It seems suddenly important to me that I should have explained myself to myself by the time everyone arrives. I need clarity. The coroner’s inquest is set for tomorrow; then there’ll be the funeral and the interment and the house will be full of people. From this evening on I shan’t have a moment’s peace for weeks; no time to myself in which to think. If ever I am to put the events of my life in some sort of order I must begin the sifting now; I must try, I know, to understand what I have done; to understand how I, at the age of seventy, have come to kill my wife and to feel so little remorse over it.
It is curious, my lack of compunction; not complete, perhaps, but almost. Now that Sarah is gone, now that I know the truth, I feel very little. Hardly any outright regret. Just a curious, empty, almost eerie calm: a numbness that shows me, perhaps, quite how much I have learned from her. Quietly, detached, I sit here alone; and it strikes me that in some ways I should be glad, though I am not; that the absence of gladness is a striking one, for years ago this knowledge would have freed me. It would have given me what some call a new lease on life; I might have gone back. So it is odd that I should feel nothing now, or at most next to nothing. The events of those weeks and months long ago, in which the seeds of it all were sown, have a playlike quality. I know the plot and can empathize with the characters; but the young man of twenty-two who plays such a central part is a stranger to me. He bears little relation (beyond a slight, decreasing, physical similarity) to the image that confronts me as I pass the looking glass by the fireplace; as I stare at the books, at the music stand, at the waves and the gun gray sky.
My life seems to have slowed. The present takes up so much time. I see myself as I was at twenty-two. Young, very young, a certain physical gangliness characterizing my movements (I was tall, with long legs) and a small nose, delicate like my mother’s. My mouth is thin-lipped; my eyes a pale brown; and all are set in a regular oval face with small ears and a slightly pointed chin. Hardly handsome, I suppose; and at that age undignified by the lines of age. My face is more careworn now; the years have creased and folded it. But that is as it should be.
I suppose that my family life and upbringing must go some way to explaining why my adult life has turned out as it has, why I have turned out as I have. Ella’s shoulders are too fragile to bear the complete weight of the responsibility, as are mine. Perhaps it is time to exhume old ghosts, to see my parents as they were in their forties and fifties: my mother with her dark hair graying and her piercing blue eyes, so shrewd and voluble; my father with his powerful shoulders and huge veined hands. He was a man of deliberate gesture and unshakable self-belief, a quality I don’t think he ever succeeded in passing on to me. What he did give me, and it is this for which I thank my family most, is stubbornness: for it has sustained me when all else has failed, when arrogance and self-belief have deserted me.
What did my parents want for me? What were they like? It is so difficult to know, so difficult to give complete answers to any questions like these. We were not rich, I know that much, but we knew rich people (which my mother felt, and once or twice almost said, was enough). And I suppose that my parents, like any parents, hoped that their son would go far in the world. In
their
world, I should say, for they lived, like so many of their class and generation, in comfortable, unquestioning calm, unruffled by external change. My parents did not look outwards. They never ventured beyond the range of their own ambition, being serenely confident—in a way which frequently infuriated me—of their place in the order of things. Their gods were tradition, propriety, the maintenance of the social hierarchy. They looked both up and down; were deferential to those above and polite to those beneath. They read
The Times,
voted Conservative, and held unchanging and predictable views on the events of the day. The revolutions of the 1960s had done nothing to unsettle their values or to disturb their quiet hopes; and because they were kind they insisted on planning my future on their own terms and with all the tenacity of challenged sincerity.
My own private plan of becoming a concert violinist, flatly and sullenly expressed in my second year at Oxford, could have met with no favor in their eyes; nor did it. And my late adolescence was punctuated occasionally, but always dramatically, by the slow buildup of family tension, its explosive release, and its subsequent subsidence over long days of icy politeness.
It is ironic that I should end my life in a house like this one, with a titled wife whose family history is as weighty as any to which her parents-in-law could ever have aspired. It is ironic that, having made so much of following my own lights, I have succeeded ultimately in achieving only what my parents wished for me all along. My musical career died gradually as my marriage progressed, for Sarah could not hope to fuel it as Ella had done, nor did she try to; and my reserves of emotion have dwindled unavoidably over time. My talent lay in translating private passion into public performance, and as the private passion stopped flowing, dried, and finally turned to a dust so fine that the slightest wind scattered it to nothingness, there was no longer anything to be translated. Technically I remained preeminent, for I have always been diligent; but I stopped playing when I could hope for nothing more than mechanical brilliance.
But I am wandering, losing the flow of my narrative. It is only to be expected from a man of my age, I suppose.
My education was unremarkable. I was clever enough to join the majority of my public school fellows at Oxford, a great relief to my parents; and until the age of nineteen I made a creditable enough return on their investment in me. But over the three years of my separation from my family at university I was encouraged by those I knew and the books I read to cultivate a certain detachment from home life and its aspirations for me, a detachment which made me critical during term time and superior in the holidays. It was then that I turned with real determination to my secret love, the violin; and it was then, comparatively late but in time enough, that I had the leisure and the teaching to discover that I might be really good; good; enough to matter. Good enough, certainly, to use my music as the basis for my first serious confrontation with my parents, one that raged the whole of the summer following my graduation and which centered around my stubborn insistence that I was going to be a musician.
But I digress in my attempt to make my twenty-two-year-old self more real to me now, an attempt in which I have been only partly successful. I remember once more what he looks like, that is true; I see his half smile and rosy cheeks and the hair tumbling over his forehead into his eyes. But I know him no longer; I have no empathy with his tastes and only a little with his enthusiasms, surprisingly few of which have remained. I struggle to remember the people with whom he filled his life, the friendships he made: curiously intense, for he was a young man of extremes, inclined to manic sociability and profound gloom by turns. Of course a few stand distinct from the tableau. People like Camilla Boardman, the girl my mother always hoped I would marry: pretty; bubbly; well connected; more substantial than she liked to seem. But I was insular at twenty-two. Indiscriminately friendly, I shared myself intimately with great discrimination; I still do. Perhaps I had little to share; certainly my life up to that point contained nothing very remarkable. I had made the progression from preparatory school to public school to Oxford with as few jolts as possible; I had not forced myself to think much or to examine the world. Life was as it was, and I accepted it on its own terms, much in the way I would later accept my marriage to Sarah: with a sort of dogged determination which I would not admit to myself.
Unthinking, unseeing, unknowing, I drifted through life until I met Ella. It was she who baptized me; it was she who threw me into the sea of life. And she did it quite unthinkingly, little caring or even knowing how much good or how much harm she might do. It was in her nature, that wild abandonment, that driving need for experience and explanation. It was she who made me swim, she who pushed me from the safety of the shallows; it was she with whom I floundered, out of my depth. It is to her, and to my memories of her, that I must turn now in seeking to explain what I have done.
In memory she is a small, slight girl, my age, with tousled blond hair and green eyes that sparkle back at me complicitly, even now. She is in a park, Hyde Park; it is an early morning in mid-June: birds sing; keepers in green overalls are setting up deck chairs; the air is sweet with the scent of newly mown grass. I can hear myself panting.
I had been running, up early and out of the house to escape the frosty conversation that had become habitual since my acceptance to the Guildhall. My father had strict views on the desirability of merchant banking; my mother, usually a useful ally (for my own happiness figured more in her plans for me than it did in my father’s) had sided with him, saying that no grandchildren of hers would grow up in Hounslow because their father was an impoverished musician. I had begun, in vain, by telling them that musicians weren’t necessarily impoverished; later I had openly called them snobs and sworn privately that nothing could be said to deter me from my course. The atmosphere at home had not yet recovered from the latest scene (unusually venomous on the parts of all concerned) staged two days previously. I had no wish for another meal of silent recrimination.
So I went running in the park. I can hear myself panting, can feel the pulse of the blood beating in my head, can see what I wore: a white T-shirt; school rugby shorts; the socks of my college boat club. I can see what Ella wore too, because I noticed her long before she saw me. She was sitting on a bench, in a black dress that pulled tight against her slender hips. Her eyes were dazed from wakefulness; a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup steamed on the bench next to her; a pearl necklace (which I have since, on another’s neck, come to know well) was in her closed hand, which was shaking a little. She was a dramatic figure in the half light of the early morning: sitting on that bench; hardly moving. I ran past her twice before she noticed me, each time shortening the route by which I doubled back unseen and passed her again. The third time I passed her she looked up at me and her eyes focused. She smiled.
I stopped, panting, a little distance from the bench, regretting my last circuit of the carriage track. When I turned to look at her, she was still smiling.
“Tough run,” she called out.
“You could say that.”
We nodded politely to each other.
“Tough night?” I asked, looking at her clothes. She saw my eyes hesitate on her hand and the shaking stopped.
“More of a long night,” she said. Her accent was American, but lilting and musical with anglicized vowels. She was soft-spoken. We smiled at each other as I wondered what to say, but it was she who finally broke the silence. “I’m sure I know those socks,” she said.
“Really?”
“They’re college socks, aren’t they?” She paused. “Although knowing my luck they’re going to turn out to be school socks or some other kind of sock—there are so many kinds in England—and I’ll feel a right arse.” Her pronunciation of the word “arse” was self-consciously rounded; here was a person who had trained herself not to say “ass.”
Glad to have been offered a neutral topic of conversation, I told her that they were college socks, as a matter of fact. “The socks of my college boat club,” I said with adolescent pride.
Remembering it now, I find it curious to think that the course of my whole life might be said to have hung on something as inconsequential as my choice of footwear that morning. Ella would not have noticed different socks; and without her remarking on them as she did do I would probably never have known her. In that case I would not be the person I am today; I would not have killed my wife yesterday afternoon; I would not be in this smoky room, trying to keep warm, listening to the waves of the Atlantic crash on the rocks beneath my windows. It is curious, the way in which seemingly innocuous details like the selection of a pair of socks can set in motion a chain of events which, as one leads to another, build up such momentum that they become a guiding force in your life. I find it strange; strange and slightly unsettling. But the evidence is there, I suppose; and who am I to refute it?
I watch myself saunter over to the bench where she is sitting, a question on my lips. Ella remains absolutely motionless, the fine bones of her neck and shoulders showing clearly through her pale skin. She is sitting a little hunched, which contributes to the effect of her fragility. She would look innocent but for the cut of her dress and the stylish parting of her short hair, which a hand pushes back from her eyes occasionally and ineffectually. Getting close I see that pronounced cheekbones make her face almost gaunt, as do pale blue rings which undercircle her eyes. But the eyes themselves are bright: sharp and green, they move swiftly up and down me as I approach and seem to indicate a place beside her on the bench. I sit down.
“These are the socks of my college boat club,” I say again.
“I know,” she says. “Oriel, Oxford, aren’t they?”
I nod, impressed by her accuracy. “How do you know?” I ask smiling.
There is a pause while the smile on her lips fades and she looks serious once more. Her fingers become conscious of the string of pearls in her left hand, which she puts into a small square bag at her feet with an unconscious gesture of protection.
“That’s a complex question. More complex than it sounds,” she says. But realizing my awkwardness, she continues: “Let’s just keep the answer brief and say that I know someone who has them.” She takes a last sip from the Styrofoam cup and discovers that it is almost empty. She seems surprised and faintly irritated.
“Who?” I am eager for her to define herself to some extent by her acquaintance with someone I can judge.
“You wouldn’t have known him, unless you’re older than you look.”