Therefore Choose (18 page)

The new city was a new place, as when one sees someone after a long time and the lines and wrinkles make the person only partly recognizable. There were the same buses, the same curbstones. But they were not the same buses or curbstones. During the war, in its excruciating boredom, in its draining anxiety, in its sudden alarms, there had been purpose: fighting for something, a something that became clearer when, at the end, Belsen and the other camps were discovered. The British had persevered. The Allies had won. Infinitely better than the alternative. Imagine life under the Nazis. Imagine it stretching ahead indefinitely. Like occupied France. People sent off to concentration camps for not getting off the pavement when a Nazi officer approached. All that strutting and shouting. He imagined German troops marching down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, imagined the House of Commons being turned into … what? An interrogation centre? There would be more deportations, more barbed wire, and machine gun-guarded concentration camps. All that crushing of the spirit. The Allies averted that, and they could believe it was averted for the whole of Europe. But now, after effort and uncertainty, futility.

There were queues. No one seemed to have much purpose. No one seemed to have anything very much at all. When the Royal Family appeared in a photograph in
Picture Post
, they seemed like illustrations in a children's book. Perhaps that was what we had all been, thought George. Children. When the government started to push towards things that were good, like the idea of a health service, people were pleased, but they were like men in cloth caps standing outside the pub in a twilight drizzle, hands in pockets, with no money to buy a drink.

George spent a second night
with Bernardette. The next morning, instead of rushing out with a perfunctory explanation as he had on the previous occasion, he woke gradually. He half remembered where he was, slowly tunnelled beneath an eiderdown of inexpressible softness, which enveloped him in a half sleep of half thoughts. This must be the origin of flying carpets. One is borne on a soft and yielding fabric, the nudges of which suggest some yet more luxurious position to lie in. One visits exotic lands no ship can reach. He snuggled over to find a patch on the other side of the bed that was no longer occupied. He felt only its warmth, no sense of abandonment.

When at last he started to feel awake, as a diver rises reluctantly from the depths, he found himself in a large bed, in a large room, opposite a large window that admitted through a slit between damask curtains a beam of light in which specks of dust were suspended, in a motion that somehow seemed both excited and calm. He got up without clothes, pulled a curtain aside. In the house opposite, a woman wearing an apron stood cleaning a window. She stared at him.

He closed the curtain quickly, put on his shirt and underpants. He drew back the curtains fully. The woman was no longer visible.

Bernardette had this house to herself. When it was built, this would have been the principal room on the first floor: the drawing room, at the front of the house, where guests were received, tall-ceilinged and grand, with fine mouldings. Now it was a lovely bedroom, here an eighteenth-century chest, here a bookcase constructed to suggest an Adam facade. George examined the books and objects.

He tiptoed upstairs to find a whole floor lined with books, the library floor. Then he came back down again and found the bathroom, furnished with two armchairs and yet another bookcase, a bathroom that didn't look like a bathroom, more like a comfortable sitting room, with Venetian pictures. Where was the lavatory? He must have used it before, he thought. Not here. Next door. No, that's a dressing room. Here, yes. As well as what he needed, there was a wash basin, a bidet as they have in France, another shelf of books. In size this could have been a small bedroom.

He crept downstairs, on the red stair-carpet anchored by brass rods. He stepped on the sides of the treads, unsuccessfully trying to avoid making the stairs creak. The front room on the ground floor was set out as a dining room. It was empty. The large room at the back of the house was a kitchen, with a wooden table and French windows that could open onto brick stairs that led to a luxuriating garden. At the back of the kitchen he found larders, a scullery, a tub, clothes on a wooden clotheshorse.

As he went back into the kitchen, he heard the front door open. Bernardette came in with newspapers and a loaf. She was wearing khaki slacks and a green shirt. With her bobbed hair she looked like a land girl.

“So you're up. You slept well in the bed of crimson sin.”

“Better than I could have imagined. Don't you have to work?”

“Plenty of time.”

She put out marmalade and thick green plates on the scrubbed wooden table.

“What about you? Have you pressing engagements?”

“I hadn't even thought.”

“Perhaps you should think now.”

George looked at a round, mahogany-cased clock in the middle of a wall. Twenty-five past seven.

“It's early yet,” he said.

He stood up and walked over to look more closely at the clock, which bore the legend
L.M.S.
and beneath that
R. Jones & Co. London
. It was plain but elegant, with Roman numerals, oriented so that they would be the right way up if read from the very centre of the clock. He went to where Bernardette was cutting the loaf she had bought, directly on the wooden table. From behind her back he leaned forward and kissed her cheek below the ear.

“I don't usually get anything like that at breakfast time. You can come again. I bought the clock at an auction. I think it must have come from a station buffet that was bombed. Its intestines were mangled. I had it repaired.”

“To make sure you don't forget the time.”

“To remind me of travel. You should put some clothes on.” She looked at him disapprovingly. “Or if you're one of those people who can't bear to dress before breakfast, why don't you get my dressing gown.”

George went upstairs to find the dressing gown, then came down to sit on a country wooden chair and picked up the newspapers Bernardette had bought: the
Daily Worker
, the
News Chronicle
,
The Times
.

“Eclectic reading.”

“I like to see how the class war is going. And it gives me an opportunity to contribute to the salvage. They collect newspapers, mince them all up, and scramble the words, so they can issue them again the next day.”

He chose
The Times
.

George had only been back in London for a few weeks since he had been demobbed. He had no idea what he was doing. He'd thought of staying on in the army and asking to go to work in Germany. He could work as an interpreter, or at logistics, or something. But that didn't seem right, so he became a civilian again.

When this lousy war is over,
No more soldiering for me;
When I put my civvy clothes on,
Oh how happy I shall be.

He had found a room on Judd Street, in Bloomsbury, and thought he could sit and make lists and work out what to do. Should he go back to university? Go back to Cambridge? Or what about University College? Do a higher degree? While he was in uniform there was structure. Now there was nothing.

A week before, he'd visited, for the third time, the bomb site where his mother had died. Gwen had told him that she and her husband had searched for possessions without much success. The rubble had been cleared. There was nothing to be done there. He thought of his rooms on the top floor, and of how his mother had welcomed Anna when she came to stay. He felt a great emptiness.

That morning, when he had woken slowly and explored Bernardette's house, it was as if a train on which he had been travelling had whooshed out of a tunnel into the light. He could read the newspaper! From scarcely being able to read a paragraph during the last few weeks, today he could read a whole article.

Bernardette was humming “It's a Long Way to Tipperary.”

“There you are, sir,” she said, putting on the accent of a cockney waitress. “Nice cuppa Rosie Lee, NAAFI best.”

“Thank you.”

“And here, come in direct on the boat train from the creameries of County Wicklow, I got you some butter. Last of my points.”

George's third night with Bernardette
did not occur until a week later. She'd be late, she'd said, and would leave a key under the dustbin.

George felt guilty at not having kept up with Bernardette during the war. He remembered the conversation with her when they kissed, on the occasion on which they went out together: “Perhaps in the future,” she'd said. Was this the future? He began to wonder whether he had let his feelings for Anna become more important than they should have been: Anna who had chosen to marry someone else and might not even be alive.

George put the key into Bernardette's front door and let himself in. He went into the kitchen, where the light was on. She was already home. She had left a note on the kitchen table to say she had gone up to bed and why didn't he join her.

George turned off the kitchen light and went up to the bedroom. Bernardette was reading a Penguin. He fussed in the bathroom, struggling to decide whether to say what he was bursting to say. He resolved not to. It was not the moment. But as he came into the bedroom it burst out of its own accord.

“Have you seen him? Pardou?” he said.

She put her book down, gave him an exasperated glance.

“And what business of yours would that be?”

“And you told him?”

“Told him what, pray?”

“About us.”

“Certainly not!”

George didn't know what to say. Should he ask, “Why not?” Should he ask, “Did you sleep with him?” Should he say, “Does he come here? Do you do it with him, here in this bed?” Perhaps he should say, “Can't you see it's not good for you?” Or should he say, “I think I'm falling in love with you?” He said nothing.

She broke the silence.

“You think you're falling in love with me,” she said. “In no time flat you'll be asking me to enter the state of holy deadlock. Don't you be thinking that. I'm not at all what you want in that department.”

He did not know how to reply.

“I'm not going to change my arrangements with Michael,” she said. “Perhaps you and I can share a bed from time to time. But it's my bed. I might even rather fancy you, but not if you're going to start pleading or being cantankerous. If that's the prospect, we'll pack it in straight away.”

“But the way you live, you can't go on like this.”

“I've got a plan, and this is what I'm doing.”

“How do you mean, plan?”

“The reason you wouldn't know is you haven't got one. You're at a terrible loose end. My plan's to be a psychiatrist. Maybe go back to Dublin, where I can earn a lot of money but do good works on Fridays, where I can have a house twice as grand as this, where I can have a special room for doing pottery, and maybe a kiln in the garden, and read in the evenings, and take extremely exotic holidays that cost a fortune.”

“You mean live alone. Why would you do that?”

“Why would I not do that? You think I've not seen enough of marriages and families?”

George responded with a grimace.

“For God's sake, George, you should see yourself, like an Irish funeral in a downpour.”

She put her book down, got out of bed, and left the room. He could hear water running. She came back, stood in the doorway, naked, and looked at him.

“I've not said I'm finishing with you,” she said. “You've made an impractical suggestion. I don't want any falling in love. If there's going to be sulking and skulking, there's an end of it.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I should think so.”

She made her Irish accent more pronounced, like a navvy. “If you want to fock,” she said, “you'd better be taking your focking trowsers off, but if you don't want to, you can fock off.”

Does each life have a centre
around which it turns? For George, the centre was the Café Bauer, when Anna asked if he would stay in Berlin so that they could spend their lives together. We think the centre will hold. George didn't understand. He didn't think of it as a choice he could make. But he did choose. He chose out of anxiety and convention. That was the centre.

The war sank a deep ravine through Europe. The historians will discover it, after trekking across the landscape of the 1920s, after they have stumbled through the valleys and raw escarpments of the Depression, they will find the ravine of the war years, deeper and wider than anything previously seen, bottomless, with no way to climb down. One can only fall. And no way to cross from there to here. After it, historians would see Europe was not the same. This was not the usual kind of change. It occurred because war was no longer a matter of a few thousand men going at each other with sharp implements and hand-held firearms. Our civilization had made an industry of destruction — factories and production lines — and visited this destruction on everyone: on men, women, and children, on people in uniform and people in ordinary clothes, on the uncomprehending and the undeserving. And not just the new machinery. We promoted those parts of ourselves that were cruel and contemptuous, parts we had ignored within ourselves that, because ignored, remained unrecognized. These parts had taken over.

George could have gone back into medicine. He was qualified and registered. He could have made a living. That's what everyone did. You could see people doing it. Bernardette was doing it, probably not as she had imagined herself when she was a student, but content enough, in her eccentric way. So why not George? Why did he not go somewhere out of the way, by the sea? Not Salcombe, but Falmouth, perhaps? Buy a boat so that he could sail. Be a general practitioner, attend to people's births, their deaths, their rheumatism. There were many things worse. He had seen many things worse. But it would be a life that merely continued a trajectory that he had taken up in thoughtlessness: a smear across the page of a book in a language he couldn't read.