The Very Thought of You Page 11

  Then at last he undertook what he had put off for too long: the train journey to Ashton Park, where asuite of rooms had been prepared for him and Elizabeth on the ground floor.

  Carter chauffeured them up the long drive to Ashton Park, then Thomas was lifted in his chair up the steps into the Marble Hall. His wheels squeaked on the polished floor, and all the rooms looked unusually high from his new sitting position. He would have liked to go upstairs, as he usually did, to see the view from his old bedroom, but did not want to cause any bother.

  He realized how far he was cut off now from his own past.

  He spent many weeks recuperating at Ashton, endeavouring once more to turn his mind to his tenant farmers, and all the other obligations of his estate.

  To exercise his hands and arms, he often spent the mornings playing the piano in the saloon. Music also gave him an excuse to be on his own. He craved solitude, but was fearful of it, too. There were many empty hours when he was alone in his head, trying to brace himself for a life in a wheelchair.

  Sometimes he would reach the end of the day with a degree of acceptance about his condition. But then the next morning he would wake up again at the bottom of the ladder, in despair, and then he would have to overcome his revulsion at his new bodily state all over again, right through the day.

  He found himself retreating into a private interior. Despite the steadfast appearance given by his manners, he was closing himself off. He tried to remain open to Elizabeth, but there was increasingly an element of role play in their warmth to each other.

  Had they ever achieved that easy, continuous, unspoken communication between spouses which works beyond words? Certainly, it was not there then. Both blocked the other, despite their smiles and little squeezes of the hand as they passed each other.

  Thomas was most at peace when left alone in his study. There he could find his own level – pain and grief could be dulled by mental exercises. He could remember opening again his classics books, and reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

  Man’s life goes in a fash, his fesh is feeting, his understanding is dark, his body aprey of worms, his soul awhirling wind, his fate unknown, his reputation undecided… what then can be man’s guide? One thing and one only – philosophy. To be aphilosopher is to keep man’s inmost divine spirit clear of reproach and injury, beyond pleasure and pain…

  “The divine spirit.” thomas had always secretly prided himself on his solitary epiphanies of sheer joy, moments when everything seemed to be connected. From the delicate veins of aforget-me-not to the constellations above, he had felt he could intuit apattern, asoul – afeeting sense, almost, of infnity. But now he only felt estranged from any such soaring intimations. All those elusive apprehensions of nature now seemed no more than the illusions of youth and health.

  He could sit alone for hours, oblivious and unmoving, as his study grew dark around him. The servants did not dare to disturb him. Eventually elizabeth would go in and switch on the lights, and try to rouse him with the trivia of the day.

  He tried to stabilize himself by reaching after order and ritual, with prayers to the god of his school chapels. But when he listened for god’s voice, all he could hear were the solipsistic repetitions of his own mind, driving him further inside himself.

  Wanting to feel less, he drank more, though this made his nights restless. The lights stayed on in his head, jolting him awake with fashes of brightness. For atime only the translation of greek or Latin kept him sane. The conscious pairing of words to a meaning reconnected him with his mind. But even as he held a pen to write, he could feel the dislocation between his body and soul. Sometimes his still-shocked nerves were overstrung with expectancy, his body ringing with too much awareness and his fingertips jangling with sensation. Even to look at the sky sometimes felt dangerous, as if it might break, or fall, or be sucked inside his mind.

  All the while, he knew he was resisting Elizabeth, subtly closing himself to her overtures of affection and care. When they made love under cover of darkness, it was perflunctory, with each avoiding the other’s eyes. His own self-disgust was poisoning any tenderness between them, he knew, but he could not help himself. He could no longer look at her properly, even in daylight.

  In the end, there had been nothing left for him to do but to trust that his dark time would pass. To wait for hope. Day after day, Thomas played the piano, schooling himself with the orderly preludes and flugues of Bach. Little by little he began to breathe more deeply, and to get out more into the fresh air – until at last the threatened lunacy of despair receded to leave only adull ache of accepted loss.

  In November 1932 came the news that Americahad elected roosevelt as President – Aman who had been severely stricken with polio adecade before. His example gave Elizabeth hope that Thomas too would recover his energy and spark. As the depressive aftermath of his illness lifted, they began to talk of his return to work.

  They moved back down to Sussex Place, and Thomas visited his Whitehall colleagues, determined to prove his ftness. Within weeks, he returned formally to the foreign office in his wheelchair. On his first day back, Norton took the trouble to wheel him to his office in the Central Department.

  Thomas found it strange to sit at adesk without needing achair any more. European affairs had shifted radically since he had disappeared into his iron lung: Adolf hitler, once asmall-time agitator of street politics, was now about to become Reich Chancellor of Germany.

  “It is Amercy we are no longer in Berlin,” he said to Elizabeth at dinner.

  “We left at just the right time,” she agreed, both of them trying to seize on reasons to feel fortunate.

  They had always been careful with each other since then. The death of their desire was never mentioned.

  18

  Roberta’s husband was now stationed in North Africa, near Cairo, and she wrote to tell him about her new job. She did not mention she would be playing band music – that sounded too feckless. Instead, she hinted that she was working for something less frivolous, like the talks programmes.

  Lewis replied to her with wry descriptions of his inaction under the fierce egyptian sun. “We listen to the BBC much of the time,” he wrote, “so now I’ll be able to imagine you at the other end of the broadcasts – right through the wireless, across the sea, back in London. Send me athought wave sometimes, my darling.”

  She comforted herself that he was safe for the moment, and this absolved her of any guilt about her new life. She had begun as an assistant on the BBC home Service, doing everything from fling to timing recordings with astopwatch. But her training was somewhat haphazard, as all the other assistants were already busy.

  She soon acclimatized to the daily atmosphere of controlled panic in Broadcasting house, everyone running blinkered down corridors and vanishing through double doorways – all frantic to keep the show going.

  “Continuity is the thing,” explained Roberta’s new boss, abespectacled man with abow tie. “We are all wedded to keeping the programmes going without interruption – it’s our first duty to the public at this time.”

  The programme she worked on was known as Music while You Work, which was designed to rally the legions of factory workers to their tasks. She soon gathered that there were certain rules about the music played. “unsuitable” numbers were those with lethargic rhythms or insuffcient melody, and waltzes were deemed too soporifc. Many of the numbers were played by the BBC Dance orchestra, conducted by geraldo, and before long Roberta was the new stopwatch assistant in the recording hall downstairs.

  She was intoxicated by all this new pleasure. Here was geraldo’s band sitting right before her in shirtsleeves – and when the conductor rapped on the music stand to signal anew change to the score, dozens of men apparently dozing in their chairs would suddenly sit straight and produce heartstopping syncopations.

  Within aweek, Broadcasting house felt like her natural home. She loved the contained atmosphere of the place. The floors were how she imagined the de
cks of aliner, with windows like portholes to the outside world. Every sound was oddly muffed, and there was always asmell of cooking drifting upwards from the lower depths.

  Solemn-looking men and women appeared and disappeared down the lino corridors but she, Roberta, danced through the doorways with abright electric step of happiness. She ran up and down the stairwells, rejoicing simply because she had never before belonged to an institution with great communal stairways like these. Even the banister rails enchanted her. She ran her hands down their smooth shaft as she moved from floor to floor.

  The music was everywhere, sweeping over her in waves. The jaunty trumpets and crooning saxophones made her long to dance again, and she sensed the possibility of anew partner hovering somewhere on the edge of her life. There was acornet player in Geraldo’s band who watched her studiedly when she walked across the room. Perhaps he would be the one. Perhaps another. Suddenly, there were all these new men around her.

  After work, free of family ties, Roberta took to following her BBC colleagues off to the nearby bars of fitzrovia. There, she drank beer and told people the story of her life exactly as she liked, perhaps hinting at minor discontent with her husband, with occasional suggestions that he had held her back. Whatever the untruths, she was enjoying this chance to reinvent herself.

  Fitzroviapubs closed in sequence, and she quickly learnt the order. After the last round at the Wheatsheaf, everyone would decamp down the road to the Duke of york. Robertapreferred the French – run, as the name suggested, by a Frenchman famous for his magnifcent moustache. The same faces came and went in each bar. By the time you had seen each other three times, you were friends.

  Drink and cigarettes, and a shifting company of new faces, made Roberta light-hearted. She exchanged glances with many men, soldiers on leave, BBC staff, artists, band players. As yet, no particular man had quite captured her attention, but she had not forgotten the cornet player in geraldo’s band, who watched her every time she came to arehearsal. He had taken to sitting up properly when she was in the room, she noticed.

  She worked hard all day, then laughed with strangers in pubs, and teetered home with the band music still ringing in her ears. But not forgetting her husband in egypt, nor her daughter sleeping at Ashton Park. visits to evacuees, she knew, were discouraged as “unsettling”, but she was sure she could ask for some leave soon, then take the train to yorkshire and see her daughter.

  She wondered if Anna still threw her arms back on her pillow as she slept.

  19

  All too often, Anna felt lonely. what did it mean, making friends? She was never sure. Sometimes, she could only see the faces of other children stacked up opposite her: Katy, Susan, Beth. They smiled, they laughed. She might run down ahill holding hands with Beth. But then Beth might turn and walk away, and Anna would watch her go and never know if Beth wanted to play with her any more or not. Why was it Beth, not her, who held this choice? every day she tiptoed across the unknown terrain of other children’s affections, clumsy with self-doubt. She could not work out why she feared other children more than they feared her. It was easier to walk away into the woods, and be on your own. Read abook.

  She met Suzy West on the way to lunch one Saturday. Suzy was in Katy todd’s gang, ashy, tentative girl, shuffing from one foot to the other.

  “What are we doing this afternoon?” asked Anna cheerily.

  “That depends,” mumbled Suzy.

  “On what?”

  “Well – I don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Whether we’re all going.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe I’m not meant to say,” said Suzy, fdgeting with her fingers now.

  “Please tell me,” begged Anna, dropping her voice.

  “I can’t. ”

  “Please—”

  “Well, promise you won’t tell I told you—”

  “I promise.”

  “We’re going to the water tower, to collect snails – there’s lots of them there.”

  “Who’s going?”

  “Just the gang – some of the gang. Billy, Mary, me. Katy, of course.”

  “Why—” Anna paused.

  “yes?”

  “Why can’t I come?”

  “Well, I think you can, but you don’t always come to everything, so I don’t know if you’re coming to this or not.”

  “Should I ask Katy?”

  “No! Because then they’ll know I told you.”

  “Then what do I do?” cried Anna, holding back the tears now.

  “Hang around the back-garden door after lunch. Then Katy’ll ask you along if she means to.” Little Suzy was scared by now, and wanted to get away. Anna let her go.

  But through lunch she could scarcely talk to those beside her; she was twisting herself into knots of misery and rejection.

  Perhaps she’d only missed the gang’s plan because she hadn’t seen Katy and the others this morning? All she had to do was bump into them, and they would say, in acheery voice, Coming?

  Then all would be well. Or would it? apart of Annafelt weary of hanging out with children she did not really want to be with, who did not like the same things as her, or think the way she did. Who were meaner than she wanted to be.

  She decided she would not hover by the garden door, waiting not to be asked on the snail-catching trip. So after lunch she walked off on her own instead, as she often did, hoping nobody would notice her.

  What do I care? Anna told herself, taking herself off to her den in the luggage room. But finding an old tennis ball in the rack there, she decided it was probably safe now to play ball outside, unnoticed by Katy’s gang.

  She clattered downstairs, and found herself a spot in the herb garden to perfect her bounce and throw against the house wall.

  * * *

  From his study upstairs, Thomas heard athudding sound. He looked outside, and saw Anna Sands throwing a tennis ball against the wall, one catch after another, her eyes fixed on the ball. He hoped she was on her own by choice.

  Thomas himself was alone that weekend, with Elizabeth on a visit to London. “To do some catching up,” as she put it. With what or whom she did not say, and he did not ask. He, meanwhile, had slipped into his own solitude, returning to a translation of virgil which he had promised to an Oxford journal.

  After all his years in the engine room of the foreign office, Thomas found it strange to be applying himself now to Latin sentences, while so many others were gathering on the front line. Eighteen months earlier, once it was clear that Chamberlain was determined to appease Hitler, Thomas had resigned from the Central Department – in sympathy with his chief vansittart, who had been quietly ousted as head of the foreign office because of his opposition to Chamberlain’s strategies. The atmosphere in Whitehall had grown intolerably toxic for any anti-appeasers, and Thomas had felt compelled to withdraw. at the time, he told his colleagues that he was embarking on anew translation of The Aeneid. what had begun as aprivate consolation had turned into a passion, and whenever he was not teaching now, he went back to his virgil.

  But he knew that sometimes he retreated into his study to avoid his marriage, too. Lately, an unspoken truce had settled between Elizabeth and him, in which they lived together and yet separately. He had learnt not to ask Elizabeth what she did on her visits to London.

  Thomas did not doubt that she had tried to love him. Over the years she had emerged as asocial orchid – everything about her was always perfectly presented to the world: her hair, her nails, her clothes. But Thomas sensed that it was romantic life she craved, to be swept onto a dance floor, to walk on the arm of a desirable man, needs he could never now meet.

  Perhaps Thomas divined this better than she did herself. He did not blame her for it, or despise her, or even hold it against her. He, too, prized her perfection and poise – had that not been her attraction for him as well? And yet, whenever he saw h
er remote eyes, he felt threatened by that look of dissatisfaction in her face.

  At least he had always been able to take refluge in his work, whether the legitimate crises of the foreign office or, now, his teaching and his translations. But he knew she had enough empty hours to feel the holes in her life. The war had offered her this chance to reinvent herself, yet even their school had not satisfied her restlessness. Her discontent was too pervasive, and he had watched her drink too much – first wine, then spirits.

  There were still times when Thomas regretted not being in love with his wife – not feeling that tenderness which might exalt daily life. As he raked over their marriage, he was haunted by one particular milestone in their mutually diminishing expectations: their holiday in venice in the spring of 1935.

  It was Elizabeth who had planned the trip.

  “venice will be easy for the chair,” she had announced with brio. “No hills. We can stroll through piazzas and visit galleries.”

  Neither of them had ever been to venice before. They took the train, setting off with the light spirit of travellers, both delighted by the opulence of the orient express. Thomas was charming and attentive to Elizabeth – who was trying so hard to fre their ailing intimacy. They passed the rolling felds of France and the mountain passes of the Swiss Alps, until at last they arrived in venice, glittering in the late-August sunshine.

  They tried to hide from each other their disappointment with the hotel. Their room had adark, damp air, and although the window faced out onto a canal, it was too high for Thomas to have any view. But still, they changed their clothes, and set off through the pretty streets to find a restaurant for dinner.

  That first evening they saw venice at its best. The colours of the buildings glowed and blended under the mature sunshine: ochre, rose, cream, coral. The pleasure of this new place made them both light-headed. They found their way to a trattoriaoverlooking the lagoon, and ate seafood while watching the sunset fade to darkness over the sea. Later that night, they made love.