Five Roundabouts to Heaven (3 page)

But then, though I fought against it, it all changed, and as the shadows lengthened, the suffering was no longer sweet, but grim.

Some of the figures which I imagined once more upon the terrace were blurred, but Philip Bartels was clear enough.

We used to keep on the terrace one or more long, flexible rods, about six feet tall, which we cut from saplings. A length of thin string was tied to the top of each, and on the other end of the string was a little piece of red flannel. When we had five minutes to while away, we would lean over the side of the terrace and dangle the bit of flannel in front of the numerous frogs which lived in the moat. If a frog bit the flannel, mistaking it for a winged insect, we would whip it out of the water while its mouth was still entangled in the flannel, and then catch it in the grass by the side of the moat.

It didn’t do the frogs any harm or us any good—only once did we decide to catch and kill enough to eat—and the skill lay in trying to deceive the frog by a lifelike manipulation of the bait.

Bartels, the keen fisherman, was naturally the most enthusiastic. He would always stroll out in his dinner jacket for a few minutes with the frogs before dinner. He was very good at frog-fishing. Sometimes Ingrid would lean over the terrace wall to watch him; and I would stroll out and join them both, because I was terribly jealous where Ingrid was concerned.

Bartels was my best friend. But Ingrid was my love. However, I realize now that I need not have worried. Knowing how I felt, Bartels was always scrupulously correct in his attitude to Ingrid.

All this I remembered, that wonderful summer night when I revisited the château: the château which was so quiet, and yet so alive to me who watched from the shadow of the rhododendron bush. I recalled, too, that the time came, many years later, when I myself was not so punctilious; when I acted craftily towards my best friend, with results which even to this day I find it difficult to assess.

I saw Bartels clearly that evening.

He stood out sharp-cut from the rest, leaning over the terrace wall. Once, he looked up and glanced for several long seconds towards where I stood, and so real did he seem that even now there are occasions when I wonder whether he was really summoned to the scene only by my imagination.

I saw him, a slenderly built figure of nineteen, with a lean face browned by the summer sun. He was not good-looking; indeed, in some ways there was something slightly comical about him. His features were reasonably regular, and the nose was straight and delicately chiselled; but he wore spectacles, of which the frames were of tortoiseshell and the side-pieces of gold; and although he kept his hair fairly well ordered, there were some hairs, on the crown of his head, which insisted upon sticking up. He had, too, a very wide mouth, of which the lips were rather thin and bloodless. So that sometimes, with his unruly hair and big mouth, he bore a faint resemblance to a cross between Donald Duck and one of the frogs he was so keen on catching.

I think his voice was his most attractive feature, that and his gentle, generous nature and ready sense of humour. His voice was deep and rich, and he always spoke very slowly and deliberately, and, when he looked towards me that evening, I seemed to hear him call to me, as he had often called before: “Come and look here, Pete—there’s a big one here going to bite!”

Yet although he was keen on gun and rod, I have seen him painstakingly rescue a drowning fly from a glass of wine, and place it on the window ledge in the sun. On another occasion I saw him spend five minutes trying to manoeuvre a daddy-long-legs out of a window. And once, in the autumn, when a butterfly which had flown into the drawing room fluttered into the fire, Bartels swung away from the grate with a gasp of horror, his hands over his face.

It was pain and suffering, for any living thing, which he abhorred, not death. He was unimpressed by death.

“What the hell difference do a few more days or years of life make in the limitless infinity of time?” he said once. “Death is of no consequence. It only seems of consequence because people decline to recognize its inevitability. They fight against it, instead of accepting it for what it is, as normal an event as birth.”

I remember we were leaning over the terrace wall looking down at the frogs in the moat when he said it; one evening, it was, before dinner. He turned to go inside, but as he did so, he added:

“It’s not dying that matters, it’s how you die. It’s the way in which you die.”

Hence the fly in the wine and the daddy-long-legs episodes; and his horror when the butterfly flew into the fire. Hence, too, the fact that he never took long, doubtful shots at wild game. He shot to kill.

He didn’t mind killing. But it had to be in the right conditions. Pity and ruthlessness lay tranquilly together in his soul. A curious mixture, indeed.

That, then, was the Philip Bartels of those days.

I made my way round the house to the rising ground which faced that part of the drive which curved to the front door. I went to L’Étoile, and sat on a fallen tree trunk, and waited as I had so often waited for Ingrid, in such a position that I could watch, between the trees, the front door through which she used to come to meet me.

But she didn’t come.

She never came to me that evening. Instead, there was Bartels again, pushing the front door open, coming out and making his way towards me, his shotgun on his arm, a bag of cartridges over his shoulder.

I saw him pause and look back at the house; stand looking up at one of the windows, just as he paused and looked up at another window nearly twenty years later.

And I realized that the window he was looking at was the window of the room which Beatrice had occupied.

I remember very clearly the evening when Beatrice Wilson arrived. It was a July evening, and very hot, with that humid, sticky heat which is perhaps the sole disadvantage of the beautiful Sologne area. But now there were clouds gathering on the horizon, and every promise of the storm which would bring freshness and relief in its train.

Despite the heat, we had played tennis in the afternoon, had changed into evening dress and dined, and were sitting languidly on the terrace drinking coffee, when the family car which had fetched Beatrice from Orléans station swept round the drive to the front door. As always, we were filled with mild curiosity about the newcomer.

Those of us who were English had adopted other nationalities, in accordance with an innocent subterfuge dear to the heart of Madame. I was to pretend to be a Swede. This arrangement had two advantages: it removed from the newcomer the temptation to speak English, and it provoked a good deal of fun and many tricky situations, all of which encouraged French conversation.

I heard Madame greet Beatrice Wilson in the hall behind us, heard her go up to her room to wash. Then she came down and was introduced to us.

She was a lovely-looking girl of about eighteen. Slim, in those days, with red hair and the milk-and-

roses complexion which goes with hair of that colour. Her features were regular and her eyes hazel. But I think that what impressed me most was her complete self-possession. She must have been aware that she was being summed up, by seven or eight young people, with all the critical and ruthless acumen of the young; yet so far from being disconcerted she appeared to be coolly indulging in some summing up herself. She gazed at each one of us in turn, reflectively, as she was introduced, and when she spoke, she used her limited school French to the best advantage.

I formed the opinion that Beatrice Wilson was likely to be a pleasant acquisition to our company, and so it proved.

Two weeks after she arrived I had to leave, but Philip Bartels stayed on for another three months. By the time I left, I had mentally noted that now, instead of changing into old clothes and slouching off by himself to fish or shoot, Bartels had taken to changing into white flannels and was prone to join us on the tennis courts in the afternoons. Moreover, it often chanced that he walked to and from the courts with Beatrice, and for tea and after-dinner coffee his chair was usually close to hers.

I was there to learn French because I was going into the hotel business; Bartels, because he was to join a well-known firm of wine importers; and Beatrice because her father, a solicitor in Worthing, thought that all his three children should be able to speak it.

I remember thinking, before I left, that Bartels might get hurt, in the end, by the cool-headed Beatrice, because she did not seem to me to be the right type for him. I had no worse a premonition than that. But then I am not psychic. Not like Bartels’ aunt Emily and aunt Rose, thank God.

I had come to the château that summer evening to dream only of the pleasant remote past, but instead, little by little, I found myself mentally drawing nearer and nearer to the events of a nearer date, of 26 February, that cold night of pain and anguish and fear. It was the last thing I wished; I was going on holiday to the south, partly, at least, to wipe out the memories of it all.

I suppose it happened because the events of February had occupied so much of my mind; so that even when I was not consciously thinking about the matter, it all lay there in my subconscious, ready to leap out and colour my thoughts, and even to some extent my actions.

For hours I would be free of the memories of that nightmare period, and then some little incident, some careless phrase from a stranger, perhaps, would bring me face to face with it; and off I would start, churning it all over and over again. Or perhaps the reason was that my own conscience was not clear in the matter.

Perhaps I had really come to the château, not so much from a nostalgic yearning for the scenes of youthful happiness, as I thought, nor even to meet again the image of my first love: else why did she not come when I sat on the log in the place called L’Étoile? Why was it Bartels whom my imagination summoned for me, if I did not feel the need for a final showdown with him?

But there I am wrong. The showdown was not to be with him. He always thought of me as his friend. The showdown was with myself.

I often wonder whether Bartels thought of me as he drove to London on the night of 26 February, with one eye on the dashboard clock and fear rising in his throat. I think he did.

If he didn’t, he should have done, because I was responsible for his—what? I was about to write: because I was responsible for his downfall. But upon further reflection I think I could as well write that I was responsible for his salvation. It depends upon what you regard as salvation. I don’t know for certain.

But I was certainly responsible for his fear. Terror, you could call it, just as you could consider his fear of enclosed spaces, of suffocation, to be terror.

I only saw two examples of it at the château. Once, during a visit to one or two of the more historic châteaux of the Loire, we stopped by the wayside for a picnic.

We spread some rugs in a field off the highway, and ate the food and drank the wine; and afterwards lay about for a while, smoking and talking and joking. In due course, one or two of the more active spirits began to lark about.

I think it was Danish Hans who crept up behind Bartels and flung a rug over his head and held him tight within its folds. I shall never forget the wild struggle which ensued, the sight of Bartels’ thrashing arms and legs, the upsetting of the wine bottle and picnic utensils, and, when he finally released himself, Bartels’ eyes, at first wild with terror and then hot and angry.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he said, and got up and walked some distance away and sat down by himself. We looked at each other silently, as people often will who find themselves in the presence of something they don’t understand. Nobody said anything. And in due course, though still somewhat subdued, we went upon our way.