by Adam Thorpe
In the summer of 1937, my uncle held a week-long ‘symposium’ on the Kabbala and Biblical theosophy. Katzen was there to give a talk. He wandered about the house and grounds in a dark suit, looking lost behind a brindled goatee beard. I wasn’t then a great fan of modern art, but I liked his paintings: a bit like Chagall, I suppose, seen through smog. But the art world at that time did not approve, and Nuncle’s crowd were so snooty about them when they were hung up in the morning-room for the week! This made me like them more.
His daughter interested me, too. She drooped about the lawn in a long lacy dress, smoking madly through a long ivory cigarette holder, and wore a broad fedora with a long veil attached to it. The veil (and maybe the dress) was her grandmother’s, I think. I was fifteen. I reckoned that she was not much older, though she behaved as if she was.
The weather was very fine, and all meals were taken outside, at a row of wobbly trestle-tables borrowed from the Women’s Institute. One of these collapsed, pinching Nuncle’s fingers in its folding legs so badly he screamed. I had to go and fetch the antiseptic cream and plaster for the cut. Copies of his magazine, the Scarab, littered the house. It was the most boring magazine I had ever come across, full of numbers and bits from the Bible or badly drawn plans of the pyramids, with overexcited contributions from people like Charles Williams or A.M. Ludovici. One issue had a drawing of an African mask on the cover, very like our mask at home.
I mostly kept to my room or roamed the wood, spying on the chattering throng with my new binoculars. There was a tall, debonair German with a bronze pin on his tie featuring a tiny swastika. ‘It goes,’ insisted my uncle, ‘the right way, the way of the sun, of creation, of light.’ Hitler’s went anti-clockwise, the way of Kali and dark destruction – but the Jewish group, led by Katzen, complained and the man was packed off on the second day, threatening us all and waving his arms about – ‘Just like Kali,’ someone said. I recognised him from the visit of the Thule Society years before, and was rather sorry, as that visit belonged to the last moments of my life before my illness, before the bad news about you. It seemed a different life, that one, going on on the other side of a heavy drape.
On the same day this man was sent packing, my roaming binoculars found Ernest Katzen’s daughter. She was part of a group talking excitedly, I assumed, about the expulsion, but she looked bored by it all. She floated across to an empty space and lay on the grass, leaning back on her elbows, taking the sun on her uplifted face. I shifted away from a blur of foliage and crept forward to the very edge of the wood, concealed by a young spindle tree. She had taken off her hat and veil, and her raven hair, burnished in the late sunlight, hung thick and loose behind her like a tumbling stream. It wasn’t at all like the cropped or curled styles of the older women on the lawn. It was, I suppose, like yours, Mother, when you let it out of its pins at night, when you got up in the morning. Her dress hung open at her neck. It was cut low. She had a generous bosom.
My binoculars stayed on her for ages. She wore no shoes, and her feet were very arched – they matched the curve of her waist when she stood. Her chin was rather sharp, but I liked it for that. It was teasing. I was struck by her resemblance to one of the actresses photographed in my old Shakespeare volume. Oh, Rachael was the most magnificent creature. So overcome was I that I fled to the other end of the wood, where I thought long and hard about love, about the different types of love.
You weren’t dead, then, Mother. I was patient, I was full of faith. I knew that the moment I gave in to my father’s and uncle’s lack of hope, you would never reappear. Father had returned a year or two after you left us. Need I tell you that he was all but broken? Quite bald, and with a pronounced stammer? I wonder what broke him. Africa, I suppose. You going off like that.
Anyway, he was now confined to a desk job in the Administration’s offices in London. I visited him from time to time, in his tiny Bayswater rooms. I’d no heart to ask what had happened to our home, to the little cluster of huts between the forest and the water, to the concrete PWD house that looked like a face, to your bush ‘hospital’, to the servants. To Quiri, especially. But the out-station did not matter so much to me, now – it was the forest behind that mattered. In there was the pearl that did not tarnish. Of course you would come back.
Whenever I asked him for details about your disappearance, I’m afraid he just looked very gloweringly at me, his lips pursed tight. Then he would go into a long, silent gloom. So I stopped asking him, and we hardly talked about you at all. Don’t be hurt.
As the week progressed, Rachael Katzen began to pearl, too, in my head. And not just in my head.
I hid my Meccano set. I gave away my Lotts Bricks.
In the day, I kept my curtains drawn. At night, I didn’t sleep very well.
I was quite often on my belly by the wood’s edge, trying not to mist my bird-watchers’ binoculars as I breathed. One day I brought my box camera with me and took a photograph of her.
I did not talk to her or even meet her eye, not once. I learnt her name only by studying the list of guests in the kitchen, while Mrs Stump moaned on about the vegetarians: three of them, could I imagine, only ate carrots – one had ’em boiled, one had ’em raw, one had ’em sliced into slivers. ‘I’ll sliver them,’ she added. Katzen, Rachael: will eat anything.
The voice had come to me mingled with others; though she mostly looked sullen, it was high and cheerful. Now and again she attached herself to her father, putting her arm through his. They looked very foreign together, and this pleased me. The rest of the gathering were clumpy and stiff and bespectacled, despite some priestly capes or Babylonian robes. She was like a sylph amongst them, in comparison.
My voyeur’s photographs were hopeless: a large area of grass in the foreground, a few blurry figures dotted about, and the gaunt cliff of the house beyond. The figures were so tiny, it was hard to distinguish Rachael at first. When I did, she looked plain, even through the magnifying glass, as if my crudely ground lens had distorted her. I tore the photographs up, sadly.
I did not see Rachael again for two years. Meanwhile, I was not wholly uninterested in that side of things, Mother. I lacked conviction, that’s all. The boys at school panted over naughty postcards of women naked but for suspenders or boots or furs; I had seen women naked but for a sheen of palm oil, and for real! The vicar’s daughter had been the object of my attentions for a while, mainly through the local tennis club, its brand-new grass courts breaking into my solitude with hearty cries, flushed faces, and warm lemonade on a burning bench. She was a magnificent player, was the vicar’s daughter. Nuncle, in a rare spasm of interest (I must have returned looking particularly miserable one day) asked how I was getting on, and I said that she ‘regularly thrashed me’. He found this very droll, repeating my comment to his friends for years afterwards. Through this girl’s brother I was roped into the same croquet team you used to play for, Mother. I spooned with my partner (a doctor’s daughter with a contraption on her teeth) after a mixed match in a nearby village. We crouched behind a shed sticky with creosote. I could taste the metal on her contraption but it didn’t matter. I got as far as her underthings, which she told me she’d knitted herself. This put me off. That’s all.
Then there was the seminar on the esoteric tradition in European painting. Uncle Edward hired the village hall for a week, for the lectures. Rachael came with her father. She’d dropped the veil and seemed firmer and less sylph-like, but just as lovely to my mind. I certainly hadn’t forgotten her, had I? Now, slipping out from the village hall during my uncle’s tedious speech on Blake and the coming apocalypse, passing the rows of pale faces, I saw Rachael getting up, as if to follow me. We had already exchanged a polite greeting over cakes and tea in the house, our eyes finally meeting like Dr Livingstone and Stanley in the huge forest (that was how I saw it, anyway). Stepping outside, my nape tingled as it had never tingled before: I didn’t dare look back. Should I close the door behind me? It had always had a difficult bolt, the wood
was warped. Could she have been getting up because she saw me leaving? I let the door swing wide.
She appeared, closing the door behind her. I automatically and too quickly offered her a cigarette through my fierce blush, which twilight hardly hid. To my great surprise, she said she would share mine.
You’re the only one I’m telling this to, Mother – the only one I’ve ever told. You’ve no idea how painful all this is to me, and how blessed. I hope it’s not too chilly for you on the veranda. Soon we can move inside and sit before the hotel’s roaring log fire, as we used to do each Christmas, pretending we weren’t in Africa. I do like writing to you. It is terrible what lies and frauds people can conjure up, and so meticulously. I’m thinking of that bundle there, on the table. I brought it out with us. You can open it when I’ve finished writing to you. The demon did it, in order to destroy me. I believed it for a while.
Rachael Katzen and I were leaning against the village hall’s corrugated-iron wall, terribly coolly. I was Winterbourne and she was the very pretty Daisy Miller, but it wasn’t quite Rome, was it? Tin huts would be very familiar to me soon, though I didn’t know it then: it was 1939. This date is as unrepentant as 1914, Mother. However, war was not yet declared, the evening was brooding and sultry and full of peace, with Europe’s cities intact in our thoughts, if we ever thought of them. I noticed small beads of sweat on her bare shoulders. She seemed even lovelier this time. She was nineteen. That seemed very much older than seventeen. She was matchless, she was fiery, she knew everything about London and its life. I sometimes think you must have been very like her when you were nineteen.
When she gave me back my cigarette, the felty pad of the filter tasted faintly of violets. ‘Violated by violets,’ I thought, blushing deeper still. It was, I think, the scent of her perfume invading my taste buds, because her full, red lips needed no lipstick. I coughed as the smoke hit my lungs for the first time in my life – I had always held the smoke in my mouth, before. I handed the cigarette back to her. What would she taste on it? Something pleasant of me, I hoped. Had I used my tooth powder this morning? I felt I’d known her for ages, despite my nerves: we’d been childhood sweethearts on a coral island far away, or in a book we’d walked out of as living beings, or in a play they’d played in the theatres of Greece and Rome.
‘London must be jolly good,’ I said, my voice cracking.
She took a deep drag and didn’t cough, then let me taste her violets again.
‘Dull,’ she replied, ‘so flat. Full of pompous little poets boring you in smoky pubs, most of them either terribly religious or terribly Marxian. I haven’t found one who actually fought in the war, the one in Spain I mean. I’m going to Paris, the minute I can, and paint. I want to sit and drink Vermouth on the pavement, and watch humanity pass. You can’t stay in a country where you can’t drink on the pavement. When they do, in London, on a hot night like this, they look so nervous, like naughty little boys and girls sipping their lemonade. I like the new sandwich bars, all that steel and neon light. I pretend I’m American. I go to the quick-lunch counter and drawl.’
She gave a quick giggle. I had no idea what a quick-lunch counter was, but I was impressed by her boldness. I hadn’t let the smoke past my tonsils, this time, and my voice came out loud and clear over the drone behind the wall. (The droners were faded, old, in specs. There was already a pact of youth between us.)
‘You want to be a painter, like your father?’
‘Not like my father, please. Like myself. I want to paint people in snack bars, just as they are. Slums, railway stations, hospital waiting rooms. What are you going to do? You look much older than you were last time, by the way. And just as sad. What’s wrong with your eye?’
‘I can’t see through it.’
‘An accident?’
I didn’t want to tell her that I’d had it for years, and that she couldn’t have been very interested in me last time, or she’d have noticed it, so I nodded. There was a pause. She was looking at me straight.
‘Nelson,’ she said.
‘Lady Hamilton,’ I replied, looking at her right in her slate-grey eyes, in the one moment of my life when I have matched my own desire to be charming, witty, and a bit of a rake. The one moment, ever! I was astonished at myself: it was as if I had suddenly become a man. Suddenly a man. Quite suddenly. All my Lotts Bricks tumbling and vanishing out of sight for ever. My Meccano set.
That’s all I can manage for today. Besides, the mosquitoes are biting. Such a lovely deep, thick thick dusk.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Fresh morning. Peak clear. View over the forest magnificent, wisps of mist rising like white smoke. Bright geckos everywhere, stuck then slithering. How do they stick and then slither? Pock, pock, pock of the red tenniscourt.
Dear Mother,
Hope you slept well. I slept well, most of the time.
I smoked my cigarette coolly as she smiled at me. The metal of the wall was hot against my back. I knew that I was handsome, desirable, and jolly brilliant, even if I knew underneath that I was none of those things.
‘Do you hate your uncle?’
This question surprised me. I’m afraid I choked a little on the smoke. Clapping broke out behind us, through the closed door. I chucked the cigarette at my feet and ground it into the grass as I’d seen chaps do in the village.
‘I think I’m going for a walk,’ I said, thrusting my hands into the deep pockets of my white baggies and looking out at the fields. ‘If you want to come.’
She did, and we took a stroll around the back of the village, avoiding the areas that might harbour the crop-headed type. It was dusk, but still warm. I felt as if I was playing truant. This elated me – it was like the odd time I’d cut class in Randle and wandered alone in the woods and fields that were only really glorious then, as if they belonged to no one else, as if they were all part of my own private kingdom. Glow-worms abounded near the river. We tried to catch one. I touched Rachael’s hand as the light pulsed inside it, then pretended to put one in her hair. We were giggling. We were still giggling when we passed a young, wizened, asthmatic young man, holding a pail. I gave him a bold ‘Hello, Ted.’ I told Rachael that you had saved him in a mill, once. She asked me if I missed you, because she’d heard the tragic story about my mother. I shrugged my shoulders. Of course I only shrugged my shoulders to impress her, Mother. This evening, you see, I was a man. This shrug did impress her, I think. I hope you don’t take it in the wrong way.
We sat on the river’s edge and watched the trout rise. I caught one for her – it was easy, there were so many of them, but she insisted I threw the flapping thing back. Everything I did was easy and controlled: the world had been created – the twilight fields, the darkling trees, the twittering birds, the river and the cottages and the ivied mill, the trap-maimed badger glimpsed limping up the bank and wobbling along its crest, the early stooks and haystacks – it had all been created just for us, for our courtship, for me to impress my lovely companion with. It was like the glimpses of wall and tree and hut behind the actors in my Shakespeare volume, only this was not nailed and sized and painted, it was real and rustling and sweet with summer and dusk. I was suddenly unashamed of my connection with the village, of my non-reading days spent bicycling and butterfly collecting or whatever, dipped deep in fantasies of the past and the future in which I was always impressing you, Mother, with some record feat, or talking in a husky whisper to my guardian angel in his cricketing togs. Rachael kept murmuring something about Proust, her eyes appearing to be kindled by my knowledge of the places we walked past. I was extremely well and happy, oh yes, so happy and well, drinking deep draughts of that summer evening and its sweet smells, convinced that the rest of my life would follow suit in one gloriously uncorroding season of Rachael, glow-worms, and heady summer air.
We did not kiss, or anything like that. Oh no. Something, some yearning not to puncture the perfect tissue of my love, prevented me from any ungainly lunge of t
he sort which had pressed my hands upon the doctor’s daughter’s hand-knitted brassière. I could not imagine even holding Rachael Katzen’s hand. Each accidental touch of the fingers was enough.
There were drinks afterwards, in the morning-room, the new French windows open on to the garden. Nuncle had that afternoon placed candles in old lamps and hung them from the branches, with my sullen help. Soon the nattering stopped over the nut-roast portions and elderberry wine and the different kinds of vintage English apples in straw-lined baskets, and those who were staying went to bed. Rachael and I wandered about the garden, admiring the stars, and talking. I can’t remember what we talked about. It was probably twaddle, Mother. Marvellous philosophical twaddle, perhaps shadowed by the Nazi menace or perhaps not. When she yawned, and turned to go in, she told me that this was the nicest evening of her life.
‘I’m jolly glad,’ I said, ‘because it’s the nicest evening of my life, too.’
All night I lay awake wishing I had either said something more interesting, or had gazed into her eyes a bit more as I’d said it. A kiss was beyond imagining.
The next morning, I accompanied Rachael and her father to the station in the tatty trap still driven by a very doddery and deaf Stan. Well, he was cheaper than a motor-taxi, and I knew that Rachael and her father were poor. The seats were frayed raw, and a cushion on one of the iron arm-rests was missing, but Rachael thought it was Proustian again. I told her Quiri’s story of how the human race first got lines on its hands – you remember it, Mother. As we swayed and jolted, and I reached the point at which the grandmother clutches her grandson by the hair to save him from the water’s grip, my finger touched Rachael’s palm. ‘The grandmother tugged, but the lake tugged harder, and she felt his hair slip slowly through her hands and down, down, down he went. All she was left with were the marks his hair had made on her palms.’ Rachael looked at her lines – just as I would always do. I was still touching her palm, the movement of the trap making my fingertips stroke her skin. When our eyes met, I thought my chest was going to explode. But her father was squashed in with us, so we couldn’t kiss. ‘What a sad story,’ she murmured. I waved to her as she waved from the carriage window, slowly engulfed in steam, and I bounced back on Stan’s trap as gay as a lark, singing aloud when we crossed the open downs. The result of my jollity was a bruised coccyx, but I nursed its discomfort like the dropped button of hers I found down the trap’s seat. It had fallen from her blouse during the ride and Stan let me search for it when we got back. It was a top button, from the hollow below her throat. It smelt sweet, probably of the skin of her throat. I kissed it and kissed it and kissed it and kissed it, and nearly swallowed it by mistake. It lost its faint sweetness under this assault of my mouth.