Peter looked lost. Martin frowned and introduced into his expression a sardonic cast which he has been cultivating ever since his coup with Dad’s book. I could see that he thought what I was saying was so much grown-up claptrap. Worse — that he was actually going to take issue with me.
‘But how can you,’ he demanded, ‘— when they’re not the real thing?’ And then he said something pithy and aphoristic which made me inwardly panic at the speed of his mental development and, more than this (there was a sharp gleam in his eye), at his psychological penetration.
‘A lion in a cage isn’t a real lion.’
‘But it’s not practical,’ I blustered, ‘to study — er — monkeys, when they’re leaping about in the jungle.’
‘So why not leave them alone?’
Do other fathers have this terror over the breakfast table, when they realize their sons are growing up to be smarter than them?
‘But then you wouldn’t be able to go out for days at the zoo, would you?’ A weak argument. ‘And you’d never know about lots of interesting animals.’
‘Why should we have to know about them?’
All this was too clever by half. I thought, he will be saying next that keeping lions and monkeys in cages is cruel.
‘Keeping animals in cages is cruel, Dad.’
I looked at him. So, it’s cruel, eh? But I’d bet he’d still like a pet of his own.
‘But if you didn’t put them in cages you’d never get to see them.’
(For what else can you do these days, if you want to be close to nature, but put it in a cage?)
He paused for a moment.
‘Yes you would. There are plenty of good programmes about animals — on television.’
I was outwitted, nonplussed. I looked helplessly round the room for inspiration. Marian had left the table and was in the kitchen. She was preparing packs of sandwiches, slices of swiss roll and chocolate biscuits for the boys to take with them. Martin’s eyes were pinned on me. Peter was sitting, blinking and frowning, glancing now at me, now at his brother, daunted, once again, by Martin’s audacity, and by this clash of words which he did not really understand. He looked, himself, like a little caged animal. Might he be on my side? And then, in desperation, an answer came — an answer which in fact I thought rather a neat one and too subtle for Martin, so I delivered it in a loud voice, for Marian to hear:
‘But don’t you think television is just another sort of cage?’
Martin stared at me blankly for a while. I thought: now I have silenced him. And then he said, as if this conversation about zoos were merely by the by; ‘Dad — why do you walk in that funny way on your way home from the station?’
But in spite of this ignominious start Monday wasn’t such a bad day. I had woken up with the thought: On Wednesday I will see Quinn; on Wednesday I will know; I can be patient till then. And it was this thought that restrained me, just as I was about to let fly at Martin. And then something Marian said to me as we saw the boys off on their trip jolted me out of my sulks and made me forget almost completely this breakfast episode. The boys had to be early at school, where a coach was coming for the zoo party, and since this coincided with the time of my departure for work we all got into the car and Marian drove us first to the school, then took me on to the station. At the school two coaches were parked already outside the gates. There were all these gabbling children with picnic bags and satchels and plastic water-bottles on straps slung over their shoulders. Teachers trying to make counts; mothers fussing and petting. I thought of evacuees in war-time. I thought of the anguish of parents frightened of bombs. Coach-crashes, Marian got out of the car with the boys and kissed them both on the top of the head. She gave Peter an extra kiss and a little pat on the bottom for good measure. She didn’t walk across to the coach with them or wait to see them off. They had already spotted their friends and didn’t want us around. She’s a shrewd mother. I waved dutifully to one of the teachers, Mrs Thurleigh, who is always saying, as if it’s her phrase for all occasions, that we have ‘two bright boys’. (I never have the nerve to say to her, ‘But there’s something unnatural about them, isn’t there?’) Marian got back into the car and we waved through the window. And then, as we drove to the station, she said: ‘Did you know you yelled out in your sleep last night? You said: “Is there anyone there?” ’
[29]
… At night (but by ‘night’ I mean any period when I was shut up in the dark) I tried to identify the smell that pervaded my cell. It is strange how imprisonment affects the memory: the mind is confined as much as the body. I knew what the smell was: it was the smell of damp, partly rotten wood. But I did not know what kind of wood or where it was that I had smelt it, so distinctly, before. Another thing puzzled me. The air in my cell, though odorous and fully enclosed, was never fetid.
Then I made an important discovery.
In those snatches of exhausted sleep I would lie huddled at the foot of one of the walls. Once, lying against the wall opposite the door, I felt about my face a tiny but distinct trickle of air. Not only this, but borne on this faint draught was another, incredible but unmistakable smelclass="underline" the smell of lavender.
I put my hand to the brickwork and began exploring the mortar joints. It was then that the identity of the first smell — the wood smell — came to me — and along with it a series of inferences which made my imagination and my heart race.
My grandfather on my mother’s side had lived in a handsome eighteenth-century house not far from Winchester. It was equipped with cellars, accessible from within the house but with openings, covered with heavy cast-iron plates, at the foot of the outer walls, through which materials for storing could be passed. My grandfather still used one of the cellars for what was perhaps its original purpose — the storing of fire-wood. Nearby, there were extensive fruit orchards and my grandfather had a standing arrangement for supplies of logs. It was the smell of apple logs in my grandfather’s cellar in Hampshire that I was smelling again in the Château Martine. As a child, staying with my grandparents during the summer, the cellars had always intrigued me. I liked to explore them and I regarded them as places of refuge whenever I had incurred adult displeasure. I was never frightened of them. Perhaps, in a remote way, I owe my ability to endure the Château to my boyhood experience. To have existed in those cells and to have suffered at the same time from claustrophobic fear of the dark would have been too much to bear. To me, the smell of apple wood in the dark (and this perhaps was why I could not place it, in such hostile surroundings) was the smell of sanctuary.