“Hang on a second, Johnny old chap. You’ve lost me.”
“Everything. I read her letters to Faye. I know that you and she …” I began to grow a little desperate. “You don’t know this, but she became pregnant, after that afternoon in the Trossachs, 1898.… That was me. She never told you. But it’s all there in the letter to Faye. You’re my real father.”
I could not hold it in. I bawled. I blubbed and bellowed in my happiness.
He grabbed my arms and shook me silent.
“John! John! What’re you saying? Where did you get this nonsense from?”
My head cleared. Miraculously. My tear-washed eyes dried. I wiped the snot from my nose and lips. I felt a nervous cold breeze: it seemed to blow only on my smarting eyeballs.
“I read it in the letter,” I repeated. “To Faye. You had a love affair with my mother.…”
Donald was twisting his body to and fro on the spot as if demented. He pressed his knuckles into his temples.
“John, listen. I did not. I never did.” He spoke calmly. “Your mother was the best friend I ever had, but I never had a love affair with her. Believe me, for God’s sake.” He paused. “It was Faye I loved. I always have. When she married Vincent Hobhouse I ran away to Edinburgh. If I hadn’t had your mother’s friendship and support, I know I would have killed myself.”
He spoke on, urgently, eloquently, explaining everything, all my blind idiotic misconceptions. I felt as though something had spilled inside me, like black ink. A gloom filled me as I looked at his kind, excellent face. I owed nothing to that noble nature. My fate was settled, all hope of escape denied me. I was indeed the son of Innes McNeil Todd.
VILLA LUXE, May 16, 1972
Good God, my heart goes out to my younger self. There’s an almost tragic dignity about my sheer guts and audacity. Imagine it: if you want to attract somebody of the opposite sex, expose your equipment. But I’m sure I never planned such a course of action precisely; I intended to do something that day, as or how the circumstances indicated. Perhaps I’d have touched her, or if she had joined in the tag, say, I might have caught her and held her against me for a moment. Anything to show her.… But at the time I chose swimming. It was not to be.
What a fellow I was then! I must have been crazy, the things I did. Never a pause for thought. A creature of pure impulse and instinct — like an animal. Nothing seemed impossible or ill advised. Sometimes I look back on the rawness of my youthful character with almost jealousy.
I can tell you now that those last days in Charlbury almost finished me off. I seriously contemplated suicide for a while. You may say I was being unduly sensitive, but to experience first such rejection and then to learn the truth about Donald combined radically to undermine my confidence. People like me with an excess of self-esteem suffer proportionally once it is threatened. The fiction that I had so fancifully allowed myself to construct and cherish had been exposed as exactly that, and the hard truths about myself I had to fall back on were not comforting.
Everything changed for me that weekend when my delusions were exploded. A deep unhappiness settled on me. I felt an alien in that house, felt like a monoglot foreigner in that countryside. Another world, another identity waited for me, to which I was condemned to belong forever. But my fantasies about Faye, and about Donald Verulam and my mother, only indicated how urgently I had longed to escape from them. I couldn’t go home to our dark empty flat and my dour father, at least not in my current state of mind. I was reduced to a Cartesian proposition: I couldn’t be sure of anything and so chose to rely entirely on myself.
Growth and decay. Something had decayed in me and I had to grow again. Hamish said later that I should have applied the calculus to my problems. He was only half-joking. “The calculus,” he said, “is the study of continual change.” But I wasn’t quite ready for his theories in those days. The beautiful mysteries of mathematics and physics — their profound secrets — indicated no particular direction I should follow at that time. Hamish, I knew, sensed he was heading towards some illumination, but I was still a novitiate, untutored. I could feel that something was there, instinctively; I could sense the scope and potential, acknowledge the power of numbers, but as yet was blind to their truths. The next stage of my life was to educate me better to perceive them.
Had I thought about it, I might have rebuked Hamish thus: the calculus deals with growth and decay, but it follows their elegant parabolic curves, exponentially rising or falling. It cannot deal with discontinuity, the sudden random change, which is the real currency of our lives. In due time Hamish supplied me with an answer to that. As for myself, I was about to experience discontinuity in all its strict brutal force.
My villa is quite secluded, backed into the hill that separates me from the small nearby village. If I take a few paces up this hill and advance cautiously onto a large rock ledge that overhangs the sea, I can get a good oblique view down onto my neighbor’s house. He has a large terrace with a swimming pool (filled).
The owner is a German — Herr Günther. The villa had been empty for years. Then eighteen months ago he bought it and built a swimming pool. He has a sizable grown-up family that visits him for several weeks during the summer. Two unmarried daughters, two married sons, daughters-in-law, boyfriends and four or five grandchildren.
From my rock ledge I can see them all quite clearly as they disport themselves around the pool — loud, fit young people. The girls are attractive (the very word “girl” is attractive to me these days) but, being German, they stir old uneasy memories. I managed to avoid them almost entirely last summer. They are curious about me. They have tried to talk to me when we met in the village, but I find the past seems to crowd round, jostling at our backs, like a hostile crowd or a pack of pye-dogs.… It’s all a bit of a strain. I mutter abrupt pleasantries and leave.
Around this villa there are many lizards. They are slim snakelike creatures, a dun olive-green with a chalkstripe. Some months ago, when my swimming pool had water in it, one of these lizards — a small one, four inches long — fell into the deep end. I saw it on the bottom and fished it out with the long-handled net I use for cleaning leaves and insects from the surface. To my surprise it was still alive, its mouth making tiny gaping movements. I put it on the pool surround and positioned a large leaf over it to provide some shade. It recovered fully in about half an hour and scurried off into the rocks.
In the lizard world, in the saurian scheme of things, that rescue and survival must have seemed like divine intervention of the most miraculous and inexplicable sort. Such fantastical things happen in our world too, I know. But at that stage of my life, in May 1916, I felt like that lizard. I had fallen in and was sinking to the bottom. I had some time to wait until my deliverance.
It’s still insufferably hot. Yesterday Herr Günther arrived with his family. I think I’ll take my binoculars and go and watch them turning their strong white bodies brown.
3 “L’homme de l’extrême gauche”
I was the first man on the Western Front. Literally. By the time I arrived in France — August 1916—the line of trenches stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The Western Front began at Nieuport-Bains in Belgium on the coast. There was the sea, the beach with its minefield and wire, and then in the dunes the trench line started.
I was standing leaning against the revetted end of the Allied line, looking east towards the Germans. On my left was the beach and the sea, and on my right a trench system six hundred miles long. I was at the very tip of an attenuated snake uncoiled limply across Europe. It provoked a curious sensation in me standing there, almost physical in its effects. The left side of my body, for example, felt unusually light — airy and untethered. But my right side felt burdened by the immense weight of this chain I started. All the armies of Belgium, France and Britain spread like the tail of a comet from my right side. The Belgians called this position l’homme de l’extrême gauche. It was more than mere description: it was like participating in a metaphor. I often found myself unconsciously massaging my right shoulder. And, strangely, my left side always felt cold, as if I stood in a strong draft blowing off the sea.