The Only Story(63)

But if Verstappen was showing youthful fearlessness rather than true courage, did the same age disclaimer apply in reverse: to cowardice? He’d certainly been under twenty-five when he committed an act of cowardice which had haunted him all his life. He and Eric were staying at the Macleods’, and had gone off to a funfair in a hilly park. They were walking down from the top, side by side, chatting, and failed to notice a group of youths coming up towards them. As they drew level, one leaned into Eric with his shoulder, spinning him round; another tripped him, and a third went in with his boot. He took all this in with a kind of heightened peripheral vision – how long before Eric was on the ground? a second? two? – and had instantly, instinctively run away. He kept saying to himself, ‘Find a policeman, find a policeman,’ but even as he did so, he knew that wasn’t the reason he was running. He was afraid of getting beaten up himself. The rational part of him knew that policemen were a rare sight at funfairs. So he ran to the bottom of the hill on this futile, pretend quest, without actually asking anyone where he might find help. Then he walked back up, nauseous at what he might find. Eric was on his feet, blood on his face, feeling his ribs. He could no longer remember what had been said – whether he offered his fake excuse – and they drove back to the Macleod house. Susan bandaged Eric, with liberal use of Dettol, and insisted he stay until the bruising had gone down and the cuts mended. Which Eric had done. Neither then nor later had Eric rebuked him for cowardice, or asked why he’d disappeared.

You could get through a life, if you were careful, and lucky, without having your courage much tested – or rather, your cowardice revealed. That time Macleod had attacked him in the book room he’d certainly run for it, after throwing one ineffective punch in reply to Macleod’s three. And when he’d scuttled out of the back door, he hadn’t been trying to find a policeman, either. He had made the probably correct calculation that Macleod was drunk enough and angry enough to go on attempting to hit him until he succeeded. Despite being younger, and reasonably fit, he hadn’t fancied his chances at close quarters. It wasn’t like facing an under-12, under-6-stone schoolboy of equal timorousness.

And then again, more recently. ‘Recently’ in the sense of ‘fifteen or twenty years ago’. That was how the mind, and time, worked nowadays. He’d been back in England for only a few years. He’d visited Susan a couple of times, bringing no visible pleasure or benefit to either of them. One evening, the phone rang. It was Martha Macleod, now – for a long time – Mrs Something-or-Other.

‘My mother has been temporarily sectioned,’ was her opening line.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘She’s in …’ and cited the mental health department of a local hospital. He knew its reputation. A doctor friend, with professional dryness, had once told him, ‘You have to be really mad to get in there.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a terrible place. It’s like Bedlam. Lots of people screaming. Either that or they’re zombified with tranquillizers.’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t ask which category Susan was in.

‘Would you go and see her? And see the place?’

He thought: this is the first time in a quarter of a century that Martha has asked anything of me. Disapproval at first; quiet superiority thereafter; though she had always been polite to him. She must be at the end of her tether, he thought. Well, he had been there in his time too; and knew how elastic the end of a tether could be. So he considered her request.

‘Maybe.’ He was going up to town in a couple of days, as it happened. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

‘I think it would do her good to see you. In the place she’s in.’

‘Yes.’

He’d left it like that. After he put the phone down, he thought: I looked after her for years. I tried my best. I failed. I handed her over to you. So it’s your turn now.

But he didn’t believe his own bitter logic. It was like saying, ‘Find a policeman, find a policeman.’ The truth was, he couldn’t face it: he couldn’t face seeing her, the remnant of her, whether screaming or zombified, among the screaming and zombified. He tried to think of his decision as an act of necessary self-protection; also, protection of the picture he had of her in his head. But he knew the truth. He was scared of going there.

As he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb, him. He knew the contentment of feeling less. His emotional life was recast as a social life. He was on nodding and smiling terms with many, as he stood in his leather apron and tweed cap in front of a colour photograph of happy goats. He prized stoicism and calm, which he had achieved less through some exercise of philosophy, more from a slow growth within him; a growth like coral, which in most weathers was strong enough to keep out the ocean breakers. Except when it wasn’t.

So his life consisted mainly of observation and memory. It was not a bad mix. He viewed with distaste those men in their sixties and seventies who carried on behaving as if they were in their thirties: a whirl of younger women, exotic travel and dangerous sports. Fat tycoons on yachts with hairy arms round thin models. Not to mention respectable husbands who, in a turmoil of existential anguish and Viagra, left their wives of several decades. There was a German expression for this fear, one of those concertina words the language specialized in, which translated as ‘the panic at the shutting of the doors’. He himself felt untroubled by that shutting; though he saw no reason to hurry it up.