He was waiting at the door when we came out, and we couldn’t avoid him, dark suit, dark tie, dark hair, thin body and thin lips and an unconvincing smile. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, winking at us, and pressed an envelope into my hand like a tax demand. I could tell from the feel that it contained a card. ‘I don’t trust the post,’ he said, ‘at Christmas.’ He waved his hand. ‘There’s Mrs Montgomery. I felt sure she would be here. She’s very ecumenical.’
Mrs Montgomery wore a pale blue scarf over her pale blue hair, and I could see the new emerald in the hollow of her scrawny throat. ‘Ha ha, Monsieur Belmont and his cards as usual. And the young couple. A very happy Christmas to you all. I didn’t see the General in church. I hope he’s not ill. Ah! There he is.’ Yes, there the Divisionnaire certainly was, framed in the church doorway like a portrait of a Crusader, stiff as a ramrod in the back and in one rheumatic leg, with his conquistador nose and his fierce moustache - it was difficult to believe that he had never heard a shot fired in anger. He too was alone.
‘And Mr Deane,’ Mrs Montgomery exclaimed, ‘surely he must be here. Why, he’s always here if he’s not filming somewhere abroad.’
I could see we had made a very bad mistake. Midnight Mass at Saint Maurice was as social as a cocktail party. We would never have got away if at that moment Richard Deane had not appeared from the church, swollen and flushed with drink. We just had time to notice that he had a pretty girl in tow before we escaped.
‘Good God,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘a party of the Toads. ‘
‘We couldn’t have known they would be there.’
‘I don’t believe in all this Christmas business, only I want to believe - but the Toads… Why on earth do they go?’
‘I suppose it’s a Christmas habit like our tree. I went last year alone. For no reason. I expect they were all there, but I didn’t know any of them in those days - in those days - it seems years ago. I didn’t even know that you existed.’
Lying happily in bed that night in the short interval between love and sleep, we could talk of the Toads humorously, as though they were a kind of comic chorus to our own story which was the only important one.
‘Do you suppose that the Toads have souls?’ I asked Anna-Luise.
‘Doesn’t everyone have a soul - I mean if you believe in souls?’
‘That’s the official doctrine, but mine is different. I think souls develop from an embryo just as we do. Our embryo is not a human being yet, it still has something of a fish about it, and the embryo soul isn’t yet a soul. I doubt if small children have souls any more than dogs - perhaps that’s why the Roman Catholic Church invented Limbo.’
‘Have you a soul?’
‘I think I may have one - shop-soiled but still there. If souls exist you certainly have one.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ve suffered. For your mother. Small children don’t suffer, or dogs, except for themselves.’
‘What about Mrs Montgomery?’
‘Souls don’t dye their hair blue. Can you imagine her even asking herself if she has a soul?’
‘And Monsieur Belmont?’
‘He hasn’t had the time to develop one. Countries change their tax laws every budget, closing loopholes, and he has to think up new ways to evade them. A soul requires a private life. Belmont has no time for a private life.’
‘And the Divisionnaire?’
‘I’m not so sure about the Divisionnaire. He might just possibly have a soul. There’s something unhappy about him.’
‘Is that always a sign?’
‘I think it is.’
‘And Mr Kips?’
‘I’m not sure about him either. There’s a sense of disappointment about Mr Kips. He might be looking for something he has mislaid. Perhaps he’s looking for his soul and not a dollar.’
‘Richard Deane?’
‘No. Definitely not. No soul. I’m told he has copies of all his old films and he plays them over every night to himself. He has no time even to read the books of the films. He’s satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can’t be satisfied.’
There was a long silence between us. We should in the nature of things have fallen asleep, but each was aware that the other was awake, thinking the same thought. My silly joke had turned serious. It was Anna-Luise who spoke the thought aloud.
‘And my father?’
‘He has a soul all right,’ I said, ‘but I think it may be a damned one.’
13
I suppose there is a day in most lives when every trivial detail is held in the memory as though stamped in wax. Such a day proved for me to be the last day of the year - a Saturday. The night before we had decided to drive up in the morning to Les Paccots if the weather proved fine enough for Anna-Luise to ski. There had been a slight thaw on Friday, but Friday night it was freezing. We would go early before the slopes were crowded and have lunch together at the hotel there. I woke at half-past seven and rang the meteo to find out the conditions. Everything was OK though caution was advised. I made some toast and boiled two eggs and gave her breakfast in bed.
‘Why two eggs?’ she asked.
‘Because you’ll be half dead of hunger before lunch if you are going to be there when the ski-lift opens.’ She put on a new sweater that I had given her for Christmas: heavy white wool with a wide red band round the shoulders: she looked wonderful in it. We started off at half-past eight. The road was not bad, but as the meteo had announced there were icy patches, so I had to put on chains at the Chatel St Denis, and the ski-lift was open before we arrived. We had a small argument at St Denis. She wanted to make a long round from Corbetta and ski down the black piste from Le Pralet, but my anxiety persuaded her to come down the easier red piste to La Cierne.
I was secretly relieved that a number of people were already waiting to go up at Les Paccots. It seemed safer that way. I never fancied Anna-Luise skiing on an empty slope. It was too like bathing from an empty beach. One always fears there must be some good reason for the emptiness - perhaps an invisible pollution or a treacherous current.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d been the first. I love an empty piste.’
‘Safety in numbers,’ I said. ‘Remember what the road was like. Be careful.’
‘I’m always careful.’
I waited until she was on the move and waved to her as she went up. I watched her until she was out of sight among the trees; I found it easy to pick her out because of the red band on the sweater. Then I went into the Hotel Corbetta with the book I had brought with me. It was an anthology of prose and verse called The Knapsack made by Herbert Read and published in 1939, after the war broke out, in a small format so that it could be carried easily in a soldier’s kit. I had never been a soldier, but I had grown attached to the book during the phoney war. It whiled away many hours of waiting in the firemen’s post for the blitz on London which never seemed to be coming, as the others played their compulsory round of darts wearing their gas masks. I have thrown away the book now, but some of the passages I read that day remain embedded in the wax, just as on that night in 1940 when I lost my hand. I remember clearly what I was reading when the siren sounded: it was, ironically, Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter..
An unheard siren would certainly have been sweeter. I tried to reach the end of the Ode, but I got no further than And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be… before I had to move out of the relative safety of our burrow. By two o’clock in the morning the words returned to me like something I had picked in a sortes Virgilianae because there was a strange silence in the City streets - all the noise was overhead: the flap of flames, the hiss of water and the engines of the bombers saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ There was a kind of hush at the heart of the destruction before an unexploded bomb was somehow set off and tore the silence away at street level and left me without a hand.