The Harlequin Read online

  Could all of that be gone? Beaumont headed east along Millbank, then across the Lambeth Bridge to the southern embankment. He knew he could catch a bus on Lambeth Road that would bring him to Kennington Lane in under ten minutes, but he decided to walk instead. He crossed the Embankment Road and carried on along Black Prince Road until he reached the junction with Kennington Road. The rush hour was still some way off, and so traffic was light. As he crossed into Kennington Lane he saw a woman in a fox fur coat stepping out of a hackney carriage. Her outline shimmered like a mirage against the gridiron of naked trees. The snow on the streets here was still white, white as royal icing or hospital sheets, and Beaumont began to walk more slowly, looking closely about him. He was almost home.

  Since the death of Stephen Lovell, the house on Kennington Lane had begun to seem unreal to him. He had been born in that house, lived there his whole life until the war came. The Kennington house had always been a constant, the most permanent aspect of his life, yet being apart from it and in such circumstances had lent it the aspect of a mirage. In the ambulance with Lovell, he found himself increasingly unwilling to believe he would ever return there. Afterwards, in Paris, he had sometimes found himself unable even to picture the house or Kennington Lane itself. In his mind the stoutly angled edifice of London stock had always been synonymous with stability, with durability, impervious to change. The war had taught him that nothing was impervious to change, that the most durable-seeming reality could be reduced to horror and chaos in less than a second.

  The house on Kennington Lane had begun to take on more and more the aspect of something imagined, a place glimpsed once in a dream and then lost forever. He remembered his friend Ambrose Weston telling him about a new novel that had just been published in France, a fantasy called Le Grand Meaulnes by a poet and literary critic named Alain-Fournier.

  “Meaulnes is not a fantasy,” Ambrose insisted. “Memory is not fantasy. It is the bridge between the real and the imagined.”

  They were at the training camp at North Allerton. Beaumont’s instinct was to reject the novel, which from what Ambrose was saying seemed mainly to be about a young man’s obsessive quest for the perfect woman. He was able to turn down his friend’s offer to lend him the book on the grounds that his French was nowhere near good enough, but in the weeks and months following the Armistice he found his thoughts returning to it constantly. He eventually discovered a copy in a murky, cigar-smoked bookshop in Montmartre and had purchased it at once, even though his funds were desperately low and his command of French, though improved, still made a fluent reading impossible.

  In the evenings in his room near Pigalle he had spent hours poring over the text by the light of the foul-smelling kerosene lamp that provided the only illumination he could afford. He was still some way from finishing the novel, but the early passages, where Meaulnes first comes to the school, released in Beaumont a sense of keen regret that he came to associate increasingly with the house on Kennington Lane. He longed to discuss his feelings with Ambrose Weston but that was now impossible. Ambrose had gone missing in action some six months before the Armistice.

  Ambrose Weston’s father was an Anglican minister, and Ambrose himself had been intending to be ordained. As a man of the cloth, Ambrose could have claimed exemption from military service, but his brand of religion – fierce, intellectually demanding and unsparing of self – had driven him to see this as impossible. Implausibly, he had enjoyed military life. He liked the order, the comradeship. Now he was gone. There was a hole in Beaumont’s mind where Ambrose Weston used to exist, unreachable and unreal as Meaulnes’s Lost Domain.

  The house was still there. In the part of his mind that remained from before, he knew it was insane of him to have doubted that it would be, yet he found himself staring at it with surprise, even with fear. The paintwork was in need of attention, and there was a noticeable build-up of grime on the downstairs window panes. Otherwise, the house was as it always had been, its four storeys seemingly inviolate behind their neatly aligned defence of cast iron railings.

  Beaumont stood immobile for a moment, shifting his shabby valise from one hand to the other. Then he walked up the short front pathway and pulled the bell. He heard a woman’s voice call out, a faint response from somewhere deeper inside the building, then footsteps hurrying lightly along the hall. He tried to remember how Lucy’s footsteps sounded but was unable to. It was more than a month since he had written to Lucy. Since his demob she had sent him a letter every couple of days, care of the poste restante at Pigalle, asking ever more insistently when he would be returning. He kept his answers as vague as he could without actually lying, but in the end, sickened by his own mendacity, he’d stopped writing to her altogether.

  Beaumont had just enough time to wonder if he should perhaps have telegraphed ahead to announce his arrival before the door was flung open and his sister was in his arms.

  “Dennis,” she said. “It is you! Oh, thank God.”

  He held her close, feeling her palms pressing against the back of his greatcoat and thinking how strange it felt to hear his Christian name. The war had remade him as Beaumont, except to the prostitutes he visited occasionally in Pigalle, who had spoken his name in the French way: Denis. He kissed the top of Doris’s head. The tidily cropped, dunnock-brown hair was streaked with grey, and he felt another jolt of unreality pass through him as he wondered if he, like Meaulnes, had been spirited away for half a lifetime instead of just three years.

  “Sorry to turn up out of the blue like this,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how long it might take me to get here. The trains are still all over the place.” He paused. “Is Lucy here?”

  “Lucy’s out. She’ll be back in an hour. Come on, this is ridiculous, talking out here on the step like this. Get yourself inside.”

  Doris stood to one side to let him pass, and Beaumont felt himself relax a little, knowing he would not have to face Lucy immediately, that he had time to compose himself, to decide what to say. He was relieved to see that, aside from the grey in her hair, Doris looked unchanged. Now that the first shock of their reunion was past, her face had returned to its habitual expression of calm preparedness. Doris was nicely made. She had never been beautiful but she had always been pleasant to look at, not least because of the clear intelligence that animated her, even when she was silent, which was often. Beaumont could not remember ever having seen her demonstrably angry on any subject except politics.

  In so many ways she was the opposite of Lucy. Beaumont didn’t suppose Lucy cared much if women won the vote or not. On the other hand, she was often angry. Dennis sometimes thought it was Lucy’s anger he had fallen in love with, her insistence on expressing herself in such forthright terms.

  He wondered what Lucy thought of the war. It came to him that in his letters he had barely mentioned it, though he had often found himself trying to imagine how she might have managed if the war had reached out and touched her directly. It was not the possibility of his own death he was thinking about – he thought he knew better than she how shallowly this would have affected her, at least in the long term – but how she would have coped with living alone, like Irène the waitress at the Café Paradis, with being on her feet until late in the evening, constantly acceding to the demands of others, perhaps in ways she could scarcely bear even to name.

  Would such a life have destroyed her, or turned her into another person, stronger and more resourceful than the Lucy he had proposed to in a fit of ardour he regretted more or less as soon as it dawned on him there was no going back on it? For the briefest of moments, Beaumont imagined her on her knees in a hotel bedroom while the man with the burned away face fumbled with her underclothes. Beaumont had not been to bed with Lucy. There had been a time when he had tormented himself with his desire for her, so acute it sometimes felt like a physical illness. More recently though it had been Irène he fantasised about, her perfectly finished, doll-like head, its curious disjuncture with her peasant’s body.

&
nbsp; “Come through to the kitchen,” Doris said. “I’ll make us some tea.”

  Beaumont put down his suitcase. He looked at the floor, the calmly repeating pattern of black and white tiles, wondering if his room in the attic was still his, or whether it had been let out to paying guests, like his father’s old room.

  “Tea sounds perfect,” he said. He hoped Doris could not smell the beer on him. Going to the pub with Ferguson had been a mistake, if only because the sight of the creature with the shattered face had reawakened memories he’d spent the past six months in Paris trying to forget.

  “Are you all right, Den?” Doris said. “You look exhausted.” She laid a hand on his arm, and for the first time Beaumont seemed properly to see his surroundings: the green-painted hall with its scrubbed tiles, the three engravings from Pevsners, hanging one above the other on the wall just inside the door. Clear daylight filtered through from the back, where the kitchen was, and the lean-to conservatory that ran off it, with its glass roof, its blue and white porcelain planters, Doris’s carefully nurtured collection of cacti and succulents. Beyond that, the garden, with its russet walls. He saw it clearly in his mind’s eye, the mown grass covered with snow, the rooks bunched in the criss-crossed branches of the empty trees.

  “I’m fine,” Beaumont said. “I haven’t slept much this past day or so, that’s all.”

  “You’re bound to feel strange,” said Doris. It was just like Doris to try and understand, to make excuses for him, Beaumont thought. The seeming futility of it cut deeply into him. He sat in the ancient beadwork chair that had been part of the kitchen’s furnishings since he was a boy, while his sister ran water into the kettle and lit the gas. The chair stood in the corner, by the boiler, and Beaumont found himself doing automatically what he’d always done when he sat in it, leaning over to lace his fingers into the metal grid of the boiler guard, luxuriating in the familiar accumulation of heat, the faint smell of oil that had always given the kitchen something of the atmosphere of a machine shop.

  Doris reached up to the dresser and took down the tea caddy, the same square tin they had always kept tea in, embossed with an enamelled Chinoiserie design of birds and peach blossom that seemed to embody everything he’d left behind here, the whole life-enhancing, God-granted expanse of it. He thought of his room upstairs, the chintz curtains and candlewick bedspread, the glass-fronted bookcase filled with texts by von Clausewitz and Machiavelli and Archimboldo, the tag ends, the abandoned remnants of his interrupted life.

  I’ll die here, he thought. He thought of his chilly little room in Paris with its single cold water tap and blackened floorboards, and longed for it with such intensity that it took the full force of his will to prevent himself from getting up from his chair, grabbing his valise from where it stood in the hallway and heading back to the station.

  It was as if he could smell the approach of death, the foul-breathed monstrosity with poisoned meat under its nails he had narrowly escaped in Cassaron, its footfalls measured not in gunshots this time but in the languid, lustrous tick-tick-tick of the grandfather clock that stood in the niche alcove on the first floor landing. Beaumont asked himself which kind of death would be worse and could not answer. All he knew was that the old life could not be returned to. It was better to leave before he fell into it, inch by stupefied inch, and lost himself forever.

  It would only take a second, and he would be free.

  “Here you are,” Doris said. “I’ve been saving this specially.” She set the teapot on the table in front of him and poured his cup. The tea was fragrant and steaming. A lump of sugar gleamed in his saucer like a cube of quartz. The tea at the Front was bitter and grey. The older soldiers used to swear it was cut with iron filings. Beaumont had almost forgotten how real China tea tasted. He sipped the fragrant liquid, relishing its scent, its extraordinary power to soothe, and asked Doris how she had been managing.

  “Things are easier with Dad gone. I know I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true.” She sat very straight, with her cup in front of her, looking down. “The money I get from his room is useful too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beaumont said. He was not exactly certain what he was apologising for. Their father had died almost exactly four months after Armistice Day, of some monstrous, creeping disease that had never been named. Lucy had written to him about it, of how his father had been towards the end, in so much pain, finally, that the morphine the doctors prescribed could only bring him relief for a few short hours. Beaumont had dreaded those letters, not for the dreadful snapshots of suffering they contained – he had seen worse at the Front – but for the sense of guilt they aroused in him, the suspicion that Lucy and perhaps Doris also blamed him for not sharing their burden, for having, in one sense at least, evaded his duty.

  But that was nonsense, of course. When Doris finally wrote to inform him of their father’s death, she urged him to stay on in Paris, if that was what he wanted, that the worst was behind them.

  “He asked for you,” Doris said. “We told him you were in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne. He seemed pleased about that.” She took a swallow of tea. “Listen, Den, you mustn’t be angry with Lucy, she’s had a hard time.”

  “I’m not angry with her.”

  “Yes, you are. I’ve sensed it for weeks now. At least give yourself time to get to know her again, properly. That’s all I ask. Do you know what she’s doing right now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “She’s seeing about a lease for a place on Kennington Road. She’s going to open a dress shop. She’s been full of it for months.”

  “She didn’t say anything about this in her letters.”

  “That’s because she wanted it to be a surprise. A surprise for you. I’m telling you, Den, she’s grown up a lot since you left. Give her a chance.”

  Beaumont fell silent. The idea of Lucy undertaking anything that constituted independent action was so alien to his conception of her that he was unable to find a space for it in his mind. It was true that she had some money of her own, but they had not got around to discussing what they might do with it. Beaumont had vaguely supposed she would use it to help them set up home together. He had never imagined her with purpose, with plans.

  The thought of a Lucy with plans made him feel tired. He could not bring himself to believe in her as a successful businesswoman – she grew bored too easily. The money and its part in their future would most likely be wasted.

  “I think I’ll go and unpack,” he said to Doris.

  “Just relax, Den. Try to, anyway. Let things happen to you for a bit. You’ll soon start to feel better, you’ll see.”

  She smiled, but she looked sad, and Beaumont could not escape the notion that he had, in some deep and irrevocable way, disappointed her. Contrition filled him, and he felt seized by the desire to hold his sister in his arms and tell her once again that he was sorry, to reassure her that all was well, that he needed some time to adjust but that he would soon be himself again.

  Such simple words, and so much the right words that Beaumont could feel his eyes filling with tears at the thought of saying them. Perhaps, if he willed it hard enough, he could even make them true.

  We all start out hungry for this world, Vladek had said. But few of us find meat rich enough to satisfy that hunger.

  Beaumont had remembered the man’s words when he first began reading Le Grand Meaulnes. He saw at once that Meaulnes was a being possessed by hunger, that it was his hunger that kept him vigorous and sane. The important thing was the hunger itself, not its satisfaction.

  Before the war, Beaumont had dreamed of writing a treatise on the folly of empire that would stun the world. He wondered if the Front had turned him into the kind of man whose hunger might reasonably be satisfied by being the husband of a woman who ran a dress shop on the Kennington Road.

  He sighed, and realised he really was exhausted.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I need a good night’s sleep, that’s all.”

&nbsp
; He swallowed the dregs of his tea and stood up, resting his hand briefly against the chair-back for support. Doris bent to retrieve his cup. Beaumont found himself wondering how much she knew of men, if she had perhaps had a love affair. He noticed again the flecks of grey in her hair.

  “There’s no need to come up,” he said. “Let Lucy know I’m home when she gets in.” He retrieved his case from the hall, then slowly climbed the stairs to his room. The house, in the main, seemed much as he remembered it. Beaumont’s father had lectured in Pathology at the nearby King’s College Hospital. Once he became too ill to go on working, Doris had taken the decision to rent out rooms, at first to medical students then, as more and more of the young men were called up, to anyone who could and would pay.

  The Chinese rugs on the upper landings had been removed, presumably because Doris feared they would become ruined by the continual passage of feet up and down the stairs. The base linoleum was oiled and clean. From inside one of the rooms on the first floor, Beaumont could hear the dry tap-tap-tap of someone working at a typewriter, but otherwise the house was curiously silent.

  Lucy’s room, he knew, was on the first floor at the back, where his mother’s sewing room used to be. It was a sunny room, south-facing, and he could understand why Lucy had commandeered it, though whether she knew it had been his mother’s he had no idea.

  He hesitated outside on the landing then pushed open the door. The room, as Beaumont had expected, was empty. The curtains stood half-closed, the thin strip of light between them gleaming with the blue-tinted radiance of sunlight on snow. A brown-and-black-checked day dress lay across the bed. On the night stand stood a Bristol Blue glass jug of dried flowers, beside it the framed photograph of himself that had been taken the day he went up to Oxford for his entrance interview.

  The room was neat, uncluttered, and in some inexplicable way so much unlike the Lucy he remembered that Beaumont felt a sense of impropriety at being there. He glanced quickly around, then closed the door softly behind him and went on up the stairs. Lucy was the daughter of one of Beaumont senior’s former colleagues, an esteemed surgeon who had undertaken work in Africa and in the Middle East. When the ship carrying him home from Aden was sunk, with all hands, by a German torpedo, Doris had insisted that Lucy come and live at Kennington Lane.