first. I was staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the evening’s events through the alcoholic fog that clouded my brain. I do not know what Barbara was thinking. At one point I glanced across at her and saw tears glistening upon her cheeks. At four o’clock in the morning I sneaked out from beneath her bedclothes, left her flat without saying goodbye, and walked all the way back to Highgate through the silent London streets.
I did not go into work that day. My hangover was too severe, for one thing, and for another, I shied away from the prospect of seeing Barbara again. The meeting would surely be too painful and awkward. And it turned out, of course, that she felt exactly the same way. Later that week she handed in her notice, and on the Friday afternoon she was given a small, subdued leaving party, which I did not attend. I was told by colleagues that she had decided to return home to Birmingham. I had no reason to think that I would ever see her again.
Three months later, I received a letter from Barbara’s father. He told me that Barbara was pregnant, and that she believed me to be responsible. It was clear from the letter that he expected me to do what was still considered, in those days, to be the decent thing.
And so, six weeks later, we were married.
We lived for a few months in her parents’ house, near the Cadbury factory in Bournville, but it was not a satisfactory arrangement. I secured a post as assistant librarian at a local technical college, and before too long we had scraped together the money to rent a small flat in Northfield. Our first and only child, Max, was born in February 1961. It would be another five years before we could raise enough money to put down a deposit on a house of our own: at which point we moved to Rubery, to an anonymous, pebbledashed, three-bedroom house, in a characterless street of similar houses not far from the municipal golf course at the foot of the Lickey Hills.
We would live here for most of the next two decades; and it was also here, in the spring of 1967, that I saw Roger Anstruther for the last time.
How he found my address, I do not know. All I know is that he appeared on my doorstep, early one Sunday evening in May. In the City, Roger had always cut a distinctive figure. That evening, materializing without warning in the Birmingham suburbs, dressed as before in a long black cape but with the addition of a matching Fedora tipped stylishly on his head, he seemed positively outlandish. When I first saw him, I was too surprised to speak. I simply beckoned him inside.
I led him into our back room, known to myself, Barbara and Max as the ‘dining room’, although we hardly ever took our meals there. There was no gin and tonic to offer Roger – he had to make do with sweet sherry instead. Barbara joined us for a while, but she had no idea who this exotic stranger was (I had never mentioned Roger to her) and it was clear that she was uneasy in his presence. After a while, she went next door to the living room, to watch television with Max. It was the day, I remember, of Francis Chichester’s return to Plymouth after his triumphant round-the-world voyage, and all three of us had been watching the live television coverage. Even while I was talking to Roger, I could hear the cheering of the crowds through the thin dividing wall, and the stentorian voice of the BBC commentator.
There was some difficult small talk between us at first, but in his usual forthright manner, Roger wasted little time in announcing the point of his visit. He was leaving the country. England, he gave me to understand, no longer had anything to offer him. In the years since I had known him, he had converted to Buddhism, and now wished to travel in the Far East. He was going to start in Bangkok, where he had been offered a job teaching English to the local students. But before departing, he said, there were some ‘ghosts’ from his past, which he felt needed to be ‘laid to rest’.
I took this to be a reference to myself; and told him, rather indignantly, that I did not consider myself to be a ghost, but a living being, composed of flesh and blood.
‘And this,’ said Roger, looking around at our dining room, with its neat array of ornaments, the ‘best’ china put out for display on the dresser, the cheap framed landscapes on the wall, ‘you consider this “living”, do you?’
I did not answer. Fortunately it was the only remark Roger made, that evening, which implied a criticism of the life I had chosen for myself. For the most part, his mood appeared to be conciliatory. He stayed for little more than an hour, having to catch a train back to London Euston in time to pack for his departure the next day. He asked me if I forgave him for the way he had behaved towards me. I told him (not entirely truthfully) that I rarely thought about it, but that, when I did, it was not with any malice or reproach. He told me that he was glad to hear this, and asked if he could write to me, occasionally, from Bangkok. I told him that he could, if he so desired.
The first postcard from Roger arrived about one month later. Over the years it was followed by many others, at wildly irregular intervals, from places as diverse as Hanoi, Beijing, Mandalay, Chittagong, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, T’ai-Pei, Bali, Jakarta, Tibet – anywhere you care to name. He never seemed to stay in the same place for more than a few months. Sometimes he appeared to be working, sometimes just travelling, driven on by that perpetual spirit of restless enquiry that seemed to be an essential part of his nature. Occasionally – very occasionally – I would reply, but I was wary of Roger, always, and careful never to reveal too much about myself or my life. I would simply write a few lines giving him the bare outline of recent events – that Max had passed five of his O-Levels, for instance, or that I’d had a poem accepted for publication in a small local magazine, or that Barbara had died of breast cancer at the age of forty-six.
Last year, some months after Barbara died and Max left home for good, I moved back to my home city of Lichfield. On this occasion I sent out change-of- address cards to only a few select friends: but Roger was one of them, so I suppose that, at some level, I must have liked the feeling that we were still in touch with one another. But I wonder now whether it was the right thing to do. Whether there was any point.
And now, in fact, I have reached a decision: no more.
In a few days’ time I shall leave for Australia, and for the start – God willing – of a new life. And no, I will not tell Roger where I have gone, this time. It is time to forget all that, surely: to make a clean, and long overdue, break with the past. Writing all of this down, at long last, after so many years, has been a lengthy but also a refreshing and even purgative process. Max can read this, one day, if he so chooses, and learn the truth about his father and mother. I hope it will not upset him too much. Meanwhile, I must try to learn something from this protracted incursion to the past. I must take some inspiration, not from my memories of Roger, or of Crispin Lambert (whose jobbing firm, I notice from the newspapers, has just been acquired for a small fortune by a leading clearing bank), but from my visit to the Square Mile itself – that labyrinth of ancient, history-laden streets dedicated to the single-minded accumulation of money. Mired in the past for far too long, the City of London has recently been in the process of reinventing itself. It has proved that such a reinvention is possible, and for that I salute it. From now on, I shall endeavour to do the same thing, in a more modest way; and hope that I might even find some small measure of personal happiness as a result.
20
‘So, tell me, Emma – how long have we known each other now?
–
‘Can’t remember? Well, amazingly, it’s less than three days.’
