Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart

by Stephen Benatar

  “Ah, my! That’s very comforting! I may have to accept.”

  “And you were only beastly to me because I was beastly to you. In fact, I’m sure I was the beastlier.”

  “You have an unusual way of putting yourself across.”

  “I can afford to tell the truth. You see, I’m a reformed character. And in future I shall make you a fine husband.”

  “I don’t believe you can ever have been that beastly.” Fleetingly she touched my sleeve. “How many children did we have?”

  “Only one. That was a sadness. I don’t know why we didn’t have a dozen. This time, however, we’ll make up for it.”

  The dance floor was deserted; had been, maybe, for some minutes. Abruptly becoming aware of this and abruptly becoming aware that I should take her back to her table and so risk losing her for the present I said something that must have seemed a little out of tune.

  “My Geneviève—but we shall be so very happy!”

  I immediately tried to give it a lighter touch, yet it had come out sounding like what it was: a cri de coeur: and for the moment she was disconcerted.

  I said: “Don’t worry. That wasn’t me. That was David Garrick, impersonating me. An instant of deathless drama but I’m afraid I forgot to warn you.”

  “Ah, then, were we married in the time of David Garrick, too?”

  I shrugged. “Oh, as to that…well, who can say with any certainty?” It seemed all right again.

  But the next second it wasn’t so all right. We had been joined by Jean-Paul and Jean-Paul wasn’t happy. His fair skin was suffused by a flush of—at best—impatience. “Ah, chéri,” said Geneviève. “Meet the gentleman from England. Monsieur Gérald, Monsieur Hart. Monsieur Hart claims to be my long-lost husband.”

  He shook my hand and muttered a conventional greeting, yet he didn’t respond to this statement with the slightest air of interest, let alone amusement.

  “There is some evidence in support of it,” Geneviève persisted, wide-eyed and meaning to impress. “He knew your name, Jean-Paul! So how do you account for that?”

  “No doubt he overheard someone using it as we were making our way to the table.”

  This was an explanation which happened to suit me, even if it did carry certain undertones. To wit, I was a spy. A grubby opportunist.

  “Oh, Jean-Paul,” she said, “how prosaic you are! Even on New Year’s Eve. How unpoetic! How practical! How typically French!”

  “Geneviève, you are wanted back at the table. Besides, it seems odd, your continuing to stand here in this way. You are drawing attention to yourself.”

  Geneviève gave me her hand. “But we can’t help that, can we, Monsieur Hart? Not if while standing here we make such a very handsome couple?” She was obviously annoyed with Jean-Paul, a little unfairly, on account of his failure to enter into the spirit of her game. “Ah, well, monsieur. It has been nice. I shall remember this encounter.”

  I kept hold of her hand for several seconds longer than was needed—or even proper—and looked her in the eye as I did so. “Au revoir, Geneviève. Bonne année! A la prochaine.”

  Jean-Paul gave a little tst of irritation. He took Geneviève’s arm and firmly led her away. I myself returned to Johnny.

  “Well done,” he said. “I watched you both. It looked as though you were really…I don’t know…getting through to her. Smarmy devil.”

  He had risen, expressly to shake my hand and clap me on the back.

  “So what happens now?” he asked.

  “I know her address. Tomorrow I go and sing ‘On the street where you live’ on the street where she lives.”

  “You do, do you? So I have to play the abandoned tourist?”

  “Johnny, it’s for your own good. Remember that. But let’s not think about tomorrow. Right now I’m going to order some champagne. This is an occasion which I feel demands it.”

  “In a place like this, champagne is going to knock you back a bob or two.”

  “So much the better,” I said. And actually I meant it. One of my constant small battles was against meanness. When for fifty years or more you’ve been a little tight with your money, the defect isn’t one you can easily eradicate, just because you want to.

  “Hope you won’t regret it when you see your bill! Hope you won’t regret it in the morning!”

  He obviously didn’t intend it but his tone was faintly taunting. This implicit reminder that the crest of the wave descends into the trough was no doubt timely yet I could have done without it. For some reason it made me think of the last New Year’s Eve on which I’d seen Ginette; and suddenly a chill passed through me. It was impossible to imagine Geneviève as the same woman. Impossible—and yet only too possible as well—to imagine me as the same man. We hadn’t even stayed up until midnight. We’d had a glass or two of sherry, yes, watched some television, spoken as little as we usually did, gone upstairs about eleven—upstairs and to our separate rooms. But it wasn’t as if we hadn’t started out, then too, as lively, decent, well-intentioned people, both of us. It wasn’t even as if, fundamentally, we hadn’t each remained decent and well-intentioned, although certainly not lively.

  No wonder that I shuddered.

  18

  We got married in Paris, in June 1960; and in the following September Johnny enrolled at the City of Westminster College in Victoria to study four ‘A’ levels. Less than a year later he passed them all and—having applied to Durham to read for a degree in music—he never met Sandra and was never lucky enough to have Geneviève for a colleague. In fact, Geneviève never went to Air France. Apart from all else, she was too busy bringing up babies. Anne came in 1961, Jacqueline in ’62. After a two-month honeymoon in France we had returned to live in Lincoln: a rented house in Steep Hill, quite close to the cathedral. There I studied for three years at the Theological College, which I could scarcely have managed if my parents-in-law, bless them, hadn’t been helping out financially. Life was good. Life was terrific. My wife and my daughters were as lovely as any man’s wife and daughters possibly could be. And I had very much chosen a career which suited me. My studies weren’t purely academic, either. Far from it. I spent a lot of my time getting out into the villages around Lincoln, being inducted into preaching and pastoral work, hospital-visiting, school-teaching, learning about mental health and psychiatric care—I mean, learning about them as much on the job as in the classroom. And then towards the end of my course the college found me a position in the one city which I’d been holding out for. At Petertide I was ordained as deacon in Southwell Minster and having been licensed to St Andrew’s in Nottingham I then began life as a curate. My curacy and Geneviève’s new pregnancy roughly coincided. The following year I would be twenty-seven. I wanted the baby to be born on my birthday and I prayed that it would be a boy.

  Obviously I knew I must be grateful for whatever God sent, but to have a son born in Nottingham on my twenty-seventh birthday had been an overriding ambition since my late teens. More than an ambition. A necessity.

  And he had to be called Arthur.

  “Zut! What kind of crazy British name is that? In France they would just laugh at it. This isn’t Camelot, it’s not the Middle Ages.” Geneviève ran her finger round my ear enticingly—along the nape and round my other ear. “Darling, why can’t we have Philipe? Even Philip? I know you like Philip, you’ve already told me so.” I promised her that Philip would be the name of our next son and remained adamant on the choice of Arthur. Since, for the girls, I had wanted Sally and Rebecca, but had prudently given in to her on each occasion, she knew she wasn’t justified in denying me the name I wanted now. “Merde!” she said. “I hope that it will be a girl!” But her pout turned—as I had known it would—to giggles when I told her that even the crazy British might consider this a touch eccentric: a little girl named Arthur. It also helped that I had deliberately brought the topic up in bed and that I knew her ticklish spots and had most shamelessly exploited my knowledge.

  However, I s
till realized there was something virtually unbalanced about the way I felt. I was objective enough to know that if I’d met anyone who had advocated a similar scenario, or even smilingly encouraged mine, I should have given them a pretty wide berth. And yet the thing was in my blood. I lived it, breathed it, thought about it as I went to sleep, thought about it when I woke.

  For Arthur—of course—was to be my means of recompense to Brian Douglas: the son he’d never had, never could have had, but who was going to make his dream come true—as literally, that is, as lay within my grasp and within Arthur’s own predisposition and abilities. A senseless vow maybe, made to myself, not even to the man whom I had so finally, if ambivalently, sinned against…or in any case not made to him directly. Senseless and perhaps inordinately presumptuous.

  Yet wholly inescapable.

  Or so it had seemed.

  But also… Wasn’t it significant that from the time I’d made my vow I hadn’t once been troubled by that nightmare? A nightmare hitherto relentless?

  Okay, this could well have been psychological. Yet, even so, I saw it as a sign.

  Though again I agree: I was always fairly good at spotting signs.

  On the 20th of March 1964 I wrote a letter to my former English master and sent it via his publishers. It was a short letter in which I simply told him I had read his poems and how very much some of them had meant to me—and in which I asked if we might meet, possibly in London. I don’t know which was dominant, my sadness or my guilt, when two days later I received an answer not from him but from his editor, to the effect that Humphrey Hawk-Genn had “very tragically passed away on March 9th,” barely a fortnight earlier, “just when he seemed to be getting fully into his stride, potentially a most tremendous loss to the world of English letters.” I was shaken, and castigated myself for days because I hadn’t written sooner. There wouldn’t have been a thing to stop me. But I’d thought I still had plenty of opportunity and hadn’t made allowance for the fact that time so often caught me out: either by the sheer rapidity of its passing or, indeed, by the exact opposite. Still. Since my feelings of shame and inadequacy, which even prayer apparently could do little to exorcise, were obviously of no value to anyone, it was as well that by then my birthday was approaching and that things about the house were hectic: Geneviève was expecting to go into labour at literally any moment.

  And she did so—most wonderfully—at 9pm on March 27th; and our child was born a little under six hours later. And he was our first boy and when he was merely minutes old Geneviève held him to her with tears in her eyes and whispered, “Oh, mon petit mignon, que tu es beau! Tu es tellement beau, mon chéri, que je te pardonne immédiatement que tu t’appelle Arthur.”

  19

  Nottingham in the middle sixties was a lot pleasanter than in the early nineties—even though the mystifying vandalism that could tear down acres of fine Georgian housing in order to replace them with unmitigated ugliness was by then well under way. We lived in Forest Road, which was peaceful and tree-lined, in a late-Victorian house that belonged to the Church and was not only about the same age as our old one in Park Avenue, but likewise had three floors and knew all about rattling window frames and irrepressible, frequently icy, draughts. (And here we had no central heating.) St Andrew’s was roughly equidistant between the two. Sometimes I used to cycle up the hill expressly to have a look at No 17—which was now let out to students—and to remind myself of how extraordinarily blest I was; and that I should never, ever, start to take for granted a life so cram-full of miracles. Park Avenue represented deadness; or, at best, limbo. Forest Road, on the other hand, seemed practically in paradise.

  20

  Arthur grew up against a background of classical music. I’d put a record-player in his nursery and from the very start kept it softly on the go, or as much as was feasible—at least it had an auto-changer. But oh, I thought, for a tape deck complete with auto-reverse or an eight-track cartridge player! Or what about, just possibly, an endless loop? Anyhow, I was doing my best to be inventive in that region, and, more practically, to inspire Johnny to be inventive in it, too. At all events Arthur, when awake, was seldom without good music for any appreciable length of time; and even when he was asleep wouldn’t some part of his brain, or soul, still be receptive to it? Both the girls had been breastfed and at first I felt disappointed that on this occasion Geneviève had dried up, but in one respect I came to look upon it as a blessing: that I myself could spend time with him during the night, either for one feed or for two, and thus provide not only more music but poetry as well—including passages from Shakespeare and Chaucer—while my son sucked, pausingly, upon his gently sloshing Cow & Gate. Under this general heading of poetry there also figured occasional readings from the King James Bible. Both Testaments.

  All right, you may laugh. I admit that on one level it was ludicrous, the idea of a month-old baby being subjected to Middle English. But on the other hand…what harm? There weren’t going to be any end-of-term tests, I would fight against unacceptable pressures being imposed by a too-demanding father. At the worst, perhaps, he would get a bit muddled. But if he started speaking in Tennysonian verse or soaring biblical cadences while clamouring for his potty, or for Marmite on his bread, all this could be sorted out when it happened. Surely it was worth an element of risk?

  Geneviève didn’t know at first about our son’s early exposure to literature, for although she wasn’t disapproving of the music—well, not exactly—there was one aspect of it that worried her.

  “Why now? It may be good or it may be…inutile, but why didn’t you do any of this for Anne or Jacqueline?” Hairbrush poised, she watched me in the mirror.

  “I should have done. I didn’t think.”

  I should have done. I hadn’t thought.

  “Then why didn’t you think? Experiments are fine but—do the girls mean less to you than Arthur?”

  “No, of course not.” Nor did they—considered purely as persons and personalities. “Surely you know how much I love them. Have I ever left you in any doubt of that?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Sweetheart, I can only say I had my studies to contend with when the girls were Arthur’s age—so much was going on—everything, everything, was new to us…” I spread my hands and hoped for understanding. We both watched our reflections.

  “Then it isn’t just because they were girls but now you have the boy you always wanted? Oh, I remember how everything had to be so completely right from the very first minute you knew I was pregnant. Even the name…”

  “And didn’t everything have to be so completely right from the minute I knew you were pregnant with Anne, and then with Jacqueline? Didn’t it?”

  “Yes, but not quite in the same way. And you were never so concerned before with—oh, I don’t know—with whether they were warm enough…or too quiet…or lying in the right position… You never once mentioned ce cauchemar effroyable, this thing you call the cot death.”

  I should plainly have foreseen all this.

  “So I ask again. It isn’t because, deep down, you think that girls are somehow less important than boys?”

  “Darling, I swear it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I promise you I couldn’t be more sure.” It was at times like this that I got glimpses of the woman I had left at an earlier dressing table, a mere mile from the dressing table at which she now sat. Such glimpses were a little frightening but in some way reassuring. Ginette was integral to Geneviève; Geneviève was integral to Ginette. There was no fear that, over the years, the two would grow apart.

  She allowed herself to be convinced. And in the circumstances I decided not to pick her up on that statement she had made: ‘the boy you always wanted’. It was a complete misreading of the case. If we had to speak in those terms at all, then Philip was the boy I’d always wanted. It was partly for Philip—very much for Philip—that I had gone through all of this in the first place. Although I was now indescribably happ
y to have gone through all of this in the first place, there was a strong chance that if it hadn’t been for Philip, Arthur wouldn’t even be here. Nor would Anne. Nor Jacqueline.

  The situation developed one night when Geneviève, happening to wake and go out to the loo whilst I was feeding Arthur, heard me reciting to him.

  “‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie…’”

  “Oh, darling!” she remonstrated. “What are you doing to him? My poor little pet! The Tempest? He’s barely five months old!”

  Irrelevantly, I was impressed she knew it was The Tempest. But then I remembered we’d seen a production of it at the Theatre Royal only the previous year. I made a stupid joke.

  “You’re lucky it wasn’t Titus Andronicus.”

  She looked at me angrily. “Assez de faux-fuyants!” She came and gathered up our bright little son in his Babygro suit and took the bottle from me and the wooden chair. Arthur looked surprised but interested. Geneviève kissed him under his chin and made him chuckle. “Ah, ton coquin papa! Que fait-il? Mon petit chou, mon pauvre petit! Where the bee sucks, there suck I. Ma foi!”

  Arthur renewed his chuckle.

  I’d felt tempted to say I’d been entertaining myself rather than him. But the pause had given me time to realize I mustn’t.

  “You go back to bed,” she ordered, in a harsh tone. I was clearly in disgrace; Arthur hadn’t saved me. “If you must feed him poetry, what’s wrong with Jack and Jill or Baa-Baa Black Sheep?” What indeed? In my zeal I had wholly overlooked the nursery rhymes, perhaps on the assumption that he’d soon enough get to know those anyway. And as Geneviève now pointed out: I had told them often enough to his sisters. “And why must it always be Mozart or Vivaldi or Purcell? Why not Piaf or Trenet or Aznavour? And turn off that machine please, whoever it is. I am going to sing my son a lullaby…in French. I am going to have a whole long conversation with him, about silly, unimportant things…in French. So there!”