Everything up to the moment of the young man’s death I remembered with stinging clarity, but everything after it was wiped from my mind. People must have gathered round, there must have been police, and an ambulance, all that, but for me the aftermath of the accident is a blessed blank. I do remember the army lorry careering on regardless — what to it was one more death, among the so many it must have witnessed in its time? But what about the girl the young man had been talking to, if it was a girl? Did she crouch beside him and cradle his poor pulped head in her lap? Did she throw back her own head and howl? How protectively the mind suppresses things. Some things.
It fell to me to get rid of our Olivia’s effects — does a child of three have effects? — her suits and smocks and pink bootees. I was supposed to take them to the church round the corner for distribution to the poor, but instead I rolled them into a big ball that I tied up with string and dropped into the river on a tearily indistinct midnight hour. The ball didn’t sink, of course, but bobbed away on the tide towards the docks and the open sea. For months afterwards I worried that it would wash up on the riverbank somewhere and be found by a rag-picker, and that one day I, or, worse, Gloria, would spot a toddler in the street, all togged out in a heartbreakingly familiar outfit.
One of the phenomena I sorely miss, from the days when I was still painting, is the stillness that used to generate itself around me when I was at work, and into which I was able to make some sort of temporary escape from myself. That kind of peace and quiet you don’t get by any other means, or I don’t, anyway. For instance, it differed entirely, in depth and resonance, from the stealthy hush that accompanies a theft. At the easel, the silence that fell upon everything was like the silence I imagine spreading over the world after I am dead. Oh, I don’t delude myself that the world will shut down its clamour just because I’ve made my final brushstroke. But there will be a special little corner of tranquillity once my perturbations have ceased. Think of some back alley, in some dank suburb, on a grey afternoon between seasons; the wind whips up the dust in spirals, turns over scraps of paper, rolls a bit of dirty rag this way and that; then all stops, seemingly for no reason, a calm descends, and quiet prevails. Not amid celestial light and the voices of angels, but there, in that kind of nothingness, in that kind of nowhereness, my imagination operates most happily and forges its profoundest fancies.
You will want to hear about our time down there in the warm south, with the mistral snapping those sunshades in the place du Marché, and our hands entwined on the table amid the dishes of olives and the glasses of greyed pastis, and the delightful strolls we took and the colourfully disreputable people we encountered, and the straw-coloured wine we used to drink with dinner in that little place under the ramparts where we went every evening, and the funny old house we leased from the eccentric lady who kept cats, and the bullfighter who took a shine to Gloria, and my brief but tempestuous affaire with the expatriate titled Englishwoman, the lovely Lady O. — all that. Well, you can want away. I grant you it’s an earthly paradise in those parts, but a tainted paradise it was, for us, with many a serpent slithering among the convoluted vines. Don’t misunderstand me, it was no worse there than anywhere else, for two poor numbed souls lost in listless mourning, but not much better, either, once the bloom wore off the fabled douceur de vivre and the beaded bubbles winking at the brim had all winked out. Forget your ideas of an idyll. I seem to have spent most of my time in supermarket car parks, baking in the passenger seat of our little grey Deux Chevaux and listening to some heart-stricken chanteuse sobbing about love on the car radio, while Gloria was off in a shaded corner having a smoke and yet another quiet cry.