Black Dogs Read online

  Despite what Bernard had said, now, in 1987, she was fading. She spent far more time this year asleep during the day. Although she pretended otherwise, the only writing she was doing was in her notebooks, and there was little of that. She no longer walked the neglected footpath through the woods to the nearest village. She was sixty-seven. At forty I had just reached the age myself when one begins to differentiate between the stages of later life. There had been a time when I would have regarded it as plainly untragic to be ill and dying in your late sixties, hardly worth struggling against or complaining about. You’re old, you die. Now I was beginning to see that you hung on at every stage – forty, sixty, eighty – until you were beaten, and that sixty-seven could be early in the end-game. June still had things to do. She had been looking well as an elderly woman in the south of France – that Easter Island face under a straw hat, the natural authority of unhurried movement as she made the early evening inspection of her gardens, the afternoon sleeps chiming with local practice.

  As I trod the bilious, swirling carpet that continued out of the hall, under the wire-mesh glass firedoor, along the corridor to cover every available inch of public space, it came to me again, how deeply I resented the fact that she was dying. I was against it, I could not accept it. She was my adopted mother, the one that love for Jenny, marriage conventions, fate, had allotted me, my thirty-two-years-late replacement.

  For over two years I had made my infrequent visits alone. Jenny and her mother found even twenty minutes of bedside chat a forced march. Slowly, far too slowly as it turned out, there emerged from my meandering conversations with June the possibility of a memoir I would write. The idea embarrassed the rest of the family. One of Jenny’s brothers tried to dissuade me. I was suspected of wanting to threaten a difficult truce by turning up forgotten quarrels. The children could not conceive how so wearingly familiar a subject as their parents’ differences could hold its fascination. They need not have worried. In the uncontrollable way of daily life, it worked out that there were only two visits towards the end when I managed to get June to talk about the past in an organised fashion, and from the very beginning we had quite different notions of what the true subject of my account should be.

  In the bag of shopping I had brought her, along with the fresh lychees from Soho market, Montblanc black ink, the 1762–3 volume of Boswell’s Journal, Brazilian coffee and half a dozen bars of expensive chocolate, was my notebook. She would not permit a tape recorder. I suspected she wanted to feel free to be rude about Bernard for whom she felt love and irritation in equal measure. He usually rang when he knew I had been to see her. ‘Dear boy, what’s the state of mind?’ By which he meant that he wanted to know if she had been talking about him, and in what terms. For my part, I was glad to be without boxes of tapes in my study filled with compromising proof of June’s occasional indiscretions. For example, long before the idea of a memoir had taken hold, she had shocked me once by announcing in a suddenly lowered voice, as a key to all his imperfections, that Bernard ‘took a small penis size’. I was not inclined to interpret her literally. She had been angry with him that day and, besides, his, I was certain, was the only one she had ever seen. It was the phrasing that struck me, the suggestion that it had been mere obstinacy in her husband that had prevented him from ordering something more capacious from his regular suppliers in Jermyn Street. In a notebook the remark could be encoded in shorthand. On tape it would have been simple evidence of a betrayal, one that I would have needed to keep in a locked cupboard.

  As though to emphasise her separation from what she called the ‘other inmates’, her room was at the far end of the corridor. I slowed as I approached it. I could never quite believe that I was going to find her here, behind one of these identical plywood doors. She belonged where I first saw her, among the lavender and box of her property, on the edge of a wilderness. I tapped lightly on the door with a fingernail she would not want me to think she had been dozing. One preferred to be discovered among her books. I knocked a little harder. I heard a stirring, a murmur, a creak of bed springs. A third knock. A pause, a throat clearing, another pause, then she called me to enter. She was just pulling herself upright in the bed as I went in. She gaped at me without recognition. Her hair was a mess. She had been buried in a sleep that had itself been smothered in an illness. I thought I should leave her to collect herself, but it was too late now. In the few seconds that it took to approach slowly and set down my bag, she had to reconstruct her whole existence, who and where she was, how and why she came to be in this small white-walled room. Only when she had all that could she begin to remember me. Beyond her window, anxious to prompt her, a horse chestnut was waving its limbs. Perhaps it succeeded only in confusing her further, for today she was taking longer to come to. A few books and several sheets of blank paper lay across the bed. She ordered them feebly, playing for time.

  ‘June, it’s Jeremy. I’m sorry, I got here earlier than I thought.’

  Suddenly, she had it all at once, but she concealed it with a bout of unconvincing cantankerousness. ‘Yes you bloody well are. I was trying to remember what it was I was about to write.’ She put no effort into the performance. We were both aware she had no pen in her hand.

  ‘Would you like me to come back in ten minutes?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve lost it now for good. It was rubbish anyway. Sit down. What have you got me? Did you remember my ink?’ As I pulled up my chair, she allowed herself the smile she had been holding back. The face creased into the complexity of a finger print as her lips pushed across her cheeks whorls of parallel lines that encircled her features and curled round to her temples. In the centre of her forehead the main trunk of the wrinkle tree deepened to a furrow.

  I set out my purchases and she examined each with a jokey remark or little question that needed no answer.

  ‘Now why should the Swiss of all people be good at making chocolate? Just what is it that’s been giving me this craving for lychees? Do you think I could be pregnant?’

  These tokens from the outside world did not sadden her. Her exclusion from it was complete and, as far as I could tell, without regret. It was a country she had left for ever and for which she retained no more than a fond and lively interest. I did not know how she could bear it, giving up so much, settling for the dullness here; the ruthlessly boiled vegetables, the fussy, clucking old folk, the dazed gluttony of their TV watching. After a life of such self-sufficiency, I would be panicking, or constantly planning my escape. However, her acquiescence, which was almost serene, made her easy company. There was no guilt at leaving, or even at postponing a visit. She had transplanted her independence to the confines of her bed where she read, wrote, meditated, dozed. She required only to be taken seriously.

  At Chestnut Reach this was not as simple as it sounds, and it took her months to persuade the nurses and helpers. It was a struggle I thought she was bound to lose; condescension is all to the professional carer’s power. June succeeded because she never lost her temper and became the child they intended her to be. She was calm. When a nurse walked into her room without knocking – I saw this once – sing-songing in the first person plural, June held the young woman’s gaze and radiated forgiving silence. In the early days she was marked down as a difficult patient. There was even talk of Chestnut Reach being unable to continue with her. Jenny and her brothers came to confer with the director. June refused a part in the conversation. She had no intention of moving. Her certainty was authoritative, tranquil, born of years of thinking things through alone. She converted her doctor first. Once he realised that this was not one more witless old biddy, he began talking to her of non-medical matters – wild flowers, for which they both had a passion and on which she was an expert. Soon he was confiding marital problems. The staff’s attitude to June was transformed – such is the hierarchical nature of medical establishments.

  I regarded it as a triumph of tactics, of thinking ahead; by concealing her irritation she had won through
. But it was not a tactic, she told me when I congratulated her, it was an attitude of mind she had learned long ago from Lao Tzu’s The Way of Tao. It was a book she recommended from time to time, though whenever I looked at it, it never failed to irritate me with its smug paradoxes; to attain your goal walk in the opposite direction. On this occasion she took up her book and read aloud, ‘“The Way of heaven excels in overcoming though it does not contend.”’

  I said, ‘Just what I’d expect.’

  ‘Shut up. Listen to this. “Of two sides raising arms against each other, it is the one that is sorrow-stricken that wins.”’

  ‘June, the more you say, the less I understand.’

  ‘Not bad. I’ll make a sage of you yet.’

  When she was satisfied that I had brought exactly what she had ordered, I stowed the goods, except for the ink which she kept on the locker. The heavy fountain pen, the greyish-white cartridge paper and the black ink were the only visible reminders of her former daily life. Everything else, her delicatessen luxuries, her clothes, had their special places, out of sight. Her study at the bergerie, with its views westwards down the valley towards St Privat, was five times the size of this room and could barely accommodate her books and papers; beyond, the huge kitchen with its jambons de montagne hung from beams, demijohns of olive oil on the stone floor, and scorpions sometimes nesting in the cupboards; the living room which took up all of the old barn where a hundred locals once gathered at the end of a boar hunt; her bedroom with the four-poster bed and french windows of stained glass, and the guest bedrooms through all of which, over the years, her possessions flowed and spread; the room where she pressed her flowers; the hut with gardening tools in the orchard of almonds and olives, and near that, the henhouse that looked like a miniature dovecote – all this boiled down, stripped away, to one free-standing bookcase, a tallboy of clothes she never wore, a steamer trunk no one was allowed to look inside, and a tiny fridge.

  While I unwrapped the fruit and washed it at the handbasin and put it with the chocolate in the fridge and found a place, the place, for the coffee, I conveyed messages from Jenny, love from the children. She asked after Bernard, but I had not seen him since my last visit. She arranged her hair with her fingers and settled the pillows around her. When I returned to the chair by her bed I found myself looking once more at the framed photograph on the locker. I too could have fallen in love with that round-faced beauty with the overtrained hair, the delighted, jaunty smile grazing the biceps of her loved one. It was the innocence that was so appealing, not only of the girl, or the couple, but of the time itself; even the blurred shoulder and head of a suited passer-by had a naïve, unknowing quality, as did a frog-eyed saloon car parked in a street of pre-modern emptiness. The innocent time! Tens of millions dead, Europe in ruins, the extermination camps still a news story, not yet our universal reference point of human depravity. It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turned out after all – who they married, the date of their death – with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.

  June was following my gaze. I felt self-conscious, fraudulent, as I reached for my notebook and ballpoint. We had agreed that I would write about her life. Reasonably enough, she had in mind a biography, and that was what I had originally intended. But once I had made a start it began to take on another form; not a biography, not even a memoir really, more a divagation; she would be central, but it would not only be about her.

  Last time, the snapshot had been a useful point of departure. She was watching me, waiting to begin, as I looked at it. Her elbow was propped on her midriff, and her forefinger rested on the long curve of her chin. The question I really wanted to ask was, How did you get from that face to this, how did you end up looking so extraordinary – was it the life? My, how you’ve changed!

  Instead I said, keeping my eyes on the photograph, ‘Bernard’s life seems to have been a steady progression, building on what he has, whereas yours seems to have been a long transformation ...’

  Unfortunately, June took this to be a question about Bernard. ‘Do you know what he wanted to talk about when he came last month? Euro-communism! He’d met some Italian delegation the week before. Fat villains in suits banqueting at other people’s expense. He said he felt optimistic!’ She nodded at the photograph. ‘Jeremy, he was actually excited! Just as we were back then. Progression is too kind. Stasis, I’d say. Stagnation.’

  She knew this was inaccurate. Bernard had left the Party years ago, he had been a Labour MP, he was an Establishment man, a member of its liberal rump, with service on government committees on broadcasting, the environment, pornography. What June really objected to in Bernard was his rationalism. But I did not want to go into that now. I wanted my question answered, the one I had not spoken aloud. I pretended to agree.

  ‘Yes, it’s hard to imagine you excited by something like that now.’

  She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, her posture for delving at length. We had been over this more than once before, how and why June changed her life. Each time it came out a little differently.

  ‘Are we ready? I spent all the summer of 1938 staying with a family in France, just outside Dijon. Believe it or not, they were actually in the mustard business. They taught me how to cook, and that there is no better place on the planet than France, one youthful conviction I’ve never been able to revise. When I got back it was my eighteenth birthday and I was given a bicycle, a new one, a beauty. Cycling clubs were still the fashion then so I joined one, the Socialist Cycling Club of Amersham. Perhaps the idea was to give my stuffy parents a shock, though I don’t remember any objections. At weekends about twenty of us would take picnics and pedal along the lanes in the Chilterns, or down the escarpment towards Thame and Oxford. Our club had links with other clubs, and some of these had affiliations with the Communist Party. I don’t know if there was a plan, a conspiracy, someone should do some research on it. It was probably quite informal, the way it worked out, that these clubs became a recruiting ground for new members. No one ever lectured me. No one was bending my ear. I simply found myself among people I liked, cheerful and bright, and the talk was as you’d imagine – what was wrong with England, the injustices and suffering, how it could be put right, and how these things were being set to rights in the Soviet Union. What Stalin was doing, what Lenin had said, what Marx and Engels wrote. And then there was the gossip. Who was in the Party, who had actually been to Moscow, what joining was like, who was thinking of doing it, and so on.

  ‘Now all this talk, all the chatter and giggling took place as we rode our bikes through the countryside, or sat on those lovely hills with our sandwiches, or stopped by village pub gardens to drink our halves of shandy. Right from the start, the Party and all it stood for, all that mumbo-jumbo about the common ownership of the means of production, the historically and scientifically ordained inheritance of the proletariat, the withering away of the whatever, all that fandangle, was associated in my mind with beech woods, cornfields, sunlight, and barrelling down those hills, down those lanes that were tunnels in summer. Communism, and my passion for the countryside, as well as my interest in one or two nice looking boys in shorts – they were all mixed in, and yes, I was very excited.’

  As I wrote I wondered, ungenerously, if I was being used – as a conduit, a medium for the final fix June wanted to put on her life. This thought made me less uncomfortable about not writing the biography she wanted.

  June continued. She had this worked out rather well.

  ‘That was the beginning. Eight years later I finally joined. And as soon as I did, it was the end, the beginning of the end.’

  ‘The dolmen.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  We were about to leapfrog eight years, across the war, from ’38 to �
��46. This was how these conversations went.

  On their way back through France in 1946, towards the end of their honeymoon, Bernard and June took a long walk in the Languedoc across a dry limestone plateau called the Causse de Larzac. They came across an ancient burial site known as the Dolmen de la Prunarède a couple of miles outside the village where they intended to stay the night. The dolmen stands on a hill, near the edge of the gorge of the river Vis, and the couple sat there for an hour or two in the early evening, facing north towards the Cévennes mountains, talking about the future. Since then we have all been at various times. In 1971 Jenny courted a local boy there, a deserter from the French Army. We picnicked there with Bernard and our babies in the mid eighties. Jenny and I went there once to thrash out a marital problem. It is also a good place to be alone. It has become a family site. Most typically, a dolmen consists of a horizontal slab of weather-worn rock propped on two others to make a low table of stone. There are scores of them up on the causses, but only one of them is ‘the dolmen’.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  She flapped her hand querulously. ‘Don’t interrogate me. I had a thought then, something I wanted to connect. Ah yes, I have it. The point about the cycling club was that Communism and my love of the countryside were inseparable – I suppose they were all part of those romantic, idealistic feelings you have at that age. And now here I was in France in another landscape, far more beautiful in its way than the Chilterns, grander, wilder, even a little frightening. And I was with the man I loved and we were rabbiting on about how we were going to help to change the world, and we were on our way home to start our lives together. I even remember thinking to myself, I’ve never been happier than this. This is it!