Miss Vandeleur has just left, in rather hangdog fashion, I’m afraid. She will not be seeing me again; or, more accurately, I shall not be seeing her. Her visit was a moving occasion; last things, and so on—and not so on. I had bought a cake—it turned out to be somewhat stale—and put a small candle on it. I have a special licence to be silly, now. She eyed the cake suspiciously, in some bafflement. Our first anniversary, I said, handing her a glass of champagne with what I judged to be just the right shading of old-world gallantry; I would not want her to think I harbour any feelings of rancour against her. But in fact, as she pointed out when she checked back to the beginning of her by now dog-eared notebook, this was not the date on which she first came to me. I waved aside these petty details. We were sitting in the study. Although she did not seem to notice it, I was acutely conscious of the awful blank space on the wall where the Poussin should have been hanging. Miss V. was in her greatcoat, yet still seemed cold, as she always does; her mechanic must have the devil of a time warming her up—girls always blame their young men for the prevailing temperature, don’t ask me how I know. She also had on her leather skirt, as of old. How account for the pathos of people’s clothes? I envisioned her in her room in Golders Green, in the grey light and fetid air of morning, with a mug of cold coffee on the dressing table, creakily getting into that skirt and contemplating another day of… of what? Perhaps there is no such room in Golders Green. Perhaps it is all an invention, her father the Admiral, her uncouth mechanic, the glum commutings on the Northern Line, my biography. I asked her how the book was coming along and she gave me a resentful stare, looking like a sullen schoolgirl who has been caught smoking behind the bicycle shed. I assured her I did not feel harshly toward her, and she put on a show of incomprehension, saying she was sure she did not know what I was talking about. We regarded each other for a moment in silence, I smiling, she with a cross frown. Oh, Miss Vandeleur, my dear Serena. If these really are her names.
“Despite appearances,” I said, indicating the champagne bottle and the ruined cake with its Pisan candle, “I am officially in mourning.” I watched her closely for a reaction; none came, as I had expected; she already knew. “Yes,” I said, “you see, my wife died.”
Silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” she said faintly, looking at my hands.
April. Such wonderful skies today, great drifting ice-mountains of cloud, and beyond them that delicate, breakable blue, and the sunlight going on and off as if a capricious someone somewhere had control of a switch. I do not like the springtime; have I said that before? Too disturbing, too distressing, all this new life blindly astir. I feel left behind, half buried, all withered bough and gnarled root. Something is stirring in me, though. I often fancy, at night especially, that I can feel it in there, not the pain, I mean, but the thing itself, malignantly flourishing, flexing its pincers. Well, I shall soon put a stop to its growth. Mouth very dry now, all of a sudden. Strange effects. I am quite calm.
“It was dreadfully sad,” I said. “It seems she starved herself to death. Refused to eat, just turned her face to the wall, as they used to say. Such desperateness to die! She wouldn’t let them send for me; said I should be left in peace. She was always more considerate than I; braver, too. The funeral was yesterday. I am still a trifle upset, as you can see.”
Why, with death attendant upon me at every moment, tirelessly prowling the rickety defences of my life, am I still surprised when it makes a kill? I had always taken it for granted that Vivienne would outlive me. And yet when Julian telephoned, I knew, before he said it, that she was gone. We stood for a long moment, listening to each other breathing through the ether.
“It’s better this way,” he said.
Why do the young always think it better that the old should be dead? The question answers itself, I suppose.
“Yes,” I said, “better.”
She had requested to be buried by the Jewish rite. I was astonished. When we were married first she used to take the children to church services, especially when she was in Oxford, but that, I realised now, must have been merely to annoy her mother. I never knew she cared for the God of her fathers. No accounting for people, no accounting. There were more surprises at the funeral. Nick wore a yarmulke, and so did Julian, and during the prayers, the Kaddish or whatever it’s called, I saw Nick’s lips moving as he joined in with the cantor. Where did all this devoutness come from all of a sudden? But obviously it was not sudden.
The cemetery was on the outer fringes of north London. It took us more than an hour to get there, despite the indecent speed at which the hearse cut its way through the northbound traffic. It was a harsh, blustery grey day with squalls of rain and a gash of infernal, yellowish light lying along the horizon. In the car I sat in the back seat, feeling shrivelled and cowed. Beside me Blanche sobbed to herself, her face all blotched and swollen. Julian sat stiffly upright at the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road. The empty seat beside him was lugubriously symbolic of his mother’s absence. Nick travelled alone, with his chauffeur. At one stage in the journey, when we were briefly on the motorway and our two cars drew level, I saw that he was working, papers and gold pen in hand, the Ministerial red box open beside him on the seat. He felt my eyes on him, and looked up at me unseeingly for a moment, remote, expressionless, his thoughts importantly elsewhere. Even now, when he is in his seventies, corpulent, bald, his face all fallen and his eyes rheumy and pouched, I can still see in him the beauty he once was; is it real, or do I put it there? That was what I was for, that was always my task, to keep his image in place, to kneel before him humbly with head bowed and hold the mirror up to him, and in turn to hold his image up to the world’s inspection.
As we were pulling in at the gates of the cemetery, Blanche made a fumbling attempt to take my hand, but I pretended not to notice. I do not care to be touched.
For a second I did not recognise Querell. It was not that he had changed very much, but he was the last person I had expected to see here. What cheek! He was thin-haired, a little stooped, yet still possessed of a watchful, sinister elegance. Or no, not elegance, that is not the word; just sleekness, rather, at once devilish and tawdry, and an air always of malevolent anticipation, like that of an expert swimmer, say, calmly looking on as a clumsy novice ventures flounderingly out of his depth. He carries the aura of his fame with ease. I was always jealous of him. When the ceremony was finished he came and shook my hand perfunctorily. We had not seen each other for more than a quarter of a century, yet he carried off the moment as if we had been in the habit of bumping into each other every day.
“Trust the Jews,” he said, “they always come back to their own in the end. Just like us—Catholics, I mean.” He was wearing a padded windbreaker over his suit. “I feel the cold more, nowadays. My blood has gone thin from living so long in the south. You don’t look too bad, Victor; perfidy keeps one young, eh?” I could not recall him ever before using my first name. I introduced him to Blanche and Julian. He gave them each in turn a keen, long look. “I knew you when you were in your cradles.” Julian was curtly polite. I do admire his reserve, so rare a thing those days. “You have your mother’s eyes,” Querell said, and Julian gave that stiff little nod of his, which to me always seems to be accompanied by a phantom clicking of the heels. My poor, lost son. Querell had turned his attention on Blanche. She was all of a quiver, flustered in the presence of such a celebrity. She withdrew her hand from his as if his touch had burned her. I wonder if they know about Querell, she and Julian? It is not the kind of thing one asks one’s children, even when they are grown up.
“When do you go back?” I said.
Querell gave me a stare.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
The spring wind gusted in the still-bare trees and a handful of rain spattered the wall of the marble temple behind us. Julian attempted to slide a supportive hand under my arm but I shook him off violently. For a moment I clearly saw Vivienne walking toward me, weaving her way among the headstones in her tubular black silk dress and flapper’s high heels. Nick had already sped off in his car, without a word to anyone. Querell was talking about taxis.
“Oh, no no,” I said, “let us give you a lift.” Julian opened his mouth but said nothing. Querell frowned. “I insist,” I said. One can have fun even at a funeral.
We fairly dashed back into the city, Querell and I in the back seat now, and Blanche and Julian in front, the two of them sitting like effigies, listening intently to the silence behind them. Querell watched with narrow-eyed interest—ever the novelist— the dreary suburban streets going past, the corner groceries, the launderettes, the brand-new but already dingy shopping malls with their garish window displays and blown litter.
“England,” he said, and snickered.
At St. Giles Circus we were brought to a halt by a traffic jam. It was as if we had blundered into the smouldering centre of a herd of big, shiny, shuddering animals.
“Listen, Querell,” I said, “come for a drink.”
How like the old days it sounded! Querell gave me an ironical stare. Julian was already edging the car towards the kerb. On the pavement the wind swirled about us callously. While Querell was doing up the complicated zipper of his coat I watched the car nose its way back into the traffic, brother and sister leaning toward each other now in animated talk. Those are the really secret lives, the lives of one’s children.
“Anxious to be away,” I said. “We have become the tedious old.”
Querell nodded.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “my mistress is younger than your daughter.”
We turned into Soho. The day had brightened, and now a strong sun appeared, shouldering its way out of the clouds, and the sky above the narrow streets seemed immensely high and somehow vigorously in flight. The wind swooped and lunged, wringing the necks of the daffodils in the Square. On the corner of Wardour Street a crone in cocoa-coloured stockings and a shroudlike coat was shrieking abuse at the passers-by. White flecks on her lips, the grief-maddened eyes. The sun flashed suddenly, outlandishly, on a sheet of glass on the back of a lorry. Two club girls went past, in fake-fur coats and three-inch heels. Querell eyed them with sour amusement.
“London was always a parody of itself,” he said. “Ridiculous, ugly, cold country. You should have got out when you could.”
We walked down Poland Street. After Boy’s flight, Leo Rothenstein had sold the house. The upper storeys had been converted into offices. We stood on the pavement looking up at the familiar windows. Why can’t the past ever leave off, why must it be forever pawing at us, like a wheedling child. We walked on, saying nothing. Miniature wind-devils danced on the pavement, lifting dust and scraps of paper in swaying spirals. I was feeling quite light-headed.
The old pub had a pinball machine now. It was noisily attended by a gang of shaven-headed young men wearing broad braces and lace-up boots. Querell and I sat in prostatic discomfort on low stools at a small table at the back and drank gin, watching the boot-boys about their raucous game, the vague old daytime topers at the bar. Ghosts glimmered in the shadows. Phantom laughter. The past, the past.
“Would you come back?” I said. “Do you not miss it, any of it?”
He was not listening.
“You know,” he said, “Vivienne and I had an affair.” He glanced at me quickly and away again, frowning. He turned his cigarette this way and that in his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was when you were first married. She was lonely.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.” He stared, in gratifying startlement. I shrugged. “Vivienne told me.”
A bus went past outside with an elephantine blare and made floor and seat and table faintly shudder, and stark pale faces on the top deck gaped in at us fleetingly in what seemed a sort of amazement. Querell with pursed lips expelled a thin quick cone of smoke towards the ceiling; there were patches of whitish stubble on his badly shaved old turkey’s neck.
“When?” he said.
“What?”
“When did she tell you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
His hands, I noticed, were trembling a little; the smoke as it rose from his cigarette wavered in the same rapid rhythm. The smoke was blue before he inhaled it, and afterwards grey.
“Oh, a long time ago,” I said. “The day after Boy defected. The day after you and the others decided to betray me to the Department.”
An argument had started at the pinball machine, and two of the young men were engaged in a mock fight, feinting and jabbing and making dangerous-looking little kicks at each other’s shins, while their companions jeeringly urged them on. Querell drank his drink and exhaled a sort of whistly sigh. He took our glasses and went to the bar. I looked at him in his vulgar padded coat and suede shoes. The mystery of other people yawned before me, as if a door caught by the wind had been flung open on to dark and storm. Another bus went by, and another set of dull, astonished faces looked in at us from on high. Querell came back with the drinks, and when he was settling himself on the stool again I caught a whiff of something off him, an internal emanation, cheesy and raw; perhaps he is sick, too. I certainly hope so. He frowned into his glass, as if he had spotted something floating in it. A patch of pink, the size of a shilling, had appeared high up on each of his cheekbones; what was it—anger? excitement? Surely not shame?
“How did you know?” he said, in a thickened voice. “I mean, about…”
“Vivienne, of course. Who else? She told me everything there was to know, that day. She was my wife, you see.”
He drank deep and sat bending his glass this way and that, watching the last silver bead of liquor rolling around the bottom.
“I wanted to keep you out of it, you know,” he said. “I wanted to give them Rothenstein, or Alastair Sykes. But no, they said it would have to be you.”
I laughed.
“I’ve just realised,” I said, “this is what you came back for, isn’t it. To tell me about you and Vivienne, and about… this. What a disappointment for you, that I should know it all already.”
His lips, contracting with age, had acquired tiny, deeply etched striations all along their edges, which gave his mouth a spinsterish cast. That is how I must look, too. What would those young men have seen, if they had turned on us their menacing attention? A pair of sad old withered eunuchs, with their gin and their cigarettes, their ancient secrets, ancient pain. I signalled to the barman. He was a slender, pale youth, a Bronzino type, drawn and somewhat debauched-looking; when I paid for the drinks I brushed his cool, damp fingers with mine, and he gave me a wan glance. In the midst of death, life. Querell was regarding me with a grim eye, feeling along his lower lip with the tip of his tongue. I tried to imagine him and Vivienne together. He blinked slowly, old saurian eyelids drooping. I smelled his mortal smell again.
“We had to give them someone,” he said.
Well, I was always able to see that, of course. There had to have been a London end to the operation, someone to receive the material MacLeish and Bannister were sending from Washington and pass it on to Oleg. It was the least the Department would have expected; the least they would have settled for.
“Yes,” I said, “and you gave them me.”
Abruptly the dangerous young men departed, and the abandoned pinball machine seemed to take on a hurt, puzzled look, like that of a dog with no one left to throw sticks for it. Talk, smoke, the desultory clatter of glasses.
“I suppose you were in before me?” I said.
He nodded.
“I had a cell going when I was at Oxford,” he said. “I was still an undergraduate.”
He could not keep the boastful note out of his voice.
I stood up. Suddenly I wanted to be away from him. It was not anger that was spurring me, but a kind of impatience; something else was finished with.
“I really am sorry,” I said, “that you didn’t get to see me squirm.”
Outside, on the pavement, I felt dizzy again, and thought for a moment I might fall over. Querell was waving for a taxi; could not get away quickly enough, now that his attempt at revenge had backfired on him. I put a hand on his arm: papery flesh under his coat, and a thin old bone, like a primitive weapon.
“It was you,” I said, “wasn’t it, who gave my name to that fellow who was writing the book—the one who was going to expose me?”
He stared at me.
“Why would I do that?”
A taxi pulled up. He moved toward it, trying to shake off my hand, but I clutched him all the more tightly. I was surprised at my own strength. The taxi driver turned with interest to watch us, two half-sozzled old geezers furiously grappling.
“Who, then?” I said.
As if I didn’t know.
He shrugged, and smiled, showing me his old, yellowed teeth, and said nothing. I released him, and stepped back, and he stooped and got into the taxi and pulled the door shut behind him. As the taxi drove away I saw his pale long face in the rear window, looking back at me. He seemed to be laughing.
Suddenly it strikes me: are my children mine?
Just now a most unpleasant exchange over the telephone with an impudent young man at the valuers. Outrageous imputations. He actually used the word fake. Do you realise, I said, who I am? And I swear I heard him stifle a snigger. I told him to return the painting to me at once. I had already decided to whom I shall bequeath it; I do not think I need to change my mind.
He answered the telephone himself, on the first ring. Had he been waiting for me to call? Perhaps Querell tipped him off, a last piece of mischief-making before he flew south again to the sun and his child mistress. I was terribly nervous, and stammered like a fool. I asked if I might come round. There was a long pause, then he simply said yes, and hung up. I spent the next half-hour going through the flat in search of the Webley, and found it at last, with a cry of triumph, at the back of a bureau drawer, wrapped in an old shirt which, I realised with an absent-minded pang, had been one of Patrick’s. Strange sensation, hefting the weapon in my hand. How antiquated it seems, like one of those domestic gadgets you see in displays of Victoriana, ponderous, weighty, of uncertain use. But no, not uncertain, certainly not uncertain. It has not been oiled since the war, but I expect it will work. Two rounds only—what can have become of the other four?—but that will be more than sufficient. I could not find the holster for it, and was in a quandary how to carry it, since it was too big for my pocket, and when I tucked it into my waistband it slithered down inside the leg of my trousers and fetched me a nasty crack on the instep. A wonder it didn’t go off. That would not do; I had suffered enough ignominy without shooting myself in the foot. In the end I wrapped it up again in the shirt—broad pink stripes, plain white collar; Patsy went in for that kind of thing—and put it in my string bag. Umbrella, raincoat, latchkey. It was not until I got down to the street that I noticed I was wearing slippers. No matter.
The taxi driver was one of those tiresome monologuists: weather, traffic, Pakis, bleeding pedestrians. How unprepossessing they are, the helmsmen that are sent to ferry us through the most momentous passages of our lives. I diverted myself by imagining the consternated howls that will rise from certain stagnant backwaters of academe over a posthumous article of mine on the erotic symbolism in Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus—I wonder, by the way, why in this picture the artist chose to portray Narcissus without nipples?—that will appear shortly in an adventurous and somewhat irreverent new American art journal. I do like to shock, even still. The sun was occluded and Holland Park had a sullen, brooding aspect, despite all those big cream mansions and toy-coloured motor cars. I got down with relief from the taxi and gave the fellow a shilling tip, or five pee, as we must say now; he looked at the coin in disgust and swore under his breath and dieseled away. I grinned; offending taxi drivers is one of life’s small pleasures. Wet patches on the pavement and a smell of rain and rot. A lilac bush beside the front door was about to blossom. A furtive thrush flitted among the leaves, keeping a beady eye on me as I waited. The maid was a Filipina, a tiny, dark, infinitely sad-seeming person who said something incomprehensible and stood aside meekly as I stepped into the hall. Marble floor, Italian table, big copper bowl of daffodils, a convex mirror in a baroque gilt frame. I caught the nurse, I mean the maid, looking dubiously at my string bag, my slippers, my funereal umbrella. She spoke again, again incomprehensibly, and, pointing the way with a little brown bat’s claw, led me off into the silent interior of the house. As I walked past the mirror my reflection fleetingly grew a monstrous head while the rest of me tapered off into a sort of complicated umbilical tail.
Pale rooms, dim pictures, a magnificent Turkey carpet all gules and purples and desert browns. Imelda’s rubber soles discreetly squeaked. We entered an octagonal conservatory with potted plants, their unreally green, polished leaves intently leaning, and she opened a glass door on to the garden and stood back, smiling a mournful, encouraging smile. I stepped past her and out. A path of paving stones set flush in the grass led across the lawn to a great dense dark-green stand of laurel. There was a sudden swish of sunlight and something quivered in the air, quivered, and sank. I walked along the path. Wind, cloud, a swooping bird. Nick was waiting in the watery light under the laurels. Very still, hands in pockets, watching me. White shirt, black trousers, unsuitable shoes. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up.
Here it is: The Agony in the Garden.
“Hello, Victor.”
Now, after all, I could not think what to say. I said:
“How is Sylvia?”
He gave me a quick, hard look, as if I had made a tasteless allusion.
“She’s in the country. She prefers it there, these days.”
“I see.” A fearless robin dropped from a twig on to the grass close by Nick’s foot and seized a speck of something and flew up soundlessly into the tree again. Nick looked cold. Was it for me he had got himself up in this nice silk shirt, these slim-fitting slacks and slip-on shoes (with a decorative gold buckle on the instep, of course) and posed himself here against all this green? Another actor, playing his part, not very convincingly. “I’m dying, you know,” I said.
He looked away, frowning.
“Yes, I heard. Sorry.”
Shadow, sun a second, then shadow again. Such agitated weather. Somewhere a blackbird began to cluck warningly; there must have been magpies nearby; I know about magpies.
“Who told you?” I said.
“Julian.”
“Ah. See a lot of him, do you?”
“Quite a bit.”
“You must be a father figure for him,” I said.
“Something like that.”
He was eyeing my slippers, my string bag.
“Well, I’m glad,” I said. “A man needs a father.”
He gave me another hard look.
“Are you drunk?” he said.
“Certainly not. Just somewhat wrought. I have been hearing things.”
“Yes,” he said grimly, “I saw Querell talking to you at the funeral. Interesting chat, was it?”
“It was.”
I crossed my ankles and leaned on the umbrella, trying to seem nonchalant; the ferrule sank into the grass and I almost lost my balance. I am at an age when one does tend to fall down. I’m afraid I rather lost control, then, and began to upbraid him, coming out with all sorts of awful things—recriminations, insults, threats—that were no sooner said than I regretted them. But I could not stop; it all came out in a scalding, shameful flood, a lifetime of bitterness and jealousy and pain, gushing out, like—forgive me—like vomit. I think I may even have unsheathed my brolly from the clay and brandished it at him threateningly. What now of my stoic resolve? Nick just stood and listened, watching me with mild attention, waiting for me to finish, as if I were a wilful child having a foot-stamping tantrum.
“You’ve even subverted my son!” I cried.
He lifted an eyebrow, trying not to smile.
“Subverted?”
“Yes, yes!—with your filthy Jewish nonsense. I saw you together at the funeral, praying.”
I would have gone on, but I choked on spit and had to cough and cough, beating myself on the chest. Abruptly my tremor started up, as if a vague small engine inside me had been switched on.
“Let’s go into the house,” Nick said. He shivered in his shirtsleeves. “We’re too old for this.”
Apple trees, April, a young man in a hammock; yes, it must have been April, that first time. Why did I think it was high summer? My memory is not as good as it is supposed to be. I may have misrecalled everything, got all the details wrong. What do you think, Miss V.?
In the conservatory we sat in wicker armchairs on either side of a low wicker table. The maid came and Nick asked for tea.
“Gin, for me,” I said, “if you don’t mind.” I smiled at the maid; I was quite calm again, after my little moment of catharsis in the garden. “Bring the bottle, dear, will you?”
Nick studied the garden, his elbows on the arms of his chair and his fingertips joined before him. A tiny speck of wet laurel leaf clung to his balding brow, seeming symbolic of something or other. A gust of wind sprinted through the willows and a moment later smacked its palms against the glass beside me. A rain shower started, but faltered almost at once. All sorts of things were going through my head, bits and scraps of the past, as if a maddened projectionist in there were throwing together a jumble of old, flickering film clips. I recalled a midsummer night party that Leo Rothenstein gave in the great park at Maules fifty years ago, the masquers strolling under the murmurous trees, and frock-coated footmen gravely pacing the greensward with bottles of champagne wrapped in wetted napkins; the soft, still darkness, and stars, and skittering bats, and a vast, osseous moon. On an ornate bench beside a grassy bank a boy and girl were kissing, the girl with one glimmering breast bared. For a moment now I was there again. I was with Nick, and Nick was with me, and the future was limitless. The maid returned with a tray then, and I started awake again into the awful present.
Only yesterday all this happened; hard to credit.
While Nick—old, paunched, pouchy Nick—was pouring his tea, I grasped the gin bottle by the neck and glugged out a good half-tumblerful.
“Do you remember,” I said, “that summer when we first came down to London, and we used to walk through Soho at night, reciting Blake aloud, to the amusement of the tarts? The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. He was our hero, do you remember? Scourge of hypocrisy, the champion of freedom and truth.”
“We were usually drunk, as I recall,” he said, and laughed; Nick does not really laugh, it is only a noise that he makes which he has learned to imitate from others. Thoughtfully he stirred his tea, round and round. Those hands. “The tygers of wrath,” he said. “Is that what you thought we were?”
I drank my gin. Cold fire, hot slivers of ice. The furled umbrella, which I had leaned against the arm of my chair, fell on the marble floor with a muffled clatter. My props were not behaving themselves at all today.
“Yeats insisted Blake was Irish, you know,” I said. “Imagine that—London Blake, an Irishman! I’ve been thinking of that time when he and his friend Stothard sailed up the Medway on a sketching trip, and were arrested on suspicion of spying for the French. Blake got into a great state of agitation, convinced some false friend had denounced him to the authorities. Silly, of course.”
Nick sighed, making a sound like something deflating, and leaned back in his chair, the woven wicker crackling under him like a bonfire. The cup and saucer were balanced on his knee; he seemed to be studying the cup’s design. The silence beat like a heart.
“I had to be shielded,” he said at last, weary and impatient. “You know that.”
“I was the one who was going to be in government. If we hadn’t given you to them, they would have got to me sooner or later. It was a collective decision. There was nothing personal in it.”
“No,” I said, “nothing personal.”
He looked at me stonily.
“You did all right,” he said. “You got your job, your place at the Palace. You got your knighthood.”
“I haven’t got it any more.”
“You were always too fond of honours, and having letters after your name, all that capitalist rot.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got someone coming shortly.”
“When did you start?” I said. “Was it Felix Hartmann, or before that?”
He shrugged.
“Oh, before. Long before. With Querell. He and I went in together. Even though he always hated me, I don’t know why.”
“And are you still working for them?”
“Of course.”
He smiled, with lips shut tight and the tip of his nose depressed; age has accentuated his Jewishness, yet the one he has come most to resemble is his gentile father—that sinuous look, the pointed bald pate, those watchful, hooded eyes. The rain, having taken a deep breath, started up again with determination. I have always loved the sound of rain on glass. Tremor getting very bad now, hands all ashake and one leg going like the arm of a sewing machine.
“Was it Vivienne who told you?” he said. “I always suspected she had. And you never let on, all these years. What a sly old body you are, Doc.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He transferred the cup and saucer carefully to the table and sat for a moment, thinking.
“Do you remember Boulogne,” he said, “that last morning, on the ammunition ship, when you lost your nerve? I knew then I could never trust you. Besides, you weren’t serious; you were just in it for amusement, and something you could pretend to believe in.” He looked at me. “I tried to make it up to you. I helped you. I passed you all that stuff from Bletchley for you to impress Oleg with. And when you wanted to get out and devote yourself to”—a faint smirk—“art, I was there. Why do you think they let you go? Because they had me.”
I poured another mighty gin. I was realising that I preferred it without tonic; it was brighter, more emphatic, steely-sharp. A bit late to be acquiring new tastes.
“Who else knew?” I said.
“What? Oh, everyone, really.”
“Sylvia, for instance? Did you tell Sylvia?”
“She guessed. We didn’t discuss it.” He glanced at me and gave a rueful shrug, biting his lip. “She felt sorry for you.”
“Why did you give my name to that fellow?” I said. “Why did you have to betray me a second time? Why couldn’t you have left me in peace?”
He heaved a sigh and shifted in his chair. He had the bored, impatient air of a man being forced to listen to an unwelcome declaration of love. As he was, I suppose.
“They were after me again.” He smiled; it was Vivienne’s icy glitter. “I’ve told you,” he said. “I have to be protected.” He looked at his watch. “And now, really—”
“What if I talk to the papers?” I said. “What if I call them up today and tell them everything.”
He shook his head.
“You won’t do that.”
“I could tell Julian. That would dull some of his filial admiration.”
“You won’t do that, either.” Distantly we heard the doorbell ring. He stood up, and bent and retrieved my umbrella. “Your socks are wet,” he said. “Why are you wearing slippers, in this weather?”
“Bunions,” I said, and laughed, a touch hysterically, I fear; it was the gin, no doubt. He was looking at the string bag again. I shook it. “I brought a gun,” I said.
He glanced aside, clicking his tongue in annoyance.
“Are they taking care of you?” he said. “The Department, I mean. Pensions, that kind of thing?” I said nothing. We set off through the house. As we walked, he turned from the waist up and looked into my face. “Listen, Victor, I—”
“Don’t, Nick,” I said. “Don’t.”
He began to say something more, but changed his mind. I could feel the presence of someone else in the house. (Was it you, my dear? Come, was it you, skulking in one of those gilded antechambers?) The maid—why do I keep wanting to call her the nurse?—materialised out of the shadows in the hall and opened the front door for me. I went out quickly on to the step. The rain had stopped again, the lilac leaves were dripping. Nick put a hand on my shoulder but I squirmed away from his touch.
“By the way,” I said, “I’m leaving you the Poussin.”
He nodded, not surprised at all; that bit of laurel was still stuck to his brow. And to think I once thought him a god. He stepped back and lifted his arm in a curious, grave salute that seemed less a farewell than a sort of sardonic blessing. I walked away rapidly down the wet street, through sunlight and fleet shadow, swinging my umbrella, the string bag dangling at my side. At every other step the bag and its burden banged against my shin; I did not mind.
I hope Miss Vandeleur will not be too disappointed when she comes around to do the final clearing-up—I have no doubt it will be she that he will send. Most of the sensitive things I have already destroyed; there is a very efficient incinerator in the basement. As to this—what, this memoir? this fictional memoir?—I shall leave it to her to decide how best to dispose of it. I imagine she will bring it straight to him. He always did have his girls. How could I ever have thought that it was Skryne who had put her on to me? I got so many things so drearily wrong. Now we are sitting here, Webley and myself, in silent commune. Some playwright of the nineteenth century, I cannot recall for the moment who it was, wittily observed that if a revolver appears in the first act it is bound to go off in the third. Well, le dernier acte est sanglant… So much for my Pascalian wager; a vulgar concept, anyway.
What a noble sky, this evening, pale blue to cobalt to rich purple, and the great bergs of cloud, colour of dirty ice, with soft copper edgings, progressing from west to east, distant, stately, soundless. It is the kind of sky that Poussin loved to set above his lofty dramas of death and love and loss. There are any number of clear patches; I am waiting for a bird-shaped one.
In the head or through the heart? Now, there is a dilemma.
Father, the gate is open.