The same could not be said for Stephen’s funeral. Stephen’s funeral was a nightmare. Heroically, Frances organized that one too, for Natasha was too ill, and Hugh too distraught. It was something to do, at least, and by chance she now knew how to do it.
Stephen had died early one morning, in a wood, in Sussex. He had killed himself and the baby. Stephen’s doctor believed that he had done it because of a misapprehension about the baby’s health. He gave evidence at the inquest, saying that Stephen had visited him frequently with small complaints, and had perhaps remained unconvinced that his daughter was a perfectly healthy slow developer. He also testified that Stephen had been overburdened with his studies and the care of the child, and had become depressed. Are you suggesting, asked the coroner, that he took the child’s life because he feared for her future? The doctor agreed that this might have been the case. It was a merciful explanation, and the coroner accepted it.
Stephen’s flat had been found littered with medical textbooks: a Paediatric Encyclopedia had been found, with the passages on metabolic and degenerative diseases of the muscle heavily marked. Perhaps he had thought the child was suffering from Oppenheim’s disease, from Thomson’s disease, from the first stages of muscular dystrophy.
The coroner concluded that the balance of his mind had been disturbed. He expressed the deepest sympathy with the bereaved family.
Stephen’s wife was still in hospital, and paid no attention to this tragedy. Frances, in irrational moments, found herself bitterly resenting the wife. One has to blame somebody, sometimes.
Stephen himself had been well aware that they would conclude that the balance of his mind had been disturbed, and he conceded that in worldly terms, perhaps it was: nevertheless, he had wished to set the record straight, to explain his own logic, and to this end he had written a long letter, describing his state of mind.
He had not, as the doctor had helpfully suggested, believed his daughter to be fatally ill. The text books, alarming though they were, had offered little support for such a belief. He had accepted the doctor’s diagnosis, that she was a slow (and not even a very slow) developer. All babies’ heads wobble, the doctor had said, and Stephen had believed him. Nevertheless, he had continued to read the text books, and had discovered that although his child might so far have been lucky, there were plenty of problems lying in store. And even if she escaped them all, what of those that didn’t? Horrified by the photographic illustrations, he stared at the limp bodies of small doomed long dead babies, at the distorted bodies of children: their faces, like the faces of convicts in newspapers, had been blacked out, through some respect of their privacy, for their dreadful isolation. As Janet Bird, an AngloSaxon post-war woman, brooded over the fate of the Jews, he, a healthy father of a healthy child, brooded over illness and death.
Thinking about these things, Stephen made himself ill. Depression and inertia overcame him. It was as much as he could do to get himself out of bed in the mornings to get the child her breakfast, and he found himself forgetting to feed himself. Beata’s way.
He would relapse into bed again, feebly, while the baby crawled around the room, pleased with little. Occasionally, he would get himself up, and go to visit a friend of his who was suffering from the after-effects of LSD: useless duty visits, for the friend, who lived with an aunt, had become more or less speechless, and did not seem to recognize Stephen, or anyone else either. The aunt feared permanent brain damage. The doctors were marginally more optimistic. Stephen did not know what he thought about the case. He would sit there, drink a cup of tea, chat to the aunt, and every now and then make an attempt to speak to Sebastian. Sebastian would answer, occasionally, extremely politely, dully, briefly. Sebastian had once been witty, energetic, eccentric, and a great talker.
Stephen did not know what he thought about Sebastian, or why he kept going to see him; to please the aunt maybe. He liked aunts. This aunt claimed that Sebastian had lost all sense of time, and would get up for breakfast in the middle of the night: also, that he would sometimes become extremely vocal, and talk a great deal, but that she could never understand a word of what he was saying in such spasms. Stephen wondered if there was anything interesting going on in his head, or whether whatever was in there had simply been ruined. How could one tell? His experiences with Beata had long since put him off the belief that madness is sanity, and sanity madness. But what, after all, was sanity?
It was while he was in this frame of mind that the news of Constance Ollerenshaw’s bizarre end hit the Sunday papers. He spent all Sunday thinking about it. In the evening, he rang Hugh and Natasha, to find out if they had anything to say about it, but they hadn’t, much: they were annoyed, indignant, but by no means overwhelmed. Indeed, Hugh had even been quite witty about the subject. A well-balanced man, Hugh. So Stephen had given the baby its supper, put it to bed, and sat down by his gas fire to brood. Like a medieval contemplative, he dedicated himself to mortality, decay, the corruption of flesh, disease. The end of all things.
Frances, in her worst moments, wept, like a woman. Karel also had a gift for weeping. Stephen lacked this gift, so he sat there and thought, instead. He felt himself on the verge of some revelation. It was sure to come: it needed no artificial invocation.
The revelation was one of extreme simplicity. It came to him like a light from heaven. It was better to be dead than alive: this was the knowledge that came to him. It seemed to descend upon him personally. Being alive was sordid, degrading, sickly, unimaginable: to struggle on through another fifty years, tormented by fear and guilt and sorrow, was a fate nobody should ever embrace. That others did, was not his affair. Man had been created sick and dying: for seventy years he feebly struggled to avoid his proper end. There was something overwhelmingly disgusting about man’s efforts, against all the odds, to stay alive. One spent one’s life in inoculating oneself, swallowing medicaments, trying to destroy disease, and all to no end, for the end was death. How sickly, how pitiable, how contemptible. Eating corpses in extremis, like those cannibals in the Andes. Condemned to a life of soul-destroying fear, one died in the end anyway, the soul destroyed and rotted by terror. Whereas if one left now, if one leapt now, unsubdued, into the flames, one would be freed, one would have conquered flesh and death, one would have departed whole, intact, undestroyed.
The certainty played around him like fire. This was it, then. He must leave himself no time to forget, no time to lose his knowledge, no time to die and rot like Sebastian and Constance, no time to wither, lingeringly, like Beata, whose feeble balance between life and death was the worst defeat, the most miserable compromise of all. If it was to be done, let it be done properly. The flames were light and bright, painless, without heat. The refining fire.
He started to pack up his things. It was midnight. It crossed his mind to leave the baby behind, but of course, it was out of the question to leave her, whom he so loved, to a life that he had rejected. He thought of his parents, his family: they would suffer, of course, but then they had so many other things to suffer for that one more, in his view, wouldn’t make much difference. Should he write them a note? He hesitated. He ought to write something to somebody, to explain what had lead to his resolution: otherwise, they might think he was doing it out of some kind of misery, which was not quite the case. He couldn’t quite face writing to his parents, direct. So he wrote them a brief note of farewell, then a longer letter, to Frances, in which he enclosed the note for Hugh and Natasha. His letter to Frances was, he thought, quite clear: he explained that living was disagreeable, and worse than disagreeable, humiliating and destructive, and that he had decided that it would be much better to depart while the way was open before him. ‘Don’t think I haven’t loved you, Aunt Frances,’ he concluded (he enjoyed calling her ‘Aunt’: it had a pleasant element of the ridiculous)—‘don’t think I haven’t been impressed by your approach. I have. But it’s not for me. Good luck to you, Frances, and goodbye.’
He addressed this to her home in Putney: she was
, he thought, still in Africa, but she would be home soon, and there was no hurry. He left a note on his mantelpiece, saying ‘Have gone, and won’t be back’, for his landlady. Then he picked up his baby, wrapped her up, put her in a knapsack with the sleeping bag and the sleeping pills, and set off through the dark town (it was after midnight), posting the letter on his way to his destination.
He walked till nearly morning. He knew the right place. They wouldn’t find him till next weekend, probably: it was a very secret place, but people sometimes walked there at weekends. He made himself and the baby comfortable, gave both an overdose, and fell asleep as the dawn broke.
They weren’t found the next weekend: they were found ten days later, two days after Constance’s funeral. The police had been out to look, prompted by Frances, who found Stephen’s letter only on her return to Putney from Tockley.
They were lying in a hollow in a wood, under tree roots, wrapped up in the sleeping bag together.
Frances wept herself into a stupor. Sodden with tears, she stumbled from police to undertaker, yet again. For days she wept almost without ceasing. If only he had left the baby, she would moan, rocking herself backwards and forwards, swollen and blotched. I would have had her, I would have had her, what’s a baby more or less to me?
He didn’t want to leave her behind, said Karel, who understood such things.
If Karel hadn’t been there, she didn’t know what she would have done. He moved in with her, of course, and they took up life together as though there had been no break. He looked after her, held her while she cried, comforted her, distracted the children, and coped with the incessant flow of telephone calls from family and sympathizers.
Stephen was cremated, in a London crematorium: it was pouring with rain as Karel drove slowly past the gravestones, up the interminable drive, to the chapel. Frances did not notice the chapel or the gravestones. Natasha did not attend, but her parents and Hugh got themselves there. Standing in the chapel listening to the piped music, Frances remembered the country churchyard, and Mr Fox in his beret, and the rose bushes and the cows and the yellow stone, and she thought to herself truly and bitterly that they had been an utter, utter irrelevance. This was the place: this was death. How can one make a friend of death, how can one accept graciously the wicked deal? It was better not to pretend. All ritual is a hollow mockery. The tears poured down her face, and Hugh squeezed her elbow. ‘Men do not weep for the dead because they fear them; they fear them because they weep for them,’ Durkheim had said, in an attempt to explain mourning. But there was no explanation. An affirmation of life, of culture: a demonstration of the poverty of life and culture: what did it matter what that churchyard, or this bleak conveyor belt represented? Nobody had felt the slightest desire to make matters better by burying Stephen in the Cotswolds churchard, or even by alleviating this grim ceremony with some well-chosen words. Nobody cared, because they cared. Stephen was dead, and that was that. It was the thing, these days, to speak of making death less frightful, more dignified, more familiar. Perhaps there was something to be said for it. But for her part, she had drawn too far away from any human continuity to wish to know. Death and love. How dreadfully they contradict all culture, all process, all human effort. Stephen had been right. The silly curtains swished together, and Stephen and his child disappeared together into the red crater, made one with nature, transformed to black ash.
Drearily, they all trudged off back through the rain to culture, process and effort. They were wedded to them, after all.
Through the following days and weeks, Frances read Stephen’s letter again and again, searching for clues. What could have been done, what could have helped? They should have known, that last weekend in the Cotswolds, that there was something wrong with Stephen: she had known it, but she had done nothing. She had flown off frivolously to Adra, to sit around a swimming pool drinking and gossiping. She reproached herself. What had any of them said, in that evening, when they had talked of Freud and the death wish and Empedocles, that had tipped the balance?
Karel reassured her. It was not their fault; it was nobody’s fault. Nothing could have been done to prevent it. He had made up his mind, and he had done it, and that was that.
Gradually, she calmed down. It was true that it was not her fault: she had always been good to Stephen, and had always had plenty of time for him. Indeed, as Karel pointed out to her, she had clearly represented for him one of the only possible patterns of living. He had loved and admired her: he said so in his last letter to her. If anybody cheered him up, it was you, said Karel: look, he more or less says so. But poor thing, poor thing, Frances would weep, what can it have been like, to feel so desperate? She could not imagine his state of mind: she did not know how he could have brought himself to it.
Her own parents were quite subdued by the event. Lady Ollerenshaw pulled herself together and emerged from hospital and started living again, with a rather impressive humility. Sir Frank stared a little more blankly still, as though fate had confirmed his worst suspicions about life, and said nothing. Hugh drank and wept: Natasha took to her bed tranquilized for days and in the nd rose like a ghost, and picked up the threads of living. She stopped dyeing her hair, and withdrew her other younger children from boarding school: both courses of action seemed like mistakes, but nobody felt like arguing with her.
In the end, Frances got over it. One gets used to anything. She even began to see it in a better light, once the shock was over. After all, Stephen had been in some curious way true to himself: one could see that his act had a kind of integrity and finality that exonerated all bystanders from guilt. He had blamed no one. He had not even, as far as one could gather, endured any very striking suffering before his death. One could regard it perhaps as a tragic accident.
Or perhaps it was not even as bad as a tragic accident. An accident cuts people off, unwilling, surprised: illness rips people panting and reluctant from life. Stephen had chosen to leave. Reperusing his last words, in a tearless calm, months later, it occurred to Frances that perhaps it was not so bad. Perhaps, in some way, it was all right. With a certain admirable determination, he had faced his own nature, and the terms of life and death, and seen what to do. He had had the revelation she had always been denied, which she had glimpsed so often in the distance. It was a revelation that she did not want at all. She would continue to live, herself. He had spared her, and taken it all upon himself.
She taught herself, over the years, to see his death as a healing of some kind, the end of a long illness, a sacrifice. Taken from them for their better health. Her own children, certainly mercifully, showed no inheritance of the more unwelcome Ollerenshaw traits. Stephen had taken it all away with him. She thought of Stephen, years later, in Prague—she and Karel never got to Pilsen, but they got to Prague, where Karel’s mother’s family had lived, and while she was there it was as much Stephen as Karel that came into her thoughts: walking round the Jewish cemetery with the slanting apocalyptic tomb stones, staring at dangerous scaffolding and great blackened stone eagles on doorways, she thought that perhaps it was the reinforcement, the double heritage that had killed Stephen. For here was Karel, still alive, despite all still alive, a man with no hatred in him, the only man in Europe. Karel wept, in bed that night in Prague, because they had been to visit his aunt, and she was now an old woman, living not too well—the light had gone out in the middle of the meal she had cooked them, and she had been distressed by the forced failure of her hospitality, but for all that she refused to return to London, for she felt more at home in Prague—and Karel in bed had turned to Frances and wept, as she had wept for Stephen, and it all seemed a part of the same fate. A fate which had spared them, and left them with so much, with each other. What could one do, what sense could one make of it? One could only give thanks.
Karel lost a tooth, in Prague, as she had lost one in Paris: it’s the anxiety of travel that makes one’s teeth go bad abroad, they concluded, as they stared at the incisor that Karel could ill aff
ord to lose, extracted by a Czech dentist who was a friend of the aunt, and who had once, when a young man in another world, met Karel’s mother. Europe and death. Karel wept into the broad shoulder of Frances, and she stared at the hotel ceiling (the aunt could not accommodate them, for she lived, as she had lived in Palmers Green, in a single room) and she thanked God for her survival, for there was no one else to thank. Karel, she said, don’t cry, Karel, don’t, please don’t—though she did not mind, for to have him there was more than she, ambitious as she was, had ever hoped, and his tears, and the sight of his teeth hanging on the doorknob of the wardrobe, and the thought of his lonely aunt, and his dead mother and brother and sister and father and dead Stephen dust and ashes rising from a crematorium chimney, were all part of a salvation so unexpected, that she lay there with him, perishing and fading it was true, but who cared, who cared, if one can salvage one moment from the sentence of death let us do so, let us catch at it, for we owe it to the dead, to the others, and it is all the living and the lucky can do for the dead, all they can do, given the chance, is to rejoice: overcome with joy she lay there, as he wept himself to sleep on her shoulder, overcome with joy she lay awake and thought of the gold baroque of Prague, and Kafka the mad Jew, and of those perilous grave stones, grave stones, her profession, her trade, her living, on account of which (account, account) she lay here with Karel in this double bed.
More years later, she stood with Karel in another graveyard, in the Precinct of Tanit in Carthage, and talked to an archaeologist of child sacrifice. She had never really understood her Phoenicians: nor had she been able to understand how Stephen could take the child’s life as well as his own. His own, yes; that she had accepted. She stood there, grey haired now in the bright North African light. There stood the little urns. Bones of children, bones of mice, bones of saints, relicts. Lucky Mr Fox, to believe in the resurrection. Whatever had the Phoenicians believed? She did not want to know, she did not want to understand, she turned away. She could not believe in the resurrection, or in the revelation, and anything more sinister she did not wish to comprehend. She was a modern woman. Her children were grown up now. (Daisy had become a physicist: her mother’s pride in this was immense. She had also married Bob Schmidt, after a highly incestuous courtship, and was about to produce the child that Karel and Frances, in belated deference to the population problem, had refrained from producing. But further forward one cannot look. Or not yet.)
The Realms of Gold Page 40