Forgotten Life (23 page)

At first, the
Rajjimi
made few appearances but, when their popularity was certain, Sheila began writing them into every book.

Well, it was not such a preposterous idea, Clement thought. Just a post-Freudian idea … We were all ruled by the dead whispering to us. The
Rajjimi
functioned rather like archetypes.

Juliet's death came back to him. He closed the front door carefully on the house and its contents.

The car crash had happened in the summer of 1974, thirteen years ago. Juliet would have been sixteen by now, in the fifth at Oxford High School. Instead, she remained forever in his mind – and Sheila's – at the age of three and a half, delicate, dependent, dear. He had been driving. That was what made it so awful. And the country had been so green and heavy with leaf. The details had always been vague, except that he did not see the other car as it pulled out of a side lane in front of them.

Then he had found himself being carried, and had no idea where he was. He shouted for Sheila. Shouted in a whisper. Things faded. He was in a moving vehicle, prostrate, and Sheila's face was near his, deathly white. His thought was, ‘I've killed her.' That terrible moment still resurfaced at intervals in his mind. He had not immediately thought of Juliet then. At the Radcliffe Infirmary he had learned that both Sheila and he were relatively whole, but their child was dying. She had been sitting on Sheila's knee, and had gone through the windscreen during the collision.

They had been sedated and patched up before they returned to
the house. They lived in Chalfont Road, then, in a roomy upstairs flat. They had avoided friends for a long while. How many times had he poured out his guilt to Sheila. How many times had she forgiven. How many times had they both wept. That beastly summer, full of irremediable pain.

Ice-cream. That was all they seemed to want to eat. Endless maple and walnut ice-cream from the new delicatessen in Summertown. And both being all in all to each other. They had endured each other's silences, each other's fits of wailing. Somehow they had clung to the idea that they still loved each other, despite a tendency to fly apart, to flee to the other ends of the world to escape from the one person who most reminded them of the dead.

They sated themselves with music as if it were a kind of drug, in particular playing records of Bach chorales over and over. Clement never heard ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ', in the sombre key of F minor, without recalling that desolate time. Slowly the mania left them, along with the need for ice-cream, as the winter's rains came down.

Then one day she had started typing on the manual Hermes they shared. ‘I'm going to write a fantasy novel,' she said.

There had been no dead child in that first Kerinth novel. All had been excitement and sunlight and it had ended happily. But the mysterious
Rajjimi
had made their first appearance, coming back from death, trailing clouds of a vanished glory. ‘Arrant impossibilities' indeed …

Clement tried to dismiss the past as he came to the Banbury Road and the challenge of its traffic, dense even today. In a city of obfuscations, the Banbury Road was one of Oxford's more definite statements, blunt rather than equivocal. For most of its length, say from St Giles to Summertown, it had been built before the age of the motor car, or at least during the mere dawn of that terrifying age. The great houses which flanked it, angular mansions of brick, had been designed for ample families; provision had been made in basement and attic for plural servants. Carriages had conveyed the families into town, to shop at Elliston & Cavell's emporium. Young rustic men in waistcoats
served as gardeners, in response to the Edwardian penchant for
rus in urbe
.

But the Kaiser had proved too much for stability. Young England had gone first to the war and then to the dogs. Now these Oxford gardens were under-tended and over-grown; models of Darwinism, they had become places where only the fittest plants survived. The houses themselves had been given over to trumpery schools of English or divided into flats where untenanted milk bottles congregated on crumbling doorsteps. The carriages had gone, swept aside by automobiles. Arthur Stranks lived in one of the little flats into which No. 82 Banbury Road had been sliced, and would drive his Zastava Caribbean regularly into the streams of traffic which ran north and south through all daylight hours and long after. This was where Clement and Sheila had once walked in agony, mutely clutching each other's hands, as far up as Squitchey Lane, after their Juliet was killed. The great houses, behind their great trees, lay back from the thronging cars, blind, wounded, extinct – yet living on, their carcasses turned over to contemporary fashion and lusting estate agents.

Catching a period without traffic, Clement hastened across the road and soon took a side street to College, but his trail of memory persisted.

How vulnerably young they had been then!

It remained a source of pride to him that he and Sheila had seen each other through that period of mourning, although at times her grief had been nearly impossible to bear. The very smell of her had changed for a while. Had anyone ever done a medical paper on that?
Changes in Olfactory Signals During Periods of Grief
. He had made love several times to her friend Maureen Bowler – looking back, he appreciated Maureen's immense understanding: she had agreed, he could perceive, not for his sake but for her friend's. This was in Maureen's pre-feminist days. The affair, lasting hardly a month, had put him back on the road in running order. He had been more able to look after Sheila. Ever since, they had remained close, devoted, although Sheila would never start another child. They had been
examples of the adaptability round which Clement was compiling his record.

Kerinth was Sheila's child. She had her escape routes. No one could bear too much reality. Even at this moment, she was writing about three hooded men galloping along a deserted seashore on an imaginary planet. He smiled to himself. Good for her.

By an inevitable and painful association, Clement's thoughts ran to another dead child, his mother's first-born, born long before he himself saw the light of day. That ill-fated little creature, that ‘steel-engraving angel', had had a malign effect on Joseph's childhood, haunting his early years. He recalled Joseph's strenuous attempts to lay that ghost on the occasion of their mother's funeral in Nettlesham, three years previously.

 

It was a suitably bleak occasion. Madge Constance Winter, widow of Ernest Winter, had died one cold April day in 1984. She left behind a wish to be buried beside her husband in the town cemetery of Nettlesham, Suffolk. Her two sons carried out her wishes.

Nettlesham lay in the midst of flat uninteresting country, a market town which had lost touch with its countryside. It stood cold and grey within a ring of treeless new estates. An east wind moved through its streets. Clement, accustomed to the legend of Nettlesham as the old family home, took a dislike to it all over again. Although he and Sheila arrived at lunchtime, the town gave an appearance of obstinate stagnation, like something washed up on an elderly beach. On the outskirts, they had driven through some light industry, kitchen designers, agricultural machinery hirers, bamboo furniture importers, and such. The centre, despite the injection of a hideous shopping centre, had fossilized in a dull bygone time, cramped and crotchety. Young people with red hands ate their lunches from paper bags in the street.

Nettlesham's one claim to fame remained the poet William Westlake, the minor eighteenth-century figure who had gone mad and died there. In the market place was a Westlake Tea Rooms, which sold postcards and scarves, as well as dusty buns.

Sheila and Clement drove up from Oxford in the Mercedes. Ellen
drove up in her Mini with her daughter Jean, even then undergoing a divorce. Joseph drove up in his van. Sheila and Clement had booked to stay overnight at the Gryphon, the only hotel for miles recommended in the
Good Hotel Guide
, thinking to have a look at the coast the next morning. The others planned to drive home that evening.

Despite the solemnity of the occasion, Sheila and Clement arrived in Nettlesham in good humour, amused at the prospect of seeing some of the family again. Clement had driven; Sheila did not drive. He sometimes wondered about that. She had refused to learn. In many things, she had come to be the dominant partner in their marriage. Above all, fame and the earning-capacity had become hers. Most of the time, he was content enough that this should be so; it was a state of affairs compatible with the times, when women played an increasingly confident role in life. But in the car and in bed with Clement she was content to play a passive role.

They all met by arrangement in the King's Arms, near where the old Winter ironmongery shop had once stood – new developments had swept the shop away with a lot of the other junk of the past. It now had a fragile existence only in the memory of Joseph Winter and possibly one or two others.

Joining the two brothers later would be Ellen and Jean, and Madge Winter's two younger sisters, Mary and Doris, together with their husbands and assorted offspring. They had all agreed to meet in the bar for a drink before visiting the dining room for a meal.

Directly Clement and Sheila entered the bar, all yellow pine and plastic avocado upholstery, they saw his elder brother there alone, drinking. Joseph sat hunched on a swivel stool, elbow on bar and glass of beer in his hand. He was neatly dressed in a dark grey jacket and black trousers. As Clement advanced, he saw that Joseph's tie was slightly awry and the top button of his shirt undone. He wore a CND badge in his lapel. Clement smiled and extended his hand.

‘How are you, Joseph?'

Joseph climbed down carefully from his stool. His untidy hair was
greyer than when they had last met, and his face more lined. He grinned.

‘Right as a cricket, and no regrets at the prospect of seeing the old girl shovelled under. You're looking as neat and upright as ever.'

He turned to Sheila and kissed her cheek, standing back to survey her dark dress.

‘Plenty of embonpoint, Sheila, dearest.'

‘I know your preference is for less of that.'

Joseph laughed. ‘Touché. Puissant as always, and selling even better than before, no doubt.'

Clement smiled rather hard at his wife to encourage her to accept this greeting, but she merely said, with a fugitive gleam, ‘I saw a book of yours announced last week in a bookseller's catalogue.'

‘Oh, that! Let's have a drink. Same old stuff that no one wants to buy – King Sidabutar of Sumatra, very obscure. Isn't it amazing that I still keep going over the same old ground? You'd think I'd be discouraged by now, but not a bit of it.' He laughed heartily, and then changed tack, clutching Clement's arm in mock earnestness. ‘Well, young 'un, what do you think to this ancient town in which I was born and bred?'

‘Not much. It looks as if it has been ruined since the war.'

‘No, not at all. Improved if anything. When I was a lad, everyone used to go about in creaky boots, with straw in their hair.'

‘I'd grow straws in my hair if I lived here for long.'

‘Where's Ellen, may I ask? She can't have thought better of it, can she?'

‘Perhaps she's staying at home to look after the dog.'

‘She'd better be here, and that pretty daughter with her. Ellie was always mother's little pet. Can't plant the old lady without Ellie here to wave her goodbye.'

He's now fifty-seven, Clement thought, surveying his brother with lively interest. Quite a raffish old man. His skin is rather blotchy, his hair needs a trim and a wash. But cheerful, or at least in his usual sort of bantering, self-deprecating humour. ‘How long have you been here?'

‘Propping up this bar? Not long. I drove over early. Decided to seize on the chance of looking round my birthplace. Don't ask me why. I don't suffer from nostalgia. I suppose you take no interest in William Westlake, Clem, renowned author of “The Crippled Goat”? Well, William's my literary mentor. I had my first orgasm only a semen's throw from where the old boy lived. He knew the folly of birthplaces.

He laughed. ‘There was a lot of sense in the eighteenth century, not to mention sententiousness. Yes, I've had a prowl around. Went to the cemetery. Revisited some old haunts. Even sought a girl I used to know. Well, two girls in fact. Rosemary and Ruth Tippler. My first loves – or second, or third … They lived over their shop next to our shop. I was twelve when I fell in love with them both. Ever since then, to enjoy two sisters at the same time has been my ideal, but I've never come across a pair as lovely as Ruth and Rosemary. 'Course, they've been married for years – left bloody Nettlesham, if they had any sense. All very carnal, Sheila, but of course I don't shock you.'

‘Keep trying,' she said, and smiled.

‘Worse things happen in Corinth, I bet – or whatever your pet planet is called.'

‘Much worse.' She was not going to allow Joseph to win a tease. ‘Where's this drink?'

After a while, Ellen arrived with Jean. Jean was now twenty-two, a pretty girl with dark curly hair and something of the Winter features. Joseph got off his stool, and began to make up to his niece. Clement, while talking to Ellen, observed how much Jean resembled Joseph as he had been when younger, and wondered whether, in her unfortunate love life, she did not also resemble him.

At fifty-three, Ellen looked spry enough in her dark two-piece suit. She dyed her hair. She cradled her handbag in the crook of her
left arm and put her right hand daintily on Clement's shoulder as she kissed his cheek. For Joseph she had a kiss on the lips and a swift hug.