The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(101)

Everything.

This racing of my heart.

This stopping of my breath.

This flushing in my cheek.

It is not love.

It is delusion.

Jenny.

Holding Vincent’s hand.

With her other she reaches out and slips the glass from between his fingers, placing it on the black surface of the grand piano. This done, her fingers return again to the back of his neck, run through the thin hairs above his collar. She is almost the same height as him, but stands a little on tiptoe anyway, her weight pushing him back. She kisses him, and he kisses back, deep and long and passionate, and the room applauds and as they part his eyes flicker to me.

A second.

Just a second.

What did he see?

I applaud too.

Only later–much, much later–do I permit myself to crawl into the furthest reaches of the garden, sink on to my hands and knees in the damp soil, and weep.





Chapter 72


Vincent.

My enemy.

My friend.

Of us two I am the better liar.

But you–you have always been a better judge of men.

Was it the final test? The ultimate proof? Could I look into the eyes of my wife as she kissed another man, and shake her hand, and smile, and say how happy I was for you both, receive her kiss on my cheek and hear her voice and know that she was yours, my enemy, my friend, without revealing all? Could I smile as she was led down the aisle, sing my way through the hymns in the church, take the photos as she cut the cake? For Harry, Harry is a journalist, Harry must be good at taking photos, no? Could I watch you whisper words into her ears, and see her laugh, and smell you on her skin, and not rise up in fury, because you took her, not for love, not for passion or companionship or even that therapeutic half-hour in the eight-hour shift. You took her because she was mine. Could I smile at this?

It would appear that I could.

I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember exactly when it died.





Chapter 73


We near the end, you and I.

It occurs to me that in all this I have not told you much of my adopted father, Patrick August, or, more specifically, of how he dies. Harriet, kindly Harriet, dies between my sixth and eighth birthdays; Rory Hulne, as you know, dies poor, although not always in the same place. Patrick, silent Patrick, who sat across the fire from me in his grief at his wife’s departure, dies in the 1960s, dissatisfied with his lot. He has never remarried in all the lives I’ve known him, and often the slow decline of the Hulnes nets him in their web, and he finds himself poor, pension-less, alone. I send him money, and each time I do I receive a stiff letter in reply, almost the same word for word in every life.


Dear Harry,



I have received your money. I hope you do not inconvenience yourself by sending it. I need little for I have what I require, and the efforts of the old must turn towards the future of the young. I walk a lot and keep myself in good health. I trust you do the same. My best wishes to you,

Yours,

Patrick



Always, when I send him money he refuses to spend it for at least six months, but hoards it in a box under his bed. I suspect he keeps it to return to me some day, but poverty takes its toll and he is at last forced to spend it for his own survival. I tried once sending him enough for a new house, but he returned my cheque with a letter politely informing me that such wealth was best spent on the young, and he had enough to keep himself in health. I am careful not to visit him for at least two months after any donation, for fear he will mis-interpret my appearance as a demand for gratitude. Even to this day, after all these years, I am still not sure of the best way to make my father’s old age a happy one.

My father.

Throughout all this I have referred to Rory Hulne as “my father”, which in a strictly genetic sense he is. He has been present through my life, a constant in the shadows, inescapable, unavoidable; and having no better term to describe him than “my father” so he has been described. I could perhaps call him a soldier, a master, a lordling, a man consumed by jealousy, a creature of regret, a rapist, but as each statement would require some sort of conditional, I settle instead for what he is–my father.

And yet he is not half the father that I believe Patrick to have been. I do not deny Patrick’s flaws, for he was a cold man, distant in my youth, harsh after Harriet’s departure. He used the rod more than a kind man would, and left me to my own devices more than a loving man might, but not once, not in any life which I have lived, did he deploy the ultimate cruelty, and tell me the truth of myself. Not once did he claim to be anything but my father, even as my features evolved into the looks of the man who denied any link with me. A truer man, a man of his word, I have never met.

I went back to that place in my fourteenth life. I had just witnessed Jenny marry Vincent, and of course–but of course–I stayed around and played the part of the excellent friend, smiling and dissembling, laughing at their jokes, smiling at their fondness, indulging their affection, and only when six, seven months had gone by and my credit was assured did I sadly report that I must return briefly to England. Vincent offered to pay for my flight–by now I was deep in his pocket and very much his man–but I politely refused, saying that this was a private affair. When I left London airport, two men shadowed me to the train. Losing a tail without making it apparent that you’re losing a tail can be a tricky business. I used a combination of errand-running, a guaranteed way to force any surveillance into an error, and well-planned spontaneous attendance at private, invitation-only functions to whittle down both the tenacity and morale of my shadowers. By the time I boarded a train for Berwick-upon-Tweed I was confident that I had lost them, without ever once having to break into a run.