by Edward Docx
‘It felt like fate, Lou. And all the things I’d taught myself not to believe in. We were just standing there in the yellow mud and silver birch of Yasnaya Polyana. And then the bus started to get ready to go. And only then – only then – did she step down for a minute and let it slip that she was going back to Moscow for the night and that she wasn’t flying until late the next day. So I made her tell me where she was staying.’
‘You went after her?’
‘I was supposed to remain for a few days longer at Yasnaya. I had a hell of a time trying to organize a Moscow hotel and get a train out of there. I had to involve the entire Tolstoy family. Endless phone calls and admin with my passport. But I did it. And that night, I called where she was staying – left a silly cryptic message for her to meet me at this other hotel I had managed to book – and then I left early the next morning . . . hoping, just hoping. It was so different in those days. No mobiles, nothing. You just said a time and a place and you had to be there and hope the other person felt the same.’
‘And she was?’
‘I couldn’t believe it, Lou. She was standing in the foyer at two p.m. sharp. Waiting for me. For me. I couldn’t believe it. She looked so beautiful and so everything. She looked so everything-despite-herself.’
‘How long did you have together?’
‘We had three hours because she had to go back to her place and meet the other Americans to get to the airport.’ He breathes deep the cool of the midnight air. ‘Christ, Lou, your mother and I – we always really lived – really lived. Every day felt like another chance to me.’ I’m thinking that his favourite subject is my mother and that in speaking of her he is most eloquent of all. ‘Then she had to go. She had to hurry. She was worried that her boyfriend had been calling her hotel phone . . . It wasn’t just me, Lou.’
We’re at the bottom of the saddle, the place where the path turns upwards. We stop to look over the Rhine. All the while, since the dinner went bad, I have had to resist the urge to say, ‘I know.’ I have had to resist the urge to say, ‘I know, I know, I know,’ for so long . . . Because, of course, my mother told me all this when she must have known she was dying and we were walking by another river. And because of course my mother swore me to secrecy that day. She let me link arms and said, don’t tell you father, Louis. Don’t ever say. Promise me. As long as he lives. Because he is ashamed of what went on and he wanted to start clean again. That was his phrase. He feels that he sacrificed his integrity for us. And it’s not true, of course – this stuff goes down all the time – all the time – all over the planet – but he’s from another world. We have to remember that. He was a child of the 1950s. The North of England. And it’s in the bones. The libraries. The deference. All the old stuff. Britain before – it was like a whole other country and he’s the last of it. But what makes him strong also causes him a lot of pain. You can’t just ditch the values that made you – no matter what you try. Because they’re in everything you do and feel – so you go against yourself in one thing and it feels like you’re going against yourself in everything.
Yes, although Mum didn’t know what exactly went on in the old house with Jack and Ralph, she told me what she’d gathered – so I could understand ‘the deal’ – and she told me everything about Russia and what followed. But I never said a word to anyone, not even my brothers – not then and not now – because somehow that would be to betray my mother and she and I . . . she and I, we are separate to all this. No matter Ralph and Jack. And, anyway, I want to hear my father speak. I want to hear it all again. But from him. Hear it renewed. Like their vows or something.
So I put my back into pushing him up the incline and I say: ‘Three hours was never going to be enough for you and Mum.’
‘There was no time even to wash. So we dressed in a rush and we went out into the Moscow evening. I remember the cars and the lights and the rain. The Soviet Union falling apart. And this terrible sadness. Swelling up like a flood, Lou. I remember thinking that the rest of the world was empty – loveless. And that they were all driving in circles to fill the emptiness. And that this was going to be me again. We stood on the corner at Pushkinskaya metro station, the rain coming down. And these endless rivers of headlights. And we did not know if we would ever see each other again. She was saying no, no, no – the rain plastering her hair to her forehead. I remember there were two old women selling flowers, stood there – like sentries of the heart at the top of the stairs down to the trains. I kept saying yes, yes, we must. We held each other. What else could we do? Me saying I want you to come to London, I want you to come to London. Or let me go to New York. She saying she couldn’t. We couldn’t. That it was impossible. Me saying when – when – when can I see you again? She saying never. Never. And then we kissed. We kissed. Since our lips wanted to go on saying something other than these useless useless words.’
‘And you thought that was it?’
‘Honestly, I thought that this was the defining moment of my life. Then she just ran down the stairs into the underground. Into the Earth. And straight away – straight away – this wild regret rose inside me and possessed me.’
A horn sounds on one of the barges and echoes in the valley. I never told my mother about the audio tapes, though. I don’t think she knew. And I never told my father that I found them. Or that I listened to them on his old Walkman cassette player all the way through. Or my brothers. Whom do you tell? Whom do you tell?
Some bird of the night is flying in from the further shore, its wings outstretched like it’s looking for somewhere to rest.
‘The saddest thing, the saddest thing, Lou, was when I got back to my room. Chopin playing on the radio. The ashtray with our dead cigarettes. Two glasses half-empty where her lips had been only twenty minutes before. And the bed . . . the bed all in disarray. Pillows turned this way and that. Duvet strewn. You never saw a more heartbreaking sight. Such life – only just there – and now . . . gone.’
My father’s head is down. But I don’t want him to stop here. So I push on up the hill. The night is colder now. Behind us the castle glows. The river runs below.
‘Tell me about London.’
His voice is full of feeling and he has to let himself breathe consciously. ‘There was nothing for three months. I wrote to her. I called her. This was before email and all of that rubbish. I thought she was gone and I convinced myself to go on . . . to love where I’d loved before . . . all these things you say to yourself, Lou.’
‘What? What did you say to yourself?’
‘Oh . . . I convinced myself that the reality – the task – of manhood is to learn to live with inappropriate feelings – inappropriate everything – lobotomize yourself and live in the family.’ He raises his hands. ‘Or else I’d tell myself a different story: that all that had happened was that I had built a chrysalis out of lust and trapped myself inside it.’
‘But you didn’t believe yourself?’
‘I don’t know how anyone believes themselves about anything. When I woke up, I thought of her; when I slept, I dreamt of her. And what was this thing inside me trying to get out and flutter into the light?’
The hill steepens.
‘Sometimes I would tell myself that my duty was to the institution, to marriage, to my wife. Other times I would say that I had a duty to myself . . . Because we have one life, Lou. And it’s fleeing. Fleeting. Flown. If we don’t seize the day, then . . .’
‘How did Mum come back?’
‘She made it happen. It was her initiative. One day, out of the blue she called me at work. She was in London on some spurious summer scholarship, she said. She hadn’t meant to call me. She hadn’t meant to tell me, but maybe, she thought, we could meet “as friends”. And, of course, in one second all the bullshit I’d been telling myself evaporated.’
‘You saw her a lot?’
‘Not enough. I was so cautious and crabbed. We actually tried to be friends for a while. All this – it was harder for me to deal with in London.
I just couldn’t find a way to be and I made it all a lot worse. Your brothers are right.’
‘What do you mean?’
There are the lights from other mobile homes parked at the edge of Der Wohnwagenstellplatz. I push my father on up the last of the hill towards the gate.
‘You get to this stage and it’s all accounting, Lou. You look at all the things you did and you can’t believe you wasted so much time. I don’t know now what the hell I was doing. But I was . . . I thought . . . I made a bugger’s muddle of everything. Anybody who thinks that he can reason his way in and out of love understands neither his own humanity nor love itself.’
‘How long did it go on for?’
‘Too long. We went out together – maybe once every two weeks but it was so . . . so difficult. We went to book events because it was almost OK for us to be there together. But it was torture not to be with her naturally, fully.’
‘You couldn’t stand being apart?’
‘Whenever we were in public, I felt as though every other conversation was a distraction until such a time as I could go and stand close beside her again. I was continually aware of where she was in the room. I could sense every other man’s eye upon her. I would strain to hear what she was saying over the babble. My heart paused when she left and beat the faster when she returned. I needed a thousand eyes just to see her. Then – you know – abstinence just melts away. I knew—’
‘That you just had to be with her?’
We stop at the top of the hill.
‘No. The opposite. I knew . . . I knew that our choices in love bind us, Lou. We must command and enter service. We will require and be required. I knew I had to kill it and honour the vows I had made to Carol.’
‘So that’s why Mum went back to America?’
‘I asked her to do that. And she wanted to. She said she should. I had been preventing her. I kept changing my mind. I tortured her, too. You’re the only person in my world that I haven’t tortured, Lou.’
I say nothing.
We cannot fit the wheelchair through the kissing gate. So I haul my father up. We’re face to face. His hands are cold but he’s warm beneath his arms where I hold him a moment before he leans on the wooden fence. Then I half fold the chair to get it through.
‘What was it like when she went?’
He looks down over the valley. Clouds are snagged on the moon. ‘That last day, my heart felt like it was withering inside me, dying. I saw her reach the door of her room and everything shrank to that moment, her hand on the handle, knowing that she must turn it, her hair still not quite dry from the shower, her smile, as if there might yet be time and space for more madness in our lives. And then she opened the door . . . And I knew she was going to step outside . . . And this terrible feeling of emptiness opened up inside me that I knew I’d never escape . . . And her lips – one more time – wet with her tears and with mine, and still nothing to be done except split up. Nothing to be done.’
I open up the chair again and set the brake then I shoulder my father through the gate, bound together as we were before. His walking seems already to be quitting the memory of his muscles. His eyes are dark to me but I can feel his breath on my cheek.
‘Why did you go to America, then? What changed?’
‘I didn’t go deliberately to see her. Or maybe I did. Subconsciously.’
I smile and say: ‘You can’t be subconsciously deliberate, Dad.’
‘But I just got this sense, Lou, growing inside me with every mile that the aeroplane flew. That this – this is where my life must go. That I had to step free of the bondage of . . . of my parents. Their censure. You look all your life for certain things in a woman. You find something here and something there. You treasure this, you treasure that. But then . . .’
‘Then?’
‘You find everything you have been searching for in one place. Everything you ever lacked or wanted – everything met so exactly. Everything reciprocated, everything understood. And you have to take that seriously. Like Ralph says: you have to take love seriously. What else can we do? What else is there? The miracle of finding one another through all the noise and distraction and the mess of life. Here she was; and here was I.’
I help him back into his chair. And I get the same sensation that I had on the ferry – that I can see my father clearly. For who he really is. All this that he has been thinking and feeling for so much of his life.
‘You mean in New York you were back together?’
‘When I got there, we stayed in her place in her tiny walk-up and just listened to music. There seemed to be nothing we could say or do that was sufficient. We couldn’t sleep or even make love. We just lay there on the bed holding hands with this music pouring through us staring up at this slow-spinning fan. And I was thinking about all the people who have been in love and how so many of them cannot be together . . . and . . . you know what?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I began to think I had a duty – not to anyone else, not even to me – but a duty to love itself.’
I slide open the van door and turn to face him. He looks up at me from the wheelchair. ‘When I met your mother, Lou, I felt as if I had known her all my life.’
I raise him up.
‘I was my truest self with her. The needy rancour inside of me – it just disappeared, evaporated. It was as if I’d been walking the Earth only half of myself like . . . like a shade.’
We swivel round and he sits on the edge of the bed. I take off his jacket. Unbutton his best shirt – blue Oxford weave.
‘She was so sharp-witted, Lou, so perceptive, so quick. She could express herself like . . . like no woman that I had ever met before. She was deadly. She was funny. She was serious. She’d do these cartoon faces whenever I was being bearish or earnest – mocking me but so warmly and cheekily that I stopped instantly and just became a better man on the spot. Most of all she had so much spirit. She understood people inside out and she could say it so well . . . I don’t know . . . I just . . . just . . .’
His bare shoulders are caved forward. The white hair wiry in the shallow cleft of his chest. He shivers. I’m standing there with the cold air behind me. But I don’t want to climb in with him and slide the door shut behind because there won’t be enough room to undress him. And I want to be alone out here. Maybe the only reason I don’t run and keep running is that I know I’ll have to come back – because the world is round and your father is always your father.
‘When I met her, she was so beautiful – I mean really. She had this intense beauty – the real thing, Lou – not made up, or contingent on her haircut, or clothes, or anything. Luminous.’ He says my name but he is talking to himself. ‘And the closer you got, the more you felt it. You felt it. It was that kind of beauty. Whenever she came into a room, it startled me all over again. I never really got over that. I never got over her beauty.’
I bend down: ‘Shoes off,’ I say.
‘I just don’t want to do all this . . . all this decaying . . . now that she has gone.’
‘Give me your arm. Up. So. Can you feel your legs? There you go – you’re standing.’
‘It’s cold, Lou. Stars are out.’
‘We have to take your trousers off. Lean on me. Two seconds and we’ll be done.’
When I look up again his cheeks are wet. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s the disease.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘No it isn’t.’ He’s smiling. ‘What can we do, Lou? You meet such a woman – and bang – it’s like the Large Hadron Collider – here at last are the true particles of existence – except you’ve both smashed yourselves to pieces to see them.’
I fish his brown paisley pyjamas out and help him put them on.
I say: ‘I’ll put up the bed in the roof – for when Ralph and Jack get back.’
‘You think they’ll come back?’
‘Whatever they’re going to do, they’re going do it together. And since Jack is never going to let himself do a
nything to hurt Siobhan, they’re going to wind up back here.’
I climb on the bed to undo the catches for the roof.
He lies down under the bedclothes – almost like a child. But when he smiles up at me in the feeble cabin light, the triangles of skin at the corner of his eyes are wrinkling like the dog-ears of a book softened from so much reading.
I throw the duvet and pillows into the roof for my brothers.
‘Here are the painkillers and a bottle of water,’ I say. ‘I’m going to smoke outside. Can I borrow your fleece?’
‘Yes.’ He gulps some water and swallows the pills. ‘Take it, Lou, take it.’
I tighten the lid on the bottle of water and prop it beside him.
He settles back into his pillow closes his eyes. I struggle into his fleece. He sleeps in a second – snoring like he’s far hungrier for his dreams than for his waking.
I slide shut the door. The window is open an inch for air. My thoughts are swooping crazy all over my kaleidoscope mind like when I try to write. So I sit outside smoking and I look back across at the castle and watch the river flow for what feels like a very long time.
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
In the half-sleep of the powder-blue morning, I think Dad must want to piss and my first pulse is irritation because I know I’ll have to go with him. All night I have been near his feet, trying to turn away, trying to breathe. Whenever I wake, which feels like every half-hour, his snoring is so loud that I can’t get back to sleep. My brothers, too, have been noisy from their drinking and they stood on me when they came in. The air smells stale and foetid with drunken, sleeping men. My single pillow is old and lumpy and slips away into the well by the side door. The bed is too hot, too cold. I dream I’m sleeping on the edge of a narrow ledge between the cold castle walls and the rising damp of the river.
‘Help me up, Lou,’ he half whispers. ‘Help me up.’
I can feel the difficulty he is having turning. But I know something is odd because he’s doing what he does when he wants to wake everyone up without waking them up: not really being quiet. I try to sit in the cramped space. I’m in my clothes more or less except for my trousers. I reach on top of the units for my phone, which I put in their pocket. I have a message from Eva. My heart rises – the thought of another reality. The thought of holding her tomorrow. Her kiss, her body, wrapped around mine in the clean of some strange bed that is nothing to do with any of this. And then the world again – waiting for us; the world undestroyed.