‘You’ve got to see me and we’ve got to talk. Stop hiding from me now, please, and let’s meet face to face. C.P.V.Z.’
‘Vicky:
Please
. I can’t bear the way you’re trying to shut me out like this. You mean more to me than anyone else in the world, and you’re
hurting me terribly. You know by now that although I have a lot of
friends there’s no one I can really talk to except you and Kevin, and Kevin looks like he’s settled in London for good and
I hardly ever get to see him nowadays. Of course I love Alicia but we’ve nothing in common and talking’s so difficult. You’re
all I’ve got, Vicky, except the grandchildren and they’re wonderful, but the younger generation are so strange nowadays and
often I don’t know what to say to them. So we’ve got to put this tragedy behind us and face the future together. Why, we owe
it to the kids not to remain estranged! I’m truly looking forward to taking Eric into the bank – I think I can hold on there
till he’s twenty-five and capable of carving out a position for himself. I’m very proud of Eric. He’ll give everything meaning
for me and make up for Scott’s terrible rejection. It’ll all come right in the end, you’ll see, and you’ll find someone else,
the right man this time, and you’ll be happy again one day, I swear it. Now sweetheart, please do write or call me on the
phone – I’ll stand by you, I’ll help you through this, I’ll do anything, anything at all, to make things right. With all my
love now and always. DADDY.’
‘Father:
‘Eric will not be going into the bank. He’ll major in environmental studies when he goes to college. This decision is final
and I support it one hundred per cent.
‘In my opinion a meeting between us would serve no useful purpose. You killed the man I loved. What more can possibly be said?
‘VICKY.’
[7]
Sebastian arrived, announced laconically: ‘I’ll fix this,’ and set to work. He talked to the children and made arrangements
with Nurse for them to follow me to Europe so that we could all spend Christmas together after the funeral. He even arranged
for my mother to take a Christmas cruise so that she wouldn’t be alone over the holidays. He talked to the police, the doctors,
the bureaucrats. He organized the removal of Scott’s body to Mallingham. He retained the security men so that I could remain
in seclusion. He conferred with my father’s aides to ensure that the inevitable publicity was kept to a minimum. He saw my
father but he would not tell me what had been said. And finally he took me to England.
The English Sullivans were at the airport to meet us, Scott’s half-brothers Edred and George, Scott’s half-sister Elfrida.
I had not seen them the previous summer. When Scott had given way to my reluctance
to visit Mallingham, his English family, much annoyed, had refused to visit us in London and so my estrangement from them
had persisted, but as soon as I saw them now I realized all animosity was at an end. I had to keep reminding myself how closely
they were related to Scott. They seemed so alien with their English voices and English clothes and English manners, but they
were kind in that understated way which was so typically English and said how sorry they were and how I mustn’t worry because
all the funeral arrangements had been made and when I said a martini did I mean a dry martini cocktail or straight vermouth,
and then they took me to a London hotel and there was a comfortable bed and I slept.
Rose arrived the next day from Velletria, but not Lori; Lori wasn’t coming to the funeral. She had just heard that Andrew’s
plane was missing over Vietnam and her eldest son had been arrested on a drug charge and her psychiatrist had advised her
against making the long journey to Europe.
‘I just can’t understand it,’ said Rose when she thought I couldn’t hear. ‘There’s Vicky’s Eric, who’s turned out so well,
and there’s Lori’s Chuck who’s dropped out of school to peddle LSD. How could it possibly have happened? What did Lori do
wrong?’
‘Maybe Vicky did something right,’ said Sebastian. ‘Did you ever consider that?’
‘The trouble with Lori,’ said Elfrida, the school principal, ‘is that she sees her children as two-dimensional figures who
boost her ego and exist to decorate her beautiful home. I never trust any mother who boasts non-stop about how perfect her
children are. It usually means she hasn’t the faintest idea what’s going on.’
‘Vicky knows what’s going on,’ said Sebastian. ‘Vicky listens when the little monsters talk to her. Vicky communicates,’ he
added as if pronouncing the last word on the subject, but they must have thought this the most eccentric judgement for of
course I couldn’t communicate then with anyone. I barely spoke, barely ate, barely breathed the air which Scott had ceased
to breathe, but when I came at last to Mallingham I understood that time which he had described as time out of mind, and in
seeing his world through his eyes I was able to step out of my grief and accept his death as he himself had accepted it, as
an end to violence and a dissolution of the structure of time which had imprisoned him. Nothing mattered now except that he
was to be at peace with his father in a place where the sea wind hummed over the marshes of a remote, ancient, beautiful land;
nothing mattered now except that I had brought him home.
I was aware of the voices again, sometimes talking to me, sometimes talking past me, sometimes talking far away when they
thought I couldn’t hear.
‘Vicky looks as if she’s about to collapse.’
‘Will she ever get through the funeral?’
‘Vicky dear, don’t you think you should go and lie down?’
‘Maybe a doctor …’
‘Vicky’s going to be all right,’ said Sebastian. ‘Vicky’s okay.’
Voices, voices, voices all floating on the air, and people wandering past like people in a dream, and all the while I looked
past the lawn to the waters of the lake or leant out of the window of my room to let the sea breeze cool my face, and always
I thought how perfect, how peaceful, how right Scott was to want to come here.
‘Now Vicky,’ said Elfrida to me briskly when she found me wandering in the garden on the morning of the funeral, ‘I’m going
to be very bossy and interfering and give you a piece of my mind because I really think someone ought to say certain things
to you. Please don’t think I’m hostile because nothing could be further from the truth. My experience as a headmistress has
taught me that perfectly frightful parents can produce surprisingly nice children, so I’m certainly no longer prejudiced against
you on account of your father – I judge you as you are and on your own merits …
‘Now you seem an intelligent woman with a reasonably pleasing personality, so there’s no reason why, after all this is over,
you shouldn’t have a worthwhile satisfying future. But you must pull yourself together and start making plans. Why don’t
you stay in England for a while and get right away from that dreadful New York? Sebastian says you’ve often toyed with the
idea of taking a degree, so may I suggest that the time for toying is past? Now is just the time when you should take action!
It would give you not only a new interest but a new life, which seems to be exactly what you need in order to recover from
this catastrophe. Why don’t you take a degree at my old university, Cambridge? They do take elderly students with no qualifications
except a reasonable intelligence and a strong desire to learn, and my former tutor’s still there – I’ll introduce you to her
and I know she’ll do all she can to help. Also Sebastian could be useful – he knows Cambridge well enough to help you set
up a home there …
‘Oh yes, I know what you’re going to say! You’re going to say: “I can’t, I can’t, the children need me!” Now Vicky, you must
be realistic about this. Your children are growing up and unless you prepare for the future now you’re going to wake up one
morning and find all the
birds have flown from the nest and your life is completely empty because after dedicating your life to your children you have
no life of your own to sustain you once they’re gone. I see this syndrome constantly recurring among the mothers of my pupils,
and believe me, such mothers are much to be pitied …
‘No, don’t try and argue with me! Eric and Paul will obviously complete their education in America, but there’s no reason
why Samantha and Kristin shouldn’t be at boarding school in England – heavens, I’ll take them myself! We’re not so far from
Cambridge, and anyway a happy boarding school like mine would be a painless way for them to settle in a new country and make
plenty of friends. As for Benjamin he’s just the right age for English prep school – oh yes! Don’t say he’s too young! Boys
here always get sent away to school young if it’s financially possible – the parents know it’s better for them than being
coddled at home. The English are sentimental about animals but not children, and anyway from what I hear about Benjamin it’s
obvious he would thrive at prep school …
‘So if all the children are away at school this will leave you very much on your own, and while I do understand that this
must be a horrifying prospect, I would suggest to you … Vicky, what is it? Why are you laughing? Oh God, Vicky, you’re not
going to have hysterics, are you?’
I pulled myself together and reassured her I was not. Then as if to prove both to her and to myself how calm and rational
I could be, I set aside all thought of the children and made the request I had been nerving myself to make ever since I had
read my father’s attempt to justify the part he had played in Scott’s death.
‘Elfrida,’ I said, ‘do you still have your copy of your brother Tony’s posthumous letter?’
[8]
I read the letter twice, once with great speed, once very slowly, and afterwards wondered how I could ever have dismissed
the details of Steve’s death as a series of past incidents which didn’t concern me. I wondered too why I had automatically
thought Scott neurotic when he had called my father a murderer, and why I had not questioned my father more closely when he
had referred with evasive reluctance to Tony’s letter.
Then I remembered my old attitude to my mother. Perhaps I had known the truth subconsciously all along. Perhaps, repeating
a
well-worn defensive pattern, I had simply found it less painful to shut my mind against the facts I hadn’t wanted to know.
I considered those facts. I considered them with the calm detachment which often follows in the wake of emotional exhaustion.
I considered them for a long time.
As the result of my father’s deliberate cold-blooded manoeuvrings in 1939 Steve Sullivan had got drunk, gone out and smashed
himself to death on an empty country road. The truth of the matter was that my father had pushed Steve towards that drunken
car-crash as violently as he had pushed Scott towards that bloodstained bath – and in both cases he had persisted in declaring
that his unjustifiable crimes were justified.
I didn’t like to think of such actions going unpunished. That didn’t seem right at all, although I couldn’t think what I could
do about it. I was trembling and could no longer reason clearly, so I decided I would have to think about my father later,
after the funeral.
I went downstairs to join the others who were all waiting to set out for the church, and soon I heard the conversation droning
around me again – voices, voices, voices, all talking of the future, the present, the past, but I was beyond them all with
my memories of Scott, and as the moment of the funeral drew nearer I was conscious again of seeing his world through his eyes
and moving to meet him across the borders of time.
‘“To be conscious,”’ I said, ‘“is not to be in time.”’
‘That’s T. S. Eliot, isn’t it?’ said Rose. ‘A very overrated poet, I’ve always thought.’
But Sebastian took my hand in his as we set out for the church, and Sebastian said, quoting from the
Four Quartets:
‘“What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from …”’
[9]
The sky was grey above the square tower of Mallingham church and the trees beyond the churchyard were bare. The episcopal
service was short. The coffin was lowered into the ground, the minister closed his book, and the chilly east wind from the
sea ruffled the wreaths of flowers. I had ordered many flowers, not just for Scott but for Steve and Tony, for Dinah and her
son Alan, all either buried or commemorated beneath the boughs of the cherry tree which Dinah herself had planted to flower
every spring.
I dried my eyes and stood watching all the flowers. They were chrysanthemums, bronze and yellow. I liked looking at the flowers
but presently Elfrida murmured: ‘Vicky …’ and I knew it was time to go.
But Sebastian said: ‘She’d like to be alone for a moment.’
They went away and I was alone.
Instantly I was seeing through Scott’s eyes again, and I was aware, as he would have been aware, of time bending so that past
and present seemed to flow into each other in a long unbroken loop. I looked around the churchyard and although the cherry
tree was bare, by some miracle I could see it in full bloom. I glanced up at the church tower, and for a single second a thousand
years coexisted simultaneously in a single chord of time.
The tears dried on my cheeks. I stood very still, afraid to move for fear of shattering the spell, but then I heard the lych-gate
click far away and I knew at once that my father had entered the churchyard.
He came slowly towards me. He wore black and looked very neat and quiet and old.
‘So you did come,’ I said as he halted. ‘They said you wouldn’t. But I knew you would.’
He was breathing evenly but audibly as he often did after his asthma had been severe. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I had to come.’ He
looked past me at the flowers and suddenly his eyes shone with tears. ‘Vicky,’ he said, ‘Vicky, please – forgive me and come
home. Please, Vicky. Please.’
I looked at him, and when I saw myself reflected in his eyes I saw a justice which none of us, not even Scott, had even begun
to imagine. I saw too that natural justice was terrible in its merciless purity, far more terrible than any justice engineered
by man, and in that moment I knew not only what I had to do; I knew that I had no alternative. It was as if I were an instrument
wielded by forces which could never be more than imperfectly understood. At the most I was merely an individual deprived by
circumstances of any freedom of choice.