Ever After

2

When I try to remember the glorious, the marvellous, the lost and luminous city of Paris, I find it hard to separate the city that exists in the mind, that existed even then, perhaps, mainly in my mind, from the actual city whose streets I once trod and which is now older by some forty years. I have never gone back. I never went there with Ruth — because of the memories — though I went to most places with Ruth, and all couples, they say, should go to Paris. Perhaps now I should return — now I am this free, this disengaged man, and now I know, in any case, that certain things were not as they once seemed.

We see what we choose to see, we see what we think we see. In Paris my mother first took me to the opera. A matinée of La Bohème—a Parisian tale. And there, in Act One, behind Rodolfo’s garret window, and again, in Act Four, as poor Mimi lay melodiously dying, was a painted vista of Paris rooftops just like any you could actually see, and perhaps still can, around Sacré Coeur or Montparnasse. It had never struck me before that Reality and Romance could so poignantly collude with each other; so that ever afterwards I saw Paris as a palpable network of “scenes,” down to the subtle lighting of a smoky-blue winter’s morning or the blush of a spring evening, the incarnation of something already imagined. It scarcely occurred to me — my imagination did not go in this simpler direction — that this same Paris which we came to in November 1945 had been occupied not so long ago by Hitler’s soldiery and that our very apartment in the Rue de Bellechasse, in the heart of the ministerial quarter, had perhaps been the temporary home — as it was our temporary home — of some official of the Reich.

My mother (whom I would definitely not, in the final analysis, call Romantic) must have been moved by the same ambiguous, uncanny reality as I, because I can recall her, only days after our arrival, saying in a rapturous if half-startled voice, “Look, darling, this is Paris, darling” (I knew it was Paris, we were in Paris, we were strolling down the Champs Élysées), “isn’t it divine?” And that word, through the refining filter of Paris, is all I need to conjure up my mother. My mother that was (death number two): as she flung the Armstrong-Siddeley through the flashing, leafy lanes of Berkshire (me, a gaping, gleeful, infant passenger beside her); as she licked from her lips the residue of some oozing cream cake (a sweet tooth which only slowly taxed her figure); as she held up to herself, like some flimsy, snatched-up dancing partner, a newly bought frock: “Divine, darling! Isn’t it just divine?”

I cannot summon my father so easily. I have no touchstone. Perhaps because of what happened. Perhaps because, in any case (sons need time — they truly need time — to get to know their fathers), he was always a distant and sombre figure, outshone, first to his delight, then to his consternation, by my mother’s heedless brightness. Yet I remember him once attempting to draw near — or so I think was his intention. It was in that same Paris apartment, on a cold, windy evening, with winter still at war with spring, the lights on outside and a fire burning hearteningly in the massive, grey marble fireplace. He was standing by the fire, one elbow on the mantelpiece, in full evening rig, waiting for my mother before they left for another of his official functions.

“The thing is,” he suddenly said, slowly, with an air of weighed wisdom and of speaking aloud some uncontainable thought, “when you are out on an adventure, you want to be at home by the fire, and when you are at home by the fire, you want to be out on an adventure.”

I wish I knew what it was I had said — if anything — that elicited that unusual pithiness. And I wish I had known then, while the fire flickered and the wind scraped at the window, what should have been the proper response. I was nine. There he was, in all his pride, fifty-five years old — some twenty years older than my mother, medals on chest, cigar lit, Scotch and soda — a large one — poured. Some question of mine? Or some impulse in his own mind that seemed to raise the whole, daunting phenomenon of his soldierly past and his mysterious present duties, his aura of belonging to a world of great, glorious (but peculiarly awkward) things?

He seemed surprised at his own words, as if he had not known they were stored inside him. He looked selfconsciously at his watch.

“Whatever can your mother be up to?”

Perhaps it was on that same evening — but this surely would have been sooner after our arrival — that I had asked him, point-blank, what were we doing, what was he doing, here in Paris? And he’d replied, with a sort of jocular, self-effacing gravity, “Oh — sorting out the world. You know, that sort of thing.”

Only once can I remember his attempting to show me the sights of Paris. We had scarcely set out — our first port of call was Napoleon’s tomb — when an icy shower caught us, the first of a series which would turn our jaunt into a stoical exercise. I could not help feeling how I would much rather have been with my mother. How she would have turned a change in the weather into a positive pleasure. Wrestling, laughing, with an umbrella. Scurrying into the aromatic warmth of a café and ordering, in an Anglo-French that was infinitely more convincing if no more proficient than his, “Un crème, un jus d’orange,” and, falling back into expressive English, “and two of those wicked little tarts!”

Seeing the sights of Paris with my mother! Shopping sprees with my mother in Paris! From her I learnt to see the world as a scintillating shopwindow, a confection, a display of tempting frippery. From her I learnt the delights of ogling and coveting and — by proxy and complicity — spending. I would go with her to spend money. To buy hats, necklaces, gloves, shoes, dresses, cakes. I would wait, perched on a velvet-backed chair, smiled at by the attentive vendeuse, while, behind drawn plush curtains, things slithered, rustled, snapped, to an accompaniment of sighs and hums. In the city of perfume we bought perfume. In the city of lingerie we pondered over lascivious creations of silk and lace. If they were meant expressly for his eyes, it only made his noble loftiness the more impressive; but I suspected — I knew — they were not. And in all this I was the adjudicator, the referee, the scapegoat. The oyster-grey or the rose-pink? “Oh, you decide, sweetie. No, you can’t? Bien, tous les deux, s’il vous plaît, Madame.” “Tous les deux, Madame? Ah oui, d’accord. Le petit est bon juge, n’est-ce pas?”

Coming out with her booty, she would hug me ardently, as if it were I who had enabled her so successfully to succumb. In the same way, prior to such purchases, when her eyes fell on anything particularly delicious and desirable in a window, she would squeeze me fiercely, conspiratorially, giving an Ooh! or an Aah! as if it were I alone who could tilt the balance between mere looking and rushing headlong into the shop. “But isn’t it just heavenly, darling?” I could have lived for, lived in that squeeze. Until I grew up and realised it was almost entirely selfish. She might as well have been hugging herself, or a handy cushion or spaniel.

Sorting out the world! He should have sorted out himself and his own jeopardized household. Did he know — but he must have done from the very beginning, he must have known what she was “up to”—that while he was busy sorting out the world and “talking with the Allies” (another cryptic phrase, which made me think of some gossipy, over-neighbourly family) and I was busy at the little école for foreigners they found for me, “Maman,” as I’d begun precociously to call her, was busy entertaining or being entertained by Uncle Sam, or plain Sam Ellison as he then was, who had his own recipe for sorting out the world, expressible in one single, vulgar word: plastics? In Maman’s defence, it could be said that she too was engaged with the Allies, Sam being American. And in Sam’s defence, it could be said that, fuelled as it was by rank commercialism, he too had a sense of mission.

“It’s the stuff that’s gonna mould the future. I mean, literally. Anything from a coffee cup to an artificial leg, to the sock that goes on it.”

“And then there’s plastic surgery.”

“No, that’s kinda different, sweetheart.”

(As my mother, an expert at lash-fluttering fausse-naïveté, well knew.)

He must have known. If I could sniff these matters out, even in their early, covert stages, then he— But then I was a virtual accomplice. When I emerged from my école in the afternoon to see Sam just dropping Maman off from a taxi, or made my own way home to find her in a distinct state of having hastily bathed and dressed, I would receive not guilty looks but one of her swift, smothering, implicating hugs — essentially no different from her shopping hugs. Thank you for letting me buy that dress — isn’t it gorgeous? Thank you for letting me fuck Sam — isn’t he divine? And, yes, that word had only to spring from her lips and I believed it to be so. I thought Sam — six feet of hard-muscled American avarice — was divine, and I thought crêpe suzette and tarte tatin were divine, and I thought oyster-grey silk cami-knickers were divine, and I thought my mother’s laughter, the sheer, vicious gaiety in her eyes, was divine.

“Do up my buttons, sweetie, would you? There’s an angel.”

A whole world existed in which men did up the backs of women’s dresses at four o’clock in the afternoon.

I can see it now, that apartment above the Rue de Bellechasse. Its ponderous furnishings, its tarnished chandeliers, its diplomatic decorum under perpetual threat from my mother’s chatter and laughter, from her gusty scurryings from room to room, and — but this was hardly a threat — from her magic snatches of song. I learnt never to ask, never to prompt, never to wait. Only to recognise the likely moments: in the evenings when the traffic outside began to toot in a distinctly perkier fashion; after one of her unspecified “lunch engagements”; in moments of lingering and meaningful déshabille. Lights coming on in the streets. Wafts of scent. The gurgle of bath water running and, above it, lilting, throbbing: “Dove so-ono i bei momeenti …”

And what world was he sorting out? Some new, rebuilt world which would one day be unveiled to the dazzlement and shame of such backsliders as Mother and me? Or some old, dream-world restored, in which implacable British sergeant-majors bawled for ever over far-flung parade grounds and men followed well-trodden paths to glory and knighthoods?

He was fifty-five. And I had the insight of an infant. But it seems, now, that I could have told him then: that world was gone. An axe had dropped on it.

And yet — Paris was still Paris. Even the Paris that a year ago had emerged from four years of occupation. The chestnuts kept their ranks; café tables spawned; a thousand mansarded roofs glinted in the autumn sunshine, without a bomb-site among them. By the following spring, Paris had the air of something simply resumed. It was only winter, not a world war, that had passed: shutters flung open; awnings lowered; bed linen hanging from upper windows; merchandise once more filling the shops, to be pillaged by my mother.

Paris. April in Paris. I had never seen Paris before, and yet even at nine years old I had this recurring sensation of encountering a vision made fact. If the trompe-l’œil Paris of La Bohème was an illusion, then on my journeys on foot between our apartment and the école, journeys which took a meandering form and had something to do, I suppose now, with a sense of having lost the right path with my parents, I daily disproved the illusion: Paris was the living, breathing rendition of itself.

“… di dolce-ezza e di piacer …?”

Somewhere on those wanderings to and from school, in the crisp, rimy breath of a January morning, I looked up from the pavement through a tall, lighted window and saw — a true vision. Three — four, five — ballerinas, dressed in leotards and tights, swathed in woollen leg-warmers, dipping, stretching, balancing, raising one leg, extending one arm in that curving way ballet-dancers do, while clinging with the other to a wall bar. I stood transfixed, entranced.

How many times did I pass that window again? How many times was the blind cruelly drawn? Once — but this must have been at a later time of day and I must have been by then a fully-fledged truant, flâneur, voyeur—I passed a café at the further end of the same street, and there, sitting at an outside table, even in that midwinter chill (warm and pink from exercise), were my ballerinas. But no longer poised, living sculptures. They were little chattering mesdemoiselles-about-town, crossing their legs, nestling their chins into their scarves, responding boldly to the badinage of the waiter, blowing at the steamy froth on their chocolats chauds. I drew close, feigning interest in an adjacent shop-front. Glowing faces. A sound of female glee. Two eyes, in particular, beneath a dark fringe, which momentarily turned on me. Two pink lips, a flicking tongue adorned with the flakes of a croissant.

A crude case of my mother’s shop-window lusts? But I knew it was more than that. What enthralled me was the pathos, the dignity, the ardour of rehearsal. The sublime fact that in a world so in need of being sorted out, young girls of sixteen and seventeen (but, of course, to me, then, they were Women) could devote themselves so strenuously to becoming sugar-plum fairies.

Lift the axe! I wish I could have taken him, gripped his hand, as he gripped mine, suddenly, on that wet, chilly day as we emerged from the gloom of Les Invalides, stood him before that secret window and said: There, it’s for that that you are sorting out the world. I wish he could have gripped my hand more firmly still, come closer to me out of his remoteness; told me, warned me.

Paris first bred in me the notion that the highest aim of civilization is the loving perfection of the useless: ballerinas, café chatter, Puccini operas, Elizabethan sonnets, silk underwear, parfumerie, patisserie, chandeliers, the magic hush when the lights go down in an auditorium …

“Mimi! Mimi! Mimi!”

… and Romantic Love.

She actually cried, she actually wept in the seat beside me, dabbing her eyes and clutching my hand, while her lips mimed the arias.

Lift the axe! A Paris morning, in April. Perhaps that very morning I had peeped at my ballerinas. Morning turning to midday. Sunshine; pigeons; the smell of food. She is waiting beyond the gates of the école, though by now I am used to making my own way home. She is alone and somehow purposeful, fixed in her own space. She opens her arms and gives me an engulfing hug, as if I have returned from somewhere far away. But she is not smiling (or crying). She is composed and authoritative; the hug is like some solemn ceremony.

“Your daddy has had an accident, at his office.”

“An accident?”

“Your daddy has had an accident. And died.”

The second part of this statement, uttered unemphatically, almost perfunctorily, scarcely registered at first. Certain announcements take time to reach the brain.

“An accident with a gun.”

With a gun? With a gun? What was he doing, in his office, in Paris, in the seventh arrondissement, in the centre of civilization, with a gun? A sudden, racing fantasy, a whole alternative life for my father, who was now dead, bloomed in my head. He was a spy, an undercover agent, he was on some hush-hush mission. It explained his distance, his absences, his resonant words about “adventure.” He bore the constant burden of secrecy and danger. For a while the delusion was so strong that it turned into a pang of regret: I had discovered this source of excitement too late — I could never, now, have access to it.

And perhaps it was this sense of deprivation, rather than the simple fact that my father was dead, that made tears rush to my eyes.

“Yes, my darling, you cry. Cry. Cry.”

And, opening her arms again, stooping, but unweeping, she crushed me against that warm, ready bosom, where Sam, by now, must already have been crushed many times.

She never used the word “suicide.” Perhaps I would not have known what it meant. Perhaps I guessed and only wanted, as she did, to gloss over the fact. It was Sam, in any case, who confirmed my suspicions. He and I were alone in the apartment. She had become a busy woman. I knew nothing about inquest proceedings, let alone in foreign cities. This must have been before she and I went back, the first time, with the body, to Berkshire.

I said, “He meant to do it, didn’t he?”

A bold, grown-up, not-to-be-evaded question.

“Yes, pal. I guess so.”

Later, it occurred to me that Sam might have been briefed to deal with this very point. But his brief, or his aptitude for it, only went so far. I was nine, he was twenty-four. Twenty-four seems now such a slender age — not so far from nine — but there was no doubt that during that time in Paris those fifteen years between Sam and me could be a wide gap to leap. Not so wide, it’s true, as the forty-six years between me and my father. Which gave Sam a distinct advantage in winning me over — along with the ability to slide into a boyish, big-brotherly familiarity quite beyond my father. But I always thought this was just a knack, an act for my benefit.

That morning, days after my father’s death, was the first time that it occurred to me, from the vantage of my own unlooked-for access of experience, that Sam really was, perhaps, just a kid. The fact that almost as big a gap of years existed between him and my mother as between him and me did not escape me. Once, on one of those tumultuous afternoons that seemed now to belong to another age, I had heard my mother simper, beyond closed, impassive doors, “Come on, Sammy, come to Mummy.…” I recalled it now, not recognising one of the least exceptional idioms of love. It was as though at the very point when Sam was most culpable, I both saw he was most innocent and discovered a new cause for enmity.

He took out a cigarette and I saw that his hand, his strong, young man’s hand, was shaking. He must have known I’d seen it.

“Why?” I said. The inevitable follow-up.

But “why” was not one of Sam’s words, the scrutiny of motives was not his strong point.

“I guess you’ll have to ask your mother that, pal.” He managed to light the cigarette and took a deep, steadying draw.

“I guess I’ll have to be looking after your mother now,” he added with a kind of feeble cheerfulness, as if the statement were half a question; as if he were watching his youth melt away.

I asked my mother. She was ready to be asked. I suppose there must have been some confabulation between them, a two-stage strategy. It was the moment, of course, for her to have broken down, wept, begged my forgiveness, confessed that her shamelessness had driven a man to his death. The things that happen in opera, they happen in life too. But she didn’t. She spoke calmly, almost dreamily.

“Perhaps there was something he knew that we shall never know.”

Which was, of course, a twisting round of the truth. It was we who had known something which he hadn’t known; or which he had known all along and could no longer pretend not to know. Her eyes hardened into a sort of warning whose meaning was clear: Don’t play the innocent, sweetie. If I’m to blame, then so are you. You were a party to this. You allowed it, didn’t you? You let it happen.

It was true: I might have gone to him at any time, like a true, a dutiful, a worthy son. Spilled the beans.

Then suddenly she smiled tenderly and took me in her arms. “Poor darling,” she said, as if I had fallen and grazed my knee; as if at the same time she thought this whole line of thinking was unnecessarily morbid. We were alive; my father was dead. She had taken Sam into her life. She had known what she was doing; she had made her choice. The fierceness, the frankness, of her will to live! She told me, many years later, with complete equanimity, how she had gone to see him in the mortuary. How his head was swathed in bandages, save his face. How they had even put a sticking-plaster over the hole in his temple. She had no squeamishness. No pity, no mercy. I think she even despised him for his death, which, for all its drastic convenience, was nonetheless cowardly, stupid, messy, extreme. She despised this man she had married, exploited, cheated — destroyed.

And it was true: if I had an allegiance, it was to her, not to him. The image of my father rose before me, as inscrutable, as open to interpretation as it was deserving of belated loyalty. He must have known for weeks about the two of them. And even if the penny had dropped only late in the day, did suicide truly answer the circumstances? A former soldier, a man of action. If a bullet was to be involved, it should surely have been placed neatly between Sam Ellison’s eyes.

A recurring dream — the very emblem of my addled adolescence: Sam with a fresh, damson-coloured hole (and no sticking-plaster) in his forehead.

But perhaps Sam and Mother were only the last, ill-timed straw. I underestimated the dimensions of the man, this man who had left my life. During those strange, transitional months, as we moved from Paris back to Berkshire, as Mother married Sam and I reached my tenth birthday, the awesome realisation offered itself to me that my father had tried but had simply not been able to sort out the world. People die when their world will no longer sustain them. Duty, ambition and even, now, his wife had let him down. He was fifty-five years old. I can see him feeling the cool weight of the pistol. The “honourable way out”; a soldier’s solution. When you are out on an adventure … Suddenly death, not the vivid, vaunted death of the battlefield, but the image of himself as a duped nonentity, stared him in the face — and he rushed to meet it.

Lift the axe! Put the pistol back! Carry me back to that world of boulevards and ballerinas. To that songful, mirthful, deceitful apartment. Carry me back even to the innocence of that moment of icy, naked shock — I had never felt it before — round which my mother, by the école gates, cast her cloaking embrace. There was a space in the world occupied by my father, which would never be occupied by him again. The spring sun falling on Parisian shutters, Parisian cobbles, was gentle, kindly, beyond reproach. It fell on the fur collar of my mother’s coat and picked out of its filaments little pinpoints of gold. All that day I seemed to see that the sunshine was made up of countless particles of irreducible, indestructible, eternal gold.