Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart (34 page)

As I did so, I heard the National Anthem. My father was already in the foyer—as he would have been on any other evening—gently rubbing his hands while he waited. My mother was tapping her foot quite happily to a tune that now remained inside her head. But she looked all right; only my father's worried glances might have suggested otherwise. The vanguard of the audience came dribbling out, mainly comprised of the younger element, the ones who'd been sitting in the back row and who would now have to find new venues for their petting. My father said, “Good evening, would you like some wine?” and held out a filled glass in either hand. These first arrivals looked at one another and giggled and murmured, “What's this for?—yeah—don't mind—ta!” A card had been screened during the interval announcing that there would be wine served after the performance, and why, but not everyone, plainly, would have had their eyes fixed on the screen. I went and helped my father pass round the drinks and the savouries. By now the main body of the audience was either slipping out—with heads studiously lowered—or else lingering, irresolute. But there were perhaps three or four couples who showed the right amount of appreciation and regret. “We're so much going to miss our cinema,” they'd say, “what a shame this all is!” “Yes,” I'd reply, “rotten old television, let's hope at least it has the grace to feel guilty!… And did you happen to see any of
these
at the Regent?” For Dad and I had spent a cheerfully nostalgic morning going through his stock of old posters, picking out those which were either the most colourful or else advertised our favourite movies, then pinning them up wherever we could find the space.
Bandit of Sherwood Forest
,
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
,
Born Yesterday
,
Magnificent Obsession
,
Guys and Dolls
… There must have been about fifty of them. “Do you think the day will ever come when we can buy old films and play them on the box?”

But such questions didn't accomplish much. I had wanted to get Johnny and one or two others to come—Gordon had by then gone off to be a pop star—yet Dad had asked me not to, on the grounds that somehow it wouldn't seem quite honest, nor quite dignified, and certainly the first of these objections had got through to me. Johnny and Simon, however, and some of Mum's and Dad's own friends, along with Gwen and Max and Gramps and Nana, would definitely have put a bit of a sparkle into things—even if privately they
had
considered the whole proceeding a mite pathetic.

“My father's really choked,” I said, “to hear the Regent's going to be demolished.” But only two people asked me if he had another job or where we were now going to live. In fact we weren't sure. There were several months before we'd have to move, and I was still trying to deter my parents from finally picking on London. They hadn't been happy there before. My father had missed his allotment—there'd been a waiting list in the area where they'd settled—and the only sympathetic job to come his way had been at the Classic in Baker Street, which had turned out to be another cinema soon having to douse its lights. They hadn't made any real friends in London, either. It had all been rather gloomy.

But it proved impossible to find the proper arguments.

Tonight, though, my mother did her utmost to enliven the proceedings. She hadn't yet become depressed, as was going to happen in the years ahead.

“Would anybody like to dance with me? Poor man's Grace Kelly. Looking for the poor woman's
Gene
Kelly. Any takers? Roll up!”

She weaved amongst the rest of us and undeniably added some much-required pizzazz. “‘Ten cents a dance, that's all they pay me, oh how they weigh me down…'”

Also variety.

“Anyone here do conjuring tricks? Juggling? Has anybody any balls?”

She sang again.

“‘Knees up, Mother Brown. Knees up, Mother Brown. Under the table you must go, ee-ay-ee-ay-ee-ay-oh!'”

My father did his best, as well…to carry on doggedly with his own one-sided conversations and pretend he saw nothing wrong. By now, though, people were either standing there and frankly watching Mum, or else edging towards the doors like a dribble of tactful sheep. It must have been evident to him for sometime that his little speech of gratitude and regret and good wishes wasn't going to be called upon. I felt sad for him, and slightly angry. It was what I think he'd regarded as the climax of his career, albeit with supposedly another fifteen years to run.

Mum finished her song and performed a curtsey. Unfortunately she wobbled—and then fell. The floor wasn't carpeted, she fell with quite a bump. Dad and I rushed over. She seemed disorientated, blankly shook her head when asked if she was hurt. She stood between us. Looked around in sorrowful surprise.

And then, without a word, she soundlessly—but copiously—threw up. Eight people, not counting Dad and me, had their coats and trousers and shoes and stockings pretty well splashed. One woman even asked to have her handbag sent to the cleaners.

17

The following August, my parents having bought a place in East Finchley, Johnny and I took a furnished flat in Camden Town. “That's nice,” said my mother. “Two good Jewish boys setting up house together. Don't forget on Friday nights to light the Sabbath candle! Have a mezuzah at your front door!” In Amersham, neither before the war, during it or afterwards, had we ever lit a Sabbath candle, set foot inside a synagogue, or had a mezuzah at our front door. Therefore, she was being humorous. But her humour had been ironic, as well as heavy-handed. In truth, she had been a little miffed by my decision to leave home.

And after we'd been there only a few days—in fact it was our first Sunday and we were sitting, pyjama-clad, over a celebratory brunch of fruit juice, scrambled egg, hot rolls and coffee, with the newspapers spread out beside our plates and overflowing onto our laps—Johnny suddenly said, “Let's go to Paris for the New Year!” He was looking at an article about Versailles.

By the New Year he would have completed his first six months at Air France—he worked in their reservations department in New Bond Street—and would then qualify for fantastically reduced travel (if only on a stand-by basis) which someone flying with him could also enjoy.

“Great! I'd love it! But how can you be certain you won't be working at the New Year? Doesn't everybody fight tooth and nail to get it off?”

But this was just small talk, what I sometimes thought of as keeping up appearances. I knew damned well he would be free—even if I hadn't expected mention of it for a further week or so. Memory plays tricks. I could have sworn it had happened in the Old Bull and Bush, up in Hampstead.

Johnny was fair-haired and of medium height and had the air of a serious-minded student—especially when he wore his glasses—not of someone who had frittered away the past six years in a series of dead-end jobs in Amersham. Indeed, I'd done my best to nag him into staying at school and going to university, reading for a degree in science or in music. But he'd been keen to be out in the world and his parents had backed him. Yet when I remembered such things as the crystal set, far more
his
accomplishment than it had ever been mine, I kept being cross at his shortsightedness and the thought of all that he was missing.

However, it mightn't be too late. I'd spoken,
ad nauseam
, about the fun of my own undergraduate days—the balls and the picnics and the punting, the all-night discussions fuelled by wine and chocolate biscuits, the playing of the drums and saxophone at dawn in misty meadows near the river bank—until at last he'd asked me, please, for the love of Mike, just to put a sock in it. I wasn't sure this was altogether a bad sign.

“Well, if we're really off to France,” I said, “tomorrow I'll inquire about evening classes in French.”

“But we're only going for a couple of days! And in Paris, you'll find, you don't even
need
French.”

“Oh, it's all right for you. You get practice at work. But for me, when I actually scraped through my ‘O' level, old Horwood nearly fainted from the shock of it.”

No, that had been the last time—again I'd got muddled—this time my pass was more respectable. But Johnny probably thought I was simply being modest. And he knew that modern languages had never been my forte. Even having a French wife hadn't helped me much, for both Ginette and her parents spoke excellent English and by the time Ginette had lived in Britain for twenty years most people were surprised to learn she wasn't British.

Previously I'd been content not to have to make the effort. Now things would be different.

“I think you're a nut,” said Johnny. “Just two days!” he repeated.

“This won't be the only time I'll go to France.”

“Maybe not, but on that principle you might as well take evening classes in Italian too—throw in Spanish, Greek, German and Serbo-Croat—people are getting better-travelled all the time.”

It was through Johnny I had met Ginette. She had become a colleague of his at Air France, some five years hence. Ginette had stayed a year; Johnny had stayed for nearly two decades. But he hadn't risen very high—too many people chasing after too few openings—and finally he'd handed in his notice in a fit of pique, before finding any other employment. From then on his life had further deteriorated. In fact, our destinies had been disturbingly alike: two reasonably bright boys who'd messed around and never fulfilled one tenth of their potential. Yet we hadn't even remained close. I didn't much like his wife but it wasn't until he'd walked out on her in the late seventies—as well as on his job—that I lost touch with him completely and had a letter returned to me, ‘Moved away, address unknown'. This had been a year or so before Philip died, when Ginette and I had still had…I am tempted to say a good marriage but it couldn't have been that, a good marriage would have better absorbed the stress, would have survived as something other than a travesty. Ironically, I think my own domestic happiness had been hard for Johnny to accept; and perhaps, as well, his seeing me so often could only remind him of his youth and the dreams he'd had of fame as a composer—although, damn it, I don't know how he'd thought he was ever going to achieve that, without the proper grounding.
Despite
his frequent references to songwriters who couldn't read a note!

In any case it was essential to get him away from Air France before he'd been there very long. His marriage had been childless—Sandra hadn't wanted children—and she'd been terrified of flying too, so after the first half-dozen years he hadn't even travelled much. She had joined the company a month or two before Ginette.

Furthermore, it wasn't enough to get him away from Air France. He also needed to be pushed towards university and/or a fulfilling career.

Does this sound manipulative? High-handed? It certainly sounds like, “Please do as I say,
not
as I do,” for my own future was still far from finalized. At present I had a job as a porter at the Royal Free, although for some time I'd been making inquiries about careers as diverse as those in the charity field and the London fire brigade and bomb disposal work; inquiries, even, about a career in the Church of England, regardless of those clear denials, perfectly sincere when made, to anyone who had previously questioned my choice of Divinity. Nor did I feel the need to mention to my parents (yet) that earlier in the year, at Cambridge, I had been both baptized and confirmed. I regarded Christianity not as a new faith but as a logical extension to my old, an extension which I had long been heading towards; during my past life almost as much as during this present one. I meant to be as certain as I could—this time—that I got things right.

Yet in the meanwhile, because I intended to be thorough, there was the question of my learning French; and also, because I intended to be thorough, there was the question of my marrying Ginette.

The order, obviously, is wrong.

But to put it bluntly—even coldly—I needed Ginette if I wanted Philip.

Philip wasn't due to be conceived until 1966 but it would be wonderful for him to have siblings—as well as wonderful for us, of course; and some of those siblings could be older just as easily as younger.

To put it less coldly: I remembered Ginette as she was at the time of our meeting and during the first fifteen years of our marriage; and I knew she would never have grown bitter if, firstly, Philip hadn't died (and Philip wasn't going to die) and—secondly—if I had been a better husband (and I was going to be a better husband). And just as when my mother had succumbed in her middle seventies, lined and strained and petulant, it hadn't taken me long to cast off the image of her old age and envisage her again as she had been in her heyday…so my renewed youth caused me to think of Ginette in the same fashion: laughing and vivacious and full of devilment. In the end I felt there was nothing cold at all about my decision to woo back my wife.

Previously, as I say, I'd met her in London, but of course I had often visited her parents' home in the Boulevard Beaumarchais, near la Place de la Bastille.

Now, however, I met her on the eve not simply of a new year but of a new decade. It seemed appropriate.

I'd taken Johnny to a nightclub in the Latin Quarter called Les Enfants du Paradis. I had been there with Ginette on another New Year's Eve and knew it was by no means the first on which she'd celebrated beneath its imitation theatre boxes, gilt cherubs and maroon rococo plushness—its seasonal balloons and streamers. The chances of her coming here tonight seemed roughly even. But I reckoned that if I didn't see her I could just hang about her apartment block the following day, even though this would present the problem of what to do with Johnny, and also of what to tell him.

That might be something I should need to sleep on.