Shuttlecock

[33]

It is over six months now since Quinn left our office. His departure was marked by the minimum of ceremony. A gathering of senior staff in one of the offices upstairs, to which, of course, myself, Vic, Eric, Fletcher and O’Brien and most of our junior ancillary staff were duly invited. Drinks and little sausages on sticks. The presentation of a gift for which I took the initiative for collecting contributions, and which for some time remained a problem until I remembered the battered golf bag I’d seen in Quinn’s conservatory. Golf-clubs are not cheap, and I don’t mind saying that I myself forked out in secret an extra large donation in order to buy the set, complete with bag, that the man in the sports shop assured me was the best. Speeches. A short valediction in which Quinn kept strictly within the emotional limits prescribed by such occasions, not allowing any undue warmth to melt, at the last moment, his traditionally chilly manner; and in which he wished, with no hint of special sentiment, ‘every success to my young and able successor’ in the seat which was ‘by now’ (dutiful ripple of amusement) ‘nicely warmed’. A breaking-up into general drinking, chit-chat and hypocritical well-wishing from which Quinn himself slipped away, scarcely noticed, not deigning to join us in the session which followed in the pub around the corner. I too slipped away from this second bout of drinking while it was still in its early stages, to learn later, from Vic, that it had developed into an orgy of Quinn-bashing, and from Eric — with whom, being now his superior, I found I could not listen to such things without making vague signs that he was being over-familiar — that this same session had led to another in which he had positively and completely explored all the remaining hidden charms of the tantalizing Maureen.

And so to the next Monday morning, and to sitting in that leather chair, which was not warm but distinctly cool (October; the office heating not yet coaxed into life), and which seemed, and still seems, I might add, too big for me.

I haven’t seen or heard of Quinn since. No phone calls or invitations. No chance, passing visits back to his old office. I imagine that is how he wishes it to be. We will cease to associate, like old accomplices who have done the deed and gone to ground. Our mutual silence will be as constant as Dad’s.

But very often, I think of Quinn. I wonder what he is doing; how he is spending his ‘retirement’. For with a man like Quinn, so solitary, so formerly work-bound, there seems no way in which this phrase can conjure up its usual stock of clichés. What will he do? The only picture I can summon of him is of a man walking — no, limping — almost continuously over the turf of a golf course, dragging a bag of golf-clubs which have already lost their new shine, pitting himself, not against the skill of others (for somehow I am sure that Quinn, with his metal foot, is neither a good nor a competitive player), but against his own deficiencies, his own nagging uncertainties, harrying the little ball towards its far-off home. Or I see him, an even more solitary figure, on one of those mythical sea-cruises the newly-retired are supposed to take, gazing from the stern-rail as the sun sets, over Madeira or Tenerife, and yet unable to drink in fully, to be pacified completely by the magic of the scene, because he cannot, ever, quite shake from his mind the memory of all those skeletons locked away in cupboards. I think, one day Quinn and I will meet, like secret agents at some seemingly innocent rendezvous — to feed the ducks on Clapham Common, to watch the animals at the zoo. I think of Quinn when I go to see Dad. Quinn … Dad. One day they, too, must meet.… But all these things, of course, are romantic visions. Lurid imagination. I think again. Quinn has his garden, his conservatory, his Siamese cats.…

And I am left only with the after-image of Quinn’s official self which I wear about my own person by virtue of occupying his desk. I look at the cherry tree through the window (nearly May again; it has passed the peak of its bloom). I summon Miss Reynolds (at first a shy and reluctant servant to a new, young master) on the intercom. I write down instructions. I survey the others (my old place taken by Eric) through the glass partition. I even suspect that I am developing the hint of a limp, and that one day, not far off perhaps, my hair will start to recede and I will simultaneously find myself in need of glasses.

And, what is more, I have the combination to the safe that, previously, was accessible only to Quinn, and I have the right to unseal all those sealed files which, previously, only Quinn could open.

Eric has just looked up. He has seen me standing at the partition, sipping the cup of tea Miss Reynolds has brought me, and his eyes have betrayed that faltering compromise that I know so well from experience: not turning away at once, but hesitating to give the full counter-stare. A tense, awkward look, perhaps lasting two seconds. Then he lowers his head abruptly, with an air of returning purposefully to his work; and then, after a few seconds more, his hand goes up to push the hair from his forehead and scratch his crown — perhaps to give an added impression of industry, but more likely to signal to me in some pleading way (for he knows I am still watching) that he is puzzled. In the last few months this bewildered, anxious, even melancholy expression has crept into the features of Eric, who was never one, in the past, to let the business of the office unduly preoccupy him. Where is the Eric who once boasted of his conquests in the typing pool, and who did not let his wife and family stand in the way of his not entirely plausible adventures with Maureen (of whom he no longer speaks)? A reasonable deduction might be that added responsibility has sobered and perplexed him; that in moving up the ladder from junior assistant number two to junior assistant number one (no huge advancement) he has come up against his own unhappy limitations. But I know this is not the case. He has every reason to be puzzled. Half the items in that file he is looking at now are missing.

I continue gazing at Eric, sipping my tea, knowing what my next move will shortly be. When my tea is finished I will open the rear door of my office and call out, like some captain on the quarter-deck, ‘Eric — can you spare a moment?’ (For, unlike Quinn, I cannot run — not with Eric, at least — to the barking of full-blown orders. But my words are a command — and a provocation — nonetheless.) And Eric will step up, and I will see the apprehension on his face, for he knows what is coming. ‘Isn’t it about time you were finished with that file?’ I will sink back in my chair. And Eric will offer up some vague excuse about the fragmentariness of the evidence, the difficulty of establishing connexions — all of which I will cut short by saying, with a faint sigh, ‘All right — leave it with me.’ And it’s then that I will see, beneath his confusion, a look of aggression enter Eric’s face; and it’s then, as he betrays himself by a momentary glance round my office, that I shall see the substance of that aggression. Envy; envy and hate. For I was once a junior like Eric; he and I were virtual equals. We stood each other drinks at lunch-time and swopped each other’s jokes. And now I sit behind a big desk, with a salary to match, promoted by an extraordinary stroke of luck (or, some say, secret machination) to a senior rank in my early thirties; and why shouldn’t Eric, who is no different from me, and only a year younger, have and deserve these things too?

I stand by the partition with this scene already scripted and rehearsed, as it were, ahead of me. But it is not really Eric I am looking at. And all that I’ve said so far about how I treat Eric — how do you know that I haven’t made it up, it’s not all in my imagination? It’s not really Eric I’m looking at. For, after all, Eric sits in my place, just as I sit in Quinn’s, and what I see are only the reproduced symptoms of a year ago. It is my life I see through the partition. My life. For this new role that has been mine for six months is not my life. I go through its motions, I wear its mask, but inside is a man just like Eric. And I like to think that it was just the same for Quinn as he stood in this same spot looking at me. Perhaps that is why he had the partition built — in order to see better, to get a clearer view.

So how little Eric knows what I am really looking at as he bends over his work. And how little he knows if he thinks in his bewilderment, beset by all those misleading files, those gaps in the shelves — for perhaps, after all, I was not making it up — by my ever increasing strangeness (has Prentis really gone loopy like his Dad?), that the confusions cease, the mysteries stop, when promotion lifts you up into the rarefied air.

The mysteries don’t stop.…

Marian and the kids look at me each night when I return home, with the thankful expression of people who no longer have to doubt or disbelieve what they see. Perhaps my transformation is a mystery to them, too. Or perhaps their explanation — the explanation which relaxes the looks in their faces — is simple. All Daddy needed was a little power. When he didn’t have it, he tried to make up for it by acting the tyrant with us. But now that he has it, we go free. Contentment is just a fortuitous apportioning of power. And they don’t ask — any more than they did before — what I do in the office. And that is just as well. For I don’t tell them, either. They don’t ask if I am tormenting some poor underling in their stead. Why should they, if that is the price of their comfort?

But I don’t believe this explanation alone will ever satisfy Marian, for whom I am not so much a transformed as a reformed man: the man I was, years ago, before Mum’s death and Dad’s breakdown, before the kids grew up. I don’t believe she thinks it is power. And perhaps she even has some inkling — sometimes I feel it on those evenings when I work particularly late — of what I’m really doing at the office; that what I am doing is not just what I’m required to do. And what I’m doing isn’t just another, idiosyncratic version of power, whatever Quinn may have said — for he could afford the luxury of a little self-reproach, the rescue-launch of retirement standing by. It is only the sort of furtive, underhand and not even original daring of a man who isn’t really powerful or daring at all. The sort of daring that knows sooner or later — does Marian know this too? — it will be found out. For one day Eric may say: ‘Look, perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but …’

And I don’t believe that Martin is satisfied by the power theory either. For when he looks at me, though I am a more sufferable father than I was, there is still the same disrespect, the same edge of contempt, the same undeluded penetration in his eyes. He doesn’t see a man with power; he sees the same old weakling. The only difference is that I no longer conceal it. And this brings into Martin’s eyes — even into Martin’s eyes — the slightest hint of perplexity. For this is something he cannot understand. But I don’t attempt to enlighten him, or to iron out the differences which exist between us, which seem to me less and less a matter of attitude than of simple physiology.

About a fortnight or so after the official notice of my promotion I had the television reinstated in the living room. Call it an act of atonement towards my family. I didn’t want it back myself. I feared, for the sake of a gesture, a return to those days of non-communication with my sons and the spectacle of their young minds sopping up trivia. But this didn’t happen. The Bionic Man was still running, leaping, focusing his telescopic eyes on distant targets, overcoming all kinds of insuperable difficulties with effortless ease, just as he must have been, unwatched by us, all through the summer — and as he must do, for ever, electronically proofed against mortality. But I noticed Martin was no longer watching his hero’s antics with total enthralment. More than once, instead of gasping, he laughed — not a sympathetic laugh but a scoffing laugh, the sort of laugh which, if you interpret it carefully, means: I don’t need the tricks of this synthetic hero, I have my own hero — me.

And then one day — miracle of miracles — Martin was not watching the Bionic Man. He was out on the common — and not spying on his father coming home from the station, either. He was simply out there to mooch about, the way kids do when they reach a certain age, to look for what might turn up, and to advertise his ever more assertive presence. Now that he has moved to secondary school, an upheaval which hasn’t perturbed him in the least, he has gone in for this cult of self-promotion in a big way. He is constantly pushing himself to the fore (so Marian tells me, who seems to have a secret intuition for such things) amongst his fellow pupils; he has actually taken earnestly to the sports field; he is caught admiring himself in the bathroom mirror. In fact, he is undergoing — and coping blithely with — all those changes which normally occur to a boy two or three years older than himself.

And so when I think of Martin as he will be in only a few years’ — who knows, only a year’s — time, I think of a creature almost wholly alien to me and therefore beyond contention or ill-feeling. I see him as one of those cocksure, invincible, infallible youths, who will not have to swot to be bright at school, for whom puberty will be a doddle, for whom life will hold no traps, no fears.

But Peter — Peter who is still addicted to the Bionic Man — is another story.

No, if they think it is power, they are wrong. It is not power at all.

And if their new-found contentment somehow depends on their ignorance of what I am really up to in my job — doesn’t that prove the main point? Doesn’t that encourage me along the path Quinn opened up to me? All these little bits of poisoned paper I am slowly dropping into oblivion. What people don’t know, can’t hurt them.…

I still go to see Dad on Wednesdays and Sundays. He still sits on the wooden bench, gazing before him, as indestructible, in his silent impenetrability, as the Bionic Man himself. I have not yet put to him those fatal questions which at one and the same time might restore and destroy my father. Did you betray your fellow-agents? Did you really escape from the Château? Did you sleep with Z’s wife? In my mind these questions sound like the key-notes of some fresh interrogation, and Dad has already undergone one interrogation, already endured trials enough. And why should his own son appear to him in the role of interrogator — as the ghost of fat-cheeks, grey-hair and ‘le goret’, all rolled into one? Sometimes I see how easily this red-brick mental hospital, with its tranquil gardens, could turn, in the instant, from a place of refuge to a place of torture. And when I ask myself what my motive might be in putting those questions, I find myself wondering whether it would really be to see at last, after the restorative shock, a flash of recognition cross those eyes; or whether it would be to exult over the confession of some ignoble truth. And it seems to me that I care very little for the morals, the rights and wrongs of the case — whether Dad betrayed those three agents, whether he slept with another man’s wife. My feelings would not be immensely changed towards a father guilty of those acts. But what does interest me, intensely, exclusively — is whether Dad cracked. For, as with Martin, you see, it is perhaps a matter not of attitude but of physiology.

But I know I won’t ever ask those fatal questions. And I won’t make further inquiries of my own. All this was decided that evening at Quinn’s. Perhaps that means that Dad will never return from the land of silence. But then I sometimes think, with the knowledge I have but don’t show Dad, and the knowledge Dad perhaps has and believes I don’t, our relations could not be more finely tuned than they are. Every time we sit on that wooden bench, which has often seemed to me like some uneasily rocking see-saw, there are no longer those sensations of tilting and swaying — as if by some mutual, tacit arrangement, we have found the perfect balance.

And if the way I am talking suggests that, behind all my reticence, I really do believe that Dad did all those things that X accused him of, and that, indeed, is the reason for my reticence, then let me assure you that that question, too, hangs like a finely poised balance. For a long time I would still read Shuttlecock; I still pored over its pages, though I was no more certain of what I hoped to find there. And often I found myself asking: the smell of apple logs? the sentry urinating against the Château wall? the woman at Frécourt (in whom — was this my imagination? — there was some faint reflection of my mother)? — all these are too particular, too vivid and intimate to be inventions. And, again: would a man narrating a fictitious escape be at such pains to describe how he was naked?

And then one day (if you want to know, it was only last month, when suddenly buds were on the trees again and I remembered it was a year since Quinn first dropped that hint about my promotion) I stopped reading Dad’s book. I inquired no further. How much of a book is in the words and how much is behind or in between the lines? Perhaps it is best not to probe too deeply into those invisible regions, but to accept on trust what is there on the page as the best showing the author could make. And the same is true perhaps of this book (for it has grown into a book) which I have resumed now after a six months’ lapse, only to bring to its conclusion. Once you have read it, it may be better not to peer too hard beneath the surface of what it says — or (who knows if you may not be one of those happily left in peace of mind by my ‘work’ at the department?) what it doesn’t say.