He was talking now, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying through the closed window and Martin had stopped crying since they went into the living room. Meanwhile, Janet was still sobbing and the man who looked like me was crouched beside her, saying something to her, though I could tell from the expression on his face that his words were not consoling but mocking or even accusing. My head was in a whirl, but despite that, two or three ideas still surfaced in my mind, each more absurd than the last. I thought she must have found a man identical to me in order to take my place during my long absence. I thought that time must have been incomprehensibly altered or cancelled, that those four years actually had been forgotten, erased, just as I had wished, and that I really might be able to pick up the threads of my life with Janet and the child again. The years of war and imprisonment really hadn’t existed and I, Tom Booth, had never gone to war or been taken prisoner which was why I was here, as on any other day, arguing with Janet on my return from work. I had spent those four years with her. I, Tom Booth, had not been called up, I had stayed at home. But then, who was the ‘I’ looking through the window, the ‘I’ who had walked up to this house, the ‘I’ who had just been released from a German POW camp? Who did all these memories belong to? Who had fought in the war? And I thought something else too, maybe the excitement of returning home had evoked some scene from the past, a scene, maybe the very last scene, that took place before I went away, something I had forgotten and that resurfaced now with the shock of homecoming. Perhaps, on that last day, Janet had cried because I was going away, possibly to my death, and I had treated it all as a joke. That might explain the child Martin’s crying, for he was still a baby then. The fact was, however, that it was no hallucination, I was neither imagining nor remembering it, I was seeing it now. Besides, Janet had not cried before I left. She was a woman of great strength of character, she had kept smiling right up until the very last moment, she had behaved as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if I were not really going away at all. She knew that any other attitude would have made everything so much more difficult for me. She would weep today when I opened the door, but this time she would weep on my shoulder, making my jacket damp with her tears.
No, I wasn’t seeing something from the past, something I had forgotten. I knew this with absolute certainty when I saw the man, the husband, the man who was me, Tom, suddenly stand up and seize Janet by the throat, his wife, my wife, sitting there on the sofa. He seized her round the throat with both hands and I knew that he had begun to squeeze even though, again, all I could see was Tom’s back, my back, the vast white shirt blocking my view of Janet who was still sitting on the sofa. Of her I could see only her outstretched arms, her arms flailing in the air and then hidden behind the shirt, in desperate attempts to loosen the grip which was not my grip; and then, after a few short seconds, Janet’s arms appeared again, fallen on either side of the shirt of which I could see only the back, except this time they were limp, inert. Through the closed windows I could hear the child crying again. The man left the room, going off towards the left, doubtless towards the bedroom where the child was. And when he moved away, I saw Janet there dead, strangled. In the struggle her skirt had ridden up and she had lost one of her high-heeled shoes. I saw the garters I had tried so hard not to think about during those last four years.
I was paralysed, but I managed to think: that man who is me, that man who has not moved from Chesham during all this time, is going to kill Martin as well or else the new baby, assuming that Janet and I have had another baby during my absence. I must break the glass and go in and kill that man before he kills Martin or his own newborn child. I must stop him. I must kill myself right now. Except that I am outside the window and the danger is inside.
While I was thinking all this, the child’s crying stopped, suddenly. There were none of the little whimpers you usually get as a child calms down, none of the progressive calm that overtakes children when you pick them up or rock them or sing to them. Before I went away, I used to sing Lord Rendall’s song to Martin and sometimes I managed to soothe him, to stop him crying, but it took a long time, I had to sing the song over and over. He would go on sobbing, but his sobs would gradually diminish, until at last he fell asleep. That child, on the other hand, had fallen silent abruptly, with no transitional phase. And in that new silence, without realising what I was doing, I stood up and started singing Lord Rendall’s song by the window, the song I used to sing to Martin and which begins: ‘Where have you been all the day, Rendall, my son?’ except I used to sing: ‘Where have you been all the day, Martin, my son?’ And then, when I began singing it there next to the window, I heard the voice of the man in our bedroom join me to sing the second verse: ‘Where have you been all the day, my pretty Tom?’ But the child, my child Martin or his child who bore my name, had stopped crying. And when the man and I stopped singing Lord Rendall’s song, I could not help wondering which of the two of us would be hanged.
(1989)
an epigram of fealty
For Montse Mateu
Mr James Lawson looked up. He had just that morning rearranged the window display of the bookstore of which he was manager, Bertram Rota Ltd, Long Acre, Covent Garden, one of the most prestigious and discriminating second-hand bookshops in London. He preferred not to overcrowd the window, displaying, at the most, ten carefully chosen books or manuscripts, each one of which was extremely valuable. They were the sort of editions guaranteed to attract his usual clientele which consisted exclusively of distinguished gentlemen and the occasional elegant lady bibliophile. That morning, with some pride, he had placed in the window works such as Salmagundi by William Faulkner, never reprinted after that first 1932 edition (of 525 numbered copies), and a first edition of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, priced at £2,000. Although he himself set the prices according to the state of the market, he could still never get used to the fact that a book could be worth so much money. But those books were nothing compared with Beckett’s novel, Watt, typed and corrected by the author himself and priced at £50,000. He had had his doubts about putting such a valuable item in the window, but in the end, he had decided to go ahead. It was a source of great satisfaction to him and, after all, he would be there all morning and all afternoon, stationed at his desk, keeping guard over the window. Nonetheless, he felt uneasy and looked up from his desk whenever he noticed someone, some figure, standing on the other side of the glass. He even looked up when people walked past. This time, however, he kept his head raised, for before him, at the window, was a wild-looking beggar. His hair was rather long and he sported a few days’ growth of reddish beard. He was well-built and had a large, apparently broken nose. His clothes, like those of any mendicant, were shabby and of some indefinable colour. In his right hand he held a half-empty bottle of beer. He wasn’t drinking, though, he did not from time to time raise the bottle to his lips; rather he was utterly absorbed, staring into the window of Bertram Rota. Mr Lawson wondered what he could be looking at. At Camus? One of the books on display was a copy of La Chute dedicated by the author himself and open at the appropriate page. But La Chute was on the right-hand side, next to the typescript of Watt and the beggar was looking to the left. On that side Lawson had placed Salmagundi and the second 1839 edition of Oliver Twist, priced at £300. Dickens was possibly of more interest to the beggar than Faulkner. He might have read Dickens at school, but not Faulkner, for the man was at least sixty years old, and possibly older.