A Life Eternal

by Richard Ayre

  She didn’t look shocked by my outburst, she just nodded slowly. ‘Okay,’ she said, knocking back the whiskey and standing. When she was at the door, she turned back to me, and those pink spots were on her cheeks again. But I didn’t think it was anger that caused them this time. She licked her lips quickly and it was one of the most erotic things I have ever seen.

  ‘If you want me to go, I go,’ she murmured. Then she shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  I frowned. ‘What the hell do you want from me?’

  She just stared at me, those wide blue eyes communicating everything I needed to know silently.

  ‘A one-night stand?’ I asked, still angry but with a growing excitement. ‘Is that what you’re after? To get back at your husband?’

  She hesitated, and for the first time, I saw indecision on her face.

  ‘Not with anyone,’ she whispered. ‘Only you. I have seen you. I like you look.’

  The anger suddenly disappeared as I laughed at the turn of phrase. She smiled too.

  ‘I’m pleased you like my looks,’ I said. ‘Because I’m bloody sick of them. Take off your clothes.’

  So she did, and I discovered that, undressed, she was even better than I had previously imagined. I went to her and picked her up, dumping her on the bed. She lay there, naked and waiting as I quickly stripped off my own clothes.

  She most definitely got her revenge on Bruno that night. She made love like an alley cat, scratching and clawing at my back as we both cried out in ecstasy at the end.

  She left after an hour or so and I lay on the bed, drained, thinking about her and about some of the other women I had known in my travels around Europe. I tried not to think about Madeleine. It still seemed wrong to be sharing any sort of intimacy with anyone but her. She had been dead by then for almost eight years but, at times such as those, it seemed like only yesterday. I climbed out of the bed that now smelled of Anya and poured myself another drink. In spite of myself I stood, naked, staring at Madeleine’s photo. I sighed deeply, feeling nothing but an incredible sadness. Eventually, in the deep blackness of early morning, I slept.

  Anya would come to me from time to time over the next few months. I knew she was still having sex with Bruno because I’d heard them at it as I walked past their trailer on occasion.

  I didn’t care. Sex with Anya was just a distraction for both of us. I felt nothing towards her, and I doubt she felt anything for me. It really was just great sex. But you can’t hide anything in a circus camp—they’re too small and full of gossips—so of course it all got out.

  And Bruno came to me looking for his revenge.

  *

  I was asleep in the trailer when he smashed open the door and heaved himself inside. He filled the doorway, his massive shoulders almost touching the frame.

  He pointed at me and shouted something in a strangled, Slavic voice. I sat up, rubbing my eyes and staring at him resignedly. I had known this day would come soon.

  It was Anya; she couldn’t help herself. I think every time they’d had an argument since our first encounter, she had hinted at some affair, some indiscretion on her part. Probably to make him jealous. By the look on his face, it had worked.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying, Bruno,’ I muttered.

  He continued to rant and rave, his face contorted and his arms waving about all over.

  I sighed. ‘I don’t understand you,’ I said, slowly, as if I were talking to a very stupid person. I climbed out of bed and pulled on my jeans and a t-shirt. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I vant to know!’ he shouted. ‘I vant to know. About you. About Anya. About you and Anya!’ He broke off again into some anguished gobbledegook.

  I waited for him to finish. A shadow fell across the broken doorway, and there was Anya. She jumped lithely inside and started tugging at his massive bicep, shouting his name over and over. He turned to her and pushed her away, screaming incoherently. They both started shouting at each other. Loudly.

  I coughed politely. They stopped and turned to me.

  ‘Are you two finished?’ I asked. ‘Because, if you hadn’t noticed, my door is broken. I want to get it fixed and get some sleep. Take your drama elsewhere, please.’

  Bruno stepped threateningly towards me, Anya hanging ineffectually from his arm. A few of the circus folk had gathered outside the door by this point, alerted by the noise, and they stared in, loving the break to their tedious lives.

  ‘You vant to sleep?’ screamed Bruno. ‘Sleep? I make you sleep, bastard. I make you sleep forever!’

  With this, he delved into his belt and pulled out a vicious-looking knife, brandishing it at me. Anya howled and held a wrist to her forehead, but I saw she was enjoying all this testosterone on her behalf.

  I suddenly became furious. The dark shadow within me, never far from the surface, exploded and I felt my eyes widen and my lips twist in rage. Who the hell did these people think they were? This bastard had come into my house, threatening me? This insignificant flea was threatening me?

  I stepped right up to him, my face inches from his own. I was as tall as he was, but he was much broader.

  ‘You want to stab me, Bruno? You think you have the balls to do it? You’re a joke. Your wife couldn’t wait to be with me because she knows it. Go on, then: stab me, you useless bastard. See what will happen. Let’s see if you have the guts to do it you piece of shit!’

  I stood back and opened my arms wide, begging him to stick the knife into me. Then he would see. Then they would all see what I was. How different I was. How superior I was to all of them. I wanted him to do it just to see the looks on their faces when I didn’t die.

  He looked shocked at my outburst and my furious face. He blinked and took a step back, but I was having none of it.

  ‘Oh no you don’t.’ I grabbed the hand holding the knife. ‘Come on!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll help you. I’ll help you do it!’

  I tried to force the knife into me, my hand grasping his own.

  He was terrified by now. He had come to threaten me, to make me grovel and beg forgiveness, and to show Anya who the real man was. But instead he was suddenly face-to-face with a screaming lunatic who was actually trying to drive the knife into his own stomach.

  ‘Let go!’ he shouted, yanking the knife hand out of my hand. The blade slid across my palm and cut it deeply. I just stared at him. At them both.

  ‘You irrelevant insects,’ I hissed at them, and there must have been something truly awful in my eyes, because they both backed further towards the door in fear, the crowd making room for them as they stumbled outside. I stood in the doorway, staring down at them all.

  I pointed my finger at Bruno.

  ‘Keep away from me, big man,’ I said, quieter now, but with no less power. ‘You have no idea what I’m capable of. No idea what I am. I know what it’s like to kill. I know what it takes. You don’t have that in you. And you,’ the finger swung to Anya, who was white-faced at what had happened and who shrank away from the finger as if it could shoot her. ‘I suggest you stop offering what you’ve got to any Tom, Dick or Harry who happens to wander along. You married this idiot, so you better start showing him why.’

  The crowd was silent, standing in a semi-circle around the ruptured doorway, staring at me. Blood from my sliced palm plopped to the grass.

  ‘The entertainment’s over,’ I told them. ‘Time to go.’

  They just stood there, open-mouthed.

  ‘Go!’ I roared at them.

  They scarpered.

  ‘Bruno,’ I yelled, and he stopped and turned back, fearfully.

  ‘You owe me a new door.’

  He just stared for a moment and then nodded. He and Anya turned away, holding each other tightly.

  I went back inside and wrapped my hand in a cloth, pouring myself a drink. I gulped it down.

  The darkness inside me was huge and I had to forcefully stop myself from going to the Gombos’ trailer and starting again.

  B
ecause if I did, I knew I would kill him.

  XX

  After that, I thought it would be for the best if I moved on. The incident with Bruno had happened whilst we were in Northern Spain, and I walked away from the circus and made my way to Barcelona where I caught a plane to Britain.

  For some reason, I craved once again the land of my birth. I still thought of myself as English, even though most of my life had been spent in other countries. And so, in that year of 1977, when my time with the circus was obviously over, I said my goodbyes to the horses and the elephants. The clowns and the troupers and the animal trainers said nothing as I left. They were pleased I was gone, I suppose, and I didn’t blame them. I never saw Bruno or his mad wife again after that night.

  I sat on the plane to Heathrow. I knew where I was going; I’d been thinking about it for a while in my circus trailer.

  Longwood was not that far away. I caught the train to the station near to where Hector and I had sheltered in a hedgerow all those years ago, booked into a hotel in the village, and then walked the old country lanes which were now infested much more with vehicles than the last time I’d been there.

  Before long, I came upon the old Gatekeeper’s cottage I had lived in with Hector. It was pretty dilapidated now, and obviously unused. Moss covered the old stone walls and, when I wiped a greasy window with the palm of my hand, I saw that the inside was dust-covered and empty. No one had lived there for a long time; I wondered if anyone had lived there since I had.

  A sudden memory flared of me and Hector, sitting by the fire. He was looking up at me with a dedication I had never deserved as I stroked his head and sipped a whiskey, talking to him about my past. In that instant, I missed that long dead dog with an intensity that actually brought tears to my eyes. I turned away from the dirty window, feeling more alone than I think anyone ever has.

  The gates were open, so I strolled past the big sign that stood there now, up the drive to a copse of trees. I had planted those trees as saplings in 1920, but they towered above me now, and provided a perfect hiding place.

  I’d asked in the village about Longwood and had been told it was now a nursing home, and this was confirmed by the sight of the wheelchair-bound ancients who sat about on the lawn in front of the house, attended by white-coated nurses.

  This was no NHS-run establishment. I could almost smell the money coming from those skeletons sitting under their tartan blankets in the watery sunlight. They reminded me of lizards, soaking up the meagre heat of the last of their days. Even as they slid inevitably towards their deaths they were spending the last of their wealth on making it as pleasant as possible. I sneered at their pointless existence.

  A figure emerged onto the lawn and grabbed my attention. My heart began to beat faster as I stared at him. The girl at the shop in the village who had told me about Longwood’s function now had also told me something else. She said the man who used to own it and the land it sat on still lived there as a resident. It seemed part of the contract for the sale of the building had stipulated that Sir Jonathon Greene could stay at Longwood for the rest of his life in return for the conversion of the house into a nursing home.

  It was Greene I was looking at. I quickly worked out how old he would be now and shook my head in wonder. He was, I think, a year younger than me, so he would be about eighty. Not an incredible age by any means, but he was certainly getting on. He was standing, talking to a man much older than him in a wheelchair. He was dressed in a Houndstooth suit and his once-black hair was thin and grey. He was bent and shrunken, and I once again thought about the frailty of human life and how quickly youth deserted them.

  His appearance instantly made me melancholy and I cursed myself for going back. One should not look back, only forward, because the past, in my experience, is always immersed in nothing but heartache and regret. Greene said something and I saw the old man laugh. It seemed he still had a ready wit about him.

  I smiled sadly to myself. The last few years had tainted my view of humanity somewhat; indeed, the episode with Bruno had almost let the wild darkness inside me out. It would have been so easy to snuff out his pointless life and I don’t think it would have mattered to me at all. It was frightening how inhuman I was becoming.

  But Greene was like an anchor to a previous existence. He had been there at the beginning, when I still believed I was normal. When I didn’t yet know that I had been turned from an ordinary man into something strange, something different. I watched from afar until Greene turned away from the old man and walked slowly back towards the house.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a voice asked sharply from behind me.

  I jumped and span around, confronted by a young man, aged about twenty. He wore the white tunic of the home’s staff. I must have been staring intently at Greene, lost in my thoughts, for I hadn’t heard his approach.

  I shook my head. ‘No. I… I used to work here. Before it was a residential home. I was just in the area and thought I’d come back to have a look at the old place.’

  I could see he had his suspicions, and I could understand why. He was looking at a tall, suntanned man with long, unkempt, sandy hair and a dark blonde beard, wearing jeans and boots and t-shirt. He probably thought I was some burglar casing the joint.

  ‘I see,’ he said, although he obviously didn’t. I remembered belatedly that the girl in the shop had said Longwood had been converted sometime in the early sixties. How could a man of my apparent age possibly have worked here then?

  I made to move past him before he asked any more questions, but a rustle in the undergrowth behind me gave me pause. An instantly recognisable voice shouted, ‘Hello! What’s all the ballyhoo here, then?’

  My heart stopped.

  ‘This man says he used to work here, Sir Jonathon. But that’s impossible.’ The boy smirked at me triumphantly.

  ‘Plenty of people have worked here over the years, Richard,’ said Greene. ‘Let’s see you, then.’

  I slowly turned around to face him.

  God. Even now I remember the wave of sadness that engulfed me as I looked at the old man I had once followed into war. He had been like a lion in the trenches. He never gave up, he never stopped fighting. He had been young and vital and strong, and he had taught me what it meant to be a man. Much more so than my own father ever had. I suddenly realised, in that second of silence between us, how much I owed this man.

  His soft, jowly face was smiling at me. His hair, as I’ve said, was very thin, and liver-spots tattooed his forehead. He was pink and shiny. He was old. But his eyes were the same behind the spectacles. Sharp, appraising. They seemed to look right through me, straight into my time-damaged soul.

  The smile on his face wavered as he searched my own eyes. His lip trembled and he whispered incredulously: ‘Rob?’

  The young boy tried to say something, but Greene held up his hand and he shut up instantly. Whatever age had done to Jonathon Greene, it had not dimmed his presence. Some people are born with a natural charisma. These are the leaders, the people who make things happen, the people other people want to be around. Madeleine had this and so did Greene. It didn’t fade with age.

  ‘Thank you, Richard, that will be all,’ he said and the boy, after another glance at my profile, left us.

  Greene and I looked at each other.

  ‘It is you, Rob, isn’t it?’ he asked in a tremulous voice. And I couldn’t deny him.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘My God. You haven’t changed one bit,’ he murmured, shaking his head. ‘Apart from that awful long hair and beard.’ He looked at me sternly. ‘You’ve let yourself go, Sergeant.’

  I suddenly laughed at the look on his face, and Greene joined me. We laughed so hard we doubled up and clutched each other. I hadn’t laughed like that in years. Not since Madeleine and I had shared our short time together.

  ‘I’ve been keeping tabs on you, Rob,’ Greene eventually said, wiping his eyes. ‘No one believed me, but I kept tabs on you.’ He wagged a finger at
me. ‘I always knew there was something special about you. That business at the Somme. You should have died. We all knew that. The men knew it. But you didn’t die: you came back. You came back to me and the men and we won, didn’t we, Rob. We won!’

  ‘We did, sir. We won because of men like you, though. Not me.’

  He smiled a soft, disbelieving smile, then he replaced his spectacles and indicated for me to follow him with a turn of his head. As we walked across the lawn I had spent so much time in the past keeping in order, he told me a little of his life.

  ‘Jane left me, of course,’ he said. ‘We never married. She had her head turned by another man whose wealth was a little more, erm, portable than mine. He was some sort of investment banker, I believe. Owning land was all well and good, but it was never going to last. If there’s one thing to be said about Jane, it’s that she knew a good investment when she saw it.’ He chuckled at the poor joke.

  We paused at the kitchen door he had led me to.

  ‘She died, you know. Just last year. I went to her funeral.’

  ‘Was she happy, sir?’

  He nodded, smiling sadly. ‘I believe she was. I hope she was. It’s all we can ask for in the end, isn’t it?’

  He stared at me with watery eyes, and I nodded, cursing the memory of Jane Godley to hell and back. I’d known she was a horror and I had been proved right.

  We went inside and he showed me into the old library. The smell of the books brought memories flooding back to me. There was a photograph of Brewis, the old butler, hanging on the wall, looking even older than he had been in my time at Longwood. Greene saw my gaze and smiled.

  ‘Brewis died in 1949,’ he said. ‘He was ever a good friend. I often wish I’d sold this bloody house earlier, so he could have spent his last years here, but he ended up in a decent enough place. I made sure of that.’

  I smiled. It was a typical act for a man such as him.

  The library now contained seven or eight tables, laid out for meals. He led me to a table by the window and we sat down.