Goodbye Again (25 page)

She said later, ‘About last night … you were right, I was avoiding the issue of me and Elsa. And you’re right to want to examine why things go wrong between people.’ She put down her glass. ‘Maybe I can give you some real truths now. She was the person I really wanted to spend my life with. But –’ She stopped. ‘I don’t know, after a year or two I got to feel we weren’t on the same wavelength, and never would be.’

‘She told me that, but you wouldn’t tell her why.’

‘No. Because I didn’t know why. I knew something was wrong between us, so that one day one or other of us was going to have to give it up. And when it came to it, I did and she wouldn’t.’

‘Why weren’t you on the same wavelength?’

‘I wasn’t right for her.’ She screwed up her eyes, frustrated.

‘No?’

‘She was going against her real nature, and you and she are the proof of that.’

She was stalling again. ‘Maybe it would be simpler to say you just fell out of love with her?’

She considered this, as a piece of crucial courtroom evidence that might save her. ‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. I didn’t fall out of love with her. She only had to be near me, and I loved her, and then I got to wonder if it wasn’t just sex.’

‘All right, but why did everything else go wrong for you?’

‘She overwhelmed me with her love and I couldn’t give it back, and this made her vulnerable, gave me power over her. I used that power. I wanted to hurt her because I didn’t really love her, and the more she needed me, the less I needed her. And the more I behaved coldly to her, the more she warmed to me, and so the
worse I behaved. Trapped in that awful equation. I should have got out before the cruelty started.’

Silence, so that I went on quickly. ‘Point is, though, you still haven’t said what it was in her character that put you off her.’

‘You should be a lawyer.’

‘Don’t you owe it to her?’

‘To you, you mean.’ She let her shoulders slump, looked down, then up at me. ‘All right – she was so confident, especially in her unwavering loving, so absolutely right and complete about it. And this began to annoy me. I couldn’t match her fine loving character, knew that the only control I was ever likely to have was in hurting her. There, I’ve told you the truth. And I don’t feel any better for it.’

‘No.’

‘And even that’s not the whole truth. You see …’ She paused, as if this time she really had to get it right. ‘We’re back to one reason why Elsa killed herself. It wasn’t just because you took her round Europe Nazi hunting, and she found out about her father. It was just as much because I wouldn’t give her the life she so much wanted with me. That was cruel of me, denying her what I could perfectly well have given her, if I hadn’t always been counting the possible cost to myself. Just selfish. If I’d simply accepted the marvellous things we did have, we could have built a lifetime together on those.’

‘But …’

‘You see,’ she went on, fiery again, ‘What was wrong was that I started thinking it wouldn’t work out with us. So it didn’t. The thought created the fact.’ Silence again. And then in a quieter tone: ‘I think if I’m quite cold about it all, I know I did the right thing in leaving her. It wouldn’t have worked out. There’d have been worse things if I’d stayed, awful rows, hatred. And you did the right thing too, in nailing her father. But then Elsa was doing the right thing as well, for her, in loving me the way she did.’ 

‘Exactly. I loved Elsa that way too, which is why she and I would have been a real house on fire together.’

‘Yes. I didn’t have her blind guts in loving. Or yours. I wish I had.’

The haddock pie came, and it was damn good, and we felt better about each other. Later, still unsatisfied, I said ‘All the same – my God, Martha, why did she do it?’

‘We know why. She couldn’t face the knowledge of what her father had done in the war. That was the final nail in her coffin.’

‘The final nail?’

‘Well, we both could have stopped her killing herself. If I hadn’t left her she’d never have gone off Nazi hunting with you. She’d have stayed in New York with me. And later you could have stopped her if you’d gone back to New York with her.’

I nearly wept again.

We didn’t say anything more, looking down at the pine table, fiddling with the cutlery. A silence that might have lasted forever, so that I felt I had to say something. ‘Dear Elsa,’ I said.

Martha looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Dear Elsa.’

‘Look,’ she said later, ‘I’m at a disadvantage – you know so much about me from Elsa, and I know nothing about you. I’d like to know what Elsa might have told me about you.’

‘She’d probably have said I was a bounder.’

‘A what?’

‘A chancer, and a drinker.’

‘Are you?’

‘Sometimes. And I’ve blown things that way with women, along with my high-hatted loving.’

‘Your what?’

‘You know – red roses, too much singing and dancing.’

She was puzzled. ‘Let me play the lawyer – it’s dishonourable not to be absolutely full-hearted in loving. And I wasn’t with Elsa.
As for being a “bounder”, or whatever, those are misdemeanours. The grand-jury trial is surely for a lack of loving, and that doesn’t seem to have been your crime. You seem to have been a real copperbottomed lover.’

She paused again, looking up over my shoulder. ‘So, members of the jury? Your Honour?’ She nodded, then looked back at me, smiled. ‘Not guilty, case dismissed.’

‘Sounds like special pleading to me.’

‘What did you think lawyers were for?’

I drew back in my chair. ‘You’re funny. I hadn’t suspected that.’

‘Not all the time. And you seemed just a boozy bounder at first, but you’re not. Where it matters you’re sober as a judge.’

‘We’re not the people we seem.’

‘No, and it’s just great luck if the real person coincides with the other real person in love.’

‘And if they can go on seeing the real person that way,’ I said.

‘Ah, yes. There’s the rub.’

‘That’s the risk you have to take in love. “Better a day as a lion than a lifetime as a lamb”.’

She considered this. Then she said, in her definite way, ‘Yes, that’d be quite something.’ She paused again, smiled. ‘I’d like to get to wear that high-hatted lion-lover’s hat of yours!’

We talked effortlessly then. You can tell when there’s a lucky coincidence, that flash of lightning between two people, when the talk is easy, always on the brink of laughter. I gave her my phone number and drove her back to the hotel. ‘We’ll be in touch before you go back.’ I said.

‘Yes, I hope so.’

But when she disappeared into the lobby of the Randolph, I didn’t know if either of us meant it. It might all have been the wine, the good haddock pie, the release of coming to terms with each other, and with someone we’d both loved, lost or betrayed.

She phoned next day at lunchtime. ‘I have a break in the conference,’ she said. ‘It’s all rather heavy going. Some British lawyer: “The Law of Tort in Property Conveyancing”.’

‘My God.’

‘And worse, there’s an even more weighty address tonight before dinner: “Estate Law: Disposable and Non-Disposable Assets, as between the Quick and the Dead”.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘Not really. Anyway, I don’t want to go. I feel among the quick. Can I return your favour and buy you a meal in Oxford tonight?’

‘How will you get out of the dinner?’

‘I’ll say I have a headache.’

‘That’s rather bounderish.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’

We ate at a Greek restaurant I knew on the Banbury Road and took up effortlessly where we’d left off the previous night. The red Demestica was good but the kebabs were tough.

‘You need to grill them very hot and quickly,’ I said. ‘Over wood, with really good lamb, not the cheap cuts. I do them on my big fire in the barn in winter.’

‘What – on a spit?’

‘No. I have an old metal half-gate, and chicken wire over that. Got it from Tom, my farmer landlord up the lane – had it as part of his sheep fencing.’

She laughed.

I said to her, ‘I’m happy.’

‘So am I.’

‘Unhappiness makes one monstrous.’

‘Shall we have another half bottle?’

I nodded and we looked at each other, before she broke the silence. ‘Ben’ she said, ‘It wouldn’t work, with you and me. It worked
with you and Elsa, because I think that’s how she really was. But I know I’m really like I am.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and there was a stab of sadness.

‘Though I wish …’

She stopped, looking at me, trapped in each other’s gaze, as we’d been that first time we’d met outside the barn in the coming storm. Then her eyes broke away, and we chatted of other things, before I drove her back to the Randolph.

We kissed by the entrance, a kiss just short of our lips. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ I said.

‘Yes, we will. And will you come to New York?’

‘Yes. And you – back here sometime?’

‘Certainly.’

A smile and she walked up the steps without another word, but inside the door she turned back and waved, as if to confirm a further promise of something, I knew not what. But that didn’t matter now. Loving and truth-hunting with women – I was going to have to put that aside for the moment. I’d tried, and found you could plumb to the depths of any human heart without finding the truth there. What mattered now was that Martha had seen some virtue in my trying. And more than that she’d brought back hope, and I felt that small thrill in the pit of the stomach that comes when you know you can do good work again, where in my painting, at least, I could display, in a portrait or a nude, the real truths of another, where their secrets could emerge in a dazzle of light and colour, on an incorruptible canvas. Martha had already given me as much as any lover. I could paint again.

It had been cloudy most of the day, but the sky cleared as I drove home, and there were pinprick stars all over. Very softly, I started to sing ‘The Skye Boat Song’.

FICTION

The Private Sector

The Sixth Directorate

The Paris Trap

The Flowers of the Forest

The Valley of the Fox

Summer Hill

Return to Summer Hill

Firesong

TRAVEL

The Dancing Waiters

Gone Tomorrow

Children of the Country: Coast to Coast Across Africa

Duck Soup in the Black Sea

MEMOIR

Wicked Little Joe