Forgotten Life (30 page)

Clement did not follow. As he stood at the foot of the stairs, he found himself listening to an unusual noise outside, like a long-protracted sigh, gentle, yet regretful. Oxford was being visited by a shower of rain.

 

On Tuesday, the weather was considerably cooler. The sky was cloudy but the threat of rain seemed to have passed. Clement decided to walk into town to his clinic. He wore a light suit and carried a raincoat over one arm. He adopted a slow pace, conscious of the pain in his left leg which he was unable to diagnose, although a list of more or less unpleasant possibilities ran through his head.

His walk took him down the Banbury Road, past the old cumbersome Victorian houses still disregarding the traffic as if their lives depended on it, through St Giles on the St John's side, and along Cornmarket, making his way with difficulty among the crowds of people there. The people all seemed to him young, and dressed in tawdry fashion, although he realized that this was a subjective view which owed much to his age. If he stopped to think, he could remember how dingily and with what lack of variety his generation dressed in the early sixties, before Style had visited the multitude, and how they had probably smelt badly in the days before roll-on deodorant. By this intellectual effort, he could think well of those about him. But he could not like their habit of pushing by on their own rude course, without regard for others; he had been brought up to step aside for his elders, and such old training did not easily die
– rather, became stronger with the years, like bands of ivy round a decaying tree. He found himself breathing heavily. Couldn't these young barbarians see he was almost fifty, and slightly distinguished? What were they doing? The answer seemed to be, Nothing. Cornmarket had become a precinct of loafers.

One token of the loafing was the rubbish and filth which lay on the pavements. Young girls were smoking and eating in the open air, throwing down their litter, using the world as their ashtray. He sighed at his own disapproval. Of course, even the fourteen-year-olds would be having sexual intercourse every day. He overheard their use of swear words – forbidden when he was a boy – as he went by. Once he had hoped such freedoms would come about. They had arrived, and they did not please him.

Sheila was never far from his thoughts. She had made every effort to appear as normal at breakfast, so that he had not dared to bring up the incident of the evening before. So rare was it for them to have a difference, that he was disturbed by it; but he would not permit himself idle speculation on a subject he could not resolve. The cause of her unhappiness would no doubt emerge in time. Meanwhile, he turned his contemplation to the sessions which lay ahead of him, as far as that was possible among the jostling crowd.

It was hard to understand the state of Britain, he thought. Either it prospered or it was going downhill. But nobody could look on the Cornmarket with much favour, certainly not Britain's European partners, the Germans, the Dutch, the French, whose own city centres were clean and decorous.

Turning into Boots, a garish shop containing all pre-requisites for brothel life, he purchased a packet of his favourite blackcurrant throat pastilles and proceeded down The High, congested with groups of tourists all looking for somewhere to sit and rest, or for even older colleges than those already visited. From The High, after lingering for a moment before the windows of the Oxford University Press, he turned right into King Edward Street. This grandly named street, which in Clement's early days in Oxford had appeared friendly, containing lodgings and old professors versed in the Napoleonic
Wars, was now coldly schizophrenic, with health shops on one side and on the other, the east side, grim offices of lawyers, solicitors and accountants, thus catering, in Clement's eyes at least, to some of the less appealing features of the English character, crankiness and litigiousness.

On the east side of the street, however, Clement had his room, which he shared with two other analysts. Tuesday was his day of occupancy. This room, situated on the first floor, and overlooking from its windows the health shop opposite, had, by a legal trick, been saved from the encroaching lawyers; it catered to the minds and souls, rather than the pockets, of the locals. On every side, one had only to drill through a wall to overhear discussions of tax matters, dividends, and disputed wills: but in this room, dreams, fantasies, and selected snatches of the past were allowed.

Despite his worry regarding Sheila, he looked about the neutral room with some satisfaction. He might have been dominated by his brother, but here at least he was in control and could help people. The light in the room pleased him; the cloud having dispersed, sunlight slanted in with a rather artificial aspect, reflected from the windows on the opposite side of the street. With its hint of warmth, it recalled to his mind a hired room in which Sheila and he had once stayed, in a town in France, on their way to the Mediterranean. He remembered that they had been in high good humour, having just eaten a meal that began with a plate of delicious
haricots verts
. The old bed had creaked when they made love.

Punctually at ten o'clock, only shortly after Clement had arrived, his bell buzzed, and he admitted his first client into the tiny waiting room. Clement crossed to the inner door and ushered into his sanctum a plump cheerful man in his early eighties, who entered the room clutching a stick in one hand and a string shopping bag in the other, his head held high in order to see through thick glasses.

‘How are you, Clement?' the newcomer said. He stomped here and there about the room, laid down his stick and shopping bag on the couch, peered out of the window, commented on this and that, admired Clement's gloomy Piranesi print as he had often done before,
finally coming to rest in the armchair by the electric fire and saying, with his habitual optimistic air, ‘Things much as ever?'

Captain Charles Parr was the oldest and most faithful of all Clement's clients, a record tacitly acknowledged between them by the captain's familiar use of Clement's Christian name. He had been consulting Clement since the mid-seventies, with intermissions only for Clement's or his own excursions abroad.

‘Much as ever,' Clement now replied. ‘And with you? When did you get back from India?'

‘Just yesterday. Terribly sorry to be back here. Bombay was as pleasant as always.' He launched into an enthusiastic account of his trip, to which Clement listened without giving it his complete attention. Captain Parr's history was no stranger than that of many others; yet it was of interest. His endorsement of Bombay, a city from which other Western visitors often recoiled in horror, was of a piece with his boyish outlook on life, which had survived eighty years of stress.

One of Captain Parr's most admirable traits was his openness to experience. He had begun life humbly, one of a large family brought up in the slums of Pimlico. Getting work in the offices of a minor shipping line, he had spent his pre-war years of adolescence holidaying in Belgium and Holland. The shipping line had allowed him discount fares over to Zeebrugge, and there he had cycled about the Lowlands, picking up fluent Flemish. One day, on the ferry returning to Harwich, he had encountered an Indian lady in some trouble, and, with his knowledge of the intricacies of immigration regulations, had been able to help her and her father. They had invited him to visit them, an invitation the youthful Parr had accepted, but the war came along and put a stop to the friendship.

The war was the making of Charles Parr. The number of Englishmen who could speak Flemish was small. He volunteered for service and, after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, was made an officer in the SOE. From London, he helped conduct the operation which airdropped secret agents into Holland. He also went twice to wartime Holland himself, on one occasion getting
captured, escaping only by shooting two of the enemy and returning to England in a stolen fishing boat.

Clement had never discovered when, if ever, Captain Parr had left the secret service. After the war, however, he had become a travel writer and journalist, ostensibly to see more of the world, possibly as a cover. Shortly after India gained its independence, he was in the Indian Embassy to make some travel arrangements, where he met Sushila, the Indian lady he had helped some years earlier. They fell in love and married within a few weeks.

The newly married Parrs settled in Lathbury Road in North Oxford, and there raised two sons and a daughter. Captain Parr, however, was often away on his mysterious trips, which took him to the Far East, the Antarctic and elsewhere. On his return to Oxford, he was always united with his family and with Clement Winter's armchair. He had discovered, however, that Sushila's relations in Bombay were as prosperous as they were amiable, and often appeared to spend more of the year with them than with his wife in North Oxford.

Sushila left him abruptly in the early eighties, when the three children were adult, to go and live with a fox-hunting stockbroker in Gloucestershire. But Charles Parr, who quarrelled with no one, took his wife's dereliction in good part, remained friendly with her, became chummy with the fox-hunting stockbroker, and returned regularly to Clement's chair, sometimes bringing with him the present of a Gloucestershire pheasant. He had also become friendly with Sheila and Joseph.

And why did he return regularly to Clement's chair? It was a question Clement often asked himself about his oldest client. Of course, old habits were hard to break. Captain Parr had nothing particular on his mind; he perhaps enjoyed the chance to talk, being somewhat lonelier than he would ever care to admit.

‘How's your book getting on?' the captain asked now, companionably. Clement replied with a few generalities, reflecting that there was, after all, something on the other's mind, the subject which had first drawn him into Clement's orbit. His wartime
operations were known as Operation North Pole; the Germans having acquired knowledge of British codes, every agent Captain Parr's organization parachuted into Holland had been captured and often shot by the Wehrmacht on landing. It was this – rather than the two soldiers he had had to kill in the line of duty – which occasionally preyed on the captain's mind, and drove him into reminiscence.

The prescribed hour was drawing to a close when the captain said, ‘Look, Clement, I know I owe you for a few sessions. I'm afraid I can't pay up until I get a couple of articles published in the States.'

‘Don't leave it hanging about too long.'

Captain Parr heaved himself out of the armchair and collected up his belongings in a brisk way. ‘I'm sorry about your brother's death, by the way, Clement. He was a bit of a blighter, your brother, but we got on well. He presented me with a copy of his dirty book,
Eastern Erections
, or whatever it was called. He was another Far East buff, although he didn't exactly share my passion for India. It was funny how he completely changed during the last few months of his life, wasn't it?'

Not wishing to admit that this remark took him unawares, Clement turned towards his desk and murmured, ‘In what way do you think he changed?'

‘I'm sure you as an analyst noticed the difference. He became much more contented. There was a whole lot of Jungian stuff he spouted to me, the last evening we spent together. Joe set more store by that sort of thing than I do.'

Clement said nothing, and the captain rattled on in his cheerful way, ‘I rather liked his girl friend, too, didn't you? What was her name?'

‘Lucy.'

‘That's it, Lucy. Very attractive girl, very vital. She knew a lot about the thing Joe went through – revelation, he called it. I got the impression they had plenty of sex. Joe was a bit of a randy bastard, wasn't he? What's happened to Lucy now? I'd quite like to see her again. She must miss Joe a lot. It was rather sudden, wasn't it? His
death, I mean. Well, mustn't keep you, Clement, old boy. See you next week.'

He waved his stick in an authoritative way, his gesture of goodbye, only to pause in the doorway. Diving one hand into his string bag, he came up with a little bundle, wrapped in greaseproof paper, which he pressed into Clement's hand.

‘I brought you a present from Bombay, old boy.'

Clement saw him out, smiling, and clutching a dozen spiced papadoms.

He went back into the inner room to phone Lucy Traill.

Clement entered the hallway of his house to find a suitcase standing there.

The time was just after five, and, as it was raining, he had taken a taxi home from King Edward Street. The rain, slight at first, no more than a whisper round the city, had persisted, gradually raising its voice, as roofs of colleges, pavements, and multitudinous gutters added their liquid commentary, until water everywhere was pouring into the many throats of the Isis and Cherwell in a continuous shout. Clement didn't like noise or wet; he phoned Luxicars to drive him home.

His mind was so taken up with thoughts of a College meeting he had to attend that evening that he allowed the suitcase little attention. At first assuming without great surprise that Michelin had returned, he was almost past it when he realized it belonged to Sheila, although it was not one of her special green Green Mouth cases.

‘Sheila!' he called.

She came immediately out of the living room as if she had been waiting for him. She was dressed in what he thought of as her London clothes, a rather pretentious new costume consisting of a deep blue wool wrap top over a blouse and emphatic gabardine trousers, with a mock tortoiseshell necklace wrapped twice about her neck. Her face was strained and anxious.

‘Clem, I don't want you to say anything. I'm going. I'm leaving. Please don't say anything. I can't explain. I don't want to hurt you, but this has to be.'

‘It's raining.'

‘That's got nothing to do with it. Please don't try to stop me. I don't like doing this.'

They stared at each other.

‘Do you mean – you're leaving me for another man?'

‘Don't ask me questions. It's all over, Clem. I can't help it.'

‘Is it that fellow Arthur Hernandez?'

She hesitated, as if contemplating a lie, and then said, ‘He gets into Heathrow early tomorrow morning. I'm going to meet him.'

He felt himself to be quite calm, chiefly because he could not believe what he heard. Pushing past her, he walked into their living room and set down on the table the little greasy package Captain Parr had given him. Then he turned to her again – she had followed him in.

‘You're trying to tell me you're leaving me for that little wretch you met in Boston?'

‘I've known him for some time. We're terribly compatible. I don't have to explain anything to you.'

‘Has this got to do with Michelin?'

‘Of course not. I loved her and I'm sorry she has cleared off. You'll have to look after yourself. A car's coming for me.'

‘Now you're clearing off.' He found he had difficulty swallowing. ‘This is a delusion. It's part of your fantasy life, Sheila. You want to be Green Mouth all the time, and it can't be done.'

‘I thought you'd say something like that.' She sounded miserable. ‘You were bound to say something like that, weren't you? That's why I will not discuss the matter with you. There's plenty of money in the bank; you won't go short.'

With trembling hands, Clement unwrapped the papadoms and held the package out to his wife.

‘Would you like one?'

As she shook her head, he said, looking down, ‘Please don't leave
me. You're so dear to me. You always have been, ever since we met. Who'll find you as dear as I do? There's so much stored between us, stored up against winter and bad weather … Our relationship has been so intense – well, I thought so – to break it now would injure you as well as me.'

He bit one of the papadoms and tried to chew it.

‘Don't be a fool, Clement, those things aren't cooked. I have to do this. I'm not your little lost girl any more. I'm independent. I want to live, be free – I'm just sick of our relationship. I want to see something of the world, travel, meet new people. Put those disgusting things down.'

‘You know I don't like Indian food.' He put the bitten papadom down and removed the piece he had chewed into his handkerchief. She looked on, unmoving, in contempt. ‘Sheila, we know what happiness is – let's not lose it.' He spat into the handkerchief.

‘I'm trapped. I feel trapped. I want to get away and meet new people.'

‘Perhaps it would be useless to tell you that you really don't.' He looked at her searchingly. ‘You're happier in your fantasy world. You just have to decide where its boundaries lie. I know I have many deficiencies, Sheila; I'm all too aware of them, but by now you are used to them – hardened to them – and against them you must set the fact that I love you as much as ever I did – no, that really we love each other as much as ever. It's a miracle, and it is real. Ours is the most enormous luck. You're my life. Shall I tell you how eagerly I open my eyes in the morning to see your face again, how I miss you if—'

‘No, you shan't tell me. You're always telling me things. I knew it would be like this. I should have left before you returned, but I wanted to do the decent thing. I couldn't just leave a note like that bitch Michelin.' She glared at him from her position of immobility as he paced about the room. ‘To hell with it, to hell with you, you and your claims on me. I want to be free, to be my own self for once—'

‘You mean you want to go off with that seedy little Spaniard!'

‘All right, call him names. Art's American, anyway, not Spanish.
Art has capabilities you've never dreamed of. Look at you – you're more interested in your dead brother than you are in me. That's what you like, you feel safe dealing with the dead. Your whole life you've kept people at arm's length. You've kept me at arm's length—'

‘Sheila, careful, some words can destroy a marriage.'

‘So can some silences. Now I'm speaking out. This is my turn, at last. Art is a wonderful talker, just as he's a wonderful lover. Yes, I am going to go off with him, to be an equal partner. He's flying over to get me. I'm going to escape at last from under your wing, if you want to know – rejoice in being a free woman.'

He sank down on the arm of the chair during this speech but, in his pain, immediately stood up again.

‘Oh, it's being a free woman, is it? You've been talking to Maureen too much. This is her idea. She dominates you far more than I do. Your problem's not me or this Spaniard, it's feminism. Can't you see that we've got a good equal partnership here? Don't let all the Maureens in the world persuade you otherwise.'

Her face was dark. ‘You keep bringing Maureen into the conversation. Don't think I don't know you had an affair with her, just when I was at my most wretched. What right have you got to criticize me?'

‘That was ages ago, best forgotten.' Hostility was naked between them now. The swords were out. They were on the battlefield.

‘Well, I haven't forgotten it. You do what you like now – and I'm going to do what I like.'

‘If you leave here now, you never come back! I warn you.'

‘I don't want to come back. I'm sick of the damned place, sick of Oxford, sick of you!'

‘And I'm glad you're going!'

The front doorbell rang, signalling from another world.

‘Don't answer it,' Clement said. ‘Bugger them.'

‘Shut up,' Sheila said. She went through to the front door, and in a moment Cheri Stranks was in the living room with them, smiling and silently confused, pretty as a peacemaker and scenting blood in the air.

‘I'm sorry, do tell me if it isn't convenient. I didn't mean to interrupt anything. Are you going away?'

‘Just for the weekend,' Clement said, shooting a glance at Sheila. ‘Come in, come in. How are you keeping, Cheri? No signs of the baby yet?'

‘We're going to London,' Sheila said, with a ferocious look at her husband, as if adding under her breath, ‘And you're going to hell.'

‘Oh, I expect you're going to the opera,' Cheri said. ‘I thought I'd just drop in and see you.' She gestured to the road, where the blue Zastava Caribbean stood out in the rain. ‘Sorry to butt in. I wondered if I could help in any way, really in any way at all. Arthur told me you'd lost your housekeeper. Can I give a hand? I was passing this way.'

‘Thanks very much, but—' Clement began, when Sheila cut him off, moving forcibly in front of him and saying, as she took Cheri's arm, ‘That's very kind. Very kind. We are in a bit of a pickle, as it happens. The surface of the pool hasn't been skimmed today – that was always Michelin's morning job. And I'm afraid there's a stack of washing-up. If you could help …'

She manoeuvred the younger woman out to the back, shut the door on her, and returned, picking up a brown wool coat from an armchair, throwing it across her arm in a business-like way.

‘There you are. There's someone else to see to all your needs. You always land on your feet, don't you, Clem? Now I'm off. A car will be round at any moment. I think I hear it now.'

He caught her arm. ‘I love you, Sheila, please don't go. He's not worth it.'

‘He's worth it to me, and that's all that matters.'

‘But you don't know,' he said desperately.

‘I'm going to find out,' she said, with a kind of grim gaiety, but he plunged on. ‘Listen, you are always pretending to everyone that you had a happy childhood. I never contradict you, do I? I know how you live in this fantasy world. Well, you'll smash it all up if you aren't careful, and then you may not like reality when it hits you.'

‘I'm not on your couch any more, and I can look after myself. I'm not one of your fucking sick, though you may like to think it.'

There was a car at the door, and the rain was stopping.

‘I didn't mean that, Sheila. Please don't go, please don't leave me!'

She had opened the front door. A uniformed chauffeur was approaching up the path. She snatched up her suitcase, but he smiled professionally and took it from her. She walked down the path behind him, not looking back. The rain petered out. Eaves were dripping. Alice Farrer appeared in her front garden and pretended to prune something. The suitcase was stowed in the boot of the car, the door was opened for her. She got in. The chauffeur got in. The car moved forward down Rawlinson Road. He stood there in the doorway, staring, hoping she would wave. She did not wave.

 

He was lying flat on the couch in his study, thinking of the years that had gone by, so many, so soon, when there was a cautious knock on the door and Cheri Stranks entered.

‘Are you all right, Clement! I wondered if there was something wrong?'

Faintness had overcome him. He smiled, a mockery of a smile, and sat up, planting his feet carefully on the floor.

‘Aren't you well? You do look a bit sick. Can I get you a gin or something?' She looked alarmed. She was a well-built girl, today allowing the world a glimpse of her good legs, her jeans having been discarded for once in favour of a tight black skirt. The best feature of her face, a certain pleasing sharpness, was more observable in profile than from the front. Her eyelashes, thick and artificially darkened, framed two lively brown eyes. Her hair was brown and floated freely about her face; there was nothing of the Scrubbing Brush mode which afflicted her husband.

‘Sheila's left me,' he said, adding, so that there should be no mistake, ‘for good.'

She came closer. As yet the pregnancy did not show.

‘I can't credit it. Left you – at her age!' Immediately realizing her error, she went on, ‘I don't mean she's old at all, it's just that …' But
the damage was done, and in a moment she stopped speaking. ‘It's a real bummer, and I'm sorry. Arthur and I have always admired you as the sort of couple …'

Again she stopped. Clement saw how ancient he was in her eyes, and that she had come round, perhaps with some urging from Arthur, to see if there was anything to be done for this poor old couple. He stood up and tried to show a little vitality, but reaction to the scene with Sheila had set in, making him tremble and look older than ever.

He cleared his throat. ‘It is a bummer, you're right. Whatever a bummer is, it's this. Oh, I'm sure she'll come back.'

‘But your wife's so famous. Everyone's read her books. Has she – I mean, did she say why …'

‘She's leaving me for another man, Cheri. He's younger. He's flying over from the States to meet her. He's got the same name as your husband, Arthur. He edits books in New York. Well, he's Sheila's editor, as a matter of fact. He stands about five feet nothing. And that's all I know.' He laughed feebly, holding his forehead.

‘Perhaps you'd rather I went.'

‘I expect you'd rather go.' He held out a hand to her. ‘It was sweet of you to come round, Cheri.'

She took his hand and almost immediately let it go in embarrassment.

‘I couldn't have come round at a worse time, could I?'

Recovering from her startlement, she was now beginning to enjoy the situation, as he could see.

‘I'm glad you're here. Come down and have a drink with me.'

She looked sceptical, but accompanied him as he made a rather shaky way downstairs. They sat in the kitchen; she drank a white wine and Perrier while he sipped a deep brandy. She sat with her legs crossed. She wore patterned net stockings.

‘I suppose in your profession – well, such things are pretty common,' she said, breaking a silence. ‘Marriage bust-ups and so on.'

‘I had an elder brother. He died earlier this year. He had a fear of desertion. Perhaps that was the biggest fear of his life. His mother
– our mother, I should say – deserted him when he was a small child. She came back, but she always held the threat of desertion over him. It is a terrifying thing to do to a sensitive child. By the time I came on the scene I got better treatment; my mother's neurosis was in remission. But somehow that fear of desertion by the one one most loves has rubbed off on me … I wasn't at all prepared. Well, one never is …'