The Sins of the Father

by Allan Massie

  She put her arm round me and was about to lead me away when she stopped and said, “But you haven’t a drink, darling. No, don’t drink that. We’ll go through to the kitchen and find some lovely Scotch.”

  I didn’t meet Franz at that party. I saw him, several times. He looked older than I expected and he had lost the pretty boy look of the photographs I had been shown. He was moving as if he didn’t belong there. From time to time he danced, with different girls, scarcely moving and no expression on his face. I wondered if he was stoned.

  “Franz stoned? You must be joking. He’s bored, that’s all. He thinks this sort of party’s terribly terribly un-him. But it’s me. I think it’s fab. Don’t you think it’s fab, Gareth darling?”

  She was trying awfully hard, I thought.

  Later, when we had drunk a lot of whisky, she said, “Let’s get out, let’s slip away.”

  “It’s your party,” I said.

  “I always slip away from my own parties. It’s the only thing to make them tolerable.”

  We went to a Chinese restaurant, but it was closed. In the taxi she threw herself into my arms, and kissed me and didn’t stop kissing me. Then she cried. When we got to my apartment, she fell through the doorway. I picked her up and put her in my bed. I ran my hand the length of her long beautiful legs and laid a quilt over her, and slept on the sofa. It took me a long time to get to sleep, and the light was creeping grey through the gap in the curtain before I did so. There was no sound from the bedroom. I had left the door ajar in case there was.

  She sat up in bed with the quilt pulled round her and the mug of black coffee laced with brandy held in both hands. She pushed her lips out to it, and looked about fifteen.

  “Why me?” I said.

  “I passed out,” she said. “Tiresome for you.”

  “It was OK. Why me?”

  “You looked so out of place at my party, Gareth.”

  “Are you saying you felt sorry for me?”

  “No, for myself, I guess. Silly, isn’t it?”

  She took to coming to my flat once, sometimes twice, a week. She came in the late afternoon when she had finished filming. The first two occasions we didn’t make love, though that was why she had come. I like sex on my own terms and I was afraid of being used, though I have never liked to use the word “afraid’ in connection with myself. Instead we talked: about her childhood, about her father’s strangeness – “He was pleased, you know, to be blind; it put him at an advantage. Of course he hated it also, but one part of him, an important part, was pleased. I never trusted him. He liked to humiliate me.” We talked about Nell and about my time in the United States. “The two girls I’ve liked most were North Americans,” she said, “but maybe I saw them differently.” We didn’t talk about Franz. Once she started and stopped and said could we go out to the pub.

  I thought after that second visit that she might not come again, but the next time she said, in the middle of a conversation about Vienna, “Will you make love to me?”

  Then in bed, she said, “We still make love, you know, and it’s wonderful.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “Thanks a bunch.”

  But she came back, and now because I knew that for the moment at least she was what I wanted, I accepted her unspoken terms. There’s a coarse side to me which has never shrunk from discussing my sex life, but I find I can’t write about making love to Becky then. She sought reassurance through passion. That’s all I can say about it. She wasn’t a happy lover. “Make love, not war,” they printed on T-shirts then, as if they were always alternatives.

  One day she asked me what I thought about what was happening in Paris. I told her I didn’t know what was happening in Paris. The news bored me. It was the students, she said, they were rising up against de Gaulle. It was a revolution. “Not another,” I said, “haven’t they learned? What do they want this time?”

  “Franz has gone,” she said. “To join them. I’ve never seen him so excited. Do you mind if we turn the telly on?”

  “He must be mad,” I said.

  It was on his return from Paris that I met him at last. Becky asked me to come round.

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Yes.”

  He was sitting in the kitchen in a denim suit. He was reading a pamphlet and held a biro in his hand with which to mark passages. He finished underlining something, and leaped up.

  “It’s ridiculous we haven’t met.”

  He emphasised the “ridiculous”. He began, almost straightaway, to ask me about my students. Were they politically active? A few were, I said; most were sensible chaps and girls who wanted a degree and saw it as a necessary step towards a good job and the semi in Kingston-upon-Thames, I added. Then he talked of the French students he had met: their wonderful vitality, their generosity and unselfishness, their commitment to a better world. He was overwhelmed by the manner in which they had received him into their ranks. Did they know who you were? I refrained from asking. He had had long discussions with Rudi Dutschke himself. It had been an enlightenment. He realised how his own time at University had amounted to nothing, just nothing. He had been politically unaware. He didn’t even know that the fault line lay between generations. Though it was of course possible to cross it; it had been extraordinary when Sartre had spoken out for the students, most of whom – he had to confess – hadn’t read a word the great man had written. But that didn’t matter. He was a name.

  He went on in this manner a long time. His English was very natural sounding; only the occasional intonation, the excessive weight accorded to particular words, suggested his foreign upbringing.

  He said, “I was brought up in a society erected on a basis of injustice, and it never occurred to me.”

  He was very lean, the skin was stretched tight on his cheekbones, and he moved his hands a lot as he talked. Then he gave a sudden smile, and I saw his charm: “But I’m monopolising the conversation. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never felt anything like this before. This exhilaration.”

  Becky cooked fettucine, which we ate with butter and garlic, and we drank a litre of red wine. Franz relaxed. Every now and then, however, he reverted to the subject of Paris.

  “I wish you’d been there,” he said, “both of you. It was a liberation. It liberated the spirit.”

  “It failed, didn’t it?” I said.

  “No,” he said, “it didn’t fail. Objectively it was a triumph. We achieved a breakthrough, a fundamental reorientation of feeling. We brought a new world into being. Things will never be the same again.”

  Later he walked with me to the Tube station. At the corner of the street he took hold of my arm.

  “Don’t feel embarrassed with me because you have been sleeping with Becky,” he said. “Besides, I don’t have the Argentinian cult of honour. That’s quite out of date.”

  “I didn’t realise you knew,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I understand Becky very well, you know. It’s because I love her. And so I realise that at the moment you can give her something that I can’t. She needs you. Don’t think I’m not jealous. Of course I am. I would like to be able to be everything to her, but, since I’m not, well then. She’s very fond of you, you know, and she admires you. She admires what she calls your very English common sense. So it’s true that you can give her something I can’t. And since I love her, I accept that.”

  But what I gave her was a child. It was deliberate on her part. She stopped taking the pill without telling me or (I think) Franz. Either of us could have been the father. We took no blood tests to determine paternity, but Becky was sure it was me. The baby was called Jessica, Hebrew apparently for “Yahweh is watching”. That was Becky’s decision and explanation.

  “It’s a sort of talisman,” she said. “I think that’s what a name should be. Do you know what Rebecca means? ‘Noose’. Perhaps that’s what I am, what I will be to Franz.”

  “That’s silly. I didn’t know you felt so Jewish.”

&nb
sp; “Nor did I, till I was feeding her. Then I came all over Jewish momma.”

  Jewishness is inherited through the female line, and Nell of course wasn’t Jewish. So there was a break in the line. But the choice of name disturbed nobody. Not many people think of Jessica as a Jewish name, despite The Merchant of Venice. Franz adored her. He would sit for a long time by her carry-cot letting her twist her tiny fingers round his. She was a bond between the three of us.

  Then it was the year of Vietnam. Franz denounced American policy. He took part in the famous Grosvenor Square demonstration, and had his head broken by a police truncheon. He was lucky not to be arrested that time. He was now writing regularly for the left-wing press and various underground magazines. When you called at the flat in Brook Green, it was often infested by long-haired chaps in beards and jeans, of great intensity and no humour. Franz listened to them, agreed with them, was one with them, yet remained detached, uninfected. It wasn’t that he was playing a part. His sincerity was not in question. It was rather that he moved through life as if it didn’t belong to him, as if he was enacting a dream. I liked this. However fierce his opinions might be, he was the gentlest person I had known.

  Becky was drinking less. Indeed for six months after Jessica’s birth she was on the wagon. She often went down to Nell’s cottage in Hertfordshire, especially during the school holidays. I sometimes went with her. We were given separate bedrooms. I believed Nell thought we were just good friends, without irony, though Nell had the habit of irony.

  It was a good time, and a strange one. There was no strain between us. Ménage-à-trois living suited. Maybe all women need two men, for different sides of their nature.

  Becky shook her head.

  “Makes you both sound inadequate,” she said. “Or me some kind of queen bee, sacred figure. Which is not so.”

  We went on holiday together, to a fishing village on the south coast of Ireland, where a friend had lent me a cottage. It was soft and damp. We lived on mackerel which we caught ourselves, and crabs and lobsters which the local fishermen delivered to our door. We went for walks along the shore, with Jessica slung in a backpack. We took turns in carrying her. She spoke her first words there, I think; none of them was “Dadda”. She would grow up calling Franz and me by our names.

  In the evening Becky sent us along to the pub, which was part of the village store, while she prepared supper. She liked doing that, getting rid of us for a bit. Was she preparing for the role of put-upon woman?

  We drank Murphy’s stout, never more than a couple of pints each. I talked against politics. I told Franz they were crazy, that people became political activists only to conceal from themselves the deficiencies in their characters. He gave me his sweet smile.

  “Maybe, often. Not true of Barbara.”

  Barbara was a young actress from a famous theatrical family. She belonged to some revolutionary splinter group and loved to make speeches in drab meeting halls and in public places. She looked marvellous on a soap box. Franz had got to know her the winter before, and thought her wonderful. He could laugh at her, but he still thought her wonderful.

  “Oh well,” I said, “life’s an extension of theatre for her. She’s just a girl who finds Shaw’s parts too small and meanly written.”

  “No,” he said, “she’s sincere.”

  “Actors are always sincere, but good ones can move a cigarette box that’s out of place on a table, even during the most impassioned scene. You can’t take Barbara seriously.”

  “I’m not in love with her,” he said, “but …”

  But …

  “It’s not expiation on your part, is it?” I said.

  “You mean my father? No,” he said, “that’s over.”

  “You told me once he found ‘meaning’ in political involvement.”

  “On the wrong side.”

  “Does the side matter?” I said.

  “You’ve read the account of the trial. You remember what Becky’s father was like, how he thought he could do deals, could bargain with the rottenness that had enslaved my father. He hid for years from the impossibility of his behaviour. I admired him only when he betrayed my father. Do you understand that?”

  “No,” I said.

  I ran my finger round the inside of my thin, straight-sided glass. It came up covered with foam. I held it up to Franz.

  “I find reality and meaning in this,” I said. “And in the lobster that Becky is cooking for us.”

  I licked the creamy foam from my finger.

  “No,” he said, “it’s not true that the senses are the best guide to action. Did you meet my friend Charlie?”

  The lemur?”

  “That’s right. I knew him at school. He was the most improbable member of a military academy. Carlo Bastini. He was a nice boy …” He paused and looked across the little smoky room, gazing beyond the fishermen in their high-necked sweaters and big sea-boots, who sat over their pints. “He’s queer, you know. He was the boyfriend of that journalist Ivan Murison, you know who I mean. Ivan was killed last year. In Tangier, by a boy he’d picked up, who robbed him. Or so they thought, the boy wasn’t ever identified. Charlie was excited by it. He says he’s still in love with me, but he isn’t. He just likes the idea, the same way he likes pretty clothes. Charlie’s on drugs now, and he goes in for what they call rough trade. I don’t think he’ll last long.”

  “So what?” I said. “What does that prove?”

  “Only,” he said, “that I could have gone that way. Maybe Becky saved me, but I’m not enough to make her happy. The point is, Barbara could never make that sort of mistake. She’ll never suffer from lack of commitment. That’s why I admire her.”

  You poor dear confused sod, I thought.

  Franz was arrested at a demonstration. It was featured on the television news, which showed him being dragged, limp, by four policemen to a van. He looked like a Saint Sebastian painted by a High Renaissance artist in love with his model. I went to see him in the Scrubs two days later. It had been difficult to get access. Becky was pregnant again, and refused to come. She said it would upset the baby.

  The left side of Franz’s face was bruised and pulpy. His eye was closed and his mouth swollen and discoloured. It hurt him to speak.

  “That didn’t happen when you were arrested?” I said. He shook his head.

  “You’re lucky,” I said. “The TV cameras caught the moment of your arrest. They can’t have realised there’s a record. That ought to be photographed.”

  “They won’t allow it.”

  “They’ll bloody well have to. This isn’t Nazi Germany,” I said. “I’ll speak to your lawyer. Is he any good?”

  “It’s a her. Barbara fixed it for me.”

  “Christ,” I said, “that’s a disaster.”

  “No,” he said. “She’s too clever for that. The lawyer’s straight down the middle, Cambridge and a Member of Parliament’s daughter. Sorry if I’m indistinct. I’ve lost a couple of teeth. Is Becky all right?”

  “Well,” Becky said, “he’s always wanted to be a martyr. You don’t know that side of him, Gareth.”

  There was talk of deportation.

  “I can’t stand Argentina,” he said. “I’ll get on the first plane back to Europe.”

  “Where to?”

  He made a gesture of spinning a globe and stabbed his finger in the air.

  “Rome,” he said. “We once talked of living in Italy.”

  Becky miscarried. It sounds corny. But that’s what happened. When I called on her in the hospital, she turned her face away from me and wept. I watched her body shake with sobs and slipped my hand between the sheets, and pressed her thigh, which was warm and damp.

  I walked across the park. Everywhere, that pale October afternoon, there were women with prams and push-chairs. I bought a hot dog from a stall to feed to the ducks. The black-veined leaves of plane trees floated like dead faces in the water. I passed a boy kissing a girl who lay on her back on the wet grass. She hugg
ed him, bent her knee, and the action threw her skirt back, exposing the creamy flesh of her thigh. The siren of a police car howled behind Knightsbridge barracks. An old man passed me, muttering to himself, jerking a string to which a scruffy terrier was attached. I swung left into Shepherd Market and stood for twenty minutes outside the Grapes until opening time.

  Barbara’s lawyer was good, too good perhaps for Barbara’s interests. The charges against Franz were dropped. Then Barbara and the lawyer both urged him to bring an action against the police, or perhaps the warders in the Scrubs, whichever (and I forget now) had been responsible for beating him up. He was eager at first. There were conferences where, I imagine, the pigs were denounced. Then Becky was released from hospital. Her doctor first summoned Franz who asked me to accompany him. The doctor explained that he was reluctant to discharge her. He was worried by her frame of mind. She might even be suicidal. But he needed the bed, and besides, you couldn’t keep people in hospital – did we understand? – merely because you suspected that they might do themselves some damage.

  So we took Becky back to Brook Green in a taxi, and she sat, white-faced in the kitchen, and drank tea and didn’t speak. It wasn’t that she refused to speak. She answered questions in a manner that was polite, uninterested and remote, as if they didn’t concern her. She sipped tea, and nodded when you spoke to her, and asked her if she was OK; but she vouchsafed nothing. Jessica was in Hertfordshire with Nell, and Becky didn’t enquire how she was. Then she said she was tired and would go to bed, and left Franz and me in the kitchen. She left us wondering if it was safe for her to be on her own in the bedroom.

  “She hasn’t any pills, has she?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t you see, Franz, how unimportant your concerns and Barbara’s are, compared to this?”

  “Maybe it’s part of the same thing. It is to me,” he said. “You don’t need to knock Barbara. Becky has no cause to be jealous of Barbara.”