Out of This World (8 page)

He didn’t die, of course. The old bastard lived on, with occasional maintenance work on his heart, till he was seventy-three. And even then –

He said, ‘If you walk out of this room it’ll be the last time
you see me. And if you walk out of this room without giving me your promise, you won’t get a thing. Not a damn thing. Do you hear? How much do you think a photographer makes? Eh? Eh?’

And I thought: He can’t actually change it. He can’t come out of it, cast it aside. Not even now. Not even when – He’s got to go through with it, sound off like some demented Victorian Papa. He’s played the part so long he doesn’t know any more if it’s him or not. I knew I was going to walk out of that room.

My God! My God, Jenny! My God, Sophie! How terrible to die, how terrible to be dying and not to know, at the end of it all, what is true or false.

Sophie
 

A toy gun in a Brooklyn yard. A toy gun in the land of guns. They won’t ever forget that day, will they, Doctor K? One of them brings home a toy gun – and it’s only a
borrowed
toy gun – and they’re playing shoot-outs in the backyard, and their mother who’s watching through the kitchen window suddenly flips, she goes right off her head.

Two things I’ve never allowed in the house. Toy guns (six-shooters, rifles, machine-guns or any form of toy weaponry). And cameras.

Joe said we shouldn’t have a thing about it. Maybe having a thing about it was worse. Because it was only natural for kids to play fight-games, and maybe it was actually better, getting it all out in a game, in harmless fun. And in any case, what was to stop them simply putting two fingers together and pointing – ‘using their imagination’ he called it! – and making those Krrrsh! Kpow! noises? And I said, well that was all very well and, yes, if every man who’d ever played with a toy gun actually progressed to the real thing, then the world would be a far sight bloodier than it is. But it didn’t mean every kid should have one. And if people say, well a toy is a toy, pretend is pretend and real is real, then what about those kids you see on
the news with little old hard faces, only eleven or twelve but they’re dressed up in combat gear and they’re toting real machine-guns around the way other kids tote baseball bats. And what about this story – have you heard it? – it’s a true story. A man goes into a store and points a gun at the store-keeper and the store-keeper hands over all the cash he has. Then, befor he makes off, the man squirts water from the gun into the store-keeper’s face. Ha ha! he says, Not real, you see! But the store-keeper dies from a real enough heart attack.

Cameras, though. That’s more complicated, isn’t it? When every true American child, brought up within a certain income bracket, is directing their first home movie at least by the age of fourteen. Watch them in front of the TV. Lifting the cookies to their mouths without even moving their eyes. You got something to tell us, Mom? To explain? What, now? While we’re watching –

Dear Doctor K, you say such wise, such clever things. I wish I could say such things. Like: ‘Life is a tug of war between memory and forgetting.’ Like: ‘What you are afraid of, Sophie, is to leave the cocoon of surrogate amnesia provided by your children’s ignorance.’ Wow! And fuck you too. You used to put your cool, papery palm on my hot forehead, as if you could draw out the trouble with just a lift of your hand …

To remember – that can be bad, Sophie. And to forget – that can be bad too. Isn’t that the problem? Either way, you’re in a mess. But the answer to the problem is to learn how to tell. It’s telling that reconciles memory and forgetting. Sophie, let us try a little experiment. Let us suppose that I am that part of you which wants to forget: yet which, deep down, would really like to hear what another part of you is longing to tell. Or – one step further – let us suppose that I am your two twin boys, Tim and Paul, your two dear boys who are waiting to hear the story that you know one day you must tell them. You have been putting it off and putting it off, and so long as they ask no
questions, so long as they remain in happy ignorance, it is as though you too can believe that certain things never happened.

Dear Doctor Klein, I would happily lie back on that couch of yours, in that cocoon of yours above 59th Street, and let you tell me a story. Hush little baby. A bedtime story …

Once upon a time in the reign …

My darling Tim and Paul. I want to thank you for nine years of Safety. That’s what I gave myself – eight, nine, maybe ten years. When you grow up, my darlings, you’ll find out that at the beginning there were the years without any memory at all. And then even when memory began, there were the years without wanting or caring specially to know. Your gift to your mother. She needed a rest from memory.

I knew one day my time would be up. I thought one day you must just say: Tell us about England, tell us about where we come from. (Like: Tell us about the facts of life.) Or one day you’d find somewhere a copy of
Aftermaths
or
Photos of a Decade
(you won’t find a copy in the house). And you’d say: Did Harry really take these pictures? Hey, tell us about Harry. (Harry is your grandfather, my angels.) Faces frightened? Agog? Or just mildly curious? Pictures like that are just two-a-penny now, aren’t they?

I never thought my time would come up like it did. A toy gun.

And a letter.

Dear boys. I don’t allow cameras in the house, but your mother still takes her mental photographs, still puts on mental film her
aides-mémoire
of your ignorant, growing years. As now, through the kitchen window, where in the fading Brooklyn evening you are playing with your father (no gun this time) in the yard. A rough and ready game of soccer (in deference to Joe who still follows the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur). Tim and Paul. Dark shocks of hair, dark eyes. Like your mother’s, and her mother’s. It was a kind of recompense perhaps, nature’s
double peace-offering for the agonies of that spring and summer: twins. Twins! And it was only because you were twins that I didn’t, in the end, call either of you what I would certainly have called you if you’d only been one: Robert.

Joe, gallantly defending the apple-tree goal-mouth. Fair hair, touched with grey. Paler skinned than his sons and reddening more quickly. Handsome about the eyes still, and still sometimes, as now when he’s locked in this boys’ game, boyish and mobile around the mouth. It used to please me once, to excite me, that combination. It was so good to meet a man who simply didn’t have the knack of setting his mouth and jaw in that grave, grim, piously masculine way. Who could actually say and mean it, with never an inch of tongue in his cheek: This is a good time to be born in, this is the age of Fun! As if he would always be young. As if despite all his efforts to be the slick, shrewd man-of-the-world, innocence would perversely win and he would never lose the conviction that he had been set down in some vast playground.

Pouring out the wine and piling his plate high –
barbounia
!
garithes
!
kalamarákia
! – in that taverna by the waterfront under the stars in Poros. Touching me up under the table. Isn’t life grand, isn’t life just a peach?
Omorfí i zoi
!

He couldn’t believe his luck – dizzy with luck upon luck – when I said, Yes. Yes.

And now it disturbs me (it shames me) when I see it. That smile like a boy’s.

He lets in a header from Paul. Mops his brow. Laughs.

A perfect snapshot. Framed in the kitchen window. The laughing father, the laughing sons.

An image, my dear Sophie, is something without knowledge or memory. Do we see the truth or tell it?

And would that image through the window still be the same if those two happy boys knew what their mother knows (and will tell them), looking at them through the glass? And would it
be the same image if the father, who knows what the mother knows, didn’t have the knack – I don’t know what it really is, a sort of generosity or a sort of stupidity – of ignoring what he knows and endorsing only the image?

‘Things Not to Miss in Beautiful Britain.’

You can shoot with both. You can load and aim with both. With both you can find your target and the rest of the world goes black.

First Tony the pony. Then Hadrian the horse. I used to ride round the paddock, then along the bridleway, over the heath. Can you imagine that? A real English heath. Crisp winter sunlight. Frost melting on the gorse and bracken. I haven’t ridden for years, but I love horses. Sometimes I think I should have been born in the age of horses. That’s what Grandad said, when I asked him more about the medal: It was worse for the horses. I didn’t understand. But I had this picture of a whole lost age of horses.

Over the heath, down the dip, along by the wood. Don’t let anyone kid you, Doctor K, that there’s nothing sexual about little girls and horses. I first menstruated on a horse. So – she told me after Grandad’s seventieth: I was drunk and I said, ‘Snap!’ – did Carol Irving.

I was Mrs Hyde. Grandad was Nicholas Hyde. Then one summer a stranger from the future came to visit. Harry. He was sun-tanned but he didn’t look as if he’d been on holiday. He watched me ride, but never came near – do you know something? I think he was
scared
of horses – and asked me about school, and sat talking with Grandad. He didn’t have his camera, but he had this portfolio, full of photos, with the rest of his things up in the bedroom. I wasn’t supposed to look. But I wanted to know about my father. And now I did.

Another image for you. A pair of images. Overlaid upon each other. The sun flickering through the cedar tree and entering that bedroom at Hyfield. Harry’s things, like the belongings
of some lodger. The man lying on the hot white sidewalk. They called it ‘that famous shot’. In
Aftermaths
all it says is ‘Oran, 1960’. The sound of Grandad’s and Harry’s voices from below. Face up, his arms outspread and ankles crossed, and from the back of his head that long, long dark stream, stretching, stretching as if it will never end, down the street. I didn’t know which was worse, that the world contained such things or that my father had taken that picture.

Harry
 

Miracles shouldn’t happen. Picture-books aren’t real. The fairy-tales all got discredited long ago, didn’t they? There shouldn’t be thatched cottages still, tucked away among green hills. You shouldn’t be able to advertise in the local papers for an assistant and fall in love with the very first candidate who comes along. I should have gone on, in fairness, to consider Applicant Two and Applicant Three, since all I wanted (honestly Michael, truly Peter) was a competent part-time assistant. But I found out that, after all, I was still human.

Vacancy filled.

As if I should have resorted to the lonely hearts columns, and discovered, at the first attempt, lo and behold, my heart was cured of its loneliness …

‘Supposing you had been Number Three?’

‘You mean you wouldn’t have chosen me?’

‘No, I mean supposing you had been Number Three and I had chosen Number Two.’

‘Then you would never have known me.’

‘I can’t imagine never having known you.’

Three days a week. Paperwork. Film processing. Sometimes at the cottage by herself, while I was seeing clients or in
the air. I used to think: She’s there, she’s there right now.

Two, three weeks of playing it straight. Jenny, could you – ? Jenny, I’d like you to – This is how – Thank you, Jenny. Is it an infallible sign of love that it makes you feel again, even at sixty-three, like a clueless adolescent? A week of (not so subtle) inquiry. Her parents were divorced. She had a flat in Swindon where the family home had been and where she’d gone to art school. Boyfriends? No contenders at present. (‘Why should that be surprising?’) Another week of mutual suspicion that perhaps we knew each other’s game: she was an independent girl with a thing about older (much older) men, especially solitary men with shadowy pasts, especially burnt-out, rough-edged photo-journalists. I was the sort of man who at a certain age hired help-mates for ulterior purposes. But was damn slow about it.

I took her one evening to the White Lion for dinner, because she had worked late. (Had I contrived – had she? – that it would be necessary to work late?) The landlord, in the saloon, poker-faced as he handed us the menus. And who should be sitting at a nearby table but Doctor and Mrs Warren (both nodding politely and both plainly inquisitive), tucking into roast duck?