Forgotten Life (10 page)

‘If you accept that she is having to undergo a big act, then perhaps this hurtful thing she said was also a part of the big act and has no further meaning? Couldn't it just have been Green Mouth speaking?'

‘Big Mouth, you mean.'

‘Well, I'm afraid that it's ten past twelve. Just gone …'

‘I meant to ask you about my brother.'

‘Can we talk about him next week?'

 

Clement got to Carisbrooke in time for lunch. As he collected a plate of plaice and pommes frites, he saw that he would be sitting next to George Forbes, the Medieval History Fellow, with whom conversation was no bore.

‘What did you make of
Playing for Time
?' George asked.

‘Yes, very funny. I took it with me for light reading on my trip. I'll let you have it back. He used to live just near here, you know.'

‘You're looking a bit battered.'

‘Worse than usual? What about you?' Such remarks as George's were perfectly acceptable, coming from George. He spoke in a kind of conspiratorial way. He was a sturdily built man with a beaky face and high cheek bones, on which there rested a high colour. He had a shock of white hair. A handsome-looking man, Clement thought. Also, he voted Labour, which Clement considered was to be prized in a Professor of Medieval History.

‘I'm fresh as a daisy,' George said, smiling to show it was not true. ‘I've been invigilating. Ten more days and I'm off to Stanford. What's the matter?'

‘Oh …' He picked at his fish. ‘Usual boring problem … Domestic, blah, blah, blah. Let me ask you something, George. Don't you regard
life as a game to be played according to the rules? Wouldn't you say that? I mainly mean unwritten rules.'

Without ceasing industriously to demolish his fish, George said, ‘We live in a post-Christian society where the written rules were brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. We subscribe to the idea that it is wrong to murder or steal. “Do not adultery commit, Advantage rarely comes of it”, etcetera. These days, there's less of a consensus than there was, say, before the world wars. It's harder to know by what rules the other chap's playing.'

‘You don't quarrel with the idea of life as a game, though?'

‘A bloody unsporting one.' George removed a bone from his mouth. ‘A philosopher would say your question was without meaning.'

‘It's true we impose the idea of a game. For most of the people I see, “game” has comforting connotations. It implies that there will be a half-time, and someone will be looking on to see fair play. It's an antidote to injustice. People hate injustice.'

‘No. They like it. They are happy to put up with it. Otherwise, they'd all vote more sensibly.'

‘I've got a spot of injustice at the moment. I'm supposed to sort out Joseph's life, as if I was capable of sorting out my own.'

‘I thought you chaps were used to that kind of situation. Doubtless it's rather different if it's your brother. Comes a bit too close to home. Are you going to have some pudding?'

‘All his papers have been dumped on me. I can't just throw them away, can I?'

‘How about letting the dead bury the dead?'

‘That comes well from an historian. He wants – wanted – me to do something with them. I don't know whether I'm supposed to write his biography or what. Or just put out a collection of his letters or miscellaneous pieces … He wasn't all that well known, that's the trouble.'

‘I suppose that Joseph Winter is quite a respected name in some circles. Trouble is, his chosen field was the Far East, wasn't it? Pity he didn't play safe and go for the Tudors and Stuarts, where the big money is.'

‘His involvement was with the East.'

‘I didn't mean to belittle him. I just meant that it's a rough old world and there are hierarchies in historical circles as in everything. Really, the study of things Far Eastern is in its infancy. The documents aren't easily available – or extant, in many cases. No prestige attaches. He wrote the standard history of Sumatra, didn't he?'

‘Yes, C.U.P. Sells all of ten copies a year.'

George pushed his plate to one side and sipped his wine. ‘Your brother did something in the East during the war, didn't he? Remind me.'

Clement said, ‘He served in the Forgotten Army.'

George spread wide his hands in a despairing gesture. The two men looked at each other. Then they began to laugh.

‘Come round and have a drink this evening and advise me,' Clement said. ‘I'd like you to view the documents. Make it six o'clock and we'll have a bit of a tipple. My wife should be back by then.'

George Forbes arrived in Rawlinson Road shortly after six, wearing an old cream jacket Clement recalled from previous summers. The two men sat by the swimming pool for a drink and a gossip; then Clement led the way up to his study, and the bundles of Joseph's papers.

‘It's a bit of a clutter as yet.'

‘My brother inherited the family business. I don't suppose he'll leave any papers, thank God.'

Boxes full of notes and notebooks presented a problem. George nosed here and there, muttering to himself.

‘Literacy, the curse of the thinking classes …'

Clement sat at his desk and watched. ‘One owes one's brother something. We were never all that close. Joseph was twelve years my senior. The war came between us, that Grand Canyon between generations. I admired him from afar.'

George presented himself as a solid block between Clement and the window, as he leafed through one of the notebooks. He read out, “‘War. Why is war so popular? Because it allows us to cease being rational. (Not only war itself but armed forces, the acolytes of war,
also irrational, organized as secret societies, end product death and disability.) Instead, more like animals, being aware of sacrifice, blood flowing, substitute of primitive courage for passage of time. Intellect tells us to hate war; an older thing sees in it a dangerous release. Like a drug.” Good enough in its day, possibly. Bit dated now. Not the stuff for the eighties.'

‘There are a lot of essays in that box which appear never to have been published.' Clement felt embarrassed and got up to pour them more wine.

After reading spasmodically, George said, ‘Trouble is, Joseph was really a popular author without being all that popular. All these Thai dynasties – they're too remote for the average reader. Why don't you turn all this material over to the Far East Library, and let them sort it out?'

‘Have a look at his wartime stuff. That's in a different vein.'

Ignoring the invitation, George said, shuffling in a box, ‘And I believed it was only in plays that men wrote on the backs of envelopes …'

‘I thought of trying to write Joseph's biography. It might get some events in my own life clear.'

George gave him a sage look. ‘Would it add to your reputation? Even in College? Bit obscure …'

A touch of colour entered Clement's sallow cheeks.

‘I feel I want to give him a chance …'

George's expression showed what he thought of that remark. The evening sun was slanting in at the window, illuminating the dust on bundles of old newspapers.

‘For instance,' said Clement, going over to another box by the window, and selecting from it a black binder containing a number of typed sheets, ‘there's this. It's a record of a British post-war operation which, as far as I've checked, has never been written about. Joseph links the personal – sometimes very personal – with the historic. It gives a clear picture of what conditions were like in Sumatra in 1945–46, after the Japanese were beaten. Would you like to take a look?'

George was already glancing at his watch and sighing.

‘All those damned exam papers waiting to be marked. I'd better get back. Thanks all the same. Maybe another time.'

 

After George had gone, Clement wandered through to the rear of the house, touching items of furniture as he went, sometimes only with an extended finger. Michelin had laid a supper table for two in the dining room. He preferred not to glance at it, turning instead into the wide kitchen which opened from the rear hall. There he poured himself a Smirnoff, trickling the vodka on to the rocks at the bottom of his glass and tempering it with a little white Cinzano.

Clutching this glass, sipping at it, he made his way slowly into the garden, across which long westerly shadows had fallen. The shadow of the great Norway maple, growing two doors away in the Phillips' garden, and a living memorial to the time when North Oxford had been pleasant farmland, was cast on the kitchen and guest bedroom wall as if to emphasize the redness of the brick. This wall was pitted with holes and rusted nails, scars and gouges, like a landscape of the past, where previous generations of householders had encouraged green things to scale the heights up to the bedroom window. Various bees and flies took refuge there in the autumn, living out October in increasingly rickety state, on this sunniest of walls. Now it was the ragged pattern of the maple which dominated the brick face.

Generating half-articulated thoughts, Clement stood gazing at the brick. He had another life which had never been lived, a life strangled somewhere in those tangled years of his childhood and adolescence, when he had been possessed by a wish to ‘get on', and had sacrificed the chance of journeys to foreign lands by sitting for his various degrees. By so doing, he had become successful in a modest way, if being part of the academic environment was success; certainly in Sheila's Kerinth there were other criteria for success – a strong sword arm, cunning, hatred of scholars, power, magic, virility … The ragged pattern on the kitchen wall seemed to stand momentarily for all the ragged coastlines he had never sailed to as sun was setting across torn sea, mysterious land. He had presided over the rebuilding of
other lives; now here was his brother's, lying in fragments. How could it be meaningfully put together, put together in such a way as to express a certain muted exhilaration, romantic but submerged, which belonged to the Winters?

Why had Sheila not come back on the five o'clock train as she usually did? What was she up to now? Other houses could be seen from where Clement stood – the backs of houses in Staverton Road; the families there seemed to be working as they should. Old Badger, the Bursar of St Arnold's, was a funny little ineffectual man, yet his existence, at least from the outside, appeared to run in a perfectly smooth and pleasant way. Of course Badger, looking from one of his upper windows and seeing a fellow of Carisbrooke drinking vodka in his back garden by his swimming pool, might be thinking identical thoughts.

Sheila did not arrive until eleven-thirty, disgorging from a taxi with some style. She had caught the ten-five from Paddington.

Dragging a large carrier bag labelled Dickins & Jones, she entered talking and put her free arm round Clement's neck as she kissed him.

‘I caught the train by the skin of my teeth. Jessica Bishop was on it. The taxi was so slow – traffic in the West End was worse than ever this evening. The taxi driver did his best. He told me he was going to retire to Clacton next week. Clacton's probably full of retired taxi drivers.'

He recognized her chattery London persona, a mock-up perhaps of a woman Sheila would have liked to be, still not integrated into her personality.

‘Have you bought yourself another outfit?'

She twirled the carrier bag and then dumped it on the sofa. ‘I'll tell you about that later. Calvin Boas Lee is a bastard. After Tarleton wrote to me, he got a phone call from Calvin in Hollywood to say he would be over in London today. So Tarleton booked us a table for three at Sidebottom's. You know how these people are – one o'clock came and went and Calvin did not show.'

He noted the Americanism, as she went into a long description of what they had done and not done, and how stingy Tarleton had
been about phoning the Hollywood office for information. As she talked, she went to stand by the fireplace, hands on hips.

Clement had been playing Wagner; she turned down the volume.

‘So eventually Tarleton said that we couldn't let the Sidebottoms down – he's friendly with them and takes all his best clients there. So we went down for a bite and it was after two before we arrived. Of course we had to have champagne to soothe ourselves. And you, Clem, why have you not eaten supper? You were being moody, weren't you? I ought to have phoned you from Sidebottom's, and this is your way of reminding me.'

‘I just didn't feel hungry.'

‘Well, then I'm sorry. Have some toast and pâté now. I'm going to have a cup of tea and then I'm going to stagger to bed. It's been a hard day and I'm absolutely exhausted, and Calvin's a bastard of the first water. And the second and third, and however many waters there are.'

‘So does this mean the film deal's fallen through?'

‘Who knows what it means?' she said wearily, turning to march into the kitchen, her figure momentarily framed in the dark doorway and then encompassed by it.

‘What else did you do in town?' he called through.

‘Nothing. What do you think I did?' Her voice came accompanied by the sound of the kettle filling from the cold tap. ‘I'll show you the new outfit in the morning. I expect you'll hate it.'

Clement decided to have a cup of tea with her and forgo his pâté for the pleasure of going to bed at the same time she did. Perhaps she might not want that, although she sounded amenable enough.

After the usual ritual of turning out the lights and chaining the front door, they took their tea upstairs. All was peaceful in the street. She talked intermittently about her agent, Tarleton, and his marital problems, as they washed and undressed. After they had scrambled into bed, under the king-size duvet, Clement clasped her to him, feeling her considerable bulk roll readily towards him. He kissed her and murmured in her ear.