There I was aimed. On a flight marked by long interludes of riotous turbulence (with the plane’s rear end waggling like that of a muscular bulldog on the point of being unleashed for a romp). As an experience, then, sitting there strapped into 58F was both expensive and uncomfortable – but not nearly as expensive and uncomfortable as being strapped into a Proton Therapy Synchrotron, which was to be Christopher’s next recourse and ordeal.
First, the past, and the end of Yvonne
During that journey Martin had Hitch-22 on his lap, and he was looking again at the pages about the fate of Mrs Yvonne Hitchens.
Hilly had a soft departure; she died in her farmhouse in rural Andalusia, attended by two devoted daughters-in-law (one of them a professional nurse); and she was in her early eighties. By contrast, Yvonne died of unnatural causes in a Greek hotel, with a male cadaver in the adjoining room; and she was in her mid-forties. Hilly’s death was in the newspapers – among the obituaries; Yvonne’s death was on the front page.
As Christopher tells it, he was lying in bed one November morning ‘with a wonderful new girlfriend’ when he got a call from a (clearly quite wonderful) old girlfriend. She asked him if earlier that day he had listened to the BBC: there was a brief dispatch about a woman with his surname who had been found murdered in Athens. Having heard some particulars (clinchingly the full name of Yvonne’s travelling companion), the old girlfriend said, ‘Oh dear, then I’m very sorry but it probably is your mum.’*2
That corpse next door was the man she had eloped with – a scrawny transcendentalist (and ex-priest) called Timothy Bryan.
Some historical imagination is necessary if we are to see the size of the calamity for Christopher’s father, Eric, the stalwart naval officer. In one vital respect Commander Hitchens still lived in the culture of Trollope – the last of the great novelists to portray a world in which familial scandal led at once to social death. In his provincial and anxiously genteel milieu the commander had reconciled himself to the defection of ‘an adored wife’, but as Hitch-22 goes on,
[I]n the surrounding society of North Oxford, the two of them had a pact. If invited to a sherry party or a dinner, they would still show up together as if nothing had happened. Now, and on the front pages at that, everything was made known at once, and to everybody.
Eric Hitchens (also known as Hitch) was ‘a man who for a long time braved death for a living’; and yet ‘there was no question of his coming to Athens, and I myself, in any case, was already on my way…’
Already on his way. This will qualify as a theme: Christopher’s compulsion to stride into his fears. It was the late November of 1973.
On November 17 of that year the regime of the Greek junta – a dictatorship, writes Christopher, ‘of dark glasses and torturers and steel helmets’ – was overthrown: the fascist colonel, George Papadopoulos, was replaced by a fascist general, Dimitrios Ioannidis, and the new junta was a dictatorship of massacre. This was the setting for the last days of Yvonne Hitchens.
And so we picture the youthful Christopher going through the motions with Athenian officialdom (the compromised coroner, the villainous police captain), and at the same time covertly mingling with the underground opposition (survivors of beatings, friends with bullet wounds who dared not go to any hospital). At one point, in a shabby student flat, he joined his comrades in an almost whispered rendition of ‘The Internationale’…
At last Christopher was informed of the judicial verdict. It did not surprise him, and it must have consoled him. In London he had taken his mother and her lover out to dinner, and he had got a sense of Timothy Bryan: ‘wispy’, musical, an adherent of the Maharishi. No, not a murderer. And so not a murder-suicide. Yvonne had made a pact with her husband; she also made a pact with her lover – they used sleeping pills. In addition, Timothy, ‘whose need to die must have been very great’, had slit his wrists in the bath. And Christopher was obliged to absorb another fact (one destined to ramify for ever in his mind): according to the hotel telephonist’s log, Yvonne had repeatedly tried to reach him in London. That was the penultimate shock – there was one more to come.
Christopher begins the two filial chapters of Hitch-22 with a description of his first memory. In Athens he was twenty-four; and here he has just turned three. The scene is the Grand Harbour at Valletta (the capital of Malta, a British possession with a naval base where the commander serves). And Christopher is aboard a ferry, intoxicated by ‘the discrepant yet melding blues’ of the Mediterranean. His mother is with him, and although he is free to run around and explore she is always present and ready to take his hand.
The year is 1952. That is how it begins. And twenty-one years later,
…[T]his is how it ends. I am eventually escorted to the hotel suite where it all happened. The two bodies had had to be removed, and their coffins sealed, before I could get there. This was for the dismally sordid reason that the dead couple had taken a while to be discovered. The pain of this is so piercing and exquisite, and the scenery of the two rooms so nasty and so tawdry, that I hide my tears and my nausea by pretending to seek some air at the window. And there, for the first time, I receive
