Goodbye Sweetheart Read online

  Yes, he said. I know.

  Ah, but you don’t. None of us do. And perhaps it was dangerous of Berenice to deny the great god Pan. To insist on his mortality.

  Then, you think it was a good idea for me to . . .?

  I think a great many things, all at once. The older I get the more strange things I can hold in my head simultaneously. I take great pleasure in it.

  He was thinking about how to answer this when she went on, And it is your thesis, is it not, that the gods still live?

  I hope so . . .

  I have known many theses, and there was always a great deal of hope involved.

  Successfully?

  Generally. Though it was usually difficult to have faith, at the time.

  It got dark, so suddenly—but then it usually does in summer storms, doesn’t it? Maybe we should have made a libation.

  Didn’t you?

  Berenice emptied her glass, at the end.

  Emptying your glass isn’t the same as a libation. No ritual. And it should be the first thing.

  I suppose so.

  Do you think the oracles really did stop with the birth of Christ? she asked.

  Do you know? Did they?

  That’s what the death of Pan is supposed to mean. Not that oracles ever were a lot of help. Entirely dangerous advice, since it could mean one thing or its opposite: what you wanted to happen, or most feared.

  The ambiguity always strikes me as very clever.

  Oh yes. But who wants clever? When I was young I imagined growing into a sibylline old woman one day. It hasn’t happened yet, but it might. She giggled. I think perhaps I am too frivolous.

  You seem wise to me.

  Oh Ferdie. You are falling into two fallacies. One is that the old are wise. They are not. They are often not even old. I am mostly not much more than twenty-three. On a quiet day I might be twenty-seven. I know I look older, but it’s the feeling that counts. And one cannot see one’s own wrinkles.

  Ferdie could see her wrinkles, but he believed her when she said twenty-three. She seemed younger than Berenice, most of the time.

  Two fallacies, I said. Ah yes. That the oracles were wise. They were not. They were cryptic, to disguise the fact they hadn’t a clue, which made them cruel. The king asks, Shall I win the battle? and the oracle replies, The king shall win the battle, and so he does, but it is his enemy the king of the other side who wins, he the consulter of the oracle is defeated. The oracle doesn’t care.

  As I said, clever.

  But not wise. Or good.

  Wisdom would be in ignoring the oracle, said Ferdie.

  You couldn’t, said Pepita. When people tried, the oracle turned round and trapped them. Not always straightaway. Look at Oedipus. Took several decades, but the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother did come true.

  I suppose so. Trying to subvert them only made them worse.

  And yet one should not submit to a callous fate, said Pepita.

  Maybe, since you reckon you’re frivolous, don’t you think, maybe that makes you truly wise.

  Her face became unusually sombre. I may feel twenty-three, but I know I’m not. I know too well what the future will bring. Death. When you’re as old as me everyone has died. Every one of your fellows. I’m lucky, I’ve got young pupils, otherwise I’d be as solitary as a pillar in the desert.

  What about family?

  She held her hand out to him and he found himself taking it and kissing it. One of her rings was a half-circle of large diamonds held in strong gold claws. That was my grandmother’s, said Pepita. Perhaps I should give it to you, for your Pre-Raphaelite girl. Nicely of the period.

  He laughed, in shock. It had not occurred to him to give Berenice a ring.

  Pepita tipped up the kettle and poured more water into the teapot; he passed her his cup. Steam rose.

  The fumes of Yunnan tea, said Pepita.

  Maybe I shall become possessed, and start to prophesy. The oracles at Delphi came from fumes out of the rock.

  The navel of the world, said Pepita. I suppose you also know, the most ancient oracle in Greece was the sound of oak leaves rustling? The oracle of Zeus at Dodona. Did your oak trees tell you anything about the future?

  Probably that there isn’t likely to be any with Berenice. I’ll be lucky if she ever talks to me again. I doubt she’ll ever forgive me the Jimmy Choos.

  Jimmy Choo shoes. That could be a very good test.

  In fact Berenice didn’t seem to have given him up. He’d dropped her at her flat for a hot bath and cocoa and bed, all of which she’d refused his help with, and supposed that she would never ever want to see him again. But when he rang her she was quite civil, and when he offered to take her out to dinner (thinking he would give up going to the pub and live on boiled potatoes for a while to finance it) she said she’d like that, to call her in a few days and make a time.

  Berenice. He wondered what it would be like to say that name, think that name, every day for the rest of your life, your tongue forming its syllables and knowing its meaning for you that very few other words could ever have. When he said it now, wondering, doubting, it seemed to mesmerise him. It was like a spell. It robbed him of power. Maybe this was how you knew you were in love. Applying logic was no help at all.

  He was making a list of all the gods that, according to Milton’s ode, died ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. Apollo leaves Delphos with a ‘hollow shreik’, there is weeping and loud lament from the ‘Nimphs’, the Lars and Lemures moan, Peor and Baalim forsake their temples. And so the list goes on, not just the classical gods, but also Ashtaroth, Hammon, Thamuz, Moloch, Isis and Orus, the Dog Anubis, Osiris, Typhon: they are all cancelled out by ‘the dredded Infant’s hand’. The poem before the Ode in his book of Milton was a vacation exercise, and he couldn’t help suspecting something of that kind of necessity behind this one. When Milton described it, in his last stanza, as ‘our tedious Song’, Ferdie wasn’t inclined to disagree too violently.

  He knew he wasn’t really concentrating on this. The word Berenice kept sounding in his head. And with what ambiguity. Berenice: love, or dread? He looked up her name in Brewer: she was the wife of one of the Ptolemys, she vowed to sacrifice her hair to the gods if her husband came back home the conqueror of Asia. Presumably he did, for she hung the hair in the temple, but it was stolen; the king was told that the winds had wafted it to heaven. And there it is, it still can be seen, near the tail of Leo, forming the cluster of stars known as the Coma Berenices.

  He thought of Berenice’s frizz of red-gold hair shining as stars in the heavens. A good sacrifice, and worth stealing. He could write a poem about it. He saw again her sculpted white arms raised, heard her voice shouting the death of Pan. She’d surprised him, and he liked that. A sonnet perhaps. Or a villanelle. Maybe a stanza for every star. His father didn’t know about the poetry. William liked poems but they weren’t something he valued as an activity in the present. Ferdie pushed aside the Milton list. A fuzz of red-gold stars to dim the night. Dim? Star the night. No, that was a repetition. Light? A tittupping rhyme. His father would be certain that no good could come of such a wastrel occupation. At least a schoolmaster had a salary, which was more than could be said for a poet. A party; somebody says, And what do you do in life? Me? Oh, I’m a wastrel. Would anybody know what it meant? Fuzz, or frizz? Frizz, perhaps. His mind’s eye saw her lying on the olive-green satin of her bed, naked, luminous, her bare childish cleft (taking him back twenty years to kindergarten and the girl next door, stepping out of her knickers and lifting her dress in the cubby house at the bottom of her garden, letting him look but not touch), her narrow hips barely curving into her waist, her tiny round breasts and then the high colour of her lips and hair, her mouth slyly smiling, her teeth pinching her lip. Such nakedness seeming a gift, but also a tease; not really a gift, not even an offer, more a glimpse of what might be, if . . . what? He passed a test? Made the right bargain? Negotiated a suitable price? The g
ods were happy with a swatch of hair; what would Berenice want?

  He suddenly thought of Ruskin, how different his life would have been if his bride Effie had done as Berenice and shaved herself. Poor Ruskin, scared off consummating his marriage, any consummation with a woman then or later, because of the shock of Effie’s pubic hair. What a different person he might have become. He imagined writing a neat little metafiction, with Effie shaven and Ruskin happy.

  A poem, anyway. A naked woman, childish in body and mind, a swatch of hair turning into the cluster of stars near the tail of Leo, the lion, the fifth sign of the Zodiac. A good poem, tight, mysterious, a bit old-fashioned. He wished he lived in a time when the old ideas which so excited him had been everyday currency. He worked on it for an hour and then rewarded himself with a call to Berenice in the flesh, though only at the end of a telephone line, Berenice certainly not naked, being clever about computers in the campus shop. Yes, she said, they could meet but not this week; give her a ring later, this week there was too much on. Pepita’s diamond ring: tell me when you need it, she had said. He went back to Milton and the ode ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. Not a cheerful poem, not joyful, not a carol or a celebration, being about the way Christ ‘Forsook the Courts of Everlasting Day, and chose with us a darksom House of mortal Clay’. Very heavy and sticky it sounds. And all the good that will come of this will have to wait till after ‘the bitter cross’, and even when the terrible pain of that has been borne, humanity has to go on waiting for ‘the wakefull trump of doom’ to ‘thunder through the deep’. Moreover, loss comes at the very moment of birth: ‘the Oracles are dumm’, Apollo flees from Delphos, the nymphs mourn. And Berenice lies on her bed like a constellation in the night sky, for gazing, not touching. So he fears. Coma Berenices: Berenice’s hair.

  And he remembers that she chose this Christianity, repudiated Pan and his pagan works. Even Milton doesn’t sound too happy with the choice.

  In the dead of night when he is fast asleep the phone rings. He wakes in fear, his heart like a large slimy trout jumping into his throat and stopping him breathing; the phone in the night is always bad news. Unless it is your mother in Australia getting the time wrong again. Ma-ma, he starts to protest, but this time she is not apologising. Ferdinand, she says, which in itself is grim enough, Ferdinand . . . your father . . . and the trout jumps in his throat again.

  Your father . . . he’s dead.

  All these years of ‘your father’, never his name. And now this final notice, and still no name.

  Dead? he asks, as though he doubts; he doesn’t, but the brain needs schooling in such a difficult idea. How?

  Lynette rang. His mother pauses so he can take this in. The second wife and the third never talk, normally. She wasn’t making much sense, his mother says. He seems to have drowned and had a heart attack.

  Ferdie says, You mean, had a heart attack, and drowned?

  Perhaps that’s what she meant. I don’t think it’s what she said.

  Ferdie listens, to hear if there is any sorrow in her words. All those many thousands of kilometres they’ve travelled, and yet the person speaking them could be in the next room. But that doesn’t make detecting the emotion in them easier. He knows his mother has never forgiven his father for leaving them when Ferdie was small, and for an older woman; it was the huge fact of their lives. Ferdie keeps a commonplace book in which he writes thoughts and ideas, quotations and shaped sentences of observation. My mother lives in a cocoon, he wrote once, a tight little cocoon of bitterness; she collects scraps of grievance with which to make it cosy. It fits snugly and protects her, she will never fight her way out of it and grow into something else—something beautiful and free. It was a good image, he thought, but he also doubted you could capture your mother like that and get her down in metaphors. She was a teacher at a smart girls school, she liked the job and did it well, but at home, in private, she worked on the cocoon. When he was small he was afraid she’d marry again, give him another unsatisfactory father, then as he grew older he realised with sadness and dismay that she never would. He told her often enough that she ought to, but she shook her head and smiled sadly like a saint. Except the time, when he was about sixteen, he announced that she should get a boyfriend. A crimson bruising blush of anger suffused her face. Ferdie! What a shocking thing to say. Never—never!—say that again. I am married to your father.

  She had her own language for telling him the story of herself and his father; it was the high old language of romance, with noble terms for sad human weaknesses and failures. She was the heroine of the narrative, steadfast and true; the subject matter was her betrayal. His father was the brave knight who had failed to be faithful to his vows. She had offered a great love, rare and incorruptible; it had been misprized.

  The facts were: his father had married a woman called Nerys and they’d had a daughter called Aurora. At some point Nerys had left and gone to be an Orange person. In his mother’s story this marriage was a false start on her lover’s part. Nerys was never going to be suitable and the most sensible thing she could have done was take herself off. And lucky too, for her own happiness. Then he’d met Helen, that was Ferdie’s mother, and they had fallen fathomlessly in love and lived in bliss until William had fallen into the clutches of Lynette, an evil and predatory creature who enticed him away from his true love. A kind of witch, in fact. When he was small Ferdie had understood that it would not be long before William saw the error of this course and broke the spell; he saw the movie of The Wizard of Oz and knew that the bad witches were always defeated but it was a long time now since he had realised this would not happen. The true lovers would never be reunited.

  Lynette had provided another narrative, a precise grid to lay over his mother’s plaintive tale. Lynette was making a family tree so her daughter Erin would know her ancestors. Its straight neat verticals and horizontals allowed a quite different scope for the imagination. His father’s marriage to Nerys, for instance, had taken place in 1968. Aurora had been born in March 1968, which meant they’d only just made it before the baby was born. Ferdie felt a faint prickle of shame run through his blood, not because of the out-of-wedlock conception—his best friend’s parents were living in sin, as their son Daniel described it—but that the need for a hasty marriage was a fact on an official document for everyone to see and know. Nerys was born in September 1949, which meant that she was eighteen when she married, seventeen when she got pregnant, seriously young, nine years younger than William.

  It didn’t say when she left to become an Orange person. Helen used to say she still was and had made a go of it. Rather a hippie upbringing for a child, said Helen, communes and such, but Aurora had left all that behind, for a degree in economics and a career in investment banking—she was often on the television when the dollar moved—and was now also in an IVF programme trying to get pregnant.

  There was Helen’s data: born 1956, married 1977, Ferdie born 1978. And then Lynette, born 1950, married 1988, Erin born 1991. The symmetry of the three children, born every decade or so, and the last two conceived in wedlock; pregnancy wasn’t why William left Helen for Lynette. Lynette born 1950: that was what enraged Helen, that her beloved husband should have left her for an older woman.

  A cool catalogue of births, deaths and marriages, and enough anguish for half a dozen nineteenth-century novels.

  On the telephone Helen says, I suppose you’ll want to come for the funeral.

  He feels the trout jump in his chest again. What is the fear now? Time? Money? The kind stepmother? The now forever lost father?

  Of course you will, says his mother. I’ll send you the money.

  He is about to say, No, don’t do that, I don’t need to come, a funeral is no help with grief, though as the words shape themselves he wonders what is a help with grief and furthermore what is the grief he feels? For the father dying now? Or the father whom he had loved and who had loved him, they both knew that, but not in any way that was a comfort or a balm or
a delight but rather was an awareness, a desolation even, of what might have been, ought to have been, that people more clever, more diligent than they might have created. When he tried to think of his father he recalled Lynette being cheerful and affectionate and making holidays good fun, demanding to know what his favourite meal was, what could she cook that he liked best, he must have some special thing, surely, and William coming late for dinner or not at all, giving him ten-dollar notes to go and enjoy himself, asking him freighted questions about his schoolwork. He feels the tears prickling in his throat for a loss that isn’t much to do with death.

  His mother is saying, I’ll like having you to go with me. And there he is again, being his mother’s little man. His mother’s big man. I think you should call me Helen in public, she said when he was thirteen. Mama is all very nice in private, but a proper name is more grown up, don’t you think? The name was heavy in his mouth, and clumsy; he forced himself to use it, thinking it must get easier with time, but it never did. When they went out she linked her arm in his, he had to hold it bent like a solid bar for her to hang on to, and sometimes she brushed his shoulder with her cheek and gave a pretty little laugh. He had a creepy thought that if he had been a girl she might have looked for a new man to fall in love with. He said to himself it was a miracle that he had escaped to the other side of the world. No, not escaped, it was too cruel to say escaped. It’s only for a few years, she’d said, with visible bravery. And I can come and visit.

  He hears himself letting her pay for him to come home. You should be able to get quite a cheap fare from your end, she said. And stay for a while. Make it a holiday. I’m sure you need one. Oh, and Ferdinand, can you tell your aunt Pepita? Lynette thought that would be best. She’s a bit old to hear it long distance on the phone.

  Whenever Ferdie sat in an aeroplane trundling down a runway trying to build up enough speed to achieve lift, he thought of the words flying in the face of nature. It was a phrase his mother used, borrowed from the old lady next door; the old lady said it in all seriousness and his mother as a joke but they both meant it. His mother was just pretending that she didn’t. He was doing exactly the same thing. The various layers of the phrase pleased him. Flying in the face of nature. Not because he didn’t know the physics of planes becoming airborne; he didn’t, but believed other people did. He heard Berenice say, I am an urban girl, I do not know what possessed me.