– An odd case indeed, you’re thinking. It doesn’t make sense. Well, nor to me. But it may at least make sense of things in my story which must otherwise have struck you as anomalous. I could see you were not altogether won over by the explanation I gave for going to Suez, for instance. You thought it strange that my father would have banished me to bring me to my senses and get me away from Michael’s dangerous political influence, and you were right. The truth was almost the reverse. I badgered him to find me a job in Suez. Philip had told me he was going out to Dar-es-Salaam to see his family for the first time in two years. He said he’d always liked Suez, for some reason, and I came to associate the place with him as a name in a fantasy world I was creating for us both. As I mentioned, there were quite a few boys at Eltham whose families were overseas, either Bible-thumping or doctoring or running the Empire, and they were the ones I tended to befriend. Some fascination attached to them because they felt different, they knew different things, odd languages and weird customs. I imagined they were familiar with stifling markets in Mombasa or Madras or had drunk cows’ blood with the Masai and knew the smell of opium in the back streets of Shanghai. My adolescent obsession with Docklands warehouses and cargo vessels was all part of the same thing. I think I described it as being a kind of poetry for me. And everything met in Philip. He became an icon. He personified Overseas for me, he embodied the landscape for which I yearned. So I imagined that by getting a job in Suez I might gain a foothold in his enviable world as well as being physically closer to Tanganyika. Pathetic! Of course. But that’s how children are when in the grip of love. Maybe we all are. Perhaps that’s the whole point of icons: to annihilate the rational.
– So because I went on at him my father reluctantly found me the job with Anderson & Green in order that I could at least survive in Suez. Why Suez? he wanted to know, and I spun him some tale. Actually, it must have been a relief to get me out of the house because I’d become intolerably moody and mooning and cross. I used to be driven into inner frenzies of jealous despair each time I saw Philip laughing with his friends, other boys his own age. Even glimpsing their names on a games list gave me a miserable shot of adrenaline. Once I overheard him talking to another colonial kid in some African dialect and my jealousy ran wild. What secrets were they sharing under cover of a language understood by no-one else in the school? Oh paranoia, envy …! Was Philip telling his friend how embarrassing and repulsive my attentions were? Worse, were they lovers? But the very worst of all was that nothing excludes like a foreign language and I realised I should never get close to him. Always and always I would be shut out. Even now, at practically eighty, I can catch sight of two kids with their arms around each other and still feel a distant pang of exclusion, like the memory of an ache for something that probably doesn’t even exist for them any more than it did for Philip. So at the time, eaten alive by adolescent dissatisfaction, I must have been a horrid creature to have around the house which probably made it a little easier for my father to arrange to put a lot of miles between us at my request.
– I found out Michael wasn’t going home to Africa that summer: he had long since left the school. Philip would be travelling alone and I was able to meet him in Suez on the British India’s Kenya. That, incidentally, was the occasion when I first got hold of the company pass from ‘Pusser’ Hammond, not when we went to meet the Otranto. It was very strange seeing Philip in Port Taufiq. I went aboard on some invented pretext and found him up on deck taking pictures of the harbour with his Kodak. ‘Good Lord!’ I said, elaborately amazed. ‘What an incredible thing! Fancy you being here!’ and so on. ‘Oh, gosh,’ Jebb‚ he said, blushing a bit with surprise. You must remember that orders of seniority were significant then and to him I not only counted as a senior in terms of school but now, having left the College, I was an adult with a job. For one awful moment I thought he might ‘Sir’ me. Fatuous chit-chat for five minutes, at the end of which we shook hands and wished each other goodbye. It was one of the few times I had ever physically touched him, and it was the last. It was also the last time I ever saw him, spoke to him or heard his voice. Like Lot’s wife I risked a backward glance but he’d gone back to his Kodak. –
And from that moment you became pure salt.
– For all the hopeless tears I shed over that boy you might well say so. –
Did he know?
– I’ve always wondered. He must have noticed something. We’re all quick to sense other people’s interest in us, adolescents doubly so. At some level he undoubtedly knew, but I wouldn’t think the knowledge ever became fully conscious. Too difficult. Too threatening, even. Anyway there it is. And I’ve no idea what you call it. You could hardly describe it as an affair since that implies the active involvement of at least two people. How is it possible to love somebody you don’t know? Infatuation? Calf love? Phrases like that have all the wrong connotations, with their overtones of a temporary madness that’s soon outgrown. The whole notion of ‘first love’ contains a suggestion of child’s play; but what if first love turns out to be last love, too? What if it energises a lifetime? Berlioz was twelve when he was foudroyé by the eighteen-year-old Estelle. He was a famous man of forty-five and she an unknown widow of fifty-one when he tracked her down, wrote her a respectful letter and finally met her again briefly. And he, too, could never write her full name. I don’t think this rare and inexplicable kind of passion can be patronised as ‘calf love’. Whatever else it is, it is neither trivial nor something out of which one grows. It is more like a miraculous sustaining wound that never heals. Philip is my phantom limb, cut off in adolescence but still occasionally paining me and giving me the exquisite illusion of being there. –
(This image jolts me. It is the very one I sometimes use to myself when describing the absent country in my life.)
– Do you know, to this day I catch myself speaking to him, so much a part of me has he become? On a morning like this I might get out of bed and stand at the bedroom window and watch the olives emerge from the early shadows like a secret and say quietly to them, ‘Oh, Philip …’ Something between a sigh and a prayer and a fond remonstration. I know it’s ridiculous. And times without number over the years when I’ve suddenly found two minutes’ respite in an aircraft washroom or some horrid lavatory in a bar in a ramshackle tropical town I’ve stared at the wall while peeing and said, ‘What am I doing here, Philip? It’s you who did this to me. It’s all because of you I roam and roam. Guiltless you may be, but I blame you all the same, and love you all the same. And shall do always because it’s too late to change now, too late to break out of this fond servitude even if I knew how, which I never did discover. Well, damn you, my dear.’ –
Jayjay is still staring up at Sant’ Egidio (which is Italian for St Giles), but that is not what he sees. At last he blows his nose and tucks his handkerchief back into its customary place in his cuff.
– Well. There is little we can do to protect ourselves from our own tenderness. Mine has been a blighted life, wouldn’t you say? A wasted span? How NOT to spend fourscore years? But the truth is I’ve flourished, in my fashion. Having your heart irreparably broken would require your long-term connivance. It’s far more painless simply to give the thing away, as I did. Expect no returns and you’ll not be disappointed. –
Yet this is said without bitterness and indeed almost tenderly, as though he recognises that with so strong a thread running through it his life cannot have been altogether thrown away; that no matter how heretical and inconvenient the thread, it draws a whole together. This constant inventing and re-inventing of someone who scarcely was, this living a life for a figure who is omnipresent yet never there, strikes me as containing the essential pathos of religious faith. Yet by being a solo effort Jayjay’s is surely a more pure act of the imagination and, in its way, quite grand.
No others, then?
– Oh, lots of affairs. All those women in Egypt, and I nearly married at least twice. But … there was always the but. In the last
resort they never felt like the real thing. Imagine, lying around in some tumbled pit of sheets with a girl I was sure I loved, yet always with that inner conviction that this wasn’t it. Not the genuine article. Can you explain it? Arrested development, whatever that might mean? Some perverse urge to remain true to a former version of myself, no matter how much it might blight me? –
And what became of Philip?
– For a long time I didn’t want to know. I was sure he’d been killed in the war. But many years ago I had some discreet snooping done because by then I wanted proof that this mythical creature who ruled my life really did have an objective existence. And he had. Royal Navy during the war, convoy protection; sunk outside Murmansk but by a miracle plucked out of the water in under a minute and thawed out. Survived war; became a farmer in South Africa; married an English girl from Devon out there; two kids; etcetera. I learned all that twenty years ago. He may be dead now for all I know. But I was glad to have found out about him. I could say that because of him my own life has been eccentric, adventurous, interesting and so on. And I could say that despite me his has probably been quite a bit less so once the war was over. I was pleased his life appeared to be so normal. It’s all very well but most people don’t actually want adventure and eccentricity: they want an ordinary family life and a secure living. So I’m happy for him. I suppose he may have turned into a bald, leathery old Kaffir-beater but for me he will always be the boy I first knew with fine blond hair and those still unshaven sideburns that come to silky wicks.
– So what was it? What is it? I’ve read a lot but the books don’t know. With the modern passion for medical categories into which everything must be squeezed it would doubtless be referred to as a sexual dysfunction. I think by now you’ll have to agree that I’m neither bashful nor inhibited about sex, so I can at least give the point due consideration and say truthfully that it doesn’t feel like a sexual matter so much as, well, a poetic one. Besides, I’m not sexually dysfunctional. I’ve never had any problems on that score with either gender. No, it isn’t a dysfunction in the sense that a fetish would be, without which one might be impotent. I’ll certainly allow that it involves the erotic; but the erotic is another category that has been debased and shrunk to become a shorthand for genital sex, whereas genital sex is only a single aspect of the erotic. The erotic thrives on subtleties, on matters of poetry and the imagination, but we’re living at the wrong time for those to be understood. A tabloid stupidity has overtaken our culture and we no longer understand anything about human behaviour that can’t be compressed into a headline. I don’t believe the twentieth century, and still less the twenty-first, ever will understand such things. The more they use quasi-medical notions of pathology to pry into the way we function, the more closed to them does the human heart become. Meanwhile we do our real living in entirely other directions. –
And all this time there has been a bee flying around us, settling on the edges of saucers and cups, pulsing her abdomen in the sun. It is odd because there is no sugar on the table. It is as though she alone has misread the dance of a returning worker up in one of the hives (with a proprietorial silliness bordering on the superstitious I automatically take her for one of my own bees). Here she is, the dunce of the hive, expecting to find a rich source of nectar and finding instead an old man breaking a lifetime’s silence to tell a rather less old man about a love as powerful and insubstantial as a sunbeam.
Would you ever think now of meeting him?
– Of course I’ve thought about it. Thousands of times. But it’s too late. It always was. What can be said on the brink of annihilation? Could I stand there and say to this old farmer, having first taken him out of his wife’s earshot, ‘I have loved you more than my life for most of my life’? He would think I was mad, and so I should be. Or else we would lapse into an updated version of that ghastly farewell on the Kenya, every detail of which is burnt into me by the glare of an Egyptian sun. No. I have only one thing to say to Philip, and it cannot be said now any more than it could then. These useless loves must go in silence to the grave. It’s the only proper place for them. –
The bee has finally left, but I notice she first bequeathed us a tiny dab of clear golden excrement on the rim of a cup. This pinprick glints in the sun like one of those flakes of jewel set in the mechanism of an old-fashioned watch. I find myself troubled by what Jayjay has told me, touched, distressed on more than just his behalf, as though what he has exposed is a part of the hidden works of any human soul. So it comes as a shock suddenly to hear my own voice. I am as appalled by its hard-nosed tone as I am by the actual words it speaks.
I’m sorry, Jayjay: I still can’t quite buy that account of your father’s role in your Suez caper. I don’t know why, but it isn’t right yet. I can’t make the dynamics of your blasted family jell at all (and then, with one of those leaps when the voice crashes on even as the lagging brain cringes to hear it): it was to do with your mother, wasn’t it? Your mother, Jayjay. Exhibit B?
There is a long, long silence. I am horrified at my ill-mannered temerity. When I dare glance at him he is weeping, silently, very dignified, staring up at the mountain and letting the tears run down ignored. Eventually he gives a brisk dab.
‘This’ll never do‚’ he says in a way that makes it clear he is no longer in narrative mode. Automatically I put down my notebook. ‘Come on, I think we need some more coffee. I’m not running away, James‚’ he smiles a little abstractedly. ‘I’ll come back to it. But just at this moment coffee is what I need most.’
*
– It would be too absurd for a man of my age to weep for something that happened in his teens, don’t you think? I admit I was dreadfully upset and messed about at the time but that’s all long in the past. When I started on this curious project with you I really had no intention of getting into any of the story about Philip, so I also hoped I might slip by without mentioning my mother except as a bland childhood presence. You can pick me up for disingenuity, certainly, as well as for being a lousy tactician. I reasoned that in telling my life story with, shall we say, enough picaresque detail I should not find myself obliged to trespass into areas I have never mentioned to another soul, living or dead. I’m still unsure whether doing so is down to some secret desire on my part to unburden myself or to your technique for interrogation that shocks one into confidences.
– My stupid tears just now were not brought on by what my mother did sixty years ago, although my reluctance to talk about her at all is a measure of the antipathy I once felt. It’s an antipathy that has long become fossilised, so that not speaking about her is purely a matter of habit rather than of ever-present trauma. No, I was startled into tears by hearing myself disclose secrets, which suddenly meant having to acknowledge a lifetime moulded by those secrets. I feel as though I’ve committed treason and deserve to be shot. It’s an uncanny thing hearing myself explain to a perfect summer’s day how I come to have lived the life I have, and why it has led so inexorably here to this terrace in Italy with you and a coffeepot. One rarely has to account for such things out loud. Still, it’s curious it should be so affecting because I’m sure most people do have moments when they look at their lives objectively, as though they were actually a third party, and are incredulous at what they see. But I suppose making it public is another matter.
– Well, my mother. It was that filthy religion of hers that did for her. We went through all sorts of hell the more she became fixated on heaven. I suppose these days it would be labelled a mania or something, and never mind what I said earlier about pseudo-clinical categories. To be blunt, the poor woman went quite off her head. When it’s a matter of mental illness the phrase ‘she suffered from’ is significantly inaccurate because it involves her family and friends, too. We all suffered, believe me. The worst of being a child when your mother goes off her chump is that there is never a moment when you can tell yourself, ‘It’s all right, she’s mad. She didn’t mean that. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.�
�� Quite the reverse: children will accept all manner of extraordinary behaviour as the norm simply because it happens at home. It takes a long time to come out from under the ether, to acquire distance and realise that none of your friends’ mothers quote the Bible from memory at mealtimes for half an hour at a stretch. Nor do they accost complete strangers in the Co-op and inform them that God is watching their every move and has big plans for Eltham. Perhaps we were more tolerant of eccentricity in those days. Or it may be that people tended not to interfere if someone was a pillar of the community, a nicely spoken lady who could still zip through the daily crossword and add up bills in her head at lightning speed. It was years before they finally saw fit to cart her off to Colney Hatch, which I think is now called Friern Barnet or something. And that was because she tried to drown a baby at its christening. Yes, I agree it’s funny, and the incident did rather excite attention. It happened during the war, when thankfully I was in Egypt. There were newspaper stories that she’d torn the baby from the vicar’s arms and held it face down in the font, screaming about how it was a child of Satan. They saved the baby but my mother took a good deal of subduing, possibly because people seem generally reluctant to rough-house in church. They carted her off to the bin where she died in 1949, wholly demented. Or dementedly holy, depending on one’s viewpoint. Perhaps the saddest aspect of it all was that her beliefs never even gave her the happiness they promised and to which she was surely entitled. My lasting memory of our household is that it was not one which had been made privy to Good News. Indeed, poor Dad never recovered.
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