Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

  Despite the early darkness she thought she would go out and post her letter before Fibich got home. Once outside the enclosed warmth of the flat the chilly evening surprised her. The coldness of the hour settled on her skin like a coating of mercury. But when she was out of the flat she was reluctant to go back in again, and she wandered down to the Cathedral, whose hybrid red and white striped mass reared up ahead of her as she crossed the broad pavement that preceded it. From the café on her right, presumably sited there for the relief of pilgrims, came an obscene smell of stale cooking; inside the large glass windows she could see hunched humbled figures drinking from plastic cups. Indignation welled up in her: why were they allowed nothing better? Her indignation continued once she was inside the building, which was strangely warm, although designed in conformity with the age of iron: bulky, lofty, ugly, commodious, authoritative. She passed the silver-faced effigy of St John Southworth, whose body beneath its covering was only dust, and lit a candle, as she always did, out of superstition rather than piety. She darted awkwardly in front of the few worshippers, rather as if she were a latecomer at the theatre, unwilling to spoil the performance for others; that awkwardness distinguished her from the faithful – the young man in the anorak, the pretty girl who looked as if she might have nothing to do with the place, the capacious woman who might have dropped in between two committee meetings – and made her feel her isolation. She envied these people, yet at the same time did not fancy paying her dues to the obscure saints in the calendar who might be thought to favour particular causes. And unlike the faithful she could not even pray for special intentions, more specific pleas, but must suppress her needs, silence the interior clamour, live outside the myth of protection. She found no difficulty in repudiating the notion of a loving father: she suspected that, for her, the deity might be an enlarged and majestic version of Mr Hardy, and the idea brought an instinctive shudder. Better on the whole to bear one’s own burdens, soldier on without help. Not a trace was left, she realized, of her initial trustingness, her hopes. She thought of the evil smelling café with another burst of indignation. Jesus would have cast out those caterers, she thought, yet exploiters proliferate endlessly. And people are grateful, that is the worst of it. They are made to feel grateful, and the process reduces them.

  She turned to go, drifted down an aisle, wrestled with the reluctant swing door. The warmth inside and the cold outside struck her as symbolic; now she could not wait to get home. A young woman, encumbered by a push-chair, was on the other side of the door, and thanked Christine for holding it open for her. Christine looked at the child in the chair, and instinctively turned away. The huge head, the features as if flattened by a clumsy thumb… She hoped that God would be there for the mother. She wished that she had added more endearments to the letter to her son. She went back into the church, bought a postcard, forced herself to go into the café, and, ignoring the cup of coffee she had bought, wrote on the card, ‘Dearest boy, when are you coming home? We send you all our love.’

  10

  Quite suddenly, it seemed overnight, the false spring was eclipsed by returning cold: early frosts and a chill mist descended at the end of the afternoon. People searched in vain for the sun, now mysteriously occluded or reduced to a whitish blue in the white sky. In this bleached light the purples and yellows of the early crocuses looked garish, unconvincing, almost tactless. Pink blossom, frostbitten, darkened on the trees.

  In the dismay that was his immediate reaction to this apparent reversal of the seasons Fibich felt doubly threatened. His inability to banish his now habitual feeling of alarm decided him in secret to go back to the analyst whom he had tried vainly to reach by telephone. An answering machine informed him that Mrs Gebhardt was away and would not return for three weeks. It was too long: he did not think he could wait. He tried, on successive days, to telephone again, to see whether Mrs Gebhardt might not have returned unexpectedly, but he was always answered by the implacable machine. Finally, he gave up in disgust, and threw himself back in his chair as if he had caught himself out in an indignified stratagem, something furtive and disgraceful, an old bad habit or addiction which had never particularly benefited him in the first place. He liked Mrs Gebhardt but was uneasily conscious of the force of her will; she seemed to have more to gain from his hangdog appearances than he did. He was not, he would have reasoned, there to provide her with professional satisfactions of an inordinate nature, as if, each time, she had briefly wrestled with him and brought him down. He was there, he would have said, to reach enlightenment. Mrs Gebhardt dismissed this as a fantasy. She was there, she said, to conduct him into the heart of darkness; only there, she told him, would he find what he was looking for. But something in him had always rebelled at the idea of pursuing this objective under her benign yet rigorous supervision. The discovering should be spontaneous, he thought, dream-like, a deliverance almost mythical in its sudden completeness, an apocalypse, or an epiphany. Without this mythic sanction the discovery, if there was a discovery to be made, would be hard, bitter. And he wanted it to be instantaneous, a blinding light, so that he could get it over, put it behind him, instead of feeling it dogging his footsteps, clouding his waking hours, accompanying him every minute of the day. He dreamed of a light-filled future, in which the past would receive an absolution, leaving him free to live out the rest of his life in peace and harmony.

  In the meantime he consulted Hartmann. Hartmann was euphoric, dismissive.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ he said. ‘You have a wife, a son, a decent home, enough money. What more do you want at your age? A second childhood? That will come in good time, believe me. Anyway, what can this man do for you?’

  ‘My analyst is a woman,’ explained Fibich.

  Hartmann cocked his head. ‘A woman, eh? Attractive?’

  ‘No, no.’ It was Fibich’s turn to be dismissive. ‘Middle-aged, grey hair. Surprisingly untidy.’

  Hartmann looked disappointed. ‘And what does this woman do for you?’

  ‘She listens,’ said Fibich, feeling faint at the prospect of describing to Hartmann those wordless afternoons when he failed to find anything for her to listen to. ‘She wants me to tell her about my childhood.’

  ‘Tell her to mind her own business,’ said Hartmann. ‘You went through it once, why go through it again?’

  ‘But that isn’t the problem. The problem is that I can’t remember it. Oh, I remember coming to London all right. Compayne Gardens, Aunt: I remember all that. But everything that went before is a total blank. Literally a blank. Sometimes I think I ought to go back there, try to find the street, the house. That way I might know that I had a beginning.’

  Hartmann looked grave. ‘Back to Berlin? Are you mad?’

  ‘I feel,’ said Fibich with difficulty, ‘like a survivor. As if I arrived where I am by accident. After a shipwreck, or some sort of disaster that blacked out my memory. As if I will never catch up until I find out what went before.’

  Hartmann sighed. ‘You are not a survivor. You are a latecomer, like me. Like Yvette, for that matter. You had a bad start. Why go back to the beginning? One thing is certain: you can’t start again.’

  ‘Do you never look back?’ asked Fibich.

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ said Hartmann. ‘I remember Munich, oddly enough. That is, I remember it in flashes. It looks beautiful to me, a beautiful city. But I have never been back, and I will never go back.’

  Fibich smiled. ‘What is your secret?’ he asked.

  ‘The present is my secret. Living in the present. My daughter. And, please god, the children she will have. And our success. Does that mean nothing to you? Isn’t that a battle we won, however late we came?’

  But Fibich was unsmiling again, remembering Marianne, whom his son might have damaged, and seeing Hartmann’s still undimmed pleasure in her.

  ‘I sometimes think it has all been a dream,’ he said presently. ‘That it has all happened to somebody else. And I have no understanding of the person – not m
yself – to whom it has all happened.’

  ‘Ah, but that may be the way of things,’ said Hartmann. ‘We change so much from what we once were. To me time is a wonder. I love it. Time has brought me this good life, the food I eat, the family I enjoy. And if I got here by an unorthodox route I rejoice all the more that I got here at all. That I am here. Believe me, that is all there is.’

  Fibich saw, from Hartmann’s expression, that it would be pointless to go on. Pointless and unkind. For he also saw that Hartmann did in fact retain something of the past, his past. Somewhere in Hartmann’s past had been the unthinking confidence of the loved child, the robustness, the carefreeness. Those qualities, which had survived, had been there at the very beginning. And with the true gift of the mentally secure he was unaware of them, their roots, their origin. Hartmann was a latecomer only in the sense that he was enjoying his latter age more than most people are supposed to enjoy their youth. Hartmann felt the relief of being no longer the boy at school, the soldier in rough khaki. He had triumphantly turned the tables on his miserable boyhood by becoming a mature and satisfied man in late middle age, and by enjoying the comforts of that age, not by bemoaning his lost years, but by discovering the voluptuous pleasure that each shortening day might bring. Look! We have come through! To spoil that pleasure would be indecent, unthinkable. To reconnect Hartmann with his losses would be an act of treachery, and of cowardice. Whereas for himself those losses had coloured his entire life, like ink dropped in water. For him it was all different: a hunger for absent knowledge, a longing, a yearning, not for those losses to be made good – that, he knew, could not come about – but to be assuaged by fact, by circumstantial detail, by a history, a geography. He longed to know what his life had been before he could remember it. He longed to walk a foreign street and be recognized. He imagined it, the start of wonder on an elderly person’s face. Is it you, Fibich’s boy? You used to play with my children. That was what he longed for. That, and the suddenly restored familiarity of the foreign street, that café, that theatre, that park. And surely a new sun would burst in the sky at that moment, restoring spring, summer, restoring the strength to his body and sleep to his nights. Then might he sleep as Toto slept, carelessly, no longer on guard. Then might he too feel triumph, bring back the smile to Christine’s face, and live the rest of his life in peace.

  And love might be released at last, not pity, not hunger, but the love on which one looks with calm smiling gratitude. And the ability to be absorbed in lives other than his own, which, he was sure, would come with the deliverance that he craved, had always craved, and was no nearer possessing now than he had been as a young man. Indeed, he seemed to be moving farther and farther away from it, and he feared that unless he took some direct action it would soon be out of reach for ever. At the same time he knew himself to be a coward, puny, feeble, one to whom action of any kind is anathema. He told himself that the testing time had come, and that if he took no action at all he would perish. In this uneasy state he lived out the last days of his old life, knowing that he must do something, yet drawing back fearfully from the very possibility of initiating a change.

  So great, so overwhelming did the decision he had not yet made but would soon have to make become that it crowded out thoughts of his son, whose path in life he should be contemplating. It may even have been the aura of difficulty which surrounded thoughts of Toto that forced his mind away from the future and back to that dark or misty past which he felt to be so compelling. He found himself trying to remember or to conjure up a landscape, an interior, which were always out of reach and coming no nearer despite the intensity of his efforts. All he could see was the small fat boy in the chair, the Voltaire, but that was literally all: even the walls of the room were absent. And what he craved was an edge of wallpaper, a plant in a pot, a footstool, to furnish the room in which he must have sat, and still they eluded him, as they always had. And he saw no practical way of finding that room, of discovering its position in a house, of situating the house in a street.

  Fearfully his mind explored the possibility of returning to that city which he had not seen for fifty years, and which had somehow, in his mind, been irradiated out of existence. On the surface, in the areas of reason and practicality, there was nothing to prevent him from buying a ticket, getting on a plane, and wandering, like any other tourist, around that city, just to see if anything were restored to him. His heart beat faster at the very thought of such an expedition: the rising hairs on the back of his neck told him that he was entering dangerous territory. And if nothing were restored to him? Could he retrieve anything from a city every atom of whose history and geography had been violently changed, and of which his only relic was the memory of a chair? He had been bundled off so quickly, in circumstances of such terror, that there had been no time to collect photographs or souvenirs, and the details of his address had been obliterated by the awfulness of his leavetaking: his mother, embracing him for the last time, had turned away and fainted into her husband’s arms. As the train began to move off into the dark night, all that he could see was the turning and sinking motion of his mother, her face white, her eyes closed, falling lifeless into his father’s arms. Vainly he had searched, through the open windows of the night express, for signs of her return to life, to her normal position; he wanted to see her eyes smiling at him once again, and his father waving reassuringly. But they had been attached to each other as a mourning group, with no thought for him, or so it seemed, and all that he had to comfort him was a packet of boiled sweets in his coat pocket, in case he felt sick on the boat, and the address of a school where a place had been found for him. A silent elderly woman had been asked to take care of him on the journey. At Dover he had been met by the representative of a refugee organization which specialized in the transfer of children, out of danger, into England. He had been escorted to the school and there had met Hartmann.

  The task of confronting this nightmare again, in comparison with which his present nightmares were of no account, sickened and wearied him, until he empathized all too physically with his fainting mother. But beyond that image, or before it, there must be something more stable, less tragic, and that was what he desired so ardently to see restored. He was a grown man now, he reasoned with himself, not a frightened child, yet in everything pertaining to his past he was prerational. He possessed inexhaustible reserves of terror, or rather of horror, which could be, and were, activated in defiance of his conscious will. He felt uneasy to this day on station platforms: before any journey he had to wrestle with himself, even if the end in sight were pleasure or diversion. This was one of the reasons why Hartmann was so precious to him. With Hartmann nothing could go wrong. Hartmann was his guarantee of a safe passage. That enquiring yet ineffable smile, that excellence of presentation, seemed to assume that attention would be paid, service be forthcoming; it rearranged the boundaries of exchange, so that momentarily Fibich would feel like the substantial business man that he in reality was and was taken to be, able to command, to dismiss, to choose. And if any arrangement were not to his liking he could decline it, demand better. All this was an illusion, of course, but an illusion which had served him well in certain critical moments. ‘This is not to my taste,’ he would say to himself, as if he were practising a foreign language. ‘Something better must be arranged. Something more to my liking.’ Yet, while exercising himself in this manner, he continued to accumulate fetishes, to obey obscure superstitions, the meanings of which were known only to himself. His ravening appetite returning, he gorged himself on sugar. But he could not bear to have boiled sweets in the house.

  At home he was preoccupied. Christine saw, with pity and despair, a re-enactment of that absent ardent haunted adolescence which had first commanded her love and her attention. When she tried to talk to him about Toto he would answer as if a huge distance separated them. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he would say. ‘The BBC. Excellent.’ What he meant was, Please see to it. You must have noticed that I am temporarily inc
apacitated. Please be the stronger of the two of us, and take me with you. His hands trembled as he cut up his food, yet he ate voraciously, as if storing up strength for the ordeal ahead. Yet nothing was ordained, laid down as ineluctable. He could still not go, stay quietly in his warm drawing-room until this madness passed. For he thought it was a form of madness and he wished to be sane again. And sanity could only be restored if the madness were put to flight.

  He dreamed a strange dream at that time, strange because it was ironic and seemed cynically irrelevant. He dreamed that he was looking down on his dead or unconscious body from some vantage point in the middle of a small crowd that had gathered to witness the event. ‘His faith kept him going,’ said the man immediately adjacent to him. ‘Either that or he was a very good actor.’ This was so consummately inappropriate that he laughed when he remembered it the following day, although it continued to trouble him disproportionately. Seeing him pass from deep thought to this intermittent laughter Christine asked him what was wrong.