Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  “You don’t think it’s all just clumsy wording?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think, does it? What matters is what Renata Shenker thought when we brought it to her attention, and clearly she thought it was more than clumsy.”

  “Well, Renata’s husband was a camp survivor,” I said. Then I realized I’d been a little slow on the uptake. “Oh, but you factored that in. I see.”

  “We did think it might weigh in our favor. But even Julia’s reader friend seems to have been shocked. Listen to her report. Here’s what she says: ‘. . . I have to confess I fear my old chum might have gone off the deep end with this idea . . .’ ”

  “Okay, it’s badly expressed,” I said, “but I still think it’s obvious what she’s trying to say. She’s admiring the woman’s stubbornness, not her actual beliefs . . .”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it did the trick.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to quarrel with Marco, and I wasn’t even sure why I was defending Julia in the first place. I had to admit I found her interest in this uberfrau from the Third Reich depressing, regardless of where her sympathies precisely lay. But I suppose I wanted the fight between her and Marco to be about what happened or didn’t happen in that Belfast hotel room. I didn’t want to see her brought down by some stupid smear, even if it turned out to be deserved. Also, I didn’t like the thought of dear old Renata Shenker being, effectively, blackmailed.

  Marco must have taken my silence for disapproval.

  “Look, all we did was send Renata a copy of both documents with a note saying she might be interested in taking a look. For all I know she was grateful to have had it brought to light before she went ahead and published. Might have been embarrassing for her if it came out after . . .”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’d have kept it decently under wraps,” I said.

  “Now, now! Nobody threatened her. We certainly didn’t force her to dump the book.”

  “I’d say it was a foregone conclusion, given who she was married to. Not to mention the Whitethorne Press being a major publisher of Holocaust memoirs.”

  He chuckled.

  “What can I tell you? We turned out to have the more powerful victim card, and we were damned if we weren’t going to play it. But don’t forget it was Julia who created it in the first place.”

  “Yes. And her so-called friend who put it in your hands.”

  “The reader? Ex-friend I should have said. One of many ex-friends, it would appear. She seems to have a gift for alienating people, poor Julia.”

  Yes, poor Julia, I thought. Nothing seemed to work out for her. I felt sorry for her in spite of everything. Her voice on Marco’s answering machine echoed in my ears, distress and rage blended in it indistinguishably: I want you to know you haven’t succeeded in silencing me . . . It seemed to me that whatever force was impelling her forward in this course of action, whether it was a real thirst for justice, or a deluded sense of injury, or just the pure malice and greed Marco believed it to be, she was clearly powerless in its grip, and clearly suffering.

  “How did she react?”

  “Julia? No idea. Not my concern. My position at this point is Julia Gault can rot in hell.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s finally over,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. We’ll celebrate again when you’re back.”

  I got off the phone, confused and dissatisfied, and thoroughly perplexed by my own lurching sympathies.

  5

  THAT WAS where things had stood when I met Renata at my mother’s funeral a week later.

  Needless to say, she hadn’t been remotely “grateful” at having her author’s misstep of twenty years back brought to her attention (or, more accurately, shoved in her face). I suspected she’d have pressed ahead with the book if it hadn’t been for the thought of her dear departed Otto turning in his grave. I don’t think she was afraid of public opinion, but she’d been devoted to her husband; they’d built the Whitethorne Press together, and it was surely the case that he wouldn’t have wanted her mixed up with an admirer of some member of Hitler’s inner circle. I pictured her in that little office I’d visited in my twenties, sighing heavily amid the stacks of manuscripts as she weighed her options and made her reluctant decision to ditch Julia’s ill-fated memoir. Well, Sir Alec Rosedale had judged his opponent nicely. But he was known for that, of course.

  I saw him at the funeral and again, later, at the reception we gave at my mother’s house. He and Gabriella were standing at the back of the drawing room by the old Dutch spinet my father had rescued from a burning building during the war, talking with a group of other elderly people.

  My instinct was to avoid him if I could. Not that I’d taken Renata’s side against him—I was trying to maintain a scrupulous neutrality—but on a personal level it would have felt treacherous to have a friendly conversation with him, having just parted from her.

  But Gabriella spotted me, her angular, well-preserved, carefully made-up features lighting up in an oddly excited smile. She tugged at her husband’s arm and he, too, smiled when he recognized me—less dramatically, but still with an odd eagerness, as if we were much better acquainted than we really were.

  Detaching themselves from their group, they squeezed through the packed room toward me. There was no possibility of avoiding them.

  After offering their condolences, they brought the subject around to Marco, telling me how pleased they were that he and I had become such good friends, and how deeply touched Marco had been by my support.

  Gabriella did most of the talking. Even though she’d spent most of her long life outside the world of fashion, she was still invested, in my eyes, with the glamour from her distant past as a runway model. Her firm, balletic gestures and severe upright carriage were impossible not to notice, as she stood before me, wafting a strong scent of roses. She wore a tailored jacket of ruched black chiffon with a large emerald brooch that brought out the grassy green of her eyes—the same color that glinted, in certain lights, among the browner hues of her son’s. Her voice had the trace of a Milanese accent, its liquid sibilants and refined vowels giving it a sort of furtive, corrupted, beguiling sensuality.

  “Marco says you’ve been a brick, an absolute savior. He speaks of you often. I can’t tell you how grateful we are. Of course we all feel very sad for this crazy woman, don’t we, Alec? And I hope she’s getting the psychological help she so obviously needs. But as a mother, I can tell you there were times when I wanted to go to her house and strangle her!”

  Alec stood beside her, nodding at intervals, frail-looking with his wisps of spun-sugar hair and shriveled pink cheeks, but with a gleam of alert intelligence in his eyes. His wren-like face had always had something impish about it, I remembered—an air of mischievous innocence that, from the research I’d done on him for my unwritten book about these characters from my parents’ world, belied a ferocious legal mind and a willingness to go to unusual lengths to win a case. Perhaps because I knew this, I had an odd feeling that under the appearance of a fragile old man conserving his energies by letting his younger wife do the talking, the reality was closer to that of some discreetly powerful sovereign carefully monitoring an ambassador to whom he had entrusted a precise and delicate task.

  Caitlin and our children, who’d flown in the day before, came up, and I introduced them. Again the Rosedales’ faces brightened with intense, eager smiles. Gabriella gushed over my son and daughter, complimenting us on their looks. Even Alec became effusive in his mild fashion, spreading his hands and making an elegant speech to the effect that even though both my parents had sadly departed, he hoped the younger generations would maintain the tradition of family friendship with the Rosedales, especially now that Marco and I had become so close.

  The vague discomfort I felt throughout all this I attributed, at the time, to my lingering sense of treachery toward Renata. Later, after confirming with my siblings that the Rosedales had indeed never been especially close fr
iends of my parents, I wondered if the whole exchange hadn’t been contrived as some kind of performance on their part—a piece of theater for the benefit of the various social circles represented in that room, engineered to demonstrate that our family was firmly in the Rosedale camp, just in case Marco’s story got out.

  No doubt I was guilty of some grandiosity myself in this conjecture. But it played into something I’d been thinking about ever since my conversation with Marco on the phone. He’d been elated, understandably, and I didn’t begrudge him that. But it was obvious to me that he didn’t seriously believe Julia was any kind of closet Nazi or anti-Semite, and that he knew he’d won his battle on what amounted to a clumsy choice of words. I didn’t even mind that, in itself. What bothered me was that he seemed perfectly okay with it. I wanted him to at least put on a show of wishing he could have had an opportunity to win by fairer means. But apparently it didn’t trouble him in the least that the question of what happened in that hotel room had been answered by means of legal transactions and maneuvers, aided by a threat of blackmail, rather than the diligent proving or uncovering of an objective truth.

  I thought of that glib remark of mine that Marco had latched on to back in the spring: the onus of belief is on the believer. It wasn’t actually something I believed at all. If anything, the opposite. I was, in my heart of hearts, an absolutist. Reality, for me, wasn’t a “construct” arrived at by some Darwinian battle of competing human interests and ideas. It wasn’t a prize awarded to whoever fought hardest, or dirtiest. It was something that existed outside the human mind, and independently of it. Whatever happened between the couples in those rooms—Marco and Julia in Belfast; Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the maid; Naffissatou Diallo, at the Sofitel in New York; Assange and the Swedish women—was an actual occurrence, fixed in time and unchangeable, not some quantum state of infinite potentiality. I couldn’t accept those stories as variations on Schröedinger’s cat, alive and dead simultaneously until its box was opened—their protagonists at once guilty and innocent, victim and false accuser. Nor could I accept them as fables on the limits of the knowable. The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable, and certainly not a matter of “belief.”

  I was still ruminating on these thoughts a couple of days later, when the phone rang in my mother’s living room and to my surprise I found myself talking to Julia Gault.

  6

  IN THE SHOCK of hearing Marco’s accuser in my own ear, I barely took in anything she said at first, beyond the fact that she’d read my mother’s funeral announcement in the paper, and seemed to think she owed us an explanation for why she hadn’t come. A concert seemed to have been involved, or the organizing of a concert. Southwark Cathedral. Syrian refugees. I was aware of condolences being offered, and of offering the conventional responses in return.

  “I haven’t seen your mother for years,” she said, “but I’ve always felt close to her. She was one of the few people on this planet who understood me.”

  Her voice, somewhat high-pitched, as it had been on Marco’s answering machine (though without the fury), had a singsong intonation that I didn’t remember from the past. Otherwise it was much the same, with its distinct mixture of flattened Midlands vowels and crisp, Oxbridge emphases—a rare blend of the regional and the imperial that, along with her intelligence and good looks, had made her a natural candidate for a career in TV.

  “Now remind me,” she said, “are you the one who went off to America?”

  “I am.”

  “I remember you! You were shy.”

  “Very shy.”

  “I think I used to make you blush.”

  “You did. You probably still could.”

  She laughed. “But I suppose now you’ve conquered America you’re one of those insufferable men who swagger about as if they own the world and everyone in it.”

  “That’s me. Master of the Universe.”

  “Well, lovely to hear your voice after all these years.”

  “Yours, too.”

  We chatted on for a while. She seemed eager to talk, or at least in no hurry to get off the phone. I had the feeling she was guilty about having disappeared from my mother’s life, and glad of an excuse to reconnect with our family. As the surprise of hearing her voice wore off, I began wondering how to bring up the topic of Marco. I was aware that this might be an opportunity to go a little deeper into his story—get closer to its central chamber, so to speak—and I knew I’d regret it, from a professional point of view if nothing else, if I didn’t pursue it. But just blurting out that I knew Marco Rosedale seemed like a bad idea—crass, and potentially confrontational.

  “Well, I hope it won’t be another hundred years before I talk to you again,” she said, winding down. “I’ve enjoyed it.”

  “Likewise.”

  “You know, I’d love a photo of your mother. Do you have one you could send me?”

  “Of course.” Inspiration struck: “Or I could give it to you in person . . .”

  “That would be nice!”

  “I could meet you somewhere in town, if you like . . .”

  “Come to tea,” she said decisively. “Are you free tomorrow?”

  I was. Caitlin and the kids had flown back the day before and I was staying on for a few days to start clearing out my mother’s house.

  “I warn you I live miles from anywhere. You’ll have to change trains about six times. I spend my entire life changing trains.”

  She gave me an address in a part of London I’d barely heard of and never visited. The journey involved stretches on the docklands light railway as well as the tube. It was raining when I arrived, and the walk from the station along wet streets with no shops or pubs to relieve the monotonous stretches of residential developments was bleak. She lived in a brick apartment building with pinched, jutting balconies overlooking a row of one-story houses behind a long wall. She buzzed me in, and I took the lift five floors up to her flat. She was waiting in the doorway, wearing a mauve wool dress with a loose turtleneck. Her face was lined and her blonde hair had faded, but otherwise she seemed remarkably unchanged from when I’d last set eyes on her, fifteen or twenty years earlier. We shook hands first and then kissed on the cheek, laughing at our awkwardness.

  “Here we are!” She showed me into a light-filled but sparse living room furnished with a wicker sofa and chairs with floral cushions tied at the corners.

  “I’ll put on the kettle.”

  She went into a kitchen alcove partitioned by a countertop—empty except for a small toaster. I sat on one of the wicker chairs, looking around.

  What was I expecting? Signs of derangement? Not exactly, but the neatness and ordinariness of the place surprised me. So did the bareness. Somehow I’d imagined her as a hoarder—of objects as well as memories, injuries. From conversations with my mother, I knew she’d been involved with plenty of interesting people in her time—politicians, diplomats, a minor rock star or two—and I’d assumed I’d find her surrounded by the memorabilia of a life that, even if it hadn’t turned out quite as expected, had certainly been eventful. But the few shelves were almost empty, and the walls had nothing on them at all.

  She brought in the tea. I gave her some photographs of my mother, and after looking through them she began reminiscing about her.

  “I remember how we became friends. I was at a drinks party just after I got my first job in television. I was complaining that I had no one in London to go shopping with, and she offered to go with me. Just like that! We had a lovely afternoon traipsing around the West End, and then she took me to tea at some posh hotel where we talked about everything under the sun—art, politics, religion, my boyfriend, your father, everything. Even you! I seem to remember she was worried you were taking drugs.”

  I laughed, and she flashed a rakish smile:

  “Well, who wasn’t, of course? Anyway, for the next few years she was like a second mother to me
, my London mother . . . I feel terrible for losing touch with her. I always have. There was a reason—I’m sure you know it. But it’s my fault all the same. I miss her . . .”

  I did know the reason. At some point in their friendship my mother had introduced her to a man in London, a young ­American. They’d embarked on an affair. He’d proposed marriage, and with my mother’s encouragement they’d begun making plans for a wedding—a lavish do at St. George’s, Hanover Square, with half of London’s cultural establishment on the guest list. And then abruptly Ralph, the American, had called the whole thing off. Though Julia couldn’t, and didn’t, blame my mother for the debacle, she appeared to have found herself too upset to continue the friendship. The episode had always interested me, not only for its melodramatic aspect (“Julia Jilted!” one of the tabloid headlines ran at the time) but also its contribution to the layer of pathos that was paradoxically what brought about the climax of her television career—her brief apotheosis—gilding her already complex aura with a final burnish of tragedy that, by whatever mysterious alchemy of luck and fashion, impressed her TV bosses as precisely the quality they were looking for in their new current affairs presenter, whose face would soon be beamed every night into a million homes up and down the country.

  I’d written copious notes on her for that abandoned project of mine—memories, observations, stories I’d heard from other people, ideas for scenes I wanted to write. I’d looked through them on my laptop before coming this afternoon, and the images they’d stirred, together with the more recent impressions conjured by Marco’s drama, gave me a peculiar sense of being among a multitude of Julias, from different times and places, in different aspects and moods. Julia and my mother gossiping quietly on the sofa in our house in London while my sister looked on, excluded. Julia visiting my father in his office as a young arts reporter, noting with private amusement his brusque way of talking to his secretaries and receptionists, while obstinately failing to flirt with her. Julia at nineteen up a tree with a girlfriend at a Blind Faith ­concert in Hyde Park, shouting out “God, Steve, you are a beautiful man!” in a voice so infectiously enthusiastic, the good-humored crowd below her took up her words as a kind of mass chorus, like a football chant. Julia as an absence from our home, a diminishing echo and source of perplexed regret, of troubling rumors. Julia as Marco’s problem, his seemingly indefatigable persecutor, her disembodied voice spilling out of his answering machine: I’m going to say you raped me . . .