Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘No more jokes, remember.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, from what Elsa could remember, he wanted to know who I was, how long I had lived at Seehafen.’ He paused, suddenly serious. ‘Perhaps he wants to buy the house, turn it into another of his model farms. Anna would have liked that. Or,’ the twinkle was back in his eyes, ‘perhaps he wants to create another of his male retreats, boys together in nature, beating the drums of their psyches, a paramystical fraternity. The Germans are good at that.’

  Helena looked at him in amazement. It was edged with renewed suspicion. ‘So you know a lot more about Max than you let on.’

  He winked at her from those hazel eyes. ‘Memory’s always there in scraps. Like shreds of paper in a vast dustbin, waiting to be retrieved or chucked out. All that about Max Bergmann’s just come back to me. One of my graduate students last year wrote a paper about male initiation rites. I think that’s where I got it.’

  ‘But none of that explains why Max chose to disappear. To use a different name. To write me that strange letter.’ Helena gazed out the window. The rain had stopped. A swathe of grey-blue light crossed the darkening sky. The branches of the trees were thick with glistening droplets. Suddenly, a man stepped out from the shadow of an oak trunk. His mane of a head was held high, lifted to the skies. He was stretching out his arms towards her. ‘Max,’ Helena whispered.

  She ran from the table, found a side door which led to the back of the hotel, raced along the path. He would catch her in his arms, embrace her, stroke her hair, as if she were a little girl. Like he had in her dream. Max found again, so firm, so comforting. She shouted his name, ‘Max, Max, it’s me.’

  There was no answer. There was no one sheltering beneath the oak. Perhaps she had mistaken the tree. She stared at it. Something about the place was familiar. That moist smell of withering leaves. It was as if she had been here before. But she hadn’t. She blinked, raced along the incline, towards another tree and another, went round in circles. ‘Max,’ she called again, more softly.

  ‘Helena.’

  She turned at the sound of her name, collided with a different figure.

  ‘You’ll catch your death, Ms Latimer,’ Adam was standing over her.

  She shrugged away from him. ‘I was sure I saw him.’

  He looked at her sceptically. And then he spied a figure walking up the slope at some distance from them. He raced after it, was back minutes later, almost forcibly urging a man along.

  Helena stared at a tall aging man in a Burberry, shook her head in shame. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry. Thought you were someone else.’ She turned away, rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Wahnsinnig!’ the man muttered.

  Adam put his arm loosely around her, ‘Come on, we’ll have some coffee, some strudel. It’s good here. Then we’ll check the hotel register. Do some detective work. Okay?’

  She nodded. Get a grip on yourself, Helena, she ordered herself. You’re behaving like a madwoman today. Wahnsinnig, indeed.

  The strudel was as good as Adam had promised, flaky and tart. She finished her second glass of wine with it. It loosened her tongue. ‘You know, I think I’m beginning to hallucinate. I need to get back to my cats.’

  ‘Only your cats?’

  ‘And some plants, who talk to me. Though not quite so much as my friends.’

  ‘I think I want to know more about you Ms Helena Latimer. Even if you make it up as you go along.’ He was looking at her with that slightly sardonic expression.

  She grimaced at him. ‘Isn’t much to know if I don’t make it up.

  ‘Well, let’s start with the simplest bits. Family English?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  He looked at her in consternation.

  ‘No, really. I’m what you’d call the genuine article. Little orphan Annie. No father, no mother - at least none that are named or that I’ve ever bothered to trace. A free woman,’ she quoted Em, laughed.

  ‘And your childhood?’

  ‘I didn’t have one,’ she quipped at him. She had all these lines ready-made, had used them on various occasions.

  He scowled. ‘You mean you don’t like to remember it.’

  ‘That too. But actually, I don’t remember much. Institutions, a couple of foster homes,’ she sped over it. ‘And then I struck lucky.’

  ‘A man,’ he filled in for her.

  ‘You call that luck?’ Helena laughed, let him pour her more wine. ‘No, a woman. A wonderful woman. She adopted me. Gave me her name, her knowledge. A home.’ She gazed into the distance. ‘She’s dead now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  They were silent for a moment.

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ Helena looked up at him, ‘All those questions Elsa couldn’t answer. What are you doing in Germany, for one?’

  ‘Having a sabbatical. Finishing a book,’ he smiled wryly, well writing one, anyway.

  ‘And why here?

  ‘My adepts of the Free Spirit, remember them? There were lots of them around here. And carnival. That comes into it. Not quite anthropology and not quite anything else,’ he gazed at her a little strangely, then turned for a moment towards the window.

  ‘And I’m interested in Germany, not only because my family disowned it,’ he paused, reflected. It’s a country of excess and excessive monotony. It’s all Europe in one, overburdened with its terrible history and the suppression of that history. It’s got an almost wholly homogeneous population and it still worries about being polluted from without. Will that do for a start?’

  ‘That’ll do,’ she looked at him curiously, trying to assimilate what he had said. ‘You like contradictions.’

  He laughed, ‘I don’t even mind ambivalences.’

  For a moment Helena thought he was going to chuck her under the chin, thought that he had been referring to her. She countered him. ‘I prefer things clear so that one can act upon them.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘And the house?’

  ‘Let’s say it’s come to me.’

  ‘From the people in Anna’s book. Your family.’

  He nodded, ‘Unlike you I have rather a lot of them, mostly dead, mind you.’

  ‘And you had a childhood.’

  ‘That too. I even remember mine,’ he smiled.

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In sunny California. Father, a lawyer, mother, a mother. A good-enough one. And sometime illustrator.’

  The waiter was hovering round their table with an air of veiled impatience. Helena glanced at her watch. It was ludicrously late, almost five o’clock. ‘We’d better go,’ she reached for her bag, took out her purse.

  Adam stayed her hand, ‘My treat. It’s been a pleasure.’

  He was looking at her with a strange intentness. Helena averted her eyes, stood. The room whirled for a moment. She had drunk too much, somehow lived through too much in too few hours. She steadied herself against the table.

  ‘I think you’d better drive,’ she said a little peevishly.

  ‘And the hotel register?’

  ‘Of course. How stupid of me.’

  She let Adam do the questioning, watched his easy manner as he asked whether Herr Bergmann or his American brother, Mr. Hillman had checked in yet, saw the shake of the clerk’s head. It wasn’t, Helena told herself, as if she had held out much hope.

  In the car, he turned to her, ‘Where to, Ms Latimer? What’s the next step in the search for the great Max?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was too tired to counter his irony, though it made her bridle. ‘Just drop yourself at your place and I’ll find my way from there.’

  After a moment of peering blearily into the gathering darkness Helena closed her eyes. It had all been too much today, the visit to that squalid house, that memory overtaking her, trapping her in its claws, so that all those old scars started to bleed afresh. And then that ludicrous hallucination, imagining Max emerging from behind a tree, stretching his arms out to her. The scene played itself out again on her eye
lids and suddenly she saw herself running; herself but not herself: a thin little girl in an ugly blue frock. And the man, that tall man with the mane of hair emerging from behind the tree, and calling, ‘coo coo, here I am,’ swinging her up in his arms, holding her.’

  Helena opened her eyes abruptly. Where had that scene come from? Had she dreamt it or remembered it? Who was that man if that awkward little toddler was herself?

  And then the thought coalesced in her. She closed her eyes again, rubbed them hard. Had Claire been right? Was it a father she saw in Max. Or was Max her father?

  She clenched her fists tightly. Everything was running away with her again. She tried to envisage where that scene had taken place, if it had taken place. The convent orphanage perhaps: she knew she had been in one in the Hampshire countryside, before it had closed down and she had been moved to London, and from there briefly to the Willoxes and then finally to the Moores. Em had been through all that with her.

  A toddler’s game of hide and seek. With a man. A father perhaps. A father whose wife had died or left him or whom he had left. A father who had given her up only to recognize her again all those years later, tell her how special she was, write to her when to all intents and purposes he had vanished into oblivion. Max, her father.

  Helena tasted the notion. It had a sweetness to it. But did it have any truth?

  There was a simple enough way to put paid to all those fancies, before they ran rampant and drove her mad. Max had a past, even though she had never bothered to find out about it. It could be checked on. A trip to the States, a little digging if it wasn’t all already clear to someone who had bothered to find out where she hadn’t. And quickly. She had to do it quickly or these visions would overwhelm her. Em had been right to nurture her sense of independence.

  As soon as one let them, emotions, the past, ran away with one. But now that they had started to run, she could stop them, with cold, clear facts - as clear as the properties of chlordane or paraquat.

  Helena replayed her last meeting with Max in the light of her present imaginings.

  The conference had taken place in a large hotel just outside Oslo. It had been an enervating gathering with delegates from the four corners of the globe. Max had spoken forcefully, his words gathering in resonance as he flatly stated that the biosphere could no longer absorb the effects of human beings’ polluting activities.

  The global environment, he pointed out, was being changed more now than it had changed at any previous time since the end of the Mesozoic Era, sixty-five million years ago. The Bhopal disaster was a warning. Toxic waste, global warming, drought, soil depletion would mean that the vast populations of the South which didn’t die off would be forced to migrate northwards. In the next forty years, the world population would expand more that it had in the last several hundred millenia. Too many people equalled too much pollution, too much destruction of natural habitats, and an end to the diversity of species and the earth’s life support systems. We had to begin to think of the Earth first!

  In the discussion period, after the rush of applause, a German woman had spoken, regal in her authority. Wasn’t Mr. Bergmann’s call of ‘earth first’ an affluent Northerner’s luxury. Her sisters in the South wouldn’t thank him. Wasn’t he with his ethical niceties about plants and animals and the wild really making a plea for the greening of the North? And the greening of the North was merely a recipe for exporting the environmental crisis to the Third World. Did Mr Bergmann in his worries about the exploding population of the South take into account that the United States alone consumed 33% of the earth’s mineral and energy resources, though it only had 5% of the world’s population?

  There had been no time for Max to answer. But afterwards in the bar when they were all milling round, the woman had been right behind her and Max. Helena had heard her say to another woman, draped in a magnificent sari. ‘He reminds me a little too much of my country’s ghastly history, that man. It’s fine and well for him to worry about your population. He’s had his 2.2 white children.’

  Max had looked back at the woman with the first scowl she had ever seen on his face. It was in response to that, that she herself had turned, said politely, ‘I think you ought to check the accuracy of your facts.’

  How clearly it now came back to her. Max had put his arm loosely round her shoulder then and guided her outdoors. ‘Let’s get away from that overbearing woman, Helena,’ he had murmured, ‘and breathe a little air. I can’t stand her voice.’ Then he had chuckled, ‘Perhaps she thinks you’re my daughter.’

  ‘Sleeping?’ Helena heard a whisper.

  She suddenly realised that the car engine had come to a standstill. She sat bolt upright. ‘No,’ she shook herself, ‘just dreaming.’

  ‘Nice dreams?’

  ‘Just dreams.’ She looked around her. Night had fallen, starless, bleak. Only the house in front of them shed any light. ‘I guess I’d better get back. Thank you for your help.’

  ‘Look, I think it would be better if you didn’t drive now. You can stay the night here. You’re not in a fit state.’

  His voice was soft, but something in its tone annoyed her, as did the proprietary caress of his hand on her hair.

  ‘Stop treating me like a child, or like some helpless woman,’ she said the first thing that came into her head, took her irritation out on him.

  ‘Was that what I was doing?’ he laughed that ironical laugh. ‘I’ll have to go to a school for manners. A very special one. Run by the new woman. But suit yourself.’ He leapt out of the car, poked his head back through the door. ‘Bye then. I could say it’s been nice knowing you. But that too might offend.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so pompously male.’

  Adam Peters nodded once abruptly and left her.

  Helena moved over to the wheel, turned on the engine, the lights, watched him unlock the door. She lurched the car into motion, swung wildly round the drive, then jammed on the brakes as shrubbery loomed in front of her. She stared at it incomprehendingly, realised she was indeed in no condition to drive.

  She sat there for a few moments in the dark, her head swimming, and then with an effort got out of the car. It would serve her right if he didn’t open the door now. She had been insufferably rude.

  She walked up and down the drive, talked to herself as she would talk to one of her friends, ‘I don’t believe it. You were too afraid to knock, so you crashed the car. Pull up your socks, woman. What’s the matter with you?’

  Taking a deep breath, Helena finally confronted the door. It took him a while to open it and when he did, he looked at her as if he had all but forgotten who she was.

  ‘So you’ve changed your mind?’ he said at last.

  She nodded.

  ‘Right, well, you know where the room is, the kitchen. If you want anything, help yourself.’

  Helena murmured an all but inaudible ‘thanks’ and ran up the stairs. She didn’t see him glaring after her.

  Adam Peters sat back in the worn leather chair and looked for a moment at the familiar clutter on his desk. Funny, he hadn’t expected her to be like that. Had been blinded by her beauty, no doubt. But there it was, another instance of what he had termed for himself, the representative woman. The individual standing for the whole gender, enshrining herself as victim, and therefore wholly within her rights to treat any man as the oppressor, the enemy.

  God, how he hated this triumphalist victimhood. It made him fume.

  What did these women want? Once they had identified themselves as victims, they could behave as badly as they liked and be indiscriminately rude, blatantly selfish. The world owed them. Nothing was their own responsibility.

  Well, he’d had enough of that, enough of being guilty of the sins of his entire sex. Too much, really.

  And the terrible thing was that it was infectious, this triumphalist victimhood. Almost everyone it seemed had now become part of a victimized group. Wore their victim status proudly like a uniform. The simple-minded group slogan on t
he sweatshirt absorbed all of identity, regardless of any personal trajectory. ‘I’m a victim. Treat me right. Let me hit you over the head.’ Women, blacks, gays, ethnic groups, and soon it would be men, too, whole national cultures, children, dogs, cats, seals. Everyone loved victims, wanted to be one, speak on behalf of one, with all the self-righteousness it permitted.

  It wasn’t that there weren’t real crimes, formidable atrocities, inequalities, genuine and terrible suffering - all of which had to be battled against. He was only too aware of that. It was the wholesale absorption of the person into a public collective identity which drove him frantic; the Whole swallowing all its richly disparate parts, smoothing them out - a standardizing in the name of the almighty victim.

  And the righteousness of it, the high-pitched moral whine!

  He lit a cigarette, puffed deeply and then laughed at himself. He was ranting, and without an audience to boot. He hadn’t indulged in that particular form of lunacy for a long time. It was that woman who had driven him to it. That Helena Latimer he should never have allowed into the house after the first lie. A narrow minded feminist puritan with a one-track mind chasing the guru she had somehow misplaced. A little fanatic who happened to be endowed with beauty. He was a fool. Only fools allowed whimsical hopes to take root so quickly.

  He shrugged her image away, turned to a pile of photocopied papers and began to read. He had almost finished his section on the heresy of the Free Spirit and the golden millenium they envisaged - a mystical anarchist paradise where state and hierarchy had given way to a kind of pagan communitarianism. Funny, how so much of it reminded him of Johannes Bahr.

  Johannes Bahr: his grandfather, if Anna’s Book was to be believed and the hints within Bahr’s own diaries. He had read both several times and he had no reason to disbelieve them. But he had never dared to confront his grandmother Bettina on the question directly, let alone his father. Neither of them had ever returned to Germany and nor had Klaus, - though he had no way of knowing that for certain, since Klaus had died when Adam was still a babe in arms. They refused the place - had voided themselves of it, as if it were an illness to be shed and never thought of again.