“Sam—,” I say, to try to shorten his misery.
He registers my tone. He looks me suddenly straight and pityingly in the eye. Then he says a most un-Samlike thing.
“Can I ask you a question? A serious question. Do you think people kill themselves for love?”
A volley of laughter from a passing punt greets this inquiry. We are on one of the bridges, leaning against the balustrade. The river beneath us is a rippling ribbon of mirth.
“Sam, why are you asking me this?” I have a strange, cold feeling in my legs.
He looks at the water. “I’m talking about your pa, kid.” An American tourist, about to take a photograph at the centre of the bridge, turns and smiles heartily in our direction, no doubt having heard Sam’s Ohio tones. “But why don’t you answer the question?”
We move off the bridge.
“How should I know the answer?”
He looks at me. “If you don’t, pal, who does? Who the hell does?”
We are not far from the Fellows’ Garden. I remember that I have the key in my pocket. Without telling him, I guide him (needing guidance myself) towards the little ironwork gate. (“You got your own garden too?”) And it’s there — it’s here — that, in a fever of clenched-faced, uninterruptible disclosure, it all comes out. It’s here, under the bean tree, that he spills all the beans.
“I mean they don’t do it, do they, pal? Not in real life. Why do you think your pa did it? Because he found out about Sylvie and me, and it was all too much for him, and he couldn’t bear to go on living? If he cared that much, why didn’t he take me aside and kick the shit out of me? Why didn’t he point that goddam gun at me? And let me tell you, if he had, I’d’ve run, I’d’ve got the hell out of there fast. You wouldn’t have seen me for dust. You wouldn’t be talking to me now. It was just a fling — Sylvie and me. If it wasn’t for— You think your Ma and me were made for each other? You think I wanted the old guy out of the way so I could pick up the winnings? That’s what you’ve always thought, isn’t it? But you’re wrong. It was just a fling. It just happened to end up lasting forty years. You see, pal, some people are just flingers. Just flingers. You see, I don’t believe in this there’s-a-girl-for-every-boy-and-a-boy-for-every-girl stuff. It’s just who you get thrown against in the trolley-car, and there’s more than one trolley-car and more than one ride. Hell — I haven’t even got to the main item. You haven’t heard anything yet.”
He looks around at the sun-filled garden, as if it’s in his power to bring a shutter down on all that he sees. He gulps for air.
“I don’t have to tell you this. I know that’s what you’re going to say: ‘You didn’t have to tell me this.’ But I’m going to tell you this. You see, I figured it was up to her. And I figured if she told you, I’d soon know about it. Then, after she died, I figured I’d give it time, in case you found something among the stuff she left you. Yeah, yeah, you found those notebooks you told me about. I’m glad you found those notebooks.” He gives me a soft, solicitous look. “Well, I’ve given it time. You see, I figured she might have meant to tell you. But she couldn’t speak, could she? She couldn’t damn well speak. So I figured it was up to me. It was damn well up to me. And don’t think I haven’t thought, over and over: I don’t have to tell him this, the kid need never know. But I’m going to tell you, because it’s the truth. The truth. And you have to tell the truth, don’t you, pal? You see, he found out. Your pa found out. Of course he found out. Were we careful? And there was this helluva bust-up between him and Sylvie, and in the middle of it Sylvie tells him — and afterwards she tells me she’s told him — that you weren’t — that you weren’t his son. She tells him that to his face. And two days later your pa — who isn’t your pa, who never was your pa — well, you know this, pal — he goes and shoots himself.”
I stare hard at Sam, whose face has the dissolved, transparent look that people have when they wish they had the power of disappearance, or when they would be very grateful if, for a few minutes at least, they could be someone other than they are. I suppose, in a different way, this is my look too.
The first thought I register on receiving Sam’s words is a perfectly empirical observation of the state of the world around me. It hasn’t altered. Spring sunshine, with a little flutter of a breeze, caresses the flower beds. A pigeon waddles nonchalantly on the lawn.
The second is the sudden, headlong, insane thought that the blenching, familiar but transmogrified face I see before me is the face — of my father. But this, of course, is impossible; this would be entirely irrational.
So I say, in a voice that surprises me with its rationality, its steadiness, its cool, unpanicking pertinence: “So, if my father wasn’t— Who—?”
“It’s okay. It’s all right. He’s dead. He was dead when Sylvie told him. He was killed in the war. He’s dead.”
I stare at him, not comprehending his propitiating tone. He can’t refuse me more information.
“I think she said he came from Aldermaston. But I guess he was always on the move.… He was an engine-driver, pal. Would you believe it? She had this thing going, back in the Thirties, with an engine-driver. On the main line west.”
13
The word “innocence” lodges in my mind. A teasing, a fugitive notion, easiest to gauge by its loss. In this metamorphosed condition in which I find myself, in this state of stunned divorce from my former self, it sometimes seems to me that innocence is the very quality of which I have been entirely drained. Self-slaughter, even bungled self-slaughter, is, I believe, a sin. A mortal sin. And yet, as I sit in these paradisiacal surroundings, it seems to me, equally, that innocence is precisely what has been rendered unto me, as if my return to life — if I can call it that — has restored me, but without expunging my memories, to a condition prior to experience.
Innocence. So insidiously close, in sound and sense, to “ignorance.” Not knowing something, we are “innocent of it”—so we say. Yet, from another point of view, only the truth is, truly, innocent. So when Matthew determined to know the truth, was it Matthew who was the foolish innocent, or was it the rest of the world, happy in its worldly credulity? And what of this place right here — this hub, this Mecca of knowledge? Are we innocent other-worldlings, cut off in our cloistered confines from mundane erroneousness, or are we really the arch-villains of the piece? A proper little gang of Fausts? Are we the ones to blame?
I told myself, of course: it doesn’t matter. What should I do? Nothing. What should I say? Nothing. How am I changed? In no way. The fiction of my life (if that is what it is) may as well serve as the fact. I am my father’s son, meaning my father-whom-I-once-knew-as-my-father’s son, by whose death my life has been so irreversibly moulded. I am who I am. I am Bill Unwin (there, I declare myself!). I am Hamlet the Dane.
Innocence. Innocence.
What I am about to relate occurred only three days after Sam’s annunciatory visit. Yet I don’t think that on that Tuesday morning I was in any particular way altered. Three days had passed, it might be said, since the passing of my innocence. But against this, I maintain, I actually felt more innocent. To discover that for fifty years of your life you have been labouring under a massive misapprehension is a fair enough reminder at least of your capacity for innocence. It puts a sort of childlike hesitancy into your step and a dazed, receptive smile on your face. It makes you feel — as though you have swallowed some initially tranquillizing drug — really quite good.