Black Dogs

  I shall never understand why I did not know or guess that Jean and Harper’s violence extended to my niece. That she let twenty years go by before she told anyone shows how suffering can isolate a child. I did not know then how-adults can set about children, and perhaps I would not have wanted to know; I would be leaving soon, and already my guilt was growing. By the end of that summer, soon after my eighteenth birthday, Harper had left for good and I had my A levels and a place at Oxford. I should have been overjoyed a month later when I carried out my books and records from the apartment to a friend’s van; my two-year plan had worked, I was out, I was free. But Sally’s dogged, suspicious questions as she tracked me backwards and forwards between our room and the pavement were an indictment of betrayal. ‘Where are you going? Why are you going? When are you coming back?’ To this last, sensing my evasiveness, my clotted silence, she returned again and again. And when she thought to lure me back, to divert me from a History degree with the suggestion, so pertly, so optimistically put, that we play instead, Sailing to a New Place, I put down my armful of books and ran out to the van to sit in the passenger seat and weep. I thought I knew only too well just how she felt, or how she would feel; it was nearly midday and Jean was still sleeping off the gin and pills with which she was mourning Harper’s departure. I would wake her before I left, but in some important respect Sally was on her own. And so she remains.

  Neither Sally, Jean nor Harper play a part in what follows. Nor do the Langleys, Nugents or Silversmiths. I left them all behind. My guilt, my sense of betrayal would not permit me to return to Notting Hill, not even for a weekend. I could not bear to undergo another parting from Sally. The thought that I was inflicting on her the very loss I had suffered myself intensified my loneliness, and obliterated the excitement of my first term. I became a quietly depressed student, one of those dull types practically invisible to their contemporaries, apparently excluded by the very laws of nature from the process of making friends. I made for the nearest hearth. This one was in North Oxford and belonged to a fatherly tutor and his wife. For a short while I shone there, and a few people told me I was clever. But this was not enough to stop me leaving, North Oxford first, then, in my fourth term, the University itself. For years afterwards I continued to leave – addresses, jobs, friends, lovers. Occasionally I managed to obscure my irreducible sense of childish unbelonging by making friends with someone’s parents. I would be invited in, I would come to life, then I would leave.

  This sorry madness came to an end with my marriage, in my mid thirties, to Jenny Tremaine. My existence began. Love, to borrow Sylvia Plath’s phrase, set me going. I came to life for good, or rather, life came to me; I should have learned from my experience with Sally that the simplest way of restoring a lost parent was to become one yourself; that to succour the abandoned child within, there was no better way than having children of your own to love. And just when I no longer had need of them, I acquired parents in the form of in-laws, June and Bernard Tremaine. But there was no hearth. When I first met them they were living in separate countries and were barely on speaking terms. June had long before retreated to a remote hill top in southern France and was about to become very ill. Bernard was still a public figure who did all his entertaining in restaurants. They rarely saw their children. For their part, Jenny and her two brothers had despaired of their parents.

  The habits of a lifetime could not be instantly erased. Somewhat to Jenny’s annoyance, I persisted in a friendship with June and Bernard. In conversations with them over several years, I discovered that the emotional void, the feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one that had afflicted me between the ages of eight and thirty-seven had an important intellectual consequence: I had no attachments, I believed in nothing. It was not that I was a doubter, or that I had armed myself with the useful scepticism of a rational curiosity, or that I saw all arguments from all sides; there was simply no good cause, no enduring principle, no fundamental idea with which I could identify, no transcendent entity whose existence I could truthfully, passionately or quietly assert.

  Unlike June and Bernard. They began together as communists, then went their separate ways. But their capacity, their appetite, for belief never diminished. Bernard was a gifted entomologist; all his life he remained committed to the elation and limited certainties of science; he replaced his communism with thirty years’ devoted advocacy of numerous causes for social and political reform. June came to God in 1946 through an encounter with evil in the form of two dogs. (Bernard found this construction of the event almost too embarrassing to discuss.) A malign principle, a force in human affairs that periodically advances to dominate and destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then retreats to await the next occasion; it was a short step from this to a luminous countervailing spirit, benign and all-powerful, residing within and accessible to us all; perhaps not so much a step as a simultaneous recognition. Both principles were incompatible, she felt, with the materialism of her politics, and she left the Party.

  Whether June’s black dogs should be regarded as a potent symbol, a handy catch phrase, evidence of her credulity or a manifestation of a power that really exists, I cannot say. In this memoir I have included certain incidents from my own life – in Berlin, Majdanek, Les Salces and St Maurice de Navacelles – that are open equally to Bernard and to June’s kind of interpretation. Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest. In Bernard’s company, I always sensed there was an element missing from his account of the world, and that it was June who held the key. The assurance of his scepticism, his invincible atheism made me wary; it was too arrogant, too much was closed off, too much denied. In conversations with June, I found myself thinking like Bernard; I felt stifled by her expressions of faith, and bothered by the unstated assumption of all believers that they are good because they believe what they believe, that faith is virtue, and, by extension, unbelief is unworthy or, at best, pitiable.

  It will not do to argue that rational thought and spiritual insight are separate domains and that opposition between them is falsely conceived. Bernard and June often talked to me about ideas that could never sit side by side. Bernard, for example, was certain that there was no direction, no patterning in human affairs or fates other than that which was imposed by human minds. June could not accept this; life had a purpose and it was in our interests to open ourselves to it. Nor will it do to suggest that both these views are correct. To believe everything, to make no choices, amounts to much the same thing, to my mind, as believing in nothing at all. I am uncertain whether our civilisation at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me. But I would be false to my own experience if I did not declare my belief in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life. I dedicate this memoir to my wife, Jenny, and to Sally, my niece, who continues to suffer the consequences of her childhood; may she too find this love.

  I married into a divided family in which the children, in the interests of self-preservation, had to a degree turned their backs on their parents. My tendency to play the cuckoo caused some unhappiness to Jenny and her brothers for which I apologise. I have taken a number of liberties, the most flagrant of which has been to recount certain conversations never intended for the record. But then, the occasions I announced to others, or even to myself, that I was ‘on the job’ were so rare that a few indiscretions became an absolute necessity. It is my hope that June’s ghost, and Bernard’s too – if some essence of his consciousness, against all his convictions, persists – will forgive me.

  Part One

  Wiltshire

  THE FRAMED PICTURE June Tremaine kept on the locker by her bed was there to remind herself, as much as inform her visitors, of the pretty girl whose face, unlike her husband’s, gave no indication of the di
rection it was set to take. The snapshot dates from 1946, a day or two after their wedding and a week before they set off on their honeymoon to Italy and France. The couple are arm in arm by the railings near the entrance to the British Museum. Perhaps it was their lunch break, for they both worked nearby, and they were not given permission to leave their jobs until a few days before they set off. They lean in towards each other with a quaint concern for being cut off at the edges of the picture. Their smiles at the camera are of genuine delight. Bernard you could not possibly mistake. Then as always, six feet three, outsized hands and feet, a preposterous, good-natured jaw, and jug-handle ears made even more comical by the pseudo-military haircut. Forty-three years did only predictable damage, and that only at the margins – thinner hair, thicker eyebrows, coarser skin – while the essential man, the astonishing apparition, was the same clumsy beaming giant in 1946 as in 1989 when he asked me to take him to Berlin.

  June’s face, however, veered from its appointed course much as her life did, and it is barely possible to discern in the snapshot the old face benignly wreathing into welcome when one entered her private room. The twenty-five-year-old woman has a sweet round face and a jolly smile. Her going-away perm is too tight, too prim, and does not suit her at all. Spring sunshine illuminates the strands that are already cutting loose. She wears a short jacket with high padded shoulders and a matching pleated skirt – the timid extravagance of cloth associated with the post-war New Look. Her white blouse has a wide open V-neck daringly tapered to her cleavage. The collar is turned back outside the jacket to give her the breezy, English rose look of the Land Girl posters. From 1938 she was a member of the Socialist Cycling Club of Amersham. One arm tucks her handbag into her side, the other arm is linked with her man’s. She leans against him, her head well short of his shoulder.

  The photograph now hangs in the kitchen of our house in the Languedoc. I have often studied it, usually when alone. Jenny, my wife, June’s daughter, suspects my predatory nature and is irritated by my fascination with her parents. She has spent long enough getting free of them and she is right to feel my interest might be dragging her back. I put my face up close, trying to see the future life, the future face, the single-mindedness that followed a singular act of courage. The cheery smile has forced a tiny pucker of skin in the creaseless forehead, directly above the space between the eyebrows. In later life it was to become the dominant feature in a seamy face, a deep vertical fold that rose from the bridge of her nose to divide her forehead. Perhaps I am only imagining the hardness beneath the smile, buried in the line of the jaw, a firmness, a fixity of opinion, a scientific optimism about the future; the photograph was taken the morning June and Bernard signed up as members of the Communist Party of Great Britain at the headquarters in Gratton Street. They are leaving their jobs and are free to declare their allegiances which throughout the duration of the war have wavered. Now, when many have their doubts after the Party’s vacillations – was the war a noble liberating anti-fascist cause or predatory imperialist aggression? – and some are resigning their membership, June and Bernard have taken the plunge. Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring. They are heading off across the Channel to the chaos of Northern Europe where they have been advised not to go. But they are determined to test their new liberties, personal and geographical. From Calais they will be making south for the Mediterranean spring. The world is new and at peace, fascism has been the irrefutable evidence of capitalism’s terminal crisis, the benign revolution is at hand, and they are young, just married and in love.

  Bernard persisted with his membership, with much agonising, until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Then he considered his resignation long overdue. This change of heart represented a well-documented logic, a history of disillusion shared by a whole generation. But June lasted only a few months, until the confrontation on her honeymoon that gave this memoir its title, and hers was a profound alteration, a metempsychosis mapped in the transformation of her face. How did a round face become so long? Could it really have been the life, rather than the genes, that caused that little crease above the eyebrows pushed up by her smile to take root and produce the wrinkle tree that reached right to the hairline? Her own parents had nothing so strange in their old age. By the end of her life, by the time she was installed at the nursing home, it was a face to match the elderly Auden’s. Perhaps years of Mediterranean sunshine toughened and buckled the complexion, and years of solitude and reflection distended the features, then folded them in on themselves. The nose lengthened with the face, and the chin did too, then seemed to change its mind and attempt the return by growing outwards in a curve. In repose her face had a chiselled, sepulchral look; it was a statue, a mask carved by a shaman to keep at bay the evil spirit.

  In this last there may have been some simple truth. She might have grown her face to accommodate her conviction that she had confronted and been tested by a symbolic form of evil. ‘No, you clot. Not symbolic!’ I hear her correcting me. ‘Literal, anecdotal, true. Don’t you know, I was nearly killed!’

  I do not know if this was actually the case or not, but in memory each of my few visits to her in the nursing home in the spring and summer of 1987 took place on days of rain and high wind. Perhaps there was only one such day, and it has blown itself across the others. On each occasion, it seems, I entered the place – a mid-Victorian country house – at a run from the car park set too far away by the old stable block. The horse chestnuts were roaring and shaking, the uncut grass was flattened, silver sides up, against the ground. I had pulled my jacket over my head, and I was damp and hot with irritation at another disappointing summer. I paused in the entrance hall, waiting to get my breath and for my temper to settle. Was it really just the rain? I would be pleased to see June, but the place itself brought me down. Its tiredness reached into my bones. The oak-effect panelling pressed in on all sides, and the carpet, patterned in kinetic swirls of red and musty yellow, rose up to assault my eye and restrict my breathing. The uncirculated air, held in long-term residence by a system of regulation fire-break doors, carried in suspension the accreted flavours of bodies, clothes, perfumes, fried breakfasts. A shortage of oxygen made me yawn; did I have the energy for the visit? I could as easily have passed the untended reception desk and wandered the corridors until I found an empty room and a bed made up. I would slip between the institutional sheets. Check-in formalities would be concluded later, after I had been woken for my supper, brought on a rubber-wheeled trolley. Afterwards, I would take a sedative and doze again. The years would slip by ...

  At this, a minor flutter of panic restored me to my purpose. I crossed to the reception desk and struck the sprung bell with the flat of my palm. It was another false touch, this antique hotel bell. The intended atmosphere was that of a country retreat; the achieved effect was that of an overgrown bed and breakfast, the kind of place where the ‘bar’ is a locked cupboard in the dining room, open at seven o’clock for one hour. And behind these divergent presentations was the reality itself – a profitable nursing home specialising, without the wholesome confidence to acknowledge the fact in its literature, in the care of the terminally ill.

  A small-print complication in the policy, and the insurance company’s surprising severity, deprived June of the hospice she had wanted. Everything about her return to England some years before had been complicated and distressing. There was the tortuous route we took to a final confirmation, with reversals of expert opinion along the way, that she had an untreatable disease, a relatively rare form of leukaemia; Bernard’s distress; transporting her possessions from France and separating from them the unwanted junk; finances, property, accommodation; a legal fight with the insurance company which had to be abandoned; a series of difficulties in the sale of June’s London flat; long car trips north for treatment from a dim elderly fellow said to have the power of
healing in his hands. June insulted him and these same hands almost slapped her face. The first year of my marriage was completely overshadowed. Jenny and I, as well as her brothers and friends of Bernard and June, were drawn into the vortex, a furious expense of nervous energy we mistook for efficiency. Only when Jenny gave birth to our first child, Alexander, in 1983, did we – Jenny and I, at least – come to our senses.

  The receptionist appeared and gave me the visitor’s book to sign. Five years on, June was still alive. She could have lived in her Tottenham Court Road flat. She should have stayed in France. She was, so Bernard had remarked, taking as much time over dying as the rest of us. But the flat had been sold, the arrangements were in place, and the space she had made around her in life had been closed off, filled in by our worthy efforts. She chose to remain in a nursing home where staff and deathbound residents alike consoled themselves with magazines and TV quiz shows and soaps booming off the glossy, pictureless, bookless walls of the recreation room. Our mad arranging had been nothing more than evasion. No one had wanted to contemplate the appalling fact. No one, but June. After her return from France, and before the nursing home was found, she moved in with Bernard and worked on the book she was hoping to finish. No doubt she also practised the meditations she described in her popular pamphlet, ‘Ten Meditations’. She had been content to let us spin about with the practicalities. When her strength ebbed far more slowly than medically predicted, she was equally content to accept the Chestnut Reach Nursing Home as uniquely her responsibility. She had no wish to move out, back into the world. She claimed that her life was usefully simplified, and that her isolation in a house of TV watchers suited her, even did her good. Moreover, it was her fate.