I shouldn’t have taken it all so seriously. It could have been something you sang about when you were young, talked about in college, argued about in bars and cafés, a dream you shouted from the rooftops while the pigs were letting off gas grenades at you: kidnapping the Dean, burning the draft cards and blowing up the computer building. I could have done it that way — the way you grow out of it, like Paris in the spring, because you weren’t ever really going to see it come about, were you? The revolution or whatever you called your hope. Sing about it passionately, yes, like Alice; that was very much part of the scenario — because it was going to fail. That was always in the last reel, wasn’t it? — the riot police, gas-masks, rubber bullets, then real ones, then tanks, finally the rigged trial and the ten-year sentence. And then you spent the rest of your life making up sad songs about it all, commemorating the failure.
But oh no, not that. That’s why I took it seriously. I didn’t want that. I saw that from the beginning. Alexei showed me and George too — the student phase, the amateur revolution of the privileged. I took it seriously. Took it and made it like a hidden birthmark, a faith like a disability that could never be displayed until the day broke — when the illness, the sore, would burst into miraculous flower and all would be well. But would it? Miracles were worse than the songs: they never happened. The seriousness had failed. God, how it had failed.
Serious. That had been the key word in everything. ‘If you are serious about it,’ she remembered Alexei saying, ‘you will put up with every setback. And they’ll come, be sure of that — the public disappointments, and much worse, the personal loss of faith. And when they do, remember the choice, the decision you make now — that you believe these ideas we’ve talked about are right. And nothing should really change that. We have only one life — and people like us try to cram too many opinions into it. But the others can’t. They have to live without comment.’
And yes, she thought, I still do believe those ideas to be right. But it’s a dry belief, without feeling. And I must suffer that. I must go on. That was part of Alexei’s whole scheme — that whatever happened there would still be people outside to carry the business through. The person next to me — George, who shared and warmed my belief — is gone, that is all. And someone has taken his place. He smokes his pipe, wears his watch, carries his old fountain pen. But it is not him. I have not properly understood all that yet — looking at these objects that once touched the body I touched.
The children can have their story now. He can read it to them, this other man, whoever he is. And I shall find out who — that, and what has happened to him — that other. I shall find out all of it — about him. And him. He will tell me.
The party finished and the children went to bed. ‘Will you read them one of your Babar stories, George?’ Helen asked me, something unexpressed in her voice and face: ‘George.’ George Graham. I wished I could have told her the truth of it all — my truth and his.
I read to the children in the nursery next their parents’ bedroom where Helen had gone, moving about, unpacking. ‘“The elephant’s school at Celesteville is closed for the whole summer,”’ I read. ‘“Zephyr, the little monkey, as well as his bigger schoolmates, goes off for the holidays. What fun to go and see his family again! But how sad to leave his friends, King Babar, Queen Celeste, the Old Lady, his teacher, and his beloved Arthur …”’
‘“… Queen Celeste, the Old Lady, his teacher, and his beloved Arthur! All four have promised to come to the river near the bridge to see him off and bid him a last fond farewell …”’
Helen listened to his voice in the next room, quietly pointed and assured as if he’d been used to reading bedtime stories all his life. Had he children of his own from his failed marriage, she wondered? But she asked him? She’d forgotten. There was nothing she knew about him. And worse, there was nothing she could remember in him, as there had been with the other men. He stood up for her in the guise of someone deeply loved, as a memorial to him, and thus he constantly provoked her memory of the real man. And so, in the days since she had met him, she had started to remember, involuntarily at first, the past cascading back to her — odd very clear incidents at odd moments. But soon she found that she needed these memories and so she came to create, to nurture them, to hold them to her like a passport, her only identity — these papers which alone would take her successfully into the future. Without them, the present, the days ahead were condemned. To survive she must carry her past with her all the time — the ideals, the purposes and the men who had shared her life with these things — and to be able to produce it as an immediate reference whenever she asked herself ‘Where — and what now?’
‘“They have to use a rope ladder to climb up to the house perched there in the treetops. Zephyr scrambles up easily, but laughs as he says to himself, ‘This wouldn’t do for my friends the Elephants’ …”’
Elephants. She closed the drawer she had filled with the twins’ clothes. After the filming in Ethiopia, she and Graham had gone on alone, southwards to Kenya, to Tsavo National Park to look at the elephants. George had been researching another TV story — the College of African Wildlife on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. And from there they’d gone out on a training safari with the College instructors and students — careering across the open plainsland of the huge park in open lorries.
That first morning had always been a clear enough thing to hold. It hardly took the form of memory, but lived safely, ever available in the grammar of the historic present: that first time properly alone with him, believing so surely than in the next few weeks — a happy stretch of certain days ahead of them. Confident with him, yet not grasping, a reasonable happiness, no more than that, and surely that would come in this empty world — this plainsland which human dissension had not yet marked?
And loving him too. That as well. But love as an easy thing now, something you could stop thinking about if you wanted to.
… The first night out we camped, not in tents, but in the crumbling manager’s house in a ruined mining village at the centre of the park with the students bedding down in the old labour lines. And it was creepy and far more strange than tents under the stars. There was no electricity in the house yet the bulbs were still there and the electric fires had never been taken away and I found an old hair-dryer in a cupboard of the manager’s bedroom where we’d been put to sleep with our bags. Mr and Mrs Graham …
That evening when it turned cold and pitch-dark within half an hour of sunset, great blocks of cedar from a ruined tree in the garden roared in the living-room grate, the Tilley lamps hissed like snakes as they were pumped up in the kitchen, and people chatted and laughed over their beers before dinner.