3. No More Naked
I WOKE EARLY, DISTURBED and angry after my familiar dream – the dream where I'm dead and I'm watching Jochen cope with life without me – usually perfectly and completely happily. I started to have this dream after he began to talk and I resent my subconscious mind drawing this deep worry, this sick neurosis, to my attention every now and then. Why am I dreaming of my own death? I never dream of Jochen's death, though sometimes I think about it, rarely, for a second or two before I banish it – shocked – from my mind. I'm almost sure that everyone does this about the people they love – it's a grim corollary of truly loving someone: you find yourself compelled to imagine your world without them and have to contemplate its awfulness and dread for a second or two. A peer through the crack to the emptiness, the big silence beyond. We can't help it – I can't help it, anyway, and I tell myself guiltily that everybody must do it, that it's a very human reaction to the human condition. I hope I'm right.
I slipped out of bed and padded through to his bedroom, to check on him. He was sitting up in bed, colouring in his colouring book, a fritter of pencils and wax crayons around him.
I gave him a kiss and asked him what he was drawing.
'A sunset,' he said, and showed me the lurid page, all flaming orange and yellow, capped with bruised brooding purples and greys.
'It's a bit sad,' I said, my mood still influenced by my dream.
'No it's not, it's meant to be beautiful.'
'What would you like for breakfast?' I asked him.
'Crispy bacon, please.'
I opened the door to Hamid – he wasn't wearing his new leather jacket, I noticed, just his black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, very crisp, like an airline pilot. Normally I'd have teased him about this but I thought that after my faux pas of the day before and the fact that Ludger was in the kitchen behind me it would be best to be pleasant and kind.
'Hamid, hello! Beautiful morning!' I said, my voice full of special cheer.
'The sun is shining again,' he said in a monotone.
'So it is, so it is.'
I turned and showed him in. Ludger was sitting there at the kitchen table in T-shirt and shorts, spooning cornflakes into his mouth. I could tell what Hamid was thinking – his insincere smile, his stiffness – but there was no possibility of explaining the reality behind this situation with Ludger in the room, so I opted for a simple introduction.
'Hamid, this is Ludger, a friend of mine from Germany. Ludger – Hamid.'
I had not introduced them the day before. I had gone down to the front door, brought Ludger up to the flat, installed him in the sitting-room and continued – with some difficulty – with Hamid's lesson. After Hamid was finished and gone I went to find Ludger – he was stretched out on the sofa, asleep.
Now Ludger raised his clenched fist and said, 'Allahu Akbar.'
'You remember Ludger,' I said, brightly. 'He came yesterday, during our lesson.'
Hamid's face registered no emotion. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said.
'Shall we go through?' I said.
'Please, yes, after you, Ruth.'
I led him through to the study. He seemed very unlike his usual self: solemn, almost agonised in some way. I noticed he had had his beard trimmed – it made him look younger.
'So,' I said, continuing with the false breeziness, sitting down at my desk, 'I wonder what the Ambersons are up to today.'
He ignored me. 'This Ludger man,' he said, 'is he the father of Jochen?'
'No! Good God, no. What made you think that? No – he's the brother of Jochen's father, the younger brother of Karl-Heinz. No, no, absolutely no.' I laughed, with nervous relief, realising I'd said 'no' six times. No denial could have been more underscored.
Hamid tried to disguise how happy he was at this news, but failed. His grin was almost stupid.
'Oh. All right. No, I thought he…' he paused, held up both his hands in apology. 'Forgive me, I should not induct like this.'
'Deduce.'
'Deduce. So: he is Jochen's uncle.'
This was true, but I had to admit I had never thought of Ludger Kleist in this way (he didn't seem remotely avuncular – the words 'Uncle Ludger' conjoined appeared creepily antithetical) and, indeed, I had also introduced Ludger to Jochen as 'a friend from Germany' – and they had had no time to become better acquainted as I had to take Jochen to a birthday party. Ludger said he would go 'to a pub' and by the time he returned that evening Jochen was in bed. The uncle-revelation would have to wait.
Ludger was dossing down on a mattress on the floor of a room in the flat we called the Dining Room – in honour of the one dinner party I had given there since we had moved in. It was, in fact, and in theory, the room where I wrote my thesis. Its oval table was stacked with books and notes and drafts of my various chapters. I allowed myself to believe, contrary to the dusty evidence, that this was the room where I worked on my thesis – its very existence, its designation and compartmentalisation seemed to make my wishes somehow real, or more reaclass="underline" this was where my calm, scholarly, intellectual life took place – my messy disorganised real life occupied the rest of the flat. The Dining Room was my discrete little cell of mental endeavour. I dispelled the illusion quickly: we pushed the table to the wall; we laid down Ludger's inflatable mattress on the carpet – it had become a spare room again – one Ludger professed himself to be very comfortable in.
'If you could see where I have been sleeping,' he said, pulling down the bottom eyelid of his right eye with a finger, as if to exemplify a basilisk stare. 'Jesus Christ, Ruth, this is the Ritz.' And then he gave his crazy shrill laugh that I remembered better than I wished.
Hamid and I settled down with the Ambersons. Keith Amberson couldn't get his car started and the family were about to go on holiday to Dorset. Lots of conditional-perfect verbs. I could hear Ludger moving from the kitchen through the flat.
'Is Ludger staying long?' Hamid asked. Clearly Ludger was on both our minds.
'I don't think so,' I said, realising that in fact I had still to ask.
'You said you thought he was dead. Was it in an accident?'
I decided to tell Hamid the truth. 'I was told that he had been shot by the West German police. But obviously not.'
'Shot by police? Is he a gangster, a criminal?'
'Let's say he's a radical. A kind of anarchist.'
'So why is he staying here?'
'He'll be going in a couple of days,' I lied.
'Is it because of Jochen's father?'
'So many questions, Hamid.'
'I apologise.'
'Yes – I suppose I am letting him stay here for a couple of days because he is the brother of Jochen's father… Look, shall we continue? Will Keith get his car fixed? What should Keith have done?'
'Are you still in love with Jochen's father?'
I looked stupidly at Hamid. His brown-eyed gaze was intense, candid. He had never asked me questions like this before.
'No,' I said. 'Of course not. I left him nearly two years ago. That's why I brought Jochen back to Oxford.'
'Good,' he said, smiling, relaxing. 'I just had to know.'
'Why?'
'Because I would like to invite you to have dinner with me. In a restaurant.'
Veronica agreed to take Jochen home for supper and I drove out to Middle Ashton to talk with my mother. When I arrived she was in the garden on her knees, cutting the lawn with shears. She repudiated lawn mowers, she said; she abominated lawn mowers; lawn mowers had signalled the death of the English garden as it had existed for centuries. Capability Brown and Gilbert White had no need of lawn mowers: grass should only be cropped by sheep or be scythed in the true English garden – and as she didn't possess or know how to wield a scythe she was perfectly happy to get down on her knees once a fortnight with her shears. The contemporary English lawn was a ghastly anachronism – striped, shaved grass was a hideous modern invention. And so on, and so on. I was very familiar with the argument and never bothered to try to refute it (she was quite happy to use her motor car to go shopping, I noticed, rather than acquire a pony and trap, as old Capability or Gilbert would have done). Her lawn was therefore shaggy and unkempt, full of daisies and other weeds: this was what a cottage garden lawn was meant to look like, she would pontificate, given half a chance.