by James Lasdun
Caitlin and our children, who’d flown in the day before, came up, and I introduced them. Again the Rosedales’ faces brightened with intense, eager smiles. Gabriella gushed over my son and daughter, complimenting us on their looks. Even Alec became effusive in his mild fashion, spreading his hands and making an elegant speech to the effect that even though both my parents had sadly departed, he hoped the younger generations would maintain the tradition of family friendship with the Rosedales, especially now that Marco and I had become so close.
The vague discomfort I felt throughout all this I attributed, at the time, to my lingering sense of treachery towards Renata. Later, after confirming with my siblings that the Rosedales had indeed never been especially close friends of my parents, I wondered if the whole exchange hadn’t been contrived as some kind of performance on their part – a piece of theatre for the benefit of the various social circles represented in that room, engineered to demonstrate that our family was firmly in the Rosedale camp, just in case Marco’s story got out.
No doubt I was guilty of some grandiosity myself in this conjecture. But it played into something I’d been thinking about ever since my conversation with Marco on the phone. He’d been elated, understandably, and I didn’t begrudge him that. But it was obvious to me that he didn’t seriously believe Julia was any kind of closet Nazi or anti-Semite, and that he knew he’d won his battle on what amounted to a clumsy choice of words. I didn’t even mind that, in itself. What bothered me was that he seemed perfectly okay with it. I wanted him to at least put on a show of wishing he could have had an opportunity to win by fairer means. But apparently it didn’t trouble him in the least that the question of what happened in that hotel room had been answered by means of legal transactions and manoeuvres, aided by a threat of blackmail, rather than the diligent proving or uncovering of an objective truth.
I thought of that glib remark of mine that Marco had latched onto back in the spring: the onus of belief is on the believer. It wasn’t actually something I believed at all. If anything, the opposite. I was, in my heart of hearts, an absolutist. Reality, for me, wasn’t a ‘construct’ arrived at by some Darwinian battle of competing human interests and ideas. It wasn’t a prize awarded to whoever fought hardest, or dirtiest. It was something that existed outside the human mind, and independently of it. Whatever happened between the couples in those rooms – Marco and Julia in Belfast, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, at the Sofitel in New York; Assange and the Swedish women – was an actual occurrence, fixed in time and unchangeable; not some quantum state of infinite potentiality. I couldn’t accept those stories as variations on Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead simultaneously until its box was opened; their protagonists at once guilty and innocent, victim and false accuser. Nor could I accept them as fables on the limits of the knowable. The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable, and certainly not a matter of ‘belief’.
I was still ruminating on these thoughts a couple of days later, when the phone rang in my mother’s living room and to my surprise I found myself talking to Julia Gault.
6
In the shock of hearing Marco’s accuser in my own ear, I barely took in anything she said at first, beyond the fact that she’d read my mother’s funeral announcement in the paper, and seemed to think she owed us an explanation for why she hadn’t come. A concert seemed to have been involved, or the organising of a concert. Southwark Cathedral. Syrian refugees. I was aware of condolences being offered, and of offering the conventional responses in return.
‘I haven’t seen your mother for years,’ she said, ‘but I’ve always felt close to her. She was one of the few people on this planet who understood me.’
Her voice, somewhat high-pitched, as it had been on Marco’s answering machine (though without the fury), had a sing-song intonation that I didn’t remember from the past. Otherwise it was much the same, with its distinct mixture of flattened Midlands vowels and crisp, Oxbridge emphases – a rare blend of the regional and the imperial that, along with her intelligence and good looks, had made her a natural candidate for a career in TV.
‘Now remind me,’ she said, ‘are you the one who went off to America?’
‘I am.’
‘I remember you! You were shy.’
‘Very shy.’
‘I think I used to make you blush.’
‘You did. You probably still could.’
She laughed. ‘But I suppose now you’ve conquered America you’re one of those insufferable men who swagger about as if they own the world and everyone in it.’
‘That’s me. Master of the Universe.’
‘Well, lovely to hear your voice after all these years.’
‘Yours too.’
We chatted on for a while. She seemed eager to talk, or at least in no hurry to get off the phone. I got the feeling she was guilty about having disappeared from my mother’s life, and glad of an excuse to reconnect with our family. As the surprise of hearing her voice wore off, I began wondering how to bring up the topic of Marco. I was aware that this might be an opportunity to go a little deeper into his story – get closer to its central chamber, so to speak – and I knew I’d regret it, from a professional point of view if nothing else, if I didn’t pursue it. But just blurting out that I knew Marco Rosedale seemed a bad idea; crass, and potentially confrontational.
‘Well, I hope it won’t be another hundred years before I talk to you again,’ she said, winding down. ‘I’ve enjoyed it.’
‘Likewise.’
‘You know, I’d love a photo of your mother. Do you have one you could send me?’
‘Of course.’ Inspiration struck: ‘Or I could give it to you in person …’
‘That would be nice!’
‘I could meet you somewhere in town, if you like …’
‘Come to tea,’ she said decisively. ‘Are you free tomorrow?’
I was. Caitlin and the kids had flown back the day before and I was staying on for a few days to start clearing out my mother’s house.
‘I warn you, I live miles from anywhere. You’ll have to change trains about six times. I spend my entire life changing trains.’
She gave me an address in a part of London I’d barely heard of and never visited. The journey involved stretches on the Docklands Light Railway as well as the Tube. It was raining when I arrived, and the walk from the station along wet streets, with no shops or pubs to relieve the monotonous stretches of residential developments, was bleak. She lived in a brick apartment building with pinched, jutting balconies overlooking a row of one-storey houses behind a long wall. She buzzed me in, and I took the lift five floors up to her flat. She was waiting in the doorway, wearing a mauve wool dress with a loose polo neck. Her face was lined, and her blonde hair had faded, but otherwise she seemed remarkably unchanged from when I’d last set eyes on her, fifteen or twenty years earlier. We shook hands first and then kissed on the cheek, laughing at our awkwardness.
‘Here we are!’ She showed me into a light-filled but sparse living room furnished with a wicker sofa and chairs with floral cushions tied at the corners.
‘I’ll put on the kettle.’
She went into a kitchen alcove partitioned by a countertop – empty except for a small toaster. I sat on one of the wicker chairs, looking around.
What was I expecting? Signs of derangement? Not exactly, but the neatness and ordinariness of the place surprised me. So did the bareness. Somehow I’d imagined her as a hoarder – of objects as well as memories, injuries. From conversations with my mother, I knew she’d been involved with plenty of interesting people in her time – politicians, diplomats, a minor rock star or two – and I’d assumed I’d find her surrounded by the memorabilia of a life that, even if it hadn’t turned out quite as expected, had certainly been eventful. But the few shelves were almost empty, and the walls had nothing on them at all.
She br
ought in the tea. I gave her some photographs of my mother, and after looking through them she began reminiscing about her.
‘I remember how we became friends. I was at a drinks party just after I got my first job in television. I was complaining that I had no one in London to go shopping with, and she offered to go with me. Just like that! We had a lovely afternoon traipsing around the West End, and then she took me to tea at some posh hotel where we talked about everything under the sun – art, politics, religion, my boyfriend, your father, everything. Even you! I seem to remember she was worried you were taking drugs.’
I laughed, and she flashed a rakish smile: ‘Well, who wasn’t, of course? Anyway, for the next few years she was like a second mother to me, my London mother … I feel terrible for losing touch with her. I always have. There was a reason – I’m sure you know it. But it’s my fault all the same. I miss her …’
I did know the reason. At some point in their friendship my mother had introduced her to a man in London, a young American. They’d embarked on an affair. He’d proposed marriage, and with my mother’s encouragement they’d begun making plans for a wedding – a lavish do at St George’s, Hanover Square, with half of London’s cultural establishment on the guest list. And then abruptly Ralph, the American, had called the whole thing off. Though Julia couldn’t, and didn’t, blame my mother for the debacle, she appeared to have found herself too sore to continue the friendship. The episode had always interested me, not only for its melodramatic aspect (‘Julia Jilted!’ one of the tabloid headlines ran at the time), but also its contribution to the layer of pathos that was paradoxically what brought about the climax of her television career – her brief apotheosis – gilding her already complex aura with a final burnish of tragedy that, by whatever mysterious alchemy of luck and fashion, impressed her TV bosses as precisely the quality they were looking for in their new current affairs presenter, whose face would soon be beamed every night into a million homes up and down the country.
I’d written copious notes on her for that abandoned project of mine: memories, observations, stories I’d heard from other people, ideas for scenes I wanted to write. I’d looked through them on my laptop before coming this afternoon, and the images they’d stirred, together with the more recent impressions conjured by Marco’s drama, gave me a peculiar sense of being among a multitude of Julias, from different times and places, in different aspects and moods. Julia and my mother gossiping quietly on the sofa in our house in London while my sister looked on, excluded. Julia visiting my father in his office as a young arts reporter, noting with private amusement his brusque way of talking to his secretaries and receptionists, while obstinately failing to flirt with her. Julia at nineteen up a tree with a girlfriend at a Blind Faith concert in Hyde Park, shouting out: ‘God, Steve, you are a beautiful man!’ in a voice so infectiously enthusiastic the good-humoured crowd below her took up her words as a kind of mass chorus, like a football chant. Julia as an absence from our home, a diminishing echo and source of perplexed regret, of troubling rumours. Julia as Marco’s problem, his seemingly indefatigable persecutor, her disembodied voice spilling out of his answering machine: I’m going to say you raped me …
I’d made up my mind to tell her I knew Marco, and to try to get her side of the story. But it was no easier in the flesh than on the phone. I prevaricated, asking what she was doing with herself these days. She told me about a charitable organisation she’d joined, which raised money for refugees. In a roundabout way she led me to understand that she was one of the public faces of this organisation, and although she spoke of the role in a self-deprecating tone, I got the feeling she was proud of it.
‘The way I see it, if I can turn the tiny bit of fame I once had to good use, then why not do it? I like being useful to other people. I wish I’d learned that about myself earlier on in life …’
Images of her from the past continued surfacing in my mind as she talked, blooming and dispersing. I remembered reaching to lift a wire for her on a country walk in my teens, not realising it was electrified, my yelp of shock prompting a peal of laughter from her, followed by an unexpected touch on my shoulder of magical tenderness and sympathy. I remembered the party at our house where my mother first introduced her to that young American, Ralph Pommeroy, and the expressions on their faces as they circled each other in those first moments: Ralph’s a little stunned as if he thought he might be dreaming, Julia’s mirthful, with that air of being deep in some private revel while at the same time alertly conscious of her own effect.
‘And you?’ she said. ‘What have you been doing all these years?’
I told her about my life in America: writing, teaching, living out in the woods with my family.
‘How romantic!’
‘It was nice.’
‘Was? It’s over?’
‘No, but the kids have left.’
‘Ah.’
She crossed her legs and tilted her head back a little, the broad planes of her cheeks catching the waning daylight from the balcony window. She was still striking to look at; beautiful by any measure, with her handsome head like something sculpted for a Roman fountain. And in fact I’d listed attributes of certain goddesses in the notes I’d made, copying out lines from Homer on Athena’s daylight-sharpening powers, her ‘slate-flecked silver eyes’, as well as a passage about Artemis from Camille Paglia: ‘Artemis is pre-Christian purity without spirituality … She has nerve, fire, arrogance, force … She is pristine. She never learns. In her blankness and coldness, she is a perfect selfhood, a sublime energy.’
‘Tell me about your wife …’ she said.
I don’t think she was remotely interested in Caitlin, but the act of making me talk about her seemed to remind her of an aspect of herself that hadn’t been called into play until then. A look of sidelong amusement came on like a light in her eyes. She nodded occasionally as I talked, but didn’t offer any comment when I finished. A car went by below the balcony window, sizzling on the wet. Lights glittered in a distant, solitary tower block, as if signalling to us. It was still raining.
‘Shall we move on to something stronger?’ she asked as I trailed off into silence. ‘Whisky? A glass of wine?’
‘Some wine would be nice.’
She took the tea things into the kitchen. From the back, sheathed in the soft fabric of her dress, she looked like a woman in her thirties. I found myself trying to decide what I thought of her: what I, in my older self, thought of her in hers. Julia as flight from nature, I’d written in those notes; abandonment of the old, animal, earthbound human archetype … Elsewhere: The world becomes clarified in her presence but also diminished, as if digitised, immolated in a cold fire … Was that ‘cold fire’ still burning? If so, did it still exert any lingering fascination over me? I reminded myself I was there to investigate Marco’s story, not to revive some ancient plot-line in my own. And yet the question pressed itself. Was I still susceptible to her in any way? I wanted the answer to be yes. One doesn’t like to lose the capacity for enchantment.
She came back with the wine, and pulled her chair closer to mine, touching my glass with hers.
‘I do remember you,’ she said. ‘I remember hearing you play your electric guitar up in your room. Your parents used to groan whenever it came on, but I enjoyed it.’ She leaned confidentially towards me. ‘In fact, I sometimes wished I could go up there and hang out with you. I’m sure you’d have rolled me a nice fat joint if I’d asked.’
‘I’m sure I would!’
She smiled.
‘I seem to remember there was a Hendrix song you used to play rather beautifully …’
‘“Little Wing”?’
‘That’s right! One of my favourites!’
I was stunned. I thought I’d long ago raked over every last ember of memory having to do with my teenage crush on Julia, but somehow I’d forgotten the little sonic bouquets I used to send down the three flights of stairs from my bedroom whenever she arrived at our house. I’d taught
myself the intricate fingering of that song specifically for the purpose of impressing her.
‘You know, I met Noel Redding once,’ she said. ‘I had a thing for musicians in those days. I’d never say no to a party where there was a chance of a real live rock star making an appearance.’
‘Didn’t you once get a chant going at a Blind Faith concert?’
‘You’ve heard that story?’
‘You were up a tree, in the version I heard.’
‘It’s true!’ she laughed, putting her hand on my arm. ‘With Francesca Leeto. Is that who you heard it from?’
‘Yes.’ The Leetos were family friends. ‘I was collecting anecdotes for a novel about my parents’ world.’
‘A novel? How wonderful! Was I in it?’
‘There was a character somewhat based on you.’
‘Really?’
‘Well … you were a part of that world. A big part, for a while.’
‘I’m flattered! Or were you going to make me into one of those twisted characters no one likes?’
‘Of course not – you were highly sympathetic!’
She looked pleased; more pleased than my flippant answer seemed to warrant. Clearing her throat, she asked: ‘How did I end up? Happy, I hope, and extremely rich!’
‘Oh, I didn’t get that far. But I’m sure you would have.’