CHAPTER 3

  That occasion was the nearest Chantal and I came to a row before we married. She sheltered in the shed but the corrugated iron roof leaked and made her hair wet. I did not come the moment she called and that annoyed her, even though she would have been no drier if I had and it was me who got soaked running the ten yards from where I had been standing. The rain came at a bewildering variety of angles and with a seemingly personal ferocity. It stung my cheeks and head and all but blotted out the house. The old comparison with stair-rods did not seem such an exaggeration. But I was laughing, which irritated her, and I was keen to tell her about what I had seen, which further irritated her. The surface of our relationship was broken by a deep exasperation which I had not seen before. It was as if the sea, when it was calm and bright, had shown for an instant a glimpse of something sinister.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said, emphasizing the last word. It was only a moment and soon she was scolding me for being wet in a manner that anticipated her capacity for prompt and opinionated motherhood, a quality which in those days I found charming. I relished the attention.

  Edward arrived not long afterwards. He rang and said he had booked into a small hotel in Antibes, having been unable to find anywhere both open and available in Villefranche. Tyrrel had not asked him to stay. He was slightly reluctant to meet before seeing Tyrrel but I told him we had something important to tell him and so we all three had dinner on his first night at M. Englert’s, down by the old harbour. Out of season Englert’s is a restful place in which you can sit all day over your coffee with a paper or a book. If I were a writer I would work in places like that, taking a table in a window so that I could watch the world go by, private, unmolested, unseeing when I didn’t want, but plenty to watch when I did.

  Over dinner that night we all three had the kind of conversation that made Chantal and me realize there was something we missed about London after all, only we had not known until we tasted it again. Edward wore a blazer and tie, rather more formal than his usual dress but it soon ceased to seem out of place and by the end of the evening it felt as if he were the host and we the strangers. His French was good - better than mine - and it came out that he had spent most of his school holidays with French relatives in Chantilly. That was the first time it struck me how little I knew of his background. He came from Yorkshire where his father was a solicitor - his mother too, I think, though they were divorced - and he had a brother and sister of whom he saw little. Most people refer quite often to their past but Edward hardly ever did. Indeed, he referred very little to himself at all. He would talk about what was going on, about books or about people and he would always question whomever he was with, getting them to talk. In this way he gave the impression of being communicative while in fact keeping himself in reserve. There was also something about him that discouraged questions; the impression that things which may have been important to others were, when it came to him, too trivial to bother with. It was as if he were hardly interested in the accidents of history and personality but only in, his purpose, which could never be discussed in any detail without breaching the work-in-progress rule.

  When we came to relate our encounter with Tyrrel it seemed rather thinner than it had at the time. We must have made it sound as if we were building up to an exchange of words or perhaps even a message, whereas there was only my description of what I had seen in the rain. I was repetitive and laboured it more than I should have, to the point where hyperbole threatened coherence. Edward’s blue eyes and regular features attended without a flicker, which I found more disconcerting than if he had shown signs of restlessness and embarrassment, like Chantal. I ended by urging him to see Tyrrel before he died of a heart attack or did away with himself. He said they were to meet the following night and, perhaps as a kindness, suggested the three of us meet again in Englert’s the night after.

  I shall not relate all of what follows in the sequence in which it revealed itself to me. If I did, you would read in the very fog in which I myself lived for so many years. There must be many of us who think we know where we are and are sure about what we see before us, until people or events prove us wrong, as they not uncommonly do. When that happens to other people one can view it with equanimity; when it happens to you it feels uniquely invidious and unfair, almost an outrage, perhaps as dying might feel. And even now, looking back on it, I know I cannot see everything.

  On the morning after Edward had seen Tyrrel - therefore, on the day on which we were to dine again - it was announced that Tyrrel had died during the night. Perhaps it was an omen that Chantal and I went all that day without knowing, albeit an omen with more reference to me than to her. It is one of the features of our world that we may receive news of events in other continents virtually simultaneously with their occurrence while our neighbour’s death on the other side of the bathroom wall may happen unnoticed. Not, of course, that Tyrrel was a neighbour but his death only a few miles along the coast was an international event of which we knew nothing because we did not bother with television or radio that day and because those that did had no pleasure in passing on news which they assumed everyone else to know. Thus are we deprived of the daily discovery and discussion of events which must in the past have contributed so much to local self-importance. Whatever the reason, Chantal and I wandered about all day without anyone thinking to mention Tyrrel.

  It was only when we were about to go and meet Edward that Catherine, Chantal’s younger sister, said: ‘You were lucky to see that English author. I wonder if he died when your friend was with him.’

  We hurried to M. Englert’s and waited but Edward didn’t come. We said we were sure he would have rung if he couldn’t make it and then, because we weren’t, I telephoned the hotel. They said there was no answer from his extension. I was all for going round and seeing but Chantal sensibly insisted we eat first. Next I was seized with an irrational fear that Edward was somehow responsible for Tyrrel’s death and was even now being accused of murder. Chantal nearly choked with laughter. Why, she asked, did I suspect Edward of doing violence? He seemed the most calm, the most polite and peaceable of men. What I couldn’t explain was that it wasn’t so much the likelihood or otherwise of Edward’s killing Tyrrel that concerned me - it is curious that I took it for granted that he was capable of it - so much as the feeling that something had happened to him.

  We did go to his hotel after dinner but there was no answer from his room. I suggested to Chantal that we borrow her father’s car and drive along to Cap Ferrat. She was incredulous: why was I so worried? Edward was not a child, he knew how to pick up the telephone if he needed help. And Tyrrel was dead, so what point was there in staring at his house in the dark? She had never seen me like this, she said; I was worse than a worried parent, stupid (she used that word again). Nevertheless I persisted and we did borrow the car, having checked that Edward had not telephoned.

  It was a quiet night and it did not take long to drive to Cap Ferrat. I thought Chantal was going to be irritated with me again but she seemed resignedly amused, or perhaps just resigned. There was a heavy sprinkling of stars and from the road that ran along the bottom of Cap Ferrat the moon laid a rippled path across the bay to the fort. We stopped by the steps we had come down during the squall.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ said Chantal.

  The absurdity of what I was doing struck me as I climbed the steps alone. To be more accurate, I was struck by how absurd I must appear but I didn’t feel absurd at all. I felt that I was doing what had to be done though I couldn’t have said why. I am not psychic; at least, no more so than most people. I have no talent for telepathy or anything like that and no particular beliefs. Throughout this account I am trying to record what happened, or appeared to happen, because it may be happening still. But after all these years I cannot always be clear as to what did happen, especially as it was not clear at the time. Contrary to what is often said, the everyday language we use for describing what happens to us is quite well suited to its purpose; it is - or can be made to be - precise. It is much more difficult to describe the half-world in which things half-happen, in which something may become visible only when it is looked for, audible only when listened for, present only when expected. Nor is it enough to write off such half-things as the products of a single credulous mind since by chance or design they often impinge upon others. There are, I believe, stranger phenomena known to physics: sub-atomic particles occupying no space but having velocity and direction and a pattern of behaviour that is modified by the mere fact of being observed.

  I felt rather like one myself that night. The steps were uneven and overhung by bushes but eventually I found the place above the shed where I had stood in the rain. There were one or two lights in the house but none in the windows where I had watched Tyrrel and the woman, though the moon was bright enough for me to see a little way into those rooms. I stood for some time, nonplussed. I don’t know what I had expected but I had expected something, and now there was nothing. I felt disappointed and frustrated, even cheated. I stared stubbornly at the big empty windows. A creature rustled in the grass nearby and a breeze stirred the olive trees. I was conscious of keeping Chantal waiting below but still I stared. I felt drawn towards the windows and it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet got to where I was going. A few steps farther up there was a gap in the fence where palings had come away and were hanging askew. I ducked through into the long grass and tangled undergrowth. It sounded to my own ears that I was making a great deal of noise. I realized that the house might well be occupied, that I might be arrested in such a thief-conscious neighbourhood and that no explanation I could give would be at all credible; but I pressed on through the undergrowth until I stood in a clear area about twenty yards down from the house and in front of the two windows. I did not worry about the moonlight.

  I will not say definitely that I saw something, though I think I did. What I do assert, even after all these years, is that I had the most vivid impression that I was being seen. The anxiety I had felt all evening and that had brought me there in the absence of any good reason, evaporated. I felt that this was what I had come for, as if I had been summoned. I was neither frightened nor particularly excited and I no longer thought of Edward. I continued to stare at the windows but calmly, without urgency now, and it was after a while of this that I thought I saw the woman again. She was standing in the upper window looking down at me. I say ‘thought’ because I wasn’t sure even then whether I was actually seeing her or simply experiencing a very strong impression of her. Not that it mattered; even a moment afterwards I could not have described her features. I could only have said that I felt I was held in a sharp, interrogative gaze.

  It may have been some trick of the moonlight and perhaps that would be the sensible thing to believe. Yet there was a definite moment when it finished and it seemed to me that she turned away. My last image was of bare arms at first folded, and then raised as she turned, again as if into an embrace. I probably imagined the figure of a man behind her, deep in the room. After that there was no more and I no longer felt any reason to be there. I picked my way back through the undergrowth to the gap in the fence and walked slowly down the steps to Chantal and the car. When she asked me if I had seen anything I said I had not.

  I was no longer anxious about Edward and when I saw him late the next morning sitting in the window of M. Englert’s, as I was on my way back from the market, I was not even surprised. He sat with a cup of coffee and a cigar, pen and paper beside him. I had never seen him smoke before.

  We greeted each other with a handshake, something we never did in England. I saw he had been doodling on the paper, large circular shapes with much interweaving. ‘I was expecting you,’ he said.

  His manner seemed to obviate questions as to why he had neither telephoned nor turned up the night before. It was as if his presence excused everything.

  I sat down. ‘I’ve never seen you smoke.’

  He put the cigar to his lips and shrugged, his elbows on the table. His shirt was open at the neck, his sleeves were rolled up and he had not shaved that morning. ‘What happened?’ I asked, slightly irritated.

  ‘We had good dinner and good talk. He had a heart attack after I left. He was found in the morning.’

  ‘I had a mad idea that you’d be implicated somehow and that the police would blame you.’

  ‘I had to make a statement. I was the last to see him.’

  ‘What about his woman?’

  ‘Apart from her.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘She was hardly there. It was him and me.’

  ‘Him and me’, with its suggestion of gladiatorial combat, seemed to have been the theme of the evening. From what Edward told me then it sounded as if he had triumphed in a struggle that had nevertheless enhanced his respect for his opponent. The rest I learned years later under very different circumstances, by which time it was clear that neither the struggle nor the result had been what he thought.

  Edward told me that morning that the first thing that had struck him about Tyrrel was the Old Man’s age, for which, like me, he had been unprepared. Tyrrel’s literary fecundity and the attention that was paid to him made one think of him as a much younger man, but his spine was curved into a stoop, his movements were slow and uncertain, his hands knobbled and stiff and his blue eyes - that evening, anyway - were rheumy. Yet his mind was more than sharp enough, as Edward was to discover, though at the time Edward’s reaction was to feel guilty at having attacked so frail an old man, even in print. Whisky helped dispel the guilt. They sat in Tyrrel’s study - the room in which I had seen him - which Edward described as bare and uncluttered, making it sound like his own. Tyrrel congratulated him on the review.

  ‘I would not say you hit the nail on the head,’ Tyrrel said, ‘but you knocked it a good way in. Nonetheless, the lid is not quite down. There are more nails.’

  ‘I wasn’t meaning to bury you.’

  The Old Man smiled. ‘The fox chasing its tail is a good analogy of the way I have frequently written. Style itself becomes the end and people forget to ask what it is for. You cannot entirely blame them. There is trickery in all art and if no one complains that a book is more trickery than substance there must be art enough in the trickery, which then becomes admirable. But what you said about my last book was wrong. You mishit that nail.’

  This was the novel based on the Faust theme that Edward’s review was ostensibly about. It was, as I think I have said, less artistic and selfconscious than its predecessors, little more than a statement of its theme, a dramatic but bald assertion that in the end a price is paid.

  ‘The simplicity of that book,’ said Tyrrel, ‘is deliberate.

  It is not due to lack of art or energy. It reflects the reality it describes. It is neither an aberration nor a throw-back but a confirmation of the unity of all my work. In the beginning was the bargain, then the years of success and elaboration, now the price.’ He smiled and poured more whisky. ‘I read your own novel after I had seen your review. It shows great promise and I believe it is the sign I have been seeking among young writers for many years now. It is, of course, a failure’ - his rheumy eyes twinkled faintly - but an interesting one. You tried to keep spirit out, did you not? Perhaps you didn’t call it that but that’s what it amounts to. You failed. But never mind. You must try again and keep trying. Look at my books, particularly the ones you think most foxily fraudulent. You will find it hard to write with less of the spirit than that; but you will try.’

  Tyrrel’s speech was old-fashioned and clipped, more formal than ours. He spoke precisely in measured periods and his voice seemed younger than his body. His manner was courteous and he listened with attention. Yet Edward did not like him. He disliked the way in which, whatever they discussed, the Old Man seemed to want it both ways: yes, there was too much mere style in what he had written but that was deliberate, so it was all right; yes, his first and last books were stark statements of theme but the theme itself was stark, so that too was all right; on the one hand, he was a writer who was political and on the other he was a political who wrote; he had always been of the Left, of course, though he had right-wing sympathies; he was utterly committed to his writing and could imagine no other life; at the same time, he was a writer who was prepared to commit himself to anything while being essentially committed to nothing. Of religion he said: ‘Sympathize with all, believe nothing. And remember that the devil never lies.’

  There was something beneath Tyrrel’s courtesy that Edward particularly disliked, a reserve, a coldness, a perhaps unreachable pride that deterred any real fellow-feeling. As Edward described all this in unusual detail it occurred to me that the same might be said of him, though I realized it intellectually without actually feeling it. I also thought that his conversation with Tyrrel did not sound as confrontational as he had said; more a laying-on of hands than a contest, I suggested.

  Edward was curtly eager to convince me otherwise. ‘I haven’t told you all. There was more to it than that.’ They had argued about matter and form, about substance and art, about ex post facto justification, about sincerity.

  ‘Do you believe in sincerity?’ Tyrrel had asked.

  Like most of us, Edward assumed the answer to be so obvious that he had never asked himself the question. ‘Yes.’

  Tyrrel’s smile was mocking. ‘I have a soft spot for romanticism. ‘

  ‘Sincerity pre-dates romanticism.’

  ‘Infinitely, infinitely.’

  I was still not clear why Edward regarded this as a victory.

  Afterwards they ate pizzas which Tyrrel heated in a microwave oven. They discussed writing routines, a subject which I believe writers find more interesting than themes or theories. Tyrrel wrote in longhand on plain paper, with a fountain pen.

 

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