‘Well, mightn’t that have been partly because …’ I saw her grapple with the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy but give up. With one of her sudden shafts of acumen, she said:
‘Did you – sort of help them?’
‘Sort of.’
‘I guessed you might have. Did you help them get the baby adopted?’
‘Well, not personally. But I did happen to know one social worker in England – just someone I’d met when I was working at a vac. job, a survey, while I was at Oxford. So I sent Evan to her. In those days, when there were still a lot of babies around wanting ‘‘good homes’’ like kittens, the whole procedure was quite amateurish still. Third party adoptions fixed up by well-meaning vicars and so forth.’ Since Ann herself was a child in the 1950s, I tend to find myself instructing her in such things. She looked vaguely disbelieving.
‘But this woman was a proper social worker?’
‘More or less. I think she’d had some minimal training just after the war. She was,’ I remarked at random as that name too came back to me, ‘called Shirley Gilchrist.’
Ann clattered teacup down into its saucer:
‘Tom – how extraordinary! But I know her. We met at that conference on school counselling I went to in Bristol two years ago. You did say Shirley Gilchrist? – oh it must be the same! APSW?’
‘Well if she is a Psychiatric Social Worker she must have done some more training since I knew her. But, yes, I suppose that’s possible. I remember her as a fairly ardent Freudian.’ Shirley had been in love with me, for a guilty, pleasurable six weeks on the survey job, but my baseness did not extend to telling Ann this.
‘I’m sure it’s the same. And I’ll tell you who she’s worked with – Melvyn Baines. They’ve done some research together. Published a book, on Family Therapy, I think.’
Ann brought this out with a faint note of triumph in her voice. She knows I dislike and distrust Melvyn Baines, who runs a Child Guidance outfit in the district where she herself is a deputy head teacher, but we don’t talk about my views on him because she gets hurt if I speak my mind too clearly on certain subjects: this is one we’ve tacitly agreed not to explore. It was as if she supposed I would think better of Melvyn for having worked with my old acquaintance, whereas in fact the news had the opposite effect: it made me suspect that Shirley Gilchrist, whom I had known only as a young and vulnerable woman, had not improved with the years. Melvyn Baines goes in for a succession of adoring female collaborators, who become his disciples in the application of psychoanalytical theories to commonplace school problems.
‘Oh heavens,’ I was suddenly very sick of the whole subject, adoption and all, and wanted to bury it again, probably for ever: ‘I should think Shirley Gilchrist’s knocking on a bit now to be in full-time employment.’
Ann looked distressed, not exactly at me, more on my behalf, as she tends to at any oblique reference to my own age, so I kindly added:
‘She was quite a few years older than me, I seem to remember.’
Ann began to collect the tea-things together. But she could not resist asking:
‘Was it all right? Did the baby settle down all right in the new home?’
We have no children, though at that time Ann was still hoping. Of course, at our joint ages, adoption was out of the question, which meant that (perhaps fortunately) we had never seriously discussed the subject. But I was aware that, in other circumstances, Ann’s maternal heart might have turned towards adoption. This conversation about a couple she had never known held different, but painful, associations for her as well.
‘I never asked for news of the baby,’ I said, and she looked disappointed. ‘In those days, you know, a curtain was supposed to descend.’
And anyway, by the time it was done, I was already anxious and half ashamed at my own interference in the sources of life, and did not much want to think about it any more. Which is no doubt one reason I never contacted Shirley Gilchrist again after she’d done me that practical favour, never thought of Evan or Joyce again after a year or two … Never, till that day.
But Ann still insisted:
‘– And the girl. Joyce. You said you saw her again?’
‘I ran into her once, yes. On the Metro. But that was all.’
‘I wonder … I mean, I wonder what happened to her. If she married someone else, had more children … ?’
She wanted to be reassured, comforted, told Oh yes, I’m sure she did. But, though I sensed her distress, I would not yield to it. Unpleasant of me, I do know; Joyce may very well have found happiness. But something in me resists that kind of appeal. I cannot give Ann facile comfort for the world’s ills, I don’t think I ever could have, even before … And I also resist, because I must, her stealthy desire, unrealized I think even by herself, to have control over the past, my past, by ‘understanding’, by ‘knowing what happened’. It is the second-wife syndrome, I see that. I, in my turn, I think, understand the yearning, lonely nature of Ann’s desire to possess that very large part of me she does not possess. But it is a desire I cannot possibly gratify and would not if I could.
When we had that conversation we had only been married a couple of years. She seemed particularly vulnerable around that time. It was as if the excitement of actually being married had dissipated itself, but out of it had not developed the emotional security and identification with me that she surely had the right to expect. (And no baby; she was having to face that: almost certainly no baby). I tried to be attentive and appreciative towards her efforts to make me a good, supportive, loving wife. Quite often I even felt appreciative. But at some level, beneath her innocence and optimism, Ann was not fooled, I think. She felt I was disappointed in her.
It was not exactly that, but I could not possibly have explained without hurting her further. It was rather that I had never expected all that much when I re-married anyway. There is a French saying – one of Jacquou’s favourites – ‘Women without long hair cannot do magic.’ Of course I don’t mean to apply that literally, though it is a fact that Ann has short, sleek hair and Simone’s was long. So, for most of her years, was Marigold’s. But it expresses what I feel about this marriage.
I had known Ann for several years as a good teacher, a wonderfully efficient and devoted administrator and a loyal and cheerful colleague on one of the numerous committees to do with education on which I then still sat. That sounds like an empty, public reference; she was also pretty – really quite pretty, in a clear-eyed, neat-waisted way; she was warm; she loved and admired me. She was well into her thirties and getting secretly desperate about the fact, so it didn’t seem to matter much that she was, even so, young enough to be my daughter. My daughter. In fact I believe I thought, if I thought at all – a marriage is such a flamboyant, boat-burning act that real thought tends not to figure prominently in it – that the rather large gap in our ages would create a comfortable space in which I could continue to exist in my own selfish secret weighted way. It did not occur to me, as of course it should have done, that Ann herself would be perpetually, wordlessly striving to close this gap. She, poor girl, still expected magic from life, even if she could not do it.
Before we set up home together (in a small, pleasant house that was new to both of us, a place without ghosts or resonances), I suppose she gave her friends some account of me, those few who did not know me professionally already. What must she have said? I imagine her using that slightly special, hushed, set-apart-from-the-ordinary voice people use for such things, and saying rather quickly:
‘His first wife was French. He met her when he was doing a post-graduate degree there. She died young, of cancer – oh, a good ten years ago now. I think it was in her family. He told me once that her mother’d died of the same thing at about the same age.’
And then, I suppose, even more briefly, she must have gone on to speak of Marigold. There are some things Ann cannot cope with at all. It seems to me that thoroughly nice people are prone to this moral failing. Even simple tragedy s
o offends the morale-boosting compound of faith, hope and charity on which they run, that they can’t fit it into their own picture of life. And as for any hint of deliberate wrong-doing, of cruelty, or evil – well Ann, panic-stricken, reaches at once for the compensatory thought of ‘guilt’, as she did when I was telling her about Evan Brown.
But I am running too far ahead in time now. At the period of which I am speaking the possibility of evil as a factor had not yet presented itself.
Though I did not yet know it that afternoon, in fact something, some sequence of piecemeal revelation, had been coincidentally set in train. But it was like a timed device, burning away slowly on a long fuse, still in the dark.
It is impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been had I not met Simone: it is like trying to imagine myself with a different personality. We used to regard with a kind of amused disbelief the fact that we owed our meeting, indirectly, to my supervisor at the Sorbonne, a very intelligent but nasty and insecure man with a terrorized wife of his own and an obsession about rising prices.
At first, disconcerted by the vast, uncaring Sorbonne in which I found myself adrift, I had assumed that much of the blame for my discomfort lay with this supervising tutor, Professor Gombach. He was a man in his fifties whose health had been permanently damaged by experiences in the war of which I only learnt much later. He was paid disgracefully little, he was supposed to deliver many lectures every week in echoing eighteenth-century amphitheatres to huge crowds of restless youngsters only a tiny proportion of whom he would ever get to know personally. In addition there hung around – or had been hung around his neck by the chaotic university bureaucracy – an indefinite number of young men and women like me, both French and foreign, who were devoting half their time to teaching incompetently in Parisian schools. In the other half, supposedly, we were not only to absorb, by some undefined osmosis, ‘a Sorbonne education’, that asset famed since the Middle Ages and, in the 1950s, virtually unchanged since then; we were also to emerge at the end of several years clasping in our arms that weighty piece of original work known in England as a doctoral thesis and in France as a licence. No wonder Serge Gombach, like most of the professors, defended himself against us. If he had taken seriously his responsibilities to all those nominally in his care, he would have collapsed in a month.
If I eventually managed to make some sort of an ally of him, that was more by good luck and my own crude confidence born of innocence than because of my merits as a student. I was a hard worker, and I was genuinely quite interested in the roots of Socialism in France but, by French standards, I was woefully untrained in logic, philosophy, religion, mythology, high rhetorical style and indeed in everything but modern history – or rather, in the progress-of-mankind, Whig version of it then still imparted at the oldest British universities. But I had been used to a personal tutor who devoted an hour to me alone every week and seemed happy to receive me courteously at almost any other time – (‘Ah, Mr Ferrier – a glass of sherry? Now, about that last essay of yours. It’s good – really quite good’). So that when I called on Gombach in his Sorbonne office, and he was cold, sarcastic and evasive, I refused mentally to believe it.
I set to work to tell him my outline ideas for the thesis, trying to quell my bewilderment that he seemed so little interested. He, in turn, appeared surprised that I should bother him at this stage, in my shaky French, and was at no pains to hide the fact. By and by I managed at least to rouse a spark of intellectual irritation in him.
‘You English are all the same,’ he cried, ‘you think that Socialism was invented by Marx, sitting in a London suburb, and was a product of your own early industrialization. You imagine that Britain taught the French, whereas the reality was otherwise. You must emancipate yourself, Monsieur, from your bourgeois Anglo-Saxon complacence, or you will never make an historian.’
I was in turn irritated and offended by his classification of me, as I was no doubt intended to be. But it gave me more of a clue to how his mind worked than I had gleaned from reading my way through his own doctoral work, a three-volume analysis of the thought and influence of Jaurés. I compared notes with a fellow student of his whom I had happily chanced to meet. She was a world-weary American girl several years older than myself with a post-graduate degree already from Johns Hopkins.
‘He’s a louse,’ she pronounced, puffing smoke over her usual double black coffee. ‘But he’s kind of an innocent louse, if you know what I mean. He’s supposed to be so advanced and radical and sceptic and all the rest of it – he takes himself for Jean-Paul Sartre, that’s why he wears those silly black wool shirts with turned over collars, like a little school kid. But have you noticed how conventional and old-fashioned and shiny the suits he wears are? And those rimless glasses? And the way he keeps his handkerchief in his sleeve and smells of stale sweat and cheap toilet water, and calls one ‘‘Monsieur’’ and ‘‘Mademoiselle’’ all the time because he’s terrified of informality, and says ‘‘N’ est-ce pas” at the end of every other sentence? He’s like someone in my first French primer, he’s like French professors have always been. Did he tell you you were insular?’
‘‘‘Complacent’’ he said.’
‘Same department. He thinks he dislikes the British for being ‘‘insular’’ but actually he dislikes them because that’s what traditional Frenchmen have done for centuries. ‘‘Perfide Albion”, you know.’
‘Well, yes, but we are insular, actually.’
‘Yes, but so’s he. He’s not modern at all, really. He’s a nineteenth-century French anti-clericalist still waiting for the Red Dawn to appear. Secretly, he’d love to die on a barricade, but no one seems to be building them much these days, so he has to pretend he’s above all that.’
‘Someone did tell me he was deported during the war.’
‘Well he’s Jewish – or at least I suppose he must be with that name, but like most of the French Jews he’s too craven to be open about the fact.’ Her nostrils dilated scornfully. ‘Jesus, this is a fetid little country, I’m beginning to think they deserved to be occupied in 1940, I really do! But actually the war – at least until he was deported – was Gombach’s big moment. The one time I’ve known him be quite expansive was when I got him onto his days in the Resistance. You should try that, some time.’
‘Yes I will, thanks. You seem to have discovered quite a lot about him.’
‘Well I’ve been suffering him much longer than you have. But it’s been uphill all the way because he hates young women – yes, didn’t you realize? He hates us even more than he hates young men! He only really likes people who remember Verdun: that’s very French too. They’re a gerontocracy. Look how old Pétain was when they put him in charge. Well into his eighties. Senile. But anyway, yes – Gombach’s marginally better with men, or so Paul tells me. Also, he respects people who stand up to him. So you should try to cultivate him … Jeez, is that the time? I must rush, I’m late again and Paul will go into his ‘‘You Americans are all crazy’’ act. He only does it to be annoying – and he succeeds. ’ Bye honey!’
She rushed, and I was left in the noisy café feeling rather wistful and that I should like to meet the then-unknown Paul. I should also rather have liked it had he not existed. Hermione (for that was her name) had a pinched young-old face and smoked too much, but I liked her better, at that point, than anyone else I had yet met in France.
I wondered inconclusively how I might cultivate Professor Gombach. My first cold, damp Parisian winter was drawing to its close when he disappeared one week. The door of his office remained locked without explanation, and was still locked the next week. Eventually the sweeper, an old, dirty and deaf Parisian whom I prized because he claimed to remember the Prussian siege of 1870, told me that ‘That one had taken to his bed.’
‘To his bed? Then he’s ill. Ill,’ I shouted in French. ‘Ill!’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. Ill! What’s ill? Sir will have his little joke, I’m thinking. Likes o
f me haven’t never had the pleasure of being ill. Ho no!’ He banged his broom furiously along the wainscot.
There was influenza in Paris. I had felt wretched myself for several days the previous fortnight but, being too young, ignorant and basically healthy to recognize what was the matter with me, I had attempted to go on with my usual life. Fortunately kind Hermione had encountered me on my way to teach at the Lycée one morning, when I had a roaring fever that I had tried to stupefy with coffee and brandy. She had persuaded me I was unfit for work, led me back across Paris to my attic, telephoned the Lycée, brought me milk, aspirin, Vitamin C and paraffin, and visited me the following evening with other provisions accompanied by her Paul. It was the first time I had met him, and I would not have chosen the circumstances to be thus, but (as Hermione said wryly) in spite of being French, conventionally handsome and living in the expensive Sixteenth district, Paul was kindness itself.
So I considered that I had some current understanding of ‘ill’ myself, and since I needed a note from Serge Gombach in order to consult a particular archive, I persuaded myself that he would appreciate a visit of sympathy from his most assiduous student. It was a rash decision. I did not then fully realize what a closed bastion is French family life, particularly among the class from which my professor came.
I had vaguely imagined Gombach in some pleasant flat on the Left Bank, perhaps overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. Although I knew in theory that many Parisians lived in restricted and comfortless accommodation compared with their English equivalents, it was a shock to me to find my professor, this power figure with a name well known in academic circles, living in a high, peeling block behind the Gare de l’Est, a place that in London or Birmingham would have been classed as a near-slum. The single staircase was hardly better than the service one up to my own eyrie, and, unlike my own building, every floor in this one seemed uniformly poor. It reminded me of pictures of eastern European cities: perhaps, I thought, since Gombach was a member of the French Communist Party, he felt spiritually at home in such surroundings.
Give Them All My Love Page 3