by Bel Mooney
She remembered suddenly, irrelevantly, how Daphne’s fleshy pink face quivered with the intensity of her compassion, not merely for Eleanor herself, but for all living, all suffering things who crawled away into their corners to die.
‘There must be something; there has to be something,’ Eleanor thinks, shaking the pages of another book. Who was the man who had sat in this room, reading his medical journals or writing letters to his son? Reading too. David read a lot, she realises now with a pang that cuts through her anger; distant from her he sat at the desk and opened books she did not even know he possessed.
She rises at last, the shelves completely empty, and flops down in the chair at the desk, resting her face in her hands. Four or five books are placed in a row on top of the desk and she gazes at them helplessly, feeling foolish to herself that she expects anything. As bad as Daphne, as bad as Paul; no difference in the seeking for reasons, she thinks, pushing the books about the leather surface with the flat of her hand. The Hardy poems and the Wordsworth do not surprise her, although she frowns at the thought of all that poetry. David never particularly liked poetry, yet here is a complete Tennyson too, with long passages marked in pencil. It is the other two books which disturb her most, and she picks them up in turn, staring. One is a newish paperback called ‘Dying We Live’, a collection (the cover explains) of letters written by prisoners in Germany on the eve of their execution. The other, contrasting oddly in appearance, is a very old calf-bound volume, with marbled endpapers, and the title Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying stamped in gold leaf on the spine. This one had been filled with slips of paper which fluttered to the ground as she shook it; now she flips helplessly through the pages, looking for whatever it was they marked.
Suddenly she stops. It is in the second half, the section called ‘Holy Dying’, that all the pencil marks occur, and Eleanor starts to read. Who was the man who wielded his pencil to mark this with a double line, an asterisk, and the one word in the margin, ‘Yes’?:
‘Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by every instrument, and in all chances, and enters in at many doors; by violence and secret influence, by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist, by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour, by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone, by a full meal or an empty stomach, by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon, by a heat or a cold, by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen into the hardness and sharpness of a dagger, or water thawed into the floods of a river; by a hair or a raison, by violent motion or sitting still, by severity or dissolution, by God’s mercy or God’s anger, by everything in Providence and everything in manners, by everything in nature and everything in chance. Eripitur persona, manet res: we take pains to heap up things useful to our life, and get death in the purchase; and the person is snatched away and the goods remain. And all this is the law and constitution of nature; it is a punishment for our sins, the unalterable event of Providence and the decree of Heaven. The chains that confine us to this condition are strong as destiny, and immutable as the eternal laws of God.’
Eleanor turns over more pages, and more phrases stare at her, swimming up from the creamy-white surface… ‘My lord, it is a great art to die well, and to be learnt by men in health … he that prepares not for death before his last sickness is like him that begins … The effect of this consideration is this: that the sadnesses of this life help to sweeten the bitter cup of death.’
‘It’s all so morbid. Disgustingly morbid,’ she says aloud at last, pushing the book away hurriedly as if it carried an infection. She reaches for the other, and finds the pencil marks again, this time beside touching letters of comfort from the condemned men to their families, their wives: ‘My dear … You my beloved, whom I love with all my heart… O little Anneliese! … My own little sweetheart …’ There is a bitter liquid in Eleanor’s mouth as she turns the pages, working from back to front and reaching at last a map of the concentration camps, and the book’s epigraph. David’s hand is here too; he has taken a ruler or some other straight edge and drawn a neat box all round the epigraph, containing it:
The spirit cannot die – in no circumstances,
under no torment, despite whatever calumnies, in no bleak place.
FRANZ MARC
And it was, ‘My dearest one, my own little sweetheart, my love, my own dear wife, my beloved darling, you, my friend and comrade, affiancéd before God …’ Those were the names they called the women who would be left behind them, in the letters they wrote, facing death calmly, yet not choosing it. They died in love; they did not die in silence, Eleanor thinks, slamming the book shut with such violence that one corner of the paper cover is bent backwards. She screws up her face in the effort to remember his face and his voice that last morning, but there is nothing there. Only the two books stare up at her from the desk, offering alien voices to mock her. With a cry Eleanor picks up the paperback and bends it backwards, tearing out the pages with their permanent endearments (my own darling, my love, my dear, my little Anneliese!) so that they flutter to the ground all around the desk, falling in the sunlight.
Paul telephoned the theatre and made his excuses, knowing they would be understanding about his absence. He said that he had to stay with his mother a little longer because she was so very upset; and laughed shortly as he put down the phone, wishing she had heard the lies. He who had detested his enforced stay in Winterstoke was now reluctant to leave. He was waiting; each day he wandered along the High Street, knocked on Conrad’s door and sometimes left before the old man’s shuffling feet could get there, turning back and walking beyond their own house, out into the lanes around the village. Conrad, pulling open the front door on emptiness, would know he had been there, and sense the boy’s troubled presence all around him.
Four days after the cremation Conrad showed Paul upstairs to his bedroom for the first time, half-ashamed of the mess and half-pleased at last to be able to admit the first visitor since David. ‘I use it as a study-bedroom,’ he explained, ‘so we might as well sit here. This is where I spend all my time.’
‘Even in summer?’ Paul asked, incredulous and stifled in the heat from the electric fire. ‘Don’t you feel claustrophobic?’
Conrad shook his head, ‘Oh no, not at all. This is my home, Paul. Not the whole house, this room; this is where I do my work. This room is all I need.’
‘Is this where Dad used to sit with you?’
Conrad nodded gravely, watching Paul closely. He seemed to have cropped his hair again, so that more than ever he resembled a young monk whose pale flesh was mortified through fasting and penitence.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Oh, my research, as usual.’ Conrad harnessed, by a great effort of will, his impulse to tell Paul details of his morning post, some of which still lay unopened on the desk.
‘You don’t mind me coming?’
‘Paul – of course I don’t. I’m glad. It’s nice for an old man to have young company.’
‘It’s only because Dad used to come, you know,’ Paul said brusquely.
‘You really don’t have to explain. Um … have you made any plans, Paul?’
‘Oh, I’ll go back in a day or so. Daphne wants me to stay for her wretched concert.’
‘That would be kind,’ murmured Conrad.
‘I won’t stay. It’s the last thing I need. You won’t go, will you?’
‘Oh yes, I always go. I like to see the same people doing the same things, you know; there’s something very comforting about the Winterstoke concert.’
‘Oh my God!’ Paul muttered expressively. Then the two men smiled at each other. ‘But I know what you mean,’ Conrad said.
After a few seconds’ silence Conrad folded his arms and looked full into Paul’s face, pointedly. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you this, Paul, though it’s hard to know how to begin … Are you, er, feeling resigned to it, now? I mean, have you come to terms with your father’s death?’<
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‘You sound like a social worker, Conrad! I wouldn’t have expected it of you.’
Conrad smiled ruefully. ‘I know. It’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that it was very hard to believe, because of the way it happened. And I wondered …’
‘Well, no, I haven’t come to terms, if you must put it that way.’ Paul’s tone was not mocking or nasty as it had sometimes been; he seemed instead to be sharing a gentle joke which the older man did not fully understand.
‘Hey, d’you know what I did yesterday?’ Conrad looked at him quizzically, but said nothing. ‘I went up on the Quantocks. Up there. Where it happened.’
‘Why did you do that?’ asked Conrad, genuinely surprised.
‘Well, it’s not too hard to guess, is it?’
‘A pilgrimage?’
‘Well, that’s not quite how I’d put it. I wasn’t going to spout any prayers or stuff like that. I just wanted to see, for myself, where it happened. I knew where to go. The police told us, and it all came out again in the court. Maybe I didn’t get the exact clump of trees, but I think I did. I could still see the marks, where his car had reversed into the bushes. Still a bit flat, but growing up again, of course. There’ll soon be no trace.’
‘Why did you go, Paul?’ Conrad asked, gently. Paul flushed and dropped his gaze, and seemed to swallow hard before continuing. ‘I wanted to … sort of … I wanted to try to get close to him, sort of thing. Up there, I thought it might be easier, because that was where he’d gone. I closed my eyes and willed myself to remember things about him, things that happened when I was a kid, you know. I was, like, making a list in my mind of all the good things he did, not for the village, but for us, Mum and me. It came quite easily too. I couldn’t do that before, and that was part of the trouble.’
‘I remember,’ Conrad nodded, half to himself. ‘It’s like walking back through a lot of inter-connecting rooms, isn’t it? And in the last one you know you’ll find the perfect miniature, the portrait you’ve been looking for.’
‘Anyway, I just sat there, thinking, and looking around. I was trying to, sort of, think myself into his skin, by seeing what he saw at the last bit of time left to him, and imagining what he must have been thinking. But you can’t do it. It’s impossible. And you know what I keep returning to, over and over in my mind, so that it made me feel sick?’
‘What was that?’
‘Why he didn’t leave a note or anything, for us.’ Paul raised his face and stared at Conrad, with such a look of hunger and longing in his eyes that the old man was shocked. ‘I kept thinking that if that was me, and I was going to do that – and by the way, Conrad, I think he had every right to, if that was what he wanted – but if that had been me I’d have wanted to explain. Unless he hated us so much that he wanted to punish us, knowing we’d always be wondering.’
‘Oh no, not hate, not David,’ said Conrad, almost reproachfully.
‘Well, I know. That’s what I think. So why didn’t he bother, even to say goodbye on a piece of paper? I think the fact that he didn’t is the worst thing for Mum and for me. Suicides always leave notes – or nearly always, anyway. So why?’
‘Perhaps it was all too much to say, Paul.’
The boy shook his head decisively. ‘No, I’ve worked it out, Conrad, and I think it was deliberate. What would he think we would think, with no note left to explain?’
Conrad shook his head helplessly.
‘Well, he’d think we would blame ourselves, it’s obvious. So if that’s the case he must have been trying to tell us something, about ourselves. And the fact that he had to do it that way is … well, I mean, what can you say?’ He whistled and shook his head.
‘Paul, it seems to me that you’re going back to blaming yourself, all over again,’ Conrad said quietly.
‘Well, of course! That’s what he meant us to do! It’s obvious! Listen, it’s the only conclusion to draw, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to walk around the rest of my life blaming myself. I don’t think I’m a murderer. I just think that we let each other get very lonely. It’s impossible to know anybody else in your family – really know them, I mean. I think Dad meant me to think that, and I think he knew it would make me feel better.’
‘Better?’ Conrad was puzzled by the eager look on the boy’s face, an almost-fanatical expression of conviction where he was accustomed to see confusion and misery.
‘Yes, better! You see, if it’s impossible to be as close as we’re all led to expect, then all those expectations are false. And if they’re false, then the family is a kind of meaningless totem. And if it’s meaningless then it’s pointless to worship before it, and then be surprised and angry when it doesn’t deliver the goods.’
Conrad pursed his lips; ‘I don’t see …’
‘Yes! It’s what Dad meant me to think. Look, Conrad, whatever you say, I fell short of him – no, don’t argue – and I know he would expect me to think that now. But you know, I realise now that I was always angry with Mum and him because I expected such a lot from them. But I don’t now. I’m more cool about it.’
There was a note of such eager hysteria in his voice that for a second Conrad allowed himself to be amused at the inappropriate word ‘cool’, before attempting to grapple with the confusion in what Paul said. Or maybe he should not bother to argue; the boy was picking his way, slowly and painfully, across stepping stones he had only just noticed in the treacherous mud, and who was he, Conrad, to tell him not to trust in their bland, smooth surface?
‘Maybe you’re reading too much into it,’ he suggested quietly.
‘No.’
‘I can see that you have to.’
‘It’s not that. I know it’s true.’ Paul’s face had set into an expression of resentment, and Conrad knew he must not pursue it. What did it matter, in the end, if the boy erected a false edifice, if it gave him some shelter? But he frowned. It was not David, this over-wrought and vengeful person with his dire message about the family and loneliness and disappointment. He did not recognise Paul’s creation.
Paul wandered around the crowded room, picking up books and putting them down again, knocking papers to the floor, then sprawling on the unmade bed. Conrad was embarrassed suddenly and wondered when last he had changed the sheets; his pillows, he saw, were grey and darkened in the centre from long use.
‘Phew,’ Paul said, smiling quickly. ‘Your flat’s worse than mine.’ Conrad started to apologise, then stopped and shrugged his shoulders, spreading both hands in a clown’s gesture of mock-helplessness.
‘Would you like to have some lunch with me, Paul?
‘What are you having?
‘Oh, an interesting little culinary miracle which goes by the name of CUPASOUP.’ His expression was exaggeratedly serious and Paul’s laugh shouted out into the room. ‘Are you sure you can manage it, Conrad? I didn’t expect the Cordon Bleu treatment from you. I tell you what, you’ve got a real expert here, I’ll make it for you.’
Conrad smiled, then looked worried. ‘Oh, but oughtn’t you to ring Eleanor, first? She’ll be expecting you. She might be cooking you something.’ The headshake was savage, but the face which looked at him across the room was pleading once again. ‘No chance at all! She isn’t bothered what I do. She’s clearing out Dad’s stuff and I … it’s pretty depressing to see. She never asks where I’m going. She doesn’t give a damn.’
An hour later he had gone, and Conrad could pick up the large buff envelope that lay on his desk. It was postmarked ‘Warwick’, and Conrad felt his heart jump, almost painfully, so that he had to catch his breath sharply and sit down. He knew what he would find inside the envelope; familiar photocopies, and names and addresses; more little pieces in his jigsaw if he were lucky. But this time it might be vital; his contacts had led him to a Warwickshire archivist who, he was convinced, would be able to answer the last question.
With trembling hands he tore open the envelope, glanced quickly at the expected enclosures, and the carefully drawn out
chart, then unfolded the letter. As he read, a smile of extraordinary beatitude spread slowly over his face.
Dear Dr Hartley,
I was most interested to receive your communication, and delighted that Mrs Wolverton at the County Records Office gave you my name. My forthcoming work on old Warwickshire families is indeed completed, and I am happy to be in a position to answer your queries
It comes as no surprise to me that you have been unable to trace your late wife’s male ancestors beyond Edward Theodore Ranshaw (1819-1882), the father of Ernest Theodore Ranshaw (1849-1910), your late wife’s grandfather. You are aware that Edward Ranshaw moved to Bristol as a young man and became a solicitor in that city; also that he married twice, the issue being from his first marriage to Susannah Pearson.
During my researches in the archives of Hilton College, I discovered brief biographical details about one of the masters, Rudolph Henri Ranslavia, who taught French at the school. It would seem that he was born in Poland in 1768, and died in Coventry in 1850. He came to England, at the age of thirty in 1798, and somehow found his way to the school and took the post. The information is scant, but it appears that Ranslavia was from a distinguished literary Bohemian family, and was attached as a relatively young man to the Austrian Embassy in Paris. He was a liberal, and much influenced by Voltaire, and the suggestion is that some sort of political, or possibly social, scandal forced him to leave Paris for England. (As much information as I have been able to collate is enclosed here, in photocopy, but I fear you will find it woefully inadequate).
There is only one letter, from Ranslavia to his solicitor, remaining in the Hiltonian archives, which explains that he lost all contact with his son after a quarrel, the causes of which he does not relate. It was, of course, Edward who changed the family name, anglicising it, which caused his father great distress. The other thing which may interest you is this: Rudolph Henri Ranslavia published a book in 1849, one year before he died. It is listed in the old library catalogue at the school, but naturally there is no trace of it now. The title was ‘Flowers of Bohemia’; as you will see from the enclosed, the records show that at one time Ranslavia described himself as ‘poet and historian’.