Forgotten Life (3 page)

Sighing, he began to sort through some newspaper cuttings which Arthur had amassed while he was away. One of them caught his attention. It was a brief account, cut from the
Independent
, of a massacre which had occurred in the Lisenitsky Forest, on the outskirts of Lvov, in the Ukraine, in September 1943.

The details were brief but clear. Following the fall of Mussolini, Italy surrendered unconditionally early that September. Italian forces were still fighting alongside the Nazis. Many of them were left politically and physically stranded by the armistice. 229,000 Italians were serving on the Eastern front. 89,000 of them were killed or disappeared without trace. The Germans were hard-pressed by the Russians after the failure of their Sixth Army to take Stalingrad. When 2,000 Italians refused to fight at the front and demanded repatriation, the Germans, ruthless as ever, simply rounded them up in a sand pit and shot them all. Trees were then planted over the site to conceal it. Over forty years later, the site had been discovered by some children from Lvov.

It was only a small incident in a long war; but it touched closely on the theme of Clement's book, the break-up of families and relationships throughout Europe as the result of two world wars. In his years in Berlin, Clement had counselled women whose husbands or sons had disappeared into the vast battlefields of the Soviet Union, never to be heard of again.

Making a precis of the facts on a file card, Clement handed it over to Arthur to store the entry in the computer. After some thought, he scribbled a line to the
Independent
correspondent in Moscow, asking for verification and, if possible, amplification of the facts. The sole witness to the massacre, according to Tass, quoted in the paper, was a woman who had been a schoolgirl of sixteen at the time.

This was only one of a number of similar massacres. In Babi Yar, outside Kiev, the Nazis had massacred 200,000 of their so-called enemies. In Katyn, near Smolensk, Russians had murdered over 4,000 Polish officers.

What had that schoolgirl been doing, wandering innocently in the woods near Lvov? And what effect had sight of that massacre had on her later life? According to her testimony, some of the Italian soldiers had been playing guitars. He saw her through the double-glazed windows of his room, wandering among the willows on the banks of the Isis. She had crept nearer to see who could be
playing guitars so happily in the middle of a war. Then came the rifle shots and the cries. She stood behind a tree, fearful. Then she had run for home and not dared to speak of what she had heard and seen.

Clement received these destructions with binocular vision. They happened a long time ago in a distant place. They were also contemporaneous, happening close at hand. Violence remained in the air. Most people in Europe were governed by force. It was inevitable that savagery would break out again. Even understanding was no defence against that.

Since that schoolgirl witness had been born, Hitler's evil empire had been destroyed. Other evils had sprung up. Her own town, Lvov, had passed from Poland to become part of the Soviet Empire. The century had produced new states of doubtful legality. The new states raised armies which marched or clashed along the shifted frontiers. The victors exacted duties, levies, and taxes – above all a moral tax – on those within their borders.

He sighed and turned back to his desk. Under all his horror at the massacres lay a fascination he sought to conceal even from himself. The fascination kept him at his work. Such massacres as the schoolgirl witnessed represented a rare time when life became greater than the imagination. Generally, the reverse was true.

Over coffee in the common room, Clement bumped into Harry Raine, Master of Carisbrooke. Raine, tall, decrepit by design, spare, thin of jowl, began to talk immediately about problems of invigilation. ‘The day of examining and being examined is upon us. You timed your return from the feverish charms of the New World well,' he told Clement, with his ghostly smile.

He dislikes me, Clement thought, because my wife makes a lot of money from her writing and I never say a word against it.

He was not sure if this were really so, since Harry sometimes gave the impression – it was something in that ghostly smile which displayed the strangely grouped grey teeth – of disliking everyone. But he never asked after Sheila.

She's too much a challenge to his antiquated set of values, Clement
thought. And he doesn't like women either. Hence his hugely pompous manner – enough to put off any sensible girl.

 

Going home that evening, Clement Winter walked to the shops in Summertown, met a few acquaintances, chatted, and collected from the delicatessen smoked herring, bean salad, and a brand of walnut ice-cream which Sheila particularly enjoyed. He was aware that he was probably duplicating Michelin's efforts earlier; but he wished to reassure his wife that the good things of life had not necessarily stopped just because they were back in England again.

As he entered Rawlinson Road, he passed his neighbour, John Farrer. Farrer was short and bald and given to tweed suits and heavy lace-up shoes when not wearing city clothes. He was ‘in insurance', and his whole demeanour from the plodding walk onward summed up the banality of the Here and Now, in Clement's opinion. This would have been insufficient to stop the Winters from speaking to him; it was John Farrer who had decided not to speak to, and even to ignore the existence of, his neighbours. They passed by on the pavement, within a foot of each other, staring straight ahead.

Clement could not resist it. He winked as they were passing.

The wink was to say, ‘Bourgeois Man, you wear your silly thick jacket, even in a heatwave. Right down to your soul you're over-dressed.' It was also to say, ‘Aren't we comic, carrying on this silly feud when we are neighbours?'

It was also to say, ‘I believe I'm superior to you because I can see the funny side of all this …'

The wink was not returned. Stony-faced, the banality of the Here and Now marched on by. Clement turned in at his own gate.

His house, like many of the others in this most superior road, was an example of bland but condescending English architectural manners, with no one feature overwhelming another. Nor did it vie with the neighbouring houses – with the Farrers' house, for instance. All the same, its essential features had been assembled in such a way that it appeared different from any of the others in the street, and
the facade was crowded with too much detail, the windows too large, the porch too heavy, the gables too pointed, for complete discretion. I'm prosperous, the house said, as Clement went in, and I think you should know it.

When he entered the building, he found his wife sitting in the kitchen by the Aga, in a familiar attitude when talking, with one arm bent and tucked behind her head, chatting over the phone to a friend, recounting the ardours and triumphs of the American tour. A cold cup of coffee stood on the table by her. It took Clement only a moment to deduce that the friend at the other end of the line was Maureen Bowler; internal evidence suggested as much. Sheila used a special voice when talking with her feminist friend.

Sheila was wrapped in her blue towelling robe, resting her bare feet on the table. She smiled and waved at Clement without interrupting the flow of her conversation. She was saying, ‘I told them that my idea of the fantastic was not just yesterday's fantastic, which has become familiar through constant use – unicorns and all that – but something really fantastic, like a whole world on which every living organism has achieved consciousness … Yes, that's it, like the planet Amarnia in
Kerinth Invaded
. And then Larry Ivens got up and tried to argue that nothing was fantastic any more—'

He went over to the refrigerator and put the herring and ice-cream in it. Going to the walk-in larder, he took a bottle of white wine from the stone floor. Uncorking it, he poured two glasses, one of which he passed to Sheila. They made toasting gestures to each other and drank; Sheila in addition waggled her toes.

He took his glass upstairs, where Joseph's papers awaited him. It was noticeably warmer on the second floor. He stood about, opened a window, and then switched on the radio. From Radio Three came the sound of a fellow with an abnormally high voice singing about somewhere called Wenlock Edge. Clement switched him off again, and stood surveying the collection of papers and boxes accumulated here.

His American trip had merely postponed a decision he must now
make. He must decide to what use to put his brother's life now that his brother had finished with it. There was also Joseph's flat in Acton, with all his books and possessions, to be disposed of.

Indecision was not a habit with him. Yet he pottered about now, the very picture of indecision. He had to admit it: Joseph worried him.

Joseph had been the adventurous one. Clement had had no adventures in life. His social work, his analysis in West Berlin, his visiting professorships in the States – all had a sheltered quality, compared with Joseph's way of knocking about the world on next to nothing.

Clement had gone to university, unlike his brother and sister, or anyone else in the Winter family. His parents would never have aspired so high. Yet the three years in Birmingham – so he felt, looking back – had been largely wasted, as far as living was concerned. He had made few friends, joined few societies, played no games. He had filled up his days with work, poisoning himself with coffee and the cigarettes he now loathed.

Introspection had led him to become absorbed in the deficiencies of the human character. Within those labyrinths, Clement found himself able to exercise endless patience, like a naturalist in dense jungle, content to wait for hours, and to endure a thousand insect bites and stings, in order to glimpse some rare species. Such a species was now delivered to him in the shape of his elder brother's papers, and he didn't know what to do with them, or what pattern to extract from them.

After graduating, he had done social work in London and Coventry, later specializing in psychiatric work at the Maudsley Hospital, where he came to deal with post-war trauma victims. The war, like a heavy monsoon, had made some people and ruined others, and the losers formed a long queue at Clement's door, demanding attention.

That queue had captured his intense compassion. He had gone to study in Berlin, and there underwent a course of analysis with T. F. Schulz, emerging as a qualified analytical psychologist in 1969. It was in Berlin he had met the young Sheila Tomlinson, long before she set foot on Kerinth.

Back in England, the queue of the maladjusted still awaited him. Marriage to Sheila did not greatly disrupt work on the queue. Only when their one child, Juliet, died, did Clement exert himself and change the course of his career, becoming a professor of sociology in 1973, and publishing his best-received work,
Personality and Aggression
, in 1974. Later, he worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. By then Sheila was enjoying her first literary success, and Clement had to take a certain amount of teasing, much of it only superficially good-natured, from his colleagues. Academics hated fantasy, feeling themselves surrounded by it; nor were they more cordial to success.

The situation had been better in the States, where success was still regarded as a fun thing, and where he had taken several visiting fellowships in the late seventies. Carisbrooke College, less conventional than older Oxford colleges, had made him a fellow in 1981.

Joseph had followed a less academic course.

Clement's temperate qualities enabled him to enter keenly into the problems of others. But those problems had merely been traffic through the plain of his own life. His one adventure, apart from the determination needed to get to university, had lain in marrying Sheila; she, too, had been part of that traffic, born the month Paris fell to the German invader, seeking a stability she had lost, and willing to find a substitute for it in Clement's cautious embrace.

Twelve years Clement's senior, Joseph had been just old enough to see action in the war, swept overseas in the struggle which had convulsed the world. In Clement's considered opinion, years of soldiering had awoken something primitive in his brother's nature, a rebellious and, from some points of view, admirable quality, which had enabled him ever after to live an independent life of struggle, punctuated by periods of insolvency and hazardous travel in the Far East. And of course many affairs with women. Joseph had never settled for anything; nor had he settled down. He had never been able to settle down. That some of his existential problems remained unresolved seemed evident from the muddle of papers in Clement's room; he had left scattered evidence of his
existence, almost as a challenge to his brother, whose duty in life it was to understand.

Clement's training, as well as his analytical disposition, enabled him to see how reluctant he was to face his own lack of involvement in Joseph's affairs. He had been far – often physically far – from the crucial events in Joseph's career.

He took from the drawer of his desk an envelope containing a letter and photograph Joseph had sent him in the early eighties. He was sorry to think that they had arrived in response to his duplicated form. When he was embarking on the research required for
Adaptability
, Clement had sent out the forms to large numbers of people, inviting memories of the beginning of the war in 1939. He had been impersonal; his brother's response had been personal and immediate.

Joseph had taken the printed question literally. His reply, in his hasty handwriting, concerned only the declaration of war, when he had just turned thirteen. On that day, 3rd September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, his sister Ellen was almost nine; Clement was little more than a toddler. Their parents, Ernest and Madge Winter, were in their late thirties or early forties.

Madge Winter had taken the photograph on the family box Brownie. It was in black-and-white, with a white margin. Time had made it crisp and slightly concave. In Joseph's writing on the back of the snap was the legend, ‘Taken an hour after war was declared.'