Fictional Lives Read online

  In fact he left them so very much in their hands over the following weeks that it wasn’t till two days before Fraser’s departure for the States, when the man called to say goodbye, that it occurred to Andrew he hadn’t written to Lucinda to warn her of his friend’s arrival. (That he hadn’t written at all for months, nor heard from her—and that she might now have forgotten him, be in love with someone else, or have left Berkeley—didn’t seem to him to be causes for concern. For aside from the fact that they hadn’t broken with each other—and that, therefore, their mutual silence, long though it had been, couldn’t be viewed as other than a pause in the dialogue, a moment for gathering breath before the great, the conclusive statement was made—the affair had assumed in his mind such mythic proportions that it would have been unworthy to admit the possibility of her doing anything so mundane as forget him, move house, or fall for some bearded, bespectacled philosophy graduate.) He debated with himself then whether to phone her, cable her, or send a note by special delivery. He was tempted to do the first, because he would have liked to have heard her voice. But eventually—after he’d realized that if he did phone he might be too tongue-tied to speak, and thought that a telegram would be too cryptic—he settled for the special delivery; hoping that it would arrive in time, and that Fraser wouldn’t get in touch with her his very first day in San Francisco.

  Having done it—and being at last so resigned he felt becalmed; a powerless ship waiting for the wind to arise—he placed himself once again in the hands of the gods; and, once again, waited.

  He was not, however, to wait for very much longer. Only one more week.

  The first letter was from Lucinda; a brief scrawl which read ‘You might have warned me!’ Whether the girl meant that she hadn’t received his note, or that she should have been warned as to Fraser’s character, Andrew wasn’t certain.

  The second letter, which arrived the day after, was also from Lucinda; and at least cleared up the above point. ‘Have returned from mailing my protest to find your special delivery. So you did warn me. Anyway, your friend Fraser (first name? Last name? I asked him, but he wasn’t forthcoming) called me yesterday afternoon, and in the evening we had dinner together. I guess you want a report on me! (Though we spent most of the time talking about you.) My first impression of him was that he was some sort of joke. My second that he was one of the strangest people I have ever met. By the time the evening ended—rather drunkenly on my part, and even more so on his, I suspect (though it’s difficult to tell)—he had made me feel very uncomfortable indeed. I got home with the sensation—and it wasn’t just the drink, I’m sure—that I had spent four hours peering down some really terrifyingly deep well. Or down the shaft of some mine whose ore is too dreadful to be extracted. And whereas I usually have a very good head for heights—for depths?—last night I suffered from vertigo. He said he is going to be around for a few days more before moving north, and we both muttered something polite about getting together again. But while he may be an old friend of yours, and while he certainly is interesting, I sort of hope we don’t. I mean I’m always grateful for a good meal, and I was curious to hear what he said about you. Only—I don’t like to be uncomfortable, even less, I’ve discovered, do I like to suffer from vertigo, and I have the probably ridiculous feeling that to see too much of Mr Fraser is to lay oneself open to the risk of contamination. Though perhaps it isn’t so ridiculous, because he said himself, during dinner, when we were talking about you, that you wear England about you like a lead shield, and that is one of the reasons why you can be friends. Which—at least now, in the sober (hungover) light of morning—seems a pretty odd thing to say, unless he does think of himself as emitting some kind of harmful rays. Anyway, if we do meet again, I shall go well protected; and shan’t go too near the edge of that mine-shaft.

  ‘One more thing. Fraser or no Fraser, I’m glad there is some link between us now, apart from our letters. I’ve often thought, over the past few months, that the forging of such a link was the next and necessary step if we were, eventually, to be—what? Joined …? I would have attempted the task myself if I had known some ambassador I could trust to represent me. But unfortunately I didn’t. Or don’t. You, Andrew dear, are lucky.’

  Andrew stared at this last sentence for a long time; then told himself that that remained to be seen.

  As it still remained to be seen when Fraser’s first letter arrived. For though the man gave no suggestion he might be seeing Lucinda again, and though (or just because) his first (and for Fraser generally sufficient) impression of the girl was everything that could have been wished for (‘She is, superficially, good-humoured, unpretentious, intelligent, and astonishingly conscious; beneath the surface she struck me as being not merely fine but truly—the only word for it—magnificent’), Andrew couldn’t help thinking that he wouldn’t be entirely happy, or entirely sure he was lucky to have an ambassador such as Fraser, until he heard that the traveller had left San Francisco, and gone north.

  However, this reservation aside, he was—as he read and re-read Fraser’s letter, and realized that the next and necessary step now (the final step, hopefully) was for him and Lucinda to meet at last—almost entirely happy. It is, he thought, as he read the letter again, too good to be true….

  He expected the news of Fraser’s departure to be announced in a second letter from the man; or in a third letter from Lucinda. He also expected to receive this letter within two or three days. When he didn’t, he began to feel impatient. After five days without news, he became worried. After a week he became very worried. And after a fortnight he knew that what he had feared had happened. It must have done. There could be no other explanation now for the silence. Fraser and Lucinda had indeed met again; and they had fallen in love….

  For a month then Andrew felt as miserable, as desperate, as he had after Jill had been killed. Even more so perhaps. His love for Jill had been a fact of the real world, of his day to day existence; it had been a tangible thing that had been with him for so long it had become a part of his body. When she had died he had, after the initial shock, found comfort and relief in the real world—in the company of friends, in the company of music they had both liked, in the company of books—and in the ritual of his daily life. He had felt her loss as he would have felt the loss of part of his body; but the body, as long as it is reasonably healthy, and the correct medications are applied, can recover from all but the most radical of amputations. Whereas his love for Lucinda was not, to him, a fact of the real world. It was an idealized love, such as he might have dreamed of, or created in a story; it didn’t—if only because it hadn’t had to, as yet—affect the course of his day to day existence. There was no worrying if Lucinda had a cold; no cause to celebrate if Lucinda had a birthday; no quiet continual sadness that had to be overcome about his and Lucinda’s inability to conceive a child. And being so idealized, so out of this world, there was nothing, now that he had lost Lucinda, to comfort him. Nothing whatsoever remained of their relationship but a few letters; which in a couple of years would cease to mean anything. He had thought of their affair as being somehow mythic; he suffered now from a mythic hurt. He had longed, in the darker corners of his mind, to go abroad; he had found in Lucinda someone who could escort him there. Now, having lost her, he would never leave England. And though he loved it, and would always love it, he was afraid that having acknowledged his longing, brought it out into the open, and then had it frustrated, it would start to rot within him, go bad; and might, eventually, turn even his love for his own country into something sour, and disappointed, and joyless. What was more, having prepared as it were his foreign notebooks, been ready to write in them all that he observed abroad, and been eager to use those notes for some novel or novels that would be longer, deeper, more complete than any he had written so far, to have to put them away unused, and return to his former territory, might likewise eventually make that territory, which had hitherto pleased him, seem small, restricted, and unpleasant.


  Losing Lucinda, he told himself, he had lost a chance of extending his life; and without her, the life that remained to him would become dull, and bitter. Weary, flat, stale and unprofitable….

  He spent that month alone in London, never answering his phone—though it rarely rang; few people knew he had taken the flat; fewer knew his number—only going out to visit galleries—to look at paintings which he found uninteresting—to visit theatres and cinemas—to see plays and films that he found tiresome—to walk through the spring-time parks—which should have delighted him, but in fact, feeling as he did cut off from all the growing life around him, depressed him, and struck him as being artificial and unnatural—and sometimes just to look at people, all of whose faces, including those of the young, seemed shaded by dullness, bitterness, and weariness.

  At the end of the month, telling himself that he had to get off this train of misery he had boarded, and that it was nonsensical to stay in London—which he had never particularly liked, nor found particularly English—he returned to his cottage, hoping that his beloved countryside, and the familiar surroundings, would help to restore his spirits.

  And for a day or two it seemed they would. The weather was wonderful—light and warm and clear—his garden—and the whole village—had rarely looked more green, more flower-filled, more peaceful and welcoming, and his neighbours, and the villagers in general, were so pleased to see him one would have thought he had been away for years, and that he were the favourite son of the entire community.

  The old man who took care of his garden for him, and kept an eye on the cottage, said ‘Don’t seem right when you’re away, Mr Stairs. Makes me feel like when they cut down all the elms.’

  But after two days, and in spite of the warmth and the welcome—just walking round the village, after so short an absence, brought tears to his eyes, and made him conscious of how deeply rooted he was in this place, where he had lived for so long and which, even before he had lived there, he had always known (he had been born only seven miles away)—his sense of loss returned. And returned now—simply because, perhaps, he was so very much at home—with even greater force than before. He felt, though he had returned to the fold, that he had been excommunicated; or that he had been blown over by a terrible wind, so that though he was now back where he belonged, his roots, instead of being planted in the rich earth, and drawing nourishment from it, were facing up towards the sky, and were, before his eyes, withering.

  He got angry with himself; telling himself that he was behaving like some adolescent who has just been jilted for the first time. He told himself he was being feeble, and weak, and self-pitying.

  He tried to be philosophical; explaining to himself that of course he felt upset—a great love at forty-five, when there is less time left to enjoy it, is obviously more profound than a great love at twenty-five, when there is a whole lifetime ahead—and that what he was suffering from was not just a sentimental disappointment, but a crisis that many middle-aged people, especially when they are lonely, and are forced to accept that what they haven’t done will never now be done, have to face; but that the pain would pass with time, and that as long as he propped himself up, and placed the earth firmly about him, his roots would once again take hold, and continue to feed him for many years. Indeed, having weathered the storm, he might very well grow even stronger than he had before, become even taller, more spreading, more firmly and irremovably a part of the land.

  He tried thinking about his childhood and youth, and sought comfort in the memory of his parents. In the memory of his cobbler father, and of his mother who took in washing; those two kind people who had had him, their only child, so late in life, and had always encouraged him, from the moment he had started at the age of eight to make up stories, to be a writer. ‘So you can tell,’ he remembered his father saying, as they had walked over the Downs late one summer evening, and the old eyes had gazed across the hills as if they could see from one end of the country to another ‘the truth. If you tell the truth, people will recognize it. Even if they don’t like it, they’ll recognize it. And having recognized it they’ll be more able to bear it. Or bear themselves. And that’s all you can do in this world. Help other people, in one way or another, to bear it and themselves. Because if you don’t you’ll find that not only the world, but you yourself, are unbearable.’

  He tried, even, to pour scorn upon the whole affair; telling himself that in a month or two he’d be ashamed of his own idiocy. A love-affair by post, indeed! It was grotesque.

  But nothing he did, nothing he told himself, nothing he thought, helped him. He could not pick himself up, re-root himself; and he could not overcome his depression. And the very realization that this depression was such a vast and impregnable fortress made it become still more vast and impregnable. He felt that he were being pierced by arrows. That exposed on an open plain he were being rained on by stones. That boiling pitch were being poured over him, and shot were passing through his flesh. He started to hate his neat pretty village—it had become smug and self-satisfied—to hate the countryside around—its fertility became a cackle of derision over the sterility of the rest of the earth—and he started to hate his body. Great red, floppy, flabby thing; already dying, soon dead….

  He couldn’t sleep at night; he couldn’t work by day.

  Oh Lucinda, he cried to the low-beamed ceiling of his bedroom, and to the small leaded window over his desk: Why did you ever write to me? Why did you say you loved me? And why did you ever encourage me to gaze into Hell; if you were not then going to accompany me there?

  Oh why, he cried, oh why….

  But just as he was never to know what he would have done about his love for Lucinda without Fraser’s intervention, so he was never to know where his despair would have led him now. Occasionally he thought later it would have killed him. (More often he thought that it would, eventually, have retreated; but retreated as a sea in flood retreats; leaving the land behind it a salty, ruined waste.) However, once again, when he could think of no way out of his predicament, something happened to alter the course of events. And this time what happened was so unexpected, so dramatic, as to transform his despair, in a matter of seconds, into near ecstasy. It wasn’t quite ecstasy—there were too many unanswered questions for the transformation to be that complete—but it wasn’t far from it; and was, in any case, a wonderful change from the misery he had felt before.

  On the morning of the last Saturday in May he received a telegram; and when he opened it, read the following: ‘Arrive London Sunday 28 Pan Am Please meet I love you Lucinda.’

  To begin with, though his despair did leave him instantly, he couldn’t believe it. At least, he told himself he couldn’t; what he meant was the shock was too great for the information to be assimilated all at once. She was coming. She was coming! He had been wrong. She hadn’t disappeared forever into the darkness that was Fraser. Nor was she standing by Fraser to keep him from that darkness. She loved him, and was coming to him! He stood at the front door of the cottage with the telegram in his hand, looked at the glowing morning garden—and saw that it had returned to glory. He walked out into that garden, gazed down the street—and saw that the village had become again the kind old place he had always known. He smelled the soft spring air, he heard the birds, he looked up at the round green hills where he had walked as a boy with his father—and wanted to cry out to them that he was back, that he was once more part of them, that once more he was them. He felt the ground beneath his feet opening and absorbing him; he felt the whole community stretching out towards him, and embracing him.

  Oh Lucinda, he wanted to cry now, in a tone very different from that in which he had cried so recently, you have saved me. You have saved us all.

  He spent the next few hours in a state of exaltation, just wandering round and touching things as if he had been blind, and now could see again; and would have spent the whole day in such a state if he hadn’t, around five o’clock, had to take first a bus, and then a train, in
order to be in London that night, and at the airport early next morning.

  But when he was on the train those unanswered questions began to loom up within him: and he began to dwell on the aspects of the affair that had been in the back of his mind, and had worried him, ever since the telegram had arrived.

  The first thing he asked himself was why he hadn’t heard a word from Lucinda for so long. Before, when they hadn’t written to each other, he had rightly perceived of their silence as being no more than a pause in their dialogue. But the silence of the past month hadn’t been a pause at all; it had been a sudden, unnatural interruption. Then, even if Lucinda, for reasons of her own, hadn’t wanted to be in touch—why had he heard no more from Fraser? The man, knowing him, must also have known how anxious he would be feeling. And not to attempt to allay those anxieties was unFraserlike, to say the least…. The third question that Andrew asked himself—and the question which, not knowing the answer to, really made him tremble—was what Lucinda and Fraser had been doing together for all this time. It was just possible of course that Fraser had left San Francisco, as planned, after only a few days, that he and Lucinda hadn’t met again, and that the girl had been busy ever since preparing for her own departure. But somehow, not having heard from either of them, he didn’t believe this was, or had been, the case. He was certain in fact that Fraser had not gone north, that he had remained in San Francisco, and that the two of them had seen each other again. And again and again and again….

  He tried to tell himself that even if he were right it didn’t matter, since Lucinda was coming to him anyway. It was him she loved. But he couldn’t convince himself. Because there was something about the very manner of the girl’s arrival that was disquieting. It was too precipitate, too, almost, hysterical. Why hadn’t she written to him and said she was thinking of coming? Why hadn’t she asked him to come to her? And why, even if she had decided to come on the spur of the moment, had she written in that telegram ‘I love you.’ It pleased him, naturally. But it was as if she wanted to reassure him, to dispel any suspicion he might have that she didn’t. And why should she think he needed this reassurance, or felt suspicious, if she hadn’t given him reason to? Maybe she considered her mere silence such a reason; but maybe, there again, she had given him reason….