Ever After

8

The little ironwork gate into this garden, which can only be opened by those honoured with a key, has a distinctive and now easily recognisable repertoire of sounds. There is first the exploratory scraping and clicking of the key in the lock — not a sound that carries far but one easily picked up by the ear if you are used to opening the gate yourself (the mechanism is temperamental and demands coaxing). Then there is the mixture of rattles and squeals with which the gate swings open; then, after a pause, the vibrant, percussive jingle with which it returns on its sprung hinge.

A tinkling bell, specially made for the purpose, would be no more effective in announcing someone’s coming. Thus I lift my head, I am prepared: though her arrival is not unexpected — she has visited me now, here under the bean tree, for several days in succession. Nonetheless, as the gate gives out its warning, I take these pages (I am writing this later — days later) from the tray on my knee and slip them into my briefcase. Then I take my notes on the Pearce manuscripts from the briefcase and pretend to be working on them.

She walks towards me across the lawn with that by now familiar gait and that soft and bulging straw basket in her hand. One of the disquieting thoughts that beset me in this curious post-mortal condition of mine is that everything might be beginning again. This is my second life, my reincarnation. Perhaps there is life and life again, always and for ever. Perhaps the world has been reinvented for me in its full potential. This is the Garden of Eden. And here comes Eve.

But no, she is not Eve. And nothing is going to happen, not this time around, even if Potter is far away at a conference in Chicago. She is more like one of those pitying and piteous women of medieval romance — yes, that is more her style. And this garden, with its locked gate which only the favoured may open, is like one of those semi-allegorical gardens into which the Lady of the Castle steals (unknown to her absent lord) to solace some wounded knight-errant (ha!). Which, with a good deal of twisting and stretching of the imagination, is not unlike our situation.

A brief history of the Potters, Michael and Katherine. Part fact and part surmise, just like my reconstruction of the life of Matthew Pearce. Just, if it comes to it, like my reassembly, here in this afterworld, of my own life. A brief history of the Potters — pieced together from hearsay and conjecture and from what Katherine herself, in circumstances rather different from these decorous meetings under the bean tree, has told me …

Picture a scene in the office of Michael Potter, university lecturer at the University of X, it doesn’t matter where. Year of our Lord, 1970. Potter is twenty-seven. Katherine is nineteen. And it is Katherine who has sought this not-so-common cross-disciplinary meeting between a lecturer in History and a second-year student in English. She would like some help with the background to her long essay: Arthurianism in Tennyson and his contemporaries. Potter has flipped through his diary (at the same time, let us suppose, discreetly appraising the young Katherine out of one corner of his eye) and said, “Okay. Say three o’clock, Thursday?” And he is the right man to have come to. This is his special field: Victorian idealism and Victorian doubt. One day he will write a book on the subject.

She duly knocks at three. She has not quite broken free of the brittle mould of a clever schoolgirl. One part of her is actually drawn to that moody, broody, neo-chivalric stuff that forms the topic of her essay — all that loss of faith, all that elegiac Romance; another believes that this is what you do, this is what is supposed to happen at modern universities: you throw yourself at clever young lecturers.

What would she have worn for this fateful tête-à-tête? The ubiquitous miniskirt of those days? No, one of those long, ankle-length, slim-waisted, high-necked dresses in some dark, velvety material, which were also, conversely, favoured then and actually evoked the graciously draped women of past ages. Potter would have noticed it (winter light fading beyond his office windows, his desktop and bookshelves in a state of beguiling disorder): the nostalgia for the nostalgia of nostalgia.

Darkness descends. The talk goes on longer than envisaged. No problem, no problem, says our doughty lecturer. He pours more coffee into the trusty coffee mugs. Then at length, the last cup of coffee having gone cold, Potter says, “A drink …? A bite to eat …?”

She seduced him? He seduced her? The latter surely, knowing what we know, now, of Potter. But this Potter of yore was not the Potter of now — this I have on the best authority. The Potter of those days was a serious, forceful, unstudiedly charming young lecturer, with something of a reputation, it’s true, as a campus heartthrob, but only just learning to take advantage of it. They seduced each other? They fell in love? Like Paolo and Francesca over the story of Lancelot? Why not?

Two years later they are married. And three years after that, rather later than anticipated, Potter publishes the book that was to have made his name. But this, alas, is not before — in fact, it is almost twelve months after — a certain C— at the University of Y has published, to considerable attention and praise, a work on much the same subject and incorporating a good deal of the same material.

The trials of the academic life! How the true, chaste scholar is tested. Those years of study and research! Potter the star student, Potter the professor-to-be. It doesn’t matter if people tell him, as many do, that his book is actually better than C—’s, more thorough, more cogent, more perceptive (it’s true: it’s an invaluable aid to my researches — you see the trickiness of my situation). C— stole the limelight, C— got the credits. And if he, Potter, hadn’t been seduced by her, by Katherine, by marriage, domesticity, kids, he might have finished it earlier, might have got there first.

So it was she who seduced him? It’s funny how the memory blurs. And as for the kids — there were no kids. Only in the mind. Only the two miscarriages — memory doesn’t mix matters here. Then nothing.

And maybe it’s around this time — the time of the second miscarriage or the time of the publication of his abortive book — that Potter begins to wonder whether, in any case, this scholar’s life is really for him. This contemplative life. This life of the mind. When you are sitting at home by the fire …

It is a well-known fact that the Potter marriage is a façade, of which the relentless people-collecting and opportunity-seeking and throwing of dinner parties are compensatory symptoms. The marriage may have died, but the wake goes on — and how many perfectly thriving couples could generate such buzz and esprit? It is generally known and accepted that Potter’s academic and extra-academic adventurism has been at the expense of domestic harmony. In a word, that Potter screws around.

It is also generally known that Katherine Potter knows that Potter screws around, and somehow accepts or submits to the fact, is long-suffering and diplomatic about it, and has not taken up other options open to her. Such as screwing around herself. Though she is eight years younger than Potter and still undeniably attractive. Undeniably attractive. But I can be pretty sure — in fact, I can be certain — that Katherine Potter has never once in her life committed an act of adultery. Not once.

Time goes by. A new Potter emerges out of the fragile, if still intact, fabric of his marriage: radio and TV pundit, would-be celebrity, but also (the scholarly career has not been entirely forgotten) Fellow of this worthy College.

Then there appears on the scene a figure of dubious credentials if intriguing provenance: the Ellison Fellow. He is briefly courted by the Potters (among others), then dropped — the man has only a borrowed lustre. But then, following the death of his mother, he acquires a certain set of notebooks, hereafter referred to as the Pearce Notebooks. And, after a period of dwelling extensively on their contents, makes the mistake of showing them to Potter. And Potter makes the mistake of not making a copy.

Once again, but for different reasons, the Ellison Fellow is pursued. After some initial exchanges of surprising animosity (it seems that Potter feels that the Notebooks are best left with him, but the Ellison Fellow demands them back, makes three copies of his own and keeps them under lock and key), Potter is anxious to smooth relations. The invitations and blandishments begin again. Furthermore, by the personal example of his renewed friendliness, Potter is at pains to uphold the Ellison Fellow’s status, by now somewhat open to question, as a genuine and good Fellow. He is doing “serious work” after all, something really rather special. In short, having missed his chance simply to grab the Notebooks, Potter sets about trying to wheedle them into his possession.

Now, throughout this period, let it be noted, even during the interval of his relative ostracism, Katherine Potter has maintained an unbroken interest in the Ellison Fellow. It seems (you will find this hard to believe, even harder if you were to take one look at me now) that for her he has the stubborn attributes of a Romantic Figure. Which perhaps only means that Katherine Potter (despite everything) is a Romantic Soul. It is true, as previously observed, that he arrives in his new quarters with a certain aura of glamorous pathos, or rather, pathetic glamour, with a certain poetically construable personal baggage, positively Tennysonian in its freight of dolour. But this was at the beginning. And time— And surely, in the end, as we all know, poetry is one thing and life is another. These big, sonorous, laden words, how inflated and archaic they sound, as if they could only belong to literature: heartache; sorrow; grief.

And as for the Ellison Fellow’s feelings towards Katherine Potter — to be honest, they involve a good deal of confusion. He reacts before Katherine Potter, in fact, as he has reacted before all new, strange (attractive) women who happen, since a certain event, to have crossed his path. He does not know how to deal with them. He is filled with dismay, a giddy sense of arbitrariness, an apprehension that the universe holds nothing sacred; all of which is only to be stilled by the imperative of loyal resistance.

He is not immune to the prickle of passing lust. But he deals defensively with it. He reacts either with disdainful dismissal (Not your type, definitely not your type) or with a rampant if covert seizure of lecherousness (Christ, what tits! What legs! What an arse!), which serves the same forestalling function by reducing its object to meat and its subject (he is past fifty, after all) to a pother of shame.

But none of this — so much as is apparent — deters Katherine Potter’s interest. Rather, it stimulates it. If someone is on their guard, then you know there is something to be guarded. Somewhere, if it is only within the hidden vaults of memory, there is treasure. You see, in this hotbed of sophistry and pedantry, Katherine Potter applies simple instinct and logic. She sees that if the Ellison Fellow is unhappy, it is because he was, once — happy.

And one night, when, thanks to the Pearce Notebooks, the invitations to the Potter home have been renewed, Katherine Potter touches the Ellison Fellow’s wrist with the fingertips of one hand and even runs the fingertips, just a little bit, brushing the hairs, up his forearm — a gesture that strikes him, among other things, as simultaneously impetuous and calculated, and certainly audacious, since there are several other people in the room at the time (though only one sees).

But this is not before the Ellison Fellow has been subjected to a concerted campaign of persuasion, across the dinner table, to release his close-kept manuscripts, there being among the assembled guests at least two other members of the History Faculty, previously briefed, no doubt, and there to voice the wider view of the Faculty that, with all due respect, he might not be the best man for the job, etc., etc. To which he responds, let it be said, with unbudging tenacity. And not before, unobserved himself, he has observed, in the kitchen (this will give some idea of the fluid nature of Potter’s soirées and his delight in mixing old and young), Potter with his hand firmly on the left buttock of one of his guests, a research graduate called Gabriella (black eyes, black hair; flashing, Italian glances), who is definitely not, as it happens, the Ellison Fellow’s type.

And whereas Potter did not know that he was observed with his hand on Gabriella’s buttock (let us be plain, his hand was thrust beneath the waistband of her undeniably fetching, tight black evening trousers, so we are not talking about the seat of her pants), it is clear to the Ellison Fellow that Potter sees Katherine, his wife, put her hand on his, the Ellison Fellow’s, wrist and, what’s more, that Katherine knows it, and doesn’t take her hand away. Which makes the Ellison Fellow, who still likes to put into his thoughts the words, if not of Hamlet, then (more appropriately perhaps) of Polonius, think springes to catch woodcocks. But since she does not take her hand away, he is forced to look into her eyes. They are blue-grey eyes. His eyes are grey. Gabriella’s eyes are black. His dead wife’s were seaweed-brown. How strange that we each have these different eyes, like jewels set in our bodies, and that when we look into someone’s eyes we think we can see who they are. These are not the eyes of a natural temptress. They seem to be pleading for his co-operation and at the same time to be saying, “I know, I married the wrong man.” And he cannot tell if she is acting.

She walks towards me across the lawn; waves; I wave in return. She is wearing a sleeveless, mutedly floral summer frock of some thin fabric, which, if it were not for the dark yew hedge behind her, would allow the sunlight to show up, in hazy outline, her still slender-but-firm body — which, let me make this plain, I have never seen otherwise exposed.

Though the point came near.

She walks with a fluid stride, which would be truly gazelle-like if there were not a touch of sheepishness about it, a self-induced and long-practised hesitancy, an air of brave cheerfulness undermined by contrition. She carries this large straw bag, out of which there peeps the glossy cap of a thermos flask and a rumpled blue-and-white-check cloth; and I know, without seeing, that also in the bag, along with the decanted, chilled white wine in the thermos, are a few choice morsels purchased on her way: the rudiments of a little déjeuner sur l’herbe. Though there will be nothing scandalous, not now, in this picture.

The straw bag is strangely affecting. It reminds me of those ubiquitous, oddly rustic “shopping bags” that were once, in those far-off days before the advent of polythene, a standard accoutrement of every woman, including even my mother, but which now seem folksy and quaint. It somehow looks right in the hand of Katherine Potter, in whose simple, flaxen tresses, vulnerable shoulders and Arcadian attire you might detect the traces of a pastoral wistfulness: a former Sixties flower-child (fallen since on thorns), a one-time student of Eng. Lit., wallowing, Ophelia-like, in simpering, whimpering poetry.

Not my type. Not my type at all.

She waves. The nurse; the convalescent. The wounded paladin; the pitying lady. These titbits stolen from the lord’s table. I think she thinks she is restoring me to life. That that is her duty now. I think she thinks it was because of her—

A little fact I omitted to mention above: When she touched my wrist that evening at Potter’s, it was as though I had forgotten that I still had a wrist, as though I had forgotten that my wrist, with its little forest of dark, pliant hairs, still belonged to me. Later, alone, I looked at my wrist and said to myself, absurdly: This is my wrist.

And when I watch her walk across the lawn, she seems to me (but don’t trust the words of someone newly snatched from the grave) like life itself. Like life itself.

She crosses the lawn and halts in front of me. “Hello,” she says. “Hello,” I say. She puts down the basket. A light breeze wafts across the garden and just for a moment it wreathes her hair about her face and flutters her thin dress against her body with almost sentient, Botticellian tenderness. The bare shoulders are infallible. Their appeal goes to some helpless spot at the centre of the chest. She starts to unload the basket. There are real napkins, real wine glasses, nothing skimped. I take the notes I have only just placed on my tray — it reconverts, you see, to its proper use — and shuffle them into my briefcase.

“I haven’t come at a wrong moment?” she says. She always says this, or something like it—“I’m not disturbing you?” “Would you rather be by yourself?” And it’s then that she wears her most contrite looks.

“How’s it going?” she says.

“Fine,” I say.

I don’t know which would hurt her more. To tell her (but I think she knows this, I think she really does) that it wasn’t because of her, no, not exactly — and so deprive her of her stricken but gratifying role. Or to tell her that it was because of her, yes, as a matter of fact — and so turn that role into a lasting, remorseful truth.

I don’t know which is true myself.

How can one person take the place of another?

She pours wine from the thermos, and condensation mists the bowl of the glass. She hands me the glass, then she says, meaning it lightly but somehow sounding reproachful, “What was that you had to hide in your briefcase?” And it’s only at this moment that I know for certain that I’m going to go through with the decision I’ve made.

“I’ll tell you — in a while,” I say.

First, we eat, we drink. We are surrounded by warmth and flowers. Under the Indian bean tree, who loves to lie with me … In far-away Chicago Potter will be just waking up. I’m prepared to bet that he is alone in his bed. I’m prepared to bet that, for once, he will not avail himself of the customary opportunities of a conference abroad. He will be the chaste scholar. And he will think a lot of Katherine, and of me.

I drain my glass, then reach over to my briefcase and take out — no, not these scribbled pages, but a complete, freshly made copy of the Pearce manuscripts. What does it matter? Who am I to raise Matthew Pearce from the dead?

“For you,” I say. “For both of you. I want you to have it now.”