Their three children—Jessica, Mary and Stewart—he loved more deeply the further away he voyaged from them. His attitude was one of benign neglect; he had not expected that they would act out his relationship with Ella among themselves. Their enmities and coldness to each other were to him unbearable; it broke his heart, he hoped it was not permanent, he begged them not to be cruel or callous when he saw them echoing the cruelty and callousness he showed Ella. He recognised himself as unfit for fatherhood but stayed the course, because staying the course was what he did in all things. He wondered if it was surrender to his own private terror.
He and Ella were at their best in company, and found the other at such times admirable—even, as he heard Ella say at one dinner, adorable. Adorable! And he admired her and pitied her for being with him. He heard her telling her friends in all sincerity that the war and the camps would not let him go. She seemed to want to make of him a tragedy, and he, who had seen tragedies, was angry that she would be so naïve, so self-dramatising as to make her husband one more. He wished she would just damn him for what he had become—a bastard. But that would have been too straightforward for Ella, and, besides, she loved him in her way, which is to say she refused to give up on him long after he had given up on himself. She took to having her hair cut like Françoise Hardy and smoking purple Sobranies in an attempt at chic distance that perhaps she hoped might also prove seductive to him. Her fragility—which to him was always her most interesting feature—remained, though it was increasingly enshrouded in a perfumed smoke he found abhorrent.
What do you want? Ella would ask, taking the Sobranie from her lips, and that was the question to which there really was no answer. And when he lied and said Nothing, or he lied and said, Serenity, or he lied and said, You, or he lied and said, Us, she would say, But what do you really want, Alwyn? Tell me, what? What?
What indeed? he wondered.
Is it just their bodies, sex, is that it? she said, and her calm hurt him far more than any anger. Just getting your end wet? she said. Is that it?
Her calm, her vile candour, her inestimable sadness—was that what he had led her to?
Is that all you are about? Ella would say, exhaling more Sobranie smoke. Is it?
Was it? How he hated that smoke. He feared he had made her coarse, she who had been anything but. He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space their private life. And the more in that private life they break with civilisation, the more that private life becomes a secret life, the freer they feel. But it is not so. You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt. Nothing could wash away what he felt. He looked up at Ella.
Is that it? Ella said.
It is not so, he said.
The wording of his answer sounded stilted and unbelievable to them both; worse, it sounded weak, and she just shook her head. Despite what she said, she always preferred strong lies to weak truths.
Along with her new candour, Ella had taken to wearing heavy perfume in her middle age, and the fumes of that entwining with the fug of the Sobranie smoke gave her an aroma that he found occasionally exciting, even erotic, but mostly—and more and more—stale and claustrophobic, like a wardrobe of old clothes destined for charity. How he wished she wouldn’t wear that perfume, that she wouldn’t smoke Sobranies, that she wouldn’t do her hair like Françoise Hardy. Because he felt in all these things a disguise made up of her bravery, her pride, her huge sadness so painful it throbbed through their home. How he wished he hadn’t made her hard.
7
IN HIS EARLY years with Ella he thought of Amy frequently. He wondered what it was that he had known with Amy. He had no idea. It seemed a power beyond love. He recalled their first meeting as unremarkable. He had noticed her beauty spot above her lip obscured by the dust motes, not because she was pretty but because the sight of her through the shafts of dusty light was striking. He thought of their strange conversation, not because it was bewitching, but because it had vaguely amused him. He remembered how, the following day, when he went back to the shop to buy the Catullus, it was the book and not her of which he had the strongest memory. The chance meeting with the girl with the red camellia had been a curious encounter of a type he understood he would soon enough forget.
And if he hadn’t forgotten her in those early post-war years, as surely as Amy had for a time become his entire reason for existence, so too she now began to recede from his thoughts. In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his fingers back into dust. And as over the years his memory of Amy atomised, Ella became his most formidable ally and his most trusted adviser. She soothed him when he was enraged, encouraged him when he found obstacles, and little by little, event by event, in the tumble and mudslide of life, his memory of Amy was slowly buried, until he had trouble remembering very much about her at all. Whole weeks would pass and he would realise he had not thought about her, then that period became months, and then several months could run together and of her specifically he had thought nothing. He began smelling on himself the same strange, blanketing complicity of small things shared—food, towels, cutlery and cups, the combined purpose of lives pursued together—that he had once been repulsed to smell on Keith Mulvaney.