A Question of Loyalties Read online

  Her name appeared in the press today – in The Times in fact – among the signatories of a letter demanding … do you know, I can’t now recall just what they were asking for, though I am sure that I read the letter. Indeed yes, for I remember thinking how leaden and yet empty it sounded; how shop-soiled and ready-made the language; politics as Nescafé.

  It was the Baroness who drew my attention to it.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ I said, ‘that you read the English newspapers.’

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘one must keep in touch.’

  She is forty, with a metallic glitter, and an allowance from her estranged husband, and she has taken a fancy to me.

  ‘She must be a trouble to you, that girl,’ she smiled.

  ‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘she does what she thinks is right.’

  ‘So foolish. These people will not thank her. Why, it is like cutting your own throat. We know that, you and I, we old Europeans,’ and she shook her head as if measuring the imbecility of optimism.

  ‘Oh come,’ I said, ‘you’re post-war, you can’t claim to be an old European any more than I am. And if we were we should have little cause for pride, don’t you think? Old Europeans made rather a mess of old Europe, wouldn’t you say?’

  I knew she wouldn’t, for she makes a cult of the idea of Old Europe. Perhaps it is natural enough that she should. She is one of the dispossessed, the child of a Pomeranian Junker family which scuttled from its sandy Baltic estates before the Red Army. And yet she has done well enough for herself: a career as a model, and then marriage to the Baron von Ochsdorf, who has made a fortune as a magazine publisher catering admittedly for a fairly low common denominator. She accepts none of this however, though for some years she tolerated her husband’s annual infatuation (her word) with some teenage girl willing to remove her clothes for his cameraman and her own future. But for all that Reineke (the Baroness) didn’t leave him; he gave her her congé, I don’t know precisely why.

  Was it because he finally couldn’t endure her sighs for a time lost that was in her case purely imaginary? The Baron, as far as I can see, wallows in the present like a pig in shit. But her nostalgia is even more self-indulgent, and perhaps disgusting. She wants me to make love to her, and the thought horrifies me. Even after a brief conversation I feel as if she had been biting my shoulder.

  I looked at the rain mingling with the lake, and said, ‘You will make yourself unhappy if you go on thinking like that.’

  She said: ‘You can’t draw a line under the past. You of all men ought to know that.’

  ‘But it is not our past,’ I said.

  I have formed the habit of going to bed after lunch. I generally sleep straight away and wake in a melancholy yellow light to the sound of car-horns. Then I turn over and read, to shut away the thoughts that come. Just now, Balzac is my narcotic: the enormous energy and gusto that do not exclude despair.

  It was my wife Rose who said to me: ‘If I didn’t know you were half French your love of abstract nouns would still give you away.’ And it is true: abstract nouns are a sort of betrayal. But they are also a guard, they objectify feeling.

  As the light dies, I take a shower and dress and go out. Usually I walk in the old town on the other side of the river, where the streets are shabby and the wind disturbs the complacency of the city. It kills time, and then I sit in a café where I watch the coming and going, and can eye the girl behind the bar whenever she is occupied. She has a pale face and an ample throat – thyroid trouble, I suspect – and her movements are slow and heavy as her mane of auburn hair. She looks soft and lazy and pliable, and it is all I can do to take my eyes off her. But I have never spoken beyond asking for a café crème or a third of a litre of white wine. What would be the point? I have no desire for an affair, and she is the sort of girl who would expect one. Or so I tell myself. For all I know she may go back to a husband and three children. But I don’t think so. There is something about the hopelessness of her movement that suggests she is the type to find her approximation to fulfilment in a doomed affair.

  To stop myself thinking about her – I have discovered that her name is Elise – I picked up a whore this evening. She beckoned from a doorway and without thinking I responded and followed her upstairs. There were posters of pop stars on the walls and the girl straightaway took off her cotton skirt, which was short and bright with poppies on a blue backcloth, and invited me to put my hands under the belt of her tights and slip them off. She smelled of almonds. She feigned eagerness but when I pushed my hands under her jersey to fondle her breasts, she thrust them away and said, ‘Not that, I don’t like that.’ I thought to myself, ‘Who’s paying?’ and let my hands drop. She sat on the narrow bed, her legs apart. She licked her finger and laid her hand on her pubic hair, curling the damp finger round. Her legs were thin and I looked at her smudged face and saw she was hardly more than a child, and, though I felt an enormous lust rise in me, I also felt disgusted. ‘No,’ I said, and put my hand in my pocket and found a handful of fifty-franc notes and tossed them to her. ‘No,’ I said again, ‘I’ve made a mistake, I’m sorry,’ and I left her and descended the dark and rickety stair.

  Outside in the street I found that I was quivering. I turned two corners and went into a bar and ordered a large brandy. All round me were people sitting in silence, and the only noise came from billiard balls being struck in the room beyond.

  ‘Is she still lying there,’ I wondered, ‘letting her finger do what I did not dare? A novice,’ I thought. ‘She really wanted it, poor girl, even from me.’ And I felt doubly ashamed, as if I had indeed provoked her lust and then insulted her.

  I had a letter this morning from an American called, or calling himself, Hugh Challefray. I put it like that because it seems an improbable name, even for an American. I had never heard of him before, but he describes himself as a historian. I am slightly suspicious because he tells me of nothing which he has written, and such reticence is in my experience untypical of American academics. But I confess that I really know very little about such things and my impressions are probably drawn from lazily constructed stereotypes.

  Anyway, young Mr Challefray would like to meet me. He is writing a book ‘about the ideological ethos of Vichy’, and would value my ‘assistance and co-operation’. I can’t imagine how he has tracked me down, but the letter is addressed directly to me here in Geneva. He ‘purposes to be in Geneva next week and’, etc., etc.

  I have no reason to call him ‘young Mr Challefray’, but I would wager he is not yet thirty. Only a young man could be interested in such cobwebby stuff.

  There is a mist hanging about the lake obscuring the mountains. The cold penetrates even my overcoat of Donegal tweed, and when I returned from my walk I discovered that the cloth was damp, flecked with drops of liquid, though it had not been raining. The mist thickened all the time I was walking and as I crossed the bridge it was impossible to see the water below. In such moments the city feels like a prison where one is the only inmate. I stopped off in a café and played chess with an opponent whose name I do not know. I came on him first a couple of weeks ago. He was sitting in the back room of the Café de la Banque, with the chessboard in front of him, and a newspaper written in some language which I could not identify on the bench beside him. Seeing me look at him, he asked if I would like a game. I nodded and we played in an agreeable silence, while he drank tea and I smoked a cigar and had a glass of marc and a bottle of Evian. It was very still in the café. There was only an old woman there, dressed in black with a pink flower in her black felt hat. She had a little dog on a pink lead and fed it the corners of her croissant. That day, I mated him on the twenty-fifth move after sacrificing my queen. But since then we have played five times, and the best I have achieved is a draw. The game is in danger of becoming a ritual. I think his newspaper may be Ukrainian, and am obscurely glad to have concluded this. He has three scars on his left cheek, and it might therefore amuse him to know my name. What would I have given to be
Stephen Scarface? But we have not exchanged names, only pawns and other pieces. Today he produced a move with his king’s bishop which took me by surprise. He is a man perhaps ten years older than myself, and the fingers of his left hand, with which he moves his pieces, are twisted as if they have been broken and badly set.

  I spend less and less time in my hotel because whenever I am in the bar or one of the public rooms, the Baroness seems to have been lying in wait.

  ‘It was absurd,’ she said to me today, ‘the life we used to lead. Truthfully it was absurd, don’t think, my friend, I don’t realise that. You would not believe the extravagances my grandfather used to commit. He would hire all the ladies of the chorus to dance at the supper-parties he gave his brother officers, to dance on the table, you understand. Then the officers and my grandfather would drink champagne from their slippers. I think they were mostly gypsies of course. That would explain why they were willing to do it.’

  And she smiled as if she had arranged the entertainment. It may be that she is going mad, because this conversation would have seemed – what? – more in keeping, more suitable, shall I say? – if she had been twice the age she is, and in reality a refugee from the Bolsheviks. I don’t know if she expects me to believe her stories, which are palpably absurd, or if she just talks for her own amusement.

  Today she also said: ‘My husband used to say I fantasised, and he hoped I would go into a clinic for treatment when I came to Switzerland, but you and I, my friend, know differently. It is his life which is fantasy,’ and she pulled out a copy of a magazine, presumably one of her husband’s, and showed me a young girl lying on the beach in the scantiest bikini looking over her shoulder at the camera.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘and it’s not as if he takes them to bed. I could have stood that.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we must all find our reasons for living.’

  ‘But why?’

  But why?

  To have reached my age and be without achievement; to have reached my age and be without hope; to have passed fifty and never have known content; to be in sight of death, and still without faith. Waiting perhaps for that vecchio bianco per antico pelo who will cry out: I’ vegno per menarvi all’ altra riva, Nelle tenebre, in caldo e in gelo …

  But I could not have spoken of that to the Baroness, so I left my question dangling in the air, like a noose. There are those in our time who have said, speaking with the assurance and succulence of a rose: ‘I choose evil.’ But if we deny evil, if we explain and excuse choices, if we can always find some reason why the cork, that particular cork, should be drawn from the bottle, do we become accomplices? Or is that nothing but rhetoric? Isn’t it rather our problem that evil presents itself as good? And that we are so easily deceived?

  I turn these thoughts round in my mind, or my mind somersaults in these thoughts, and the jet d’eau rises from the lake, and loses itself in the mist.

  When Arthur ordered Bedivere to throw the sword into the lake, and the hand rose to seize it and draw Excalibur under the dark waters, was that arm good or evil? Was it preserving justice – for Excalibur was the sword of righteousness and justice – or was it drowning it?

  It is autumn turning to winter in the gardens that march by the lake where the steamer plies to and fro, to and fro, and I walk up and down, and draw on my cigar, and wait.

  I am becoming a popular man. Three letters this morning, apart from another from my broker, and none except his pleasing. The first is from Mr Challefray, announcing that he will be in Geneva on Friday and proposing to wait on me at my hotel at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning … perhaps if I am unavailable, I could appoint another time. Well, I am in the deepest sense unavailable, but Mr Challefray (who must, I think again, by the pomposity of his prose, be very young) is evidently determined in pursuit. I remember talking once with a friend who had spent two years in prison; he described the relief he had felt when he knew his arrest was certain. All that had been years before, but he still rediscovered the note of wonder when he told me of it; ‘It was like being free of living,’ he said, ‘and simply watching a movie of one’s own life.’ And immediately he said that, I could feel the velour under my hands and sense the dimming of the light. One has no responsibility for an auto-movie. Such surrender of control is a way of escape, yet it may also be a trap, flight up a one-way street. For I find, like Flaubert, that ‘as my body continues on its journey, my thoughts keep turning back and burying themselves in days past’. Involuntarily; indeed with reluctance, and without hope.

  I didn’t recognise the name scribbled with the sender’s address on my second letter: Bendico Perceval, unconvincing surely. And then I remembered it was the rather too exquisite young man who had expressed his intention of writing about Aurora, and I tore the envelope across without opening it. I had only seen Aurora once since the war and then she had said, ‘Well, I was silly, darling, but you can’t imagine what awfully good sense it seemed then. And of course they made such a heavenly fuss of me in Berlin that any girl could be excused … but now you know I just run the village, and grow azaleas, much more satisfying, don’t you think?’

  The third letter was from Sarah, and I had to read that. All the same I stuffed it in my pocket and kept it there till the middle of the afternoon; and I got myself a glass of brandy before opening it.

  ‘Dear Daddy,

  I’m going back, and I had to write to you first, because I don’t know what will happen when I get there, and anyway I’m fairly certain that my letters will be opened.

  I would like you to understand me, and I know Mummy can’t. But that doesn’t mean much, and you two haven’t ever really been on the same wavelength, have you?

  I was so depressed by our last talk in London, I even came away from it wondering if you were right when you said that 99 per cent of people don’t believe in anything, so why bother? But it’s not true, and I have been trying to work out why you should say anything so untrue and awful. It’s something to do with my grandfather, I know that, and then I realise that I really know nothing about him. You’ve never talked of him to me. I did ask Mummy once, but – you know her way – she just waved her hand and said something about it all being so long ago. So I tried Granny because I’m persistent by nature, I suppose, even though I knew she never talked about him either, and I realised I’ve never even seen a photograph of him, but I put that down to Roddy’s being jealous of his memory, which makes sense. Anyway, I did ask her, and, to give her credit, she looked me straight in the eye, and do you know what she said, “Kind of you to ask, child. He was killed in France, during the war. I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind. Pains me still you know.” Oh, I’m no good with words and I can’t catch the way she speaks, but it was so offhand it made me ache. I mean I realised how much it did hurt and felt a brute for asking. Still, that makes it clear enough to me, and I suppose he was tortured by them, poor man. And that’s why you flinch from commitment. But don’t you see he was right? I mean, I do, and don’t you see that it’s exactly the same Fascist mentality that I’m fighting against? The people with power always believe and you have to have a belief to fight them. Now you have spent your life running away from this, and that is why you are unhappy. Because you are, and it’s no use pretending it’s just because of Mummy. I think actually she’s done as much for you as any woman could for a man who is fundamentally unhappy because he keeps running away from the truth and shirking things. I daresay you will laugh and call this very pompous talking from a chit like me; pompous is one of your favourite words, isn’t it, and I’ve noticed that you use it when you want to escape having to take things seriously. But the trouble about refusing to do that is that you end by taking yourself too seriously, and I daresay that’s why you’re sitting in Geneva now – what a bloody awful city to choose – drinking too much brandy and feeling sorry for yourself. Oh dear, this seems to have turned into an angry letter, and it was meant to be a loving one, saying that I understand you better than
you think. And still love you. Because I do, though you drive me nearly mad with your refusal to face up to things …’

  I have rarely read a more masterly analysis based on a false premise.

  A vile dream last night which has made it impossible for me to eat any breakfast.

  It began as an idyll. I was lying with Rose under an oak tree. It was a glorious summer afternoon, and a picnic was laid out on a white cloth before us. We had made love, though that was not part of the dream, only the consciousness that we had done so, and there was no sadness. It was as in the first weeks of our marriage. She spread herself on the grass and I leant over and popped a strawberry in her mouth. A little juice trickled from the corner of her lips, and she drew me down towards her and its sweetness delighted my tongue. So we lay for a long time in a happiness that seemed everlasting while doves cooed and in the distance I could hear a woodpecker hammer at a tree. Then ‘Look,’ Rose said and pointed towards a clearing in the wood, and I saw that a ruined temple – three or four broken columns and a fragment of pediment – stood there, but it was not to the temple that she pointed, but beyond it to a vine-wreathed arch under which two boys stood with their arms around each other. One was blond with hair that curled into his nape like a Greek statue, and long honey-coloured legs, the other dark, with the sharp face of a fawn and a wide mouth; the blond boy wore a short white tunic, and the dark one, whose fingers now moved to the belt that encircled his friend’s garment, was naked to the waist and clothed in goatskin breeches cut off at the knee. They stood still a moment as if posing for a photograph that required a long exposure or waiting for time to stop, and then, wordlessly, embraced each other. A little wind blew up from the east, and all at once the blond boy was alone and