I refuse to feel guilt at leaving her. I am sure that he sends her money, while he is away, and in a curious fashion I feel that they are growing old together without me, even though now he seldom seems to be there. I have always wondered if perhaps …
PART
II
7
(1)
‘I HAVE ALWAYS wondered.’ What was it that I ‘always wondered’, I ask myself as I read this account of our life together, an account which I had begun to write years before but had abandoned when I left home. I found no answer to my question in it.
I had heard of Liza’s grave state in hospital from the police and so I came to what I still reluctantly called my home to do all the tiresome things which are required when one prepares for the death of a parent. There was no real next of kin to whom I could pass the disagreeable task. Liza had been nearly killed in a stupid road accident as she crossed the street from the baker’s where it had always been my duty years before to fetch the bread. The police found a letter for me in her pocket, a letter in which she typically reminded me to get vaccinated against the coming flu, and her near death gave me a passing sense of guilt at having left her, for otherwise it would have been I who had gone to fetch the bread and the accident would never have happened.
At the hospital, speaking with difficulty, she told me to destroy a lot of letters which she didn’t want strangers to read. ‘Why I kept them I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He always writes a lot of nonsense.’ She added, ‘Don’t let the Captain know that I’m here.’
‘But if he turns up …’
‘He won’t. In his last letter he spoke about next year or the next …’ She added, ‘Be kind to him. He’s always been kind to us.’
I brought up the forbidden word. ‘Does he love you?’
‘Oh, love. They are always saying God loves us. If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.’
I was prepared for his letters, but I was taken a little by surprise when I came on this unfinished story – fiction, autobiography? – which I have written here. It lay under several piles of letters preserved by Liza, neatly stacked and tied with rubber bands, in the kitchen drawer which was otherwise devoted to napkins and queer useless objects known in far-off days as doilies.
I didn’t even recognize at first my own handwriting, so legible had it been in the past. My handwriting now after the passage of years and all the hasty work involved in cheap journalism, reports of trivial occasions for a newspaper which I at heart despise, is almost unreadable.
There had been a period in my youth when I had nursed the vain ambition to become what I thought of as a ‘real writer’ and I suppose it was then that I began this fragment. Perhaps I had chosen the form because I knew so little of the outside world which could possibly have any interest for others. I must have left this draft – of what? – when I abruptly and shamefacedly abandoned my basement life, taking the opportunity during one of Liza’s rare absences, and with me went a little of the money which I found in her bedroom – there was enough left, I told myself, to last her till the next instalment from the Captain arrived. He had never failed her yet, and I thought the small contribution I had extorted was fair enough. She would certainly have spent much more on me in the months that followed and now I was gone she would have the next draft all to herself to play with – not that she ever played with money.
Liza, it was evident, had read my manuscript (I was glad to find when I went through it that it contained no wounding criticism of her maternal care), for she had scrawled on the last page, in her not very literary hand, what might well have served as a conventional epitaph on the Captain’s tombstone, or perhaps she intended it to be a final reply to all the police officers who had come and worried her with questions: ‘All the same whatever you say about him the Captain was very good to both of us. He was’ (the ‘was’ had been crossed out) ‘he is a very good man.’ Characteristically she made no use of that mysterious term ‘love’; there remained for the tombstone only this defiant recognition of the Captain’s virtue. Had physical love (I wondered if that was the meaning behind my question-mark?) ever existed between these two odd people whom as a child I had less than half known?
I felt it very strange to find myself all alone, in the shabby basement in that rundown street in Camden Town, reading a document which I had composed so many years before, and afterwards, one by one, I glanced through the hitherto unseen letters from the Captain, all of them preserved in their envelopes bearing foreign stamps. I soon discovered it was much against the Captain’s will that he had continued to address them to the house in Camden Town. The Captain had at least been good to both of us in his intention. During all his absences he had written with some regularity, though seldom with an address more exact than a poste restante. The last disappearance of which I had been a witness occurred a short while before the visit of yet another plain-clothes officer. Afterwards a small parcel would arrive at intervals of two or three months, sometimes containing a letter, sometimes not, but always money or valuables. The parcel would be thrust through the letterbox by a strange hand which had first rung the coded signal on the bell.
‘I don’t like it. I can’t bear it,’ Liza once remarked to me. ‘It’s not fair. That was a secret between him and me. When it rings I think … perhaps this time … and it never is. Sometimes that code seems now the only thing we ever really shared.’ She added dutifully, ‘Except you of course.’
Then for months the money ceased to come, and no letter either. Luckily the owner of the house was refused permission to pull it down as he wanted to do, and three of the rooms upstairs had been unwillingly rented furnished, so that there were a number of tips and extras for Liza to earn. Otherwise we would have had to survive rather than live on what Liza gained from her caretaking.
As I turned the letters over I remembered how out of the unknown one at last arrived bearing a Spanish stamp with the postmark of some place on the Costa Brava. It contained a far more important sum than he had ever sent before – a cheque for three thousand pounds drawn on a bank in Switzerland – and I recalled Liza’s exclamation of dismay. ‘That’s awful. What’s he done? They’ll catch him. They’ll send him to prison for years and years.’ But, if for no other reason, the lack of an extradition treaty at that time with Spain saved him from such a fate.
I found this letter near the top of the pile and I read it for the first time. It had arrived, I could tell by the date, not long before I left and went to work as an apprentice reporter on a local newspaper, having gained the job in spite of my youth by a very readable account of a bizarre accident which never really happened. Perhaps the title I gave the piece had caught the editorial attention – ‘The Biter Bit’. I feared the editor might check up with the source which I falsely claimed, but I timed my piece well, the paper was just going to press, and the editor was anxious to get it in the first and only edition before the story could hit the headlines of the giants, the Mail or the Express. I had been innocent enough before then to share Liza’s belief that what counted for a newspaper was truth rather than reader-interest, and my success helped to cure my innocence.
When I came to give the good news of my job to Liza – all the more good in my eyes because of the clever little bit of crookedness I had used (which I felt the Captain would have approved), I found her sitting in the kitchen with the letter I now held in her hand.
Though Liza had told me to destroy the letters, I had no intention of doing so, at least until I had read them all. Of course I would reassure her on my next visit to the hospital – ‘never took them out of their envelopes – popped them straight into the oven’. I had no sense of guilt. These two people had made me what I had become. I had a right to know my creators.
‘My dear Liza,’ I began reading, ‘I’m off again as soon as I can after this letter’s posted. Spain isn’t as good as it used to be, so I’m off where I always wanted to go, to the just republics where a man can make his fortune without fuss or b
other, and it may be a little time before I write again and the letters may take rather a long time, so don’t be anxious, I’m fighting fit, but I can’t bear to think of you still living in that miserable basement year after year. It’s time Jim got a job and contributed. Please use this cheque to find somewhere better. I wish the cheque was a bigger one, but I have to keep enough for my journey and finding my feet, though that won’t take long I think where I’m going. As soon as I’m settled I’ll give you my poste restante number and I swear that quite soon I’ll be sending you another much bigger cheque, enough for you to join me in the place where I’ve settled. I miss you, and I need you, Liza, all these bits of years without you have been awful, and sometimes I can’t sleep at night for worrying about you. Your letters don’t tell me much. You were never one to complain even when that Devil hurt you. Do believe me that it won’t be long now before we are together. As for Jim of course he can come with you, if he wants to. I don’t like you to travel alone. Tell him I can hear the mule bells on the way – he’ll know what I mean. Your Captain. PS. My hair is beginning to go. I’ll soon be glabrous. It’s always that way when I’m without you.’ The word ‘love’ I noticed was still missing, and what the hell did ‘glabrous’ mean? I looked it up in a dictionary when I got back to my room and found as the answer ‘smooth skinned’. It made some sense for once, unlike most of the long words he liked to use.
Liza had not shown me the letter then, but even after the years which had passed I could remember the wetness in her eyes on the day she received the cheque, and how she told me with a kind of despair, ‘He writes such a lot of rubbish. I haven’t any time for such nonsense.’
‘You look unhappy,’ I told her. ‘Is it bad news?’
‘Oh, it’s only because I’ve been cutting up onions. What on earth does he mean by hearing a lot of mule bells?’
‘I suppose they have mules in Spain.’
‘But he’s off again from Spain, and he doesn’t even say where he’s going. And glabrous?’ she added. ‘What does glabrous mean? I never understand those grand words of his. But it’s always been his way. He’s an educated man.’
All the same she had cashed the cheque and given me a share, but she wouldn’t leave her basement. ‘I’m not going to live like a swell on him,’ she once said. ‘I’m keeping all I can till he rings on the door.’
As far as I knew she never received the new poste restante address for her reply, and after another year had passed she began to speak of him in the past tense as one who was dead. ‘Even if he was in prison,’ she said to me, ‘he would have written to me somehow.’
I took the letters with my own unfinished scrawl back with me to the two-roomed flat for which I had exchanged my bed-sitting-room in Soho after I received a share of the cheque, and in the weeks which followed I read the letters several times. It was as though I were looking through someone else’s eyes at the dying woman who had been my substitute mother, and as I seemed to peer at her between the lines, the mystery grew. What had kept those two so close and yet so strangely apart? Twice in my life after I left ‘home’, I had found myself in what I called love, and on each occasion the affair had ended (so far as I was concerned) quite happily, and I looked forward with increased confidence to some third girl whom I had not yet encountered. With both girls there had been, during brief absences, an exchange of what might be called, I suppose, love letters. (I had preserved the girls’ letters as a proof of how successful I had been, and I imagined that the girls with equal pride had probably kept mine.) There was certainly no lack of the word ‘love’ in any of these letters, and there were plenty of references to the pleasures we had shared together, but when I read the Captain’s letters I found myself entering a foreign land where the language was totally strange to me, and even when a word was identical to one in my own tongue, it seemed to have a quite different meaning.
‘Last night I had a strange dream about you, Liza. You had come into a fortune, and you had bought yourself a car and the worst of it all was you were a very bad driver and I was sure you would have an awful accident and you would be in hospital again and I wouldn’t know where. I woke up feeling you were far away so I’m writing this letter because there is no other news bad or good but this funambulist dream, but please go on hoping.’
This was an earlier letter than the one with the Spanish stamp. I looked up ‘funambulist’ too in the dictionary. I think he must have connected it with words like ‘funeral’ and ‘funereal’, for the true meaning ‘rope-walker’ certainly made no sense. He was not so educated as Liza thought.
Another letter began: ‘Please, please, don’t worry as I guess you are doing about the size of that cheque. I’m going to make a fortune one day which we’ll share. Only perhaps it would be safer for you – because I don’t want you to be worried by people asking questions again – if I make future cheques out to ‘Bearer’. I wouldn’t open an account if I were you – it’s always better to keep money in cash and no one’s going to rob your poor basement. The cheques will be signed for the time being Carver. I’ve never liked Cardigan – too honorifical – and I’ve had quite enough of Victor. Even Jim doesn’t like that name and he has reason. But you don’t need to worry, everything here is hunky-dory except for missing you. This is a dull business letter, but you know well enough the other things which I don’t want to write today. You are my life, Liza, remember that. A man has got to have an object for living and you are my object. Your Captain. PS. I wish all the same you would leave that basement and not let the Devil have your address, only let the post office have it for forwarding. Don’t reply to this letter until I let you have the poste restante of Carver because I think I may be moving around again.’
This must have been the last letter Liza received before she was taken to hospital; the postmark was indecipherable and the stamp was Colombian.
I took another letter at random. I felt that I was – for some reason valuable only to myself – in search of knowledge, and I remembered what my father had said about the Captain’s lies. But what, I asked myself, had the Captain to gain from lying to Liza when he was so far away? When I lived together with a girl I had too often found the necessity of lying – to preserve the relationship a bit longer, but what sort of a relationship could remain intact when two thousand miles intervened? Why keep up such a comedy? Or was it a comedy which the Captain was playing to himself alone to escape from his loneliness? It was possible that the next letter of an earlier date which I chose to read did suggest a partial explanation.
‘You are the only one besides myself I seem to have been able to help a little. To so many I seem to have done only harm. I get frightened when I think that one day I may harm you too like I’ve harmed the others. I’d rather die now than let that happen – but then my death might be harming you even more than my life has done. Dear Liza, I can talk more easily on a bit of paper than I can with my tongue. Perhaps I ought to live in the next room to you and just write you notes?’
Why, I wondered, did the Captain feel this need always to be away from a woman he loved. Did he really fear the harm he might do?
‘Sometimes when you wanted to talk to me the handle would turn and you would come in – if it was only to give me a cup of tea. How I would watch that handle to see it move, though the tea didn’t suit me all that well. I drink only whisky now. It’s better for the stomach, and tea which reminds me of you seems a bit too funambulist.’ That word again.
As always there was a PS as though he were reluctant finally to fold the paper and put it in an envelope. ‘Don’t be scared, Liza. I’m only joking. One whisky at six o’clock. I’m not turning into a boozer. I can’t. For the sort of work I’m doing I have to keep my wits dry as a bone.’
What work? I wondered. The word ‘wonder’ seemed to come only too often to my mind.
(2)
To me these were the oddest of love letters, if they were indeed love letters and not merely the expression of a deeply sentimental friendship.
They aroused my curiosity. I had been reading one half of a shared life and I wanted to read the other half. What sort of a reply did the Captain receive at the other end of the world? Perhaps it was the old ambition to be ‘a real writer’ which was latent in me and the curiosity of a would-be writer which drove me next to go and speak to that family Devil, my father. I want to continue this account and find a better conclusion than ‘I wonder perhaps.’
I had a good enough excuse – it was only right after all to tell him of Liza’s serious state. But even if she had already died I would have seen no necessity to more than inform my father of her funeral – if you could call a funeral the half hour which I would have to spend at a crematorium, perhaps with two shopkeepers and one of the tenants, who sometimes asked her to do a bit of cleaning.
So it was that I wrote to my father, telling him nothing of Liza’s state, for it might have robbed me of my only excuse for a meeting. I simply suggested that when next the Devil came to London, we should see each other. I had of course another reason. I was getting short of money. If Liza died I would have no claim on her ‘estate’ (I used the word to myself with irony), that unknown account into which she had perhaps against the Captain’s advice more than once paid a cheque made out to ‘Bearer’. If she had obeyed his instructions surely there would have been more than the few pounds I had found in the bedroom drawer, and yet there was no sign of a cheque book anywhere unless she had it with her when she was taken to hospital.
Before I had received a reply from my father, I went back to the basement and found another letter, which had been pushed under the door, carrying a stamp of Panama.
The Captain wrote: ‘I enclose another of Carver’s cheques to Bearer. This time for fifteen hundred pounds. It’s not as much as I meant to send, but it’s just enough for you to pack your bags and fly here to Panama City. There are two weekly planes from London, but you have to change at New York and I don’t much like the thought of your going through New York, especially alone. There are good reasons not to. Better take a plane to Amsterdam and come direct from there. It’s a long journey, so please travel first and take a glass or two of champagne to help you sleep. Telegraph Carver at Apt 361 Panama City date and time of arrival and the old man will be waiting impatiently for your plane to touch down. Don’t worry about Jim. It’s good for him to be on his own for a while and it won’t be very long before he joins us. We’ll see to that together. I have a job I think I can arrange for him here in a few weeks’ time. Tell him the mules are heavy laden and very close now, but I can’t wait for you to join me until then. I’ll soon be a rich man, Liza, I swear it, and all I have will be yours and his. I’m so excited by your coming, I can’t sleep. Come quickly and make Carver goluptious.’ I think he judged words by their sound and this time when I got round to checking he proved to be not so far out.