“I don’t think he’s come in yet.”
“You mean, he’s sick?”
“Well, it’s not like him to be late, so—yes—he may be. I’ll check with his secretary.”
“No, I was wondering in general. Does he have…does he have problems with his health?”
She laughed. “Not unless you count the odd hangover!” That laugh, so well remembered. “Oh, Debbie, there’s a Mr Ethan Hart in reception asking for Brian… What? Yes, I thought I hadn’t seen him. No, he hasn’t called in… Just a tick.” She looked back at me. “Is it something that his secretary can deal with?”
“No, thanks. That’s all right. I know where he lives.”
I’d have liked to stop and chat. But after I had passed comment on the weather I couldn’t think what else to chat about. It suddenly struck me it was a long time since I’d tried to savour my surroundings. I felt regretful as I said goodbye. A bit melancholy.
I travelled to Sneinton by bus. The bus was crowded. I sat beside a young woman with a baby on her lap and a wet umbrella she couldn’t decide what to do with. I took charge of the umbrella and was sorry when she finally got up. Hearing about her life with Jason, and even about the continuing disapproval of her parents, was preferable to merely sitting and becoming nervous; although otherwise I would have tried to pray. After she and Jason had gone, my prayer in fact began with them but then widened to include everybody on the bus. I nearly overshot my stop.
In the street where Brian lived there weren’t any women talking on the corner, nor was there any young lad pumping up his tyres. I guessed I was a little earlier than before. The rain hadn’t yet turned to a drizzle.
But the door was opened just as quickly. I hadn’t been looking forward to this moment: to seeing a face I had last seen when it was under water, to meeting eyes I had last met when they were either insentient and blank, or filled with such emotions as I might variously ascribe to them. For fifty-five years Brian Douglas had lived with me both day and night—become in a sense my most intimate companion. I’d wondered if out of all the people I had ever encountered in this life, always excepting Zack, Brian might be the one person who was going to recognize me. Despite the change in my appearance.
There was a change in his own appearance. It wasn’t simply that he wore a suit this time, a suit which I might—or might not—have seen at the office. His body underneath it looked more solid.
And, above all, I felt relief. It reminded me of what had happened once (or indeed twice) when I was young. I’d been standing by the graveside at my grandmother’s funeral—Granny’s not Nana’s—and then I’d been awoken by a tap on the door, and she had brought me in my breakfast.
The sheer joy I had experienced was something I’d never forgotten. Even though she had actually died less than a year later, I’d felt those nine-and-a-half months had come to me, on both occasions, as a treasured gift.
“Ethan Hart?”
“Yes.”
“Come in, sir, I was expecting you.”
He didn’t sound the same, either. This wasn’t a man who was dying or who was wanting to die. This wasn’t a man who was going to require any saving. My relief and my gratitude—if possible—intensified.
After he’d taken my umbrella and hung up my overcoat he led me into his living room. That certainly remained as I had first seen it. No emptied drawers or overset furniture.
I turned and faced him. “I don’t know why I’m here. Will you fill me in?”
“No, I’m sorry, sir. I’m not the person who can best do that.” He glanced at his watch. “But you won’t have long to wait. And in the meantime, Mr Hart, may I offer my congratulations?”
“I’d rather you didn’t call me sir. Nor Mr Hart. My name is Ethan. Congratulations on what?”
“On coming through.”
“You may do so with pleasure. But it seems to me I had no choice. Being invulnerable.”
“On coming through, I mean, with such distinction.”
I pulled a face and shook my head. “But, anyway, thank you.” I gave him my hand and thought about the last time we had shaken hands: barely a minute before he had stepped into the bath.
I said: “I’m sorry I was forced to—no, I’m sorry that I chose to—”
He waited. I finished very lamely.
“I’m sorry for what I did.”
“And what was that?” He smiled. “But first things first. May I get you some coffee?”
“Good God!” I said. “You don’t remember?”
“Then obviously we have met before? I wondered.”
“Most certainly we have.” Though, unsurprisingly, I balked at revealing under precisely what circumstances. “You spoke about a certain dream you’d had.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me, not in the slightest! I know the dream you’re referring to. Old Chaos?”
“You didn’t use that phrase, but it was clearly what you had in mind.”
Old Chaos. The bottomless pit towards which—in theory—all of civilization was now being irresistibly drawn. Well, almost irresistibly drawn.
“Yes, I was obsessed by it!” And then he gave an exclamation. “In fact—hang on a tick—I think I am remembering! I said that if ever I had a son…? But now that sounds so incredibly presumptuous! Why should any son of mine…?”
He broke off; looked uncomfortable.
“And talking of presumption,” he added, “when I spoke of the Once and Future King I believe you mentioned Glastonbury. Is that right? And I have an idea I may have asked…”
“Go on.”
“Whether you thought that Arthur would simply leap onto his trusty steed and tear off down the motorway? No! Please tell me that I didn’t!”
“Well, if you did, I certainly don’t recall it.”
It must have been the first time in my life—in this second portion of my life—that I had ever, consciously, told a lie.
“Thank God for small mercies,” he sighed.
“But, in any case, why would it have been presumptuous?”
“Perhaps I used the wrong word. Discourteous? Disrespectful? Appallingly so. I know this can’t be seen as an excuse but plainly at the time I didn’t appreciate…” He stopped again.
“Yes?”
“About the dream.”
“What didn’t you appreciate?”
“That you were the one whom it involved.”
“You mean, because I tried so woefully to take it over? I only feel ashamed I couldn’t make it work.”
He stared at me.
“But didn’t you realize, sir?”
I waited.
“There was no question of your taking it over.”
“I’m afraid I’m not following you,” I said.
“At no stage did its focus even slightly shift.”
“I think I’m still being slow.”
“From first to last that dream was about you!”
He wasn’t to blame, of course. It could hardly have been his own fault if they hadn’t clued him in.
And only a second later I would have realized this.
But in the meantime I had snapped at him.
“Oh, for God’s sake, man! Talk sense! Do talk sense!”
He looked surprised. As clearly he had every right to. I struggled to retrieve my calm—and pretty soon apologized. “But you had just come out with something so monstrous! Worse than monstrous! Blasphemous if you but knew.”
“Blasphemous?” His expression had lost its air of startled hurt, yet he still appeared bewildered. “But why?”
“Oh, God! Have I really got to tell you?”
Despite the oath, however, I was speaking more calmly. More deliberately. Partly, this could have been because at the same time I was having to fight back an urge to vomit.
The shock had come too fast. How long had I known? Thirty seconds? Forty? Hardly more. It was the sheer immensity of his mistake—or, at least, what I had seen as his mistake—which had broken through the b
arrier. Had briefly unleashed my innate, if generally controlled, fierceness of temper.
“That dream,” he’d said, “was about you!”
But then, suddenly, it was as if I’d always known. Not always, no, but virtually from the moment I had opened my book to begin that troublesome essay for Mr Hawk-Genn; from the moment I had poured out that hugely awful first paragraph.
Now I swallowed, and cleared my throat, yet still couldn’t get my voice to sound quite natural.
“You talk of crisis and disruption,” I said. “You talk of the return of Arthur. And you talk about these things—”
At first I couldn’t even say it. I forced myself to say it.
“And you talk about these things to the benighted oaf who struck the Saviour on his way to execution.”
Brian Douglas didn’t flinch. He only said: “And who five centuries later found his way to Britain.”
“Oh, yes.” My laugh was bitter, brutal, full of self-loathing. “Didn’t you always know that Arthur was a Jew? Not just a Jew. A disgrace to every decent Jew who ever lived?”
He shrugged. “Well, to be honest,” he smiled, “I never heard it mentioned, one way or the other.”
25
Other memories came: flashes from a past life of the kind Brian Douglas had once hoped he’d get in his bath—although now, presumably, he didn’t remember whether he’d had them or not. I saw a hermit living in his shack in the woods at St Albans and looked after in his dotage by the monks; that was during the thirteenth century. A beggar travelling throughout Germany, ragged and hirsute, during the sixteenth. A gambler in Italy the century after. I had a glimpse of him in 1772 sitting for his portrait in Belgium. God knows how I knew it was 1772. There wasn’t any calendar.
And—yes—I saw him, too, in Powys, in fifth-century Britain. Chieftain of a warring tribe.
Although these were simply glimpses, I felt an affinity towards the man, maybe not a liking but an interest in his welfare and an immediate acceptance. The empathy I felt for such as Isaac Laquedem in Brussels, Solomon in York, Arthur at Tintagel and even Cartophilus in Jerusalem was so strong, so instinctive, it could only have been inspired, I realized, by direct experience. I sat there feeling no longer nauseous, but dazed—utterly dazed. I had a mug of strong black coffee in my hand, yet I was hardly aware of it, and lifted it to my lips only absent-mindedly.
It seemed that every time I did so, however, I saw reflected in the depths of that dark liquid a further facet of my own personality.
26
Brian went out—ostensibly to brew more coffee. Zack came in. It was thirty-six years since we had last met but the moment I saw him I lost all trace of my resentment.
He told me his apparent withdrawal had constituted the final test. In truth, he’d never withdrawn, not for an instant. “But I needed to know that you could make it on your own. Even in the hardest of circumstances.”
“Why?”
“No, don’t be difficult,” he said.
I laughed. “I mean—do you have plans for me?”
“Certainly I have. So long as you’ll be happy to fall in with them.”
I felt honoured and numbed and undeserving. Perhaps the fact of feeling numbed prevented me from feeling frightened. But, although I sensed that fear might come, I also sensed that I’d be able to handle it. Anything. Whatever there was in the future could never be worse than much of what there had been in the past. And, whatever now befell me, I knew I shouldn’t be alone.
“But, Zack? Whatever induced you to take a chance on me—on me, of all people? Such an obviously lost cause?”
“The harshness of your punishment,” he answered, simply. “I had a fellow feeling.”
“Why?”
“We were both such lost causes.”
“Have I asked you this before? During other lives?”
“No, you were never ready to do so.”
“Good. I’d hate to think I was becoming a bore.”
“And that sense of fellow feeling,” he added, “was probably the very thing which they’d been banking on. They’re enormously devious.” He said this with a smile.
“I’m not with you.”
“Look. You wanted to make amends. I wanted to make amends. Forgiveness was out of the question for myself but at least I wanted to be the means of your being able to achieve it. Perhaps I just wanted to show I hadn’t forgotten, not completely, how to be one of the good guys.”
“Well, if you want my own take on it—and whether you want it or not, you’re going to get it—you’re not merely one of the good guys, you must be one of the all-time, all-round best.” I grinned. “And I seem to remember having told you so before. ‘You’re the kindest person I have ever known!’”
“Yes, flattery, flattery,” he murmured.
“Not at all.” But then I returned to his earlier comment. “Devious?” I said.
“Yes, William Cowper had it absolutely right. ‘God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.’”
“But what was he banking on? God?”
“On you, Ethan! On you! On your becoming such a downright, positive force for good in this world.”
“Huh!” I said.
“Huh!” he mimicked.
“Well, in any case, that was obviously no credit to me. It was all of it down to you: your showing me the way, your setting the example—your obliging me, even, to compose my own small print! Always it was down to you! So answer me this, Zack. Why is it out of the question for you to be forgiven?”
He gave me what he thought were reasons. But they didn’t amount to much. Not in my eyes.
“Yet surely, if God represents forgiveness and mercy, and you are repentant…?”
For I couldn’t bear the idea that, thanks to Zack, I myself had been slowly hauled towards salvation, whereas there had clearly been no one around to do the same for him. (“Perhaps I scare people off?” he smiled. “Perhaps they reckon I’m overqualified!”) I couldn’t bear the idea of me going forward into light, while he himself had to remain in the darkness.
“Just because you were once ambitious,” I protested. “Just because you were once tempted and gave in to your temptations… Just because you once led a rebellion…”
He tried to make light of it. “An awful lot of ‘onces’ there, for an educated man! And, anyway, who knows? Maybe my time will come.”
“Well, it better had! Because when I die, Zack, if they refuse to have you back in heaven, then I shan’t want to be there either. I’d rather be with you.”
“I don’t think they could ever have counted on such loyalty!”
He still made light of it but I could see that he was moved.
“Or love,” I added.
“Ethan, let me get this straight. What scared you most at the beginning was that I’d try to claim your soul. Now you’re actually offering it. But have you considered? You know how I react to temptation!”
“Which makes me think you need me all the more. And need me somewhere I’ll be well posted to keep an eye on you.”
“You aim to infiltrate the underworld?”
“Something like that. Why not? But did the G-men usually discuss their plans with the gangland bosses?”
He looked thoughtfully across the chasm which, metaphorically speaking, separated our two positions. “The idea has a certain irresistible charm,” he said. “The Wandering Jew keeping an eye on Lucifer. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“No, Arthur keeping his eye on the Bearer of Light. And being in the right place to do so, to know the very instant that temptation waves hello. Plus, attempting to repay an unpayable debt. And, yes, I am my brother’s keeper; and I’m certainly not one of those who regard you as being overqualified! So? We can argue this, if you like, all the way through to the Second Coming, but what I reckon is, it means you’re stuck with me. That you always were stuck with me. From the moment I hit Christ, Zack, I think your days were numbered.”
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ng without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Stephen Benatar
Cover design by Gabriela Sahagun
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8225-2
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Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart Page 32