Damage Read online

  Years later, I often wondered how much had been discussed between Ingrid and her father, before the fateful dinner party. Had they found me so easy to manipulate? Or was my guard so low with them, as with everyone, because I thought myself unknown by anyone, and unthreatened?

  I was an adman’s dream. I was forty-five, with a beautiful and intelligent wife, a son at Oxford, and a daughter at public school. My father had been a well-known businessman. My father-in-law was a leading politician who had paid his dues to the Party.

  I was reasonably good-looking. Not handsome enough for my supposed good looks to precede me, like some ill-deserved reputation, but enough to be pleasing on television — the new gladiatorial arena. There, those who combat to the political death salute not Caesar, but the people whom they are about to betray. This gives the masses an illusion of power which serves to hide the fact that, however bloody the battle to the death seems, the politician always wins. In a democracy, some politician, somewhere, is always winning.

  I intended to be the politician who won. My suit was a strong one. I was elected and rose to higher ranks with the ease that had attended all my endeavours. I believed as strongly in my cause as I did in medicine. But neither endeavour had cost me anything. Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, is not a great sacrifice; nor is effort that brings worthwhile results; nor energy from a man in middle years and perfect health.

  In politics I committed myself to the same old values I had practised in a busy surgery — honesty, a kind of prickly integrity, a total lack of interest in personal power, combined with the maddening arrogance of one who knows that, if he decided to play, he would win.

  I avoided all the basic suppositions on which parliamentary life is based. Loyalty to the Party as a form of self-advancement, the trading-off of favours, the recognition and grudging acceptance of emerging leaders — the masters of the future, who need to be acknowledged and have fealty sworn to them: all this I found repugnant.

  However, to appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy.

  It was improbable, but not impossible, for me to emerge at the top. All I needed was the cutting edge. Perhaps I did not have it. Or perhaps it was just hidden. I became an enigma to my colleagues — a seemingly purposeful man, but without a purpose. My obvious abilities were as yet untested, but my colleagues and I were aware that should the chance come, success would probably follow. But why should the chance be given to me? Unlike so many others, I did not lust for it.

  I had not found the key to myself in any area of service, medical or political. I carried out my constituency surgeries with the same absolute involvement with which I had attended my patients. But it was the absolute of the intellect. No effort seemed too great to advise on this matter, or act on another.

  My thoroughness and expertise bred a respect, and a kind of confidence. I was doing the job well. There was no doubt about that. I spoke out on subjects which seemed to me to need comment. I said what I meant. I meant what I said. The political consequences were not weighed by me, at least not unduly. On the other hand, the subjects on which I spoke out strongly were hardly fundamental to Party discipline. My ideas were attractive to large numbers of the Tory left.

  I never faced a serious moral dilemma. Nothing that I felt or said was extreme, or left me completely out on a limb. All options, except those of the far right, were open to me still. Had I planned the perfect political life for myself, it could not have worked better.

  I was soon given the post of junior minister in the Department of Health, to which I was obviously suited. My concerned face and well-bred voice spouting acceptable, vaguely liberal cliches appeared on television. Or I gazed earnestly from newspapers and magazines, saying the things I’d always believed, in what came across as a sincere and genuine manner. I learned the public geography of my soul from television and newspapers. It was neither shaming nor pleasing, just another perfect set-piece. Even I recognised that if I kept up this performance for some time, I might shine even more brightly as the years went by.

  One poll, published in a Sunday paper, listed me amongst the possible future Prime Ministers. Ingrid was thrilled. My children were embarrassed.

  I acted those parts required of me, like some professional member of a good English repertory company. Reliable, competent, taking pride in my work, but as far away from the magic of an Olivier or a Gielgud as not to seem part of the profession at all.

  The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine. But in all its essentials, my life was a good performance.

  SIX

  MY SON WAS a handsome young man. If there was in me a slight stockiness, Ingrid’s slender proportions tempered it in Martyn. He had both height and strength. Ingrid’s excessive paleness was there. My dark hair and eyes seemed to counterpoint the almost feminine delicacy of his skin. His was a dramatic colouring, unusual in England, and the exact opposite of his sister Sally’s. She was that rare yet common miracle, the true English rose.

  Beauty in our children is disturbing. There is an implied excess that casts a question mark over the parents. Most fathers would like their daughters to be attractive, their sons to be manly. But true beauty disconcerts. Like genius, we wish it on another family.

  Martyn’s looks and elegance embarrassed me. His sexual involvements were so blatantly casual that it astounded me his girlfriends saw no danger in him. The succession of young women whom Ingrid and I met at Sunday lunches or at occasional parties, seemed never-ending. I realised that my son was sexually promiscuous. He was undoubtedly careless of the many loving looks sent in his direction. Ingrid was amused by it all. I was much less so.

  His attitude to life, when he left university, dismayed me. Medicine was of no interest. Politics was unappealing to him. He wanted to be a journalist — the onlooker’s position in life, it seemed to me. He was very ambitious and determined about his career, but his ambition was totally for himself. At no time did he delude himself, or us.

  He got a job on a local paper, where, amusingly and perhaps to his chagrin, he was made political correspondent. When he was twenty-three, he got a junior journalist’s job on a Fleet Street newspaper. He left the small flat we had created for him over the garage, and found a place of his own.

  Ingrid was pleased by his success, and single-mindedness. It was such a flattering contrast to the sons of our friends, who seemed so unsure of everything. To me, however, he remained an enigma. I looked at him sometimes and reminded myself that he was my son. He would shoot a questioning look back at me, and smile. I knew that with Martyn my performance was only adequate.

  With Sally, I fared a little better. She was earnest and sweet. Her small talent for painting she developed to its highest potential. She became a junior in the design department of a publishing company.

  So here was a marriage, its outlines clear. I was a faithful, if not passionate, husband, and I acted lovingly and responsibly towards my children. I had seen them safely through to young adulthood. My ambitions, in important and respected fields, had been realised. I had enough money from income, and private means, to put me beyond financial worry.

  What man was luckier?

  I had obeyed the rules. I had been rewarded.

  Clear direction, some luck, and here I was, fifty and fully realised.

  SEVEN

  I HAVE SOMETIMES LOOKED at old photographs of the smiling faces of victims, and searched them desperately for some sign that they knew. Surely they must have known that within hours or days their life was to end in that car crash, in that aeroplane disaster, or in domestic tragedy. But I can find no sign whatever. Nothing. They look out serenely, a terrible warning to us all. ‘No I didn’t know. Just like you … there were no signs.’ ‘I who died at thirty … I too had planned my forties.’ ‘I who died at twenty had dreamed, as you do, of the roses round the cottage some day. It could happen to you. Why not
? Why me? Why you? Why not?’

  So I know that in whatever photographs were taken of me at that time, my face will gaze back at you confident, a trifle cold, but basically unknowing. It is the face of a man I no longer understand. I know the bridge that connects me to him. But the other side has disappeared. Disappeared like some piece of land the sea has overtaken. There may be some landmarks on the beach, at low tide, but that is all.

  ‘She looks older than you. Not a lot. But how old is she?’

  ‘She’s thirty-three.’

  ‘Well, that’s eight years older than you, Martyn.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So nothing. Just the fact that she is eight years older than you.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ I asked. We were in the kitchen.

  ‘Anna Barton, Martyn’s latest girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh. She’s new, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, God. You make me sound as if I’m some sort of Casanova.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Martyn sounded sad. ‘Or if I was once, it’s finished. Well, anyway, I just never met anyone who mattered.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This Anna Burton.’

  ‘Barton. Anna Barton. I’ve only known her for a few months. Well, she’s more important than the others.’

  ‘Brighter too,’ said Sally.

  ‘Oh, you’d recognise a bright girl would you, Sally? She’d be something like you no doubt.’

  ‘There are many different types of intelligence, Martyn. Mine’s artistic. Yours is for words. That’s all. But you couldn’t draw a cat to save your life.’

  The Sally who had blushed or cried at Martyn’s attacks was long gone. She was not close to her brother, and depended on him not at all. The subject of Anna Barton was dropped quietly with the Sunday post-lunch conversation. She was not referred to again by either Martyn or Sally.

  ‘You don’t like this Anna person then?’ I asked Ingrid as we prepared for bed.

  She paused for a long time and then said:

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  ‘Why? Surely it’s not just because she’s eight years older than Martyn.’

  ‘Partly. No, she makes me uneasy.’

  ‘Oh, well it’s probably nothing. Knowing Martyn, it’s just another of his flirtations,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s more, I feel sure.’

  ‘Oh? How did I miss out on meeting her?’

  ‘She came here a few times last month when you were in Cambridge. Then another time for supper when you were in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Pretty?’

  ‘Strange-looking. Not really pretty. Looks her age I thought. Not many girls do nowadays.’

  ‘You certainly don’t,’ I said to Ingrid. I was bored now with the subject of Anna Barton and I could tell that it distressed Ingrid.

  ‘Thank you.’ She smiled at me.

  And Ingrid certainly did not look close to fifty. The same slim blonde beauty remained, slightly less smooth. The eyes were less bright but she was a beautiful woman, undoubtedly. A woman who would remain beautiful for a very long time to come. She still seemed as impregnable as ever. Blonde, cool, beautiful. My wife Ingrid, Edward’s daughter, Martyn and Sally’s mother.

  Her life and mine had run on parallel lines during all these years. No crashes, no unread signals. We were a civilised couple, approaching our later years with equanimity.

  EIGHT

  ‘ANNA BARTON, MEET Roger Hughes.’

  ‘How do you do?’

  The introduction going on behind me seemed as though it were happening in a silent room. In fact I was at the packed Christmas party of a newspaper publisher. In his wife’s Mayfair gallery each year he gathered his world around him in a seductive, dangerous bear-hug. Then everyone was released into a free fall for the rest of the year, as though all the tribulations his paper would cause his guests before the following Christmas were already forgiven.

  Why didn’t I look round? Why, out of normal curiosity, or politeness, or concern, did I not approach this girl? Why did ‘How do you do?’ sound singificant? Its formality seemed deliberate. Her voice was very deep, clear and unfriendly.

  ‘Anna, I want you to see this.’

  ‘Hello, Dominick.’

  Another voice claimed her and she seemed, silently, to move away. I felt uneasy. I felt out of tune with everything. I was preparing to make my goodbyes, when suddenly she stood in front of me and said:

  ‘You are Martyn’s father. I’m Anna Barton, and I felt I ought to introduce myself.’

  The woman who stood before me was tall, pale, with short black wavy hair swept off her face. She was a figure in a black suit and smiled not at all.

  ‘Hello, I’m so glad to meet you. I seem to have missed you each time you’ve been to the house.’

  ‘I’ve only been there three times. You’re a busy man.’

  It should have sounded abrupt, but it didn’t.

  ‘How long have you known Martyn?’

  ‘Not very long.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘We’ve been …’ she hesitated ‘… close, for about three or four months. I knew him a little before, through work. I work on the same paper.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I thought I recognised your name when I first heard it.’ We stood silently, I looked away. I looked back. Grey eyes stared straight back into mine, and held them and me, motionless. After a long time she said:

  ‘How very strange.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  She turned, and walked away. Her tall black-suited body seemed to carve its way through the crowded room and disappeared.

  A stillness descended upon me. I sighed a deep sigh, as if I had slipped suddenly out of a skin. I felt old, and content. The shock of recognition had passed through my body like a powerful current. Just for a moment I had met my sort, another of my species. We had acknowledged one another. I would be grateful for that, and would let it slip away.

  I had been home. For a moment, but longer than most people. It was enough, enough for my lifetime.

  Of course, it wasn’t enough. But in those early hours I was simply grateful that the moment had occurred. I was like a traveller lost in a foreign land who suddenly hears not just his native tongue, but the local dialect he spoke as a boy. He does not ask whether the voice is that of an enemy or a friend, just rushes towards the sweet sound of home. My soul had rushed to Anna Barton. I believed that in such a private matter between myself and God I could freely let it tumble forwards, without fear of damage to heart or mind, body or life.

  It is in that essential misreading that many lives stumble. In the utterly wrong idea that we are in control. That we can choose to go, or stay, without agony. After all, I had only lost my soul privately, at a party, where the others could not see.

  She rang me the next day.

  ‘I’m coming to lunch next Sunday. I wanted you to know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ The phone went dead.

  On Saturday an insanity gripped me. I became convinced that I would die before Sunday. Death would rob me of Sunday. Sunday was now all I wanted. For on Sunday I would sit in the same room as Anna Barton.

  On Sunday morning, in what seemed to me the prison of my study, I waited, motionless, for the slamming of the car doors, for the sound of the iron gate on the paving stones and for the reverberations of the bell, which would first warn me, then summon me, to her presence in my house.

  I heard my footsteps on the marble hall as I crossed to the sitting-room and above the laughter, the metallic click of the handle as I opened the door to join my family, and Anna.

  I had delayed them and, as Martyn with his arm around her shoulders said, ‘Dad, this is Anna,’ Ingrid whisked us all into the dining-room. No one seemed to notice that my breathing had changed.

  We all sat down to lunch — Ingrid, Sally,
Anna and I, and Martyn.

  But of course in reality Ingrid and I sat down with Sally. And Martyn — a different Martyn, tentative, undeniably in love — sat down with Anna.

  Anna behaved towards me as any intelligent young woman would, when first meeting the father of her boyfriend. Boyfriend? They must be lovers. Of course they are. They are lovers. Months together. Lovers, of course.

  Neither of us mentioned our meeting. Anna concealed even the faintest acknowledgement that such a meeting had ever taken place. Her discretion, at first so soothing in those early minutes, now became the cause of anguish. What kind of woman is such a consummate actress? I thought. How could she be that good?

  Her black-dressed body today seemed longer, slightly threatening; frightening even, as she walked from the dining-room to the sitting-room for coffee. This is the first stage with you, I thought, the first barrier. Watch me, watch, I’m your equal.

  ‘We’re thinking of going to Paris for the weekend.’ Martyn spoke.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Anna and I, of course.’

  ‘It’s my favourite city.’ Anna smiled at Ingrid.

  ‘Oh, I don’t really ever enjoy it as much as I hope I will. Something always goes wrong for us in Paris,’ Ingrid replied.

  It was true. Whenever we’d been there handbags were stolen, or we’d had a minor car crash, or Ingrid became ill. She’d fallen out of love with Paris. It was an ideal that had never quite been realised.

  I heard all this conversation calmly. I smiled as Ingrid said: ‘What a nice idea,’ to Martyn.

  The surface remained untroubled, but the ground was beginning to be less firm under my feet. A fault long hidden was being revealed. There was the smallest, briefest tremor, barely worth recording. But the pain that shot through me was so intense, I knew real damage was now being done.