Ever After (2 page)
I shouldn’t blame Tubby Baxter. Rather, I owe him infinite thanks for introducing me to Literature, which despite its failure to save lives, including, I suppose I must say, my own, and despite its being, in a place like this, for ever chopped up and flung into preservatives as if it were a subject for an autopsy, I still believe in. I still believe it
is the speech, the voice of the heart. (Say things like that round here and see what happens.) Tubby Baxter was not to blame for the doleful but charismatic Renaissance protagonist who has somehow got under all our skins. Nor was he to blame for the circumstances which induced in me a particularly acute rapport.
Hamlet is actuated, or immobilized, by two questions: (1) is there or is there not any point to it all? (2) Shall I kill Claudius? Or to put it another way: shall I kill Claudius or shall I kill myself? It was the vengeance theme that grabbed me from the start, just as much as the distraught meditations on the meaning of life, though I understood, even aged thirteen-and-a-half, that the two questions were not inseparable.
For Claudius, read Sam Ellison. “Uncle Sam,” as he was inevitably known, since he hailed from Cleveland, Ohio. Otherwise my stepfather, and founding father of Ellison Plastics (UK). For forty years of my life I have conducted a theoretical vendetta against Sam, though I do not think real killing was ever on the cards. And the odd thing is I have always liked him. I have never been able to help liking him.
Now he is dead; and revenge is pre-empted, or has been satisfied. Or, if revenge is a two-sided game, it is Sam who in a posthumous but canny fashion has got his revenge on me. I rather think, in fact, that Sam’s death, which occurred only six weeks ago, may not have been unconnected with my own averted one. It is not the huge, primary things that push you over (I suppose I can speak now as an authority) but the odd, secondary things. He died, and I always really liked him. Furthermore, Ruth being already dead, his death removed—I have to admit it, absurd as it seems—one of the main shaping factors, one of the plots of my life.
What was left? Potter? Katherine? The strange, stray notebooks of an unknown man—another latter-day fixation—who lived over a century ago? But I will come to all this.
The manner of his death—death number three, chronologically speaking—was also significant, though to me it was neither as surprising nor as scandalous as it might be to a number of people who do not know about it or as it is to a number of people who are conspiring to hush it up. (I could get my posthumous revenge that way, but it would be cheap, low-down revenge.) He died of a heart attack in a Frankfurt hotel room, aged sixty-seven. His death was reported by the call-girl he was with at the time, who, to give her her due, might simply have fled the scene. At the fatal moment, either Sam was on top of her or she was on top of Sam. At any rate, it seems they were intimately connected when death occurred. An unsavoury business. But then if we could choose our deaths—and I tried to choose mine—I am not so sure that this wasn’t exactly the kind of death Sam might have preferred. (You see what this new me is like.)
Under certain circumstances, generosity is one of the most effective and perhaps one of the sweetest means of revenge. If it were not for Sam, I would not be enjoying the mixed blessings of my present situation—I mean the sanctuary of these ancient walls, not my recent resurrection. I will come to this too in a moment. There is the more immediate question of Sam’s will and my prominent inclusion in it. I must reveal that I find myself a rich man, and that had my attempted demise been successful, I would have immediately made the taxman the chief beneficiary of my short-lived wealth. I am a plastics heir, you might say, in the way that people talk of cocoa heirs, or rubber barons.
But it is not just a question of the money. Is a plastic cup less real than a china one? Nylon stockings less real than silk? More to the point, is plastic any more fraudulent than a stage performance? Or a poem? Yet long ago when my former self refused my stepfather’s offer of a future in plastic, it did so in the conviction that the real stuff of life lay elsewhere. And I am not alone, perhaps, in regarding plastic as the epitome of the false. Sam never saw it that way. In those days when it seemed to me that his goal was nothing less than the polymerization of the world (this is when the spirit of Hamlet breathed newly and fiercely in me), his argument would have been roughly thus: “You gotta accept it, pal” (he called me pal, when he did not call me “kid” or, scathingly, “professor”), “the real stuff is running out, it’s used up, it’s blown away, or it costs too much. You gotta have
substitoots
.”
Yet, as Ellison Plastics went from strength to strength (without my assistance), it would have been clear to anyone that Sam’s appetite for the “real stuff” developed in proportion to his capacity, with the money he made from substitutes, to purchase it: the new mansion in Berkshire—
real
Tudor (with a swimming-pool), as opposed to the mock Tudor in which I was raised; the affectation of fine tailoring and choice antiques; in its ultimate form, the apotheosis of Sam, a New World clone, into a Real English Gentleman. A plan preposterously conceived, doomed from the start by his indelible Cleveland accent, but earnestly and perseveringly undertaken: the genealogical investigations (why should these things have mattered to
him
?); the wondrous discovery, not that he had come over with the Normans or was of
Mayflower
stock, but that a former Ellison, John Elyson (d. 1623), had been a senior Fellow of this College, this place where I am now myself an inmate. Which gave him an hereditary stake in the
hallowed ancient walls; and gave him the nerve, in his sixty-seventh year, to boost the college finances by a handsome endowment, the one (secret) condition of this munificent gesture being that it should provide for a new college fellowship, the Ellison Fellowship, whose first incumbent, whatever the outward form of selection, should be me.
And this is the Sam who once mocked and refused to fund my former yen to be a scholar.
Without knowing the full story—give me time—you may sniff here the bitter scent of retaliation. It was his way of coming to my rescue after Ruth’s death. There was the question of my income. One way or another, as he tenderly reminded me, I had lived off Ruth’s earnings. And there was the question of my seemingly incurable paralysis in the face of Ruth’s absence. Better to be somewhere where paralysis was generally accommodated. In other words, it was his way also of humiliating me and, after lifelong resistance, rendering me entirely dependent upon him. The cloister was my real home all along, wasn’t it? So much for my fugitive dream of a life with performers, show people. Back to your books, professor.
The trouble was I really liked him, and the trouble was I was desolate and he was being kind. In the event, anxious not to forgo its windfall, the College did not raise a squeak at the dubiousness of my candidature (a ten-year career, abandoned some fifteen years ago, as an unillustrious university lecturer). The embarrassments and resentments came later. Nor did the College seem to mind its revered fabric being underpinned by plastic.
Sam’s death, leaving me in this utterly bogus position, with the duty of being a living testimony to his noble public gesture, was like the closing of a trap. “One day, pal, you’ll get the money, I’ll see that you get the money!” This was
how he threatened me when I went my own proud, penniless way, years ago—as if money were a penalty, an inescapable second-best.
You see, I think I found the real stuff, the true, real stuff. Now it seems, in this new life, I am turned to plastic. I am born again in plastic.
Four o’clock. Chimes float gently over the soft, historic air. What benign incarceration! What beguiling obsolescence! What agreeable trappings in which not to know who you are. The contemplative life! Sometimes even the most disgruntled inmate or sceptical visitor will be touched by a sentiment that is more than just picturesque nostalgia. Twilights full of bells and the pad of feet on old stones. Lights in study windows. Arches and towers. The whole absurd but cherished edifice rising like some fantastical lantern out of the miasmal Fens and out of the darkness of dark ages. The illusion of the illusion. It is civilization that we are talking about, that we are saving, we dotty dons.
Here, in our exclusive asylum.
When I emerged from the hospital, a fully reconditioned if fragile specimen, a period of convalescence was ordained. What better convalescent home than the old College itself? With its immured peace, its quiet lawns and its long experience of catering to the frailties and follies of learning. It was the long vacation. The long vacation, indeed. I was considerately and spitefully relieved of my scant college duties. A mere charge to its budget. A mere token of a Fellow.
And so I sit in these college gardens, under the shade of an Indian bean tree (a fine, mature example), trying to
recover my substance. The weather is warm and settled. All the tranquil delights of a lovingly tended garden in high summer greet my eyes. The gardeners give me a wide, respectful berth. It is not quite a case of the Bath chair and the plaid rug. I can make my own way here from my rooms. On my knees is an inverted wooden tray and on it this notepad.
The gardens lie separate from the college buildings, across the river and, happily, some distance from it. At this time of the year, in weather like this, the river is a mêlée of mismanaged punts, splashes and squeals, with all the gentle charm of a wet T-shirt competition. Even here, in my arbour, the occasional scream or cackle of laughter reaches me; and more adventurous tourists, taking the path from the bridge, through the avenue of limes, and stopping at the gap in the high hedge and the little gate with its discreet, white-on-black sign, “Fellows Only,” might even be able to observe me, across the lawn. Look, they must think, like visitors at a zoo, pausing by some cage of shy rarities, there is one of
them
. And no doubt, seeing me scribble at this notepad, they take me to be immersed in some unfathomable and abstruse research.
But aren’t I?
Why should I resent my situation? I am restored to life. The sun shines through a punkah of green, tender leaves. Life! Life! Does it matter, so long as you breathe, who the hell you are? Or where you are? Or what you remember? Or what you miss? Why should I hate the man—who is dead anyway, and whom I
liked
—who has provided me with all this? Who has taken away from me—good God, how life can change, how everything can change in the space of less than two years—all worldly cares? But I have not told you yet the nub of my hatred, the nub of my forty
years’ vicarious habitation of Elsinore as my second home. There is nothing worse than Revenge Refuted. You see, I thought Sam killed my father. So to speak. But now I know he didn’t. My father killed my father. And this in more ways than one.
When I try to remember the glorious, the marvellous, the lost and luminous city of Paris, I find it hard to separate the city that exists in the mind, that existed even then, perhaps, mainly in my mind, from the actual city whose streets I once trod and which is now older by some forty years. I have never gone back. I never went there with Ruth—because of the memories—though I went to most places with Ruth, and all couples, they say, should go to Paris. Perhaps now I should return—now I am this free, this disengaged man, and now I know, in any case, that certain things were not as they once seemed.
We see what we choose to see, we see what we think we see. In Paris my mother first took me to the opera. A matinée of
La Bohème
—a Parisian tale. And there, in Act One, behind Rodolfo’s garret window, and again, in Act Four, as poor Mimi lay melodiously dying, was a painted vista of Paris rooftops just like any you could actually see, and perhaps still can, around Sacré Coeur or Montparnasse. It had never struck me before that Reality and Romance could so poignantly collude with each other; so that ever afterwards I saw Paris as a palpable network of “scenes,” down to the subtle lighting of a smoky-blue winter’s morning or the blush of a spring evening, the incarnation of something already imagined. It scarcely occurred to me—my imagination did not go in this simpler direction—that this same Paris which we came to in November 1945 had been occupied not so long ago by Hitler’s
soldiery and that our very apartment in the Rue de Bellechasse, in the heart of the ministerial quarter, had perhaps been the temporary home—as it was our temporary home—of some official of the Reich.
My mother (whom I would definitely not, in the final analysis, call Romantic) must have been moved by the same ambiguous, uncanny reality as I, because I can recall her, only days after our arrival, saying in a rapturous if half-startled voice, “Look, darling, this is Paris, darling” (I knew it was Paris, we were in Paris, we were strolling down the Champs Élysées), “isn’t it divine?” And that word, through the refining filter of Paris, is all I need to conjure up my mother. My mother that was (death number two): as she flung the Armstrong-Siddeley through the flashing, leafy lanes of Berkshire (me, a gaping, gleeful, infant passenger beside her); as she licked from her lips the residue of some oozing cream cake (a sweet tooth which only slowly taxed her figure); as she held up to herself, like some flimsy, snatched-up dancing partner, a newly bought frock: “Divine, darling! Isn’t it just
divine
?”