Making Things Better (9 page)

But, obeying some obscure instinct, he stepped off the pavement and turned not into the Métro station but across the street, walking rather more urgently now, his raincoat over his arm. He was making for St-Sulpice and for the haunting image that he remembered from his first ever visit to Paris, an image of two men wrestling or dancing in a forest clearing, a hat flung down by one of the wrestlers, a dusty train of men and horses disappearing into the distance: Jacob and the Angel. The scene would lose none of its power or its mystery for being viewed so many times. So it proved. Jacob's head was still down as he attempted to butt his strange adversary in the chest; he looked brutish, unenlightened, but courageous. He needed his courage to confront the angel, who had the grace and stature of a fully grown man, one who would inevitably win this particular fight. He would win it not by superior strength, though that was manifest, but by the ardour of his gaze directed at Jacob's unseeing head. What did that gaze imply? It was not rebuke, still less retribution. It was, rather, the reminder of eternal surveillance. As Herz remembered the story the fight ended in a draw. Jacob had come out of it rather better than might have been expected, had shown a kind of understanding, had demanded a blessing. This fact alone signified acknowledgement, even grace. Nothing more need be demonstrated.

Yet the angel still remained the conqueror, by virtue of his beauty, his strength, the enactment of his task, which was surely, then as now, to carry out the terms of his employment? This he had done, for the benefit of the spectator, if not for Jacob himself. No one who had witnessed the fight (those hapless voyagers departing on their horses had not even been aware of it) could remain unconvinced that at one time, in the remote past, in no time at all, perhaps, there had been mythic certainties, apparitions, prophecies, but that even then such interventions had not been quite clear. Herz, in front of the picture in the semi-darkness of the chapel, stood in awe: had he been wearing a hat he would have removed it, as Jacob had done, to ready himself for the fight. So that there were confrontations that were benign, a fact which Jacob had recognized, by demanding a blessing rather than dying of fright. But whatever fear he might have felt was not in the picture. What was there was not even loving correction—that came much later. What was there was parity, equal status, and a lack of astonishment. This matter-of-fact struggle seemed at one with the certainties of that strange time. And the fight had been concluded without hard feelings on either side. Yet that ardent angelic gaze, that effortless muscularity, denoted powers that Jacob could not even imagine. For all his easy victory he was marked for life.

Mystified, gratified, and somehow heartened, Herz stood for a moment in tribute. He had few beliefs, certainly none that would carry him to a peaceful conclusion. Yet Jacob was his ancestor, in more ways than one. He regretted that he had never engaged in a similar struggle, had neglected the promptings of that so remote antiquity. Yet faith, such as he had never possessed, even as a child, must surely foster a facile optimism, a notion that someone was in charge, that he, Herz, was worth nurturing, if only by admonition. He saw the saving grace of religion, which was to succour, to console, to provide an illusion of reciprocity which all desired. Yet better a stoical pessimism, a hard look at life's realities, and most of all a determination to enjoy that life, certainly to value it. Jacob's advantage was to have been the object of a visitation, one that he did not, perhaps could not, understand, was not meant to understand. He had done the right thing, had asked for a blessing, rather in the spirit of one accepting an unexpected compliment. And the angel, after a successful mission, would rejoin his equally athletic colleagues and await further incomprehensible instructions, rather in the spirit of a highly trained soldier obedient to his superior officer and to the ethos of the company into which he had been conscripted. Only his unearthly gaze revealed him to be of a different species. In his realm, perhaps, all were similarly endowed.

In perhaps equally mystical fashion the visit declared itself to have been concluded, its high point reached and overtaken. Now Herz would simply go home, all thoughts of further exile expunged from his mind. Absurd to think that he might move to Paris; absurd to imagine that the hotel would be as he remembered, that the original owner was still alive. Absurd above all this persistence of memory in circumstances that were radically altered. He no longer thought in terms of a reluctant return, of the glum evenings that had reclaimed him after his so brief adventures. His former companions would be old women now, who thought of their early forays indulgently, if at all. In the here and now, to which he had a duty, such company was not to be had, and unseemly longings must be stifled. In that moment, imbued with the spirit of the chapel, he accepted the prospect of endless solitude, and, in a mood of heightened awareness, embraced it. There would be no revelation, no combat with a divinely appointed stranger. He would endure, for as long as he was able. That was the only message he was likely to understand.

On his way to the station he stopped for a glass of wine, and applied himself to observing the lives around him. But the well-known formula failed to work. Apart from the hour spent in St-Sulpice this had been a futile exercise. New initiatives were no longer within his reach; he must live on the old ones. Only one more event of note was foreseeable, and he supposed that Bernard Simmonds would chronicle that. He must remember to leave some sort of instruction. Around him the evening was beginning to get under way, people stopping off after their day's work, meeting friends, talking on their mobiles. The globalization, of which he had read so much, was here in evidence: Paris was no longer the paradoxically tender-hearted place that he remembered, but as busy, as noisy, as London or New York. Even the population looked different, more emphatic, less hierarchical, social distinctions more blurred than they had been thirty years previously. The picturesque Paris of his, and, he supposed, everyone else's imaginings was being eroded by a new breed intent on the market, on performance rather than on ideas. He had once been of an age to sympathize with students, though never a student himself. That had been the ethos of that earlier time, the years of his brief freedoms. Now he was merely an outsider, and the bohemians of yesterday were now men in suits, with metal briefcases. As a comment on the passage of time he found them woefully lacking in poetry.

He looked at his watch and started: it was already five o'clock and his train left at six. He hurried into the Métro and stood shoulder to shoulder with the crowds, feeling the familiar flutter in his throat, as if his heart were trying to escape. He reached the Gare du Nord with only ten minutes to spare, was hurried to his seat, and leaned back cautiously, his hand to his chest. The train left on time, and beyond the dark window the lights of Paris bloomed and faded; soon the landscape was flowing past in the opposite direction to the one taken that morning. His capacity for experiment had become extinct in the course of this inconsequential day. He wondered now what had possessed him to set out when he had had no reason to do so, was glad that he had told no one, that he need not explain himself. Later, he knew, he would recover, might mention, but without attaching undue importance to the fact, that he had gone to Paris to renew acquaintance with a picture that had once impressed him. In that way he might invest his poor adventure with a certain urbanity. But he knew that he would make no similar attempt in the future. Much as he still acknowledged larger appetites, he knew that he could no longer satisfy them. The silent striving figures of Jacob and the angel were still vividly present in his mind's eye. He supposed that they would offer themselves for reflection in the days to come.

In Chiltern Street he sank down thankfully into a chair, his raincoat still over his arm. He was too tired to eat, or even to go to bed, too tired to plan ahead, grateful that no further tasks awaited him. Later, lying flat on his back, he reflected that at least he had seen the thing through, tried to retrieve some dignity from the experience, without success. As he turned on his side he reflected that the courageous thing to do would be to repeat the experience, and in that way derive some pride from what would be difficult, as if displacement were merely a test of character, as he supposed it might be. He was not fully awake, but not yet shading into sleep. ‘You know the Delacroix in St-Sulpice?' he might remark to Bernard Simmonds when they next met. ‘A particular favourite of mine. I popped over to see it a few weeks ago. I find I remember it with the greatest affection.'

9

Herz arranged the photographs on his desk, intent on examining what the past had contributed to his strange joyless present. He looked round the room to see if it were ready to welcome in some impossible but unknown, unhoped-for guest, saw that it was, as ever, immaculate, and with a sigh turned to the mute oblongs he habitually kept in a folder, in a suitcase, obscurely, and which he was now resigned to concealing forever. He felt a distaste, but also a curiosity that always accompanied this particular investigation: the photographs, of no conceivable relevance to anyone he currently knew, were to him a painful record of people whose hold on his affections had dwindled to almost nothing.

Yet he was bound to those people, had been formed by them, had now exhausted their legacy, such as it was, and considered himself the recipient of their various discontents, in comparison with which his own seemed somehow lightweight. It was a feeling of unworthiness, as if he had somehow got off scot-free, that contributed towards his ambivalence. Even the photographs served as a reminder of complicated familial unhappiness. He did not intend to look at them again, would put them away forever, to be thrown away after his death with the rest of his belongings, but conceived it as a duty to pass them once more in review before locking them away in the suitcase which would in turn take its place in the basement room he shared with others at the back of Mrs Beddington's shop. He half-hoped that unseen hands would dispose of them when the basement was emptied, just before Christmas, by dustmen coming to collect their annual tip. It would be something of a relief to know that the suitcase had gone, so much so that he would not enquire as to its whereabouts. The act of putting the suitcase in the basement would be a catalyst. He would have relinquished it, and with it the past. That was all that mattered.

Here was his mother, in evening dress, preparing to attend the annual dinner that was held at his father's firm, hierarchical in her finery, and with an expression of triumph on her face, which had been beautiful. That triumphant expression was what he remembered best, yet there had been few occasions on which it could have been seen. She had been a discontented disappointed woman, too long constrained by her religious parents, and obliged to marry for reasons of her own emotional survival, envious of her more worldly sister who had cast off the parental shackles with apparent ease, and seemed to be none the worse for it. Consumed with longing, she had kept up a façade of sophistication; a failed pianist, she had played in improvised concerts in her own drawing-room, so that visitors were obliged to listen respectfully and to compliment her. Herz remembered his own childhood embarrassment as she took off her rings and sat down to play, even to his school-friends, who would be expected to sit in silence when it was against their nature to do so.

Here was a photograph of her seated at the piano, turning to her unseen audience with a smile on her handsome face, in which it was possible to discern a wistfulness behind the mask that was never laid aside, so that it came almost naturally to her to patronize her few friends. She had survived the transition to England rather better than any of them, writing to her sister Anna to tell her how comfortably they were situated in their new home in Hilltop Road, and purposefully ignoring his father's drastically reduced circumstances. By that time she had placed all her hopes in Freddy, whose virtuosity would eventually elevate her to a position that would enable her to triumph once more. All this fantasizing was, he knew now, directed against her sister, the thorn in her side, whom she suspected of enjoying the happiness that had always eluded her. Here she was with Freddy, her hand possessive on his shoulder. How alike they were! Large-eyed, solemn, as if they were obeying some occult instruction, whereas in fact his brother's reputation had foundered as soon as his health gave way, so that in England he remained unknown, a fact overlooked by his mother who perceived a sublime future for them both as soon as he recovered from the illness which she ascribed to his delicate nerves, but in the lightest possible sense. He had not recovered, did not appear to be unhappy with his fallen status. His strange decline had not been recorded by any camera. He had been eclipsed, or had eclipsed himself.

Here was his mother as a child, posing with her sister, their arms entwined, as he never remembered them being in adult life. They had the stricken consumptive look that children had in such posed photographs, their eyes enormous, their abundant hair loosely tied back, condemned to sit at home until released by some man or other, for in those days liberation came in the form of a husband, subsequent on a meaningful introduction by a third party, in this case their mother, or more probably their father, who would know about such matters. It was not possible to deduce from those two solemn infant faces that one sister, the less pretty of the two, would escape such controls, would in fact meet her future husband quite simply crossing the street—the street!—as a schoolgirl, would endure family rages, the condemnation of her parents, and would marry him when she was eighteen, after who knew how many clandestine meetings, to live happily ever after, until the exodus from Germany separated them forever. By that time some slight rapprochement between the sisters had taken place. Herz surmised that it must have done, for that was the time when he was in love with his cousin Fanny. Sharper than any photograph was his memory of those afternoons in his aunt's drawing-room, waiting for Fanny to join him, as she so rarely did, and his awareness of the contrast between the light of his aunt's villa and the dark flat to which he must return, and which he knew would resound with his mother's piano and his brother's violin.

Here was his father as a young man, also solemn, extremely handsome, long before marriage had condemned him to worship at one impossible shrine, obedient to both parents and parents-in-law, never allowed to enjoy his life as a man, his spirit already broken by excessive obedience, willing, by virtue of that same obedience, to be inducted into a marriage which was to be proved unhappy throughout its tortuous evolution. That handsome young face had mutated early on into something a little too anxious to please, growing careworn under the strain of contributing to his wife's fluctuating moods, and already bearing the burden of knowing that the family's safety was compromised, and that exile was inevitable. His stifled fears had made him excessively indulgent towards his children, particularly towards Freddy. Sometimes tears would come into his eyes as he contemplated the boy practicing. It was he who bore the burden of Freddy's illness, so much so that he could not bear to visit him, and was glad to depute that task to Herz himself. In that way both mother and father had renounced Freddy, out of a terror (or was it a conviction?) that Freddy would not come back to them, would not redeem them, would not compensate them for their various losses, including the loss of Freddy himself. Yet in that young handsome face of his twenty-year-old father Herz could see no foreknowledge, no doom. He had never known his father in that guise, with an unknown future before him. He remembered him as a haggard figure, obliged to sleep a lot, remembered with a dreadful pity his father's grateful relinquishing of the daytime hours as he went heavily up the stairs to the flat above the shop in Edgware Road for his nap, to reappear some two or three hours later, dishevelled and unkempt, the very image of a failure. Yet here was a photograph of his parents at some sort of function, presumably that same annual dinner for which his mother composed her appearance so carefully. They looked worldly, even complicit, his father's eager smile setting off his mother's beauty, captured in a rare mood of pleasure, soon to be lost forever, and hardly remembered in the maelstrom of their changing fortunes.

Here were his mother's parents, the grim couple who put their faith in every religious prohibition and who observed even more rules than were theirs by inheritance. They had an appearance of worthiness which was fallacious, a photographer's compliment, the formally dressed man standing respectfully behind his wife's chair, and that wife, monumental in black, staring forward without the trace of a smile, never once, in the lifetime that Herz dimly remembered, ever showing an instinctive affection towards any member of her family, yet undoubtedly mourning the defection of one daughter while grappling the other to her side. It had somehow been decreed that this remaining daughter should never leave home. Had his grandfather not taken pity on her and introduced the so appropriate young man into his household she would have remained unmarried for the rest of her days. Herz examined the two rebarbative faces, acknowledged the repugnance he felt, yet was grateful that they had died naturally, in their own home, a fate denied to so many of their kind. Looking at them from this distance he could discern what had made them so disagreeable: they had never known pleasure. Under those stiff formal clothes were stiff formal bodies, which had learned to keep their distance from one another, coming together only for certain regimented purposes, and resuming their forbidding demeanour immediately afterwards, and no doubt with relief.

Here was the Baden-Baden photograph, the most precious of all, and here at last was one of himself as a child, in short check trousers, with his hand to his heart, as it so often was these days, but in the photograph without a hint of weakness. He too was solemn, but with a wide mouth that was prone to move into a smile, even then. That smile had become one of protection, as his family's destiny unfolded, of propitiation too. It had never left him, although his own destiny was obscure by any standards. The feeling that he had escaped still puzzled him. In Herz's particular cosmology there were no lucky escapes; all good fortune had to be elaborately justified, and above all nothing taken for granted. To be sitting in his own flat, with no obligations, seemed to him more precarious than it might appear. He knew that it was luck that had brought him to this pass, and he distrusted luck as fervently as his devout grandparents might have done. Maybe it was from that unlovely couple that he had inherited his conviction of God's irritability, and with it the likelihood that undeserved good fortune might incur the strictest of penalties.

Their later lives were not recorded, apart from a photograph of a deserted Hilltop Road which he had taken with his own camera, somehow brought intact from Germany, and one of Freddy in shabby grinning retirement, all traces of his mother's ambition eliminated, as if by will alone. Taken by someone unknown, it showed him sitting on Brighton beach, his trousers rolled above his ankles, shirt sleeves protruding from an ancient pullover, wearing a smile that Herz thought unlike his own in that it implied an absence of memory that was also deliberate. Freddy was happy! Herz had only to contrast this photograph with one of Freddy in full concert-platform fig to understand what a burden his former life had been to him, and to sympathize. He had somehow escaped blame: the move to England had effaced his nascent reputation, after which he had lapsed into an illness that was sufficiently unspecific to allow him a breathing space. He had also escaped his parents' disappointment, since they were so anxious to believe him on the verge of a miraculous cure, a new maturity that would raise them all to eminence, would wipe away their tears. It was in order to nurture this illusion that they visited him so little, delegating the task to their younger son, who saw, early on, that there would be no renaissance of their former way of life, and none at all of Freddy. The illusion was shared only by his parents, a
folie à deux,
in which the husband was implicated largely by fear of his wife. That later photograph of Freddy, looking like a day-tripper, was all that remained of his life as a man. So improbable was it that Herz gazed at it in wonder before reluctantly laying it aside.

The other photographs were of lesser interest, mainly postcards of his travels, souvenirs from which the original attraction had faded, and reproductions of favourite paintings, only some of which he had seen: a bird from the catacomb of Priscilla in Rome; a portrait of an English lady wearing a large hat, from the Jacquemart-André Collection in Paris, bought because of the hilarious yet touching contrast between her clumsy appearance and the elegant surroundings of the museum; a stylish back view of a woman by Manet, barely sketched in and evocative of further nudity; an almost illegible sculpture frieze from Parma Cathedral; an arresting image from the National Portrait Gallery of a dressmaker pinning the skirt of an impassive client who resembled Fanny Bauer (black hair, dark eyes, prominent crimson mouth, and bad-tempered expression); and a Fayum portrait head which he cherished because Josie had sent it to him and which he could imagine her choosing carefully in an effort to adapt to him. That postcard had moved him unbearably. He had read into it a desire to please which she was normally determined not to show, and perhaps a glimpse of a response to beauty that he had longed to cherish. It had been in the early days of their relationship; he had taken her to the Wallace Collection, he remembered she had been bored; the visit was not a success. But two days later she had enclosed the Fayum reproduction in a note thanking him for a pleasant afternoon. He had thought it a charming gesture, a tribute of sorts to something she did not share but which she acknowledged as being part of his dreaming mind, and which, puzzled, she respected.

As a record of a life it lacked consistency, hinting at grandeur, hinting at tragedy, but subsiding at the end into that grinning figure on Brighton beach. And it was a record from which Herz himself was virtually absent, his life after boyhood unwitnessed. There was a prehistory that had vanished, schooldays, holidays completely absent. There must have been other photographs that had been left behind, only these few selected to present a picture of family life that was intended flatteringly to obscure the banal existence that his mother deplored. It was she, he saw, who had made this selection, ruthlessly excluding those aspects of life with which she was impatient. At least she had left some kind of representation which she might produce for public consumption. For she too had required an audience. As she had turned so gracefully at the piano she too had imagined some sort of public. He had inherited this from her, only in his case the public was reduced to those who might serve as fascinated observers, or as the friends he no longer had, or as an impossible lover whose only interest was himself. This had never come about, which was why there were no further photographs. No one had said, ‘Over here! Smile!'; he was as absent from other lives as he was from his own. What he was looking at was what had been laid down for him: a life of patient attendance and no less patient study. He had inherited his father's sadness, as that father had made his dutiful way to work every day, returning every evening to his myth-making wife. Yet he, Herz, had schooled himself into pragmatism, and in so doing had acceded to a condition which was not quite enviable though no doubt necessary. The absence of photographs of himself had made him appear and feel invisible, and so, he supposed, he truly was as he went about his self-appointed business of staying alive, diverting himself as best he could, showing only a licensed eagerness, a permitted receptivity, yet knowing that at any moment desire might resurface, might prompt him into making a rash move, such as he had not made when it might have been possible to do so. The boy in the check trousers, with his hand held so poetically to his heart, foreshadowed the ardent lover he was willing to become, foreshadowed Nyon and his absurd adventure. These days his hand went to his heart for other reasons, to make sure that his pills were still in his breast pocket. To date he had never used them. They were there as protection against the rash move that even now might undo him, precipitate him into a condition from which there might be no recovery, the next big thing to which Ostrovski had alluded. In due course that mystery might be solved. Or not, as he supposed.