Altered States (2 page)

Then the guard came out and posted the sign for the Geneva train, and within seconds people arrived from
nowhere, some of them dragging suitcases on wheels, and I lost sight of the woman who was probably—undoubtedly— not Sarah. When the train disappeared and silence was restored she was nowhere to be seen. In an hour’s time she would be in Geneva, perhaps in an apartment in the rue des Bains—the last address I had for Sarah—drinking a cup of coffee, raising a forkful of cake to her mouth. I stood for a few minutes, feeling heavy in my raincoat, feeling too a regret that nevertheless had something anticipatory about it, a very small dawning of excitement that was less like an ending than a beginning. Then I turned, and with my papers under my arm, began the long and by now chilly walk back to my hotel.

I usually take my holiday late in the year, leaving current matters in the capable hands of my partner, Brian Smith. I am, as ever, beguiled by the prospect of a golden October, trees still full but changing colour, thoughts of the vintage occupying one’s mind. In my politically incorrect way I like to think of smiling inhabitants ready to welcome me. These people would once have been described as peasants, though if peasants still exist they are mostly indoors watching television. What I invariably encounter is this curious sense of withdrawal, this intermittent mist, and trees a sullen but darkening green. I do not altogether dislike this, although sometimes I straighten up from unpacking my bag with a sigh, knowing that long walks and the English papers are to be my only distractions. There is no one who expects me, no one to whom I might telephone, but I have always been reasonably content with my own company. My mother always commended me for this, taking it to be a sign of character. Her values were old-fashioned, somewhat austere. I can hardly blame her for her reticence over my choice of the woman I was to marry, although she was very kind to my wife. As it turned out her kindness was needed.

I now feel that this interval, which I describe to others as a holiday, is peculiarly suited to one of my temperament, which is stolid, and my history, which is not. I accept the solitude, the routines, as old people do, and although not technically old—fifty-five is not old these days—I begin to anticipate a time when small landmarks, such as my mid-morning coffee at the Grand Café de la Place, and my walk to the station to pick up the English papers, will be appreciated. My old age will come as no surprise to me, and something tells me that I might spend it here, in this little town of Vif—a misnomer, for no place could be more somnolent—on the Franco-Swiss border. I come here every other year in October; it is healthy, and monumentally dull. In the spring I spend a week or ten days at a small cottage I own at Shoreham, on the south coast. I am always glad to get back to London and the office, which casts my plans for later life in a rather illusory light.

It is just that when I am here, with nothing at all likely to happen, I feel incapable of leaving, as if under some sort of sedative. And although the place has little to offer except tranquillity, this tranquillity has become fraught with consequences, owing to the burden placed on me, and which I was only half minded to discharge. Old Mrs Miller, with her strangely changing name and identity, had been lying on the sofa when I had last been to see her, her ugly feet protruding from under the shawl she had taken to wearing in the house. ‘Find Sarah for me,’ she had said, and her eyes were still trustful. I assured her that I would try, knowing that the whole thing was an impossibility. I had nothing to go on apart from two addresses on a piece of squared paper: the pencil was faded and the paper limp from much folding. One address, the one in Paris, I already knew about; the other, in the rue des Bains, in Geneva, is almost certainly unreliable.

I have my own reasons for searching for Sarah, reasons I
am careful not to admit to, even to myself. Grand passions are no longer the order of the day; divorce has replaced fidelity in the gardens of the West. I am not even sure that my memory of her is exact, for I frequently winced at her cruelty until I learned to laugh at it. What is needed, I tell myself, is a certain pragmatism. I shall not find her, but I shall have been in her vicinity, and the impression I shall take away from my quest will be precisely this dullness, this inconclusiveness, the peace of this little town, an apt comment on my inadequacy, but not a harsh one. Maybe all lifelong searches end like this, I tell myself, as I begin the steep climb back to my hotel, and the only verdict on all my activities, on my life, in fact, contained in the withheld kindliness of the slowly and inexorably descending night.

My name is Alan Sherwood and I am a solicitor, as were my father and grandfather before me. By a pleasing coincidence my partner, Brian Smith, is the grandson of the original Smith: we are thus the true inheritors of the firm of Sherwood Smith, founded nearly one hundred years ago. We have our offices in Gloucester Place and we pride ourselves on our effectiveness, although the premises are not imposing and by no means extensive. There is one office apiece for each of us, while our clerk, Telfer, who is into Eastern religions, has to share a rather pleasant room overlooking the back garden with Mrs Roche, who is more of a hostess than a secretary and who knows more about the business than any of us (or so we tell her). Mrs Roche in her turn commands—and that is the right word—the services of Amanda, Julie and Anne and their computers; they share an adjacent room, also
overlooking the garden, and have charge of the coffee machine. Brian and I, soberly dressed in dark suits and white shirts, look out on to Gloucester Place and its curiously bleak Georgian façades. In all the years afforded me for study of this particular architectural style I cannot view it as anything better than town planning of the cheapest kind, guaranteed to confer a deadly conformity on the urban landscape. Gower Street is another example. I am a Victorian myself, or better still an Edwardian. In my opinion Lutyens should be our national architect and afforded all the respect normally given to Christopher Wren. He too has his boring moments.

Brian is my oldest friend. We have known each other all our lives, were at school and university together, although our paths diverged for a time after we came down. Brian went to Hong Kong to stay with an uncle, a prominent lawyer there, while I spent three guilty but hedonistic years in Paris, supposedly studying international law but in fact doing very little. My memories of Paris in those years are not of Sartre and Camus but of the nightclubs to which I took my French girl-friend Simone. We went to the
Rose Rouge
, the
Vieux Colombier,
the
Cabane Cubaine
, and believed for a time that we need never grow up. But family pressure extended itself imperceptibly, and when I received news from home that my father was ill I said goodbye to Simone and left Paris, never willingly to return. I had been happy there, but I knew that this particular form of happiness could not be sustained. I also knew that once I reached home—and it was always home—I should become what I was always meant to be, a respectable member of the middle class, affectionate towards my mother, reliable in an emergency, but unsentimental. Emotional clients think me too severe; I tend to say nothing and watch them impassively while they reach for their handkerchiefs. Oddly enough this does not put
them off. The women tend to come to me, the men to Brian. ‘You appeal to the masochists,’ Brian says. ‘The sadists know I am one of them.’ Actually he has a kind heart, as he has shown me over the years.

Brian is a livelier character than I am, and is unfaithful to his wife Felicity with a variety of women, usually in the lunch hour. I have had to cover for him several times, particularly when Felicity telephones. She supposes me to have her interests at heart, since I was best man at their wedding: in fact I like her enormously, though I have come to dread her voice on the telephone. For decency’s sake I have to make conversation with her, while expressing surprise that she does not know that Brian will be out of the office for a good part of the day. Surely you remember him mentioning it, I say. In that way I avoid telling a direct lie, justifying my squeamishness on the grounds that Brian has the stronger claim on my friendship. I do not approve of his behaviour but I tolerate it. Brian has proved a powerful ally in the past. I have to remember that it was Brian who broke the news to me of my daughter’s death. One does not forget these things.

We both hold the treacherous view that men are superior to women in the areas of love and work, since we appear to derive more pleasure from these activities than we are supposed to. Although our natures and temperaments are quite different, Brian and I share moments of levity in the office at the expense of plaintive women suing for alimony and other hard luck cases. We also derive enormous pleasure from the appearance of our secretaries, all of whom are nevertheless protected by us: we view their innocence as part of our responsibility, and even Brian respects this. He would not dream of offering them more than an appreciative compliment. They in their turn are devoted to him, and are more at ease with him than they are with me. They seem to sense something not quite straightforward in my sternness, and
they are not wrong. The even landscape of my life became quite jagged for a time, and my equilibrium suffered for some time after that. It is not that they are frightened of me, rather that they are more at home with Brian and his affectionate and meaningless compliments. It is as if they sense that a compliment from me might have an undesirable weight. They are right. My conduct towards them is entirely proper, and I am not particularly interested in any one of them beyond their performance in the office. This confers on them a degree of immunity which they welcome. In this and other ways they negate my threat as a man, although they are clever enough to perceive this threat. It is as if they know that, left to myself, I could become a lonely fanatic. I believe that, apart from my mother, these excellent girls are the only ones to penetrate my disguise.

But is it a disguise? I neither parade nor deny the fact that I suffered a grievous blow while still fairly young, and that I do not appear to be taking any steps to restoring my life to any sort of normality. This is what disconcerts me. They know that my wife died after only eleven months of marriage, and that our baby was stillborn. They know that I live alone in my flat in Wigmore Street and am quite kind to elderly acquaintances. They suppose my heart to be broken, although I give no sign of this, and they must surely be disarmed by the occasional bark of laughter that has been heard to issue from my office. This worries them, as well it might. They are more comfortable with my Robespierre-like impassivity as I wait patiently but without indulgence for female clients to put away their handkerchiefs. They have no access to my secret life, which is not one of licence, or sexual excess (would that it were!), but rather of emotional aberration. I have been in love, and was once in love for a very long time, but I claim no indulgence for these facts. I persuade myself that nobody knows about my love for Sarah, not even
Brian, but this is unlikely. Brian has always been supremely tactful; even at the height of my madness he had the grace to keep his comments to a minimum. Men are better at this than women. Perhaps it is an example of the sort of affection between men that women rarely understand.

Although solitary by nature I should welcome a large family, the sort of panoply of odd relatives that surrounded me in childhood. Mad old ladies have never frightened me, although I have not had much success with younger ones. The first love of my life was my mother, a delightful woman by any standards, not merely my own. She was my father’s second wife, the first, always referred to as ‘poor Mary’, having died abruptly of a wasp sting to which she proved allergic. My mother was a friend of her daughter’s; her subsequent marriage to their father, many years older, was regarded as a scandal by the daughters, Sybil and Marjorie, and my mother was never truly forgiven, though relations of a kind were resumed some years later. The girls, as they were invariably known, seemed mysteriously older than my mother, although only a few years separated them, a consequence perhaps of the dreadful dignity they assumed whenever my mother tried to revive the friendship. But as they were incompetent they often had recourse to her counsel, particularly in later life, when my mother was a widow, a fact which seemed to mollify them.

The girls were devoted to each other. Marjorie, who was lame and walked with a stick when I knew her, was presumably unrecognisable as the once dashing redhead she had been as a girl, when she owned and ran a dress shop in Dover Street. The day when she could no longer afford the overheads, and when ‘Marjorie’ ceased to exist, was the saddest day of her life. She declined slowly after that; her limp became more pronounced and she spent lonely days at
home, earning a living from her now somewhat dated skills as a dressmaker. Gradually she became more and more dependent on her sister Sybil. When I knew her she already looked old: her make-up was craggy and her hair dyed the colour of Mansion Polish. I rather liked her, as did my mother.