Forgotten Life (31 page)

‘My parents never got on too well. Always rowing. There were five of us kids.' They talked for a little while, but, despite her evident intelligence, it was an unequal conversation.

‘I'll have to get back to Arthur. He needs the car this evening. He's got to go over to Abingdon, to a meeting. Why don't you come back and have supper with us?'

‘You're enormously kind, Cheri.' And more than kind, he thought, but of course not always kind. She would have her moods too, docile as she might seem now. She had rested her soft right hand on the table, and he saw there were gilt rings on each of its fingers. It was a beautiful hand, the nails of which were enamelled shell pink. At present that hand slept as far as he was concerned, after its little exercise in being held out to him. And it was accustomed to beckoning husband Arthur towards her. But the day might come – who could tell? – when the hand would be raised with all the force of a policeman's to halt Arthur's approach, or to catch another passing man. And then the dainty nails would appear more like claws, and no doubt heart's blood would flow. But there was no denying it, at this moment she was enormously kind, though the hand could never reach out and touch him with the warmth of Sheila's.

‘We've always admired you, Clement, ever since you came with us to the Tina Turner concert and enjoyed it so much. Generally speaking, your age group doesn't go a bomb on rock'n'roll. Don't say no, have supper with us. It's macaroni cheese.'

‘No, I'll stay here, thanks. I'd rather. Another time.'

She looked hard at him, then offered a smile. ‘You'll be okay?'

He laughed. ‘I won't do anything desperate. Promise.'

When she had gone, he walked about the house, brandy glass in
hand. He picked the packet of papadoms off the living room table and threw it in the waste bin.

A plan formed in his mind. He could phone Swain Books in New York and get the number of Arthur Hernandez's flight. He could check with Heathrow and find what time it landed the next morning. Then he could drive up to Heathrow and shoot both him and her as they came out of Terminal Three.

However, he did nothing. He sat in Sheila's favourite chair, as unmoving as she generally was, going over the dreadful scene in his mind, trying to analyse it. In retrospect, he was able to appreciate the tension and apprehension in her.

It was his own fault. It was his own fault that Sheila's hand, the hand that typed all the stories about the fantasy world of Kerinth, had been raised against him. He had never expressed his love enough; oh, he had done all that a husband should or could and possibly more; but Sheila lived by words as well as deeds; her real world, like her fantasy one, must be largely built of words and the need of them. It was a human need. He had never said to her – for instance – for instance, for he was putting himself to an inquisition – he had not talked enough about her novels. He had defended them and her against the prejudiced, had at times been fierce as a tiger. But he had failed to like them, or perhaps just failed to take them seriously enough for her taste. Arthur Hernandez, now – there was a man who took the damned books seriously, who could be said, in his position, to be almost dependent upon them. Creature of Kerinth. The title rose spontaneously to mind. He had emerged, her Latin hero, sparkling from the sugary foam of her fantasy. And there was nothing Clement could do about that.

‘I must not fall into the trap of blaming myself,' he said aloud. He stood up and sat down again. She was so dependent on her audience. He had seen that in Boston, without realizing all its implications. The novels, which had begun as a substitute for the dead daughter, for little Juliet, had become a substitute for other relationships. She loved Clement, but even more she needed her audience, those warm hearts who found no fault with the Kerinth fantasies and who sent
her presents and cards and love. Arturo Hernandez was merely an embodiment of that audience. Rises and falls in sales were received by her as the ardour or coolness of a lover. And here – winging across the Atlantic even now – was the man who had his finger on those sales, the maestro of salesmanship, the astute commercial little man of Swain who had not one word of adverse criticism to offer as long as the product was right.

‘I could have warned her.'

But of course that was impossible. People were not to be warned. He had encouraged her by keeping quiet. He had profited by the enormous worldwide sales. After the poverty of his childhood, had they not been ever welcome?

Besides, keeping his trap shut was a habit. Analysis had not changed that. It had appeared that his habit of holding back had been agreeable to her, one of the reasons they had been happy together. Instead of holding back, he should have held her when she tried to go, have been more physical, as Joseph would have been.

And why had Clement held back? What had kept him from ever saying enough to her? Of course it went back to childhood, as everything did eventually. His thoughts returned to that old dull time, as an escaped prisoner's thoughts must return to his cell. His older brother and sister not wanting him about; then their sudden absence as they got sucked into the global war. His parents, committed to tedious work, rendered more tedious by their religion. Brought up strictly, with everything in short supply. Not like now. The endless preaching that people were wicked and sinful, that happiness was reserved for some vague after-life, and then only for a few, a minority to which he could never persuade himself that he might belong. The conviction that the world was a vale of tears and God had it in for him. The sense that his parents saw it God's way.

Why had he gone in for analysis, if not to banish that diseased vision of life? How delighted he had been when, in his teens, he had come on one of Freud's works dismissing religion as neurosis. It had led him on like a torch to new thoughts, new ways of life, better ways.

But, despite his analysis in Berlin, despite the easy adult life he had lived, so full of surface pleasure, that infernal picture set up in childhood had evidently persisted. He had known secretly that life was grim, and had its revenge on those who smiled and drank wine and made love, and that one day … one day, unsuspecting, a man would discover that the whole easy fabric would be torn from the place where he lived, to reveal the bare stones of misery. And those who had lived the easy bourgeois life would feel it worst, and be flung down hardest.

What was he going to do now? What was left for him? His father would have said, glowing with
schadenfreude
, as his way was, ‘That's what you get …'

That's what you get … As if the phrase contained a profound truth, beyond which nothing could fruitfully be said.

He wished he had told all that to pretty Cheri, a little earlier, to warn her. There must be some way of warning people what to expect.

That's what you get … He found he was standing looking at his widespread hands, as if to convince himself that what he got was nothing. He ran upstairs, ignoring the pain in his leg, and stared into Sheila's study, assuring himself she was not there. Everything in the clotted cream factory was as usual, except that the room did not live without Sheila's presence. It had become a photograph of itself. On the rear wall, the large painted
mazooms
and
crichts
, inhabitants of Kerinth's moon, stared at Clement with their large cat eyes. That's what you get, they said.

He went listlessly downstairs again, wandering about, wondering what could possibly be done. It came to his memory that he had arranged a party for Thursday evening. Friends would be arriving at six o'clock to celebrate Sheila's return from the States and to drink to her new novel. He dismissed the thought irritably. He would worry about that in the morning. There were more important issues to worry about. Of course he would be disgraced; he took that for granted. Going to the patio windows in the rear of the house, he looked at the dull evening trapped between the walls of the garden. The sun, striking through a band of cloud over Walton Street, lit the
maple in the Phillips' garden nearby so that all its wet leaves gleamed. Its shadow fell on the Winters' garden. The swimming pool lay motionless, its surface blank as a sleeping face.

He felt a sudden unity with Joseph, who had been pursued by a fear of desertion for ever after his mother's betrayal, and had fought the fear, leading as vivid an existence as possible – preferably in the Far East, as distant from the scene of the crime as could be.

He saw more clearly than ever that it was not only the desertion and that expulsion from the family home on the day – the very hour – of Ellen's birth which had so scarred Joseph, but the way in which those heedless acts had come as confirmation of a whole prior history of maternal deprivation, dating from his birth, that birth over which the steel-engraving angel had presided so decisively.

The dreadful thoughts would not allow him peace. He could no longer bear to stay in the house alone. Bursting through the silent rooms as if pursued, he ran out of the front door, slamming it behind him – to the evident satisfaction of both Farrers, alert in their front garden – and walked with uncharacteristic rapidity in the direction of the Woodstock Road and Wolvercote, as if all the steel-engraving angels in the world were pursuing him.

Clement's night was a restless one. Often he imagined Sheila, lying somewhere in a hotel bed in London, must also be restless. He slept in fits and starts, waking late after a vivid dream.

After showering, he dressed and went down to eat a piece of toast in the kitchen. Memory of the dream returned. He had been in Australia, an hour before dawn, waiting for the sun to rise. Already it was hot. Other people jostled by him. He could not see their faces. In the tall, dead, brittle, elephant grass, a creature like a dog roamed. He had looked towards the west, where a great black rock loomed between him and the sky. The dawn, because this was Australia, was postponed several times, but he knew it would come, and this knowledge filled him with happiness.

The question he asked himself was, why did this fragment make him happy, and how did he connect it with Sheila?

He set the question aside for a time, while he sorted out the mail. Most of it was for Sheila, as usual, many letters in familiar American air mail envelopes. There was a bill for him and a letter addressed in writing he recognized as Michelin's. He slit it open with a buttery knife.

‘Poor dear Michelin!' he said aloud. ‘There seems to have been an outbreak of love here. Perhaps I should have the house fumigated before I catch it …'

He stood there, thinking, absently making himself a cup of coffee as he worried about this uncharacteristic impulse of Michelin's. If only she had confided in Sheila earlier in the week, perhaps after comparing notes neither of them would have left, and he would not now be alone …

The doorbell rang. As he went to answer it, he thought, ‘She's back.' But on the doorstep stood Mrs Flowerbury, neat, ample, smiling her rather fixed smile and clutching the handbag she always carried.

‘You look startled, Dr Winter. It's Wednesday and it's ten o'clock, or am I a bit early?' She smiled with her head on one side, as if this was her patent way of smiling, to which she stuck through thick and thin.

‘Oh, Mrs Flowerbury, I'm afraid Sheila isn't here this morning. She has had to go up to London.'

‘It would be about the film business, I expect. Never mind, I can get on with my work.' She made to enter.

‘Well, I'd rather you didn't, Mrs Flowerbury. I'm going to have her study cleaned professionally while she's away. See you next week.'

‘Oooh, everything will be turned upside-down.' She backed away, as though an offer had been made to clean her professionally, and
turn her upside-down into the bargain. She retained enough self-possession to wave to Clement as he shut the door.

‘Of course,' he thought. ‘Sheila is also down-under slang for “woman”. That's why the dream was set in Australia. It was all about her, and she is the sun about to return to my life.'

Perhaps the doglike thing in the dry undergrowth had been a vague memory of the pet Sheila had owned in Berlin. He went back to his coffee, thinking of an occasion when they had encountered each other in a park in West Berlin. It was spring. Sheila wore a neat fawn coat and a hat. She was slender in those days, even thin. She had been walking her little dog on a lead.

She was reserved; he was shy. But he had induced her to sit on a bench with him. She had nursed the dog while they talked, running her long fingers through his fur, and once or twice kissing him on the head, with a gesture of unconscious coquetry.

The doorbell rang again. He thought, ‘She's back' but, when he opened the door, Arthur and Cheri Stranks stood there, Arthur looking business-like and standing on his toes. Cheri back in her stone-washed jeans and clutching her husband's arm proprietorially, as if to demonstrate who had brought whom. Behind them in the road the Zastava Caribbean was parked.

‘Er – I just had to come round and say how sorry I am,' Arthur said, stealing a march on his wife – stealing such a march that he had moved forward and was entering the house before either Cheri or Clement could forestall him. ‘Cheri and I have been talking about it all night. If there's anything we can do – for instance, if you want to go somewhere and don't want to drive yourself …'

He was inside now, adjusting his spectacles and nodding, with Cheri following nimbly behind.

‘Please don't mind us intruding,' Cheri said, ‘but we had the notion that we might just nip in and be of use. That's what friends are for. You have only to say the word.'

‘Creative people are known to be sensitive,' Arthur said, looking as if impressed by his own insight. ‘Er – creative people in particular. They're more dependent on the old bio-clock. More dependent than
is comfortable, sometimes. It would be a hell of a world if men menstruated as well, wouldn't it? No, no, it's easy to quarrel at such times.'

‘We didn't quarrel.'

‘Oh, er, I don't imagine you did. Cheri and I think of you as far too gentle – well, too wise, really – too mature – for that. Still, the male psyche's under threat these days, isn't it? When the social order is disrupted and the NHS is having to cope with AIDS victims and is breaking down under so many people demanding heart operations.'

‘He's maddening,' said Cheri, placidly, interrupting her husband's demonstration of understanding. ‘He never went on like this till I got pregnant. What about the vulnerability of the modern woman, under threat from all sides, her role questioned? Listen to Arthur or read the papers and you would think the modern woman was off her rocker. There's passion, you know, and that's what decides what happens, not just feminism.'

‘You may be right there,' Clement agreed.

‘It's generous of you to say so,' Arthur said, ‘but to my mind, er, financial independence comes into it. That's what's caused the breakdown of family life. Women out to jobs, women earning more money than men …' He paused dramatically, to let the relevance of this remark sink in.

‘Arthur talks like something out of the Old Testament sometimes,' Cheri said, excusing him. ‘Don't listen to him, Clem.'

Thinking this was excellent advice, Clement said hastily, ‘There is one thing you might do for me, Arthur. Sheila and I were going to have a party here tomorrow evening. I've got a list of the people invited in my study. If you could phone them and say the party is off, owing to unforeseen circumstances, I'd be grateful. Don't say more than that. Say I'm not too well, or something, if you must.'

‘I'll do the washing-up,' Cheri said. ‘There's a liberated woman for you.' She struck out in the direction of the kitchen as Clement proceeded upstairs with Arthur.

‘It's funny how women behave,' Arthur said, in a low voice, inviting man-to-man confidences.

‘Men have been known to run off from their wives.'

‘Yes, but – er—' Perhaps Arthur sensed he was treading on delicate ground. ‘You and Sheila seemed so stable. Cheri and I admired you for that.'

‘I'm sorry to let you down.'

‘But what do you make of it?'

‘I don't make anything of it, Arthur. I simply hope that she will come back.'

Arthur halted in the doorway of Clement's study, his solid form blocking the entrance. He turned back, the expression on his face obscured by the dimness on the landing. ‘Er – but I mean, you being an analyst, doesn't this rather upset your ideas, if you didn't see it coming?' A hesitation in the way he phrased the question removed some of the impertinence from it.

Clement saw the force of it. If an analyst, whose business it was to understand others, got into such messes, what hope was there for research assistants?

‘I didn't see it coming.'

‘Does that make you question – well, I'm no judge, but Jung's ideas always struck me as rather airy-fairy … I thought you perhaps … No, I shouldn't be saying this. But what price the archetypes now?'

‘Arthur, I don't really think you want a lecture, but archetypes aren't just airy-fairy ideas. They're modes of functioning. The chick pecking its way out of the egg obeys an archetype. A woman loving her newborn child is probably obeying an archetype. Ethology shows us how every species has a whole range of suitable behaviours. Archetypes have evolved through natural selection and are no more airy-fairy than biological entities. Sheila at the moment is trying to escape a wrong archetype, an archetype of dominance, embodied for her in the figure of a threatening step-father. I'm convinced this is more a question of dominance-avoidance than of Eros. If so, she may come to that realization soon, and return. If I'm wrong, I may not see her again.'

‘Gordon Bennett,' Arthur said. ‘What a mind you have, Clem.' And he gripped the older man's arm in a spasm of admiration.

Clement managed to settle Arthur in front of the phone with the invitation list for the party. He went slowly from his study into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed, head bent, reflecting.

It was lax of him to have mentioned Sheila's overbearing step-father to Arthur. He had an unspoken agreement with Sheila, which had grown up over the years, to edit that man from her life. When talking to others – even when talking to him on occasions – Sheila pretended that she had enjoyed a happy childhood. He always listened with sympathy; the pretence might be regarded as her protective entitlement. He knew all too well the terrors of her early adolescence, and feared only that she might come to take the lie for the truth, unpalatable as the truth might be.

She had slowly reconstructed her own biography to suit her needs as a successful writer of romances. He had seen it in print, in articles about her: ‘Green Mouth enjoyed a radiantly happy childhood in Somerset, on her father's estates.'

Sheila's father had been killed in the Ardennes, in the closing stages of the war. Her mother had married again, after the war, to one William Harstow, a friend of her late husband's and a regular soldier. When he was posted to West Berlin, Harstow's new wife and her daughter went with him. It was an ill-advised match. Harstow was a rigid disciplinarian, and ruled over their uncomfortable home with a heavy military hand. He frequently beat Sheila and her mother, starved them, and humiliated them in front of others. On occasions, when drunk, he sexually assaulted his ten-year-old step-daughter.

One dark night, Harstow came to the bad end his army friends had long been predicting. He was set upon in a dark Berlin alley and battered to death. The incident reached the papers. Had some German vented his anti-British feelings? The matter was never cleared up. No one was charged with the murder. Sheila and her mother returned to England under a mystery, a cloud, and some debts.

But Harstow left behind a sister, Sheila's adopted Aunt Anna. Anna Harstow had also gone out to Germany, and secured a job in army welfare, which she left after a while in order to work for a German
civilian firm. Anna was a different kind from her brother, as gentle as he was rough. Moreover, she took a liking to Sheila, and visited her whenever she was in England.

It was Aunt Anna who brought Sheila to Clement Winter, at the clinic in Berlin where he had just started out as an analytical psychologist, under the aegis of T. F. Schulz.

That was in the autumn of 1969. Sheila was twenty-nine. She was fair and slender, with blonde hair hanging straight to her shoulders. The style of her clothes was dated, but she had an innate elegance. Her manner was polite and reserved. There was little animation about her, a trait that was to persist, as though she had been born to an indoor, sedentary life.

She fixed the impressionable young analyst with a radiant smile, showing irregular teeth – which would be properly fixed in the Kerinth days which lay ahead. The smile was maintained even when the aunt handed her over to Clement's care and retired to a waiting room – although he observed her increased rigidity and the tighter grip she took of her handbag.

Yes, she told Clement, smiling apologetically, there had been some trouble with her step-father, but the poor man was dead, so it was all over. She had a flat of her own in England. Well, a room, really. She was on fairly good terms with her mother. Well, better terms. And she loved staying with Aunt Anna in West Berlin.

But Clement had been slow to perceive how much the girl suffered. This pretty young woman, with her sweet expression and gentle air, concealed her sorrow well. While she admitted that she had mentioned suicide to her aunt, that of course was all past. Last year, when she was ill. A misunderstanding when she happened to be feeling lonely.

It was the aunt, Anna Harstow, who had understood that her niece's loneliness went deep, and still continued, to the point of anomia. In some ways, the caring Anna saw Sheila more clearly even than Clement did – for he had fallen in love with her. It took him many months, and another of her suicide attempts, to see how obsessively Sheila tried to conceal the depth of anguish she was
experiencing. He had not encountered a smiling depressive type before.

Years later, in the early eighties – he and Sheila had been married for over ten years by then – when he saw photographs of Chinese smiling blankly into the cameras of foreign journalists, shortly after the death of Chairman Mao, he could comprehend something of the tragedy which had overwhelmed China and its population.

The Berlin analysis had proved seminal for Clement as well as Sheila. Week by week, sometimes day by day, he had been in his room with her, gaining her confidence. Once she had begun to talk, it was easier.