Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  It was strong stuff. Stronger than Bryn could handle. What made it even more tricky was the mismatch between Strange’s disturbing remarks and the civilised urbanity with which he expressed them; and his obvious assumption that Bryn agreed with him. How was he going to find a way of disabusing Strange without seeming rude? It was a too familiar predicament.

  ‘You gotta understand Israel,’ said Strange. ‘It’s a country where the people are accustomed to realising their ambitions through violence. They have no tradition of persuasion or legality.’ He grinned. ‘I guess it takes an American to understand that.’

  He looked across at Bryn and delivered again that half throatclearing, half-laughing rattle.

  The rauchbier had worked its way through. Bryn cursed his habitual lack of bladder stamina, excused himself and went off in search of the toilets. They were not easy to find. After a couple of false journeys down corridors at the back of the restaurant, a kindly waiter set him in the right direction.

  Afterwards, as he was working his way back through the building, the first thing that struck him was that the all-pervasive tannoy had actually been turned off.

  Then, when he opened the door into the restaurant, people were standing at their tables and shouting and milling about. The place was building to uproar. Two landpolizei had just come in from the street and another two were hauling someone away in handcuffs.

  It was the little photographer. As he passed, he looked directly at Bryn as if he knew him. He had a sallow complexion, like a Japanese by all means, but – now that Bryn saw him more closely – much more obviously Middle Eastern in appearance.

  Udell Strange was deep in conversation with two men, one of them the chauffeur. The other – a shorter character in wraparound dark glasses, the same (Bryn was convinced) whom he’d seen stealing in behind Strange at the end of the opera interval – was holding the miscreant’s camera in his hand, swinging it idly by its strap.

  It looked very much as if the evening was at an end. The elderly Americans were beginning to settle their bills, and the businessmen had already left. Waiters were clearing tables. A group of young people passed by and made for the door. Bryn caught a glimpse of one, blonde and unseasonally muffled. Surely that wasn’t Agnete stealing away with them?

  While he stood, marooned in the confusion, Strange marched briskly towards the exit. He called out to each of his two acolytes to follow and they left without a further word. There was a short, rasping growl from the Mercedes as it pulled away from the kerb.

  Bryn went back to his seat to collect his belongings. A waiter presented him with the bill. In other circumstances he would have tried to refer it to his absent host, but his German was not now up to a complicated argument, so he bit his lip and paid. It was a modest enough sum.

  And then he discovered that his Harrods carrier with its cushions and programme had disappeared. He was certain he had put it under his seat. Worse than that, he had absent-mindedly slipped his new iPhone into it. And all was gone. Nowhere to be seen. With a mixture of mime and a few phrases that fell serendipitously from his brain, he tried to explain his plight to the waiter. The waiter looked around half-heartedly and shrugged his shoulders. Another waiter came over but he must have misunderstood the situation because he took Bryn to the cloakroom, where unsurprisingly there was no sign of the bag. One of the policemen came back into the restaurant and had the situation explained to him and he – to his national credit – responded in perfect English, and wrote down the details. His firm advice, though, was to return to it again in the morning.

  There was nothing left for Bryn to do.

  He walked back through the wind and rain and the flying lime seeds, empty-handed, to the hotel.

  He did not see Agnete again that evening, though he hung around in the hotel lobby, hoping she might turn up. Nor did he see her at breakfast next morning. He asked at the desk about her but, after some conversations among the desk clerks, the nett response was a pantomime of shrugged incomprehension. It was the day of his departure and he had clearly missed his chance. It was all very depressing. He hoped he had not lost his touch.

  There was one excellent piece of news, however. The head clerk went back into the hotel office and re-emerged with the missing bag. ‘I believe you left this at your restaurant, sir,’ she said. More astonishing yet, programme and cushions and – most especially – iPhone were still stuffed and intact within.

  A ringing phone on the reception desk prevented further explanation.

  He had a little time before he was due to catch the train for the first leg of his return journey to Salt Lake City. He sat down at the hotel’s computer to copy off Marion’s promised email. After so long away, what he needed now was a good, old-style, sentimental letter, three pages or more. And here it was. It looked as if Marion was of a similar mind:

  ‘Dear Bryn

  ‘Years ago when we first met we used to write long letters to each other and I’ve kept all yours. They’ll always be treasured memories. So I thought it would be appropriate since I have so much to say to you now if I wrote a letter just like in the old days… ’

  A little stiff maybe. But it needed to be enjoyed at leisure. He pressed the print button and surrendered the computer to the next hotel guest.

  Later, when he brought his bags down from his room, two things struck – and disturbed – him. The first was some breaking news on the television set in the lobby. The sound had been turned down but there was a digest of what was happening on a crawler across the bottom of the screen. A group of Israeli agents had been operating illegally in Germany, using false German passports. Amongst the footage of them being expelled, one face caught his eye. It looked remarkably like the little photographer in the restaurant.

  And then he noticed a policeman standing outside the main entrance to the hotel. He had never known this before in Germany: it was more the kind of thing you might expect in a third world country. Of course there were any number of reasons why an officer might be on duty. Perhaps an important German politician was staying at the hotel for the festival. Or maybe the policeman was there to discourage rogue taxi drivers. Who could say?

  He did wonder whether – after the previous evening’s restaurant experience – he was becoming just a little bit over-sensitive.

  The train from Bayreuth to Nuremberg was packed with festival visitors going home. Bryn sat by a window watching, for probably the last time in his life, the unchanging Franconian countryside reeling past; and felt an unexpected affection for it. It was so far away from that other much less pleasant world of international news, violence and politics.

  Broad fields of ungathered maize, birch woods, brown horses and brown sheep, the summer’s dust rising in a cloud around a tractor, a little red and white Franconian flag fluttering gently in the middle of a field. Then a cluster of houses with the highpeaked gables of the region, a tiny church and onion-shaped tower, buzzards circling in the sky. And – as if to remind him of the present century – a small aeroplane above the horizon, flying parallel with the railway track.

  When the train ducked down into a cutting and all he could see were trees and undergrowth, he pulled out Marion’s email. She had said she was intending to send a ‘proper letter’ when they had last spoken on the phone, but he had not expected quite such an extended missive. He settled himself comfortably to read it.

  ‘Dear Bryn

  ‘Years ago when we first met we used to write long letters to each other and I’ve kept all yours. They’ll always be treasured memories. So I thought it would be appropriate since I have so much to say to you now if I wrote a letter just like in the old days.

  ‘We have been together for nearly 25 years, since we were students, and I think for most of that time we have been happy more or less. I never regretted marrying so young or having to give up so much to have our family. So I will always be grateful for that part of my life.

  ‘You know how I fought to avoid going to America. I always told you I didn’
t want to move because I had my own life in London – and I didn’t want to travel because I didn’t like flying – and all of that was true. And then when finally I agreed to come to Utah with you last year, you were surprised at how well I settled in. You said how contented I seemed to be. And you were right. But there was a reason for that which you have never guessed. Sometimes – I’m sorry to say this, Bryn – I think you’re the one person in the world it would not have been obvious to.

  ‘The truth is – I love Dan and Dan loves me. I first fell in love with him ten years ago when he came over that summer and stayed with us. Do you remember? Yes, we slept together – but only once. And then decided the situation was impossible. He went back to his wife in Salt Lake City and I went back to you. Because neither of us wanted to hurt either of you.

  ‘I had hoped that the passage of years would erase my feelings for him and in the end I foolishly persuaded myself they had. That’s why last year I agreed to come with you to Utah – even though you would be working alongside Dan – because I really believed it was over between him and me. I’m really sorry. I couldn’t have been more wrong… ’

  He stopped reading. The letter ran on for a couple of pages more but he could guess what it contained. Proposals for an amicable divorce. Two divorces, in point of fact. Something about Dan’s plans for their new life together. More regrets. Assurances of enduring friendship. Concern about his feelings. How and when they should announce all this to the children. Other sensible considerations.

  The train emerged from the cutting and he gazed through the windows at the medieval landscape beyond. The little plane was still there on the horizon, as if fixed to the same position, like a blemish on the glass.

  Chapter 3

  You move on. That’s the time-honoured response to calamity; or the collapse of a relationship.

  For a time, though, Bryn had clung to the pain. So long as it remained, he found it preserved some outline of his loss. He had resisted sharing his misery with friends who might have tried to alleviate it; and certainly the last thing on his mind was any sort of therapeutic advice. What he felt was an enduring, living thing and it belonged to him.

  And that was why he was now in the Yosemite Valley: by himself. Added to which, it would have been an awful waste of a reservation so over-subscribed that he’d had to book it the previous autumn…

  But – inexorably – time had begun to lend distance and bind the wounds. He had even become a little ashamed of those earlier feelings – raw, furious and natural as they surely were. After a couple of weeks, they were becoming a burden. There was little enough temptation now to pour them out to sympathetic friends. He had decided that he did not do public grief.

  By the same token, the memories of the last twenty-five years were beginning to take on a quite different colour and shape. The past may not be another country but the married couple he and Marion had been seemed well on their way to becoming other people. He did not begrudge himself his self-indulgence and nostalgia. But he was inclined to regard it now more as a necessary rite of passage before getting on with the rest of his life.

  He had already been amusing himself with a whole host of bright new options. A change of life. Jacking in academia and returning to England. Or trying something even more radical. Transplanting to a distant warm country – like Australia – and bar tending or patrolling beaches for a year or two. Setting up an eco-community and raising vegetables. Writing a novel. Joining an amateur drama society and getting laid.

  There was a singular flaw in every one of these – apart from their general and obvious impracticality. All had to do with flight. And it did not, after all, make a huge deal of sense to run away from a relationship that had already fled from him.

  So if not precisely moving on, then carrying on.

  At least he had made one decision. He was determined that the bad news from Utah would not disrupt this part of his holiday. He was damned if he was not going to enjoy it.

  He was sitting at a table in the Food Court of Yosemite Lodge, in the shadow of the Yosemite waterfall, and had given himself till the end of breakfast to write a reply to Marion. He had not, to be honest, made much progress. He had hoped that something in manuscript this time, and running – of course – a few pages, might strike a helpfully heartfelt chord.

  The difficulty lay in reconciling his objective, if he could identify it, with what might be achievable. For a start, was he even certain – after everything she had told him – that he wanted her back? He had spent two weeks exploring the proposition and still did not know the answer. The nearest he had come to a conclusion was that – if he came to no conclusion – there were at least two other people who would reach one for him. So maybe – and without prejudice to some greater clarity in the future – he should do whatever he could to preserve the status quo. And that meant, for the time being, making whatever arguments he could to keep the marriage alive.

  There it was. A decision.

  Best to move on before he was tempted to revisit it.

  The next question was whether a direct appeal would be effective. Probably not. If he knew anything about Marion, her mind was already made up and any pressure from him, rational or emotional, would merely make her more determined. Should he simply aim instead to keep open the lines of communication? Employ a strategy of general availability? Be ready to respond helpfully to whatever twists and developments and unpredicted difficulties lay ahead?

  That was good. Very promising.

  On the other hand…

  There was always the other hand. The running thread throughout their relationship – and even in Marion’s most recent email – was his supposed lack of purpose, ambition, resolve. What he reasonably took to be sensible consideration, she would perceive as feeble indecision. What he saw as contingency planning, she characterised – in a favourite phrase – as displacement behaviour.

  Was it not Cocteau, though, who said: ‘What others criticise you for, cultivate. It is you’?

  On the other hand… a letter from him which carried on as if no gulf had opened between them would serve only to reinforce her prejudices.

  ‘Dear Marion,

  You were right: I never guessed it.’

  That was as far as he had got.

  The nine hand-written words floated in front of him. And the more he brooded on them, the more unreasonable Marion’s action appeared. So sudden and arbitrary. So disloyal. And unfair. Something bilious and disruptive began to well up and he shoved the sheet of paper away.

  Maybe, after all, he was not quite ready to move on.

  It was mid morning but he had still not finished his breakfast. He sipped his weak coffee in its pale brown Yosemite mug speckled like a hen’s egg, and gazed through the windows at the Douglas firs, the plummeting backdrop of the mountain, and – along its topmost edge – a ribbon of brilliantly blue sky. At this time of the year in California it was always hot; but in Yosemite it was a fresh, burning heat, as unlike the adhesive humidity of Bayreuth as could be imagined.

  He wished he had made more of an effort with Agnete. If he had not been flattered and distracted by the American, she and he might now – who knows – be in the midst of a splendid affair.

  And so little to remember. Wisps of silver blonde hair drifting across those electric blue eyes. That unblinkingly frank, challenging, alarming, opaque gaze. The cocktail dress and defiant – contemptuous – stride. Had he seen her smile? Perhaps a fleeting glimpse, unless he’d imagined it, of just the tips of her teeth, as secret and white as icebergs. Would their paths ever cross again? Was it the baggage of a married man that had held him back… ?

  A tanned young hiker in shorts and boots was sitting opposite him, alone at a table with her eggs over-easy and crispy bacon. Her hair was a light ash brown, shining and curly, flecked with product-induced highlights – not by the sun, as Marion’s used to be. She had the fresh, child-like glow of a woman who had recently stepped from the shower.

  Her thoug
hts seemed also to be on other things than Yosemite. A Park Guide was spread beside her speckled mug but her gaze was fixed on something deep in outer space. Her vivid prettiness made Bryn smile – and he tried to catch her eye. She immediately beamed back, a radiant, uncomplicated response that took his breath away.

  ‘Hi,’ he began. ‘I don’t suppose you’re – ’

  A strapping young man swept past his table and embraced her. The moment may not have lasted more than a second or two. It felt longer. Then the young man dragged round a chair and the pair chatted away in West Coast American, while he helped himself to the remains of her meal.

  It was less than a year ago – Bryn reflected – that he had left a safe academic job in London and moved to Utah. In pursuit, like many before him, of a mid-life fantasy of freedom and opportunity on the sunnier side of the Ocean. How trite it sounded. The elusive, illusory ‘Yes We Can’. He would hardly be the first immigrant to discover an America as problematic as the country so recently left behind.

  Not that he’d lacked fair warning.

  He had an older, cleverer, oppressively successful cousin called Marcus. Early the previous September, Marcus had taken him to lunch at the Travellers’ Club in London for the grand purpose of advising him against taking up the associate professorship he’d been offered at the Western University of Utah.

  ‘You are not a natural expatriate, Bryn,’ he said. ‘You’re not cut out for it. You are too British.’