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Sebastian Faulks’s books include A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, Birdsong and the number one bestseller A Week in December.

About the Book

On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer, is forced to confront the events that made up his life.

His host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man whose time is running out, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.

The search for sanity takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.

The recurring themes of Sebastian Faulks’s fiction are brought together with a new stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks’s most remarkable book yet.

Also by Sebastian Faulks

FICTION

A Trick of the Light

The Girl at the Lion d’Or

A Fool’s Alphabet

Birdsong

Charlotte Gray

On Green Dolphin Street

Human Traces

Engleby

Devil May Care

A Week in December

A Possible Life

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

NON-FICTION

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives

Pistache

Faulks on Fiction

EDITED

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Sebastian Faulks has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Hutchinson is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

CHAPTER ONE

With its free peanuts and anonymity, the airline lounge is somewhere I can usually feel at home; but on this occasion I was in too much of a panic to enjoy its self-importance. It had been hard work getting there. The queues at Kennedy were backed up to the terminal doors; the migrants heaving trunks on to the check-in scales made New York look like Lagos.

I had done a bad thing and wanted to escape the city. Staying in an Upper West Side apartment belonging to my friend Jonas Hoffman, I had ordered in a call-girl. I took the number from a phone booth on Columbus. It seemed to me important to get the sex act into perspective, to laugh at myself in the way you laugh at other people for their choice of mates. A true view of myself and my concerns: that was what I needed.

I suppose I’d say I was a voluptuary, someone who had seen it all, yet when the super called to say there was a young lady on her way up, it struck me that I was nervous. The front door buzzed. I took a pull of iced gin and went to open it. It was eleven in the morning. She wore an overcoat of olive green and carried a serviceable handbag with a clasp; for a moment I thought there was a mistake and that she must be Hoffman’s cleaner. Only the high heels and lipstick suggested something more frolicsome. I offered her a drink.

In so far as I’d imagined what she might be like, I’d pictured a pin-up – or a tart with platinum hair and rouge. But this woman was of indeterminate nationality, possibly Puerto Rican. She was not ugly in any way, yet neither was she beautiful. She looked like someone’s 38-year-old sister; like the person who might be in charge of the laundromat or work behind the desk of a Midtown travel agent.

I brought back the water and sat beside her in Hoffman’s huge, book-lined living room. She had taken off her coat and was wearing an incongruous cocktail dress. It was hard not to think of her family: brother, parents … children. I put my hand on her knee and felt the coarse nylon. Was I meant to kiss her? It seemed too intimate: we’d only just met … But I tried anyway, and found a world of fatigue in her response.

It brought a flash-recall of Paula Wood, a sixteen-year-old girl I’d kissed in a village hall a lifetime ago, before I’d discovered the awfulness of desire. Kissing this hooker was like kissing a mannequin; it was like a repetition – or a memory; not like a kiss at all. I went to the kitchen and poured another half tumbler of gin, with ice cubes and two slices of lemon.

‘Come this way,’ I said, gesturing down the corridor to the spare room – my room – at the end. Hoffman kept it for his mother, for when she visited from Chicago, and I felt a moment of unease as we went in. I pushed off my shoes and lay on the bed.

I pulled out some money and handed it over. With what looked like some reluctance, she undressed. When she was naked, she came and stood beside me. She took my hand and ran it up over her abdomen and breasts. The belly was rounded and there were small fat deposits above the hips; the lumpy navel had been botched by the obstetrician. Her skin was smooth and there was a look of concentration in her eyes – not kindness or concern, more a sort of junior-employee focus. I felt extremely tired and wanted to close my eyes. At the same time I felt an obligation to this woman; it seemed we were joined in this thing now, for better or for worse.

After the breasts, I touched the plated sternum – and then the clavicle. As I did so, I wondered how my fingers felt to her. When you run your hand across another’s skin, is it merely your intention that distinguishes a lover’s heat from a doctor’s care?

What this girl presumably felt was neither of those things, but a simple friction of skin on skin. I stood up and took off my clothes, placing them on a chair. With Annalisa such movements were made in a literally tearing rush. I used to panic that I would never sate myself on her; I used to fear her leaving before we had begun, because I knew as soon as the door closed I would be desperate for her again. And that was one emotion – the frantic dread – that I knew could not be right or real. That was something on which I badly needed to find a healthier point of view.

There was a mirror in Hoffman’s spare room that gave me the reflection of an ageing man copulating with a stranger: here was the zoological comedy I craved as I watched white skin collide with brown, my ugly face flushed, her head down and rear extended. This was the rude comedy of manners I saw in other people’s lives, and I smacked her rump in satisfaction.

I pressed her to stay for tea or beer afterwards, to gloss the exchange with some civility. She told me she lived in Queens and worked part-time in a shoe shop. In a vague way, I had thought being a New York hooker was a job in itself, not with ‘prospects’ and a trade union, but at least a full-time pimp beneath the lamp post. She seemed reluctant to tell me more, for fear, maybe, of breaking the illusion of glamour; I guess she didn’t want me to think of her as someone who would go to the storeroom to fetch a size-seven brogue.

A few minutes later she was spreadeagled on the rug by Hoffman’s fireplace, intent on a repeat. I felt reluctant to start again, but I didn’t want to deny her the chance of earning more. My motive was not so different from the one that made me, at the end of the evening at the village hall, offer to dance with Paula Wood’s mother. Courtesy, perhaps; or an ignorance of what women want.

When it was done, I gave the girl another twenty dollars, which she folded into her purse with a nod of thanks.

I fetched her coat and held it out to her; there was an awkwardness as she said goodbye. Was I to kiss her, and if so how? She touched me on the cheek, then put her lips quickly to where her fingertips had been. It was in its way the most erotic moment that had passed between us.

Alone again, I slumped down in the big armchair and looked out over Central Park. A few single women were running there, probably with cans of Mace inside their tracksuits; there were no mothers with children even at this middling hour of the day. A handful of men with Walkman headphones also loped round the paths – assailants, vigilantes, hard to tell; but they didn’t look like athletes. For all Mayor Koch’s bumper stickers, no one loved New York in 1980. What was there to love in a city where, as you left the local bar, the doorman insisted you wait till he had the taxi hard up against the kerb, door open, ready for the getaway. It was only three blocks over, but they had told me never to walk.

After I had showered in Hoffman’s mother’s bathroom, I poured another gin, went back to the living room and thought about the hooker. They say that when you sleep with someone all their previous partners are in bed with you, but I’ve never felt that. And in any case it would have had to be some bed to accommodate the back catalogue of a professional. What I always did feel was a dim awareness of my own past lovers. The hair on the pillow, the discomfort of the mattress, the varying degrees of guilt … So much of what I’d heard and read as a young man excited in me the belief that enduring sexual passion, romantic ‘love’, was the highest type of interaction – perhaps indeed the highest state of being – to which a human could aspire. How lamentably I had failed. How seldom had I felt the weight of all my joy and all my safety to hang on the say-so of another – though I did remember the first time it had happened.

I was twenty-eight years old and was in the Italian backstreet lodging of the girl I had been courting for some weeks. Even at this remove, I find it hard to name her, to utter those three syllables without pain; so I’ll have to call her L. It being wartime – which is how I’d got the pistol wound – we had also slept together. As I stood there, I had the impression that the chest of drawers, the dull eiderdown on the bed, and the walls of the room had become iridescent. Even the thin blind seemed to be glowing. I glanced about to see if there was an overturned lamp; then I looked at her, leaning towards a mirror as she completed her preparations for the evening, dabbing at the corners of her mouth with a white handkerchief. She stopped, turned round, looked at me and smiled. I took a pace back. All evening she carried that light in every room we seemed to shimmer through.

A few hours after the hooker had left, I had a feeling that my encounter with her had not been unnoticed. It was not just the way the Super cleared his throat when I went out or the way the bartender in my usual place raised his eyebrow as he poured the drink; even the panhandler in the doorway seemed to be smirking as he eyed me. And the next day I thought I’d better get out of New York.

It suited me quite well to leave. I had come to the city for a medical conference and had listened to a number of speakers in the halls of Columbia in Upper Manhattan. Such was the surplus weight of sponsorship money from drug companies that the junior delegates had been shifted at the last minute from bed-and-breakfast inns round Murray Hill to rooms in the Plaza hotel. I found myself on a high floor with a barn-like suite, which was of little use to me. The whole place seemed less like a hotel than a monument to construction work. I wrestled vainly with the air-conditioning controls; at night the plumbing in my unused sitting room sighed and muttered like the brain of an exhausted lunatic.

When the conference ended, I decided to extend my stay by moving into Jonas Hoffman’s apartment. I had met Jonas after the war at medical school in London, where he had arrived on some American magic carpet of GI Bill or Rhodes scholarship. Our friendship had survived the fact that he had become rich by taking anxious women through their past lives in his Park Avenue consulting rooms while I was in Kensal Green, in a house that was a short walk from the necropolis. The fees from these long hours of listening had enabled Hoffman to take on the apartment from whose spare room I could see the turning colours of the autumn trees while reading the newspaper in bed.

My flight to London had been called, so I gathered my briefcase and left the anonymity of the lounge – not without a pang, I confess: I wasn’t eager to confront what lay outside its vacuum. I wondered how many hundred times I had gone through the doorway of an airliner, touching its hinge and rivets as I ducked my head and summoned a smile for the cabin staff with their primly folded hands. In my seat by the window, I swallowed a sleeping pill and opened a book. The aircraft backed off the stand and idled along on its plump tyres; then it changed into a different beast as it surged madly down the runway, pushing me against the back of the seat.

My fellow passengers were soon opening their puzzle books or gazing up at the bulkhead to watch the film. My seat was at an awkward angle, so the light striking the screen made the characters appear in coloured negative, like oil in water. The passenger in front seemed gripped enough by it, as he sat forward and munched through his bag of nuts.

After a couple of gins, I felt the sleeping pill dissolve in my bloodstream; I pulled down the blind, arranged a thin blanket over me and told the stewardess not to wake me with the tray at dinner time.

The night flight had coughed me up by six thirty at Heathrow, and the day ahead looked endless as the taxi drove me through the grey backstreets of Chiswick. When I let myself into the house, I was tempted to go straight to bed, but knew from experience that it would make matters worse. Mrs Gomez, the cleaner, had piled up three weeks’ post on the hall table. I went through it quickly, looking to see if there was anything in Annalisa’s handwriting, but there was only one envelope that wasn’t typed or printed. I tore it open and saw a note on plain paper:

Dear Mr Hendricks, we have just moved into the top-floor flat and we are having a party on Saturday night. Please do look in if you feel like it. From 8. V. informal. Sheeze and Misty.

I had the ground and lower ground floors of the house, which was larger than the average for the area. The first floor had been occupied for more than twenty years by a Polish widow, but the top floor was in constant flux. Something about their names made me think the new people were Australian; I guessed it would be noisy and they wanted to forestall my objections; presumably they had also invited poor old Mrs Kaczmarek.

In the study was my recently acquired telephone answering machine. I had tested a number in the shop and had chosen this one because it took normal-size cassettes and its three clearly marked buttons made it easy to operate. I could tell from the time it took to rewind that it was almost full. A peculiarity of the machine – perhaps a mistake in the way I had set it up – was that it always replayed my greeting before it played the incoming messages. ‘This is Robert Hendricks’s answering machine …’

My voice always displeased me. It sounded sandpapery yet insincere; it had something of the simper in it. I sat down with a pad and a pen as the tape rewound, and braced myself for my own familiar and irritating tones: I had the narcissist’s dread of myself as others heard me.

But what came out of the machine was a woman’s voice. ‘We know what you did, you filthy bastard. We know what you did to that poor woman. No wonder you ran out of New York.’

It was no one I recognised. She had an American accent and seemed to be in her fifties, or older. I went out into the hallway and waited for it to stop; I didn’t want to erase it for fear of wiping others at the same time. I didn’t hear the squeal that meant a new message was beginning, but eventually there were deeper, male, tones in the study. I went back. It was my voice: the usual greeting that concluded with the assurance that I’d ring as soon as … Then the callers began.

‘Hi, Robert, it’s Jonas. I’m sorry I missed you in New York. The thing in Denver was a king-size pain in the ass. I’d have had more fun pouring liquor down you at Lorenzo’s. Call me some time.’

There came the regular high-pitched sound, then another message. ‘Dr Hendricks, it’s Mrs Hope here, Gary’s mother. I know you say to ring the secretary but he’s been bad again …’

I sat down at the desk and picked up the pad. There were fourteen more messages, all quite normal. When I had noted down any details that needed my attention, I scrubbed the entire tape. Then I pressed Play to make sure my greeting was intact. Sure enough, it whirred and spoke: ‘This is Robert Hendricks’s answering machine …’

I woke up in the middle of the night in a rage of jet lag. I enjoy these surges; it’s as though you’ve absorbed some of the kinetic energy of Manhattan. I went into the kitchen and made a pot of tea. One thing I like about Americans is that they take themselves seriously. You don’t need deep roots or self-deprecation in New York; you have a brass plate on the door, a diploma, a position – you’re ahead of the huddled masses who’ve just ridden in from Kennedy. And they’re right to think this way. Your life is a small thing, but why should you not value it? No one else will.

With a mug of tea, I went to the desk and started opening the accumulated letters addressed to Robert Hendricks, MD, MRCP, FRCPsych. That looked like a career. There was nothing provisional or fake about those qualifications; they had been gained by graft and time – by a certain dedication in a field where few had the heart to persevere. I wondered whether it was a peculiarly English trait to feel like an impostor all one’s life, to fear that at any moment one might be rumbled – or whether this was a common human failing. And, really, as a practising psychiatrist, I should have known.

I fetched my briefcase and put the hotel bill and a couple of business cards ready for filing. As I opened a drawer on to the pile of papers I could never face, I saw a letter that had baffled me when I received it a few weeks earlier. It was from France, postmarked ‘Toulon’, and was written in ink by an elderly hand.

Please forgive me for writing to you out of the blue, but I have something that I think may be of interest to you.

During the First World War I was in the British army, serving as an infantryman on the Western Front. (I also served as medical officer in the Second, by the by.) I have spent my working life as a neurologist, specialising in old people’s ailments – memory and forgetting, and so forth. As I near the end of my own life – I am very old now, and have been unwell for some time – I have been trying to set my papers in order. In the course of this task I came across references in some old diaries to a man with the same somewhat unusual surname as yourself. He was in my Company from 1915 to 1918.

I had not looked at this diary for decades, but something about his name rang a secondary bell, as it were; and then I remembered. There was a book I had much admired when it came out some fifteen years ago by one Robert Hendricks – The Chosen Few. I went to my shelves and pulled it down. You can perhaps picture my excitement when I examined the small author photograph on the back flap and found that it brought back to mind quite clearly the face of a young soldier I had known so many years ago.

My excitement intensified when I sat down to reread the book – which I did in a single sitting, through the night. In chapter five I came across a reference made by the author – you yourself, I believe, Dr Hendricks – to the fact that his father had been a tailor – as was the man I had known in the war.

There was more in this vein, ending with an invitation to visit him. His name was Alexander Pereira and he was apparently offering me a job.

On Saturday afternoon, I went for a walk on Wormwood Scrubs. On the way, I collected Max, my long-legged terrier cross, from the cleaner’s flat in Cricklewood, where he’d been during my absence. Although he was spoiled by Mr Gomez, who I suspected fed him on paella and biscuits, he was always touchingly pleased to see me; I had rescued him when he was a puppy from a pound in Northamptonshire and he seemed to nurse a keen sense of gratitude.

We walked round the perimeter of the Scrubs, returning on the long south side by the prison officers’ houses, then the jail itself. I gave half a thought to the wretched men inside, banged up in the warped dimension of institutional time. But only half a thought. Mainly, I was wondering whether Annalisa might be free in the afternoon. The odd thing about ‘relationships’ is that it’s often only in retrospect that you seem to have developed one. At the time it may feel more like a series of meetings: a sequence without causality. It was only the possibility of not seeing Annalisa that made me stop and think how much space the idea of her was occupying in my life. For some reason I couldn’t acknowledge the depth of this feeling, or call it by a better name.

It was agreed that I would never ring her in case her ‘boyfriend’ picked up the phone, but she was free to call me, and frequently did. I shoved Max into the back of the car and went to a telephone box just outside the Scrubs car park. I could pick up recorded messages remotely by dialling my own number and pointing a gadget into the mouthpiece of the receiver as the greeting played. I heard my voice and fired the remote. There were no messages.

Annalisa and I had met some five years earlier, at the osteopath’s in Queen’s Park where she worked as a receptionist. I had had problems with my back since a growth spurt in my teens had left the lower spine unstable; the big muscles felt they needed to go into protective spasm at the least provocation (bending down to turn on the television had once been enough to trigger it). I had tried exercises, painkillers and yoga, but the only sure relief was a violent manipulation from a New Zealander called Kenneth Dowling.

Annalisa was in her forties, a good-looking woman of apparent respectability, dressed in a smart skirt and sweater. It was not until my third visit that I noticed something in her eyes – a dreamy light at odds with the desk diary and the receptionist’s manner. While we waited for Dowling to free up the previous patient, I talked to her about work and whether she had a long commute. She had a pleasant manner and seemed keen to talk, as though not many people bothered to engage with her. At the end of another visit, I lingered after writing out the cheque. I discovered that she wasn’t needed by Dowling on Tuesdays and Fridays; I mentioned that I could do with an assistant in my private practice, someone to deal with paperwork, and asked if she would be interested.

I did my private consulting from a flat in North Kensington above a convenience store run by Ugandan émigrés. It was not a glamorous location, though it fairly reflected the status of my speciality within British medicine. It was at least a quiet street, and the consulting room itself was airy. There was a kitchenette and shower room as well as a small back office, once a bedroom presumably, where I kept a filing cabinet – and in which I now installed Annalisa at a desk. I disregarded what seemed a gratuitous brushing against me as she went to file some papers; I ignored the way she made no attempt to pull down her skirt when it rose up her thigh as she sat at the desk. People talk about ‘tension’ as though it were palpable, but you can never be certain what’s actually shared and what’s in your imagination.

It must have been on her third day at work that things became obvious. I was standing behind her when she deliberately took a half step back. There was contact. She turned round and touched the front of my trousers at the point where our clothes had met. I imagine it was less than a minute before we were engaged in the act. There was a fractional swelling at her belly; the backs of her thighs had lost the firmness of youth – though I found these signs of frailty both touching and arousing when she leaned over the desk.

Annalisa had been married once and now had a long-term connection with a man in his fifties called Geoffrey; she was attached to him and unwilling to jeopardise their domestic life. This Geoffrey was a property lawyer, who, from Annalisa’s description, sounded – I thought – homosexual. I never said so; there was no point in unsettling the arrangements.

That Saturday evening, I took a long bath and drank some gin with vermouth and ice. Then I thought I would go to the party upstairs. I could tell it had begun because the music was trickling down the stairs, though it was nothing yet to frighten Mrs Kaczmarek. In fact, the noise from the top-floor flat had changed recently. Ten years earlier the house had shaken with apocalyptic thunderings; now the songs seemed machine-like and unthreatening. I didn’t care for any of it, but this latest sound was easier to deal with, like the background tape at a business convention.

The door was opened by a smiling girl with black-rimmed eyes and hair that looked dyed blonde. ‘Hiya. I’m Misty. Come in.’

She fetched me some wine from a variety of bottles lined up on the kitchen counter.

‘There you go. Chateau Oblivion.’ She had the cheery Australian inflection I’d foreseen, as did ‘Sheeze’, the flatmate who came bounding up next. Misty was shorter and prettier, with neat little features and a flawless skin where Sheeze’s face was blotched; in other respects they were like twins, with blue eyes and the undimmed hopefulness of youth; they looked as though they expected to be happy.

Their friends were also young, accomplished and confident, or so it seemed to me. The music was getting louder, but I could still hear all right as I introduced myself to a circle of strangers and began that cycle of self-revelation and licensed curiosity. I didn’t like to tell people what I did because it seemed to unsettle them; I said I worked in general practice, and that was well received. Then I tried to steer the conversation towards less personal topics: a curious item I’d heard on the radio, or a film that had just come out.

I had never been quite certain what was expected from me at parties. Growing up in the English countryside, I had been to village dances and people’s houses for birthdays or at Christmas. Some of these evenings, like the one at which I kissed Paula Wood, could be quite louche, even then, back in the thirties. Often there was an occasion or event: a tennis tournament at the recreation ground or a village fete at the big house. In the summer, people would slope off into the darkness and there seemed always to be rhododendrons for cover. I remember the glowing cigarettes, laughter, the rustling leaves underfoot and the feel of a cool bare thigh.

‘Robert, come and meet a friend. This is Mandy. She’s a nurse.’ Perhaps it was the medical connection that made my hostess think I would get on with her friend. This nurse was a woman who made it easy for me because she talked without stopping. I presumed there was a complicated argument that needed to be built up. But after my attempts at helping her to focus had been rebuffed, I saw that she had no point to make; she was merely scared of silence.

Soon the music had reached a point where conversation was no longer possible, except in the narrow kitchen. Thinking it rude to leave before ten o’clock, I checked my watch and resigned myself to fifteen minutes jammed up against the washing machine. I talked to a young man in a red check shirt who said he was a tree surgeon, and to his brother, who was a travel agent.

It seemed to me that they were both drunk. They were friendly towards me in a puzzled way, as though surprised that I would choose to come to a party. I felt a rush of envy at what I presumed of their domestic life: a commotion of willing girls with young breasts and white teeth.

‘So I just put the client on hold while I dial up the airline and photocopy the schedule,’ said the travel agent, helping himself to red wine. ‘It’s not exactly brain surgery.’

Neither brother registered my attempt at wit, and when I turned to refill my own plastic glass, I found myself face to face again with the nurse.

I looked at her closely – the dilated pupils, the glassy irises. ‘No, I don’t.’

She pressed her hand against my chest. I feared she might be going to vomit, but it seemed she was merely steadying herself.

I elbowed and squeezed my way out of the kitchen, paused to thank Sheeze for the party, and made my way out on to the landing. Back in my own flat, I turned on the television and poured myself a deep whisky before sinking into the reclining armchair. The babel of the last hour fell from my shoulders; I lit a cigarette and put my head back. There was time to watch a film on tape, and halfway through it I would take a sleeping pill; when it was over I would block out the last of the music with wax earplugs, pull up the bedcovers and set sail for the morning.

It was only twenty minutes later that there came a cautious knocking at my door.

She sat on the sofa in the living room and began to cry. ‘Sorry, Robert. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s just that because you’re older … And you’re a doctor. I’m in a mess.’

The important thing, I thought as I clattered kettle and cup, was to get this girl out of my flat as soon as possible. When I returned with the tea, I saw that she had taken off her shoes and put her feet up on the sofa. A strand of hair was stuck to the side of her face and there were damp-looking patches showing through the soles of her nylon tights.

If it came down to it, I thought, I would just take her back upstairs to her friends: she was their responsibility. Mandy pushed herself into a sitting position and bent down to pick up the cup, causing her skirt to ride up her heavy thighs.

‘Look, Mandy, why don’t we just get you into a taxi and safely back to Clapham?’

‘Balham. What’s the hurry? It’s Sunday tomorrow. And I just … I need some company.’

There was a story about a man, some indignation, an attempt on my sympathy … But there was no connective logic and I tired of looking for it.

‘… so I’m thinking, What about me? You know, isn’t it time I had a say in all this? And … What’s that?’

I went to the hall and buzzed open the front door. It was Annalisa, and her face was so full of conflicting emotions that it made me shudder.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said, pushing past me into the hall and then the sitting room, not even pausing for a kiss.

The events of the next minute seemed to play out like a cartoon, like the images on the screen of the plane from New York. There was shouting and there were accusations. Annalisa clearly thought I was about to sleep with the nurse and that I’d brought her down to my flat for that reason.

The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it’s a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love.

Eventually, both women left. I sat down heavily on the sofa. I am so alone, I thought. All the connections I’ve made with people over more than sixty years of living can’t conceal the fact that I am utterly alone.

CHAPTER TWO

I awoke early the next morning, reeling from a dream of violence. As I shaved and cleaned my teeth, I struggled to escape from the tentacles of my unconscious and to get on with a waking life. This was a pretty normal start to the day for me.

After I’d fed Max and read the paper, my thoughts did finally seem to align themselves, but they were not on Annalisa. It was the letter from this Alexander Pereira that preoccupied me. Pereira claimed that he had known my father – which was more than I had. I was two years old when he died, shortly before the Armistice. Although there was a photograph of him holding me as a baby, I had no memory of him.

My mother was my shield and provider. She was a short, thin woman, who feared the worst. She worked hard as the office manager at a mixed farm, but at the end of the week, when she collected her pay, she always expected to be sacked. She saw monthly bills as evidence that the milkman or the electricity company was persecuting her personally; we never had people round for tea because she didn’t ‘hold with’ entertaining; she was suspicious of the motives of those who asked us to their houses, so we seldom went out either. She told me that her parents had run a boarding house somewhere on the south coast, but there had been a fire. I think they had separated or divorced, but she used the natural disaster as a cover. She had met my father at the house of an aunt near London. Before the war he had been a tailor, though by her account much more than a short-sighted man with a needle in a back room: although he was only thirty when he volunteered in 1915, he already had six people working for him in his high street premises. She had a photograph of my father and herself on their engagement day; her face had a smile I had never seen in life, though a look of faint uncertainty as well.

My father had had an elder brother, Uncle Bobby, who lived in an institution. After my father’s death in 1918, my mother went to visit my uncle every year at Christmas and once, when I was about seven, she took me with her. There were long bus rides before we came to the outskirts of the county town. A last bus coughed and hauled us up a hill, where we got out in front of a row of tumbledown shops; a hundred yards down the road was a tall pair of iron gates with a wooden lodge, where a porter sat beside a smoking brazier. He nodded us through.

‘What’s the matter with Uncle Bobby?’ I said. ‘Why does he live here?’

There was a driveway flanked by acres of open park. In the distance I could see what I thought were farm buildings and a yard where smoke came from a tall brick chimney, like a factory in miniature. The main building itself was almost the length of a street. We went in through the central door and up to a glassed-in box, where a woman took our names. The hallway was a bright area with a skylight in a dome high above and a stone floor. I was glad for Uncle Bobby that it looked so clean.

We began to walk. To our left were windows at intervals, overlooking the park; to our right were closed and numbered doors, from behind which came odd noises. Eventually, we came to another communal area, like the main hall but not so large; opening from it was a room on the back of the building, where Uncle Bobby was expecting us.

This lounge had a dozen or so chairs that had seen better days. A man in a long brown jacket, like a storeman at a furniture depository, stood with his arms folded. He ticked our names off a clipboard and nodded to a man who sat by the window in one of the better armchairs.

Uncle Bobby looked to my seven-year-old eyes to be ‘grown up’, or even forty. He had dark brown hair that had thinned out and he wore glasses with smeared lenses; his suit was old and his tie shone with wear.

It was hard to tell how Bobby was because he didn’t answer questions directly – which is not to say he wasn’t talkative. He called my mother by her correct name – Janet – two or three times, as he told her what other people had said or done. She nodded encouragingly and tutted or clucked where it seemed appropriate.

My mother tried to include me in the conversation, but Uncle Bobby’s eyes slid off me, as though he couldn’t register another person. There was a relentless quality to his stories, which, whatever their content, were all on the same note. It was as though he were reading out loud from a language he didn’t understand.

I didn’t think that at the time. What I thought was: this is my father’s brother. He must be strong and kind because he’s my flesh and blood. Soon I’ll understand; soon it’ll become clear.

Then I looked at his hands and wondered what games they’d played as children, if he’d bowled while my father batted, if they’d made snowmen together at this time of year. I searched his eyes, hoping for some light of recognition. Adulthood was strange. It looked joyless.

Tea came on a trolley and Uncle Bobby sipped noisily from his cup. Tearing my eyes from my uncle for the first time, I noticed that my mother was still wearing her felt hat with a feather in the brim.

Conversation seemed to die down. My mother began to look uncomfortable; Uncle Bobby took a cigarette from his cardigan pocket and lit it with a shaking hand.

I looked hard at the lined skin of his face, well shaved apart from a small patch under his lower lip. I stared at his eyes. This was the closest I would come to my father. I longed to touch him.

The evening after the upstairs party and the misunderstandings that followed, I looked again at the letter from Alexander Pereira, the man who claimed to have known my father. It concluded:

I live on a very small but rather lovely island off the south of France, which you can reach by water taxi from the foot of the presqu’île south of Toulon. (The island is about five kilometres from Porquerolles, if you consult a map.) Would you care to come and spend a couple of days as my guest? I didn’t know your father well, but I have a few souvenirs of the war, photographs and such like, that include him. The island has a vineyard whose wines are little known, but worth getting to know.

Let me end by assuring you that my admiration for your book is sincere. I have made some discoveries of my own in the field in which you worked, so when we have finished with my few bits and pieces from the Great War, I feel sure we could have much to say about our shared interests. Then if all goes according to plan, I hope you may consider an arrangement in which, if you were so minded, you might take forward my work after I am dead and become my literary executor.

I know this is an unusual offer to receive from a stranger, but I do hope you will indulge an old man! Even if the executor proposition does not appeal to you, I can assure you that you would have a most pleasant and relaxing time here.

The next day I went to the London Library in St James’s Square to see what I could find out about this Pereira. In the reference section I found the Conseil de l’Ordre des Médecins en France. Sure enough, there was an Alexander Pereira, who had been born in 1887. It gave a list of appointments, some clinical, some academic. His career seemed to have come to an end quite abruptly after the Second World War. In a second reference work I saw that he had published a number of articles as well as five books, all of which seemed to relate to memory and dementia. Before the war, he had held some notable posts in his profession and had clearly had that privileged inside-track of French education that eases its elite through lycée and grande école to the handful of top jobs in engineering, medicine and finance.

How very different it was, I couldn’t help thinking, from my own education. Our village school consisted of three rooms in a building in the corner of a field with a five-bar gate. Can it really have been like that? I’m making it sound like a byre, a sty. And perhaps it was. There was little money at this time, the early twenties, just a need to forget the recent past. The cook with her hair in a net, Mrs Adams, holding a spoon over the giant rice pudding, poised to break its skin … My feet running over the uneven yard that separated the rooms … Mr Armitage, the headmaster, who had been shot at Ypres, with his right arm tucked into his jacket and the mysterious spring that disappeared up his trouser leg from the instep of his right boot …

We were always being asked to make raffia mats or model with plasticine; the teacher was impatient and I was made to stand in a corner. Then in the second year there was less craft and more arithmetic; there was spelling and learning to read. I remember the morning on which the words began to make sense. I felt shifty because I was no longer working them out letter by letter, but if the word began ‘env’ and still had some way to go it was obviously going to be ‘envelope’. I wasn’t sure if this was allowed.

After school, I used to walk over Pocock’s fifty-acre field to the farm where my mother worked. I liked to get lost on purpose, which was easily done by plunging into the deep woods. With foliage all round and over me, there were no bearings to be had and it freed my mind to be among the roots and mosses and the small wild flowers that no one else would ever see. Once I lost myself so successfully that I had to be brought home at night by the local policeman when I emerged in the neighbouring county.

At my mother’s farm there was a stable lass called Jane, who used to let me help muck out the stables; and if she was in a good mood, which wasn’t often, she’d tell me about the different characters of the horses. I longed to get on to a pony and see for myself. There was a piebald called Stoker that I had my eye on; and eventually I learned to ride.

Soon, I moved into Mr Armitage’s class. He beat your hand with a ruler if you were slow on the uptake, but he explained the work clearly. One day he asked if I would get my mother to come in early before lessons began. She and I presumed there was trouble. I wasn’t aware of what I’d done, but there were rules I didn’t know, any one of which I could have broken.

We arrived soon after seven o’clock, while the classroom was still being swept and the milk churns were arriving. There was nowhere to talk except the schoolrooms, so my mother and I sat at desks in the front row, with Mr Armitage in the teacher’s big chair. He told her that the boys’ grammar school in town was obliged to take a quarter of its pupils on free scholarships from village schools like his. If my mother had no objection, he was going to put my name forward. She had many objections, baffling ones to me – about our place in life and so on – but Armitage carried some authority; his shot-up body was proof of experience beyond our imagining.

He pulled himself up and limped to the window, where he stood looking out over the fields, as though picturing some other hills.

‘When we were over in France,’ he said, ‘I used to think about a quiet life teaching in the village. We all had thoughts about what we’d do afterwards. A lot of men used to think they’d go into business together or open a pub. I used to imagine a moment like this, when I might be able to open the door for a boy from the village. You don’t have to send him, Mrs Hendricks, but I think he should go.’

She was shamed into agreeing, and the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In imitation of older and grander places, it concentrated on Latin and Greek. Just as no one is better dressed than the arriviste, so no school in England could have devoted more time to the subjunctive and, in due course, the works of Ovid and Euripides. Fortunately, I liked these subjects. Parsing Latin prose and composing verse was an exercise in mechanics that let me understand the pleasure some boys had in dismantling and rebuilding engines. I had no literary appreciation of Livy or Homer, but that kind of response was not required; it was only about the logic of grammar. The physics teacher advised us to look at the water in the bath at home, to consider how liquid turns into vapour and think about the displacement caused by our getting in; but I looked at water, tap, mirror, basin, according to how their scansion would fit into a hexameter.

In retrospect, all this seems insane, but I suppose it kept us from thinking about anything more troublesome. One thing it clearly left us with was a sense that our century was insignificant and, compared to the heroes and lawgivers of antiquity, our leaders paltry; it was hard to picture Mr Neville Chamberlain cleansing the Augean stables or Mr Baldwin bringing home the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides.

After high tea with my mother, I would go upstairs to do my homework, with Bessie the sheepdog (given to us as surplus to the farm’s requirements) rounding me up into her imagined pen. The work usually took no more than an hour and left me time to read the Bible. My mother used to worry that I spent too much time with my ‘nose in a book’. I didn’t see how she could object to my doing what we were all urged to do, but I took some pleasure in making her anxious. A child is so desperate to be acknowledged that even inflicting pain on someone he loves can seem like a small victory over insignificance.

The house we lived in was bigger than you might imagine. It had fallen into my father’s hands before the war. The sum of a hundred pounds and an insurance policy were part of a story my mother seemed not to understand. ‘Your father was an educated man,’ she used to say, as if that explained it. Most people then were tenants in tied cottages; the price of houses was low; there were plenty to be had where we lived and no one thought of them as investments.

Ours stood in an acre of garden, which backed on to fields; it had outbuildings that had once been used for tanning. There were more rooms inside than we needed and my mother took in lodgers. I didn’t like it when a new one arrived, as when she’d shown him to his room and they’d agreed on the rent, she always ended up saying, ‘Never mind Robert. He’s a funny lad, but he won’t get in your way.’ This was followed by a rumpling of my hair.