Elfrida’s head jerked up. Her expression puzzled me. She looked thoroughly bewildered. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know!’ she
said automatically.
I had a sharp premonition of disaster. I kept my face impassive but my hands interlocked tightly behind my back. ‘Of course
I don’t know! If I knew I’d sue the bastard for slander!’
‘You can’t sue a dead man.’
I stared at her. She stared back, still sceptical of my ignorance, but finally she wrenched open her purse and pulled out
a tattered envelope.
‘I did bring the letter,’ she said, ‘but I hardly thought I’d need to remind you of its existence.’
I knew I was on the brink of some appalling abyss but I knew too I could not stop myself toppling into it. I went on staring
at her. Then I realized I was staring at the letter. The ache of tension started to twist in my lungs.
‘Don’t tell me no one’s ever shown you Tony’s letter!’ Elfrida burst out incredulously. ‘Don’t tell me no one’s ever confronted
you with it and demanded an explanation!’
‘Tony,’ I said. ‘Yes. I knew it was him. It had to be Tony, always Tony … Tony wrote a letter?’
‘He wrote it in 1944 just before he went to Normandy. Alan had been killed and Tony wanted to be sure that if he were killed
too Edred, George and I wouldn’t grow up in ignorance of how our parents died.’
‘1944. He wrote the letter in 1944.’
‘Yes. He typed it and made two copies.’
‘Copies. Did you say copies?’
‘Yes, he put all three copies in separate envelopes and left the lot with my mother’s solicitors in Norwich with instructions
that the top copy should be held there until Edred and I were eighteen. Didn’t you wonder why you never heard from us again
after the January of ’48? That was when we got our copy of Tony’s letter.’
‘And the other two copies—’
‘—were posted to America as soon as Tony was killed in ’44. One went to Emily. Tony felt guilty that he had abandoned her
home to live at Mallingham, and he felt he owed it to her to explain just why he had turned so completely against you. And
then of course the last copy of the letter went to—’
‘Scott,’ I said.
‘Who else?’ said Elfrida.
[5]
I was breathing very carefully, in out, in out, in out. I had to think about my breathing. I could not afford an asthmatic
scene. In out, in out.
‘Tony wanted Scott to know everything too,’ Elfrida was saying. ‘He was upset that they’d become estranged, and he hoped that
if Scott read the whole story in a posthumous letter he might at last be able to believe the truth. Of course Tony planned
to see Scott after the war and make another effort to convince him, but he was taking no chances. That letter was his insurance
that the truth would survive.’
I couldn’t think of Scott. I wanted to but I knew it would upset me too much. I wanted to tell Elfrida to stop talking but
I didn’t dare speak. I had to wait. I must do nothing that might disturb the rhythm of my breathing. Did I dare hold out my
hand or would even that small physical exertion prove fatal? In out, in out. No, I had to risk it. I had to know.
I held out my hand. She gave me the letter. For one long moment I stood listening to my laboured breathing and then I sat
down, opened the envelope and stepped right on to the rollercoaster which swooped back into the past.
[6]
I read the letter. Afterwards it was so hard to know what to say. I knew in my mind how I felt but it was so hard to find
the words to express
myself. Since I’m not an intellectual I don’t have that intellectual trick of dealing in metaphysical abstractions as if they
were concrete facts. The language of philosophy is foreign to me and although I can talk of morality as fluently as any man
who has had a religious upbringing, it occurred to me now that that language too was foreign to me, my fluency learnt parrot-fashion
and useless in any intellectual argument. Anyway I had always distrusted intellectual arguments. They only clouded one’s view
of reality. It was far more practical to see a situation in stark black and white without any colours that could confuse the
issue. One made better decisions that way. And of course to get on in life and be a success one had to make good decisions.
But now someone else was using my technique against me. Tony Sullivan was seeing the past in black and white, but his blacks
were my whites and his whites were my blacks so his view of the past was the opposite of mine. I wanted to say that to the
girl before me but I knew that wouldn’t be sufficient comment; I had to persuade her that Tony’s landscape, with its absence
of colour, even of greys and off-whites, was no more valid than my own stylized view of the past which had sustained me for
so long, but truth was such an abstract subject and I was incapable of saying what I wanted to say.
I suddenly thought of Kevin remarking when we were discussing why people hid behind masks: ‘I think it’s because life’s so
fantastically complicated …’
‘Life’s so complicated,’ I said at last, ‘so confusing. Everyone sees the truth differently. The truth is different things
to different people. Eyewitnesses can give different stories of the same set of facts. I respect Tony’s view, since he’s obviously
so sincere, but what he says in this letter just isn’t the whole story.’
‘Oh?’ said the girl bitterly. ‘Do you deny that you were so obsessed with power that you did everything you could to smash
my father’s career and ruin my mother’s life?’
I was careful not to snap back a brutal reply. Instead I thought hard and struggled again for the right words, for the words
which came closest to reflecting the truth. ‘I don’t believe,’ I said slowly at last, ‘I was any more obsessed with power
than your father was. But perhaps the truth was that it was more necessary to me than it was to him. He was a big tough guy
with an attractive personality and he didn’t really need power, he just enjoyed it. He had other ways of making people notice
him, you see. Power wasn’t his sole means of communication.’
‘
Communication
?’ She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Perhaps I had. I wished again I could express all these abstract ideas better. I wished
there were some hard facts I could use, but there was only the
truth, slippery and shadowy, and my knowledge that for once I had to confront it instead of retreating behind a shield of
comforting clichés. I thought of those clichés – ‘I did what I had to do,’ ‘I was more sinned against than sinning,’ ‘I considered
it my moral duty …’ – the familiar phrases, usually so comforting, echoed emptily through my consciousness, and suddenly I
felt very, very tired. I wanted so intensely to withdraw into my familiar black-and-white world but there was the letter,
my black-and-white world turned inside out against me, the accusations filling line after line after line.
‘Cornelius forced Dad out of Van Zale’s but that wasn’t enough … hounded him … tried to smash his new business … rumours about
Dad’s drinking fostered on both sides of the Atlantic … Sam Keller forged a photograph … Dad knew he was ruined … driving
… empty road … even then Cornelius wouldn’t let Dinah alone … persecuted her … but she fooled him … she won—’
She won.
‘Please go now,’ I said to Elfrida.
‘But is there nothing more you can say?’ she said in a shaking voice. ‘
Nothing
?’
‘What more can possibly be said? I could spend about five hours telling you my life story and trying to explain why I acted
as I did, but what’s the point? You’re not truly interested in me or even in the whole truth about what happened back in the
thirties. You’re interested primarily in yourself. You’re trying to anaesthetize the pain you feel about your parents’ deaths
by blaming someone, and of course I’m tailor-made for the role. Okay, go ahead. Blame me. I don’t pretend to be a saint. I
don’t pretend I haven’t done things I’ve later regretted and I don’t pretend I haven’t made mistakes. But does that make me
a monster? No, it damn well does not. It makes me a human being, and maybe when you’re a little older and a whole lot wiser
and more tolerant you’ll have some glimmer of the hell your father put me through time after time with his sneers and his
jeers and his – but no, I’m not going to say any more. I’m going to stop right there. Nothing I say now can alter the past,
so why discuss it? The past is over, the past is done.’
‘But we all have to live with it,’ said Elfrida. ‘The past is never over. The past is present.’
‘That statement has no reality,’ I said, speaking too loudly. I supposed I was very upset. My chest was hurting. I knew I
was going to be ill. ‘That statement is an intellectual delusion. That statement,’ I said, ‘that statement … is not … acceptable
… not acceptable to me either now … or at any other time.’
I left her. I had to. I somehow got to the nearest bathroom where I sat down on the edge of the bath. I was gasping for breath,
fighting and sweating for it, but I kept calm and bent my whole will towards subjugating the suffocating pressure in my chest.
For a while I thought I was going to be all right. My breathing became more regular and the pain eased. Eventually I found
I could move. Using the towel rail I groped my way to my feet, paused for a moment to make sure there was no relapse and then
very slowly eased myself back into the sitting-room.
Elfrida had gone. Alicia, fully dressed for the evening, was watching television as she waited for me.
‘Cornelius, are you ill?’ she said as soon as she saw my face.
‘My asthma. Don’t think I can make it. Tell Sam and Vicky I’m very sorry.’
‘Was it Elfrida? I heard you shouting at each other, and I wondered—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
She stood in silence, her gloved hands gripping her jewelled evening purse tightly, and I longed for her so much even though
I knew she was far beyond my reach.
‘Kevin was right,’ I said more to myself than to her. ‘Trying to reach people … so hard … yet no one wants to be alone. Being
alone’s like being dead. Alicia—’
‘Yes?’ She was pale with anxiety now, distressed by my obvious ill-health. I saw her twist the little jewelled strap of the
purse in her hands.
‘Do you remember last week … in the paper … report of how the last of the Stuyvesants died?’
She was obviously bewildered but made an effort to respond. ‘Yes – poor old man! He was the last of such a famous old New
York family and he’d been a recluse for years. It was all rather pathetic, wasn’t it?’
‘He died alone,’ I said. ‘One of the richest men in New York … all by himself in his Fifth Avenue Mansion … and
he died alone
.’
‘Cornelius, sit down and I’ll call a doctor this minute. Have you got your medication or is it in the bathroom?’
‘He was absolutely isolated,’ I said. ‘He had no communication with anyone … no communication … It’s all a matter of communication,
you see. Elfrida didn’t understand but it’s all a matter of communication. I’ve got to have power, I’ve got to communicate,
how can I communicate without power? Nobody would take any notice of me … Steve Sullivan … never took any notice but I made
him notice. I communicated. Only way … for someone like me …
but why doesn’t it work better? Why am I so isolated? Alicia, do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, dear, but don’t talk any more. It’s bad for you when you’re breathing like this … Operator? I want to call a doctor
at once. It’s an emergency.’
‘Alicia, you’re not listening. Alicia, you’ve got to listen. Alicia—’ My breath finally gave out. The iron band closed around
my chest. and the last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was Alicia rushing towards me yet at the same time receding
eerily into the distance.
[7]
Later when I had recovered I was embarrassed by the memory of the scene, but fortunately Alicia must have been as embarrassed
as I was for she never referred to it again. Ranting about the last of the Stuyvesants, rambling on and on about communication
– I shuddered at the memory of such demented behaviour and decided that I had been temporarily unhinged by shock. I was still
shocked by Elfrida’s revelations but I had made up my mind not to think about them while I was sick. My first priority was
obviously to struggle back to health.
I had had to be taken to hospital. I had not been hospitalized for my asthma since I was a child, and I had forgotten how
much I hated hospitals.
‘Get me out of here!’ I said to Alicia as soon as I dared expend precious breath on a conversation. ‘Get me out of this country!
Just get me out!’
We left in early September, curtailing our vacation, and as soon as Europe disappeared over the horizon I felt better. Now
I no longer lay awake at night and wondered where my next breath was coming from. Now instead I could allow myself to dwell
on that terrible interview with Elfrida. And now at last I had no choice but to grapple with the enigma which was Scott.
I couldn’t think why Scott had never confronted me with Tony’s letter. Emily’s case was different. I knew exactly why Emily
had never shown the letter to me. She’d been too ashamed. She had practised what she preached and forgiven me as best she
could, but I saw now why she had moved away from me back to Velletria, and I understood why, whenever we met, there always
seemed so little to say.
Emily was easy to figure out.
But Scott remained an enigma.
I thought of Scott with his self-confessed interest in justice, a latter-day knight in search for a mysterious Holy Grail
which he had never defined with precision, and the more I thought of him the more clearly I could see him: smart tough capable
Scott, always so
interesting
, pleasant sociable respectful Scott, always such a
comfort
to me – always there when I wanted him – always the perfect antidote to isolation …
I thought: of course I’ll have to get rid of him. After this I’d be insane to do anything else.
[8]
‘Hi Cornelius!’ exclaimed Scott a week later. ‘How are you?’