Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (69 page)

Wheeler stopped again, this time, more than anything, in order to catch his breath. He clearly needed to. He had a slightly faraway gaze, which was directed at the stairs, although without actually seeing them. He seemed to me simultaneously very tired and very agitated, as if he had relived the words he had spoken to Valerie rather too intensely, words spoken perhaps in their haunted bed, perhaps when she woke him with her crying and with her nightmares that corresponded all too closely to reality, and those are the ones no one can bear, when reality only echoes the dream. 'Let me be lead within thy bosom, may you feel the pin prick in your chest. Despair and die.' I waited and waited and waited. Finally, I said: 'I assume it was no use.'

'No, it wasn't, and the worst thing is that, by then, I knew nothing would be of any use, that her life had been twisted out of shape forever and could never be made straight again. I was already part of the group, which was created too late to save her life. Not that my gift, my capacity for interpretation was any less before I joined, of course, but you adapt your vision to the task in hand and you hone that vision; you grow used to deciphering and looking deeper into what tomorrow will bring. You must have noticed the same thing, that increase in perspicacity, since you've been with Tupra, or am I wrong?'

'No, you're right. I am more alert now. And I tend to interpret everything, even when I'm not working and no one wants me to report on what I've seen.' And I took the opportunity to ask him something that I couldn't quite understand, even at the risk of losing precious time and of Mrs. Berry interrupting us: 'If I remember correctly, Peter, the first time you talked to me about the group, you told me that Valerie was already dead when the idea was first mooted by Menzies or Vivian or whoever. I don't understand, given that the group was formed during the War.'

Wheeler looked bemused, perplexed. He sat thinking for a few moments and then his face lit up like someone who has found the solution to a minor enigma (right to the end, he enjoyed linguistic curiosities) and he said in Spanish:

'Ah, I see. It's a problem of ambiguity, or a misunderstanding on your part, Jacobo. If I said it as you said it now, "she was already dead," that would translate in your language as
"estaba ya muerta,"
but in the figurative sense, I meant that she was already doomed, not that she had literally died.' And he moved back into English again, because by then, it was clear that speaking a foreign language tired him more. 'What I probably meant was that by then it was too late, that she had already done the thing that would later lead her to kill herself, that her fate was sealed. And that was the thing, you see; if the group had been formed before, someone might have decided, doubtless I myself with my watchful, trained, alert eye, that just as Valerie wouldn't have gotten very far as a spy, as she herself knew, neither was she equipped for black propaganda, which was too dirty for her scruples and for her dislike of deceit. Still less was she equipped to put at risk or sacrifice the lives of innocent people, however German they might be. As you know, step by step, you start doing things for which you have no stomach or aren't suited, and war stretches people a lot, or they themselves, without noticing, stretch themselves beyond their capabilities and only snap when it's all over. If someone had spotted her limitations in time, they would perhaps have withdrawn her from Milton Bryan. She would have been sent back to the Foreign Office maybe, or been restricted to working on white propaganda.' Wheeler ran his hand over his forehead, almost squeezing it this time. 'Sometimes I tell myself that I should have known anyway. But it's easy to be wise after the event or
a tor pasado
as you say—once the bull has passed—when you know all the facts. I wasn't altogether sure what kind of work Valerie was doing in the PWE, and we were thousands of miles apart most of the time. And she never even mentioned the term "black propaganda," so she may well have been engaged in it without knowing of its existence, or, rather, without even knowing the concept. She may also have been following orders and divulging nothing, not even to me. I don't know. If Delmer was diabolical, then Jefferys was Lucifer in person.' He paused very briefly, then added: 'I'll never know who he was, who was hiding behind that name. I have very little time left, Jacobo. Almost none.'

The music stopped, and after a few seconds, I heard Mrs. Berry coming down the stairs. 'That's it, it's over,' I thought. 'I'll never find out how Valerie killed herself and why Peter saw her do it, even though, in principle, I have more time than him, and not almost none. And why, if he saw her kill herself, he couldn't have stopped her.' And I added to myself: 'But I can't complain. I've found out a lot today, and that isn't even why I came.' However, Mrs. Berry didn't come into the living room or call us in to lunch, but went straight to the kitchen, where I could hear her bustling about. Perhaps we would still have time if she was putting the finishing touches to lunch and if I hurried.

'How did Valerie kill herself, Peter?' I asked, this time with no show of tact. 'And how come you saw her do it?'

Wheeler shifted in his chair, trying to find a more comfortable position, and then he hooked one thumb under his armpit as if it were a tiny riding crop and he seemed to rest the whole weight of his chest on that thumb, at least that was my impression. It was as if he needed to lean on something, even something symbolic: a poor thumb, although he did have long fingers.

'We were living then in a house rather like this, but much smaller,' he said, 'with two or three floors, depending on how you looked at it, because the top floor was very small indeed, with only a
chambre de bonne
I suppose you'd call it, which we used now and then when we had visitors. It was and still is in Plantation Road, near where you lived. It cost a lot more than my salary could stretch to then, of course, but the money I had inherited allowed me such privileges, as it always has. Anyway, after four agitated nights during which she barely slept'—'Yes,' I repeated to myself, 'sorrow did indeed haunt thy bed'—'Valerie persuaded me to go and sleep in the little room on the top floor, so that I could get some rest until she calmed down; she hoped it wouldn't last very much longer, that vicious circle of nightmares and insomnia, of loathing herself when awake and being filled with panic whenever she fell asleep, of being unable to tolerate herself either awake or asleep. It worried me to leave her unaccompanied during those night hours, because they were doubtless the worst and the most difficult to get through, but I thought, too, that perhaps she needed to spend them alone in order to begin to recover, that it might be good for her not to have me by her side to talk to her and try to console her and ask her questions, to reason and argue with her, because this had served no useful purpose in the four days and nights she had spent awake, none at all. I don't know, when a situation doesn't change, you think all kinds of things. I remember feeling very uneasy as I got into bed, leaving the door open so that I could hear her if she called me, so that I could go to her at once—we were only separated by one floor, two brief flights of stairs. But such was my accumulated exhaustion that I soon fell asleep. Sleep must have proved utterly irresistible because I didn't even turn out the bedside light or close the little book I was reading and which lay on the counterpane. I only woke at dawn and I must have been lying very still because it was only then, and not before, that the book fell to the floor, with hardly any noise: it was
Little Gidding,
the last of the
Four Quartets,
the paperback edition published by Faber. I remember that clearly; it had only recently come out and I hadn't been able to read it during the War; books like that didn't reach Ceylon or the Gold Coast.' And he murmured what were doubtless lines or parts of lines: '"Ash on an old man's sleeve . . . This is the death of air . . . the constitution of silence . . . What we call the beginning is often the end . . ." etc' Then he went on: 'So it wasn't the book falling that woke me. I don't know what it was. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was in the
chambre de bonne
alone and to remember why. I picked up the book and placed it on the bedside table, glanced at the clock—it was almost four—and automatically turned out the light, although not with the intention of going straight back to sleep, because that sense of unease had returned. I preferred or decided to look in at our room first, to see, without going in, if Valerie was sleeping or not, and, if she wasn't, to ask if she needed anything; or if she perhaps wanted me by her side. I put on my dressing gown and went very quietly down the stairs, so as not to wake her if she was asleep, and then I saw her sitting where she shouldn't have been sitting at all, at the top of the first flight of stairs, with her back to me.' Wheeler pointed upwards to his left, towards the top of the first flight of stairs in his current house beside the River Cherwell and not in Plantation Road. 'Just there, where you say you saw a drop of blood. It's odd, isn't it? She was still fully clothed, not in her nightdress or her dressing gown, as if she hadn't been to bed at all or was getting ready to go out, and that was what surprised me most of all, in the very brief instant during which I could feel surprise. But I didn't feel alarmed, the fact is that never, never, not during one of those fleeting moments or beforehand, did I ever suspect, did it even occur to me to fear that she was going to do what she did, not once. And there I failed. My gift or my faculty or my ability, whatever you want to call it, the gift that Tupra and you and that young half-Spanish woman have, the gift that Toby had and I have had regarding matters that were of no importance to me, failed me completely on that occasion. How could I not have guessed, how could I not have seen it, how is it that I had not the slightest glimmer? I've been asking myself that since 1946. How could I have been so stupidly optimistic, so trusting, so unaware, how is it that I saw no warning signs? That's a long time, isn't it? When it comes to the things that touch you most deeply, you never want to hear the warnings, but they're always there. In everything. One is never willing to think the worst.' Now Wheeler covered his eyes with one hand, placed it like a pulled-down visor, perhaps as I had done at some point while I was watching and not watching Tupra's horrific videos on that night when he was Reresby. 'I could understand her concern, her bad conscience, even her horror,' Wheeler continued to speak with his eyes covered, 'but I thought that sooner or later she would get over it or it would abate, just as almost everyone else got over what they had seen or done in the War, what they had lost or suffered. Up to a point, of course, enough to be able to live. It's one of the things that peacetime brings to people who are no longer at war, although it falls to some of us to continue and to watch. It brings forgetting, at least a superficial form of forgetting, or the sense that it was all a dream. Even if that dream is repeated every night and lies in wait during the day: just a bad dream. A terrible dream. But we had, after all, won the war. "Valerie," I said, and that was all I had time to say. She had
her hair caught up. She didn't turn round, but I saw the back of her neck and her shoulders shudder and saw her fall violently backwards, and at the same time I heard the explosion. And only then, in the midst of my despair and my incredulity, I realized that she had been sitting there, for who knows how long, with the hunting rifle in her hands, pointing at her heart. Perhaps she had been hesitating or waiting until she felt brave enough, she who wasn't brave at all. I was probably the signal, my presence, my voice, hearing her own name.'—'Strange to leave one's own first name behind. Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work . . .'—'She probably thought I would snatch the weapon from her and that there would be no more time later, I don't know'—'And indeed there won't be time to wonder, "Do I dare?" and "Do I dare?" Do I dare disturb the universe? Time to turn back and descend the stair . . . And in short, I am afraid . . .' And so it would be best not to wait.—'She lay there.' And Wheeler again pointed up to the top of the first flight of stairs of his current house, where I had found the drop of blood and cleaned it up with such diligence and difficulty. 'It was very hard to get rid of that blood. It poured out, flowed out, even though I immediately staunched the wound with towels. I knew she was already dead, but nevertheless I covered the wound. She had gotten dressed and put on her make-up, she had put her hair up and put on lipstick to say goodbye to me, it was a matter of politeness, the age we lived in, her now very antiquated politeness, she never received a guest or went out into the street without her make-up . . . And even when there was no trace of blood, I could still see it.'—'The last thing to go would be the rim,' I thought; 'Although there would have been several, because there must have been more than one stain, and perhaps it made a trail.'—'And then I moved house, I couldn't stay there.'

'But you didn't come to this house, did you, Peter?' I asked.

'No, I went to my rooms in college and lived there for three years, I preferred to have people around me. But you see, the one night, the one and only night, that I failed to watch over her sleep or non-sleep, Valerie went and killed herself. She couldn't live with what she had done. And I didn't foresee it. It never crossed my mind, not even when she sent me upstairs to the
chambre de bonne.
It was a perfectly reasonable excuse, and I wasn't prepared: it was the first time she had ever deceived me. You can't imagine the times I've wondered if I would have gotten there in time had I only been quicker to realize where she was when I woke up'—'Don't linger or delay,' I thought—'if I hadn't picked up the book or turned out the light or put on my dressing gown or if I'd gone down those two flights of stairs more quickly or gone down them just as quietly but without opening my mouth, without saying her name, without letting her know I was there. All nonsense of course. But you think those things over and over.'—'Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake,' I remembered.—'Some time afterwards, I wrote to Maria Mauthner and introduced myself, because she knew nothing about me. I told her that Valerie had died, but not how or why. The War, I said, and that was enough. I helped her nephew come to England, but I couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with him, it would have been like looking at Valerie's rifle. And I've helped his son, too, the Rendel that you know: apparently he's pretty good, but not as gifted as Tupra or you, he lacks vision. At least he has a good job, though. My vision, I can assure you, has improved greatly since then. I promised myself that such a thing would never happen to anyone again simply because I couldn't or didn't dare to see. Not that anyone was ever as important to me again, of course: most of the people I observed and interpreted subsequently, on whom I reported, of whom I said whether or not they might be useful and for what, haven't mattered to me one jot in comparison. But now at least I can say to you, with no fear that I might be wrong, that you
can
live with what has happened to you, with what you came here to talk to me about, because, unlike her, you find it hard to believe that you were responsible.'—'Yes,' I thought, 'I will always be able to say to myself tomorrow: "Oh, I didn't intend to do it, I knew nothing about it, it happened against my will, in the tortuous smokescreens of fever and shadow and dreams, it was part of my theoretical, parenthetical life, of my vague parallel existence that doesn't really count, it only half-happened and without my full consent, in short, as it said in the report I found among those old files and which was headed
"Deza, Jacques,"
I don't see myself or know myself, I don't delve into or investigate myself, I don't pay much attention to myself and I've given up trying to understand myself. And besides, that was in another country." And then the judge would say: "Overruled, case dismissed.'"—'And anyway, you're made of very different stuff and you belong to a different age, Jacobo, a much more frivolous age. No, don't worry, you're not like Valerie. In fact, no one ever has been, during all these years without her. Or only occasionally, in my dreams.'—'Give me your hand and let us walk. Through the fields of this land of mine . . .'—Wheeler removed his hand from his eyes and looked at me with surprise, or fright, as if he had just emerged from a long dream. Or perhaps it was more that he opened his eyes very wide, as if seeing the world for the first time, with a gaze as inscrutable as that of a newborn child, born only weeks or days before, and who, I imagine, observes this new place into which he has been hurled and tries perhaps to decipher our customs and to work out which of those customs will be his. He looked very tired and very pale, and I suddenly feared for his health. I felt like putting my hand on his shoulder, as I had with my father a few days earlier. He noticed the olives, picked up two and ate them both. Then he drank a little more sherry, and the color returned to his cheeks, maybe he had suffered a brief drop in blood pressure. When he spoke again and I heard a different tone in his voice, I felt completely reassured, realizing that the evocation, the story, was at an end: 'Go and ask Mrs. Berry if it's time for lunch yet,' he said. 'I don't know why she hasn't called us, she stopped playing a while ago now'