It hardly needs to be said that the relief I felt when the Salvation Army retreated up Blenheim Street was misplaced. I had seen the end of the trunks — but I still had all the papers, packed into thirteen cardboard boxes marked Dr T and Claude.
I still had Louis Fehler’s trommel too, but that is another story.
When at last my house was sold, the future of Claude’s papers had to be decided. I called Margery, explained the situation to her and asked whether she wanted me to return what was left of Claude and Berti. It was an awkward call. I don’t think I’m going to write anything about them, I said. I’ve tried, really I have. I’ve picked through these things more often than I can tell you: I know them pretty well. And I just don’t know what to do with them. I could invent a character, perhaps. I’ve seen Claude sometimes, flitting through a corner of my mind in grey flannels and a flecked cardigan, with a book under his arm, I can’t see what it is, Handbuch der Judenfrage or The Nicest Girl in the School, I’ve seen him. But all these papers don’t help. He keeps disappearing behind them. They’re crying out for the attention of a historian.
The following week (it was February 2012) I packed the boxes into my car and drove them to Margery’s place in Westdene. Her boy Julian was there, twice as tall and broad as I remembered, and he helped us carry the heaviest boxes into the house. Margery hefted a couple too. But I made sure I took only the smallest. I had put my back out with all the packing and shifting of boxes and it had only just begun to heal.
Margery has always had a knack for living well, with a carefree, tumbledown grace you cannot copy from the design magazines. Her home felt open and welcoming. There was a lean-to roof between the house and the outbuildings, and a concrete slab with a table and chairs on it, perfect for eating outside. To one side stood the weightlifting bench where Julian must have done the work of broadening his shoulders. We sat around the table and drank tea. The garden was lush and green in the late summer sunlight. We might have been in the Italian countryside, although there was not a Tuscan folderol to be seen.
A box full of Dr T’s effects stood on one of the chairs and I fancied I could smell that compound of musty paper and cigarette smoke he gave off. At home here, I thought.
As we spoke about him, a strange thing happened. I began to see the outlines of his life more clearly than ever. I remembered the crossing to Dover, the garden in Brockley. The little girls on the omnibuses, with their straw hats and ribboned hair, and the striped bathing suits they wore on the strand at Wimereux and Rochebonne. The day on the jetty at Boulogne-sur-Mer when the wind blew Mama’s hat into the sea and Berti dived in to save it. What luck he was there to do it — he was so seldom at home. He was always sending postcards from far away, from Montevideo, Nassau, San Francisco. How excited we would get, but Mama would just turn them over with a sigh and stand them up on the mantelpiece.
I told Margery I had binned the books at the SPCA shop in Edenvale and she was relieved. Now that all these things were under her roof again, she remembered certain details: the photographs from Japan, for instance. Was it possible that Berti had led a second life? That he had another family somewhere? We spoke about trying to track down the relatives in Nova Scotia. But they’re fish packers, Margery said. What would they do with all this old junk? What could they do that we haven’t been able to?
Now that she mentioned them, I also remembered the photographs from Japan. I couldn’t recall seeing them on my last repacking of the boxes. Perhaps the thief who broke into the guest suite had walked off with a few things after all. I told her about the burglary and my efforts to keep the contents of the trunks intact over the years. While I was talking, another ghost appeared in the corner of my eye. This time it was Berti, strolling in the gardens of the Nagata Shrine at Kobe with Mr Nakamura. A brusque, self-confident European, with an imperial moustache and a polka-dot bow tie, a man for whom the world was not so much a playground as a marketplace.
It grew late and the air chilled. Julian went to work. Margery fetched a bottle of wine from the fridge and the conversation strayed to other things, the joys and sorrows of growing old, the long years of our friendship, the need to work and the wish to garden. As night fell, I noticed that Claude had left the table, although the box was still there on the chair, mute and unremembering.
Report on a Convention
DAY 1
17:30
Pleasantly surprised to see ‘Mr Wu’ on the board at the airport. Accustomed (almost) to being called Mr Jing. The climate is hot, yeasty, overspiced. No doubt the place would seem filthier without the vegetation, profuse greenery everywhere, enormous leaves and vivid blooms — ‘flamboyants’ — in which the litter looks floral.
We took the coastal road to the destination, with the sea behind the dunes most of the time, smelt rather than seen. The driver wanted to chat but I shut the partition. As you know, I like to keep my marketing eye open. Papa’s face everywhere in the terminal, as expected, on gantries and signposts, and on billboards advertising the Trade Fair along the highway. No sign of bandits.
The Ambassador is one block back from the beachfront — fine views though — within walking distance of the Convention Centre. Or it would be if one could brave the streets, which I am advised against. Rickshaws are recommended. The taximan said I should summon him, day or night, if I want a ‘good time’. We’ll see about that. Keyed in the number of the control room just in case.
The hotel façade is solid Papa, a gigantic head-and-shoulders, from breakfast terrace to roof garden. A projection with no evident source and very impressive on this scale. One of his best-loved expressions, benevolent and stately, but not overly friendly. Crowned by his unmistakable homburg.
Let me start on the ground floor. The drop zone had a pair of Papas — no handiwork of ours — on either side of the door. Twin commissionaires with the awning resting on their heads, at a scale of 3:1, in ferroconcrete with a marble finish. The airlock lined with smaller versions of the same in alcoves, these from our factory. Gratifying to see our merchandise in situ for the first time. Fixtures, I think, not just hauled out for my arrival. The whole space bathed in red light and that unquestionably for my benefit. It’s amazing what they think in these backwaters. I know you find it sweet, but you don’t have to experience it at first hand. The lobby rosy too, but not as garish, thank God. Ambient, almost certainly chameleonic — sensed it cooling perceptibly as I checked myself in.
A voice message in my earpiece: words of welcome from Mr Booty Khuzwayo, Convenor of the Trade Fair, and an invitation to join him for breakfast in the Parrot Parrot Room tomorrow morning (if I so wish).
Saw my first flesh-and-blood Papa in the elevator on the way up to my room. Not a professional here for the Convention, as you might imagine, but a waiter! He was lugging a tray of cocktails and I held the door. In truth, he resembled Papa only slightly: if there was a likeness at all it was an effect of the homburg and doublet and a certain solicitous, fatherly bearing.
(I remembered your wise counsel, Fei. The eye is the most fallible organ. I’m sure the people here are as various as people anywhere on this green earth and if they all look somewhat alike to me it is the fault of my untutored eye.)
When the waiter got out of the lift on the seventeenth floor, he inclined his head in a regal bow, and I took the costume and the mannerisms — it really did not go much further than that — as an allusive tribute to Papa, who did so much to foster economic and cultural exchange between his people and ours, or a small gesture of gratitude to the delegates at the Fair, of whom I am self-evidently one, for the welcome injection of credit and know-who into the local economy. Unless of course there was something ironic or even facetious in his attitude — a possibility signposted in your helpful briefing papers — and he was registering his displeasure at my presence. I must remember that they do not like foreigners.