Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  I did think there might have been a fight here once, Cleaver said. He pointed to the chair-leg that had been repaired, the conspicuous stuccoing on the mantlepiece. Like someone had heaved some furniture around. There’s a dent in the wall too, Alex noticed.

  For perhaps half an hour, then, they discussed the Stolberg family. Alex was sitting in the chair where Olga had sat for a whole month. Perhaps Jürgen killed the old man? he suggested. Someone’s got patricide on the brain, Cleaver smiled. He shook his head: You don’t know how much time I’ve spent thinking about it. It’s a sort of mental trap. At the end of the day I came to the conclusion it must have something to do with the triangle: old Nazi, Frau Stolberg, Jürgen; father, mother, son. There’s some negative dynamic there. Or there was. Rosl is an escapee, the one that got away, the one who became Italian. Ulrike was a victim, and maybe Seffa’s going to be another. There’s something up with the old struldbrug too, the old lady, but I can’t work it out. Then Alex remarked that he had read about an old man in the Scottish Highlands who had confessed to having had sex with five generations of his own womenfolk: grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, granddaughter. You see how well behaved I was in the end! Cleaver laughed. Alex grinned: Can you play? he asked, pointing to the accordion.

  You try, Cleaver said.

  His son put the thing on his lap and moved his fingers over the keyboard. He could remember the right hand to Alla Turca but was put off by the problem of squeezing the air in and out of the bellows. After a couple of tries, he gave up. Can’t do it. Show me.

  Cleaver pulled the instrument onto his knees. He played Auld Lang Syne, hamming the thing. Alex laughed. Granddad’s Hogmanays, he said. Then Cleaver played Rock Of Ages. The mournfulness of the tune began to take over. He crooned a few words. Not the labours of my hands … You used to sing it as a lullaby, Alex said. Angela hated it. Cleaver stopped, put the instrument down. Enough, he said abruptly.

  There was silence. Cleaver looked at his watch. Wonder when Hermann will be coming? I’d better get my things together. Whatever I’m going to do, I won’t be sleeping here tonight.

  Alex hesitated. Dad, actually, there was another reason for my coming.

  Cleaver looked at his son.

  Alex sighed. There’s something I wanted to tell. Maybe. I didn’t know … There’s something I’d like you to understand.

  Cleaver felt anxious. What?

  Don’t worry! Alex laughed. I’ve already destroyed your reputation, remember?

  Tell me.

  Give me a moment to think. I wasn’t sure that I was going to tell you this.

  Cleaver stood and went to feed the fire. He placed two logs crosswise. Maybe the biggest pleasure, here, he told his son, has been watching logs burn. I mean, really concentrating and watching. He blew to get the flames going. I love it when the pressure builds up inside the wood and the heat forces a jet of gas out of one end, following the grain I suppose to where the log was cut, and the jet catches light, like a Bunsen burner. But not steadily. In sudden little spurts. You never know when it’s going to start or stop. Blue flames sometimes and even green. They really rip, then suddenly the flame goes out and there’s just smoke coiling and writhing. I suppose the mixture changes. Then the flame again. There’s a little roar when it catches. You know what I mean?

  Sure.

  I’ve spent whole afternoons here, watching that. It must be the closest I got to not thinking.

  Fires are mesmerising, Alex said. But he was ready now. Okay, he said, listen. So, four years ago, I went to live in Manchester, you remember?

  I remember I told you not to.

  Right. You told me not to, his son smiled. When did you ever tell me I was doing the right thing?

  Alex, I …

  Just listen. The main reason I went to Manchester was to get married.

  You what? You’re married?

  Yes.

  But why didn’t you tell me? When? Does Amanda know? Are we going to be grandparents?

  Listen! No she doesn’t. I’m going to tell you now.

  Alex paused. He looked at his father as if weighing him up. When I was doing my postgrad at the LSE I met this girl studying at art school. The Royal College actually. She was a big talent, lively, bright, good-looking. We started living together. That was when I had that place on Balls Pond Road.

  Again Alex paused, as if daring his father to interrupt. Cleaver restricted himself to shaking his head.

  And she was rich too. Her parents were rich. She had already had a show and made a couple of sales.

  I’m surprised someone like that wouldn’t have wanted to stay in London, Cleaver said. What’s in Manchester?

  Wait, wait Dad.

  Does the lady have a name? I always think girls should have names.

  Alex swallowed. Letizia.

  Quite a name.

  Her mother was from Sicily. Dad, let me tell you, it isn’t what you’re expecting.

  I’m not expecting anything, Cleaver said.

  We started living together, but it wasn’t going that well. She was very extrovert, very moody, always flirting with other guys, self-confident. Ambitious, even arrogant.

  You mean bossy? Cleaver asked.

  No, not bossy, but arrogant, like, brushing other people aside. I’d just got my first job with Business Week, remember? She did nothing but take the piss. Only art mattered, everything else was dull. Etc, etc.

  So, Cleaver said, you were going to split up when she tells you she’s pregnant.

  Dad, I said wait. It’s not your story. About six months into it, we were having this crisis, trying to break up and not quite managing sort of thing, when she fell ill. She sort of ran out of energy, couldn’t do anything. It was unusual for her. She was a whirlwind normally. I thought it was psychosomatic, because of us arguing and everything. Anyway, she went back to her parents in Manchester and I assumed it was over. I was upset, but not that upset.

  You did have something of a track record with psycho-sick girlfriends.

  Then her mother phones me to say she’s got leukaemia.

  I’m sorry, Cleaver muttered.

  Quite. Alex hesitated. So, I went up to see her. I mean, she didn’t know her mother had called me. She didn’t know I knew she was so ill. She was very subdued, changed and tender, and we sort of fell in love again.

  You mean you felt sorry for her, Cleaver said.

  Please don’t tell me what I mean.

  Okay, Cleaver said, sorry.

  Then about a month later, her mother asked me if I would marry her.

  I beg your pardon?

  Letty was only going to live six months or so, if that. That’s what the doctors said. She hadn’t been told. Maybe she guessed. I was the only guy who had stayed with her more than a month or two, lived with her. The mother begged me. To make the last part of her life happy.

  But that’s completely mad! Cleaver burst in. That’s crazy. And you agreed?

  Alex put both hands in his thick hair. I asked her and she said yes.

  But why didn’t you talk to me? Or your mother. Jesus! I thought you talked to Amanda more or less every day. Weren’t you always on the phone?

  I didn’t talk to you or Mum because I knew you’d come down on me like a ton of bricks and I’d have to hear what an idiot I was and how stupidly I was behaving and why didn’t I come and work in London in a decent newspaper and so on and so forth.

  Go on, Cleaver said. Let’s not get sidetracked.

  Anyway, like I said, when I went to stay up in Manchester we were sort of in love again. It was easier at her house than in London. There was a strong sense of family. There was the mother and father – he was much older, he’d never wanted Letty to go to art school and seemed almost happy she’d had to come back – then two younger sisters. It was as if I was the son they hadn’t had, the only boy, the young man of the family.

  Again Alex hesitated. Cleaver grimaced but waited.

  In the end, though, Dad. Alex bit his li
p. In the end, though, I think it had to do with Angela.

  Their eyes met.

  I mean, that I married her. It was like being close to Angela. Letty was that sort of girl, artistic, charismatic. And she was dying. I don’t know why, but I was glad of the chance to be close to death. It was as if I’d missed Angela’s dying, it happened so quickly and I was too young, I felt guilty, she was the talented one, and now it would really happen and I would play my part. I thought, it’s only for six months, a year at most. It was as though, I was giving time to a part of me that had been buried too quickly. Afterwards I’d be able to put it behind me.

  Cleaver was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  We got married. The parents are rich. Or he is. There are all kinds of business interests. He found me a job in a computing magazine, I was doing the promotions, and they set us up in a sort of separate flat on the top floor of their house, a mansion really.

  Alex, Cleaver breathed, Alex! I can’t believe you didn’t say anything. Leave aside the question of advice. You could have just told us.

  What did you ever tell me about your real life?

  But Alex, it’s not …

  Let’s leave that argument to another time. Let me finish. And by the way, I did tell Phil and Caroline. They came and visited. They came to the wedding and we all agreed there was no point in upsetting you and Mum with it all. You always had your own shit to deal with. Alex paused. Anyway, the fact is that she didn’t die.

  Cleaver watched his son. He was hunched forward, slim hands clasped together, lips frowning, as he had once hunched and frowned over his homework. There is something extremely resilient about my son, Cleaver thought. Always has been. Something hard and prosaic. Like Amanda.

  It seemed she was going to die. They put her in hospital. I went every day. It was a ward where people went to die, really. I must have seen seven or eight people die, usually children. But Letty hung on. The doctors couldn’t understand. Her mother kept saying it was my love. Alex sighed: Anyhow, after about three months of this, they found a perfect bone-marrow match, you know they have this international tissue-typing register now, in Holland. It was one in a hundred thousand. They did the operation, and slowly, but very slowly, she started to get better.

  Cleaver sighed. Looking around the room as his son took a breather, the stone floor, the rugs, the window, he had the impression that Rosenkranzhof was changed. To sit here in the future would not be the same as it had been in the past.

  But really slowly, Alex resumed. It must have been four or five months before she got to her feet. Meantime, the mother says to me, if I need a woman, she’ll find me one.

  I beg your pardon!

  Alex smiled. She’s canny the mother, she’s Italian, quite young still, she married a guy twenty years older than herself when she was eighteen and pregnant; so she’s thinking, here’s a young man and he needs sex and Letty can’t give it to him, and she wants to keep control of it all so that it doesn’t break up the family.

  For a moment the figure of Frau Stolberg crossed Cleaver’s mind. And so?

  So I told her to mind her own business. I mean, I was really angry, especially when she had these friends over from Sicily and there’s this woman in her early forties all over me, clearly acting on orders.

  Cleaver shook his head.

  Finally Letty was back on her feet. She came home. But she wasn’t herself at all, she was sleeping fourteen or sixteen hours a day, completely listless. The whole core of her was gone. She didn’t draw or paint or even want to look at art. The only thing she could think about was dragging herself through the day.

  No creature comfort, Cleaver said.

  It was unthinkable, Alex said. Anyway, at this point I was already having an affair.

  Ah.

  That’s cheered you up, Alex smiled. His eyes shone in the flames from the fire.

  I’m just glad something was going for you.

  Wait. Alex paused. It started, or, no, it sort of half started way back, more or less when Letty first went to hospital. I met this girl in the gym.

  Not the gym.

  Alex smiled wanly. She was much younger, still at university. But no, there was no sex. We just spent time together and it was sort of tacitly understood that after it was over, after a decent interval …

  Like a fortnight, Cleaver said.

  Please, Dad, whatever. After an interval, we’d become lovers.

  Cleaver was about to remark that his son had always found women who wanted to put things off, but he stopped himself. Go on, he said.

  Actually, I still haven’t come to the reason why I’m telling you all this. You can’t imagine.

  So go on. I’m listening.

  Okay, when Letty is getting better, but not really better, and I realise she’ll never be the same, I start going to bed with this other girl.

  Name please, Cleaver asked.

  Marilyn. Alex pronounced the name quickly but with the utmost caution, as if it were broken glass in his mouth. Then Cleaver understood. For a moment he was overwhelmed with pity. He had seen to the end of the story.

  Alex began to speak more rapidly and with less expression.

  Okay, we started making love. It was all so intense and poignant and happy. She begged me to leave Letty, and I said, how could I, in the situation I was in? We made love in her student dorm, or in the car, or sometimes in hotels. I would tell Letty I was coming down to London to see you and Mum, and instead I took Marilyn to the Lake District, or even Blackpool, wherever. So, it had been going on a year and more when she was due to graduate. She was going back home to Portsmouth. Then I kind of had a breakdown. I said I’d leave Letty and come and live with her. Only Marilyn said no. Maybe at the beginning it would have worked, she said, but not now. She broke it off.

  I went crazy, Alex said. I lost it completely. I was banging on her door in the middle of the night. Stuff like that. Letty must have guessed what was going on. Certainly her mother did. But nobody said anything. Then one day she just disappeared. Marilyn. She left the dorm, must have changed her e-mail and mobile number. All of a sudden this woman I’ve been seeing every day just disappears from my life, completely. Not a trace.

  Priya, Cleaver thought. I’m truly sorry, Alex, he said. Really, really, really sorry.

  And that’s when I started writing Under His Shadow.

  Alex looked up into his father’s eyes. It was a look of challenge.

  At first, it was a kind of therapy. I thought it would take my mind off things. I’d even been thinking of killing myself. Banal. I’d never have had the courage. Then the more I got into it, the book, the more mixed up everything got in my mind. The real energy of the thing was how angry I was, with Letty’s mother, with Letty, with Marilyn, with myself. But at the same time, it was your fault too. You’d always given me the impression I wasn’t the talented one. That was Angela. Genius died with Angela and so on. It was as if I’d become the nobody you always took me for. I started feeling angry about it. The cynicism. All those bad jokes about infidelity, and the famous dinner guests. It was awful. And I realised I’d partly married Letty in reaction to how cynical you were. To be different somehow, better. I’d fallen into a trap you set for me.

  Alex stopped. His voice was defiant. Cleaver had his head in his hands. He wouldn’t reply.

  Actually, I think the book’s pretty accurate, if you want to know. And I don’t feel sorry for having written it at all. You made our lives so unpleasant sometimes and, most of all, confusing. Do you have any idea? A minute ago, you asked, why didn’t I talk to you? Because whenever I did, in the past, you were always more interested in showing how clever you were at analysing psycho situations than in me. Every situation you come across is a sort of gymnasium for your talents, a possible documentary. It’s the same with these people here. You don’t give a damn about this Frau Stolberg and Rosl and whatever they’re called. You just like wondering if you can sniff out an incest.

  Cleaver sat silent.
The whole portrayal of Angela was a lie, he thought. A deliberate lie. But now is not the time to tackle it.

  Anyhow, I just thought you should know – Alex suddenly smiled rather too brightly – now I’m here, that at the end of the day the anger in that book wasn’t only to do with you. I mean, what mattered to me at the time was the mess I was in over Marilyn.

  Again the two men caught each other’s eyes. Cleaver was shaking his head quickly and rhythmically, in a kind of trance.

  Alex waited, as if making sure that he had given his father enough rope to hang himself. Cleaver wouldn’t speak.

  Then the younger man relaxed. He sat back. Anyway, as you see, your Alex understands now that life can get complicated, and the book was just a book, Dad, just one possible take, when I was trapped in a kind of gloomy state of mind. Perhaps I overdid it here and there.

  Alex, Cleaver finally said. I feel completely drained. And I need a pee.

  Cleaver hobbled outside and stood in the snow in the cold afternoon. Without a jacket, he shivered. Count yourself lucky I didn’t pee on you, he shouted at the troll. My son is in a serious state, he thought. Or maybe not. Maybe he just needed to tell his story. It was because of Angela, he had said.

  Going back into the house, Cleaver climbed the stairs to gather some clothes. Alex was staring into the fire. So what’s the situation now? Cleaver called from upstairs. He pushed trousers and socks and shirts into his suitcase.

  Sorry?

  What are you planning to do now? He wouldn’t go to the old Nazi’s wardrobe for his shirt and tie. Just your mountain clothes, Cleaver decided.

  Oh, I’ll go back down to Luttach. With the Klöckler.

  No, I mean, with your life.

  I don’t know. There was a pause. After the book came out, I was offered a job with some radio show on one of the London stations. A sort of avant-garde arts magazine.

  Take it, Cleaver called. Normally I’d say to stay a million miles from arts magazines and broadcasting in general, but take it. Move away, then maybe divorce. He sorted out his underwear, then added: You see now the wisdom of not marrying.