The Drowning People Read online

  But I am wandering, losing the flow of my narrative. It is only to be expected from a man of my age, I suppose.

  My education was unremarkable. I was clever enough to join the majority of my public school fellows at Oxford, a great relief to my parents; and until the age of nineteen I made a creditable enough return on their investment in me. But over the three years of my separation from my family at university I was encouraged by those I knew and the books I read to cultivate a certain detachment from home life and its aspirations for me, a detachment which made me critical during term time and superior in the holidays. It was then that I turned with real determination to my secret love, the violin; and it was then, comparatively late but in time enough, that I had the leisure and the teaching to discover that I might be really good; good; enough to matter. Good enough, certainly, to use my music as the basis for my first serious confrontation with my parents, one that raged the whole of the summer following my graduation and which centered around my stubborn insistence that I was going to be a musician.

  But I digress in my attempt to make my twenty-two-year-old self more real to me now, an attempt in which I have been only partly successful. I remember once more what he looks like, that is true; I see his half smile and rosy cheeks and the hair tumbling over his forehead into his eyes. But I know him no longer; I have no empathy with his tastes and only a little with his enthusiasms, surprisingly few of which have remained. I struggle to remember the people with whom he filled his life, the friendships he made: curiously intense, for he was a young man of extremes, inclined to manic sociability and profound gloom by turns. Of course a few stand distinct from the tableau. People like Camilla Boardman, the girl my mother always hoped I would marry: pretty; bubbly; well connected; more substantial than she liked to seem. But I was insular at twenty-two. Indiscriminately friendly, I shared myself intimately with great discrimination; I still do. Perhaps I had little to share; certainly my life up to that point contained nothing very remarkable. I had made the progression from preparatory school to public school to Oxford with as few jolts as possible; I had not forced myself to think much or to examine the world. Life was as it was, and I accepted it on its own terms, much in the way I would later accept my marriage to Sarah: with a sort of dogged determination which I would not admit to myself.

  Unthinking, unseeing, unknowing, I drifted through life until I met Ella. It was she who baptized me; it was she who threw me into the sea of life. And she did it quite unthinkingly, little caring or even knowing how much good or how much harm she might do. It was in her nature, that wild abandonment, that driving need for experience and explanation. It was she who made me swim, she who pushed me from the safety of the shallows; it was she with whom I floundered, out of my depth. It is to her, and to my memories of her, that I must turn now in seeking to explain what I have done.

  In memory she is a small, slight girl, my age, with tousled blond hair and green eyes that sparkle back at me complicitly, even now. She is in a park, Hyde Park; it is an early morning in mid-June: birds sing; keepers in green overalls are setting up deck chairs; the air is sweet with the scent of newly mown grass. I can hear myself panting.

  I had been running, up early and out of the house to escape the frosty conversation that had become habitual since my acceptance to the Guildhall. My father had strict views on the desirability of merchant banking; my mother, usually a useful ally (for my own happiness figured more in her plans for me than it did in my father’s) had sided with him, saying that no grandchildren of hers would grow up in Hounslow because their father was an impoverished musician. I had begun, in vain, by telling them that musicians weren’t necessarily impoverished; later I had openly called them snobs and sworn privately that nothing could be said to deter me from my course. The atmosphere at home had not yet recovered from the latest scene (unusually venomous on the parts of all concerned) staged two days previously. I had no wish for another meal of silent recrimination.

  So I went running in the park. I can hear myself panting, can feel the pulse of the blood beating in my head, can see what I wore: a white T-shirt; school rugby shorts; the socks of my college boat club. I can see what Ella wore too, because I noticed her long before she saw me. She was sitting on a bench, in a black dress that pulled tight against her slender hips. Her eyes were dazed from wakefulness; a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup steamed on the bench next to her; a pearl necklace (which I have since, on another’s neck, come to know well) was in her closed hand, which was shaking a little. She was a dramatic figure in the half light of the early morning: sitting on that bench; hardly moving. I ran past her twice before she noticed me, each time shortening the route by which I doubled back unseen and passed her again. The third time I passed her she looked up at me and her eyes focused. She smiled.

  I stopped, panting, a little distance from the bench, regretting my last circuit of the carriage track. When I turned to look at her, she was still smiling.

  “Tough run,” she called out.

  “You could say that.”

  We nodded politely to each other.

  “Tough night?” I asked, looking at her clothes. She saw my eyes hesitate on her hand and the shaking stopped.

  “More of a long night,” she said. Her accent was American, but lilting and musical with anglicized vowels. She was soft-spoken. We smiled at each other as I wondered what to say, but it was she who finally broke the silence. “I’m sure I know those socks,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “They’re college socks, aren’t they?” She paused. “Although knowing my luck they’re going to turn out to be school socks or some other kind of sock—there are so many kinds in England—and I’ll feel a right arse.” Her pronunciation of the word “arse” was self-consciously rounded; here was a person who had trained herself not to say “ass.”

  Glad to have been offered a neutral topic of conversation, I told her that they were college socks, as a matter of fact. “The socks of my college boat club,” I said with adolescent pride.

  Remembering it now, I find it curious to think that the course of my whole life might be said to have hung on something as inconsequential as my choice of footwear that morning. Ella would not have noticed different socks; and without her remarking on them as she did do I would probably never have known her. In that case I would not be the person I am today; I would not have killed my wife yesterday afternoon; I would not be in this smoky room, trying to keep warm, listening to the waves of the Atlantic crash on the rocks beneath my windows. It is curious, the way in which seemingly innocuous details like the selection of a pair of socks can set in motion a chain of events which, as one leads to another, build up such momentum that they become a guiding force in your life. I find it strange; strange and slightly unsettling. But the evidence is there, I suppose; and who am I to refute it?

  I watch myself saunter over to the bench where she is sitting, a question on my lips. Ella remains absolutely motionless, the fine bones of her neck and shoulders showing clearly through her pale skin. She is sitting a little hunched, which contributes to the effect of her fragility. She would look innocent but for the cut of her dress and the stylish parting of her short hair, which a hand pushes back from her eyes occasionally and ineffectually. Getting close I see that pronounced cheekbones make her face almost gaunt, as do pale blue rings which undercircle her eyes. But the eyes themselves are bright: sharp and green, they move swiftly up and down me as I approach and seem to indicate a place beside her on the bench. I sit down.

  “These are the socks of my college boat club,” I say again.

  “I know,” she says. “Oriel, Oxford, aren’t they?”

  I nod, impressed by her accuracy. “How do you know?” I ask smiling.

  There is a pause while the smile on her lips fades and she looks serious once more. Her fingers become conscious of the string of pearls in her left hand, which she puts into a small square bag at her feet with an unconscious gesture of protection.

 
“That’s a complex question. More complex than it sounds,” she says. But realizing my awkwardness, she continues: “Let’s just keep the answer brief and say that I know someone who has them.” She takes a last sip from the Styrofoam cup and discovers that it is almost empty. She seems surprised and faintly irritated.

  “Who?” I am eager for her to define herself to some extent by her acquaintance with someone I can judge.

  “You wouldn’t have known him, unless you’re older than you look.”

  Since she doesn’t seem disposed to say anything further, I question her more closely, telling her that one never knows.

  “His name’s Charles Stanhope,” she says, uttering a name I indeed do not recognize. I say this and she looks up at me and smiles.

  “I’m sorry to have interrupted your run,” she says. “But I’ve been sitting out here on this bench for so long I think I’d’ve stayed here forever if someone hadn’t disturbed me and broken the spell.”

  “What spell?” I am bold enough to ask.

  “The spell of wakeful hours.” She looks up at me, eyes twinkling. “The rut of question-answer-same-question your brain gets into when developments take a turn you didn’t really expect.”

  I see her fumble absently in her bag for a cigarette, watch her light it, and follow silver-gray smoke circles upwards to a pale blue sky. The park is noticeably warmer now; people are trickling in, and as they pass they cannot help but look at us, an odd pair under the trees. I can smell the faint odor of sweet perfume and soap and stale cigarette smoke that surrounds her; can hear the click of her lighter flint as she makes a flame; can see, as she holds her cigarette, that one of her nails is bitten to the quick.

  “Have you been out here all night?” I ask.

  She nods, with a little tightening of pale lips. “Oh yes,” she says. “This bench and I are old friends. It’s heard more of my secrets than it cares to remember, I suspect.”

  “And has it offered good advice?”

  “Well that’s just where benches have the advantage over people. They don’t offer advice; they don’t sympathize. They just sit, listening, reminding you by their very immovability that nothing in your life can be that earth-shattering. I think benches are a good guard against melodrama.” She looks up at me. “I suppose you think me very melodramatic.” She says this more as a half-murmured musing to herself than as a question to me. “Sitting here in these clothes,” she goes on. “Smoking. Drinking coffee. Forming crazy relationships with benches.” She looks up at me again, shyly this time, and we both laugh.

  “Not at all,” I say, itching to ask her more but being constrained by … what? By twenty-two years of being told that it is rude to pry; by a certain social reserve which is characteristic of me to this day; by a fear that she is troubled by love for another, whom I instinctively hate and whose existence I want to put off confirming until the last possible moment.

  “You are very polite,” she says eventually, in a tone which sows doubt in my mind about the sincerity of the compliment.

  I nod, and as I do so her words sound in my ears like an accusation. I feel that something is required of me, but what it is I do not know, and as I am not experienced in talking to pretty women I say nothing.

  “I wonder if that is your personality or your education,” she goes on. “This admirable respect you seem to have for my privacy. In your place I should be curious to know what prompts a fully grown woman to sit up all night in a lonely park and grow garrulous with the larks.”

  This sounds like an invitation, which I cautiously accept. “Would you tell me if I did ask?” I say quietly.

  “Five minutes ago I might have done,” she says, closing the clasp of her bag with a click. “But your presence has cheered me too much for confidences. And of course this old bench is still just where it was last night, a fine example to us all.” She pauses. “Constancy in a changing world.” She smiles and pats the worn wood of its seat. “I feel better now,” she says, “and less inclined to … bore you with my troubles. All of which, I should add, are purely of my own making.”

  “They wouldn’t bore me at all,” I say, now wanting to know more than ever what is troubling this beautiful, fragile woman with the softly foreign accent and the bitten fingernails.

  “Well I’m glad to know you’re human,” she says and we both laugh again.

  “Could I ask your name, at least?” I say, braver now that I sense she is about to go.

  “You could. A name is the least private thing about a person.” She gets up and leans over to stub her cigarette on the ground. She puts the butt into an empty carton in her bag. I hear the click-click of the clasp closing and unclosing. I see that she isn’t wearing any shoes and watch her pick up a pair of black satin pumps which have been collecting dew under the bench. There is a pause.

  “Well then, what’s your name?”

  “I’m Ella Harcourt,” she says, standing, and offers me her hand.

  I shake it.

  “And you are?”

  “I’m James Farrell,” I say.

  “Well, James …” There is a slight awkwardness between us, born of intimacy almost attempted and just missed. “It was a pleasure,” she says at last.

  Now whose education is dictating what they say? I think to myself, irrationally annoyed at her leaving. She sees my irritation and laughs.

  “Good-bye,” I say, getting up too.

  “Enjoy the rest of your run,” she says and turns to go, barefooted, her shoes in one hand, the empty Styrofoam cup in the other. I see the redness on her heels where the pumps have been chafing her. She walks delicately, but purposefully and quickly. She does not look back. I sense that she knows I am watching her. It is a long time before she is gone completely from my view, for the carriage track is straight and almost empty. I stand looking after her shrinking form, hearing the thud of my pulse once more, aware of tiny sounds usually lost: the scratch of squirrels’ claws on bark, the rustle of a breeze in the oak leaves, an indignant magpie.

  CHAPTER 2

  IHAVE SAID THAT I STRUGGLE TO RE-CREATE MYSELF as I was then in any way that makes sense to me now. At twenty-two one labors under the delusion that one knows everything; at seventy, I find to my regret how little I hold certain. I am mistrustful of myself; of recollection; of feeling. And my memory, long disused, is imperfect; that I freely admit. Yet certain images, as I am discovering, remain with one always. Ella sitting in the park that first morning is one such image: it has returned to me, with very little effort on my part, as complete and perfect as if I had observed her yesterday. And it has brought with it a host of other images: the sights and sounds and smells that surrounded our second meeting; the weight of the people crushing in on every side; the manic tinkle of their purposeful laughter; the sweet taste of brandy in champagne. Rising above it all I hear the cadences of Camilla’s voice, the shrill rapid emphases of her speech, the fantastic elongation of her vowels. “Daahling!” For the scene that now flickers into life is the scene of Camilla Boardman’s twenty-first birthday party and I can see Camilla, her auburn curls framing her face with all the elegance which coiffeurial skill can impart, leaning on the present table, smiling at no one in particular and fingering the silk bow of a large striped gift. The “intimate dinner” for “a few of her closest friends” is over, a dinner to which I have not been invited, and I am arriving with a horde of others to join the “crush.”

  I am tired. I have spent seven long hours practicing in a cramped, airless room at the top of my parents’ house; an endless trill from a Beethoven violin sonata drums in my head and my fingers twitch involuntarily at the stimulus. A difficult passage of pizzicato, frequently repeated, which joins the trill as I say my first hellos, has made the tips of the fingers on my right hand ache. I want nothing more than to go to bed, to dream of my music in peace; but Fate and my mother have decreed otherwise and sent me, bathed, brushed and faintly bemused, to the birthday party of a highly eligible girl who scares me a little but w
hom I like and who my parents think is someone “one should know if one can.”

  My fellow guests and I are under the high ceilings of the Boardman drawing room in Cadogan Square; bewigged, darkly painted gentlemen stare down from the walls; the furniture has been cleared from the center of the long room and most people are standing. Younger sisters and their friends, in black skirts and white blouses, circulate with trays of champagne and count the hours until 2:00 A.M. and the presentation of a check for their pains.

  In remembering the friends of my early twenties Camilla Boardman stands preeminent. Not for any special intimacy on our part (although, in a purely platonic way, that did develop later) but for the absolute panache with which she did things. Camilla took herself from the realm of the cliché and into that rarefied space beyond parody. Her curls were curlier, her dresses tighter, her breasts rounder, her vowels longer, her use of the exclamation mark in conversation more indiscriminate, than anybody’s I had ever met. My mother was delighted that I knew her and harbored secret hopes, I am sure, of just such a daughter-in-law. I, needless to say, was thoroughly in awe of the great auburn-haired beauty who flung her arms around me on the slightest provocation (a compliment she paid to all the men she knew) and who, that evening, took her present from me with a squeal of delight and dragged me into the center of the room to “mingle.”