There was a sound at the door. ‘My dear chap,’ said a voice, still with the slight hesitance, the suspicion of a stammer, that I remembered so well. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.’
There is a moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet catches sight of her sister who has returned with the dastardly Wickham, rescued from disgrace by the efforts of Mr Darcy. ‘Lydia was Lydia still,’ she comments. Well, Damian Baxter was Damian still. That is, while the broad and handsome young man with the thick curls and the easy smile had vanished and been replaced by a hunched figure resembling no one so much as Doctor Manette, I could detect that distinctive, diffident stutter masking a deep and honed sense of superiority, and I recognised at once the old, patronising arrogance in the flourish with which he held out his bony hand. I smiled. ‘How very nice to see you,’ I said.
‘Is it?’ We stared at each other’s faces, marvelling simultaneously at the extent, and at the lack, of change that we found there.
As I looked at him more closely I could see that when he had talked in his letter of being ‘a dying man,’ he had been speaking the literal truth. He was not just old before his time but ill, very ill, and seemingly past the point of no return. ‘Well, it’s interesting. I suppose I can say that.’
‘Yes, you can say that.’ He nodded to the butler who hovered near the door. ‘I wonder if we might have some of that champagne?’ It didn’t surprise me that even forty years later he still liked to wrap his orders in diffident questions. I was a veteran witness of this trick. Like many who try it, Damian imagined, I think, that it suggested a charming lack of confidence, a faltering but honourable desire to get it right, which I knew for a fact he had not felt since some time around 1967 and I doubt he knew much of it then. The man addressed did not seem to feel any answer was required of him and I’m sure it wasn’t. He just went to get the wine.
Dinner was a formal, muted affair in a dining room that unsuccessfully crossed William Morris and Liberty’s with a dash of the Hollywood hills. High, mullioned windows, a heavy, carved, stone chimneypiece and more of the bouncy carpet added up to a curiously flat and unevocative result, as if a table and chairs had unaccountably been set up in an empty, but expensive, lawyer’s office. But the food was delicious, if quite wasted on Damian, and we both got some fun out of the Margaux he’d selected. The silent butler, whom I now knew as Bassett, hardly left us for a minute and, inevitably, the conversation played out before him was desultory. I remember an aunt once telling me that when she looked back to the days before the war, she was astonished at some of the table talk she’d witnessed, where the presence of servants seemed to act as no restraining force at all. Political secrets, family gossip, personal indiscretions, all came bubbling forth before the listening footmen and must presumably have enlivened many an evening in the local pub, if not, as in our more greedy and salacious times, their published memoirs. But we have lost that generation’s sublime confidence in their own way of life. Whether we like it or not – and I do like it really – time has made us conscious of the human spirit in those who serve us. For anyone born since the 1940s all walls have ears.
So we nattered on about this and that. He asked after my parents and I asked after his. In actual fact my father had been quite fond of him but my mother, whose jungle instincts were generally more reliable, sensed trouble from the start. She, at any rate, had died in the interim since we last met and so had both of his, so there wasn’t much to be said. From there, we discussed various others of that mutual acquaintance of long ago, and by the time we were ready to move on we had covered an impressive list of career disappointments, divorces and premature death.
At last he stood, addressing Bassett as he did so. ‘Do you think we could have our coffee in the library?’ Again he asked softly, as a favour that might be denied. What would happen, I wonder, if someone so instructed should take the hesitant question at face value? ‘No, Sir. I’m afraid I’m a bit busy at the moment. I’ll try to bring some coffee later on.’ I should like to see it once. But this butler knew what he was about and went to carry out the veiled command, while Damian led the way into the nicest of the rooms that I had seen. It looked as if an earlier owner, or possibly Damian himself, had purchased a complete library from a much older house, with dark, richly shining shelves and a screen of beautifully carved columns. There was a delicate chimneypiece of pinkish marble and in a polished steel basket a fire had been lit for our arrival. The combination of flickering flames and gleaming leather bindings, as well as some excellent pictures – a large seascape that looked like a Turner and the portrait of a young girl by Lawrence among them – gave a warmth notably lacking elsewhere in the house. I had been unjust. Obviously it was not lack of taste but lack of interest that had made the other rooms so dreary. This was where Damian actually lived. Before long we were equipped with drinks and cups of coffee, and alone.
‘You’ve done very well,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘Not terribly.’
He accepted this with a nod. ‘If you mean I was always ambitious, I confess it.’
‘I think I meant that you would never take no for an answer.’
He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he said. I wasn’t completely sure what he meant by this but before I could delve he spoke again. ‘I knew when I was beaten, even then. When I found myself in a situation where success was not a possible outcome, I accepted it and moved on. You must grant me that.’
This was nonsense. ‘I won’t grant you that,’ I said. ‘Or anything like it. It may be a virtue you achieved in later life. I cannot tell. But when I knew you your eyes were much larger than your stomach and you were a very poor loser, as I should know.’
Damian looked surprised for a moment. Perhaps he had spent so much of his life with people who were paid, in one way or another, to agree with him that he had forgotten not everyone was obliged to. He sipped his brandy and after a pause he nodded. ‘Well, be that as it may, I am beaten now.’ In answer to my unasked question he elaborated. ‘I have inoperable cancer of the pancreas. There is nothing to be done. The doctor has given me about three months to live.’
‘They often get these things wrong.’
‘They occasionally get these things wrong. But not in my case. There may be a variant of a few weeks, but that’s all.’
‘Oh.’ I nodded. It is hard to know how to respond suitably to this kind of declaration because people’s needs can be so different. I doubted that Damian would want wailing and weeping or suggestions of alternative cures based on a macrobiotic diet, but you never know. I waited.
‘I don’t want you to feel I am raging at the injustice of it. My life has, in a way, come to a natural conclusion.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I have, as you point out, been very fortunate. I’ve lived well. I’ve travelled. And there’s nothing left in my work that I still want to do, so that’s something. Do you know what I’ve been up to?’
‘Not really.’
‘I built up a company in computer software. We were among the first to see the potential of the whole thing.’
‘How clever of you.’
‘You’re right. It does sound dull, but I enjoyed it. Anyway, I’ve sold the business and I will not start another.’
‘You don’t know that.’ I can’t think why I said this, because of course he did know exactly that.
‘I’m not complaining. I sold out to a nice, big American company and they gave me enough money to put Malawi back on its feet.’
‘But that’s not what you’re going to do with it.’
‘I don’t think so, no.’
He hesitated. I was fairly sure we were approaching what they call the ‘nub’ of why I was here, but he didn’t seem able to progress things. I thought I might as well have a shot at moving us along. ‘What about your private life?’ I ventured pleasantly.
He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t really have one. N
othing worthy of the name. The odd arrangement for my comfort, but nothing more than that for many years now. I’m not at all social.’
‘You were when I knew you,’ I said. I was still transfixed by the thought of the ‘odd arrangement for my comfort.’ Golly. I resolved to steer clear of any attempt at clarification.
There was no further need to keep things moving. Damian had got started. ‘I did not like the world you took me into, as you know.’ He looked at me challengingly but I had no comment to make so he continued, ‘but, paradoxically, when I left it, I found I didn’t care for the entertainments of my old world either. After a while I gave up “parties” altogether.’
‘Did you marry?’
‘Once. It didn’t last very long.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I only married because I’d got to that age when it starts to feel odd not to have married. I was thirty-six or -seven and curious eyebrows were beginning to be raised. Of course, I was a fool. If I’d waited another five years, my friends would have started to divorce and I wouldn’t have been the only freak in the circus.’
Was she anyone I knew?’
‘Oh, no. I’d escaped from your crowd by then and I had no desire to return to it, I can assure you.’
‘Any more than we had the smallest desire to see you,’ I said. There was something relieving in this. A trace of our mutual dislike had surfaced and it felt more comfortable than the pseudo-friendship we had been playing at all evening. ‘Besides, you don’t know what my crowd is. You don’t know anything about my life. It changed that night as much as yours. And there is more than one way of moving on from a London Season of forty years ago.’
He accepted this without querying it. ‘Quite right. I apologise. But, truly, you would not have known Suzanne. When I met her she was running a fitness centre near Leatherhead.’ Inwardly I agreed that it was unlikely my path had crossed with the ex-Mrs Baxter’s so I was silent. He sighed wearily. ‘She tried her best. I don’t want to speak ill of her. But we had nothing at all to hold us together.’ He paused. ‘You never married in the end, did you?’
‘No. I didn’t. Not in the end.’ The words came out more harshly than I intended but he did not seem to wonder at it. The subject was painful for me and uncomfortable for him. At least, it bloody well should have been. I decided to return to a safer place. ‘What happened to your wife?’
‘Oh, she married again. Rather a nice chap. He has a business selling sportsware, so I suppose they had more to build on than we did.’
‘Were there any children?’
‘Two boys and a girl. Though I don’t know what happened to them.’
‘I meant with you.’
He shook his head. ‘No, there weren’t.’ This time his silence seemed very profound. After a moment he completed the thought. ‘I can’t have children,’ he said. Despite the apparent finality of this statement there was something oddly unfinal in the tone of his voice, almost like that strange and unnecessary question mark that the young have imported from Australia, to finish every sentence. He continued, ‘that is to say, I could not have children by the time that I married.’
He stopped, as if to allow me a moment to digest this peculiar sentence. What could he possibly mean? I assumed he had not been castrated shortly before proposing to the fitness centre manageress. Since he had introduced the topic, I didn’t feel guilty in wanting to make a few enquiries, but in the event he answered before I had voiced them. ‘We went to various doctors and they told me my sperm count was zero.’
Even in our disjointed, modern society, this is quite a taxing observation to counter with something meaningful. ‘How disappointing,’ I said.
‘Yes. It was. Very disappointing.’
Obviously I’d chosen badly. ‘Couldn’t they do something about it?’
‘Not really. They suggested reasons as to why it might have happened, but no one thought it could be reversed. So that was that.’
‘You could have tried other ways. They’re so clever now.’ I couldn’t bring myself to be more specific.
He shook his head. ‘I’d never have brought up someone else’s child. Suzanne had a go at persuading me but I couldn’t allow it. I just didn’t see the point. Once the child isn’t yours, aren’t you just playing with dolls? Living dolls, maybe. But dolls.’
‘A lot of people would disagree with you.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Suzanne was one of them. She didn’t see why she had to be barren when it wasn’t her fault, which was reasonable enough. I suppose we knew we’d break up from the moment we left the surgery.’ He stood to fetch himself another drink. He’d earned it.
‘I see,’ I said, to fill the silence, rather dreading what was coming.
Sure enough, when he spoke again his tone was more determined than ever. ‘Two specialists believed it might have been the result of adult mumps.’
‘I thought that was a myth, used to frighten nervous, young men.’
‘It’s very rare. But it can happen. It’s a condition called orchitis, which affects the testicles. Usually it goes away and everything’s fine, but sometimes, very occasionally, it doesn’t. I didn’t have mumps as a boy and I wasn’t aware I’d ever caught it, but when I thought it over, I was struck down with a very sore throat a few days after I got back from Portugal, in July of nineteen seventy. I was in bed for a couple of weeks and my glands certainly swelled up, so maybe they were right.’
I shifted slightly in my chair and took another sip of my drink. My presence here was beginning to make a kind of uncomfortable sense. In a way I had invited Damian to Portugal, to join a group of friends. God knows, in the event it was more complicated than that but the excuse had been the party was short of men and our hostess had got me to ask him. With disastrous results, as it happens. So, was he now trying to blame me for being sterile? Had I been invited here to acknowledge my fault? That as much harm as he had done to me on that holiday, so had I done to him? ‘I don’t remember anyone being ill,’ I said.
He did, apparently. ‘That girlfriend of the guy who had the villa. The neurotic American with the pale hair. What was her name? Alice? Alix? She kept complaining about her throat, the whole time we were there.’
‘You have wonderfully perfect recall.’
‘I’ve had a lot of time to think.’
The image of that sun whitened villa in Estoril, banished from my conscious mind for nearly four decades, suddenly filled my mind. The hot, blond beach below the terrace, drunken dinners resonating with sex and subtext, climbing the hill to the haunted castle at Cintra, swimming in the whispering, blue waters, waiting in the great square before Lisbon Cathedral to walk past the body of Salazar… The whole experience sprang back into vivid, technicoloured life, one of those holidays that bridge the gap between adolescence and maturity, with all the attendant dangers of that journey, where you come home quite different from when you set out. A holiday, in fact, that changed my life. I nodded. ‘Yes. Well, you would have done.’
‘Of course, if that were the reason, then I could have had a child before.’
Despite his seriousness I couldn’t match it. ‘Even you wouldn’t have had much time. We were only twenty-one. These days every girl on a housing estate may be pregnant by the time she’s thirteen, but it was different then.’ I smiled reassuringly, but he wasn’t watching. Instead, he was busy opening a drawer in a handsome bureau plat beneath the Lawrence. He took out an envelope and gave it to me. It wasn’t new. I could just make out the postmark. It looked like ‘Chelsea. 23rd December 1990.’
‘Please read it.’
I unfolded the paper gingerly. The letter was entirely typed, with neither opening greeting nor final signature written by hand. ‘Dear Shit,’ it began. How charming. I looked up with raised eyebrows.
‘Go on.’
Dear Shit, It is almost Christmas. It is also late and I am drunk and so I have found the nerve to say that you have made my life a living lie for nineteen years. I star
e at my living lie each day and all because of you. No one will ever know the truth and I will probably burn this rather than send it, but you ought to realise where your deceit and my weakness have led me. I do not quite curse you, I could not do that, but I don’t forgive you, either, for the course my life has taken. I did not deserve it.
At the end, below the body of the text, the author had typed: ‘A fool.’
I stared at it. ‘Well, she did send it,’ I said. ‘I wonder if she meant to.’
‘Perhaps someone else picked it up from the hall table and posted it, without her knowledge.’
This seemed highly likely to me. ‘That would have given her a turn.’
‘You are sure it is a “her”?’
I nodded. ‘Aren’t you? “My life has been a living lie.” “Your deceit and my weakness.” None of it sounds very butch to me. I rather like her signing it “a fool.” It reminds me of the pop lyrics of our younger days. Anyway, I assume the base deceit to which she refers comes under the heading of romance. It doesn’t sound like someone feeling let down over a bad investment. That would make the writer female, wouldn’t it? Or has your life steered you along new and previously untried routes?’
Past Imperfect Page 2