The Anderson Question Read online

  But that is the problem. They expect nothing whereas we grow up to expect everything so that the stone lies forever in the middle of the stream, blocking its forward rush. ‘Always the possibility …’ Yet how can we continue with the hope held out to us, in vague promises, by our fathers? How can we keep the memory of injury at bay, not to ourselves but to others, because of our own fraudulent skill? The guilt; the knowledge that we are not as we seem? Not here. Yet that is why I came here, after all. It never succeeds.

  So concentrate: a cloud passing in a long streak, and the light on the water over there, and for now that is all I must know. And will I know more? Soon, and here. I am at the centre now, and all of them are so far from me, not merely in distance but in essence too, so that I remove other choices at last. There is no reason for me not to betray them, as I have always betrayed them, despite their trust. But they did not know before, and now at last they will know, soon, and here … no longer possible for me to protect them from that knowledge.

  Part Two

  It was very early. Pale, milky-yellow light filtered through the flowered curtains, and Paul Anderson stirred and groaned, deep in his sleep. The light penetrated his eyelids, and he swam up towards it like a swimmer afraid, suddenly, of the pressure of water. For a moment he imagined himself in his flat, and his hand moved automatically to the left to press the button on his radio, but when it encountered crisp lace he knew he was somewhere else, somewhere alien, and withdrew it in fear. Home. This was home, he realised dully, fully awake now and focussing on the gathering brightness beyond the window.

  Something had happened to transport him back, but he felt like a child who knows that the day will bring a visit to the dentist. He did not want to be here. Like Alice in Wonderland, shrunken and gazing up at the key upon the glass table, Paul felt helpless and near to tears. His mother wanted him to stay, to reprimand him about his handwriting, pocketing the little key forever. They never allow you to be free of them; they follow you through the quiet hall and up the stairs to your flat, and once you have locked the door behind you, their faces leer at you, bulbously, from the silver cushions. God!

  He curled into a ball, his fists thrust between his legs, eyes tightly shut so that a pattern of whirling green and black replaced the morning light. Two days in this house, and all he could think of was leaving, although his father was not yet found. Guilt at his own selfishness made Paul groan again, but consciously this time. He imagined the day ahead: Eleanor sitting by the telephone with every hair in place, but that look on her face which might have made Paul, in different circumstances, rejoice. Caught unawares, she had the look of someone whose whole life has been founded upon a single truth, only to find it demolished overnight: not shock, exactly, and certainly not anguish, but puzzlement. Sometimes there was something approaching indignation in the shake of her head.

  ‘Just what I feel too,’ Paul thought, ‘so perhaps we are alike after all, and that’s what’s wrong.’ Because of the vacancy where David had been, Eleanor loomed the larger, almost as a threat to him, and Paul realised with a shock that that was how she had always seemed. Eleanor was one of those women who always defer to a husband in public, and most of the time in private too; and yet, by the relentlessness of practicality, wear down all resistance so that those around – husband, children, friends – find it easier to accede to the kindness and the better judgement, losing all self-regard.

  Last night she had cried in her bed, not troubling to stifle the sound. Paul had heard her clearly, and winced at the reiterated, strangled sound of his father’s name, but he had not gone in. He knew that the morning would mend her face, and that she would make the effort to open the front door to the anxious postman with an air of gentle curiosity, like a housewife awaiting a mail order parcel.

  Although Conrad Hartley was as much a fixture in his life as the village street itself, Paul went to visit him unwillingly. He should have gone before. David had always joked that Conrad was Paul’s surrogate grandfather, especially when Paul waved the generous cheque after his excellent A level results. Paul barely remembered his real grandfathers, but the knowledge that they were both doctors oppressed him even before he was consciously aware. ‘Paul! Come in, my boy, come in!’ Conrad’s welcoming smile was so broad that he looked almost simple.

  The knowledge that his father came here, and talked to this person more than to anyone else, made Paul constrained. He sat on the edge of a chair, refused coffee, and stared at the ground, shuffling his grubby white trainers. ‘I know, Paul, I know,’ Conrad said gently. Paul jerked his head up in surprise, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, inexplicably. ‘It would surprise me if you came here and asked me polite questions about my health, Paul. That would be shocking, not this. I just wish I could do something to help. I telephone Eleanor every day, but that is all.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be done. Except wait. But …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I wish you had some idea. You were the one he talked to. Can’t you guess where he might have gone, or why?’ Paul stared at him, almost as if he were making an accusation.

  Conrad shook his head sadly. ‘No, Paul, I keep going over our last few talks in my mind to see if there’s a clue, but it all appears to have been so normal that thinking about it makes a mockery of the present. Tell me, how is your mother bearing up?’

  ‘Oh, just as you’d expect.’

  ‘Do you talk to her about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should, you really should try.’

  ‘It won’t do any good. It won’t bring him back.’

  ‘Why do you say that with such conviction?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just have this feeling that he’s gone forever. And Conrad …?’

  ‘Yes?’ The old man was gazing at him intently.

  ‘I can’t remember him at all now. I can’t picture his face. He’s gone completely away from me, and yet he was my father, for God’s sake. It’s awful. My mind keeps going round and round and I still can’t find him.’

  The old man stared at him, glad that the boy could not see the pity in his face. The hunched figure before him, wearing a crumpled cotton jacket over a lilac tee-shirt, and skin-tight jeans, with sunlight glinting on his curious hairstyle and the tiny gold earring in one ear, was very different from the sturdy, ruddy little boy of Conrad’s memory. The contrast intensified Conrad’s sadness; the sense of pitilessness about it all.

  ‘You look pale. Do you eat enough in that flat of yours, Paul?’

  The transformation was instant; the face grew bright again. ‘Well, after a fashion! Baked beans and takeaway pizzas mainly. But I’m learning to cook; there’s a little kitchen in the corner of the room. Sometimes people from work come back and we make spaghetti with a sauce from a tin. It’s really good there, I love it.’

  ‘What about the job?’

  ‘Great! I’m definitely moving across into publicity soon. I showed some of my designs to Simon West – he’s the bloke in charge – and he seemed impressed. We get to see all the rehearsals, you know. And I can get you tickets any time you want.’

  Like a child again, Conrad thought, showing me his stamp collection, and later his sketches of the church. ‘That’s very kind, Paul. I don’t get up to town at all now, otherwise I would. Alice loved the theatre.’

  ‘Mum and Dad were never very keen.’

  ‘Oh, we used to go every week, in the cheapest seats, when I was researching in the BM and she was at Birkbeck. Years ago, of course. I bought her binoculars. They’re still upstairs.’

  Paul’s face had lost its light. ‘Mum doesn’t think much of my job. She’s still disappointed in me. Conrad? Did Dad ever say anything to you, about me? What he thought?’

  ‘Sometimes … And he wasn’t disappointed in you, if that’s what you expect me to say. I don’t think he wanted to change you, Paul. I think he accepts you as you are.’ Paul looked up sharply. ‘You’ve changed tenses. We’ve been talking about him in the past, an
d now you’ve switched to the present. But we don’t know if he’s alive, or dead, do we?’

  There was fear in his voice. ‘We have to assume he is alive, Paul,’ said Conrad gently, ‘and hope that he has had a blackout and is wandering somewhere. He’ll be found soon. It isn’t possible to imagine life in Winterstoke without him.’

  As Conrad spoke he knew he was skirting the truth, although that truth was veiled. Never impossible to imagine, but essential to imagine impossible, he said to himself, thinking suddenly of Alice, and how the truly unimaginable had become a reality, and that reality absorbed …

  ‘We need to prepare ourselves all the time, every minute, and to have the unimaginable sharply in focus, because that is the only way even to approach an understanding of it – the unimaginable sharply delineated at last, the unseen made visible. And it is worth understanding too, because it leads more precisely to a celebration, for what do we do but deny the essence of life itself, if we turn away in fear from its ending? It was Jung who said that waxing and waning are part of the same curve; and only now can I look back at Alice and recognise her properly, all along the curve of her life. It took death to achieve that after all; death not unkind, though greedy.’

  He felt excited. Another little package that morning, and a letter which took him a step further in his search. It seemed that Alice’s great-grandmother may have been illegitimate; there was a significant fudging of the records. The Warwickshire farmers, sturdy and conventional yeoman stock, were called Pearson, and one of the daughters had given birth to a child who was denied. It took the smallest detail to summon up for Conrad the lives of the long-dead, with their rows of children. He knew too much to guess; each small step in the search had to be recorded in four notebooks, with its source and date, but now Conrad was conscious of an urgency he had never felt before.

  ‘Before I die, I will trace you, Alice. Non erat ante nec erit postea te similis,’ he was fond of chanting to himself. ‘Yet somewhere I will find the key to you. For none of us is unique, Alice, not even you. To claim uniqueness would be so lonely, after all, and in these photocopied documents I am finding company for you, my dear.’

  The old man’s face was rapt. Paul was staring at him with curiosity, and thinking at the same time how odd it was that most old men become like pregnant women, sitting with splayed legs to bear the weight of their stomachs. He got up. ‘I’d better get back, Conrad. Something might have happened. I suppose I ought to be around, in case.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes,’ mumbled Conrad, as if he were far away.

  ‘I’ll ring you, you know, if anything …’

  Conrad drew himself back into the room. ‘Thank you, Paul. And I’m sorry I wasn’t more help to you.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘Oh, Paul?’ Conrad’s voice was suddenly eager, ‘Might you have dinner with me one night? They do a decent set meal at The King’s Head. Not a bad wine list either. It would be a treat for me.’

  Paul looked at him, aghast. ‘We could talk, Paul,’ Conrad added, nodding and blinking, as if their positions were reversed, and he the young man encouraging the very old by loud inanities. We could talk, thought Paul, but about what, for God’s sake? About Winterstoke or family life, or living alone? Perhaps we could drink a toast to absent friends. ‘That would be very nice, thanks,’ he said.

  As he walked back along the High Street Paul remembered that he should have called on Daphne and Enid Ryan, as Eleanor had said. He kicked a stone at the thought, and did not turn back. Everywhere I look I see guilt staring me in the face, he thought; I’m bored by Conrad and all the rest of them and I hold back from mum, in the way I always have. But it’s her fault, after all. Unyielding, that’s what she is, with no real need of anyone, least of all me.

  He saw two women watching him from across the road, and one of them made as if to wave, but he dropped his gaze. Deliberately he made his walk more lazy, scuffing his feet, and hunching his shoulders; cultivating boorishness. Nosy old cows, he said to himself, staring and pointing and wondering what’s going on, but that’s all mum’s fault too. She puts people off; she walks around like Lady Bountiful organising people out of existence. If she hadn’t been like that I might have been different … forcing me on, telling me to visit people, and expecting me to be like her, to get things done …

  His miserable self-absorption drove anxiety about his father from Paul’s head. And at that moment, twenty miles away, a police car and an ambulance jolted over rough ground and halted on the plateau, near the Ordnance Survey post. The Bristol Channel flashed in the sunlight, dazzling the eyes, and Wales beyond was misty and green. A solitary figure with a knapsack and stout walking boots stared at the horizon, unhappily. Then he turned to greet the four men in dark blue, raising one arm nervously as if to claim responsibility for the revelation he did not want, and on which he might have turned his back, were it not for decent conditioning.

  The doorbell rang. Paul went as if to rise, but Eleanor was on her feet before him. He heard the sound of voices in the dining room, more murmuring, then silence. He waited for her to call him, but she did not. Paul felt paralysed by the conviction that something was happening. He stared from the kitchen window at the bright garden, teeming, moving, seeming to bud before his eyes. There was a mercilessness about the light, and in the blackbirds which jabbed at the soil with their harsh yellow beaks, looking for something to kill. In North London the streets were dirty and busy, and the Saturday din of the street market filled his flat. Black plastic sacks were piled outside the Indian restaurant, someone had dumped an old mattress on the pavement in front of the building, and he was woken each morning by the noise of the concrete mixer on the building site next door; but Paul wanted the anonymity of that life, where dirty grass and trees were firmly under human control. Not this; not the quietness, and those birds, and the sense of Winterstoke folding about him, burying him in its surrounding hills.

  The voices began again. He could hear his mother’s pitch, though not what she said. Footsteps to the front door, more talking in a low buzz, and then he heard her say ‘Thank you’ quite clearly, in the polite but distant tone of voice she reserved for the milkman and passing Jehovah’s Witnesses; a dismissal. He waited. She came in and sat down at the table, staring at the remains of their bread and cheese. At last she looked up and said, in a voice that was perfectly steady: ‘They’ve found him, Paul. Up in the Quantocks. He’s dead, of course. They said it looks like a heart attack.’

  Paul jerked his head up, enraged at the perpetrators of the lie. ‘I don’t believe it! How do they know?’

  She raised her hands to her face, and spoke through them. ‘We have to believe it, Paul, because it’s true. Don’t make it worse.’

  The paralysis again, as if bones were set in concrete, defying the will; but Paul made an effort and reached out an arm towards her, only to drop it heavily because it was too short to reach its destination. His mother was motionless. She looked like a figure in a Vermeer painting, caught at the humble table with a still life which mocked the movement of events, and yet transfigured with those ordinary objects by the light from the window. He wanted to smash the scene, drifting outside it as usual. ‘How could he have a heart attack?’ he shouted. ‘Dad was as healthy as me! I know he was.’

  Her hands dropped into her lap. ‘Oh, but men his age … it’s very common, Paul, only the other day he showed me a long article in the BMJ. He made me read it…’ Her voice shook and she stopped.

  ‘What happens now?’

  Eleanor made a visible effort, clenching her jaw. ‘I have to go and identify it … I mean … him … and then they have to do a post mortem. I wish they didn’t but they have to. Don’t ask me questions, Paul, I can’t cope with them.’

  He wondered afterwards why neither of them cried, or fell upon each other’s shoulders, as he had seen people do in films. It never happened as you thought it would; … all the small subconscious rehearsals for such moments were wrong in the form and subst
ance of their drama.

  ‘I’ll have to make arrangements.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, all the things that have to be done. Will you help me, Paul?’ The last words shocked him, and he dropped his eyes. ‘I’m never any good, at getting things done. You know I’m not.’

  He did not see her nod. ‘It’s all right. I’ll ring Daphne afterwards, not now, I might go and see the rector. I’ll ring Daphne first, yes …’ Her voice wavered again, and she hurried from the room, leaving Paul stabbing at the table with his greasy knife.

  Daphne was out. Enid ignored the phone at first, then decided to answer it, only to find that the ringing stopped when she was two yards away, leaning heavily on her walking frame. She swore quietly, because there was no one to hear, and glanced at the grandfather clock; four o’clock only, and yet the afternoon had seemed interminable, made worse by her inability to play today. Back in her armchair she picked up her volume of Mozart’s letters, put it down, looked at her watch, then glanced at The Daily Telegraph. Daphne should be back by now, she thought irritably, shopping can’t possibly take this long, and there’ll hardly be time for tea before she has to go out again. She would not go to the wretched rehearsal, she decided, because everybody knew her pieces were perfect. But it might well make supper late, and Enid detested having her meal any earlier than eight, or later than eight-thirty, the dining room table properly laid, as their parents had insisted. Appearances matter, she was fond of telling Daphne, who sometimes suggested a simple supper on their laps. Enid knew that the rituals, even between sisters, gave a structure which kept all chaos at bay, beyond the mahogany and silver. Daphne would be back soon; she must be back soon. Enid reached in sudden fear for her book and tried to read, terrified for that second by the possibility that her sister might not come.

  The rehearsal was at six in the village hall, and Daphne, who had intended to be early, was four minutes late. She was red-faced and angry. ‘You do your best, struggle in with all those bags, and call cheerfully that you’ve got some trout for dinner, and she hardly looks up from her book, just mumbles that she isn’t in the mood for fish. That’s all … she doesn’t care what I do, not one bit! Tea and biscuits and unpack the shopping, and then peel the potatoes and set the time, and then rush out here; and she won’t even come with me, even though her piano solo is always the high spot. Oh, why do I bother?’