“It was fitting to think of death because my friends and I were waiting to kill a young man. He and his friends quite naturally had the opposite intention, which is how these things proceed. But this gentleman, I did not wish to kill him. He was a boy, a yellow-haired boy with a soft, clear brow, wonderful eyes and such a desperation to die. He believed he was on a course to establish his honour and I could love him for it because he was so much as I had been when I first became a cadet and would have murdered the whole city to prove my existence. I was so small and Paris was so enormous I could do nothing but wash it in blood. Do you know in Henry’s time four thousand similar gentlemen died to gain the honour they had always had? The honour which was neither dependant on a fine suit nor a good horse, a full purse or one’s sword? Did you know that? Of course you did, these things don’t change, not at their hearts.
“On the morning we are discussing I was a terrible old duellist—I was like a musket ball, just swimming through the morning until I hit him dead with both our honours unconcerned, unaffected and I think more and more with our maker squinting down from behind the sun and finding us too ridiculous for words. ‘Haoh, you don’t learn, my little ducks. I had no need of your crusades and I now have no need of this. Your souls are mine already, there’s no need to keep throwing them back. I could find that discourteous.’ But I knew this and the boy did not and there was no place for love, or he would kill me.
“You see, he had approached me in the plain view of all the world and given me ‘the opportunity to prove my courage.’ Now, my health had been less than perfect for many months. Having become accustomed to walking abroad and finding myself daily bombarded with casual and formal and polite and ridiculous challenges from dawn to dusk, suddenly I had to contend with unsteady limbs, an old man’s weakness, a constant enemy in my breast. I had kept myself miserably out of company in order to preserve what was left of my life and to save the world the sight of me shuffling under the sun supporting a face the colour of old cod. I looked as if I had . . . a particular disease.
“Fortunately I was somewhat recovered when this boy, whom I might call Guy, courted me, coaxed me, pursued me. Day after day he casts insults against me and my friends and although I am careless of myself when he threatens those I care for I have to act. No choice.
“Poor Guy, he only wanted to live for ever. Like the boy . . . there was a boy who challenged that lunatic’s lunatic, Chevalier d’Andrieux. ‘Chevalier, you will be the tenth man I have killed,’ he says. The Chevalier smiles and gives this small, mad nod he had. ‘And you will be my seventy-second.’ The Chevalier duly dispatches his opponent and nothing of the youth is immortalised, beyond his stupidity. I haven’t forgotten his name, I never knew it.
“These ridiculous, posturing conversations, they came to sicken me. Each man using the other to prove God’s special grace for himself alone. ‘Save me, Lord, now that I choose to risk my life in taking another’s without even asking you if this is prudent (never mind a very likely sin), prove that you love me more than him.’ Arrogance. We were such children.
“I asked my God to forgive me that morning. Just very quickly, it doesn’t do to think much of heaven at these times, it diverts the will. Guy was stretching his arms, warming his limbs like a stupid veal calf in the sun, letting me watch his confidence, and I knew I would have to kill him because he would not be stopped in any other way, he had too much spirit and he did so want my heart.
“He had an odd style, hardly effective. He would leap up and forwards to overcome my guard like a very predictable bird, tiring himself. The cold grass turned greasy underneath us, he weakened, grew more and more incautious and also dangerous as he abandoned his technique, fought with his body and not his mind. I could always see his mind, but his body, well, his body might surprise me. His conclusion was less than glorious. He simply slipped and I could do nothing but stab him in the throat, spike through his neck. I watched him drown in a meadow with his hands searching for apposite phrases in the grass and his beautiful eyes reflecting a colour better than the sky. One of his friends closed them and was about to push me away before he stopped himself, because he knew that if he touched me, I would have to kill him, too.
“Someone gave me a bottle of cleared wine and I had stopped drinking wine then, but I took it and I walked away, stared off at the frozen windmill. I filled my mouth and even as I did that the dark in the air sank through my mind until I couldn’t swallow. I had to spit out. A breeze had drawn up and it caught the neck of the bottle and made it almost sigh and at that time, when I had already killed far more men than Chevalier d’Andrieux ever did in all of his terrible life, I knew I would never kill anyone again. Except perhaps myself.
“I was staying on the rue Saint-Jacques then and I went home there and washed myself. Then I walked almost to the river and went into the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and made my confession. I was not a great man for confessions and found I had very little of any usefulness to say. After that I had my breakfast, my life continuing while Guy’s did not. Do you see this, am I clear?”
I coughed and told him he was clear but not always easy to understand.
He would often ask if he was clear, if “it” was clear—whatever “it” was. I became used to that, Savinien checking his point had slipped home. I became used to the way he would clap his hands together when he stood, his early morning exclamations when he woke to find himself still there. I learned that in periods of depression he would hide in the bathroom, lock the door and sit. When both of us must have been barefoot one night I accidentally set my feet in the imprints of warmth his own had left at the base of the toilet bowl. I generally have cold feet. If I consider those weeks now, I know that I spent them forgetting the difference between being with another person and being with more of myself.
When I came home late, I would catch Arthur watching the updates on a prominent game of chess. An Englishman and a Russian were playing and playing against each other and, as the games progressed, the Englishman began to speak as if English were not his first language, he paused and searched for words, he grew an accent, hardened his stare. The Russian turned soft, developed ineffectual little gestures in his hands, a bashful smile. They sat and thought at each other, the Englishman losing while the Russian won, their identities extending, exploring, exchanging. I’ve never really liked chess—my parents played it—but I couldn’t help taking an interest in those men. I understood where they were going together because I was going there, too.
Of course, nothing tangible happened between Savinien and myself. What could happen between the professionally calm and the long-term dead? But I knew I moved my hands the way that he did and I knew he had one of my laughs and I knew I didn’t care. There was nothing to stop us being together so we didn’t stop.
In fact I genuinely started to relax. I’ll tell you about that.
There’s a difference between calm and relaxation. You’ll be aware of that. The former is still, while the latter is unwary, and in domestic situations I had, for years, been used to being wary. I learned I should be wary and, yes, a child must eventually crawl out from beneath its mother and father and make a few decisions in its own right about itself and the world against it, but these things take time, they really do. Particularly when you have been taught so well in early life to have leanings in one direction and not another. It makes me uneasy to relax. Unless it happens very slowly, softly like a leaf fall. The way it did with Savinien.
“Martin?”
“No. We’re on our own. I beg your pardon, who did you ask for?”
“All right then. Savinien. I just don’t want it to be a habit and then have to explain. To the others.”
He presses my hand between his. “Sometimes perhaps I need to be too precise. I am sure, after all, that we know who I am. What did you want?”
“Why don’t you put your hood up. It’s getting cold. You don’t want your eyes getting blurry whenever you go outside.”
“My h
ood? In the . . .”
“The parka.”
“Mm. The parka.” He manufactured an entirely insincere smile.
“Or you could get a hat. I think Pete had a hat, but he probably took it with him. It’ll be cold where he’s gone.”
“Now a hat, yes. Something to make me appear in some way less like an indigent agricultural labourer.” One hand waved a neat little denial. “Although I have almost no interest in my costume, like so many other people in your country. (Please believe me, I feel most sartorially at home here.) But yes, you’ve a reason there. You’ve a reason for a hat. Is there one—something a little more generous than the current mode?”
All very domestic and humdrum, but think about what’s happening there—right up at the beginning, before he gets all bound up in how politely he can loathe his parka. Do you see? The third little paragraph I say? I know the cold will affect his sinuses and put his eyes out of focus. I know it without asking. Every change of air pressure can send my sinuses into a nervous rumba of congestion and fug. I did not have to check we agreed on this point, I was already certain. Without thinking, I assumed that, in this point, Savinien and I were the same.
So you have the full picture now—my principal constituents at that time were calmness, relaxation and assumption. I don’t know about you, but when I roam around unchecked in that condition for any length of time at all I don’t need to ask if disaster is likely—it’s already on the way. If I only look up, I’ll feel its shadow on my face.
I learned that particular lesson one evening in the snow. Broad, slow snow was falling and I was young and still living with my parents. As I’ve already outlined, home life with Mummy and Daddy was what you might call theatrical. I think of it now as Life with the Lions, if that isn’t too dated a reference. When I found myself alone with both my parents, I tried to be aware of available exits and how best to take them. And it wasn’t so bad—they were really very predictable if you watched them closely, Ma and Pa. When trouble was on the way, they would start to get a shine around their mouths, or something in the eyes would tick slickly into place. Paying attention to their voices—I worked to develop a good ear—I could often pick up alterations of tone, the seeping in of low notes, slackened consonants. Time to go.
But outside, in the world, we were all of us very well behaved. I assumed there was an unwritten rule that whatever insanity we suffered from would never leave the house with us—was not for show. I assumed.
Then came the evening with the snow. We had been playing at families, out all day, taking part in a surprise trip to Glasgow. My head was filled with the grizzled air, the bruised colour of the buildings and the huge, roaring streets. The city seemed sprung for darkness, waiting to be busy in the spaces between lights. Living here now, I can look down at the peaceful haze of frost in my empty, aimless street, quite contented, but this is still the city I felt suck around me, swirling my brains with the cold, bright threat of utter indifference. I was, of course, right in my impressions the first time and I am, of course, right now. It is impossible to be wrong about a city—it will be anything you do or do not want, quicker and harder than you can think.
Walking between Mother and Father, even holding their hands to be sure the bad streets wouldn’t get me, I sneaked up a look at the sky and found it, remarkably, ashy green. The snow, still skating down, was black and then white and then lost in the churning pavements. This was what the city offered instead of night. We would have to go back to our car now and drive home. I assumed this would be a good thing. Safe.
The car was a big, brave beast. The heater hardly worked and on one or two occasions the engine had caught fire, but it was still my friend with a brown leather back seat where I could stay on my own. I was still short enough to sit with my legs flat ahead of me along it, if no one was looking, and taking my shoes off to prevent mess. The engine numbed out my parents’ voices and we ground slowly beyond the shops and house lights. I fell asleep.
Until a cry in my dream pulled me up awake. We were slewing and toiling in a thin track of packed and mashed ice. The carriageway was mad with snow, it boiled in a mist just beyond the windscreen, dragged against the jerking wipers and made wild elongations and reflections in every trace of coloured light. There was a great deal of light. Red tailgates, naked white headlamps, swaying and bouncing, and to either side of us, bright tableaux of throbbing orange and crimson and blue, set out at the foot of skidded pathways, flicking illumination across impacted metal. In one place I saw a small fire winking under a pillar of black smoke, in another an entirely dark car, apparently undamaged but splayed across the hard shoulder and already deep under faultless snow. In the centre of a curve of vehicles and men, one woman sat up straight, her coat and the snow hidden in the darkness of her own blood.
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“How fast do you want it?”
“How fast do you want to go?”
Father was wheedling at Mother. She was gripping the steering wheel hard, compensating for twists and slithers, every now and then breaking out with an odd short laugh. Then Father laughed, too.
We were accelerating into the fluming tunnel of white and headlight and speckled, sheering dark. Lost in all the varieties of noise, my parents’ voices only surfaced now and again, but I knew they were planning something. We hadn’t got home soon enough, whatever it was would start here in the innocent world beyond our house.
I asked them to stop—an admission of feeling, of defeat which I regretted immediately—but I think they did not hear. They showed no sign of remembering I was there while I wondered what I meant them to stop. To stop driving, to stop speeding, to stop being so together, to stop being. The car rocked and slipped while Father finished with Mother’s breasts. I saw the shadow of him slip under her tensed arms as he dragged up her skirt and then dropped his head against her thighs. She said something and I closed my eyes to prevent seeing out of the windows.
It may have been their intention to kill themselves that night. I would have been their unfortunate bystander, a chance casualty. Instead, they accelerated me from a condition of terror into one of stillness and the dumb assumption that I would die. By the end of the journey I had discovered that I would always be correct in assuming that I would die, anything else would always be more doubtful, disappointing.
So I was lucky, really. I might have returned with nothing more than bargain Christmas presents—instead I’d found out the beginning of a whole Philosophy. Which was much more uplifting than it might seem—quite naturally, if I was going to die, they were, too. They were older, they would go first. I looked forward to that.
“Have some attention, here.”
It worried Savinien that his past had been so violent. He imagined it might disturb me.
“I am paying attention.”
“I was not as I would wish to have been. I was a fine writer, a fine playwright, a fine friend. I do believe that. Nevertheless what I did best was to kill. I created myself in that.”
“Hrrf. Well, that was your life then. Things were different.” I understood about wanting to kill and about wanting to hurt, which he never actually mentioned, having a more pragmatic and unsentimental attitude to death. “I mean, your past is over. It doesn’t affect me. It needn’t affect you.”
“I made myself. I trained and drilled and trained like the novitiate I was, dedicated to the early dispatch of souls. I took dancing lessons to ease the passage of my feet, I parried and broke ground, advanced, beat against time as if it were a man against me and I made a whole city careful how it looked in my face. I developed a not entirely comfortable reputation.”
“But if you have anything now, it’s a new start. No one need know what you’ve done, or why. Listen, I have to get on, though. I’m due at the studio in an hour and I’ve still got to eat and have a shower and pay our rent.”
“And pay our rent.” I said it without thinking, full in the face of a man who had often told me how much
he loathed imposed dependencies.
Savinien let the air gather back over my four stupid words before he spoke again.
“Ah, yes. Of course. Goodbye, then. Goodbye.”
He nodded, stood up and away from the bench, paused with his head a touch forwards and to the right. “Goodbye, Jennifer.”
“Hm, see you later.” I moved off towards the park gate, the grass giving wetly under a thin bite of frost. For no reason I can think of, I glanced back up the rise and saw him still standing, kicking with one foot at something in the leaves. He was ankle deep in leaves.
When I left for work I was calm, I was relaxed, I assumed I would return the following morning and all would go on as before.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
For Jennifer, My Dearest Friend,
Already irredeemably in your debt, I must make one final demand, that you should lend me enough of your language to hold my thanks. You should be warned that as my thanks are infinite, this will be no small request.
Be sure I am a thief at heart, for there I shall keep hidden every good effect of your connaissance. Your patience and welcome restored me no less to myself than to my health. Your own and your household’s numbrous kindnesses leave me a guerrier defeated for I have not the slightest means to repay you, other than by removing the source of any further depense, the man who remain always,
Your Servant,
DC DB.
The note was on the kitchen table, deftly folded around itself with my name marked in a clear, high hand, the J of Jennifer enlarged with florid care. The lines inside were neat and regular, rather small, with each of the t’s crossed savagely in long sweeps that sometimes overran the page. The whole effect was politely ferocious. Or ferociously polite.
I looked at the paper and the letters and the black Biro ink and hoped this would stop me reading what all of them came together and said. Their information was not possible, it was too abrupt. They appeared to be saying he’d gone. Martin had gone. Savinien had gone. He’d gone.
So I Am Glad Page 10