Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart

by Stephen Benatar

  I’m not sure how he managed it but it was as if he’d asked me to go into detail.

  “Oh, all sorts of little irritations which make my stomach tighten and give me nervous indigestion. And I know this is devoid of sense but being so young doesn’t mean I can’t be hypochondriacal. My mother never seems to air the washing properly, my woollies often feel quite damp. Apart from that, there’s the whole question of noise. Soundtracks from the cinema downstairs, people hacking in the street, dogs barking, the revving up of cars and motorbikes—there may be fewer of them but they take longer to warm up. All that kind of thing. Do you think you can help?”

  He nodded, although ostensibly in reply to something my mother had just been telling him. A feeling of great calm possessed me.

  “Won’t you choose an occasion next time when we could have a proper conversation?”

  But he shook his head, with pursed lips. He said, “You know, this is such a quiet and charming sort of place, I wish I could get to Amersham more often. But sadly all the things one has to see to in this life…! Ah, well. No rest for the wicked.”

  My mother laughed. “But just in case you should ever grow less wicked, we live in the flat above the cinema. There, you can see it from here. The Regent.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He took out a notebook and wrote down the address. “My name’s Zachary Cornelius, by the way.”

  “Mine, Sally Hart.”

  I admired the thoroughness with which he played his role. I told him so. “But what I’d really love to know is who you are when you aren’t playing a role.”

  He put away his pen. I realized I couldn’t receive any answer now. I wondered if I ever would.

  Yet even as I wondered it (I wouldn’t have thought this possible) I fell asleep. Next thing I knew, my mother and I were back at home. I speculated on whether Zack had departed by train or whether he had some other means of transport. I speculated both on where he might have gone and, still more engagingly, into what period. I felt privileged he’d paid me a visit but, despite his pursed-lip claim, didn’t imagine lack of time could really be a problem. I hoped he’d very soon return.

  I also felt gratified that my mother had spoken of me as she had. I aimed to be just about the most considerate baby ever known to man. (Obviously, apart from Jesus.) An equally exceptional boy and youth. But at the same time I didn’t want to get labelled as a goody-goody or a bore. Fine athlete with a kind heart, cheerful disposition, inquiring mind… That would do. There wasn’t a single good experience I meant to miss out on—although of course I would; you’d need a hundred lives, not simply two, to do all the things that were worth doing, see all the places, meet all the people. Even a hundred would be nowhere near enough. And that was what made my present incapacity all the more frustrating.

  So there were certain drawbacks even in those early days. I hoped especially in those early days.

  On the other hand, in spite of these, I had begun almost from the start trying to live for the moment: something I’d often attempted before but quickly grown discouraged over—always because after a week, or a day, when all the elation had worn off, I had simply found it too demanding. Now, though, I believed I should be able to develop a mindset which, with time, might become automatic. Live for the present. In the present.

  At any rate, to kick off with, I was determined fully to appreciate my room: the one in which I’d slept till I was twenty-two, when the Regent had been demolished, to make way for a frozen food store. The room was certainly small, but small could equal snug. Also, it gave me back a view of the sky that would remind me now of the walls and ceilings in Cromwell Street, however much repudiated by the landlord, a view which even in my prior existence had constantly exerted a beneficial influence—providing interest, providing aids to contemplation. (And this time, I vowed, I would save up to buy myself a telescope.) The room likewise restored to me something I might have been at risk of losing, something which had always given me such pleasure, be it derived from gunshot blast or lion’s roar or the clash of steel on armour—or just the sympathetic laughter of a streetwise blonde. I mean the soundtracks which floated up to me six nights a week and which were gaudily woven into the fabric of my youth.

  Originally I’d liked the westerns best, and maybe that was still true, although I was regularly disappointed to find I’d gone to sleep before the final shootout. If the picture were a murder mystery Dad would tell me who the villain was and fill me in on the story as best he could; at most I was allowed actually to see one programme a week, although frequently I did a trade and saw two second-features—sometimes on a Wednesday and Saturday, so that I could flesh out the work of my imagination (yet this could often prove an anticlimax)—sometimes on a Monday and Thursday, so that for the next three nights I was able to have the enjoyment of a mental re-run. I seldom bothered with the musicals, but nevertheless it was agreeable to have Bing Crosby or Dan Dailey or Betty Grable sing me softly to sleep on occasion.

  The room, judged solely as a room, wasn’t extraordinary; but it had been mine, a place of warmth and withdrawal during the day—and at night, because of my view of the sky, a launch pad for starships and manned rockets, which had eventually succeeded a well-worn magic carpet and the albatross upon whose back I used to fly…especially on Sundays, when the cinema was closed, and especially in winter when the comfort of my bedclothes emphasized the magnitude of my blessings. My reacquisition of this room—along with the books, pictures, records, ornaments that would gradually reappear as part of it—this alone could have compensated for any drawbacks arising out of my frustration.

  (Okay, so I didn’t get the freedom I’d been used to. I wasn’t entirely my own boss. I could wait.)

  Compensated for all save one of them.

  The biggest.

  But how on earth had I not thought to speak of it to Zack when I had spoken of everything else from barking dogs—and damp woollies—to nervous indigestion?

  My memory of Brian Douglas.

  That memory gave me nightmares. My mother had forgotten to mention there were times when I woke up screaming—although, it’s true, she knew about only two of them; I could immediately contain my horror. If only he had died more gently! Zack had asked me to do it and because I trusted Zack I knew it had been necessary. And merciful. And right. But all the same…

  If only he had died more gently.

  I couldn’t regret what I had done; how could I possibly regret it? I felt completely confident there was a heaven, and that Brian Douglas would have gone to it.

  How could I regret it?

  And yet. Every single time my mother put me in the bath—some thirty years, for Pete’s sake, before Brian Douglas had even been born—I needed to school myself not to resist, not to grow tense, not to cry out in panic, and this, whether or not she laid my head back to rinse the shampoo from my hair, whether or not I got water up my nose or in my eyes or in my mouth. My God, I had to pray then—yes, how I had to pray—for Brian, for Zack, for Ginette, for every living thing upon the face of this earth, either now or in the future; my frantic prayers were not selective. In fact, I also prayed when I wasn’t in my bath, every time for instance that I’d been laid down in my cot and after my mother had gone from the room. But that was something different.

  Though always in the end it came back to the same thing.

  Always the same thing.

  If only he had died more gently.

  8

  For our first English homework at the Grammar, Mr Hawk-Genn told us to write a composition.

  “On any subject. I want to gauge the kind of work you’re capable of. The range of your interests, the depths of your imaginations.”

  “Oh, sir! Do we have to?”

  “Mine isn’t very deep, sir. I can tell you that right now.”

  “I don’t have any interests, sir.”

  “Couldn’t we learn a sonnet, sir? Hickory, dickory, dock…”

  Poor Mr Hawk-Genn. I now understood he was a po
et with a growing reputation—although this was something I’d discovered only many years later, after he’d committed suicide and I happened to see his obituary in the Telegraph. He was about thirty when I first knew him, quite nice-looking in a mildly effeminate way, a slight man of only medium height, with slicked-down flaxen hair, and a yellow cord jacket which stank of cigarettes. He left the Grammar before I did, having banged down a desk lid on top of a boy’s head and given him concussion. The boy, a new boy, had been winding him up by opening his desk every few minutes to conduct a lengthy rummage and treating the class to a running commentary on everything he found.

  We ourselves, as new boys, also thought we had the measure of him, even before he was five minutes into our first lesson. Whereas with Mr Horwood and Dr Derry and Mr Tank you realized you had to behave—to some degree it was a matter of reputation but to a greater one it was a matter of presence—with Mr Hawk-Genn it was believed that you could get away with anything.

  And the pity of it was, he would have made an excellent teacher. He longed to enthuse us with his own love of language and of literature.

  “He said on any subject,” Gordon Leonard told the class at the end of the period, when the master had departed. “Let’s write on rubbing up. Let’s all write on rubbing up.”

  The first time I’d heard this, fifty-five years earlier, I must have been uncommonly naïve. I hadn’t understood what the expression meant; hadn’t been aware of the activity it specified.

  “I know! We’ll claim we’ve done it so much we’ve all gone blind but haven’t yet learnt brail!” Gordon put out his hands and stumbled down the central aisle, zigzagging drunkenly and being helped along his way by sturdy pushes. “Alms for the blind! Alms for the blind! Hendrix, you’ve let off, you filthy beast. Don’t try to deny it. You’re disgusting!”

  And I had used to think he was so wonderful: this nonchalantly dashing Gordon Leonard.

  “Tell you what, though. Being serious now. We can time ourselves, see who can write the thing in under ten minutes. Say twelve at the most.”

  Then small, grey-haired, dynamic Dr Derry swept in, wearing his black gown, and the uproar was immediately quelled. He didn’t say anything but merely turned his back on us, selected an unbroken stick of chalk, and stood thoughtful for a moment in front of the board. At length he began to write. The chalk squeaked unmercifully for over a minute—for over a minute and a half—for over two minutes. Some of us looked at one another and wondered if it was ever likely to stop. Even I wondered that, because when it came to the minutiae of my existence I had naturally forgotten more than I remembered. But finally the small man stepped aside and we saw what he had written. “‘Manners maketh man’ is the motto of Winchester College and I should like to say how thoroughly I agree with that, and how I shall now do everything within my power to adopt such a laudable maxim, and to endeavour to live up to it!” We were then informed we should have to write this out a hundred times before tomorrow, obviously rendering every word in every line so legible that there could be no fear of our needing to rewrite it two hundred times for the day following. After that, there ensued a further silence which lasted, except for authorized interruption, throughout the whole of that miserable Latin period, our first, and possibly least enjoyable, of all that Dr Derry ever took us for.

  I didn’t know what to do about Mr Hawk-Genn. During those chaotic few minutes between classes I could perhaps have remonstrated, said, “Hey, he’s all right, let’s give him a chance!” But probably a better way was to try to win over Gordon in private, since Gordon was patently a born leader—or else hope to influence some of the others at a more conducive moment.

  Meanwhile, there remained the question of the essay.

  “Any ideas?” asked Johnny Aarons, as we sauntered home that evening.

  “A visit to the seaside,” I offered. “The life of a threepenny bit.”

  “Gosh, yes. Thanks, Ethan. Original thinker—ahead of your time.”

  I smiled. “Talking of which, you know what I reckon I might do? The shape of things to come! But not according to H.G. Wells. According to E.B. Hart.” It was a subject I’d often been drawn towards at prep school but which I now felt glad I’d saved. “I’d like—if I can—to produce something quite impressive.”

  “For Hawk-Genn? You’ll be in a minority.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “Minority of one.”

  “What about minority of two?”

  “Hah! You know what old Dallas used to say about my English.”

  “But if I try to help with it?” In any case we’d frequently done our homework together—and Johnny’s mathematics had always been far in advance of mine. “And why should we just sit back and let Flash Gordon run this show?”

  It hadn’t been a ploy but it was providential. A spot of rivalry existed. In times past they’d seldom vied for the greater share of my affection, yet to be better-looking and taller and stronger had certainly made something of a difference. For one thing, of course, it must have provided me with more confidence.

  It was strange I’d again picked Gordon for a friend but perhaps in some ways we were closer than before—in part, I think, simply because I didn’t fawn on him as I had used to. And, invariably more thoughtful when away from the crowd, he was by far the best person to go bird-watching with, or bicycling or camping with, a trait in him I had never before recognized, let alone appreciated. Also, as it happened, we were currently talking about buying a set of weights together, from the proceeds both of our paper rounds and of a visit from one of Gordon’s great-aunts (he was a generous friend), then exercising in his father’s garage. And since Johnny was less interested in physical and outdoor pursuits and more into music and the sciences—together, twice now, we had made an effective crystal set which passed between us on alternating weeks—they complemented each other these days much better than when I myself had not been so attracted to such things as hiking and football and fishing. (Though I always threw the fish back and still objected unreservedly to shooting.) Gordon’s father was a keen huntsman who enjoyed baiting me on the subject of blood sports but nowadays I could answer in kind, whereas previously I’d avoided him or, if unable to do so, had addressed him assiduously as ‘sir’. Previously, however, I had missed out on the tree house he had helped us build in their cherry orchard, the really splendid tree house which Gordon had also missed out on, since the idea for it and even the first rough sketch had emanated from me.

  So despite the changes that had taken place in myself (I often remembered telling Zack I was afraid a higher IQ might alter my personality but I’d made no allowances for other, gentler things), Johnny and Gordon were still my best friends, and it had felt weird on my eleventh birthday to have my mother snap the three of us in front of our prep school and remember the second occasion on which it had happened, with Zack and me standing on the opposite pavement and watching her flirt with Mr Dallas. When the camera had been put away I wouldn’t even have been flabbergasted to hear a familiar stranger asking for directions to the station: a sly joke, maybe—a wink across the calendar—engineered by Zack. Gordon had asked, “Ethan, what do you keep looking for over there?” “What? Oh, nothing, really. Ghosts!” And he had laughed.

  “Or perhaps I’ll write about the building of the tree house,” I remarked now. Johnny had been invited up to it a lot and though so far he had refused to come the subject was no longer awkward. “And how I told Mr Leonard I’d decided to become a vegetarian and that it was him who’d mainly been responsible!”

  He laughed. “Interesting. But, no, I’d still rather hear about The Future According to Hart.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m happy.”

  “What aspects will you choose?”

  “Thought I might have the Festival of Britain as my framework. Not really sure yet.” Instead of getting it done in ten minutes—or even twelve—I could envisage it taking something more like ten hours. Or even twelve.

  But I was wro
ng. It took me fifty minutes. It flowed. It flowed as fast as the ink from my Platignum—faster, in fact, since the nib kept scratching up the paper. It could have been a lesson in dictation, without all the pauses or the needless repetitions.

  Yet it wasn’t about the future. Mr Hawk-Genn had asked us to plan what we wrote so that it might build towards a satisfying climax or at least to a logical conclusion. Naturally I could see the sense in this but I had started writing with a mind that was practically a blank—save for the projected Skylon, save for the exciting Dome of Discovery.

  And I found the result to be horrifying.

  9

  So okay. I hit him. Big deal. He was a weakling. Messiah? The man who was going to carry us to victory? You should’ve seen him. He couldn’t even carry his own cross. Stumbling this way and that! Pitiful. They had to pull some foreigner out of the crowd. To get that bit of wood up the hillside for our self-appointed hero the Romans had to commandeer a wog! That’s when I hit him.

  And I promise you, that really threw him off his balance.

  He looked at me. It was supposed to be one of those I-know-you-didn’t-mean-it-I-forgive-you looks. Blood, sweat and condescension. Turn the other cheek. So I walloped him again.

  Then everybody cheered.

  All right, I’m not a liar, not everybody. A lot of ’em. But anyway I didn’t hang around to milk my sixty seconds’ worth of glory. I wanted to get up the hill before he did—three crucifixions there were going to be—I didn’t want to miss a minute.

  And at first it was fun, all but some of the women loved it. (Women of both sexes.) It came to him and they rammed that crown of thorns down even tighter. They bowed and spat and laughed and bowed again. They ripped off his clothes and pushed him to the ground. They stretched his arms along the crossbar—and still they joked and chuckled as they did it. They showed him the first nail. Good and thick and long and rusty; perhaps it had been used before. “This’ll knock a bit of sense into you, Yer Majesty! Let in the daylight, as it were!” I saw his mother’s face.