Hindsight (9 page)

How did I get into a discussion of The Fanatics? These drugs do make one ramble. I shall have to get the medicos to put me on to something else before I tackle my final section. The maddening thing is that I have only eighty pages to go. If it weren't for this bloody woman! Forgive me, I know she meant a lot to you. Anyway, she cannot have been anybody's aunt. A trivial point, and irrelevant to you as you are writing fiction and could give her ninety nieces if you chose.

What else? I take it you put the remark about MB throwing all her papers into a trunk to tease me, but should I come across any of your father's letters I will put them aside for you, having (I'm afraid) read them myself. A curse of my method (of my temperament, really) is that I have to read every word. It has rarely proved worth while, but on those few occasions how worth while! Now that I feel myself to be in a hurry I am more conscious of the actual curse than the potential blessing.

I do wish your method (temperament?) had allowed you to deal more extensively with Captain Smith. I feel that MB is, typically, edging him out, though this is scarcely your fault as she is the focal point of your book. May I suggest that when you have finished a section you jot down for my use anything you can remember about him but which you have been unable to incorporate? Do not worry if it seems unlikely to be of use to me. I need straws to clutch at.

Later. This is all very rambling, I'm afraid. I have re-read your instalments so far and must tell you that I have done so with increasing doubts about the usefulness to me of what you are doing. How do even you know what is true and what is not? How do you distinguish between real memory and invention masquerading as memory? Of course in my trade I frequently have to extract fictional impurities from the accounts of supposedly reliable witnesses, where, for instance, somebody has added a bit of shaping embroidery to a favourite anecdote and has then retold it so often that he can no longer remember not seeing what his tongue has got into the habit of saying he saw. But with you I am trying to extract factual impurities from a fictional brew. Ironically this is what Baston claims the reader has to do with Steen's work. The
locus dassicus
, on which Baston expends a whole chapter, is the back-from-the-dead episode in
To Live like the Jackal
.

Do you remember, Steen was attempting to follow von Lettow­-Vorbek's retreat to Mahenge when he ran into a patrol and got laid out by a bullet across his scalp? His companions, four local tribesmen and his ‘friend' Mshimbi, thought he was dead, dragged the body into the bush and buried him in a shallow grave before making off. But Steen came to, dug himself out and somehow or other found his way to their camp, where they all ran off, thinking he was his ghost. It's a bravura bit of writing, maintaining the actuality of detail and the sense of his own delirium in a marvellous balance. Baston makes hay with it, and concludes that there's hardly a word of truth in the whole thing. It is a key passage in his debunking exercise. My own view, if you are interested, is that it is true enough. Perhaps, as Baston says, Mshimbi and the others knew he wasn't dead and only heaped branches and a few clods of earth on him to hide him till it was safe to come back and collect him; and perhaps in that case they didn't go far away. Mshimbi told Baston as much, and that he was on his way back to the spot when he found Steen staggering along the trail. But Baston admits he paid him, and Mshimbi on that basis would have told him what he wanted to hear. Steen, I am sure, came to and found himself in what he believed to be a grave, dug himself out, followed and found his companions, somehow. By the time he came to write his book he saw himself, vivid as truth, stepping in among them where they sat mourning in the moon-shadow under the bean-tree.

It may or may not have happened like that, and how shall we know? I am reconciled to leaving the question unanswered in Steen's case, but you are still here for me to question. When I feel stronger I may well challenge you, Baston-like, on a number of points. I hope you will bear with me.

Later.
I have had a minor but extraordinary illumination which I must tell you about, because you have accidentally provoked it. It comes, I suppose, of thinking about Steen's back-from-the-dead adventure just after writing and thinking about Désirée O'Connell. I believe her infatuation with him, and his consequent loathing of her, may be partially explained by the episode in East Africa. As far as one can make any definite sense of O'Connell's poems of the period, she was obsessed by dead men; she seems almost to have worked herself into a state of female necrophilia (clinically a somewhat rare complaint, I should imagine). Steen, by his own account, could be considered one of the living dead, and therefore providing her with an erotic stimulus scarcely available elsewhere. Steen, of course, took a quite different view of himself, as a creature brimming with excess life, and regarded the adventure as proof of that. The notion of being anyone's zombie would have disgusted him. I will get my secretary to bring me the D.D. poems next time she comes and see whether any of the later ones can be read in this sense. If only they weren't so ineluctably obscure.

I must get back to work; though, quite by accident, writing this rambling hodge-podge has turned out to be just that. I fear it will have been less use to you. To make up for wasting your time I will tell you that I have collated MB's bank statements for the late Thirties. Her finances improved considerably over the period. She spent less than half the income from Steen's trust and seems to have invested the remainder, quite cannily. The dividends (sources listed in statements in those days) rise steadily. There is a stray statement from '51 by which time she is living wholly on dividends. The sizeable royalties from
To Live like the Jackal
must by then have been going elsewhere. (Where? Why? Another tormenting little mystery.) But when you knew her MB could certainly have afforded to pay Orne some rent. Or at least her share of the coke-bill!

I am in two minds whether to send this, for fear it will sound to you maudlin. I am not in fact awash with self-pity; anger is nearer the mark. Write to me soon. Don't forget, Smith is the one I want to know about. I have as much of MB as I can take.

Yours ever,

Simon Dobbs

Dobbs's hope that I would not be ‘seriously put out' by the possibility of his death was badly off the mark. I was appalled. If anything, the slightness of our acquaintance made it worse. I have had friends die, both suddenly and predictably, and coped with my own reactions in the way one does. This was different, I think because it seemed to involve two deaths, that of Dobbs and of his book. Of course his publishers would get somebody else to finish it, but it wouldn't be the same thing—a zombie, to use his word. I sensed that if he did manage to get it done it was going to be very much what I have called a ‘real' book, not just a contribution to knowledge, but a source of pleasure and enlightenment for readers long after most of the books of our day are forgotten. So, in a mysterious way, I felt it to be Steen's last chance too. It was very unlikely that another writer of Dobbs's calibre would take him up, especially if the uncompleted zombie work existed on the shelves, providing an apparently satisfactory Life.

It seemed to me that I had a duty to do my small best to help, even if it meant taking risks with my own creative processes. I would settle down to getting all the ‘true' bits of my own book written before I did anything more about the ‘fictional' bits. This
was
a risk, partly because I had never before tried to write a book except from beginning to end, and partly because in this case the coherence of the finished product was obviously going to depend on an organic interweaving of elements. If I let the ‘truth' set too hard, the ‘fiction' might never cohere to it. The result would be a mess like a cracked mayonnaise. Still, I felt I had a moral duty to give it a go.

Truth is the devil. Strange that I should be finding that out so late in life. External truth is bad enough, but internal truth is gone like a lizard on a sandbank, glimpsed at best as a sort of already-vanished motion. The preceding two paragraphs contain a kind of truth, but still they are humbug. Now it would be dishonest to delete them.

The real truth, if I dare use such a phrase, was that I knew my own book was going off the rails, that the ‘fictional' element wouldn't wash, and that even the ‘true' parts had suddenly become shaky as a result of what Dobbs kept telling me. The fact, for instance, that Molly was really quite well off. I remembered her as desperately poor (even the drinks tray was stocked because the officers used to turn up with at least one bottle between them) but managing by her own personality to shed round her a sense that her world was one of invaluable richness. This was an important factor in my picture of her, miraculous evidence for her creed that one could live one's life on one's own terms, rather than on the world's.

On the other hand I merely ‘remembered' her referring to Daisy as Dee-Dee, and yet Dobbs told me I had got that almost right. My fictions at this level seemed truer than my facts. In deciding to do what Dobbs asked me I suppose that unconsciously I was hoping to provide myself with enough similar solid details to prop up my tottering structure. Mind you, I did not then acknowledge that it was already a near-ruin—I seemed to myself to be enjoying what I wrote.

Even less consciously (though I am now more painfully aware of my motives at that level) I must have wanted to get back to the deer. There was one particular half-afternoon in which I had actually been attacked by a stag in rut. This was an episode—like the finding of Mr Wither's body—which I could not be said ever to have forgotten but about which I never thought. It was like a known fact shut away in an unread book. I hadn't really even thought of using it in my novel. I suppose I told myself that it didn't fit in with my image of the deer, those tutelary spirits of what Paddery had meant to me, embodiments of wildness and freedom. But now, at a more sensible if less rational level, I was having to face the knowledge that wildness and freedom have their shadows in danger and suffering. The deer-like life that Molly could be said to have led must have caused a fair amount of chaos, and worse, in other people's lives. So in that sense the episode of my being attacked by the stag could be said to have become proper to the novel, though this was not the reason I gave myself for writing about it. Dobbs's request for more information about the Captain had triggered the memory, and only then had I realised that two longish encounters with him were linked with that afternoon, occasions on which he had momentarily exposed to my view glimpses of the creature that inhabited his baroque carapace. I got the whole lot done in two stints of writing and sent it off to Dobbs. In my covering letter I tried to adopt the attitude to the news about his health which I thought he would prefer—friendly concern, faith in his book and so on. I tried not to let the curious near-hysteria I felt show through. I don't think I had any inkling myself why it mattered so much to me that Dobbs should not die before … not before he had finished his book, but I mine.

9

T
he summer holidays had almost finished the War, but not quite. It wasn't so easy now; on half holidays the single football pitch involved almost a third of the school; the colder air and damper ground made ambushes and lying in wait less attractive tactics; and though The Man had extended bounds eastward along the lake to include the chestnut grove, and had thus opened new battlegrounds, the variations on campaigns, ruses and assaults were becoming exhausted. The hay forts had of course gone long ago.

Still there were fairly frequent skirmishes among a few shrilling enthusiasts, and occasionally for no good reason the whole school found itself in the mood and hostilities were resumed in earnest. On one such morning Paul came out, having missed most of break because of doing extra maths with Clumper Wither, and looked down over the battlefield. He had his gun in his hand, having heard the racket while he was working with Clumper (one of the juniors had come back from the holidays with a ricochet-whine, much easier to make convincing than the initial crack of a shot). He stopped at the edge of the gravel, hoping to see where a sudden charge from the flank might have best effect. A tang hung in the air like the smell of smoke as the chill of an almost-winter night was eased away by the sun. Paul's skin, chilly too with long sitting, crawled and tingled in the mild warmth. The day was clear and golden, with trails of light mist along the surface of the lake. It was down there that the battle raged, over the yellow leaf-fall of the chestnut grove and in and out among the dark, ridged tree trunks. Too far for a charge, and in any case break must be almost over. Miss Penoyre, duty master this morning, was looking at her watch; the handbell stood on the gravel beside her. Paul let out a deliberately audible sigh, and she looked up.

‘Boys have all the fun,' she said. She sounded angry about it.

‘Can I ring the bell?'

‘Three minutes. If I'd been a boy they'd have sent me away to school. You don't know how lucky you are.'

‘You don't know how lucky you are having an aunt like Miss Benison. You should see mine.'

I suppose so. I can remember laughing at her in my pram. But she's got other sides. Look how beastly she is to Chris. What's she got against him?'

Paul felt uncomfortable; there was a school rumour that Miss Penoyre and Mr Wither were in love, but this was just gossip, of no greater credibility than the long-standing myth of Matron's unrequited passion for Hoofer Hutton. (A whole series of Matrons had filled that role.) It seemed to Paul at the time that his discomfort arose from the way Miss Penoyre was using Christian names. That was all right down at the conservatory, not up here … But there was more to it than that, a feeling that she was about to do or say something truly embarrassing, something more to do with Molly than Mr Wither, as if she was going to ask Paul to
choose
…

‘She's only teasing,' he said.

‘It's never “only” with her. The more she laughs, the more she means it.'

‘Who means what?' said the deep voice of the Captain, close behind them. One of his characteristics, much noticed by the boys, was his silent walk. He seemed to float, with his small feet merely trailing along the ground, as though his bulging torso were gas-filled almost to the point of weightlessness.

‘You were at Aunt Molly's,' said Miss Penoyre. ‘You heard her getting at poor Chris. What's she got against him?'

The Captain gazed at her and nodded, accepting that Molly had so behaved.

‘I will consider the matter,' he said

‘Oh, please …'

He nodded again, closing the subject, and his dark, red-rimmed eyes turned towards Paul, moving slowly over him and coming to rest at last on the gun. Though his look expressed neither comment nor question Paul felt a need to explain.

‘I thought there'd be time to have a go in the War, sir.'

‘Some for fear of censure,' said the Captain. ‘Some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later.'

He wasn't the sort of master you could please by making guesses at where a bit of poetry came from, and in any case Paul had no idea—wasn't even sure it was poetry at all—but at the same time made an intuitive leap to what the words were about, and then, naturally, couldn't resist showing that he'd done so.

‘My father fought in the real war,' he said.

‘I don't even know whether mine did or didn't,' said Miss Penoyre.

‘Mine got the MC,' said Paul.

He put down his gun and reached for the bell, glancing up at Miss Penoyre for the signal to ring it. She wasn't looking at him but at the Captain, smiling as if he amused her. Paul realised with surprise that in spite of her being so much more like one of the boys than a master she wasn't afraid of the Captain. He might have been a large and friendly animal in her eyes, her guard-dog, only dangerous to other people.

‘Of course your father fought,' said the Captain.

‘Did you know him too, sir?' said Paul.

‘Too?'

‘Miss Benison did.'

You didn't normally interrupt the Captain, but he had seemed to Paul to speak of his father as if he was expecting some response, and then to react to Paul's question with surprise. Now, however, he turned his huge head straight towards Paul and stared at him with sudden ferocity, revealing more clearly than Paul had ever seen it before what the boys had somehow instinctively known from the first, that there was something inside him far more dangerous and alarming than the normal run of schoolmaster could command. Even Stocky at his worst could only make you miserable. This power to make your heart leap to your throat and sweat break out all over your skin was something different in kind. The effect only lasted an instant before the Captain turned away again.

‘I think it is time for the bell, Miss Penoyre,' he said.

‘Oh, yes. But you will think what to do about Aunt Molly and Chris, won't you?'

‘Ring the bell, Rogers.'

Gripping the glossy mahogany handle Paul swung the bell from side to side at knee-level. You had to get the rhythm right, stopping each stroke abruptly so that the clapper really slammed into the brass. It was quite hard work. After a dozen swings Paul looked up for the signal that he could stop, but the Captain had taken Miss Penoyre by the elbow and was leading her away from the centre of clamour. He said something. She stared at him and put her other hand to her mouth. A pinkness tinged her sallow cheeks, making her look excited but a bit frightened. Paul did half a dozen more good swings and put the bell down. He watched the War end with a half-hearted charge out of the trees against enemies who had already turned their backs and were trailing up the hayfìeld. The landscape still seemed full of a ghostly ringing.

The Captain was late for Extra Greek. Paul waited in the dust-smelling little room where he did these extra lessons with increasing nervousness. It wasn't just that he knew he had somehow infuriated the Captain during break, in fact that didn't worry him much, because experience had shown that the Captain could change mood quite unpredictably. On the whole Paul enjoyed his private sessions with the Captain, though they were very different from the dolphin-like plunge and skim on which Clumper Wither led him through the kindly waters of mathematics. The Captain belonged to colder oceans, a creature too large for you to make out his whole shape, let alone his intentions. Still, Paul found it satisfactory to have such an adult pay sole attention to him for fifty minutes. It made him feel that he mattered.

Today, though, there was a school match. Paul hated these. Luckily, now that petrol was rationed, only the School XI went to away matches, but for home fixtures everyone paraded form by form in the courtyard and then the form heads marched them out to the football pitch, where they were expected to stand yelling ‘Come on St Aidan's!' until the syllables were meaningless. After all that, the school nearly always lost. Because everyone in Schol except Paul, Higley and Dent ma. was either in the XI or a prae (praes looked after the visitors) Paul was due to head the procession, marching out his squad of two. The idea so disgusted him that on an impulse he had told Higley that he might be late, because of Extra Greek, and having done that he had made a sort of bet with himself: if the session with the Captain lasted long enough to cause him to miss the parade, he would go off on his own on a deer-stalk, and time it to reach the football pitch just before the match ended. Nobody was going to spot there was one less chanting boy there. It was this decision that made him nervous. Now that the Captain
was
late, and it seemed more and more of a possibility, he became steadily less sure that he could go through with it.

Coming in without explanation or apology, the Captain slid a sheet of paper on to the table Paul used as a desk. Instead of being one of the usual old Eton Schol papers it was four lines of Greek, written out in the Captain's tiny, print-like script with the meanings of the difficult words listed below. The last of these words was ‘deer'.

‘It concerns a battle, and the defeat of a king,' said the Captain, then turned and walked to the window where he stood, staring out. After ten minutes he came and looked over Paul's shoulder at three false starts. With a silver propelling pencil he drew a series of curving arrows across the poem, charting connections from word to word.

‘Hello, they make a pattern,' said Paul.

‘As the poet intended,' said the Captain and returned to the window. Helped by the arrows Paul sorted out a story which seemed to him to make a pointless kind of sense.

‘Finished, sir.'

The Captain came over, his silent walk mildly ominous, and read the result.

‘The average examiner might consider that a tolerable attempt,' he said. ‘I find it offensive. Consider. These lines were written by a man of intelligence, a man with a purpose. That they have survived over two thousand years suggests that he succeeded in his purpose. What do you think he was trying to do?'

‘Er … make fun of Philip, I suppose.'

‘To wound him, to hurt his pride, to lessen his soldiers' trust in him. How?'

‘Oh, he ran
like
a deer!'

There was a change of emphasis in the rumour of school life, that varying mutter that seemed permanently to emanate from Long Passage. It rose slightly as people stopped doing whatever they'd been up to and began to get ready for the match. Paul stared at the four lines of Greek. He could have asked about Philip, got the Captain going on Alexander … he was afraid to try.

‘The note of gloating mockery is intentional,' said the Captain. ‘This is a true war poem, much more so than something like
O Valiant Hearts.
The poet, a certain Alcaeus, understood about war. He saw the bodies sprawled among the rocks—unlike the hymnodist, whoever he may have been.'

‘Arkwright, sir.'

‘Your father would confirm what I say. I take it he met Miss Benison during the war, not after?'

‘Yes, sir. She nursed him.'

‘Did he tell you that?'

‘He's dead, sir. When I was five.'

The Captain did not make any of the usual little mutters, really mostly embarrassment at having mentioned the subject. But though the noise from Long Passage could now definitely be interpreted as a general movement away towards the locker-room for macs and caps (compulsory for match-watching) he made no move to end the session.

‘How then did you discover your acquaintanceship with Miss Benison?' he said. ‘Not through your mother, I imagine.'

As Paul started to explain he found his mind had made itself up. He would skip the match. Perhaps it was talking about Molly that did the trick, the knowledge that she would positively have approved of his rule-breaking. Perhaps it was the omen of being set a poem about deer to translate, perhaps something to do with the Captain's interest. At any rate he began deliberately to spin the story out, going into detail, even though this involved talking about the strangeness of Daisy's behaviour.

The Captain listened in silence, seeming to accept Paul's right to speak about another adult in that fashion. Indeed when Paul finished—by which time the school noises were trampings and squeaks of command, coming via the window and thinned with the lack of indoor resonances—he went further. For a moment the whole adult conspiracy—that huge unspoken pact whereby the shortcomings of adults, even such men as Herr Hitler, were never acknowledged, let alone discussed, in the presence of children—vanished.

‘You believe Miss O'Connell is a madwoman?' asked the Captain.

‘I don't know, sir. She's like … well, there's a woman I know at home who drinks too much …'

‘Yes.'

‘And I suppose that's why Miss Benison has to look after her.'

‘So it would seem.'

‘And Miss Penoyre helps.'

‘Yes.'

‘But I don't think she likes it.'

For a moment Paul thought he must have triggered off the same rage he'd inexplicably provoked that morning. The atmosphere, almost the smell, of the little room seemed to change, become heavy and musky. Then he realised that this time he was not the focus of this anger, if that was what it was.

‘She dislikes looking after Miss O'Connell?' asked the Captain.

‘No … I mean not that specially. I suppose I've only seen them with people about. It might be the way Miss Benison teases everyone.'

‘Perhaps. I have suggested Mr Wither simply stops going to tea on Sunday.'

‘She'll tease about that.'

‘The roster for duty master changes at half term. Mr Wither can take over from me on Sunday evenings, beginning next Sunday. I tell you this because Miss Benison is certain to ask you about it. All you need say is that the roster has changed. There is no reason why she should be given an excuse to distress Miss Penoyre.'

‘But she's very fond of her. She often says so.'