I hated the stuff but I wanted to seem as much of a local as possible, not some clumsy Englishman on holiday. He poured me a measure and left me a jug of water, and I diluted it slowly, watching the clear liquid turn milky. He served one or two other people, and then, as he wiped the countertop, I summoned the courage to ask him where Marian might be.
I tried to sound as casual as I could, and maybe it was just my bad French, or maybe it was the question itself that made him look strangely at me.
‘You are a friend of Marian’s, yes?’ he said, in English. It was half a statement, half a question that sought reassurance that I was bona fide.
I nodded.
‘Yes, but we’ve been . . . out of touch.’
He considered that for a moment.
‘Then you don’t know that she went back to America. Because of her heart.’
I was too surprised to say anything at first; in fact, I was unsure what surprised me more, that Marian was gone, or that there was something wrong with her.
‘Her heart?’ I asked.
At first, foolish as I am, I thought the barman used the word in its metaphorical, romantic sense.
‘Her heart?’ I repeated.
‘You didn’t know about her heart?’ he said, and he said it in such a way that I knew he was telling me I couldn’t have been much of a friend.
‘Marian has a heart condition. She has gone back to America to have an operation, which her parents will pay for.’
I finished my drink quickly and staggered back to my hotel. I didn’t go out that night, but lay on the filthy bed, trying to take it all in.
She had never told me about the problem with her heart, and why should she have done? Maybe she felt weak about it, or maybe it depressed her too much to think about. Whatever, it must have hurt her pride deeply to have to return to her parents in order for them to pay for the surgery. I could see the deal they would have struck: give up that silly life in Paris, and come home. And we’ll look after you.
I cut short my trip. I thought about trying to spy on Verovkin in Saint-Germain, but something stopped me, and that something was a deep misery over Marian that had risen out of the ground and threatened to swallow me. Instead, I returned home the very next day, and wrote a long letter to her. I knew her parents lived in Amagansett, and when I asked an American colleague of mine he told me it was a small place. Her family was wealthy and would surely be known; a letter addressed to her there would almost certainly reach her.
Amongst many other things, I apologised once more for my behaviour, for being foolish about Verovkin. I asked if she was well, and what her future held for her.
I sent the letter, and got no reply.
Chapter 17
I wrote again, a few weeks later.
Still no reply, and I presumed that along with her life in Paris, she had been ordered to cut everything else from that time too. That was what I told myself to start with, but as the weeks turned into months, I suspected there was another reason. I had let her down, forcing myself on her; she was clearly not interested in me in any other way than as a friend, someone she’d run into once, who had got her a meeting with her hero.
I didn’t like that explanation much, for it belittled what I felt about her, and to be honest, made me feel inadequate and unlovable. I had been nothing to her, when I wanted to be everything.
The only other explanation was that the letters were not getting to her, either because of the US postal service, or her parents’ intervention.
The months started to mount up on each other, and I forgot about Marian, in time.
It became a foolish episode in my youth. I was approaching my mid-thirties, and began to work on haemophilia as I’d promised Downey I would. I decided to put it behind me. Not just Marian, but everything. Paris. The war. Everything.
Ten years passed.
In the first of those, I met a woman called Sarah, in the second, we got married, and in the third, Sarah died.
I mourned for a while, and before the age of forty I found myself to be a widower, and childless.
That’s how things would have stayed. The years passed. My forty-second birthday came and went. And I would have grown older still, in ignorant bliss, and worked hard, and become respected in my field at last, but for the fact that one fine spring day, I received a letter.
As I sat at home opening my post over a late breakfast, I saw among the other envelopes an airmail one, from America. It was thin, so you could almost see through it, and as I held it my hands began to tremble, and the envelope with it. It had been sent to my old address, and forwarded on to me by the new tenants there.
I looked at the postmark, the stamps; they seemed so utterly foreign, so far away, so remote.
I slit the flap with a buttery knife and three folds of paper dropped out in front of me, and I read.
Dear Mr Jackson,
I don’t know if you’ll have moved by this time, or indeed whether you will get this letter, but I hope you do, because you sound like a kind gentleman.
You wrote to my daughter, Marian, ten years ago, and from your letters, I can see that you two were friends during her time in Paris. You will have to forgive that when we received those letters, my husband and I were not in a position to answer them, nor, I must add, did we understand what you had written.
My husband died a few months ago, and since then I have started to go through old papers and so on, and last week I found your three letters to Marian. We had only opened the first one; the second and third we put in a box with the first and then forgot about them.
Mr Jackson, I will be honest and say that my husband, though he loved Marian very much, did not show that love very well. He could be a difficult man and he took it badly when she left us to go to Paris. Many things in this house were run the way he wanted them to be run, but I mourned for my daughter, for her leaving us with such bad blood. My husband never accepted that she wanted to live her own life, her own way, and I was too scared to do anything differently, so I obeyed my husband. He is gone now, and I am old, and I start to see things differently, and I realise the mistakes I’ve made.
But that is not why I’m writing to you. As I say, you seem like an honest fellow, and I want to set you straight upon a couple of things, so that you do not have to go through life wondering about them.
The first is this: it seems you feel you made a fool of yourself in Paris in some way. On that note, let me tell you that Ann, Marian’s sister, told me she once had a letter from Paris in which Marian spoke of meeting a lovely Englishman, that she was going to Cambridge to see him, that she wondered if she might fall in love with him.
The second is, I’m afraid, harder to tell. You seem to think there was something wrong with Marian, her heart, I think? That she came back to the States to have an operation here? Both of these things are not true. She was quite well, there was nothing wrong with her heart, nor, for that matter, was there anything seriously wrong with her, ever. And she never came back home. We received word that she died in Paris in 1951. She was buried in a cemetery there. I do miss her so very much. So now there’s just Ann and me, and she’s a married mom and always busy, though happily she lives nearby and I see her every week.
My! You don’t want to know my life story; I just wanted you to have the truth so you never had to think, what if . . . ?
Thank you for caring for my daughter. Even if it was for a short time, it makes me glad to know somebody loved her.
Sincerely yours,
Margery Fisher, Mrs.
The letter dropped from my hands on to the table, and I realised I could not read any more, could not see, because my eyes had filled with tears.
TWO
Avignon
August, 1961
The Saviour of Men appeared to Catherine while she was praying.
And placing the right hand on Catherine’s neck, he drew her to the wound of his sacred side, saying to her, ‘Drink, daughter, that luscious beverage which flows fro
m my side, it will inebriate thy soul with sweetness.’
Catherine, thus placed at the very fountain of life, applied her mouth to the sacred wound of the Saviour; she drank long and with as much avidity as abundance; in fine, she detached herself from the sacred source, satiated, but still eager.
From The Life of St Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua
After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.
I Corinthians 11:25, King James Bible
Chapter 1
A week passed, at the end of which I realised I had been waking from a dream, a dream that had lasted a decade.
I did not take the truth about Marian’s death easily; it was as if I could not admit it was the truth. Yet I read and reread her mother’s letter a hundred times, and as I did so, question after question piled upon me, until I could not breathe.
One morning, I woke at four o’clock, yelling a wordless sound, just from fear. I lurched out of bed, my heart pounding, and though I went for a long walk in the yellow dawn light, I could not shift an unnameable terror inside me.
Looking back, I think that might have been when I started to change, but I cannot be sure. Maybe it had happened long before that. Maybe it had begun in a hole in the ground in Paris in 1944.
And who knows? Could there have been other, still older things I had not even thought of as yet that might have lain at the root of my motivations? I had not begun to have such thoughts; these were places of which I was not yet aware.
In those ten years, I had almost totally forgotten about Marian. She had left, angry with me, or so I thought; she had wanted nothing more to do with me. I had written her three letters; she had replied to none.
As I reread Margery Fisher’s letter, questions I had stopped thinking about years before were joined by new ones. How had she died? Really? The letter didn’t specify. Where was she buried exactly? And why in Paris? Surely they’d had the money to have her body brought home to the States. There were these, and many other, questions, but the one line in the letter I read a thousand times raised the biggest question of all. Was it really true she’d thought she might fall in love with me? Had she?
If not, what happened that stopped her, why did she change her mind about me? And if she had fallen in love with me, then why did she pull away? If I closed my eyes, even after all that time, I could still see her pale skin that day I tried to kiss her, when anger crossed her face, when she walked away.
With some pain, I brought back an image of her that morning, tried to see the emotion there once again.
She’d said one word so forcefully: ‘No’.
Now I wondered what she meant by that, exactly. That she didn’t want to kiss me, that I should stop, was obvious, but why? Why didn’t she want me to kiss her when once she’d felt she was falling in love?
I grew angry as I woke from this ten-year dream, and suddenly felt useless. I was forty-two and I felt as though I was at the end of my life, that I had sailed down a series of dead-end paths without even having my eyes open.
I had few friends. There was Hunter, of course, and I suppose he was more than enough friend to make up for having so few. I rarely saw Donald, who now had three children, and though we met occasionally on my infrequent trips to London, he was as busy as I was. And I was busy. I had set up and was running a small research unit, trying to develop better ways to help haemophiliacs through improved plasma products, if not actually find a cure. We had some small successes, and started to see that we were on the verge of emerging from a dark age, a very long dark age, for the sufferers of that illness. When I began the work in the unit, there was still not even a proper definition of the disease; its name, ‘love of blood’, seemed a powerful link to a time not so far back when the various awful cures for the ‘bleeders’, as they were known, included mercury and leeches. Even as I started my work, I learned about a similar unit to ours in Oxford where they were working with snake venom. It was preposterous to me that we seemed to be no better off in our consideration of a cure for the disease than were the doctors of that most famous sufferer of all, Alexei Romanov. It had taken a witch doctor to keep him alive, and without him Alexei’s death had been only a matter of time. Lenin’s bullets had cheated the disease of a famous scalp.
The work was slow and to many people would have been very boring, but it occupied me, hour after hour, as I stared through the lenses of the microscope at pink-stained slides of haemoglobin in various anomalous states.
Every night I would go home, to my large empty house. Many years before Margery Fisher’s letter arrived, I had moved from the college flat to a bigger place of my own, on Hills Road, so I would be near the new hospital when it was opened. Sarah, my wife, and I had chosen it, imagining we would fill its many rooms with children, children that never came. When Sarah became ill, that thought evaporated, and she went quickly. She died before we even completed on the deal, but I moved there anyway, not knowing what else to do, and in that big house I rattled around, living, I could see now, like a ghost.
I had no children, my wife was dead, and I hadn’t met anyone else since her death, though in fact I wonder now if I was even looking.
I had been dreaming.
For ten years, I had been dreaming, and now a letter from America had pulled me awake into a reality I didn’t want to acknowledge, because if it was true that I had been dreaming, I had woken into a nightmare.
Chapter 2
At the end of that week of waking, I went to see Hunter.
It was a beautiful and hot day in early May, and we left his rather stuffy and dark rooms and walked out to the Backs. The trees towered above us, in full bright green leaf, and students and tourists eyed each other on the river.
We saw none of that, as I told Hunter about the letter. He had all the same questions, and I told him that I’d written to Marian’s mother, asking how she had died, and where exactly she was buried. And about the Estonian.
‘When did you send it?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t yet. I wrote it last night. I’ll send it later today.’
‘Are you sure you want to?’
He stopped walking for a moment, which I took to be a sign that this was an important question.
‘Yes. I think so. Why?’
‘Consider the old girl, Charles. There she is, sitting in her big house, sad, but happy in her memory of her daughter, and she gets another letter raking up the past. Are you sure you want to do that to her?’
I can see now that he had a point. I didn’t then.
‘She said herself in her letter that she wanted me to know the truth, so I didn’t have to live not knowing. I’m only doing the same for her.’
‘But she does know. Or she thinks she does. She presumably thinks her daughter was run down by a motor car, or drowned in the Seine, or whatever they told her. She’s dealt with that and, from what you’ve said, it sounds like she’s come to a point of peace with it. And you want to tell her the truth, the real truth, but you don’t even know what that is. That some man you saw in a tunnel in the war killed her?’
I shook my head.
‘I don’t know. I . . .’
I stopped. I found it hard to think, let alone to explain.
‘You don’t know what happened any more than she did. Are you sure this Estonian was even the man in the bunker? What makes you think he had anything to do with Marian’s death, however that happened? You have no proof of that.’
There I had to disagree with Hunter.
‘No, on the contrary, I think it highly unlikely that Marian died in an accident when she was also consorting with a murderer. That’s the most likely explanation.’
‘The two are not connected,’ Hunter persisted. ‘You’re displaying false logic. It’s just as likely that she died from some other cause as by his hand, and anyway, there is absolutely no evidence to show he had anything to do with h
er death. Tell me! What would you say if you walked into a French police station? That some man you once saw just once, mark you, dining with the young lady, is a murderer? Why? They’d laugh at you. It was all so long ago, Charles. Why don’t you leave it be? Wouldn’t that be better?’
‘It’s not a question of better,’ I snapped at him. I regretted it immediately, but I could see my anger had hurt him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I stared at the punters on the river as if I was looking straight through them. ‘I’m sorry, Hunter.’
We parted soon after that, and I was left thinking about what Hunter had said. Why not just let it go?
He was right, it would probably be better to do so, but it wasn’t a question of what was best. It was a question of what I had to do.
I’d mourned Sarah when she’d died, of course, but it was only with Marian’s mother’s letter that tears had come, and now it seemed they would not stop.
I had to find out what had really happened, and though Hunter was right that I had nothing I could ever report to the police, I knew that Verovkin was in some way connected, was responsible.
How did I know?
All I had to do was shut my eyes, and think my way back to a hole in the ground in Paris as the city erupted in jubilation, and there, in that hole, was that man.
Looking at me.
And it was that look that told me I was right.
He had killed Marian.
Chapter 3
At the end of May I managed to get away to Paris for a few days. I had in the end sent a revised version of my letter to Margery Fisher, in which I asked for details of Marian’s death, but said nothing of my fears.
Arriving in the city by train, I began to hunt around the Place de Clichy, but I found nothing. No one at Marian’s old address had ever heard of her; Jean, the barman in her local, had moved on too, no one even remembered him, though strangely, in that frustrating way in which memory often behaves, after ten years I had been able to recall his name when before I couldn’t.