Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  She could not pretend to be tired when she felt so alert; and, although she found the conversation with her father awkward, she was aware of an urge, perhaps inspired by the wine, to communicate in some way. She felt the weight of many unassimilated experiences pressing her for some expression.

  With an effort, she said, ‘I met another interesting man in France, a painter. We had lots of long talks together. I was a lodger in his house for a time.’

  ‘Oh yes. What sort of painter?’ Gray was lighting a pipe. ‘One of those daub-and-splash merchants, or the real thing?’

  ‘Oh, the real thing. I think he was famous once, but he says he lost his way. He lost his inspiration.’

  ‘I suppose that can happen.’

  ‘He said it was because he had stopped dreaming.’

  Gray laughed. ‘Sounds a wee bit like an excuse to me.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Charlotte did not know why she wanted to talk about Levade, but was reluctant to let the subject go. ‘He was in the war, you know. Your war. He told me some terrible stories.’

  ‘Aye, well, they were terrible times. Best forgotten.’

  Charlotte felt she was close to something. It was vital to keep the conversation going. With a greater effort this time, she said, ‘Don’t you think you ought to talk about it? To get it out? Isn’t that what you tell your patients?’

  Gray laughed drily. ‘Well, you never forget. It’s always with you. Just now, when I told you not to tell us what you’d been doing, I know you thought I was being rude and uninterested. No, wait, Charlotte, let me finish. It wasn’t that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, no. It’s just that when you’ve commanded a battalion for three years you understand about war. Security, intelligence and so on. You have people’s lives in your hands, so you do understand.’

  ‘Of course you do. I’m sorry if I seemed . . .’

  Gray suddenly stood up and went to the fireplace. With his back to Charlotte, he said, ‘My dear girl, I’m very proud of you.’

  Charlotte could say nothing.

  Gray turned round. ‘So very proud of you. Now, will we be friends?’

  ‘Friends . . . friends?’

  ‘Please, Charlotte. I know I’ve failed you as a father. But it was difficult, after the war. It was very difficult. I tried to keep a balance, but I was troubled by memories. And dreams.’

  Charlotte still said nothing, too frightened to confront what Gray seemed to be suggesting. Was he asking her forgiveness for what had once happened between them? If so, could she trust her memory of what had taken place?

  Gray said, ‘Do you remember, I told you once of how some men in another company took some German prisoners and then, instead of handing them over, took them into a wood and shot them?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘We were very tired,’ said Gray. ‘We’d been under shellfire for days, and the men were not themselves. There’d been a hit in our part of the trench, and terrible casualties. It was raining and we were supposed to walk for almost five miles with these Boches. I couldn’t get my men to do it. I couldn’t make them. I think they might have shot me if I’d pushed them any harder.’

  ‘So it was your company?’

  ‘You can’t possibly understand what it was like. Three years of this. They’d seen all their friends slaughtered. We stopped at a little copse and I said, “I’m going to speak to the officer in the village. I leave the prisoners to your disposal.” I knew perfectly well what they’d do. And they knew I knew.’

  Gray’s voice was flat and without remorse.

  ‘Is that what you dreamed of?’

  ‘No. The dreams were of my men’s faces. The look of incomprehension, the look of terror when I told them we were ordered to attack at dawn. On the Somme. In daylight. At walking pace. Night after night I saw those young men’s faces. Boys younger than you are now. They looked at me and they knew. We all knew what was coming.’

  Somehow Gray had remained calm. Charlotte murmured some soothing words.

  ‘Now, Charlotte, you must try to forgive my shortcomings. Or at least describe them to me, so perhaps I can explain or understand.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t think I can.’

  There was a silence for a moment; then they heard rain beginning against the windows.

  In a voice of desperation, Gray said, ‘What did I do wrong?’ When his self-control gave way, it went completely. A great sob rose up in his chest and made him double over. ‘For God’s sake, Charlotte, please tell me what I did wrong.’

  Gray held out his hand to her, but Charlotte would not take it.

  ‘My dear girl,’ he sobbed, ‘whatever it was, can you not forgive me?’

  Confronted at last with the outline of the thing that had lain for so long unrealised in her mind, Charlotte was too terrified to look.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I can’t.’

  In the days that followed, Charlotte tried never to be alone with her father. When he returned from work at six o’clock, she made sure she went upstairs for her bath, then helped her mother in the kitchen until it was time for dinner.

  In the afternoons, she went for long walks in the hills and tried to understand herself. She could not but be impressed by her father’s anguish. If he had done something terrible to her, how would he have been able to beg her to explain it to him? He had always been an honest man; he would not only have thought dissimulation to have been immoral in such circumstances, but would also have been incapable of acting.

  Yet, if he truly had no idea of what had passed between them, it must mean that she had imagined it, or somehow misremembered. This she could not accept, or force herself to believe. In some physical and cruel way, he had destroyed her innocence; and while the fallible functions of memory would not tell her exactly how, she was as certain of that simple fact as she could be, with an instinctive conviction that had never before let her down.

  Still it seemed vital to her to establish what had really happened, and she felt agonisingly close to doing so. She thought of what her father had told her about the war, about his dreams and subsequent sufferings. For some reason, she remembered, too, the letter from father to daughter she had found at Le Bourget-Drancy station. She strained at the memory of her own childhood, at the sense of some rapture lost. Yet it all remained like some frozen sea: great blocks of ice, submerged, but static, and beyond the melting capacity of her conscious will.

  As she strode over the damp hills and turned for home, she felt torn between guilt that her father stood in some way wrongly accused by her and an absolute knowledge that her memory had, if not in detail, then at least in essence recorded what had happened.

  At tea-time on the third day of her visit she returned from her walk and went to the kitchen, where her mother was taking a tray of scones from the oven.

  Amelia Gray gave her usual friendly, slightly startled smile of welcome. ‘You’re just in time,’ she said, as she poured tea from the pot on the scrubbed table. ‘Let’s have it in here, shall we, as it’s just the two of us?’

  Perhaps her mother could help, thought Charlotte; perhaps this was the time to enlist her confidence. Somehow, the very thought of it was discouraging to Charlotte: her mother would turn her face from intimacy of this kind, she would run for some domestic cover.

  In her state of heightened introspection this, too, seemed suggestive to Charlotte. Was this another aspect of the problem? Or was she now turning in such tight circles that she could no longer distinguish between the trivial and the significant?

  She put her elbows on the table and sighed, holding her face between her hands, the restored colours of her hair tumbling down over her fingers.

  Amelia Gray was looking at her daughter with anxious concern when the telephone rang.

  ‘Oh, drat,’ she said. ‘Who can that be?’

  She went into the sitting room to answer it. ‘Charlotte,’ she called out a few moments later. ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘For m
e?’ Charlotte was dragged out of her reverie. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘He didn’t say,’ said her mother, as she came back into the kitchen.

  In the sitting room Charlotte picked up the big receiver from the polished occasional table where it lay on its side.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Charlotte?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Charlotte, you may not remember me. It’s a voice from long ago. This is Peter Gregory.’

  ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God.’

  ‘Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  At the end of their conversation, Gregory had to inhale deeply. He was sitting in the office of the convalescent home near Godalming, to which he had been sent on his return from North Africa. There had been a wait of two days before Daisy could contact her mother to find out the telephone number of Charlotte’s parents, and he feared that she might already be on her way back to London by the time he got through.

  Gregory was not by nature a timorous man, but on board the ship from Genoa he had run this conversation through his mind several times. At various points he had convinced himself that he should not contact Charlotte. He could not offer her what she was worth; all he could bring was this absurd passion that he had conceived for her almost in the moment of their separation, then kept doggedly alive in the months of his absence. He knew that it was this feeling alone that had brought him through the agony of his untended injuries and through the pain of his reconnection with the world. He valued it accordingly, but was not convinced it was worth offering.

  Only when he heard her stunned and gasping reaction to his voice did he fully register the depth of his passion for her. There was such struggle and humility in her tone, the sense of something so long and terribly desired, that he felt crushed by it. But for the first time since he had known Charlotte he no longer felt intimidated, and he understood that the complexity of her feelings was not for her the source of any sense of superiority but, on the contrary, the cause of awful anguish. For the first time he believed that his own life, however tarnished in his eyes, was what was necessary for the redemption of hers.

  Charlotte put down the telephone and walked out of the house, down to the end of the garden. She sat on a wooden bench in an area of lawn surrounded by rhododendron bushes and tried to control her feelings. She could not at first think of Gregory as a person, as a man with a voice and hands and things of his own to say; his return seemed only a disembodied vindication of her long and solitary refusal to give up hope. She felt stunned by gratitude, because that hope had never amounted to belief.

  In the evening, over dinner with her parents, her trance-like incredulity began to be penetrated by the first movements of joy. What would he look like? What would he say?

  ‘You’re in a world of your own tonight, Charlotte,’ said her father.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She smiled at him.

  She tried to hold his eye and in some way to encourage him. She felt the return of Gregory had a bearing on her father, too, and that there might yet be some way out of their impasse.

  That night, sleeping deeply beneath her old quilted eiderdown, she had a sequence of dreams. They were mostly of the intensely realised but inconsequential kind that her father’s friend had characterised as ‘neural waste’. She dreamed she was a nurse at war, and that Levade came to her with the wound on his shoulder gaping. She was on a ship, and had to organise interminable games among unruly children who would not listen to her orders. Finally, she dreamed she was herself a child. She was on the deck of the ship, surrounded by her dolls and by her books, and, from a door down to a lower deck, her father emerged.

  Instinctively, she recoiled as he came and knelt beside her. He opened his arms and hugged her, hard, against his chest, then laid his face on her shoulder. Looking down, expecting to see his cruelty or rage, she saw instead that he was weeping. She brushed away the tears with her fingers; she soothed him and stroked his white hair.

  All the next morning she paced round the house and garden. She had the feeling that the blocks of frozen memory were melting, that movement was coming back into these long-locked regions. There was nothing she could do to speed it up or clarify it, but she felt that physical activity would in some way help.

  After lunch, she went for another walk, and, as she sat on a hill looking back towards the city of Edinburgh, she began to think of Levade’s death. The rooms of the Domaine – her bedroom and, in particular, his studio – seemed very clear in her mind: she could smell the lime wood of the back staircase, the oil paints, the dusty air.

  She mourned her dead friend at last, thinking of his undignified death in that half-built place among strangers. She cried for his lonely end and for his defeated struggle, and she cried, if she was honest, a little for herself as well, and a suspicion that, whatever the degree of anxiety in which she had lived those days in the Domaine, she might never again exist at such a level of intensity.

  Later, when she was walking home, she felt an uplifting gratitude towards Levade. Perhaps a dozen times in his life he had painted pictures in which he had been able to pierce the deceptive layer of appearances that clothed the world, to go beyond it and re-imagine a deeper existence that lay beneath. Then he had become a prisoner of his sensual desires, and of his mind’s refusal to unlock itself, with the result that the last ten years of his life had passed with a vain hammering at the gates of his memory. Yet, Charlotte thought, as her quickening steps carried her toward the lights of the village below, that dreaming process he had so passionately desired had worked instead for her: what had long imprisoned him had set her free.

  The next day was a Saturday, the last but one of Charlotte’s intended visit. Her mother went into Edinburgh to do some shopping. Charlotte said she would stay and cook lunch for her father. Both her parents looked surprised, and her mother talked temptingly of Princes Street and new clothes.

  Charlotte remained firm and, when they had had lunch and cleared the plates away, forced herself to confront her father once more.

  ‘You know what we were saying the other night? About . . . you and me, being a father and so on.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gray sounded uneasy.

  They were in the sitting room, either side of the fire, on which he now self-consciously threw another log.

  Charlotte folded her hands in her lap. ‘I’ve been thinking. I think I must apologise.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Gray was at his most discouraging. His tone suggested that not only was what Charlotte was trying to say intrusively personal, but that it was also likely to be misguided.

  Very slowly, and picking the words she felt were as gentle as possible while still being truthful, Charlotte said, ‘All my life I’ve believed that when I was young, perhaps seven or eight, you did something to me. You hurt me. I’ve never known exactly how. All I knew for sure was the result. I felt as though my childhood had ended. As though something had been prematurely and cruelly taken from me.’

  Gray looked appalled. ‘What did I do?’

  Still speaking with slow precision, despite a constricting pressure in her lungs, Charlotte said, ‘My memory is of some physical contact that went too far. Later on, I came to believe that it might have been something sexual. I don’t believe that now, but only something like that could have explained the depth of the wound you inflicted.’ She found her cheeks and forehead were burning.

  Gray swallowed. For a moment his devastation at what his daughter had said appeared to overwhelm him; then some professional curiosity steadied him. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me, I’m glad it’s out at last.’

  His shattered voice sounded anything but glad, but Charlotte was reassured by his response. There was no trace of guilty recollection, and his attitude meant she might now carry on.

  ‘Since I’ve been here, in these last few days,’ she said, ‘I feel as though I’ve somehow come to grips with it. This thing, this terrible thing that has been in my mind all my life . . .’ She began to sob, t
hen controlled herself. ‘By a complicated process, too much to explain, I think I may have understood.’

  Gray was nodding, but did not speak.

  ‘Do you remember anything?’ said Charlotte. ‘Any incident?’

  Gray stood up. ‘Before you tell me what you think, would it help if I told you what I had thought? Then if we think the same, at least you won’t think I’m just agreeing with you to bring it all to a close?’

  ‘All right.’

  Gray chose his words with equal care. ‘What you must understand first is that you were a miracle to me. At that time of war. To return from the scenes I’d witnessed, and to see this girl child . . . To look at my hands, know what they had done, what my eyes had seen and then to think that from inside my own body I had created this female flesh . . .’

  He shook his head and breathed in tightly for a moment. ‘That’s what a father feels about a girl – this otherness, this innocence, when I myself felt so terribly old and filthy and corrupted by experience. And as a little girl you did love me. Then I was aware that something was wrong. You weren’t an easy child, Charlotte.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You turned into such a bluestocking. You were so ferocious with your studies, so good at them. But I felt I couldn’t reach you. And then those awful depressions. I felt powerless. This was my profession, and I couldn’t help you. Of course, I strongly suspected that I was the problem, or part of it. It was agonising to watch. Can you imagine? Because, still, for me you were the hope of life and femininity.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Your mother was . . . a wonderful woman, but she was not comforting in any physical sense. I don’t mean like that, but—’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Perhaps there was a time, a particular incident.’ Gray spoke very slowly. ‘Perhaps there was. I can honestly say I don’t remember, but perhaps at some level I was determined not to. And this cruelty I forced on you. Do you know what it was?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Charlotte, very softly. ‘War. The memory of war.’

  There was a long silence in the room. Eventually, Gray said, ‘Better men than I were destroyed by it.’