Forgotten Life (20 page)

So I didn't, but it served little to improve the old man's health. He was seventy-five and had suffered a stroke just before he left home for work that morning. His sons took him to hospital (in Hereward's car), and father stayed by his bedside overnight. When the old man
appeared to be sinking next morning, my father said to him – as mother faithfully reported to us later – ‘I hope you've divided the business up fairly between Hereward and me in your Will. Otherwise we'll only quarrel over it.'

To which grandfather said, or rather husked, these drear words: ‘You'll have to fight your own battles from now on, Ernest.' An hour later, he died, right hand still clutching a book about Scott's Expedition to the South Pole.

After the funeral, attended by all the other acceptable ironmongers for miles around, I returned to Tremblingham. Term was almost over when I received a letter from my mother saying that they were moving to a small house in Lowestoft. Lowestoft was to be home from now on. Hereward and father had quarrelled bitterly and Hereward had bought father out of the business.

Father had fought his own battle. And lost.

It was goodbye to galvanized pails at one shilling and one penny ha'penny, goodbye to red-faced Seneca, Setebos, and Cecil – already away learning to be Gentlemen at a much smarter school than mine – and goodbye, alas, alas, to Rosemary and Ruth, my two loves. Nettlesham was now behind me for ever, and I returned at term end to a saturnine house on three floors, with two small rooms on every floor and a smell of fish emanating from the basement, standing at the fishier end of Lowestoft.

My parents, who so often had no idea, had no idea that I might miss my various friends and enemies in Nettlesham. I was simply left to adjust to the new circumstances on my own. Defeated, I retired to the top floor of the house and played under the sloping roof with my Hornby trains. Ellen by now was old enough to serve as a competent guard or ticket collector. Come summer, we found our way to Oulton Broad, and there we swam together, the best of companions.

That side of life was enjoyable. In the house, gloom reigned. My father felt himself a displaced person. He did not acquire another business for himself, nor would he work for others. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in large decayed houses, in which we would live while he redecorated and repaired them, and strove mightily to
get the garden into order again. Then he would sell at a profit, and start the process over again in another old house. So our homes became impermanent.

Father had little to do with us. He became a man of deep silences. We saw him as someone on the top of ladders, painting ceilings, or at the bottom of gardens, laying crazy paving. He was another crippled goat that lost its way.

Father came into his own when buying property. While the owner was extolling the merits of his house, father would stand creaking a board beneath his foot – he unerringly found out creaking boards – and interrupt suddenly, saying, ‘Is this floor rotten, do you know?' Or he would tap at a wall and ask, wistfully, ‘Any death watch beetle recently?' His way of looking at guttering or sash windows could reduce a proud owner to silence.

At selling houses, father was equally adroit. He never used an estate agent. So for a while his business flourished. He made money. But the war was approaching fast, and property on the East Coast became very slow. Finally, nothing was selling, and father was left with a monstrous house on his hands. He closed it down in a fit of desperation, and took us off to Cornwall to live – a great swerve in his life, as if to avoid demons. The Lowestoft house was commandeered by the military during the war, and sold off later to the council for a song. It is now demolished. Twenty town houses stand where it once stood.

 

At this point came a break in the narrative. Using a different pen, Joseph resumed further down the page.

 

It is impossible to continue as I began. The protective tone of levity has failed, after taking me through the years of early childhood. Long
after that, until I was grown up, until after I left the army, I could never communicate to anyone the shame I felt at my mother's desertion of me and my banishment to my grandmother's house in Lavenham.

Much of the pain came from a source quite beyond my control, years before my birth. I have said that I was my parents' elder son but not their first-born. Here's the awful secret. They had another child, born six years before me, which died.

The story of my generation, now getting a little long in the tooth, is set about with war. We were a parenthesis between wars. My parents-to-be, young Ernest Winter and Madge Scoones, met during World War I, when he was on leave and she was acting as temporary nurse in a hospital in London. He was so eager to meet her again after the war that, when the home-coming troopship on which he was sailing was delayed outside Southampton harbour, he dived overboard and swam ashore. This exploit became a family story. It was hard to equate the aloof father I knew with that eager young man.

They were married in Nettlesham, Ernest's home town, in June of 1919, after a brief engagement. In March of 1920, a child was born to them.

How can I best relate this dark story? I never remember a time when my mother was not telling me about that dead child. Father never spoke of it. It was a girl. Mater told me piously, ‘Your poor little sister is with the angels now.'

It happened that an old book I often looked through contained steel engravings of religious subjects. Perhaps it was an illustrated edition of Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
– a book which even as late as my childhood could still be found in every self-respecting religious home. One picture showed a small boy climbing a hill. Over his head – rather uncomfortably close, to my infant mind – floated a small girl angel, with only a shred of cloud to conceal her nudity. This menacing little phenomenon became my dead sister, hanging over me like the Sword of Damocles. The Angel of Damocles.

Nothing I did was ever as good as what my steel-engraving angel
would have done. Nor could I in any fashion prove an adequate substitute for her. Mater would in no way allow my coming into the world to appease her grief for the child that had left it. It was her tragedy and she needed to hold it to her.

Her story was that the little creature had lived only six months before fading out. ‘We just have to believe,' she told me, ‘that she was too good for this world.' Six years of mourning had gone by, and then I turned up. She felt herself insulted. ‘We just have to pray that next time it's a little girl,' she told me.

Next time, it was a little girl. It was Ellen. Ellen assuaged Mater's wretchedness as I could never do. Gradually, she became more cheerful, more human, and, by the time World War II broke out, she was able to confront its vicissitudes with amiable courage.

But that wretched little steel-engraving angel took far longer to fade from its position a foot above my head.

My despair at school became worse when father again moved house to buy a small business in Bude, in Cornwall. On that occasion, my parents removed my sister Ellen from her school and took her down with them to a local school. I, however, was left at Tremblingham, despite my pleas to be moved too. Clem was just an infant then.

I took this rejection as a further desertion. Coming at puberty, it went very hard with me, and I suffered a nervous breakdown. The school doctor was a sympathetic man, and sent me nearer home. For some weeks, I was housed in a small private nursing home on the north Cornish coast, and allowed to recover gradually. In the evenings, in a season of calm weather, we were able to watch from the upper windows the first wartime convoys moving out of the Bristol Channel into the Atlantic, the ships outlined against a setting sun.

There I experienced again a recurrent dream which had first come to comfort me at my grandmother's, at the age of five. But my recovery was due as much as anything to a woman called Irene Rosenfeld, who lived only a few minutes away from the nursing home.

Irene was in her mid-twenties. Of course I thought of her as much older than I. In the October of 1941, when we set eyes on each other,
I was fifteen, and in many respects still a hag-ridden little boy. We met on my daily walks along the cliffs and at first we only talked together. Then Irene invited me to her house for tea.

She was completely alone. She had a big complicated family, but they lived elsewhere. She was married to a man now serving in the Air Force, who came home on leave only occasionally. She was lonely but did not actually want the burden of a love affair. I was her substitute – her victim, I suppose, in some ways. So I can see the situation, years later. At the time, however, I fell into her embrace and her tuition with gratitude.

as old Westlake remarked of more academic matters.

The days at the nursing home became transformed. I lived in a golden daze, to think that I would be with her all afternoon and evening, that we would be naked to each other and in bed together. I could not believe my luck. Here was someone who really did love me, and showed it abundantly. Later, it became possible for me to see that, in her kind way, Irene was merely enjoying sex with me, and passing empty hours in a manner she thought safest; but for me it was a full-blown love affair, tinged with some pathos to think that my poor darling was so old.

The threatened return of Irene's husband on leave happened to coincide with the nursing home's declared intention of returning me to school. I bought her flowers, I made her speeches, I felt my heart breaking, I suppose I was as absurd as a fifteen-year-old can be. Irene took it all seriously and sweetly, and kissed me over and over, even weeping prettily as we finally parted.

Somehow, the remaining school years passed. In fact, I was happy at school for the first time. I had something positive to set against all the previous negativity. I talked smut like the rest of the boys – but that pure affair (as I regarded it) with Irene remained my precious secret, to be shared with no one.

In the autumn of 1943, I was conscripted into the army, and went straight from school into a barracks at Prestatyn. The days of my childhood were finished. Within a year, I found myself in Burma.

 

Joseph's ‘Life History' ended there. Part II, mentioned in the opening paragraphs, was missing. There, Joseph had promised to show how he had misunderstood his own story.

The meaning of that curious remark as yet remained obscure to Clement.

‘You have been a bit absent-minded since we got home, darling,' said Sheila, with a calculated amount of indulgence in her voice.

Clement was on his hands and knees, picking up the pieces of a cup and saucer he had knocked on to the kitchen floor.

‘It's partly because I've so much to cope with at present,' said Clement, realizing how sorry for himself he sounded. He kneeled up and looked at his wife over the top of the table. ‘Joseph.'

It was a code name.

Sheila settled herself comfortably beside Michelin and continued to arrange flowers in a glass vase. ‘But you weren't all that close, were you? He was too much your senior. The war came between your childhoods.'

‘Still there was a brotherhood,' said Michelin. ‘Sorrow has to come out.'

‘Mourning is often a matter of guilt as well as sorrow,' said Sheila, in one of her writer's intonations. ‘He probably feels guilty because he was not as close to Joseph as his sister was.'

Clement did not relish hearing himself explained. ‘I've no reason to feel guilt,' he said. He put a hand to his left knee to help him rise, clutching the shards of cup and saucer in his other hand.

‘It's essential to be practical after a funeral,' said Michelin, addressing him rather than Sheila, as if now taking his side. ‘One has
to do something after a funeral.' She was drinking a spritzer, as was her evening habit. The kitchen television set was tuned to Channel Four. A domestic drama was on. They had taken up an incident in the play for discussion and, as so often, sharing little of the public humility before the medium, they found their own opinions more interesting than Channel Four's offering.

‘I am doing something,' Clement said. ‘And more than just breaking tea cups. I'm always doing things. The puzzle is the small effect they seem to have.' He piled the broken pieces of china, with their crisp edges and interesting shapes, on the draining board.

‘After a funeral,' Michelin continued, ‘one holds a memorial service – at least we do in France. Or orders a stone angel, or polishes up the photo frames. And of course goes round talking endlessly regarding the dead – favourably at first and then, as the flowers on the grave wither, more freely and scandalously …'

‘I did think of a memorial service,' said Clement, ‘but I couldn't be quite sure who would come. Do you think that universities in Singapore, Medan and Bangkok would have sent representatives, because I don't.'

‘You're fortunate, Clem. You have plenty to do. You don't have to polish up photo frames,' said Sheila. ‘You have all Joseph's junk to look into, all his secrets to nose out. You can find out if you will all his scandalous relationships with women. That Lucy Traill woman, for instance. It's of moment to you if no one else. As you say, people in Singapore are hardly interested, but now that your brother is dead, you can turn his life into your hobby.'

‘You're being unpleasant.'

‘No, it's a perfectly legitimate hobby. Why don't you go over to that flat of his in Acton again and sort out the rest of his things? The sooner you sell that place, the better, after all. Just don't be made miserable. Why should his death upset you? You saw little enough of each other. You disliked his political views.'

‘No, I didn't, I admired many of them, though I felt he held some of them for the wrong reasons. If you'd been nicer to him, he would have come over to see us more often.'

‘I was nice to him, most of the time. He was jolly, but whenever he came over for the weekend, he used to booze and get argumentative. At your mother's funeral in Nettlesham – well, you both went out and got thoroughly plastered, didn't you? Like a couple of overgrown boys.'

He remembered the occasion, and frowned. ‘I certainly don't forget how you attacked Joe that evening. I'm amazed you choose to mention it. No wonder we didn't see much of him after that.'

Sheila remained unperturbed, smiling conspiratorially at Michelin. ‘It's true I told him a few home truths that evening. Also, I didn't care much for some of the women he brought over here. You remember that Filipino girl – Carmilla, was it? I swear she stole that pair of gold earrings off my dressing-table.' She laughed at the memory.

Clement laughed. ‘And she was sick in the lavatory. Carmilla was a disaster, admittedly.' He helped himself to more white wine.

‘Then there was that physiotherapist of his. You remember her, Michelin? Lucy Traill. The unmarried mother, right?'

As it happened, Clement had taken a fancy to Lucy Traill, liking her spirit. He knew, too, that she had a more permanent place in Joseph's later years than any other woman. So he said, ‘Not an unmarried mother, Sheila, please. Lucy was a one-parent family. Keep your terms up to date.'

Ignoring this, Sheila continued, ‘Joseph brought her over a couple of times, the first time with that awful child of hers. The second time, she'd only been in the house for half-an-hour when she started manipulating my shoulders! It was like being seized by a mad wrestler.'

They all laughed. Clement said, ‘You thought she had gay aspirations towards you.'

‘She said I was suffering from something or other and needed Alexander technique. I thought it was something to do with sex.'

Amid laughter, Clement said, ‘She was quite sexy. She used the word “posture” rather adroitly, I recall.'

‘Oh, and we heard them arguing in the bedroom at night. That
was because Lucy wanted to go off on some CND march, wasn't it?'

‘She tried to speak to me in French, and wasn't at all good at it,' Michelin said. ‘After family deaths in Languedoc, there often follows increased drinking and risks of suicide. It is related to a tendency to stay indoors more, so as not to meet other people who will fail to comprehend your grief. Then the lack of blue sky overhead tends to promote mental illness, and pretty soon the house of grief is again a house of illness. What's the word? Terminal illness.'

‘In England, too, one marriage partner tends to follow the other to an early grave,' Sheila said. ‘The bereaved often suffers a heart attack. It must be the same in France, and elsewhere.'

‘There's more drinking in France than here.' Thus reminding herself, Michelin gave them all a refill of wine.

‘Those drinking statistics are highly suspect. I've always thought so. French drinking is mainly wine and aperitifs. Over here the stuff is harder. The further north you go, the more fiery the liquors consumed.'

‘I'm not exactly suffering from grief,' said Clement, ‘and can manage without fiery liquor, thanks. I would just like to be able to put my brother's life in order, that's all.'

‘You mean put his papers in order, Clem. Putting your brother's life in order is a big commitment.'

Clement nodded at Michelin to show that she had made her point, and said to Sheila, ‘I think I will take your suggestion and drive up to Acton to the flat. Will you come too?'

She spread her hands. ‘Oh, I have so much to catch up with here. No, no, I'm just so busy. I'd only be in your way. Acton depresses me. There are so many letters to answer and I'm still feeling the effects of jet-lag. Besides, you like to be there alone – you can be as melancholy as you wish. One thing I have against Joseph was his attitude towards his parents. I suppose you might say I am no judge because my childhood was so idyllic. But he was very vengeful towards them, blaming them for all sorts of things that were his own fault.
That's a token of weakness of character. From what I saw of your parents, they were perfectly nice ordinary people. You thought so, Clem, you know you did.'

‘We may have been brothers but we were born in rather different circumstances. In this notebook' – he indicated the green-covered book – ‘Joseph makes the case against our parents very clearly. I consider he was treated with monstrous insensitivity as a child. When I came along, family circumstances were different, and they behaved rather better towards me.'

‘I can believe that,' agreed Michelin. ‘Very often in a family there is one child on whom all the family anger is visited. It may be a boy or a girl. The other children are treated kindly, even spoilt, yet the one unfortunate child is given a very bad time, is not loved, is starved, or whatever the special beastliness of the house may be. We have a lot of that in France, too. Nothing seems to explain why one particular child should be treated so.'

‘My brother has an explanation,' said Clement.

‘You admire him, don't you?'

‘I admire him because, despite the way he was treated, he never exhibited the slightest jealousy towards Ellen or me. She and I failed to realize how he suffered, how desperate he was, but he never showed us other than his gentlest side.'

‘He probably thought it was his destiny to suffer,' said Sheila.

‘Destiny is rather an old-fashioned word these days. We talk about genetic inheritance instead.'

 

The heatwave persisted over the south of England. After only a week of dry weather, there were already warnings of drought and water shortage. Householders were urged not to use their hoses. Standpipes were installed in the West Country. There was a plague of ladybirds in Kent. Inspired by the heat, British holiday-makers went abroad in their thousands, in quest of even higher temperatures. A bomb exploded in a tourist hotel in Tunisia, injuring ten British tourists.

Acton looked cheerful in the sunshine. When Clement Winter
arrived towards noon the next day, men and women were already standing on the pavement outside pubs, drinking and taking in the sun, enjoying the start of the weekend. He parked the Mercedes in Chesterfield Street. His dead brother's flat occupied the upper floor of No. 22, a house which had been built in some indeterminate period either before or after World War I, when people had said that house-building had reached its nadir, simply because they had not the gift to see into the future. The street had been designed to provide cheap housing for an upwardly mobile lower middle class. Although the houses almost touched each other, they were detached within the strict meaning of the term. They had bay windows and a small porch with a half-hearted Gothic decoration. The front door of No. 22 contained stained glass offering a vague memory of some mullioned pile from which it was remotely descended. The front garden, although no larger than a senior executive's desk, boasted a holly tree.

The ingenuity of the builder had been taxed when it came to the matter of class distinction. Yet, even with the limited space at his command, he had solved it, as far as anyone could tell, to the satisfaction of many generations of denizens of Chesterfield Street. The narrow brick facade of each house was crammed with a porch and front door, a bay window, and a second door, designed solely for the use of tradesmen, maids, bootboys, or similar inferior species. There being no access to the rear of the house, the builder had inserted the back door at the front, making it lower than the front door, to which one step led up, by three steps which led down, thus plainly denoting its reduced status.

This inferior door still bore on it a legend saying
TRADESMEN ONLY
, despite the fact that many of the houses in Chesterfield Street were now occupied by the tradesmen themselves. Beside the legend on the inferior door of No. 22 was a note on card in waterproof ink, but smudged nevertheless, saying
J. WINTER
. Clement had no doubt that Joseph had enjoyed this wry joke.

He went to unlock the door but found it ajar. Proceeding inside cautiously, he ascended the narrowest of stairways, carpeted with
worn stair-carpet, and became conscious of the smell of the place. It comprised a mixture of dirt, nutmeg, and imprisoned heat. It halted him for a moment on the stair, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he heard a noise above, and went slowly forward.

He reached a narrow upper hall from which four doors led. One door was open. A burly man poked his head out and asked of Clement in a suspicious voice, ‘Who may you be when you're at home?'

‘I should be asking you that. And how did you get in?'

For answer, the burly man fished in his pocket and triumphantly produced a key, which he held upwards, rather as if it had been a small sword.

‘You'll be the posh brother from Oxford,' he said. ‘Cheers.'

‘I'll have that key, thanks, and I'd still like to know who you are.'

The burly man came out on the landing. He wore trainers, jeans, and a blue shirt open almost to his navel. There was a casual, open-air look to him. He bore a tattoo and a gilt bracelet on his left arm. He held out the key to Clement, grinning as he did so.

‘Possession being nine points of the law and the law being nine points about possession,' he said. ‘I'm Ron Mallock, good friend of your late brother's, known him many years.'

‘You weren't at the funeral.'

‘I'm an atheist, same as what Joe was. He'd have laughed if he saw you giving him a Christian burial. I come here to pick up some disarmament pamphlets I should have got hold of before.'

He retreated into the rear room. Clement followed, feeling slightly at a loss, still conscious of the heat and scent of the flat.

‘None of this stuff is your property, you know,' he ventured.

Ron Mallock flashed a smile. ‘Funerals, property … What next? I'm not trying to rob you, chum, I'm just looking for a few pamphlets. I don't imagine you're a member of CND, are you? – so I can't think it would hurt you if I collected them. Your brother and I ran the local branch, you know.'

‘We're still waiting for probate,' Clement said, becoming conscious at once of the inadequacy of his reply.

Ron Mallock gave a half-grin but made no answer. Instead, he got on his knees and crawled under the gateleg table which occupied the centre of the room, where stacks of
Marxism Today
and other periodicals had found a resting place.