‘It might be fun to have a crack at it. And him.’
‘What’s he like? Do you know him?’
‘A bit, yes. “Call me Barry” Kesteven is a pleasant, talkative fellow a few years older than me, say early forties. He’d make a useful video-shop proprietor, the sort that puts aside stuff he thinks you’ll like. Not at all what you might expect from a servant of the Devil.’
Macdonald grinned a little fixedly. ‘Do you mean all that seriously?’
‘What, that the Devil exists, et cetera? You bet I do, mate, and I’d advise you to take the same line yourself if you know what’s good for you. All right, I’ll do Barry. You’d better send me a xerox, if you would, of what he actually said or wrote. Can I get you a drink?’
Daniel went and came back with another ginger beer for himself and another whisky for Macdonald, who asked, ‘How long is it now?’
‘Oh, it must be . . . Sorry, it’s some time since I worked it out. Well, it’ll be eight years this coming 10th August. No, actually that was the day I took my last drink, so it has to be the 11th I started on the ginger beer.’
‘Was that before or after you met Ruth?’
‘I’d just got through my second week off it when she turned up. That was the way round things were in those days.’
There was no trace of staunch cordiality in Macdonald’s voice or manner when he asked, ‘How is she these days?’
‘Much as usual, but there are signs she’s starting to get a little more cheerful.’ Daniel always said something along those lines anyway when people asked something like that, merely to avoid spreading gloom.
‘Good,’ said Macdonald when nothing more seemed to be on offer. ‘I hope I didn’t . . .’
‘Absolutely not. It’s just that no news is no news.’
When Daniel got back home he thought several times of telephoning Eric Margolis to make quite sure that as regards Ruth’s state of mind there was indeed no news, but each time he decided against it. The Davidsons’ bottom two floors of the house were empty. They had lived there since a few weeks after their marriage, and for some time after that he had wondered occasionally how a baby might have been fitted in there, but he never wondered about that now. He made himself a pot of tea and waited for Ruth to come back. When sufficient time had passed, he decided she must have gone on to see someone, perhaps her sister in Westbourne Park. The couple who lived on the upper floors were both out at work, and the only sounds he could hear came from outside the building. When he had finished his tea, he went up to the ground floor and into his workroom above the kitchen. There, in a spot beside the desk from which he could see the trees at the end and along the side of the small garden, he knelt and prayed as he did a couple of times every day. After thanking God for his mercies, he petitioned as always for removal or alleviation of Ruth’s sufferings by any fitting means, spiritual or physical or a blend of the two. Then, with a few reminders from his notebook, he appealed for the various forms of divine help needed by some of his parishioners. Finally he went through his list of late afternoon and evening visits, telephoning to check one or two doubtful cases.
Before he went out to start his round, Daniel rang Eric after all and was told Ruth had seemed to show no spectacular improvement if indeed any had been measurable. But, said Eric with ferociously guarded optimism, the possibility of some turn for the better some time in the future should certainly not be ruled out.
II
Over the next few weeks nothing changed much. Ruth’s state continued to give grounds for modest hope that it might one day mend. Daniel’s article on the utterances of the Bishop of Kesteven drew some correspondence in the newspaper and an approving reference in the Spectator. Daniel himself officiated at two weddings and several cremations, gave a communion service on the Thursday mornings, read the Church Times every Friday, attended the monthly meeting of the Parochial Church Council, prepared and delivered a weekly sermon.
One Saturday morning he was typing out such a sermon when Ruth came into his workroom and said, ‘There’s a man watching the house.’
He got to his feet. ‘Sit down and tell me about it, darling.’
‘I haven’t started going mad,’ she assured him cheerfully, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. There just is a man watching the house. Most interesting.’
‘What sort of man?’
‘The funny thing is, I haven’t been able to see his face, he’s got sunglasses on for one thing, but I’ve got the feeling I know him. You see what you think.’ On the way to their bedroom, which was on the same floor at the front, she said, ‘I suppose he might be waiting for somebody or have decided he could do with a bit of a read, but to me he looks like a man watching the house. I don’t know, perhaps having mistaken it for another house. There, see?’
What Daniel saw without difficulty was a man of about his own size and shape, wearing sunglasses as noticed and holding a newspaper that hid another part of his face. After a short inspection it became hard to believe he was actually reading his newspaper and quite easy to agree with Ruth about what he was up to.
‘How long ago did you spot him?’ Daniel asked her.
‘It must be getting on for ten minutes now. He hasn’t moved since.’
‘I don’t think I know him.’
At that point, the man on the pavement tucked his paper under his arm and took off his glasses and wiped them. Daniel moved to get a better view, perhaps over-abruptly or unduly fast; anyway, just then the man looked up and at last showed his face, or enough of it to be recognizable by somebody with good eyesight at that sort of range. This Daniel had. He also had strong nerves, which helped him not to respond to what he had seen in a way many might have, with a cry of surprise or alarm. As it was he gave a violent start and drew in his breath sharply.
Ruth caught him by the arm. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh God, didn’t you see? Surely . . .’
‘Daniel, what is it?’
‘You didn’t see.’ With great reluctance he looked again where he had been looking before, and saw no one. ‘The . . . fellow seems to have gone now.’
‘Who was he? Did you know him? Please tell me.’
‘In a minute. Let’s go back next door first.’
In his workroom once more, he made straight for his desk-chair and sat, thinking to himself that if there had been drink in the house he might very well have made straight for that instead. Ruth took the only other chair in the room. When he was breathing normally again, he said,
‘I’m sorry, my love, I didn’t mean to frighten you, but I had a bit of a scare myself. Just for a second I could have sworn that the chap outside was me, or the dead spit of me, or very nearly, to an uncanny degree. Quite a shock in a way. Of course I realize now he was just very like me. Nothing terribly odd about that. My face is the sort of face a lot of chaps have.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Ruth, ‘but then I’m biased. Anyway, I’ve got it now, he wasn’t just very like you, he was the absolute image of you, he was your double. You were right the first time: he was you.’
‘I thought you didn’t see his face.’
‘I didn’t have to. I could tell by the rest of him and the way he was standing. I almost got it the moment I saw him the second time because I’d seen you in between. You thought he was only, how did you put it, very nearly the image of you because all the millions of times you’d seen his face before it was the wrong way round. In your mirror.’
‘Maybe,’ said Daniel. ‘Well, plenty of people have doubles. But . . .’ He paused abruptly.
‘But why should one of them come and spy on the other?’
Before Daniel could have spoken, the front-door bell rang.
‘Don’t answer it,’ said Ruth.
‘It’s all right, darling, I promise you.’
Daniel went and opened the door. His double stood on the step, fair hair worn a little shorter than his own but still left long and parted in the same place, bright blue eyes, genera
lly healthy looks, perhaps half an inch shorter, dressed differently but not so differently.
‘You must be the Reverend Daniel Davidson.’ The accent was American.
‘I am he. And you must be Mr Leo Marzoni.’
‘Correct. But I’m not only that, I’m your twin brother. Did you know I existed?’
‘No.’
‘Nevertheless I do, as you see, and that is what I am. But I have the advantage of you: I knew about you already. If you like to ask me in I can tell you more.’
‘Please come in,’ said Daniel mechanically. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Oh, you’re forgiven,’ said his visitor, with a sudden smile that communicated no warmth. ‘The circumstances are out of the ordinary.’
Ever since he heard the bell ring, Daniel had been under the delusion that his words and actions were proceeding of themselves, without any need of his premeditation or will. He felt powerless to behave otherwise as he moved back to allow the man called Leo Marzoni to cross the threshold, and did no more than note his own instinct or whatever it was that told him that the other could not be what he said or seemed and that his coming here meant some incalculable harm. These feelings showed no signs of lessening while he took the stranger into his workroom and introduced a startled but not obviously frightened Ruth. Daniel found himself pronouncing words of reassurance to her and others meant to be explanatory about twins and doubles, and went on to tell her something of the American he had run into some weeks previously. Marzoni, on the other hand, appeared to find the situation little more than exceptional, striking, perhaps difficult. In a straightforward style he apologized for his various antics, for having had the absurd idea of waiting to catch Daniel as he came out of the house and especially for having panicked just now and taken off down the street before having the sense to turn back. He added that he would tell his story in full when they had all had a little time.
By the end of this recital, Daniel had begun to struggle free of his impression that events were taking place somewhere that, despite obvious resemblances, was not the world he knew. But he only really came to himself when the three of them were sitting in the kitchen over cups of coffee and the man he must learn to think of as his brother had duly begun the first instalment of his story. Several instalments were to follow; later, he was able to fit them together in his mind.
Leopold Marzoni was now thirty-eight years old. He had been brought up by a couple whom he treated in every way as his parents and whom he loved as a son, but he could not remember a time when he had not known that he was not biologically their son. He understood from them that he had been born in Brighton, England, and taken to America in infancy. His true mother had died soon after giving birth to him and to his twin brother. Leopold’s foster parents had purposely avoided making the least move towards locating or even inquiring after this brother, whom they assumed to have also been adopted but no doubt reared in England. They had felt it their duty to tell Leopold this much, but had also impressed upon him that any attempt on his part to find his twin would be a dubious and almost certainly useless undertaking. Although he could remember, in his childhood, treating a British brother as an invisible companion in times of solitude, he had hardly given the real person a thought for thirty years.
So far, indeed, had that person been from Leopold’s mind that he had said nothing of any twin brother when a neighbour, Irving Rothberg, had announced a forthcoming trip to England. But when Rothberg had come to see him on his first day back home and had spoken excitedly of having seen and talked briefly to an Englishman who was Leopold’s replica, the latter had given his twin more than a thought. At once he had acted counter to parental advice and set about finding the Englishman in question.
‘How did you manage to do that?’ asked Daniel.
‘It was easy, given Irving’s memory. He remembered your name and the fact that you were an Anglican minister, so I got on to your General Synod and they delivered right away. It seems there’s a Daniel Davies in Liverpool, but I ruled him out. Too old, for one thing. You must have had quite a shock, Daniel, when Irving sprang into your path and started calling you Leo.’
‘I suppose it might have helped if I’d known I had a twin brother.’
‘But your foster parents didn’t tell you.’
‘I didn’t have foster parents in your sense, Leo. I was brought up in an orphanage, by an orphanage.’ Without either of them being more than half aware of it, Daniel and Ruth joined hands as he said these words. ‘They couldn’t have been kinder or nicer to me or have done more for me than they did, but no, they didn’t tell me I had a brother.’
‘I see.’ Leopold Marzoni looked almost grim, or at least as though he was coming to a less straightforward part of his tale. ‘Not merely a brother, but a twin brother, as you said. And not merely a twin brother, but an identical twin brother, such that you and I look exactly alike. And I mean exactly alike, more alike even than most other identical twins. The nail on your left middle finger is smaller than usual, like mine. Your left eyebrow takes a little turn upward at the end and so does mine. And do you by any chance have a mole shaped like a horseshoe just below your navel? So do I.’
‘And the pair of you don’t merely look alike, you sound alike,’ said Ruth. ‘You have the same voice. One moment it talks with an American accent and the next it turns British, but it’s the same voice, from the, I don’t know, from the same part of the mouth, with the same little hesitations.’
‘So Irving noticed,’ said Leo, still rather sombrely. ‘But you and I, Daniel, we don’t merely look alike and sound alike. To understand the extent of our likeness, you need to know something about twins in general, okay? It’s pretty solid stuff, so you’d better be sure you want it. No objections? Good, very good. For ease of digestion I’ll give it to you in bits. Here comes Part I.’
Most cultures (said Leo) had greeted the occurrence of twins with hostility and even dread. Comparatively recently, attitudes had improved and serious study been possible. This had defined the difference between identical twins, who were always of the same sex, and the much commoner fraternal twins, who were often of unlike sex and no more similar than ordinary brothers and sisters. The difference was primordial and intrinsic.
Monozygotic or MZ twins, popularly known as identical twins, were the separate fruits of a single fertilized ovum that for some reason still under study had split into two. The name emphasized the fact that such twins have identical genes, are clones of each other. Fraternal twins were the product of two discrete fertilized ova and had only half their genes in common. Psychologists, biologists, geneticists and others interested in heredity had studied twins for many years. More lately, research had focused on MZ twins who had been separated soon after birth and reared apart. These individuals were rare, but there were probably a few thousand of them in the contemporary Western world, and recent investigations at Minnesota University had tracked down and studied more than a hundred of them.
Such was the gist of Part I. Daniel respected his twin’s seriousness of purpose, while far from clear what that purpose was. At any rate, by the time Part II began he was seeing Leo as just a man and not as some kind of unearthly visitant.
When such twins were subjected to a full comparison (Leo continued), the close similarities between members of a pair in physical attributes, such as height, fingerprints and hair colour, might have been predicted. What was rather more surprising was the similarity of non-physical attributes such as tolerance, self-control and sociability. But most people would have been very much surprised by something more than similarity in the case of what might be called biographical detail. For instance, such correspondences between a pair of twins as recorded in 1979 included the following, selected from more than thirty such:
(‘I’ve been over this so many times I have it off by heart.’)
Both men, aged thirty-nine when studied, had married a woman called Linda, divorced her and subsequently married one called Betty
.
One twin had named his first son James Alan, and the other had named his James Allan.
Both had been employed by McDonalds and as a filling-station attendant.
Both had white benches built round the trunk of a tree in the garden.
‘I’m particularly fond of that last one,’ said Leo. ‘I have fun imagining some guy who likes to think we’re shaped by our environment rather than by our heredity explaining that either as a coincidence in itself or as the result of coincidental similarity in upbringing. Like the paddling in what comes next.’
From twenty-five resemblances in a study of a pair of female twins:
Both had fallen off a fence in childhood and bore scars in the same place.
One had a reasonless chronic pain in the right thigh, the other had a wasted muscle in the right hip but suffered no pain.
They folded their clothes in the same way, and when putting blouses and shirts in drawers, both did up every other button.
Both had developed the habit of walking backwards into the sea when going paddling.
‘And just in the event that’s not enough to convince you of something,’ said Leo finally, ‘and before we go any further, my wife, whom I married seven years ago, is called Ruth.’
‘Does she look like me?’ asked Ruth Davidson.
With only a brief hesitation, Leo said, ‘My Ruth is roughly of the same physical type as yourself, fair-complexioned, vivacious in appearance if that’s physical. But here, you can see for yourself’, and he took a photograph out of his wallet and laid it on the table between them.
Ruth picked it up, studied it briefly and passed it to Daniel, who saw a pretty woman of about thirty looking rather like his wife, about as much like her as a sister of hers of similar age might have done, perhaps a fraternal twin. He got up and opened the French door into the garden. In fine weather like this the small kitchen could begin to get quite stuffy in the middle of the day. He filled a glass with tap water but set it down after only one sip.
‘What sort of temperament would you say your wife has?’ he asked Leo.
Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 45