Restless

'No you don't.'

'Well, I have seen you almost every day for three months. I feel you are a friend.'

'True. OK.'

'So: how did this happen?'

I decided to tell him, or to tell him as much as he needed to know. Perhaps the act of relating such a history would help me also, set it in some kind of a context of my life; maybe make it not less significant (because it had produced Jochen, after all) but provide its significance with some perspective and thereby transform it into a normal slice of autobiography and not some gaping, bleeding, psychological wound. I lit a cigarette and took another long sip of wine. Hamid, I saw, had leant forward on the table, his arms folded, his brown eyes fixed on mine. I am a good listener, his pose was telling me – no distractions, full focus.

'It all began in 1970,' I said. 'I had just graduated, I had a first-class degree in French and German from Oxford University – my life lay ahead of me, full of bright promise, all sorts of interesting potential options and avenues to explore, etcetera, etcetera… And then my father dropped down dead in the garden from a heart attack.'

'I'm sorry,' Hamid said.

'Not as sorry as I was,' I said, and I could feel my throat thicken with remembered emotion. 'I loved my dad – more than my mother, I think. Don't forget I was an only child… So I was twenty-one years old and I went a little crazy. In fact, I think I might have had some kind of a nervous breakdown – who knows?

'But I wasn't helped at this difficult time by my mother who, a week after the funeral – almost as if she'd been given orders by someone – put the family home on the market (a lovely old house, just outside Banbury), sold it within a month and, with the money she made, bought a cottage in the remotest village she could find in Oxfordshire.'

'Maybe for her it made sense,' Hamid ventured.

'Maybe for her it did. It didn't to me. Suddenly, I didn't have a home. The cottage was hers, her place. There was a guest room that I could use if I ever wanted to stay. But the message was plain: our family life was over – your father is dead – you're a graduated student, twenty-one years old, we will go our separate ways. And so I decided to go to Germany. I decided to write a thesis on the German revolution after the First World War. "Revolution in Germany" it was called – it is called – "1918- 1923".'

'Why?'

'I don't know – I told you, I think I was a bit mad. And, anyway, revolution was in the air. I felt like revolutionising my life. This was something suggested to me and I grabbed it with both hands. I wanted to get away – from Banbury, from Oxford, from my mother, from memories of my father. So I went to university in Hamburg to write a thesis.'

'Hamburg.' Hamid repeated the name of the city as if logging it in his memory bank. 'And this is where you met Jochen's father.'

'Yes. Jochen's father was my professor at Hamburg. A history professor. Professor Karl-Heinz Kleist. He was supervising my thesis – amongst other things like presenting arts programmes on TV, organising demonstrations, publishing radical pamphlets, writing articles for Die Zeit on the German Crisis…' I paused. 'He was a man of many facets. A very busy man.'

I put out cigarette number one and lit cigarette number two.

'You've got to understand,' I continued, 'it was in a very strange state, Germany, in 1970 – it's still in a strange state in 1976. Some sort of upheaval was happening in society – some sort of defining process. For example, when I went to meet Karl-Heinz for the first time – in the university building where he had his office – there was a huge hand-painted sign across the façade – put up by the students – saying: Institut für Soziale Angelegenheiten – "The Institute for Social Conscience"… Not "The History Faculty", or whatever. For these students in 1970, history was about studying their social conscience-'

'What does this mean?'

'It meant how – you know – the events of the past, particularly the recent past, had shaped their ideas of themselves. It really had little to do with documented facts, of forming a consensus around a narrative about the past…'

I saw I was losing Hamid but I found myself remembering that first meeting with Karl-Heinz. His dark, shadowy room was filled with towers of books, leaning against the wall – there were no bookshelves. There were cushions scattered on the floor – no seats – and there were three joss sticks burning on his low desk, a Thai bed in actuality – otherwise empty. He was a tall man with fine blond hair which fell to his shoulders. He was wearing several beaded necklaces, an embroidered pale blue silk chemise and crushed-velvet mulberry flared trousers. He had big emphatic features: a long nose, full lips, heavy brows – not so much handsome as unignorable. After three years in Oxford he came as something of a shock to me – and this was a professor. At his behest I lowered myself down on to a cushion and he dragged another over to sit opposite me. He repeated my thesis title several times as if testing it for residual humour, as if it contained some hidden joke I was playing on him.

'What was he like?' Hamid asked. 'This Karl-Heinz.'

'At first he was like nobody I had ever met. Then, as I got to know him over the next year or so, he slowly but surely became ordinary again. He became just like everybody else.'

'I don't understand.'

'Selfish, vain, lazy, careless, dishonourable…' I tried to think of more adjectives. 'Complacent, sly, mendacious, weak -'

'But this is Jochen's father.'

'Yes. Maybe all fathers are like that, deep down.'

'You're very cynical, Ruth.'

'No, I'm not. I'm not in the least cynical.'

Hamid clearly decided not to pursue this particular line of our conversation.

'So what happened?'

'What do you think?' I said, refilling my glass. 'I fell crazily in love with him. Totally, fanatically, abjectly, in love.'

'But this man had a wife and three children.'

'This was 1970, Hamid. In Germany. In a German university. His wife didn't care. I used to see her quite a lot for a while. I liked her. She was called Irmgard.'

I thought of Irmgard Kleist – tall as Karl-Heinz – with her long, breast-sweeping, hennaed hair and her carefully cultivated air of extreme, terminal languor. Look at me, she seemed to be saying, I'm so relaxed I'm almost comatose – yet I have a famous, philandering husband, three children and I edit political books in a fashionable left-wing publishing house and still I can barely be bothered to string three words together. Irmgard's attitude was contagious – for a while even I affected some of her mannerisms. For a while nothing could stir me from my self-regarding torpor. Nothing but Karl-Heinz.

'She didn't care what Karl-Heinz did,' I said. 'She knew, with absolute confidence, that he would never leave her – so she allowed him his little adventures. I wasn't the first and I wasn't the last.'

'And then comes Jochen.'

'I got pregnant. I don't know – maybe I was too stoned one night and I forgot to take my pill. Karl-Heinz said immediately he could arrange an abortion through a doctor friend of his. But I thought: my dad is dead, my mother is a gardening hermit who I never see – I want this baby.'

'You were very young.'

'So everybody said. But I didn't feel young – I felt very grown-up, very in control. It seemed like the right thing to do and an interesting thing to do. It was all the justification that I needed. Jochen was born. Now I know that it was the best thing that could ever have happened to me.' I said this instantly, wanting to pre-empt him asking me if I had any regrets – which I felt he was about to do. I didn't want him to ask me that question. I didn't want to consider if I had any regrets.

'So Jochen was born.'

'Jochen was born. Karl-Heinz was very pleased – he told everybody. Told his own children they had a new baby brother. I had a small apartment where we lived. Karl-Heinz helped me with the rent. He would stay a few nights a week with me. We went on holidays together – to Vienna, to Copenhagen, to Berlin. Then he got bored and started having an affair with one of the producers of his television show. As soon as I found out, I knew it was over so I left Hamburg with Jochen and came back to Oxford to finish my thesis.' I spread my hands. 'And here we are.'