by David Lodge
The house is quite an ordinary large inter-war semi, with a long back garden. They moved there early in their married life, Bede said, and extended it, building on top of the garage, and out at the back, and converting the loft, to accommodate their growing family, instead of moving. They have four children, all grown-up and flown the nest now, it appeared. Bede was on his own in the house, which had an unnaturally clean and tidy look, as if most of the rooms hadn’t been disturbed since the last visit of the cleaning-lady. I peeped into some of them when I went upstairs to use the loo. I noticed that there were twin beds in the master bedroom, which gave me a silly satisfaction. Aha, no sex any more, I said to myself. Not necessarily true, of course.
Bede hasn’t changed much except that his coarse unruly hair has turned quite white, and his cheeks are sunken. He still wears horn-rimmed glasses with lenses like bottle ends. But apparently I’ve changed a lot. Although I arrived at the time appointed, he greeted me uncertainly when he opened the front door. “You’ve put on weight,” he said, when I identified myself. “And lost most of my hair,” I said. “Yes, you had rather a lot of hair, didn’t you,” he said. He led me into the sitting-room (where, I was amused to note, the curtains matched the loose covers) and invited me rather stiffly to sit down. He was dressed like a man who has spent most of his life in a suit and doesn’t know quite what to wear in retirement. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket with leather patches, and a checked shirt with a woollen tie, grey worsted trousers and dark brown brogues – rather heavy clothes for the time of year, even though it was a cool, blustery day.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, in his familiar pompous way. “I was speaking to my daughter on the telephone this morning and she informs me that your programme – what is it called? – is one of the most popular on television.”
“The People Next Door. Does your daughter watch it?” I asked.
“She watches everything, indiscriminately,” he said. “We didn’t have a television when the children were growing up – I thought it would interfere with their homework. The effect on Teresa was that she became completely addicted as soon as she left home and was able to get a set for herself. I have come to the conclusion,” he went on, “that all effort to control other people’s lives is completely futile.”
“Including government?” I asked.
“Especially government,” he said. He seemed to regard his career in the civil service as a failure, in spite of the OBE. “The educational system of this country is in a much worse state now than when I joined the Department,” he said. “That isn’t my fault, but I was unable to prevent it. When I think of all the hours I spent on committees, working-parties, writing reports, writing memoranda … all completely futile. I envy you, Passmore. I wish I’d been a writer. Or at least a don. I could have done a postgraduate degree after I got my First, but I took the Civil Service exam instead. It seemed the safer bet at the time, and I wanted to get married, you know.”
I suggested that now he was retired he would have plenty of leisure to write.
“Yes, I always used to think that is what I would do in my retirement. I used to write a lot when I was young – poems, essays …”
“Plays,” I said.
“Quite so.” Bede allowed himself a wintry reminiscent smile. “But the creative juices dry up if they’re not kept in circulation. I tried to write something the other day, something rather personal about . . . bereavement. It came out like a White Paper.”
He left me for a few minutes to make some coffee in the kitchen, and I prowled round the room in search of clues to Maureen’s existence. There were a number of fairly recent family photographs on display – graduations and weddings and one of Bede and Maureen together outside Buckingham Palace with Bede in morning dress – in which she appeared as a proud, smiling, matronly woman, her hair grey and cut short, but with the same sweet heart-shaped face I remembered. I stared greedily at these images, trying to reconstruct from them the missing years of her life (missing for me, I mean). Propped up on the mantelpiece was a brightly coloured picture postcard of St Jean Pied-de-Port in the French Pyrenees. On the other side was a brief message from Maureen to Bede: “Dear Bede: Am taking a rest here for a few days before tackling the mountains. All right except for blisters. Love, Maureen.” I would have recognized the round, girlish hand anywhere, even though there were dots instead of bubbles over the is. card was postmarked about three weeks ago. Hearing Bede in the hall, I hastily replaced the card and scuttled back to my seat.
“So, how’s Maureen?” I said, as he came in with a tray. “What has she been doing with herself while you were climbing the ladder in the DES?”
“She was a qualified nurse when I married her,” he said, pushing down the plunger in the cafetière with both hands, like a man detonating dynamite. “We started a family almost immediately, and she gave up work to look after the children. She went back to nursing when our youngest started junior school, and became a sister in charge of a ward, but it’s frightfully hard work, you know. She gave it up when we no longer needed the money. She does a lot of voluntary work, for the Church and so on.”
“You both still go to church, then?” I said.
“Yes,” he said curtly. “Milk? Sugar?” The coffee was grey and insipid, the digestive biscuits damp. Bede asked me some technical questions about writing for television. After a while, I pulled the conversation back to Maureen. “What’s this pilgrimage she’s on then?”
He stirred restively in his seat, and looked out of the window, where a boisterous wind was blowing, shaking the trees and sending blossom through the air like snowflakes. “It’s to Santiago de Compostela,” he said, “in north-west Spain. It’s a very ancient pilgrimage, goes back to the Middle Ages. St James the Apostle is supposed to be buried there. ‘Santiago’ is Spanish for St James, of course. ‘St Jacques’ in French. Maureen read about the pilgrimage route somewhere, a library book I think. Decided she wanted to do it.”
“On foot,” I said.
“Yes, on foot.” Bede looked at me. “How did you know?”
I confessed to having peeped at her card.
“It’s absurd of course,” he said. “A woman of her age. Quite absurd.” He took off his spectacles and massaged his brow as if he had a headache. His eyes looked naked and vulnerable without the glasses.
“How far is it?” I asked.
“Depends on where you start.” He replaced his spectacles. “There are several different starting-points, all in France. Maureen started from Le Puy, in the Auvergne. Santiago is about a thousand miles from there, I believe.”
I whistled softly. “Is she an experienced walker?”
“Not in the least,” Bede said. “A stroll across Wimbledon Common on Sunday afternoon was her idea of a long walk. The whole idea is completely mad. I’m surprised she got as far as the Pyrenees, to be honest, without injuring herself. Or being raped, or murdered.”
He told me that when Maureen first proposed doing the pilgrimage he offered to accompany her if they went by car, but she insisted on doing it the hard way, on foot, like the mediaeval pilgrims. It was apparent that they’d had a major row about it. In the end she went off defiantly on her own, about two months ago, with a rucksack and a bedroll, and he’s only had two cards from her since, the latest being the one I had just seen. Bede is obviously worried sick as well as angry, and feeling not a little foolish, but there’s nothing he can do except sit tight and hope she gets to Santiago safely. I found the story fascinating and, I must admit, derived a certain amount of Schadenfreude from Bede’s plight. Nevertheless it seemed a surprisingly quixotic adventure for Maureen to undertake. I said something to this effect.
“Yes, well, she’s been under a lot of stress, lately. We both have,” Bede said. “We lost our son Damien last November, you see.”
I blurted out some words of commiseration, and asked about the circumstances. Bede went to a bureau and took a framed photograph from one of the drawers. It was a colou
r snap of a young man, healthy and handsome, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, smiling at the camera, leaning against the front mudguard of a Land Rover, with a background of blue sky and brownish scrub. “He was killed in Angola,” Bede said. “You may have read about it in the newspapers. He was working for a Catholic aid organization there, distributing relief supplies to refugees. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but it seems that some maverick unit of rebel soldiers stopped the truck he was in, and demanded that he hand over the food and medicine to them. He refused, and they pulled him and his African driver out of the truck and shot them. Damien was only twenty-five.”
“How awful,” I said, inadequately.
“Not much sense to be made of it, is there?” said Bede, turning his head to gaze out of the window again. “He loved Africa, you know, loved his work, was totally dedicated . . . We had his body flown back. There was a Requiem Mass. Lots of people came, people we had never even met. People from the charity. Friends of his from university. He was very popular. The priest who gave the address, some sort of chaplain to the charity, said Damien was a modern martyr.” He stopped, lost in thought, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, so we were silent for a moment.
“You think your faith is going to be a consolation at times like these,” he resumed. “But when it happens, you find it isn’t. Nothing is. Our GP persuaded us to see some busybody he called a Grief Counsellor. Stupid woman said we mustn’t feel guilty. I said, why should I feel guilty? She said, because you’re alive and he isn’t. I never heard such rubbish. I think Damien was a fool. He should have given those brutes the damned food and driven away and never stopped until he was out of the whole bloody continent.”
His gills were white with anger as he remembered. I asked him how Maureen had taken the tragedy.
“Hard. Damien was her favourite child. She was devastated. That’s why she’s gone off on this absurd pilgrimage.”
“You mean, as a kind of therapy?” I said.
“It’s as good a word as any, I suppose,” said Bede.
I said I thought I had better be going. He said, “But we haven’t talked much about the old days at Hatchford.” I said perhaps another time. He nodded. “All right. Give me a ring. You know,” he went on, “I never much liked you, Passmore. I used to think you were up to no good with Maureen at the youth club.”
“You were absolutely right,” I said, and wrung another thin smile from him.
“But I’m glad you came this morning,” he continued. “I’m a bit lonely, to tell you the truth.”
“Does Maureen ever talk about me?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Never.” He spoke without malice or satisfaction, merely as if stating a matter of fact. While we were waiting for my taxi to come, he asked me if I had any children. I said two, one married, the other living with a partner. “Ah yes, they do that nowadays, don’t they?” he said. “Even ours do. Think nothing of it. Not like it was in our youth, eh?”
“No indeed,” I said.
“And your wife, what does she do?”
“She’s a lecturer in one of the new universities,” I said. “In Education. As a matter of fact, she spends a lot of her time counselling teachers who are having nervous breakdowns over the National Curriculum.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Bede. “It’s a total shambles. I’d like to meet your wife.”
“I’m afraid she’s just left me,” I said.
“Has she? Then that makes two of us,” said Bede, in a characteristically clumsy effort at humour. At which point the doorbell rang, and I was driven off to Wimbledon station by an annoyingly loquacious driver. I didn’t want to make small talk about the weather or the prospects for the tennis. I wanted to think about the fascinating revelations of the morning.
A plan is forming in my mind, an idea so daft and exciting that I dare not even write it down yet.
Friday 11th June. Well, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going after Maureen. I’m going to try and track her down on the road to Santiago de Compostela. I’ve spent the last three days making the necessary arrangements – booking the car ferry, getting a green card, buying guidebooks, maps, travellers cheques, etc. I ripped through the backlog of mail and phone messages, and dealt with the most urgent ones. There was a series from Dennis Shorthouse reporting that Sally has made a court application for a maintenance order to meet the running costs of the house, and asking with mounting urgency for instructions. I phoned him and told him I wouldn’t obstruct divorce proceedings any longer, and would agree to appropriate maintenance and a reasonable financial settlement. He asked me what I meant by reasonable. I said, let her keep the house and I’ll keep the flat, and the rest of the assets can be divided fifty-fifty. He said, “That’s not reasonable, that’s generous. The house is worth considerably more than the flat.” I said I just didn’t want to be bothered with it any more. I told him I was going abroad for a few weeks. I don’t know how long it will take me to track down Maureen, or what I will do if I find her. I just know I have to look for her. I can’t stand the thought of spending the summer cooped up in this flat, taking calls from people I’m trying to avoid in case it’s her.
I haven’t told Bede about my plan, in case he gets the wrong idea, though what the right idea would be I’ve really no idea. I mean I don’t really know what I want from Maureen. Not her love back, obviously – it’s too late for a Repetition. (Though I can’t stop myself from going over every bit of evidence that her marriage to Bede has grown cold – if it was ever warm – like the single beds, their row over her pilgrimage, the rather cool “Dear Bede” postcard, etc. etc.) But if not love, then what? Forgiveness, perhaps. Absolution. I want to know that she forgives me for betraying her all those years ago in front of the Nativity play cast. A trivial act in itself, but with enormous consequences. You could say that it determined the shape of the rest of my life. You could say it was the source of my middle-aged Angst. made a choice without knowing it was a choice. Or rather (which is worse) I pretended that it was Maureen’s choice, not mine, that we split up. It seems to me now that I never recovered from the effect of that bad faith. It explains why I can never make a decision without immediately regretting it.
I must try that on Alexandra next time I see her, though I’m not sure she’ll be pleased. I seem to have abandoned cognitive therapy in favour of the old-fashioned analytical kind, finding the source of my troubles in a long-repressed memory. It would be a consolation, anyway, to share that memory with Maureen, to find out how she feels about it now. The fact that she is nursing a fresh grief of her own makes me all the more anxious to find her and make my peace with her.
Also in my mailjam was a draft script by Samantha filling out her idea for a kind of The People Next Door-meets-Truly, Madly, Deeply-meets-Ghost episode to end the present series. It wasn’t at all bad, but I saw at once what needed doing to it. She had Priscilla’s ghost appearing to Edward after the funeral. What must happen is that Priscilla appears to Edward immediately after her fatal accident, before anyone knows about it. He doesn’t think she is a ghost at first, because she tries to break it to him gently. Then she walks through a wall – the party wall – into the Davises’ house and back again, and the realization sinks in that she’s dead. It’s sad, but it isn’t tragic, because Priscilla is still there, in a sense. There’s even a kind of comedy in the scene. It’s very thin ice, but I think it would work. Anyway, I did a quick rewrite and sent it back to Samantha with instructions to try it on Ollie.
Then I called Jake and listened meekly to ten minutes’ bitter recrimination for not returning his calls before I was able to tell him about my work on Samantha’s draft script. “It’s too late, Tubby,” he said flatly. “Clause fourteen applied weeks ago.” “Have they hired another writer, then?” I asked, bracing myself for a positive reply. “They must have,” he said. “They need an agreed script for the last episode by the end of the month at the latest.” I heard the creaking of his swivel chair as he rocked himself in it
, thinking. “I suppose if they really went for this ghost idea, there might just be time,” he said. “Where will you be the next two weeks?”
Then I had to break it to him that I was going abroad tomorrow for an indeterminate time and couldn’t give any phone or fax numbers where he could contact me. I held the phone away from my ear like they do in old comedy films while he swore. “Why d’you have to take a holiday now, for fuck’s sake?” I heard him exclaim. “It’s not a holiday,” I said, “it’s a pilgrimage,” and put the phone down quickly while he was still speechless.
It’s extraordinary what a difference this quest for Maureen has made to my state of mind. I don’t seem to have any difficulty in making decisions any more. I no longer feel like the unhappiest man. Perhaps I never was – I had a look at that essay again the other day and I don’t think I got it quite right before. But I’m certainly present to myself when I’m remembering Maureen, or hoping to find her – never more so.
I’d just finished typing that sentence when I noticed a regularly blinking light reflected in my windows – it was dark, about ten o’clock, but I hadn’t drawn the curtains. Squinting down into the street I saw the roof of a police car parked right outside the building with its blue revolving light flashing. I switched on the video monitor in the hall and there was Grahame, rolling up his sleeping-bag in the porch under the surveillance of a couple of policemen. I went downstairs. The more senior of the two policemen explained that they were moving Grahame on. “Were you the gentleman who made the complaint?” he asked. I said I wasn’t. Grahame looked at me and said, “C’n I come up?” I said, “Alright. For a few minutes.” The cops looked at me in astonishment. “I hope you know what you’re doing, sir,” said the senior one disapprovingly. “I wouldn’t let this toerag into my house, I can tell you.” “I ain’t no toerag,” said Grahame indignantly. The policeman eyeballed him fiercely. “Don’t give me any of your lip, toerag,” he hissed. “And don’t let me catch you kipping in this doorway again. Understand?” He looked coldly at me. “I could have you for obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties,” he said, “but I’ll overlook it this time.”