Although I thought I’d forgotten what he looked like I recognized him immediately, believed I should have recognized him even in Oxford Street or Newcastle. He gave me a cheery smile, just as if he recognized me too, and fifty-five years ago I would never have imagined myself capable of responding. I wondered if Philip had once been the recipient of that same cheery smile.
I stationed myself in the gap between the van and the vehicle to its left, blocking the way to any schoolchild who might be in a hurry to get home, and stayed there, not only until I’d seen Mrs Bancroft drive past, searching for something in her handbag—“Why, that bloody bitch!” I thought—but until the delivery man had returned and with a further pleasant nod driven out into the traffic. For this I had rescheduled my whole timetable and paid to travel these three hundred miles. But at least it had enabled me to deal effectively with my conscience, had provided precious time to read, had put me in the path of an old vagrant I should never otherwise have met—well, more than one, of course, but one I thought of in particular. Had placed in my hand a hatbox which came from New Bond Street and which had something inside it that—I felt confident—could rival even Parisian chic.
When I got home there was a note from Geneviève.
“Philip hurt in accident. Serious. We’re with him at the hospital. Come as fast as you can.”
Also on the table was a duck, only half unwrapped.
I couldn’t understand it. Why had they allowed Billy Cooper to live? Why had they allowed Anne and Jacqueline, and Arthur, to be born? (Whom did I mean by ‘they’? The Fates—God—Zack—whom?) Had there been something in Philip’s future life which overstepped the bounds of acceptability? Some accident or atrocity that one of his children or descendants might have caused, bringing destruction to those who simply weren’t expendable? All questions such as these I only asked myself a long time afterwards. For the moment I went off the rails—at least inside my head I did—even if, on the outside, I might have appeared to be getting by. People were kind, sympathetic, supportive. The girls came home and didn’t go back to Durham until the following January. Arthur, normally undemonstrative, kept giving me hugs for no apparent reason. I suspected that he cried even more than his sisters. I often noticed his red rims and twice found him washing his face at unusual times. I began to feel that during all these years I might gravely have misjudged him. Had never really known him.
I was equally surprised by the lorry driver. I mean by my own attitude towards him. Especially in view of how I’d recently reacted to Mrs Bancroft. Geneviève beat at him with both her fists and had to be, quite literally, pulled off. But I felt no animosity at all. If it hadn’t been him it would have been somebody else. In fact, I felt sorry for the man: why should this quiet-spoken, pleasant-faced individual, devoted father of two, need to go through life knowing he had killed a boy of roughly their age? Would he think of Philip every time he looked at Diane or Harry, particularly when one of them was celebrating a birthday? If Philip had had to go, why couldn’t he just have died instantly, painlessly, from some rare, congenital, wholly undetected heart complaint? I didn’t understand the ways of God. But I told myself that this was his loss, not mine. I couldn’t give a fuck about the ways of God.
Yes, it was God for whom I saved my animosity. God and Zack. I hadn’t seen Zack in over twenty years. He had clearly washed his hands of me. A little thing like the loss of a favourite son was obviously too unimportant to merit the time-consuming inconvenience of a visit.
Fuck Zack.
People said that I was wonderful. How did I manage to remain so calm, so active, so forgiving? Mixed in with their admiration—if indeed any of that was genuine—was undoubtedly a deep vein of criticism. The subtext read: how can you be so cold, so distanced, so inhuman?
I didn’t give a fig for the subtext.
Geneviève certainly felt no admiration. “Who are you? What are you? Why don’t you rail and cry and beat your breast? You always told him that you loved him. What hypocrisy! The only one you ever loved was you. You’re the only one you ever will love. You see—I understand you now!”
She pushed me away when I tried to comfort her, when I tried to hold her in my arms and let her howl. “Oh, yes, I know,” she said, “you like to feel superior.” I saw history repeating itself, would never have believed that it could happen like this…so flagrantly! When her parents arrived to take her home to France—they’d been travelling in Australia at the time of the accident, impossible to get hold of—I had no idea what she might have told them during the car ride from the airport, or might have written in her letter, but they were atypically cool towards me for the few days they remained. After Christmas, when Geneviève and the children came back from Paris (all three of them had just paid lip service to the idea of staying behind with me; Philip would never have done that), I guessed our marriage would be over in everything but name. I hadn’t even felt convinced that Geneviève would come back. Or not for any length of time.
But she did. And our marriage was over. In everything but name. Never once did we make love again.
My friendship with her parents surprisingly revived.
My friendship with my wife just couldn’t make it.
Perhaps it never had a chance.
Because when, the following February, Gordon Leonard returned from wheeling-and-dealing in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, he learned from Johnny what had befallen us; and came posthaste up to Newcastle—by air. Ironically, that week of his arrival, I happened to have been on a retreat, in a monastery in Norfolk, trying to find some pattern to my life, some plan, some meaning; trying to gather strength, to make my peace with God, to learn from him the way I must proceed. With Geneviève. With Arthur. With everyone.
With everything.
I came back on the Friday evening to find the vicarage empty. There was a light on in the hall and my supper in the cooker and, once more, a note left on the kitchen table. But this time in an envelope—and sealed. Normally the only envelopes Geneviève employed in her communications with myself were used ones which she wrote on the back of: see you at about ten, make sure you heat the pie through properly.
The first time she had met Gordon had been at my induction in Dorset. They had hit it off immediately, anyone could see that. Part of the chemistry had obviously been sexual. But for ten years—or so I was informed under the harsh fluorescent light and with a tap dripping in the background—they had held out against temptation. Yet now, she asked, why fight it any more? Clearly she and I no longer had a future. She felt that with Gordon she could make a fresh start.
The clothes she hadn’t packed, she said, could be given to Oxfam. Evidently we should need to be in touch over details of the divorce—or would it be better to wait to hear through our solicitors? Arthur liked the idea of living in London and of completing his ‘A’ level studies at some technical college. Naturally I could see him whenever I wanted.
End of twenty-year marriage, or nearly twenty-one. I’d walked back from the station planning to take her in my arms, override her protestations, romance her, ply her with pretty things: with bottles of champagne and candlelit dinners and weekends well away from the parish; yes, actually to begin again, a third beginning, renew all those resolves I’d made at the start of the second. And I’d felt confident. When once determined on a particular course of action, I was usually able to carry it through.
But why in God’s name had Gordon come back from the States during that specific week?
What made it worse: there’d been a retreat a fortnight earlier I could have gone on. I remembered praying about it. So shouldn’t I have been given some glimmer of a premonition? The faintest stirring of a merciful sixth sense?
I didn’t even believe they had always held out against temptation. There’d been frequent shopping and theatre expeditions which she’d made to London at times I couldn’t get away. In retrospect, I supposed her bubbliness on such occasions should have alerted me to something, even when I’d supposed th
at basically we were still happy. But it hadn’t alerted me to a thing. I’d never had the least suspicion.
Yet had this been only because I would have deemed such qualms unworthy? Or more because my stupid male vanity couldn’t accept the fact she wasn’t sufficiently fulfilled at home?
Oh hell!
Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell!
I took the train to London early the following morning: resolute to win her back and sure that in the long term I represented at least as good a bet as Gordon, whose tastes up till now had always seemed to run to women in their twenties. I was prepared to do battle; and I trusted in my ability to be persuasive. But the porter at Gordon’s Knightsbridge block informed me that Mr Leonard had left about two hours earlier for the South of France, accompanied by a ladyfriend and a young gentleman—they would be gone for several days.
At first I felt tempted to follow them. They would probably be easy to find, I thought, staying at one of the best hotels in Nice or Cannes or Monte Carlo. And it would have been a fairly dashing line to pursue, one that would have been likely to appeal to Geneviève. But I had my responsibilities: a sermon to be preached the next morning, a heavy week ahead—with my curate and his wife departing late this afternoon to attend a family wedding in the Algarve and then remaining there for several days. The timing of it all continued to amaze me.
Besides. Think how embarrassed Arthur would have been.
But forget that untimely return from America. Why in God’s name had Johnny and Mary had to bump into Gordon, ten years ago, in one of those art-deco lifts at Selfridges? To avoid such a meeting they might only have had to arrive a dozen seconds earlier. Or a dozen seconds later. It all seemed somehow…so perverse.
Was this my punishment for having persuaded Johnny not to remain at Air France?
For having—once again—bet on a certainty?
No. I refused to believe that.
I rang my mother, met her for lunch and told her what had happened. Her sympathies lay mainly with Geneviève—I wasn’t surprised. She had once warned me she thought I was neglecting my wife in favour of my children. While she was talking, it occurred to me that Geneviève had never spoken of Jean-Paul as being an excellent father, not this time around. Indeed, she had hardly spoken of him at all. But in our last life there hadn’t been any Gordon Leonard, had there, resplendent on his dashing white charger? Or in his dashing white Porsche—his Jaguar—his Lamborghini?
My own days of excellent fatherhood were over; would-be excellent fatherhood. I felt I’d now discharged my duties to Arthur, my duties to Brian Douglas. The fact I’d failed both of them in what I’d set out to do was unfortunate but irrelevant. Let Arthur make of himself what he would. Now my duties lay primarily with my wife, my mother and my parish. Anne and Jacqueline were both so attractive they would soon almost certainly find themselves husbands. (And I had dared to think that Arthur was a chauvinist!)
But over the next few days I changed my mind about the nature of my duties towards my wife. Who knew? Maybe Gordon would indeed prove to be the person who could make her happiest. If this were so, then I should clearly serve her best by standing down. If, on the other hand, things didn’t work out for them, she would at least have flushed him from her system, and that perhaps would be the best time for a new start. I still believed a new start could reanimate our love and restore to it the strength it had possessed in the beginning. But then, of course, I had believed this before and mundanity had obtruded. There was no guarantee, I supposed, that mundanity wouldn’t always obtrude. I still hoped, not very nobly, that one day I’d be able to find out.
Slowly, too—very slowly, it took more than a year—I changed my mind about the nature of my duties towards my parish, or in fact towards the cloth. It wasn’t that I saw myself as being played out. It was merely that I thought I could perhaps be more useful elsewhere. I now had no family commitments. A man without family commitments was a relatively free agent. And as I had pointed out to Geneviève over a decade before…there was no shortage of good vicars.
I had to try to be of maximum service.
That was now my one reason for continuing.
To leave the Church wasn’t all that simple—there were many attempts at dissuasion—but at last I was working out my notice. While I did so I took a crash course in nursing and first-aid. It was my idea to do some voluntary work abroad, most probably in Africa, and see what opportunities suggested themselves during my time there. But then, in 1983, practically upon the eve of my departure—to Tanzania—there was that earthquake in Turkey in which the death toll eventually rose to two thousand. On the day the news reached Britain I booked my flight; and three days after that was slowly making my way by train towards the devastated areas. And there I didn’t any longer need to wonder how I could best make myself useful. Any able-bodied man who was anxious to help would have been welcome but one with nursing skills was additionally so. I thought I’d found my niche; had soon learnt enough of the language to be able to communicate reasonably well, if ungrammatically; had been prepared to stay on indefinitely to assist rebuild broken communities—even literally rebuild, for I was ready to turn my hand to anything.
But then, a year later, there was the famine in Ethiopia, and the year after that the cyclone and tidal wave which hit the Bay of Bengal and as a result took the number of dead and missing as high as fifteen thousand—and where, again, to bring succour and comfort to those suffering people felt like the most important work anywhere on earth.
In any of these places I could cheerfully have stayed put, but somehow, when news reached me of the next famine or natural disaster—or even, once, of the next war—the urge to move on was always so strong as to prove irresistible. Lee Marvin’s wand’ring star seemed nothing as compared to mine.
I’d meant to return to England in 1990, not simply to recharge my batteries but to learn about Geneviève and Gordon and to see my children, but was stopped by a further earthquake, this time in Iran, where apart from the thirty-six thousand dead there were a hundred thousand injured; and then in ’91 there was the famine in the Sudan. I had flown back very briefly in 1987 when Gwen had written to say that my mother was in hospital, and thank God she did, for Mum died just two days after I’d got there. She had been lucid, for the most part—and loving—and cantankerous—and had seen Geneviève fairly often, it appeared, though Geneviève had just then been in Italy, spending practically a year in Rome and Florence as part of her degree course in European Studies. (“Happy? I suppose so. But I never liked him that much—not even when he was a boy. Too glib, too plausible, too jolly pleased with himself. Not a patch on Johnny.” But she hadn’t spoken like that on the day I’d gone to her from Knightsbridge, so I wondered what, if anything, this change of view might indicate. Paradoxically, though, it made me remember chiefly how generous he had been: when finally we had sold our weights, for instance, he’d insisted I take half the proceeds. It had been good to have him as a friend.) I had returned to Guatemala City immediately after the funeral. In early 1992 I knew Somalia was going to be the place I should go to next, either there or Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the situation seemed so grave some said it could be hatching an apocalypse, but I wanted—no, not wanted, somehow felt compelled—to be in England for my birthday. Not just in England, either; Nottingham. I believed this part of my life had to be sloughed off officially, and that my birthday—or, more properly, the second day that followed it—would be the time when this would happen. After that I would be…well, mortal again. No longer the bearer of a charmed existence. Did such a thought please me, or perturb me, or neither? During the past nine years I had been totally absorbed in what I did and knew that I had been of use. Which, of course, was happiness…of a kind. But I wasn’t sure when I’d last been happy, I mean happy-happy. Possibly not since my arrival back in Newcastle on the day of Philip’s death; certainly not since my arrival back in Newcastle on the day of Geneviève’s departure.
Not happy-happy.
My return, then, to Nottingham was one I felt I had no option over—I was being led there hypnotically—despite the freedom of choice which I’d experienced in every other way. I thought it was intended I should meet Brian Douglas. This second encounter, second because I didn’t count our occasional nods to one another on the stairs, this second encounter would undoubtedly mark my final break with the past, the bit of ceremony which I believed to be required.
I no longer feared I might be asked to drown him again.
Or, rather, I no longer feared that anything could have the power to make me agree to it.
Somehow I would save him.
24
So…Monday 30th March 1992…and naturally it was raining. Steadily. I got to the office at about ten. Even now, even towards the end of the phenomenon, I was still surprised at how things remained just as I remembered them. Yet perversely I was more surprised when they didn’t: small details present I’d forgotten, small details absent I must either have imagined or transposed.
I’d have liked to see the name on my own door. But here—from the reception area—it wasn’t quite possible.
Iris finished putting through a call to Mr Walters.
She looked up at me with her usual friendly smile. “May I help?”
Although I’d stood and watched for a few minutes in the sixties while this office block was being erected, it was ridiculous to think I hadn’t actually set foot inside it or exchanged pleasantries with any of these four young women for well over half a century. It felt more as if I’d been on just my annual break.
“I’m here to see Brian Douglas.”
“Mr Douglas? Oh—do you have an appointment, sir?”
“No. But I believe he’ll want to see me; may even be expecting me. My name is Hart. Ethan Hart.”
Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart Page 31