Post 6

A STOLEN LETTER: NOT THE FIRST

The previous evening before I went to bed I had taken a rather high-fettled action, even for me; for although shy and unnoticeable sometimes to a degree that used to make me angry but no longer does, I have never been unadventurous. I had, over the past weeks, found and systematically rifled Aunt Molly's very private old-letter drawer full of the papers of my late Uncle Paul. It was not the place where she kept Philip's letters and, sometimes indiscreetly, letters of `general interest' to the rest of us: which being freely available nobody but me had time to read. This private drawer had no handle, it was at the back of her desk, and to my paralysed astonishment, opened for me to a random touch like Aladdin's cave one day when she had asked me to look for her glasses. It was from Uncle Paul's papers there that I discovered, a little later, that my other grandfather Alistair had been murdered by his wife Jenny my other grandmother. But last night I had stolen a letter I did not intend to put back. It contained an unusual, unsettling revelation. I read it again.

This letter was one of several from my father to his elder half-brother my Uncle Paul. It was about my mother. It was from the Boulevard St. Michel, Paris, Thursday evening, July 1939. `My dear Paul, It is very late. Idleness prevents my getting into bed. I have finished my work. I am driven to letterwriting. This damned war-scare is all over the streets here and no-one talks about anything else. Paris is in a panic; not wild, shouting fear, but gentle quick-glancing panic, which confident official references to the Maginot Line do nothing to allay... Poor Berenice, she still works too hard, practises too long, worries too much about her career, which is all fantasy, as you know, for her gift has left her. She worries, (but with a touch of exaltation), I think, about a new war; she worries about me, about the little girls. In her last letter she writes of `tendencies she does not admire in Sarah', who, let me remind you, is at present under five years old! Berenice writes like this as though I have been away for years. I have been away five days tomorrow. I return on Tuesday, and whatever she means by `tendencies' other than Sarah's natural inclination not to practise the piano eight hours a day, it will be one of the subjects for her interminable, mad, metaphysics when I get back; and a mysterious disappearance will follow. My character, friends, means of livelihood will be called to account once more by my poor sick girl. Sometimes I wonder if I can stand it. I must stand it. Too much has already been sacrificed to standing it. I feel like taking her bodily to see the man that old Streeter advised us to see, for there is no prevailing with her. Something is eating her life away. What a joyful girl she was when we married. How soon that changed. My guilt is boundless when I am with her and eats me up. I hate myself, and sometimes, God help me, I hate her. Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew.

Bee's solution to our `problem' (for she regards them collectively as one, large familiar and revered old friend - and perhaps they are, as most of you seem to believe, but if I accept that I think I might despair) is that the war situation being what it is, she should take the three girls to Washington. Maybe she is right to think we should go our separate ways; but the idea of Matthew, of all people, taking them under his wing in Washington is intolerable to me. In any case, how could he possibly, after all that has happened, want ever to set eyes on Bee again? In the event of war it would probably be the best place for them, there is no doubt, but in her present condition of health she could not even undertake the journey, let alone endure the exile. I do wish she would let herself get well, but I think her heart is now forever set against that...'

I did not finish it. It was signed by my father Charles. I gazed at the handwriting and the signature, upright, bold, astonished and sad that this mark on the paper had lasted so much longer than he had. It was a terrible letter to me, and my mind, as it was the first time I read it, lingered interminably on the one sentence where I stopped. Reading it yet again, I came with a fresh shock, as every time it had shocked me, to: `Perhaps after all she should have married Matthew'. As if the consequences of my mother having married my father and not Matthew were, after all, inconsequential. I felt personally affronted and insubstantial. It brought back a remark to my mind that I had once overhead Aunt Molly make to Matthew himself. `Charles's mistake was that he did not realise that Bee was unfit to have children.' As if the existence of the three of us, in Molly's household and under Molly's care did not give the lie to that!

I sat on the bed a long time, pondering once more. No, I did not have the slightest wish to go swimming, or move. It was not that, later, I did not intend to do my homework; it simply never crossed my mind to do it.