Enduring Love (17 page)

It cost me more effort than last time to climb the hill. Then adrenaline had powered my limbs and accelerated every thought. Now my reluctance was deep in the muscles of my thighs, and I could
feel my heart knocking in my ears. While I paused at the top to recover, I looked about me. A hundred acres or so of fields and one steep slope. Now I was here, it seemed as though I had never really left, for this was the stage, the green painted flats, of my preoccupations, and it would not have been such a surprise to have seen approaching me from different corners Clarissa, John and Jean Logan, the unnamed woman, Parry and de Clerambault. Imagining this, seeing them arrive to back me against the escarpment’s edge in a horseshoe, I had no doubt they would come to accuse me collectively—but of what? Had I known immediately, I would not have been so indictable. A lack, a deficiency, a failed extension into mental space as difficult to describe as one’s first encounter with the calculus. Clarissa I would listen to at any time, even though we didn’t trust each other’s judgment at present, but it was the Frenchman in the double-breasted suit who fascinated me now.

I began to return across the field toward my car. It was a simple idea, really, but a man who had a theory about pathological love and who had given his name to it, like a bridegroom at the altar, must surely reveal, even if unwittingly, the nature of love itself. For there to be a pathology, there had to be a lurking concept of health. De Clerambault’s syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane. (I walked faster. The car was four hundred meters or so away, and seeing it now, I knew for certain the front doors had stood wide open, like wings.) Sickness and health. In other words, what could I learn about Parry that would restore me to Clarissa?

The traffic into London was heavy, and it was almost two hours before I parked outside our apartment building. I had thought about it on the way, and I expected him to be there, but seeing him waiting for me as I got out of the car gave me a jolt to the heart. I paused
before I crossed the road. He had taken up a position by the entrance where I would have to walk by him. He looked dressed up—black suit, white shirt buttoned to the top, black patent shoes with white flashes. He was staring at me, but his expression told me nothing. I walked toward him quickly, hoping to brush right by him and get indoors, but he stood across my path and I had to stop or push him aside. He looked tense, possibly angry. There was an envelope in his hand.

“You’re in my way,” I said.

“Did you get my letter?”

I decided to try to squeeze past him by pushing into the low privet hedge that flanked the path, but he closed the gap and I didn’t want to touch him.

“Let me through or I’ll call the police.”

He nodded eagerly, as though he had heard me inviting him up for a drink. “But I’d like you to read this first,” he said. “It’s very important?”

I took the envelope from him, hoping he would then stand aside for me. But it was not enough. There was something he wanted to tell me. First he glanced at the presence over his shoulder. When he spoke his voice was breathy, and I guessed his heart was racing. This was a moment he had prepared for.

He said, “I paid a researcher and he got me all your articles. I read them last night, thirty-five of them. I’ve got your books too.”

I just looked at him and waited. Something had shifted in his manner. The yearning was there, but there was a hardness too, a change around the eyes. They looked smaller.

“I know what you’re trying to do, but you’ll never succeed. Not even if you wrote a million and I read them all, you’ll never destroy what I have. It can’t be taken away.”

He seemed to expect to be contradicted, but I folded my arms and
continued to wait, concentrating my attention on a shaving cut, a black hairline nick on his cheek. What he said next appeared at the time to refer to the ease of hiring a researcher, although I wasn’t completely sure. Afterward I considered his words carefully and began to think that perhaps I was being threatened. But then, it was easy to feel threatened, and I ended up with no clear idea at all.

He said, “I’m pretty well off, you know. I can get people to do things for me. Anything I want. There’s always someone who needs the money. What’s surprising is how cheap it is, you know, for something you’d never do yourself?” He let this pseudo question hang, and watched me.

“I’ve got a phone in the car. If you don’t let me through, I’m calling the police now.”

I got the same warm look as before. The hardness dropped from Parry as he gratefully accepted the affection he had detected in my warning. “It’s okay, Joe. It really is. It’s difficult for me too. I understand you just as well as you understand me. You can be open with me. You don’t have to wrap it up in code, really you don’t.”

As I stepped back and turned toward my car, I said, “There is no code. It would be better if you accepted that you need help.”

Even before I had finished he laughed, or rather he whooped and slapped his thigh, cowboy style. He must have heard from me a rallying cry to love. He was almost shouting in his joy. “That’s right. I’ve got everyone and everything on my side. It’s going to go my way, Joe, and there’s nothing you can do!”

Mad as this was, he also took the trouble to stand back and let me pass. Was there calculation here? I couldn’t even trust his derangement, and for that reason alone I was glad to end the conversation and go indoors. Also, it was obvious the police wouldn’t have helped. I did not even look back to see if he was going to wait around. I did not want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that it bothered me.

I put his envelope in my back pocket and took the stairs two at a time. It was like a painkiller, the distance and height I opened between us in fifteen seconds. Studying Parry with reference to a syndrome I could tolerate, even relish, but meeting him yet again in the street, especially now that I had read his first letter, had frightened me. Fearing him would grant him great power. I could well imagine preferring not to come home. As I reached the landing outside the apartment door, I was wondering whether he had in fact threatened me; if a researcher was easy to hire, so too were a few goons to thrash me within an inch of my life. Perhaps I was overinterpreting. The ambiguity fed my fear. As threats went, it was perfectly nuanced.

These were my thoughts as I unlocked the door and stepped into the hall. I stood there a moment, recovering my breath, reading the silence and the quality of the air. Although her bag was not on the floor by the door, nor was her jacket draped across the chair, I sensed through my skin that Clarissa was back from work and something was wrong. I called her name and, hearing nothing, walked into the sitting room. It is L-shaped, and I had to go several paces in before I was certain she was not there. I thought I heard a sound in the hall I had just left, and I called her name again. Buildings have their own archives of creaks and clicks, mostly prompted by small changes in temperature, so I was not surprised to see no one when I went back, though I still did not doubt that Clarissa was somewhere in the apartment. I went into the bedroom, thinking she might be taking a nap. The shoes she wore to work were lying side by side, and the bedspread had an indent where she had lain. There was no sign she had used the bathroom. I made a quick search of the other rooms—the kitchen, her study, the children’s bedroom—and I checked the bolt on the door that led out onto the roof. It was then that I changed my mind and devised a logical sequence: she had come home, kicked off her shoes, lain on the bed awhile, put on another pair of shoes,
and gone out. In my anxiety following the encounter with Parry, I had simply misread the air.

I went into the kitchen to fill the kettle. Then I wandered into my study, and that was where I found her. It was so obvious, and it was such a shock. I saw her as if for the first time. She was barefoot, slumped in my swivel chair, with her back to the desk, facing the door. With all that had happened that day, I should have guessed it. I returned her stare as I came into the room and said, “Why didn’t you answer?”

She said, “I thought this would be the first place you’d look.” When I frowned she added, “Didn’t you think I’d be going through your desk while you were out? Isn’t that how it is with us these days?”

I sat wearily on the couch. Being so entirely in the wrong was a kind of liberation. No need to struggle, no point marshaling arguments.

She was calm, and very angry. “I’ve been sitting here half an hour, trying to tempt myself to open one of these drawers and take a look at your letters. And do you know, I couldn’t raise the curiosity. Isn’t that a terrible thing? I don’t care about your secrets, and if you’ve got none, I don’t care either. If you’d asked to see my letters I’d’ve said yes, go ahead. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.” Her voice rose a little, and there was a tremor in it too. I had never seen such fury in her before. “You even left the drawer open so I’d know when I came in. It’s a statement, a message, from you to me, it’s a signal. The trouble is, I don’t know what it means. Perhaps I’m being very stupid. So spell it out for me now, Joe. What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

Dear Joe,

The student I hired rang my bell at four yesterday afternoon and I went out to meet him at the gate. I gave him five hundred pounds for his work and he handed the bundle through the bars. Thirty-five photocopied articles by you. He went off happy, but what about me? I had no idea then what kind of night lay ahead. Perhaps they were the worst few hours of my life. It was torture, Joe, coming face to face with your sad dry thoughts. To think of the fools who paid you good money for them, and the innocent readers who had their day polluted by them!

I sat in the room my mother used to call the library, though the shelves were always pretty bare, and I read every last word, and actually heard them, in my head, spoken by you straight to me. I read each article as a letter sent by you into the future that was going to contain us both. What were you trying to do to me, I kept thinking. Hurt me? Insult me? Test me? I hated you for it, but I never forgot that I loved you too, and that was why I kept going.
He needs my help
,
I told myself whenever I came close to giving up,
he needs me to set him free from his little cage of reason
. I had moments when I wondered if I had truly understood what God wanted from me. Was I to deliver into His hands the author of these hateful pieces against Him? Perhaps I was intended for something simpler and purer. I mean, I knew you wrote about science, and I was prepared to be baffled or bored, but I didn’t know you wrote out of contempt.

You’ve probably forgotten the article you wrote four years ago for the
New Scientist
about the latest technological aids to biblical scholarship. Well, who cares about the carbon dating of the Turin Shroud? Do you think people changed their minds about their beliefs when they heard that it was a medieval hoax? Do you think faith could depend upon a length of rotting cloth? But it was another piece that really shocked me, when you wrote about God Himself. Perhaps it was a joke, but that makes it even worse. You pretend to know what or who He is—a literary character, you say, like something out of a novel. You say the best minds in the field are prepared to take “an educated guess” at who invented Yahweh, that the evidence points to a woman who was living around 1000
B.C
., Bathsheba, the Hittite who slept with David. A woman novelist dreamed up God! The best minds would rather die than presume to know so much. You’re dealing in powers neither you nor any person on earth can have any grasp of. You go on to say that Jesus Christ was a character too, mostly made up by Saint Paul and “whoever” wrote the Gospel of Saint Mark. I prayed for you, I prayed for the strength to face you, to go on loving you without being dragged down. How is it possible to love God and love you at the same time? Through faith alone, Joe. Not through facts, or pretend facts, or intellectual arrogance, but by trusting in God’s wisdom and love as a living presence in our lives, the kind of presence that no human, let alone a literary character, could ever have.

I suppose I was naive to think in that first rush of feeling I had for you that it could all come right simply because I wanted it so much. When the dawn came, I still had ten more pieces to read. I took a taxi to your place. You were asleep, unaware of your own vulnerability, indifferent to the protection you enjoy from a source whose existence you deny. Life has been very good to you, and I suppose standing out there I began to think you were ungrateful. It probably never crosses your mind to give thanks for what you have. It all happened by blind chance? You made it all yourself? I worry for you, Joe. I worry for what your arrogance could bring down on you. I crossed the road and put my hand on the hedge. No message this time. Why should you speak to me when you don’t have to? You think you have everything, you think that you can meet all your needs on your own. But without an awareness of God’s love, you’re living in a desert. If only you understood fully what it is I’m offering you. Wake up!

You might have got the impression that I hate science. I was never much good at school and I don’t take a personal interest in the latest advances, but I know it is a wonderful thing. The study and measurement of nature is really nothing more than a form of extended prayer, a celebration of the glory of God’s universe. The more we find out about the intricacies of His creation, the more we realize how little we know and how little we are. He gave us our minds, He granted us our wonderful cleverness. It seems so childish and sad that people use this gift to deny His reality. You write that we know enough about chemistry these days to speculate how life began on earth. Little mineral pools warmed by the sun, chemical bonding, protein chains, amino acids, etc. The primal soup. We’ve flushed God out of this particular story, you said, and now he’s been driven to his last redoubt, among the molecules and particles of the quantum physicists. But it doesn’t work, Joe. Describing how the soup is made isn’t the same as knowing why it’s made, or who the chef is. It’s a puny
rant against an infinite power. Somewhere in among your protestations about God is a plea to be rescued from the traps of your own logic. Your articles add up to a long cry of loneliness. There’s no happiness in all this denial. What can it give you in the end?