And I don’t believe that Martin is satisfied by the power theory either. For when he looks at me, though I am a more sufferable father than I was, there is still the same disrespect, the same edge of contempt, the same undeluded penetration in his eyes. He doesn’t see a man with power; he sees the same old weakling. The only difference is that I no longer conceal it. And this brings into Martin’s eyes — even into Martin’s eyes — the slightest hint of perplexity. For this is something he cannot understand. But I don’t attempt to enlighten him, or to iron out the differences which exist between us, which seem to me less and less a matter of attitude than of simple physiology.
About a fortnight or so after the official notice of my promotion I had the television reinstated in the living room. Call it an act of atonement towards my family. I didn’t want it back myself. I feared, for the sake of a gesture, a return to those days of non-communication with my sons and the spectacle of their young minds sopping up trivia. But this didn’t happen. The Bionic Man was still running, leaping, focusing his telescopic eyes on distant targets, overcoming all kinds of insuperable difficulties with effortless ease, just as he must have been, unwatched by us, all through the summer — and as he must do, for ever, electronically proofed against mortality. But I noticed Martin was no longer watching his hero’s antics with total enthralment. More than once, instead of gasping, he laughed — not a sympathetic laugh but a scoffing laugh, the sort of laugh which, if you interpret it carefully, means: I don’t need the tricks of this synthetic hero, I have my own hero — me.
And then one day — miracle of miracles — Martin was not watching the Bionic Man. He was out on the common — and not spying on his father coming home from the station, either. He was simply out there to mooch about, the way kids do when they reach a certain age, to look for what might turn up, and to advertise his ever more assertive presence. Now that he has moved to secondary school, an upheaval which hasn’t perturbed him in the least, he has gone in for this cult of self-promotion in a big way. He is constantly pushing himself to the fore (so Marian tells me, who seems to have a secret intuition for such things) amongst his fellow pupils; he has actually taken earnestly to the sports field; he is caught admiring himself in the bathroom mirror. In fact, he is undergoing — and coping blithely with — all those changes which normally occur to a boy two or three years older than himself.
And so when I think of Martin as he will be in only a few years’ — who knows, only a year’s — time, I think of a creature almost wholly alien to me and therefore beyond contention or ill-feeling. I see him as one of those cocksure, invincible, infallible youths, who will not have to swot to be bright at school, for whom puberty will be a doddle, for whom life will hold no traps, no fears.
But Peter — Peter who is still addicted to the Bionic Man — is another story.
No, if they think it is power, they are wrong. It is not power at all.
And if their new-found contentment somehow depends on their ignorance of what I am really up to in my job — doesn’t that prove the main point? Doesn’t that encourage me along the path Quinn opened up to me? All these little bits of poisoned paper I am slowly dropping into oblivion. What people don’t know, can’t hurt them.…
I still go to see Dad on Wednesdays and Sundays. He still sits on the wooden bench, gazing before him, as indestructible, in his silent impenetrability, as the Bionic Man himself. I have not yet put to him those fatal questions which at one and the same time might restore and destroy my father. Did you betray your fellow-agents? Did you really escape from the Château? Did you sleep with Z’s wife? In my mind these questions sound like the key-notes of some fresh interrogation, and Dad has already undergone one interrogation, already endured trials enough. And why should his own son appear to him in the role of interrogator — as the ghost of fat-cheeks, grey-hair and ‘le goret’, all rolled into one? Sometimes I see how easily this red-brick mental hospital, with its tranquil gardens, could turn, in the instant, from a place of refuge to a place of torture. And when I ask myself what my motive might be in putting those questions, I find myself wondering whether it would really be to see at last, after the restorative shock, a flash of recognition cross those eyes; or whether it would be to exult over the confession of some ignoble truth. And it seems to me that I care very little for the morals, the rights and wrongs of the case — whether Dad betrayed those three agents, whether he slept with another man’s wife. My feelings would not be immensely changed towards a father guilty of those acts. But what does interest me, intensely, exclusively — is whether Dad cracked. For, as with Martin, you see, it is perhaps a matter not of attitude but of physiology.
But I know I won’t ever ask those fatal questions. And I won’t make further inquiries of my own. All this was decided that evening at Quinn’s. Perhaps that means that Dad will never return from the land of silence. But then I sometimes think, with the knowledge I have but don’t show Dad, and the knowledge Dad perhaps has and believes I don’t, our relations could not be more finely tuned than they are. Every time we sit on that wooden bench, which has often seemed to me like some uneasily rocking see-saw, there are no longer those sensations of tilting and swaying — as if by some mutual, tacit arrangement, we have found the perfect balance.
And if the way I am talking suggests that, behind all my reticence, I really do believe that Dad did all those things that X accused him of, and that, indeed, is the reason for my reticence, then let me assure you that that question, too, hangs like a finely poised balance. For a long time I would still read Shuttlecock; I still pored over its pages, though I was no more certain of what I hoped to find there. And often I found myself asking: the smell of apple logs? the sentry urinating against the Château wall? the woman at Frécourt (in whom — was this my imagination? — there was some faint reflection of my mother)? — all these are too particular, too vivid and intimate to be inventions. And, again: would a man narrating a fictitious escape be at such pains to describe how he was naked?
And then one day (if you want to know, it was only last month, when suddenly buds were on the trees again and I remembered it was a year since Quinn first dropped that hint about my promotion) I stopped reading Dad’s book. I inquired no further. How much of a book is in the words and how much is behind or in between the lines? Perhaps it is best not to probe too deeply into those invisible regions, but to accept on trust what is there on the page as the best showing the author could make. And the same is true perhaps of this book (for it has grown into a book) which I have resumed now after a six months’ lapse, only to bring to its conclusion. Once you have read it, it may be better not to peer too hard beneath the surface of what it says — or (who knows if you may not be one of those happily left in peace of mind by my ‘work’ at the department?) what it doesn’t say.
[34]
‘Marian,’ I say (she is still talking to her plants), ‘do you believe in the pathetic fallacy? That it’s really a fallacy, I mean?’
[35]
And today — a Sunday — I forwent for the first time one of my visits to Dad. I said to Marian and the kids yesterday evening (for I knew it was going to be one of those hot, cloudless, high-summer Sundays that sometimes come even in early May): ‘Let’s go out for the day tomorrow. Let’s go to Camber Sands.’ And Marian looked at me, as much as to say: ‘But aren’t you going to see Dad?’ And the kids, as much as to say, ‘What about Grandpa Loony?’ But they did not say these things, and their expressions of surprise soon melted. They are a shrewd family.