But as soon as he entered the pleasant room with its rough plank walls and pine-scented air he changed his mind. What is happening? he thought. What am I doing? He went back to the house. In the cool of the sunken living room he picked up a gigantic volume of Helmut Newton nudes. As he leafed through the long-boned, silvered figures his thoughts moved forward to the moment of Chloe’s arrival back from her lover (there was no doubt in his mind that that was where she’d gone), and he felt the impossibility of being able to step back into their briefly revived intimacy. Better not to be here at all when she returned than risk alienating her with the sullenness he was inevitably going to be radiating. He shut the book and went out to the pickup truck in the driveway, dimly aware, as he turned the key in the ignition, of having rationalized a desire he knew to be irrational.
Town was unusually busy, with traffic backed up a quarter mile from the green. Something was going on in the athletic fields that ran down one side of the road. A stage had been erected, and there was a woman on it speaking into a microphone. As Matthew drew level, her words became briefly audible: “… so for those of you who have ever needed the fire company, or enjoyed the flowers on the village green, or had a relative taken care of in the Aurelia hospice…” Farther along, hanging over the entrance to the field, was a sign reading VOLUNTEERS DAY PICNIC AND FIREWORKS.
The traffic eased up after the green, and he was soon crossing the bridge over the creek and turning onto the leaf-dappled twists and turns of Veery Road. The LeBaron was in the driveway. Right next to it, gleaming remorselessly in the hard sunlight, was the Lexus.
He drove on. What now? It was three in the afternoon. He appeared to have exhausted his options. Waiting at the house for Chloe, circling back to the A-frame, packing his things and leaving: every possibility seemed to bring him up against the same intolerable reality.
A band of schoolchildren was on the stage playing “Crazy Train” as he drove back past the athletic field. Troops of families were gathered before them, cheering them on. Apparently the town had an existence beyond supplying Charlie and Chloe with convenient places to play tennis and conduct assignations.
Back up the mountain, he went straight to the guesthouse. At least here he felt a degree of calm. He lay on the bed, reaching for his father’s old Penguin edition of Pascal’s Pensées; this also more for purposes of talismanic comfort than any more practical aim.
The book was part of a boxload his mother had sent him when she’d remarried and decided to get rid of his father’s things. For a long time Matthew hadn’t been able to face unpacking them, but lately he’d begun thinking about his father from the point of view not just of an abandoned child wanting to be magically reunited with him, but of an adult curious to understand him. A year ago he’d started reading through the books, hoping they might have something to offer in this regard. It turned out his father had had a habit of noting the date he’d read each volume, enabling Matthew to follow him in chronological sequence, and giving him the somewhat eerie impression of tracking down his absconded parent along a kind of trail or spoor of print.
As a young man Gerald Dannecker’s tastes seemed to have run mostly to English comic novels, full of farcical plot twists and larky repartee. Later, after marrying and settling into his career, he’d begun to read more widely: political biography, travel, popular science. It was in the period following the Lloyd’s crash that the books by Pascal and other philosophers had begun appearing. Having never before been a marker of passages, he had begun carefully underlining pithy phrases during this period, and this gave the books a peculiarly personal aura. Alighting on the markings, which were in pencil and always very neat, Matthew would feel a tantalizing proximity to his father’s thought processes. The sense of an agitation crystallizing, dissolving, reformulating itself, was palpable. From the beginning, the question of suicide had been ominously present. In a book of Schopenhauer’s writings Matthew had found underlined: Neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or even definite disapproval of it. Several months further along, in a collection of aphorisms by E. M. Cioran, the thought was still clearly on his father’s mind, and its coloration had become even more positive: Suicide is one of man’s distinctive characteristics, one of his discoveries; no animal is capable of it, and the angels have scarcely guessed its existence. In the same book, however, the underlinings had directed Matthew to stirrings of what appeared to be an entirely different impulse: There has never been a human being who has not-at least unconsciously-desired the death of another human being. Disturbed, Matthew had wondered whose death besides his own his father might have been desiring. The directors of Lloyd’s? Charlie’s father-Uncle Graham-who had talked him into becoming a “member” of that accursed organization in the first place? But before he could answer the question, it too had undergone radical twists and refinements, culminating in a passage at once so opaque and so communicative, Matthew had committed it to memory: Who has not experienced the desire to commit an incomparable crime which would exclude him from the human race? Who has not coveted ignominy in order to sever for good the links which attach him to others, to suffer a condemnation without appeal and thereby to reach the peace of the abyss?
For at least a year after his father had disappeared, Matthew had been certain he was going to contact him, probably with some cryptic message that only Matthew would recognize as coming from him, and that only Matthew would understand. No such message had ever come, and yet as he’d read through this last sequence of books, it had begun to seem to him as if it was after all written right there in those neat pencil lines: just as cryptic as he had always imagined it would be, and at the same time just as powerfully eloquent. By the time of Pascal’s Pensées, the last in this concluding sequence, the quandary over what course of action to take seemed to have given way to a more generalized mood of reflection and speculation. Perhaps a decision had been taken and his father was merely waiting for the courage, or the right moment, to act.
A coroner’s verdict had declared him legally dead after the obligatory seven-year period, but the declaration had been a purely administrative event in Matthew’s mind. Unlike his mother and sister, who had eagerly accepted the verdict, relieved by this final official purging of the taint of disgrace, Matthew had never been able to assign his father conclusively to the category of either the living or the dead. He thought of him as a kind of vacillating spirit moving between both worlds, and these books had done nothing to settle this uncertainty. It had always been hard for him to accept the banal criminality of his father’s deed. Emptying out his clients’ accounts! The very fact that he’d had signatory power over these accounts in the first place was proof, surely, of his absolute probity; a measure of how thoroughly out of character the deed had been. And yet the books, with their cunning and convoluted moral arguments, only made it harder to reach any kind of stable verdict. He didn’t know what to believe; wasn’t even sure what he wanted to believe. In one fantasy his father had killed himself but stolen his clients’ money first so as to make it look as if he’d just run off somewhere, and thereby spare his family the trauma of his suicide. In another, his father had reached some obscure philosophical justification for the theft and was still alive, living anonymously in some secluded place on the proceeds. Matthew even half fancied he knew where that place was. There was a turquoise house on the hillside high above the little secluded cove known as Tranqué Bay on the Caribbean island where the family had gone on holiday three winters in a row. Lying in his deck chair, his father used to gaze up and fantasize out loud about living there. “If we ever come into any serious money,” Matthew remembered him saying, “that’s the house I shall buy.” Matthew had reminded his mother of this at the time of the investigation, and she had passed it on to the detectives from Scotland Yard. Nothing had come of it, and yet whenever he thought of his father as still living, his imagination persisted in placing him there above Tranqué Bay, enjoying the sea breeze on the carved wooden veranda that was just visible from the white sands below.