to the day of Sam’s visit, there was a slight chill in the breeze. That is, I think the chill was in the breeze, not in me. But perhaps what I am struggling to avoid saying is that on that bright May morning, which began with my routinely making my way (always carry on as normal), like a good scholar, from college to library, I felt the first shadowy premonition of what I am now.

For the scholar on foot, the way to the Library (I mean the University Library, not our quaint but incommodious college library) lies along those very paths which Sam and I had trod, on such different business. Over humped bridges, by flowery verges and through budding groves (the veritable groves of academe). There is only one road to cross; then a further, less sylvan path leads to the looming bulk of the Library.

It is hard not to see in this layout an allegorical significance:
the Palace—the Citadel—of Knowledge approached through the meads and thickets of Dalliance, along the by-ways of Beguilement. And anyone can be beguiled, even the worthiest pilgrim of Learning. For there, on this spry spring morning, was Potter. Or rather, there was Potter’s easily spotted and meant-to-be-conspicuous car—a red Audi—drawn up at the edge of the road (the Highway of Worldly Traffic) which the good pilgrim must cross. And there, leaning in at the passenger window, was one of the pilgrims. At least she was dressed in the sombre hue of a votary—black skirt, black sweater, black tights, short, pixyish black boots. But such a funereal outfit on a girl of little more than twenty has a way of suggesting not solemnity, not mournfulness at all.

I recognised her as Gabriella, from that evening at Potter’s.

I could see that Potter was leaning across from the driver’s seat and that his hand was extended through the open passenger’s window and was grasping hers. Or rather—which was a crucial difference—he was not grasping her hand, he was grasping her wrist and pulling at it. And it was clear from the tension of her body that, if she was not exactly pulling away, she was resisting his tug. There are only certain limited circumstances in which this sort of contact might occur between a man and a woman (just as there are only certain circumstances in which a woman might stroke, not just touch but quite deliberately, coaxingly stroke, a man’s unsuspecting forearm).

I thought of slinking off—into the Thickets not of Dalliance but of Discretion. But as is often the case when you stumble upon an awkward situation, evasion is more obvious than holding a steady course. I walked on.

Potter saw me first. I’m sure he didn’t wish to see me. I’m sure these were the last circumstances in which he
would have wished me to appear on the scene—I admit to savouring my advantage. But then he didn’t know how much I had seen—least of all that I had observed Gabriella in his clutches before, the clutch being then not to the wrist but to the buttock. He let go his grip. She turned: a furl of dark hair; a face, in the gleaming brightness reflected from the wet road, of startled Latin loveliness. A smile—I couldn’t tell exactly—of pleasurable recognition or of flustered gratitude at my timely intervention. She took the opportunity, at any rate, to depart without more ado, moving round to the back of Potter’s car and waiting in the road for a gap in the stream of traffic. I thought: she is going my way, to the Library; I should continue in that direction too. Then Potter, still leaning across towards the passenger window, exclaimed, “Ah, Bill—just the man,” as if he had been expecting me all along. Then he added, opening the passenger door, “Get in.”

“I’m going to the Library,” I said. My eyes may have flickered for a moment to where Gabriella was still standing, waiting for the chance to cross.

“I know. Get in,” he said, in the peremptory tone that gangsters in films use, often reinforcing their words with a gun. Come to think of it, with his eyes hidden by a pair of thick-framed dark glasses, Potter looked, intentionally or otherwise, not a little like a gangster. I had the feeling of having happened on him at his most absurd and desperate—caught in some outlandish charade. Perhaps he realised this. I was glad his eyes were hidden. Perhaps he merely wanted to prevent me from joining Gabriella on the walk to the Library. Perhaps he was trying to save the situation by an apparent seizing of the initiative.

Like a fool, I got in.

Gabriella had crossed the road and was about to disappear from view. The black sweater almost eclipsed the
black skirt. He stuck his head out of the driver’s window and shouted
“Ciao bella!”
in her direction. She didn’t turn. Perhaps she didn’t hear. As we drove off, he said, “I think you’ve met Gabriella. Research student. From Verona. Sweet kid. Sweet kid.”

He looked at the briefcase lying on my knees.

“Where are we going?” I asked meekly.

“Oh—just for a ride. A ride, a spin, a chat. Lovely morning like this. Don’t worry, the Library won’t go away. You’re working on the Pearce manuscripts?”

“Yes, as it happens—”

“And how’s it coming along?”

I shrugged.

“You can’t do it, Bill. You can’t fucking do it!”

“I can’t?”

“You don’t have the background.”

“I’ll find out. That’s why I was—”

“Why should you spend a year researching what I could tell you right now?”

There was an answer to this, not an easy or a scholarly answer. But this was no time to give it.

“They’re my notebooks,” I said.

“It’s my field.”

“It’s my business.”

We stopped at traffic lights. He groped for a cigarette and roughly offered me one. Inside the car there was still a faint trace of scent. The seat was warm. How casually we human beings exchange places. Then I noticed on the shelf in front of me, beneath the dashboard, hidden from Potter by assorted clutter, a small, cylindrical bottle of perfume. So (the evidence of a hasty exit): while they had “had words,” she had coolly taken out her perfume and dabbed herself, perhaps serenely eyed her compact mirror as well. Then, the words getting more heated, she had got
out and slammed the door, having absent-mindedly flung the perfume bottle beneath the dashboard. Then she had remembered and reached in through the window—“My perfume”—and he had grabbed her wrist.

These little scenes …

He turned to light my cigarette. The glare of the sun, as it had set off Gabriella’s limpid complexion, showed up his tired features. Minor celebrity-dom has not become Potter. As his TV face has acquired definition, so his private face has become blurred. Perhaps it is exposure to the studio cameras which has given him, in the light of day, the worn-but-defiant looks of a faded matinée idol. The hair, which affects a tousled nonchalance, is betrayed by the crinkled brow. The eyes, when not masked by the raffish sun-glasses, have their own shadowy nimbus. Every so often they have this vexed expression, as if a serious man were trying to get out from the guise of a clown.