'Taken away? I thought he threw her out.'
'Why do you say that?' a high-voltage charge in her eye.
'I was told he did a lot worse. He more or less killed her mother. That's what Jeanine said.'
'He didn't!' She was angry. 'It's wicked tommyrot, what she told you.'
Vamplew admired Madigan, and David has found out much in his favour. But standing in MB's room, I felt an urge that I couldn't resist to view him from Jeanine's standpoint.
'From what Jeanine told me, he sounds ghastly.'
'No! He was a good man. A wonderful man.'
I looked again at the two photographs and battled to square those contrasting faces with Jeanine's tyrant.
'His bread had no salt, that's all,' she said. 'That's all.'
'What do you mean?'
'His good acts weren't known. You've been told bad things.' She was quietly crying. 'I am to blame. You mustn't listen to his daughter. It was something I did wrong.'
September 27.
Some post came from London while I was eating breakfast - including two packages from David. Tore them open at once - a jumble of newspaper articles, transcriptions of interviews, photocopies of correspondence, addresses.
My excitement soon dissipated. It's the raw material of David's e-mails and makes no sense in its unedited state. Stuff from Turkey, Armenia, Syria, Australia . . . Notes of a telephone conversation with a Henry Pyke in Perth ('Madigan's father-in-law', David has scrawled across the top). An uninformative communication from Crispian Bennett ('Madigan's lawyer in London, 1968-2004'). A brief interview with a Mr Purves of Ducker & Son, 6 The Turl, Oxford. Another, with a Pamela Chenevix of 9 Holland Park, about a photograph Madigan took of her daughter. A retired eye-surgeon in Mooloolaba recalling an operation on Chris Makertich c .1959/1960. An Armenian government report into a cyanide spill from the Aurora Copper mine. And so on. Pages of it. Some names I recognised from David's e-mails; other names mean nothing.
I'd started to read a 1962 article in the West Australian about a spectacular discovery of iron ore when Mrs N. came into the breakfast room, concern on her face: 'Did I hear your grandmother groaning in the night?'
I went upstairs and knocked. No answer. I pressed an ear to the door. Asleep.
About tea-time, I knocked again and found her up and dressed.
She was holding the stick, which I saw was a dried branch. She waved it in the air, the way you'd imitate a magician casting a spell or a priest holding an imaginary crosier, then put it down.
'People never fight evil,' she muttered. 'Do you believe in the Devil, Mr Larkham?'
'What, red with horns?'
'No, in human form.'
'In a manner of speaking,' I said carefully. What trap was this?
She went on looking at me, and then with a smile so small you needed a magnifying glass to see it: 'You will have to take my word for it when I say I thought the Devil had come to his funeral.'
It took me a moment to realise what she was saying. 'You thought I was the Devil?'
'I did.'
While I absorbed this, she picked up another photograph and showed it to me. It was of Madigan as a young man, taken five years or so after the one of him on the motorbike. But in his misassembled features quite different, as though a forest fire had swept through him. He wore a black patch over his left eye and stood in a desert landscape with a mountain in the background.
I took the photograph from her, looked at it. 'Australia?'
She nodded.
'He was Armenian, wasn't he?'
'Yes, but his grandfather was Turkish,' and focussed on her hands resting together between her legs. 'Although,' she said quickly, 'I don't know anything about him, and neither did he.'
I looked at his face. 'Did he live in Turkey ever?'
'Never.' She cracked forward and said: 'He was born in Syria, grew up in Australia and had a British passport.'
'And a British name. Why?'
She did not answer.
I said: 'Was he ashamed of the one he was born with?'
She shook her head. 'No, it's not that simple.'
'Was he trying to hide from someone?'
'Only from himself.'
'What had he done wrong?'
She looked up at me sharply. 'Nothing! First thing to understand - he's Armenian. Anybody ever tell you about Armenians, Mr Larkham? No, I see that doesn't mean anything to you. But that's the answer. I don't know much about the seaside. On the other hand, I know something of what it is to be Armenian.'
Her chair protested as she sat back.
'If I begin to tell you about Krikor,' her leathery folds disappearing, 'I don't know when I will stop.'
I dug out one of Madigan's bottles. 'Start at the beginning, why not?'
'But which beginning?'
'Where did you meet him?'
Her hands went up to her face. She shook her head. Puffing up her cheeks. 'In Vienna. I met him in Vienna.'
September 28.
She slept all morning and came down for lunch. Even in a few days she has changed from the spiritless woman of a week ago. Her eyes clearer, browner. Her voice stronger, less choppy. She doesn't sound so foreign - or is that because I've penetrated her accent? She uses a precise, almost clerical English, which she speaks with perfect knowledge, although it can make her sound as though she's living in another era. I'm ashamed that I saw her as a cantankerous battleaxe. She's extremely together. Flashes of tenderness, too - except towards Mrs N.
After lunch, we went into the conservatory and she had a nap until the door opened hesitantly, as if a baby were pulling it and Mrs N. came in with the tea trolley.
Mrs N.: 'I've made some more flapjacks for you-hu.'
MB assessed her dourly. 'My good woman,' putting on her vicar-in-the-pulpit voice. 'I cannot tell you how indifferent I am to flapjacks.'
As soon as Mrs N. withdrew, she hauled herself up and took one and started to nibble. Then she said: 'Here, take this blanket. I hate its touch on my skin.'
So as not to offend her by not doing what she asked, I folded it away. She shook her head and I was afraid that she might have regretted talking to me yesterday.
'You've got a -' I touched my nose.
She wiped away the flapjack crumb and smiled. Her smile made her eyes small. But that smile she had, it was hard to earn, and once it had parted her lips, it remained on her face.
'Where did I get to last night?'
I reminded her.
Her tight voice all at once filled like a top-gallant and she was off. I hung onto it. She talked until dinner. Drank half a bottle of Sammarco 1997 from the other crate. (Mrs N. tried to palm us off with her late husband's Valpolicella, but MB dismissed it out of hand.) 'Wine invents nothing,' she said at one point. 'Everything I'm telling you is true.'
September 30.
Something is happening. I've abandoned Stuart Furnivall's text and have thrown myself into writing down what MB has decided to tell me about Christopher Madigan.
October 1.
Her cheeks have a new tone. Her fur coat, too, is sleeker, gleamier. There's something sun-streaked about it, alive.
October 2.
This afternoon she spoke for the first time about Jeanine. She described how she used to read to J. as a child. For no particular reason, I had an image of myself in the back of a large car looking at the blue tissue paper from which my father unwrapped a crushed, dried white snowdrop.
Talked all afternoon and evening.
October 3-14. Ditto.
MAKERTICH
1
L AST S ATURDAY IN S EPTEMBER , light beginning to fail, Andy sat in one of two matching green armchairs in Maral Bernhard's room, an open bottle of Castello dei Rampolla on the table between them.
'You wish to know about Christopher Madigan,' she said. She was wearing a mauve and white summer dress with three large buttons at the back. 'Before I go further, I must tell you about someone who was the most important person in hi
s life.'
'Jeanine?'
'Mr Larkham, please . His grandmother.'
Andy had to quell his frustration. He was not interested in hearing about a long-dead old woman. But to be lumbered with the story of Madigan's grandmother was a price he would have to pay. And the wine was good.
'She came from the Armenian village of Marash in Anatolia,' Maral was saying. 'And how did people in those days deal with what happened to Armenians in Turkey? The way people deal today with Chechnya or Rwanda - by not thinking about it. What everyone forgets is that the Turks used the First World War as an excuse to do some ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.' Her eyes, sensing his awkwardness, rested on him. 'Or do you know all this?'
'Not really,' Andy admitted.
'I grew up with it, but people who hear it for the first time are enraged. It was unexpected, completely. The Armenians - some of whom supported the Young Turks, by the way - were second-class citizens, but they held these powerful positions; they were the doctors, teachers, lawyers, musicians, intellectuals, and it was a shock when the Turks seized the opportunity during those months while the world's attention was on Gallipoli. It was done so furtively. The Young Turks didn't want Armenians to exist. To understand how they almost succeeded in exterminating them in their homeland, look at Hitler's justification for getting rid of the Jews - "Who now remembers the Armenians?" And he was talking about the foremost believers in Christianity . . .'
She had to stop and fortify herself. 'It's what I've heard pretty much from any Armenian I've ever met. The men were taken away, butchered. The women were raped. They were told they had to be transferred, then they were marched into the wilderness with no food and water, and left there in the scorching sun; either that or shoved off a cliff into the Euphrates. Most died. I'm talking about a quarter of our population. A million and a half men, women and children, Mr Larkham.'
She licked her lips. 'It's numbers of people, but then it dawns on you what else was lost. A relationship to this earth; centuries of culture, links, history - Armenia appeared on maps two thousand years before Turkey. But the Turks didn't even give Armenians time to pack their bags. They had nothing, absolutely nothing, just the sandals on their feet. Otherwise, like Krikor's grandmother, all they had left were stories and memories.'
Her family had lived on the same mountain for four hundred years, but in the winter of 1915 the Turks hounded her people across the Syrian desert and she settled in Aleppo, where, twenty-three years later, he was born.
'Armenians are always asking where someone is from. I was Ismirtsi - from Ismir. Krikor was Halebtsi - from Aleppo.'
His name at that period was not Christopher Madigan but Krikor Makertich.
Right from his birth, Makertich and his grandmother had a close relationship. 'He could tell her what he dreamed about, what made him nervous.' Things that he couldn't tell his parents because they were busy; his mother working in a tailor's shop and his father as a welder in a soap factory - 'that is, when he wasn't at the gambling table'.
Makertich grew up playing with his grandmother's cigarette butts. He listened to her singing the liturgy while washing up. Der voghormia - Lord, mercify me . He hid in her wardrobe.
'She kept her few good clothes wrapped up, a spare hat, a jersey. She was so careful with them, as if she was prepared to move again.'
His happiest moments were spent perched on the antimacassared arm of his grandmother's chair, listening to her resurrect her life when she was his age. Mists, apricot trees, goats' teeth on the bark, and in the lakeside sand the turtles' eggs that gave her hair its gloss. She was an emancipated woman who had studied in Paris and spoke to Makertich as though to an adult. Years before he understood their meaning, she would sit in the low front room, a Gitane worming into ash between long fingers, and in her gravelly voice that detested all dishonesty read him passages from her favourite authors - Dumas, Shakespeare, Hugo - so that he came to associate the act of reading with the reek of tobacco.
'Her family had been financiers to the Ottoman Empire.' Before that, they were masons and tillers. They had an uncanny knack of making more money than their Turkish neighbours. Vastly outnumbered, they had to fit in and adapt, to negotiate and compromise. Keeping their heads down, noses clean, getting on with others. 'All of them were People of the Book.'
She saw it as her duty to teach him the unique alphabet that Saint Mesrob had devised in the fifth century for the purpose of translating the Gospels.
Though religious, Makertich's grandmother never lost the bohemian stripe that she had picked up from her time as a student on the Left Bank. She was unselfconscious about parading through the house in a slip or saying what was on her mind. She continually chastised his mother - 'What have you got in those breasts, water?' - and his father - 'No, I will not lend you any more money!'
Only in repose did the muscles and nerves around her eyes betray her continuous battle not to evoke certain scenes. Prime among these was the murder of her husband.
In the winter of 1915 a 'butcher battalion' composed of released convicts arrived at the farm. Nazareth Makertich was separated from his young wife of two months and taken behind the stables, along with the able-bodied men on his estate. Not yet pregnant with Krikor's father, she remembered to her last shallow breath the soft clubbing noise - 'the Turks didn't want to waste ammunition' - and, later, the bleeding body of her husband lying in a twisted, cruciform shape, the bayonets pegged into the snow through his palms.
She never married again.
'She was like me - an Armenian,' Maral said. 'Brought up to be faithful, totally, to one person. It was the same with Krikor. That, and never to tell a lie or seek revenge.'
Makertich did once ask his grandmother about her journey across the Syrian Desert. He remembered her sudden narrowing, the way she held him by the shoulders. Her parched lined face was a page of the Bible over bone. 'Krikor, look me in the eye,' and when he did: 'You can't understand the need to describe what I went through when there's no proof left, no witnesses. You can't tell people how it was. Impossible.' By and large, she had not told anyone. Easier to eradicate her memories than to enter the lunacy of verification.
'You find that a lot,' Maral said. 'People can't speak about it. They want to disappear so that they never have the knock on the door. My grandmother escaped from Ismir with my mother. Her husband was taken away. Soldiers came knocking at the door and I don't really know what happened.'
Alone to Makertich during her final illness did his grandmother at last talk about the events of 1915.
'She always had refused to be "a snivelling woman in perpetual mourning". But now she wanted to explain. She had this guilt that she hadn't fought back, that it had happened. At the same time, she had this passion to pass it on. It was clear that what she had wished her whole life was for the one thing - just for the Turks to say sorry, to admit what they had done.'
In the course of her rambling confession, she let fall certain images - the mirror in her donkey's feed-basket, reflecting a file of filthy, half-dressed men and women stumbling behind her to the pitiless horizon; the soles of her sandals sticky with blood; the puddle she tried to drink from, before the Turkish zaptieh sent her sprawling - and then, shifting his gaze from her face that she had smeared with mud to her young breasts moving freely within their blouse, advanced with a rigid expression towards where she lay in the dirt.
'When she found out she was pregnant - like all the women she was with, she thought she had stopped her periods because of shock - she immediately wanted an abortion, but her brother disapproved strongly.'
Pointedly, she entrusted to her grandson rather than to her son two mementos from that period: a bullet-hard pellet of bread baked from mud, manure and grass; and the silver bracelet from the monastery at Varak that she had received at her baptism and stitched into the donkey's basket.
'I'm giving you a history lesson,' Maral said, 'because this is where this man comes from.'
2
T
O BEGIN WITH , A NDY had sat and listened.
Sometimes the radio was on downstairs, and music or conversation could be heard between what she was saying; sometimes she lifted her hand in an animated way and the shadow of what he was convinced was a man would lean across the table.
Then, when he had said goodnight, he walked fast to his room and covered page after page of the notebook in which he had written down ideas for Missing Montaigne .
Maral Bernhard had lived with Christopher Madigan twenty-nine years. She knew his life by heart. Once she had made the decision to speak about him, the pressure of the memories building up inside forced her to talk with scarcely enough time to catch her breath.
And yet the frustrating thing was that the Madigan who stepped forward in her presence shrank the instant Andy left her side. When Andy attempted to record from memory what she had told him, even though virtually no time had elapsed, he felt as if he were jotting down a vital telephone number using a biro that didn't work. There were details he missed, phrases and inflexions he forgot. He was merely nibbling, as it were, at the rind of the man.
His impatience drove him on the fourth evening to transcribe Maral's recollections in front of her, as she was speaking.
'Hey, mister, what's that you're writing?'
'What you've just said.'
She flinched, and he filled her glass.
'Go on,' his pen poised.
Much later, he remembered another line from Montaigne: 'An open way of talking opens the way for more talk, drawing it out like wine and love.'
As Maral began to speak of Makertich, Andy found that he could visualise him.
3
T HE S ECOND W ORLD W AR had been over for four years when his grandmother died. Makertich was eleven.
His throat closed up on him. He had practically no feelings. But her death was less traumatic for his parents: they could now be like everyone else. They decided to leave Aleppo.
England, their first choice, refusing to accept them, the following spring they sailed on a converted refrigeration ship to Western Australia, where they found lodgings in a market-garden district of Perth. The wooden bungalow in Furneaux Park had a creek at the back leading into a river, and a yard large enough to keep four ponies. It was the last remnant of pride to which Makertich's father clutched: on the family estate in Anatolia, on the grassy hilltops, his ancestors had bred horses prized by the Persians.
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