The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (10 page)

It was at this point in his imaginary letter that Hector was jolted forwards and almost fell off the ledge of boxes on which he was lying. The train had stopped.

Hector listened. He hadn't seen the thick snow falling, but by the temperature in the car and by the absence of any sound, he was able to judge that it was the deep middle of the night. The train would still be a long way from Minsk, a long way even from the border, so he supposed that it must have stopped at a signal and that in a few minutes it would get going again.

Somehow, the immobilisation of the train made the cold inside the freight car more intense and the ghost of breath that filled the space around and above Hector became agitated and began a strange kind of wailing.

The train moved. But it was going backwards, Hector could tell by the way his body rolled. And then it stopped again. Hector raised his head off his knapsack, to hear better, to see better, but he could hear and see nothing except the ghost in the air.

What Hector couldn't know was that the train had been rerouted into a siding because the line further east was temporarily closed by snow. What he couldn't know either was that the driver of the second freight had forgotten all about him and, once the train was safe in its siding, got down from his cab and walked away across the white fields towards a village, in search of a warm fire and a bed for the rest of the night. So Hector lay there, waiting for the train to resume its journey, while the soft snow piled up on the roof of the box car.

After an hour had passed, he tried to move himself towards the edge of the car, so that he could bang on the doors with his feet, but he found that his body was unwilling to move. It asked him to let it rest. He attempted, then, to call out. He knew that a human voice inside a freight train would probably make the kind of sound that disturbed one's peace and altered nothing in the world, but he tried to call nevertheless. ‘Train driver!' he said. ‘Help me!' It was a whisper, not a shout. Hector believed that he was shouting, but he was only murmuring. And anyway, the driver of the second freight was a mile away. He was sitting by a fire with a schoolteacher and his wife, drinking vodka and eating poppyseed cakes.

After his efforts at calling, Hector's throat felt sore and he was afflicted suddenly by a desperate, unbearable thirst. He had no memory of where his water bottle was or when he had last seen it, but what he did remember was the solitary lemon he had put into his knapsack on the morning of his departure. And his longing, now, to suck the juice from this lemon became so great that he succeeded in extracting one hand from the blanket and with this one hand reached behind his head to try to undo the fastenings of his knapsack.

He could picture with absolute precision the colour, shape and texture of the lemon, as clearly as he could picture the icy Russian lake and the grey dacha beside it, in which he and his beloved sister would live. And his yearning for the freshness of the juice of the lemon was so deep, so absolute, that into his search for the precious fruit he put every last ounce of his strength.

The snow stopped falling an hour before sunrise and the sky cleared and the dawn was bright.

Woken by the winter sunlight, the driver of the freight to Minsk remembered at this instant the German soldier he'd agreed to hide in one of his box cars in return for DM5.

He dressed hurriedly, tugging on his overcoat and his hat, and let himself out of the schoolteacher's house.

The snow was thick on the fields. The man wasn't young. Trying to make his way through this deep snow was exhausting for him and it took him the best part of half an hour to reach the train.

He opened the door of Hector's box car and stared in. The light on the snow had blinded him and, for a moment, he could see nothing. ‘Hello!' he called. ‘Hello! It is morning.'

Hector was lying face up, one arm behind his head that rested on his knapsack. The German's face had the pallor of bone, but there was a smile on it, as if, in his last moments, Hector had glimpsed something strangely beautiful.

The train driver walked a few paces from the car and fumbled to light a cigarette.

He stood in the snow, thinking.

It didn't take him long to decide what he was going to do. He was going to leave Hector exactly where he was. He wasn't even going to touch him or cover his face. Even if the day remained fine, the cold in the box car would preserve his body and, with a bit of luck, the train would get to Minsk before nightfall.

At the depot, the freight would be unloaded by rail workers from Belarus, and so it would be they who would find the stowaway. In this way, provided he remembered to get rid of the German currency, the driver would have shifted the burden of responsibility. The dead German, wearing some kind of military uniform, would become a Russian problem.

Death of an Advocate

The thing which first annoyed Albert about that afternoon was everybody pretending they weren't cold.

He considered this ridiculous: his wife, Berthe; his sister-in-law, Marianne; his parents-in-law, Claude and Joséphine, sprawled there on the tartan picnic rug in the weak October sunshine, drinking their tea, smiling, listening to the birds, as though this were a hot day in July.

‘You know it's freezing,' Albert announced.

Nobody paid him any attention. They just carried on sitting still. For that was what this picnic seemed to be about: eating cake and sipping tea and then falling silent and staring at Nature – or what passed for Nature in this part of the municipal park. Everybody hunched and separate and in a reverie of his own. Albert noticed with irritation that the women even pretended the chestnut leaves weren't falling on the picnic cloth. They let them lie there, as though they didn't see them, or as though the brown leaves might have been slivers of fruitcake left half-eaten through inattention.

‘Stupid,' said Albert under his breath. ‘Absolutely stupid.'

A wasp arrived and began crawling over the cake. He stared venomously at it. As a child, he'd almost died from a wasp sting. The natural world waged a senseless war with man which exasperated Albert. How he hated this kind of Sunday outing! He wished he were in his office in the rue St Hippolyte, immersed in the Estate Accounts of one of his solidly wealthy burgher clients, or, better still, about to read out – in all the glory of its repetitive and complicated language – the Will of an aristocrat to the dead man's confused and betrayed wife.

Albert loved this work. Love was not too strong a word to attach to the feelings he had for it. Berthe sometimes teased him that he loved only the fees he earned, those rounded ten per cents which followed one another in a steady and almost unbroken stream. ‘
Non, ma chérie
,' he always told her, ‘it's the lawyer's work itself, that
sorting out and tallying up of things
, which I adore.' Albert went so far as to admit that he often felt himself to be boiling up with contentment in his chosen profession. ‘Boiling up' was how he liked to put it. Because it made him hot and scarlet, and he could feel his feet burning and he could imagine his liver, beet-red and glistening.

But now, sitting in the park on this October Sunday in the year 1877, Albert felt cold. He picked up one of the voluminous table napkins provided for the picnic by Berthe and wound it round his neck. Marianne giggled. ‘I don't know what you look like!' she said.

‘If you don't
know
what I look like, then why did you say anything, Marianne?' said Albert. ‘If you had found some witty comparison between me and, say, some little-known species of marsupial, then you might have given us a moment's amusement, but as it is you've just wasted your breath.'

Berthe, against whose familiar rump Albert was reclining, turned her head and looked sharply at him. Why, came her unspoken question, was he being so pompous and disagreeable, especially to Marianne, upon whom, everybody knew, he doted in a way that was sometimes almost troubling?

Why indeed?
Why
? Albert didn't know. He stared at Marianne, at her pretty face under her smart Sunday bonnet, at the bodice of her striped taffeta dress and waited for the pleasurable and familiar feeling of mild lust to arrive in his groin. But what arrived instead was a feeling of boredom so crushing, so absolute, that Albert had the sensation of falling over. He was glad that he wasn't standing up, for then, surely, he
would
have fallen over. It was as if the sky had literally darkened, or as if the universe were collapsing in on itself.

Albert looked away from Marianne. He saw that he was still holding his teacup. He examined his own thumb on the rim of the saucer. He thought how plump, pink and ridiculous this thumb appeared. He set the cup down and now realised that everybody had turned away from him: Marianne and Berthe and his six-year-old daughter, Delphine, and Claude and Joséphine. All of them had turned their backs on him. The child was whispering something to herself, one of her little songs, but the grown-ups remained silent and unmoving, and Albert wondered whether they knew what was happening to him, knew that his universe was faltering and that, lying as he was near the rim of the pond, they were simply waiting for the moment when he would roll backwards and fall into the water and drown under the flat green leaves of the water lilies.

Albert rubbed his eyes. Then, one by one, he examined the things that lay within his vision: the tea caddy, the teapot on its stand, some bottles of water, the half-eaten cake, the wasp, a plate of biscuits, the fallen leaves, the knives and forks, the white cloth, the edge of the rug, the grass beyond, the shadows of clouds on the gravel walkway. He expected to find consolation in one or other of these things, especially in the tea caddy, whose square shape and ivory handle he had always found aesthetically pleasing. But now, on reflection, Albert decided that a tea caddy was a ridiculous object; in itself and through-and-through an unnecessary thing, balefully ugly and superfluous to human need. He wanted to rage at the mind that had invented it.

At this moment, Delphine picked up her skipping rope and asked her grandmother if she could go and do some skipping on the gravel walkway. ‘Yes,' said Joséphine, ‘but go right over there, so that you don't kick up dust into our faces.'

Albert looked away from the tea caddy, over to where Delphine now stood in the sunshine, laying out the rope in front of her feet, then experimentally jumping over it, to remind herself what skipping involved. Though he was pleased to discover that these little gestures still touched his heart, Albert soon realised that what they touched his heart with was sorrow: sorrow for Delphine's loneliness in a grown-up world, sorrow for her future as the wife of some unfaithful husband, sorrow for her mortality. Though he loved her, he wished at that moment, as Delphine began to skip, that he had never brought her into the world.

He couldn't lie there any more, shivering with cold, leaning against Berthe. Though his legs felt weak, he stood up, brushing crumbs from his jacket, and walked towards his daughter. ‘Watch me, Papa!' she called out, so he did as she asked, watching the concentration on her face, and then watching her feet, shod in brown boots, jumping up and down in the dust.

He slept badly that night, for the first time in his life irritated by the smallness of the double bed, by the solidity and heat and nearness of Berthe. That afternoon, he'd been cold; now he was far too hot. He wanted to be in a narrow space of his own, in absolute darkness, with the sheet pulled taut and cold and clean across his chest. When Berthe began snoring, he wanted to bundle her out on to the floor. ‘What's
happening
to me?' he asked himself.

Albert turned his back towards Berthe and lay staring at the darkness. He began counting money in his mind, which is what he often did to encourage sleep: adding up the total of all the ten per cents, actual and probable, that he would earn before the year's end. The figure he arrived at was large and encouraging, but almost immediately the thought came to him that money, these days, simply remained money. In his youth, or even until quite recently, it had always been alchemised into purchases and acquisitions. But his house and office were now stuffed with these purchases and acquisitions. Albert couldn't think of one other single thing that he wanted to buy. In fact, he decided, there were a number of things that he would like to throw away, starting with the ivory-handled tea caddy.

The logic of this was depressing. For if there was really nothing more that he wanted to buy or acquire by any means, what was the point of continuing to work as a lawyer for the next twenty or twenty-five years? A consoling (but strangely weary-sounding) voice in Albert's head reminded him that he enjoyed his work very much – for its own sake, for the satisfaction of turning chaos into order, muddle into transparency, expectation into fulfilment. What he earned was far from being the only important thing. But the next realisation to torment Albert, as the birds began their dawn revels outside his window, was that the vocation of a lawyer specialising in Estates and Wills amounted to nothing much more than the job of a
femme de chambre
, commanded to tidy out the piles of forgotten junk people kept in their attics. All he did, in the end, was move things around. (And then take away some sizeable pieces for himself.)