And then nothing. Four or five blank black pages.
Clémence turned back to a couple of the photographs of Alastair. There weren’t many of them, which wasn’t surprising since he was the photographer. They reminded her of someone or something.
Who?
Stephen speeded up as he approached the crossing, but the green man had finished flickering and turned to red by the time he got there. He swore mildly to himself: that particular crossing took an age to turn green again.
Two young women joined him, shoving pushchairs. They were speaking animatedly in French. This seemed to be the new thing in Notting Hill — first it was the English yuppie bankers, then the Americans, and now the French spilling over from Kensington. There were very few people he still recognized from his arrival in Notting Hill in the seventies. Mr Chaudhury, who had just sold him the copy of the Racing Post which he was clutching under his arm, being one of those few.
Stephen eavesdropped. The women were discussing one of the fathers at school who always wore very tight trousers. The question was, did he do that on purpose to advertise the size of his manhood? Indeed, was his manhood worth advertising? The women were so engrossed in the problem that they had not noticed Stephen.
They were quite attractive really, especially the small one with the promising chest. Years ago, they would have noticed him. The conversation would have tailed off, there would have been sideways glances, and then whispers when he walked off. But not now. Obviously not now.
He cleared his throat and addressed the smaller woman. He spoke loudly and clearly in his plummy French accent: he had been taught how to project, after all. ‘Madame, ces nibards sont magnifiques! Votre fils a beaucoup de chance.’
One of the women let out a small shriek and the other reddened instantaneously. The light changed to green and the two pushchairs shot across the road, leaving Stephen chuckling to himself.
He got home and opened the Racing Post to plan his campaign for the day. A horse he had backed unsuccessfully before was running at Uttoxeter. He still fancied it. Difficult one.
The phone rang. Who the hell was that? Bloody people, never gave a chap a moment’s rest.
He picked it up. The phone hissed. ‘Dad? It’s Rupert.’
What the hell did he want? But actually, Stephen could guess. He grunted.
‘I’ve just had Clémence on the phone. From Wyvis.’
‘I know,’ said Stephen. ‘She rang me yesterday. Whose stupid idea was it to send her up there?’
Stephen and his son spoke for ten minutes, which must have been the longest conversation they had had in years. Things were unsatisfactory. Most unsatisfactory.
As Stephen hung up the phone, he thought of Clémence. By and large he didn’t like his grandchildren much, at least the ones he knew, but he had grown fond of Clémence the couple of times he had seen her as a schoolgirl when she had visited him on her way to boarding school. He didn’t want her mixed up in the whole Sophie thing; she would only get hurt like the rest of them.
He stared at the Racing Post on the kitchen table, but he couldn’t concentrate. His eyes were drawn to the half-empty bottle of Scotch he kept in the kitchen. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock. He could wait an hour and a bit until his pint at the Windsor Castle.
He was a bad father. An appalling father. It wasn’t entirely his fault, but he had lost his own children long ago, when he had gone to prison. Fabrice, the eldest, had disappeared entirely for years — contact with him had been minimal. Beatrice, Fabrice’s younger sister, had cut herself off from him, until he had been released. Then she had reintroduced herself. But she was nuts, frankly, and her three children were out of control. She was now in her late fifties and divorced, and who could blame her husband? She lived in Putney somewhere and occasionally took it upon herself to pester her wayward father.
And Rupert, like his older brother, had taken off, but had kept in slightly better touch. Stephen knew Rupert hated him. And he didn’t like Rupert either. So Clémence was the best of the bunch.
Madeleine at least had done what she could to help out her sister’s children, and grandchildren, paying for their education. She could be an interfering old bat, but she had a good heart. Stephen glanced at the photograph on the mantelpiece. Which was lucky: Sophie deserved someone more capable than Stephen to look after her offspring.
Stephen felt his eyes stinging. Angrily, he picked up the paper and forced himself to concentrate on the 2.40 p.m. at Uttoxeter.
The old man returned from his walk to find Clémence in the sitting room, ready to resume the book.
He sat down, apprehensive.
‘All right?’ said Clémence. The old man could tell she, too, was nervous about what she might read.
‘All right.’ The old man nodded.
Clémence opened the book.
Chapter VII
Capri Revisited
The Bay of Naples, June 1947
I was glad to be out of Naples and on to the sea. The city had been utterly devastated by the war. It had been poor in 1939, but it had been bustling, purposeful, joyful even; ramshackle new buildings had mixed with the faded glory of the older city. But the war had reached down from the north, picked up Naples, and shaken it to pieces. And then, in 1944, Vesuvius had erupted, shaking it some more. Now there was rubble, rubbish and dust, dust everywhere. The people were thin, dejected and dangerous: boys tried to take your money, girls tried to sell their bodies. And the city stank of refuse and sewage.
Nowhere was happy or prosperous after the war, but as the train had left France and headed south through Italy, the poverty intensified. Nothing in Europe was untouched, and certainly not me. My sister had died. Joyce had been wandering through the streets of London, on leave with her boyfriend Tommy, when a doodlebug’s engine had cut out high above them. They had run to the precise spot on the Strand where it had landed — both dead.
As for me, I had become a soldier, and a good one. I had been granted a commission, and shipped out to North Africa, where the Green Howards had fought hard and been defeated soundly by the Afrika Korps at Gazala. I had escaped the confusion of battle with two comrades and trekked through the desert back towards Egypt, although one of us, Corporal Binns, hadn’t made it the whole way. Back in the line, more fighting and capture this time. I was one of the last Allied POWs to be evacuated from Africa to a stalag in Germany. After a couple of failed attempts, I had escaped and made my way through France where I had remained holed up in a village in the Massif Central until my hosts were liberated.
From there, back to England, but the war had ended before they could thrust me back into the front line for a third time. Yet for all that toing and froing, for all my efforts, I was pretty sure I hadn’t actually succeeded in killing a German, or an Italian.
All a bit of a waste of time, really.
Escaping from the British Army had taken longer than escaping from a German POW camp, but eventually I had been demobbed, and returned to St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College for my final two years. Bart’s in 1946 was totally different from Bart’s in 1939. There were those fellow students who were just out of school who had missed the war, and who had the boisterous enthusiasm for medicine which must have infected me at their age. And then there were those who had served in one way or another in the armed forces, but even these were younger than me, for I was now in my thirties. Most of my direct contemporaries from pre-war Bart’s had been rushed into becoming field medics. Two others had become pilots, both killed. One had joined the navy and was somewhere at the bottom of the Barents Sea.