Forgotten Life (21 page)

There was little furniture in the room. In one corner lay a pile of grey blankets. Papers were everywhere. Conspicuous among the books were many volumes of B. Traven who, Clement knew, was a favourite of Joseph's. Where not occupied by bookshelves, the walls were covered with threatening-looking posters in various languages; the Polish Solidarity sign was among them. In contrast was a delicate Korean Buddha, standing on a window sill. A desk by the window and a side-table were covered with more pamphlets and papers, some in Eastern alphabets. Half-empty bottles of wine and stronger liquor stood on the mantelpiece, together with a mug lacking a handle.

Everything was as Clement had last seen it. It was a comfortably squalid room. He had visited many like it in Oxford, rotting here and there in old mansions which had once been family houses. It was a place where bookwork was done. Its stuffy yet curiously inviting smell made Clement think of drugs. As if to emphasize the heat, flies buzzed about the room or darted their little dynamic bodies against the windows.

Seeing Ron Mallock sink back on his heels and begin to read through a book on the Vietnam War, Clement made impatient noises.

‘Sorry, don't mind me. I'm having the day off. I'll be sad when this lot goes. This place has been a home-from-home for me. I've got a place over in Brentford. You don't mind me being here?'

‘Well, not a lot, I suppose,' said Clement, seating himself in an old wicker chair with rather more force than necessary.

‘Here's the morning paper.' Ron took a folded copy of the
Daily Mirror
out of his rear pocket and threw it across to Clement. ‘You might like a read. Take it easy – you look pale.'

Clement accepted the newspaper rather shame-facedly, thinking that after all this man had probably been a better friend to Joseph than he had.

The front page of the paper carried a huge headline,
TUNIS TRAGEDY
, and an account in various weights of type of how bombs had exploded in four luxury hotels in Monastir, on the Tunisian coast. Six English people, all women and children, had been injured. Despite reassurances from the Tunisian government, British tourists were now flocking home by the hundred, cutting short their holidays and heading for safety.

‘Terrible, i'n't it?' said Ron, catching Clement's eye.

‘Yes, it is. Innocent holiday-makers.'

‘Terrible the way they panic and all start rushing home at one little spot of bother.'

‘The Arab world is rather in ferment at present. What reassurances can a government possibly give that more bombs won't be planted? Agreed, Tunis is pretty peaceful, but you can't take chances. If I were there with my family, I'd bring them back home pretty promptly. It would not be a case of panic, rather of simple caution, surely.'

‘These people don't know anything. Rich tourists. They're selfish.' Ron spoke as if he had not heard Clement's reply. ‘They just panic and rush home with never a thought that they might be ruining the tourist trade on which the Tunisians depend. So the Third World gets poorer and poorer and suffers a further decline. More victimization by the Developed Countries.'

‘If I were in one of those hotels, I would think of my family before the local tourist trade, wouldn't you?'

‘There you go, the extortion of the Third World. This will scare off the American tourists, you'll see, and they will all stay at home. It's the Americans' fault in the first place, all this.'

‘How do you make that out?'

‘Obvious, isn't it? Start a lot of oppression, gang up with Israel, this is what you get.'

‘I feel I mustn't take up any more of your time. If you can find those pamphlets, well and good. I must have the flat to myself, since I hope to tidy everything up. Besides, I'm hoping to write a book on my brother …'

Ron stood up. ‘And what sort of a book will it be, may I ask?'

‘That's what I haven't quite decided. I'm keeping an open mind until all the evidence is in.'

‘An open mind, eh?' Ron appeared to think about it. ‘Yet I gather from what you say that you're a Tory?'

‘As a matter of fact, no, I'm not. I'm a socialist – a socialist with rather a small “s” these days, I'm afraid, but still a socialist.'

Ron laughed, showing a lot of white teeth and looking amazingly well. ‘You're kidding. Listen, Mr Winter, your brother was a really good man. There was a side to him you maybe never saw. He worried greatly about the rotten social system in this country, and all the misery it brings. And he cared about the Third World – especially the nations of South East Asia, which he often visited. Such as Kampuchea, ruined by American Imperialism. You'd better put all that in your book.'

‘I intend to.'

‘And put in that he was a sensitive man who cared for the spiritual side of life. Not a man of action, you wouldn't say, more your dreamer, but none the worse for that. A scholar and a gentleman.'

‘I thought he didn't have much time for gentlemen.'

‘It's just a saying, isn't it? He had revelations, your brother. Which is more than what I have. Or you, I daresay.'

Feeling his temper rise, Clement said nothing.

Ron hefted the volume he had been looking at. ‘I'd better be off if my presence offends you. Let's have my paper. I don't see the CND pamphlets anywhere, but I'll just borrow this book, if you've no objections.'

Clement made a gesture and opened his mouth to speak.

Ron said quickly, ‘Oh, I know, don't tell me. Probate. Keep the book, and good luck to you. I'm not a thief, you know.'

As he left the room, Clement shouted, ‘Take the bloody book if you want it.' He felt rather feverish.

Clumping down the stairs, Ron Mallock shouted a response which Clement did not hear. As he left by the tradesmen's entrance, he slammed the door shut behind him.

Clement wandered round the room, vaguely vexed. He opened a window where a fly buzzed and stared out over the unappetizing prospect of back yards and broken roofs. He could hear his heart beating and wondered why he was so upset.

Perhaps he was not the sort of man to write his brother's biography.

It was true he did not have revelations. Life had to be lived on a low plane, without sudden glimpses of the numinous. The survivors of the war, chief witnesses in his work on adaptability, testified to finding God in merciful escapes from death among ruins. There had been no similar challenges for Clement, barely seven when the war ended; he remembered nothing of it, only the return of bananas when it was all over. His was a peaceful peacetime existence, without especial exhilarations.

Of course there was Sheila, the great consolation. Her pleasantness, day by day and year by year, was a form of revelation for which he was grateful.

 

At last he turned away from the window, conscious of the stuffy silence of the flat surrounding him. Death – the ultimate in probate – had immobilized it. He walked uncertainly through the other rooms, the poky bathroom/toilet, the kitchen/diner where Joseph's body had been found, the bedroom with its unmade bed. Each room had an individual silence and individual smell.

On a shelf in the bedroom stood a large framed photograph of Lucy Traill, Joseph's last girl friend, standing her ground while a small child tried to wrench her arm off. Tucked into the frame of this photograph was an old snapshot – rather surprisingly – of Ernest Winter, Joseph and Clement's father. In his early fifties, he was standing by a privet hedge, holding a large pair of shears and smiling uncertainly into the camera. His appeared an intelligent face, although Clement never ceased to be astonished at how little of their owners faces gave away. Even hands were more revealing.

Ernest Winter had died at the age of seventy-one, when Clement
was thirty-one. Clement tucked the snap back where he had found it.

Going down to the car with some boxes, he came up again carrying two empty suitcases, into which he started to pile his brother's clothes. There was nothing he wanted himself. It was cheap stuff, well worn. Michelin could take it to Oxfam. He hesitated once, when he came on Joseph's bush hat, moth-eaten souvenir of his years in Burma, the Fourteenth Army flash still sewn on its brim. Joseph would like him to keep that.

The journeys up and down stairs made him feel weak. A certain delicacy prevented him from stretching out on the bed. He sat in the cramped living room, with its curious drugged scent.

In the ancient, battered roll-top desk, bought doubtless from a local junk dealer, he found various CND leaflets, probably the ones Ron Mallock had been seeking. With them was a bundle of letters, secured by a rubber band. Clement bent over to lift them out into the light. Again that smell came to him, strong as a herb. He found himself incapable of moving from the stooped position. Time passed in dull, thick pulses.

He saw that it was in fact a long way across the room, a distance hardly to be measured, which wound its way through barricades of books. They were depicted in a vivid purple light which he felt did not deceive him for a minute. Through the open door lay another extravagant vista, seen as if through a weight of water, attended by bar-like wooden banisters and a shabby rug which lay in wait for an unwary footfall. It took time as much as anything to observe these things. At the far end of this distressing view was a strip of wall and another open door, painted dull brown. Through the dull door, a fragment of the kitchen could be seen, and there a man was standing at the sink, washing his hands with slow and portentous industry.

It was crucial that this man should not turn round and see Clement, who had become small as well as immobile. The likelihood was that the man would turn round, since the fatal scent in the air, which found its way to Clement, emanated from this figure.

Somehow, Clement found himself able to see the porcelain sink, and the stream of water falling, falling from a thin tap down on a pair of veined white hands, and a bar of soap revolving slowly over and over in the grasp of the hands, foaming terribly as it went, as if it bled. This he was forced to watch, all the while fearing that the man would turn round – he would be bound to turn round slowly, but turn round he would – and look at him. That was to be avoided at all cost. The flies in the room were making a terrible noise.

The bar of soap went on foaming and revolving, in some way independent of anything else that was happening, for the man was now drying his hands on a towel, his veined white hands now repeating their previous movements under the tap into the folds of towelling. And he was turning round.

Clement thought that it was time he took another breath, an action that proved laboriously difficult to carry out, stooped as he was. He caught the sounds of his own lungs and imagined them down below somewhere, sponge-like and flapping in a strong wind.

His brother had now turned completely round. He still held the towel. Now he was advancing on Clement. Considering how far there was to come, he advanced with terrifying rapidity. The towel trailed behind him leading all the way back into the kitchen.

He entered the living room. Clement remained bent over the open desk.

Although his brother's face was pallid, it bore a smile. He was near now. He stood over Clement. With a great effort, Clement rose to his feet and confronted Joseph.

Joseph said, ‘Everything worked out all right.'

Then he was gone.

For a long while, Clement stood where he was, listening to the flies buzzing against the window pane. The strange scent had disappeared. With automatic movements, he went over to close the window he had opened.

Still clutching the bundle of letters, he moved down the stairs,
down the steps covered with their old brown carpeting. Outside, the street looked unnaturally bright, the Mercedes against the curb unnaturally large. Somehow, he locked the tradesmen's entrance of the flat behind him and crossed the pavement to his car.

He sat there for several minutes, breathing slowly, before driving away.

Sheila was sympathetic.

‘You poor darling, it's not like you to see things.'

‘There Joseph stood, as close as you are to me. He said “Everything worked out all right” – almost like a voice from the grave. I couldn't have seen him more clearly. He had been washing his hands.'

‘You poor darling,' she said again. ‘It's the heat. Temperatures were over ninety in Somerville when they took the noon reading. Why don't you go up and get into bed and I'll have Michelin bring you up a nice light supper.'

‘Perhaps I'll do that,' Clement said. ‘It sounds a bit feeble.'

‘You're allowed to be feeble once in a while.'

‘“Everything worked out all right …” I can still hear his voice. It was amazing.'

‘Would you like me to get Dr Lloyd?'

‘No, I'll go and have a bath as you suggest.'

‘Have a nice cool bath. Not too cool. Perhaps I'll take your temperature.'

When he lowered his flabby bulk into the bath, Clement lay there half-submerged. He was unable to wash himself. Staring at the tablet of bath soap, his mind returned to that other bar of soap in Chesterfield Street, slowly revolving, foaming its substance away in Joseph's hands. What had it signified? He tried to answer the
question clinically, imagining it posed by Mrs Emerova. Answer would not come: only the vision of the soap rotating, its colour now forgotten, and the minute linked bubbles of foam falling away from it, regularly.

After the bath, he slid into bed between the sheets, to find himself shivering. He could not get to grips with himself or with his recent experience. The functioning of his brain seemed oddly affected, although he could not explain how. Nor was it possible for him to decide whether he had actually received a visitation from his brother, or whether he had had some sort of illness, say a minor stroke, which had caused a vivid hallucination. The latter possibility left him unmoved; strokes were part of the rational world. Far more alarming was the prospect that his brother might actually have come back from the dead to speak to him; the rational world had no place for such events.

Suppose, against all belief, Joseph had returned. The meaning of ‘Everything worked out all right' was still obscure. Probably Joseph was referring to his own life. Or was he referring to Clement's problem with the book, or with Sheila? Perhaps he meant that the whole confused world worked out all right, on evidence from some superior time-annihilating position of vantage granted those who had died …

It was more comfortable to suppose that the whole episode had been a delusion. Heat may have played a part. Clement remembered the smell of the flat; it might also have had a disturbing effect on the mind.

He dozed lightly, hearing traffic go by in Rawlinson Road. When he roused, his head felt better and he noted that he was less uneasy, at least until the thought of Mrs Emerova came into his mind. It would be difficult communicating this new episode in his life to her.

‘It was a vision of some kind. One hates using the word because of its Biblical connotations, but a vision is what it was: something between reality and unreality.'

‘Do you mean between objective and subjective? Is there such a state?'

‘Why do you look at me like that? I suppose you think the whole thing was just an outcrop of disturbed sexuality?'

‘Is that what you feel it was?'

‘It was just a joke. Maybe I was just having a kind of brain storm. I was rather upset by the friend of Joseph's I met there, Ron Mallock.'

‘Why did he upset you?'

‘Oh, he was just talking about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament …'

Suddenly, Clement remembered that a psychotherapist of his acquaintance at Carisbrooke had told him over drinks that two of his patients were high-ranking members of the CND who had come for treatment, in conditions of utmost confidentiality, because they found that competing with their wish to ban the bomb was a strong desire to see it dropped. Wish and fear were close neighbours; opposites attracted.

In a similar way, his vision in the Acton flat seemed to incorporate opposites, fear and reassurance, or his love of his brother and his hatred of him. Joseph had excluded him from his life.

Feeling slightly perked up, Clement sat up in bed and adjusted his pillows. The untidy bundle of letters he had brought from Acton lay on his bedside table. Taking them up rather feebly, Clement began to shuffle through them.

With one exception, the letters were from Lucy Traill, the last of Joseph's long succession of girl friends. He knew Lucy was a physiotherapist, from the disastrous occasion when she had tried to practise her art on Sheila. He also remembered, as soon as he started to read the letters, that she was an ardent supporter of CND, and that Joseph had met her on some demonstration or march. She worked in a hospital in Richmond, and lived with Joseph only at weekends, which explained both the letters and their highly-charged sexual content.

Lucy was good at describing in detail what she and Joseph had done the previous weekend, and what she wanted them to do when next they met. The uninhibited nature of the correspondence caused Clement to stir uneasily in the bed.

He and Sheila rarely talked much about sex. Nor was there much
in the way of description of sexual activity in Sheila's Kerinth novels. Yet vivid and happy memories came back to him of their early years of marriage, when they had both discovered in themselves a desire for sexual intercourse out of doors. They had done it wherever and whenever they could, sometimes tumbling out of cars to perform in a lane or a field, quickly before anyone saw them – Sheila had always been fast off the button. They had done it in parks, in woods, by roaring motorways, on beaches. They had done it lying down, or had enjoyed knee-tremblers against trees in the rain.

Thought of those happy years brought a gush of pleasure to him. How close they had been! – And still were, perhaps because of that carefree, randy time. It had ceased with the birth of their daughter, Juliet, in 1970.

He sighed, still not willing to think of Juliet, and opened another of Lucy's letters.

After a long description of their next encounter in bed, she wrote, ‘But all these joys may never be. You have been increasingly strange lately, not even coming on the last demonstration. We put on a great show outside the base at Lakenheath, yet you weren't there. And that remark of yours about the Pershings – that they weren't pointing at us. Okay, I know you were drunk. It was in The Queen's Arms, remember. There was a sudden hush. Everyone suddenly shut up and stared at you. I felt such a fool. We have to be united, firm in our beliefs. Every missile in the world points at us. If you're going to give up now, just when we seem to be succeeding, don't count on me to be around.'

Her next letter showed that Joseph had given a reply she found unsatisfactory. Her tone was abusive.

Joseph had made a pained and elaborate response. That it had been important to him was indicated by the fact that he had typed it out on an old manual typewriter and kept a carbon copy. It was dated January 1987.