The Execution. Hugo Wilcken
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I’d written. His childhood, the Sorbonne scholarship, the volumes of poetry, the 1968 events, the political career, the UN posting, the business empire … a feeling of boredom set in as I scrolled down. Then after a while I realised it wasn’t so much boredom but frustration.
I looked at the exploded image of my face reflected in the cellophane cover of a book the librarian had got out for me. It was a compilation of profiles of African writers, published by some Canadian university. I turned to the interview with Jarawa, largely a self-serving mix of anecdotes about his early struggles. They struck a more personal note than anything in the newspaper clippings, though. There was even an apocryphal-sounding nativity story – his birth had been a difficult one and his father had supposedly remarked to the midwife: ‘If it’s a choice between the mother and child, save the mother.’ That was what a malevolent uncle had told Jarawa when he was five or six. It had marked him for life and had underpinned his determination to succeed, he said.
Another of these anecdotes caught my eye. It was about a poem Jarawa had written in the sixties. The subject is a kid with Down’s syndrome. He’d lived in the village where Jarawa had grown up. He wasn’t allowed to come out of the house. So his whole world was the house to the garden wall. Years later Jarawa returned to his native village for a visit, and he happened to see this kid. Jarawa had grown from a child to an adult, but the kid still looked exactly the same. Jarawa had travelled around Europe and yet this kid’s world was still the same house and garden.
This story reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. As I photocopied the pages I wondered for the first time whether I would ever get to meet Jarawa.
When I got back to my office I checked my voice mail. There was a long, garbled message from Christian – he didn’t say who he was but I recognised the slightly whining quality of his voice immediately. He sounded distraught and repeated several times that he had to talk to me about something, that it was urgent. After that there was a pause of about a minute or so and I could hear him breathing unevenly into the receiver. Finally he said he’d never forget what I’d done for him the day his wife died and then hung up. I’d been meaning to ring Christian to see how he was but what with all the work on the Jarawa campaign I hadn’t got round to it. He’s on compassionate leave and no one’s replacing him so the Jarawa team’s just me, Jo and a few volunteers. I have to admit that I prefer it that way because to be frank I hadn’t been looking forward to working with Christian.
I listened to the message again. I knew I should ring him back now but somehow I just didn’t feel in the mood for it. So I called Marianne instead to see if she wanted to meet for lunch, but she wasn’t at the gallery. She wasn’t at home either. Then flipping idly through my Filofax I noticed the card Charlotte Fisher had given me at the gallery. I’d forgotten about her. I’d forgotten that I’d said I’d call. The phone rang for ages and just as I was about to hang up she finally answered: ‘Oh hi it’s you – I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.’
‘Why not? I said I’d call.’
We small-talked our way cautiously around each other then finally she said she was going home to cook some pasta, why didn’t I come round? I replied: ‘It’s such a nice day though, why don’t we go for a picnic instead?’ It’s true that it was a nice day, but I also wanted to be on neutral ground – I wasn’t yet sure what exactly I wanted from Charlotte.
Outside it was warm, peculiarly warm for London for this time of the year. A lot of pubs and cafés had put chairs on the pavement, dance music blared out from the open doors of clothes shops and hairdressers. People were hanging about on street corners, talking and flirting – everyone was dressed for summer and there was a sort of sexual buzz in the air. As I walked up Camden High Street to Charlotte’s flat that curious sense of well-being began to surge through me again. It was like a feeling of infinite possibilities, maybe even immortality.
Charlotte had had her hair cut into a summery-looking bob and was wearing an orange cotton dress that really showed off her legs, which were lightly tanned. I’d forgotten how good-looking she was and complimented her on her appearance. I kept looking at her as we walked down the street – I could see she was getting a lot of pleasure out of my reaction to her and I knew she was still interested in me.
We bought some picnic stuff from Safeway and went to Regent’s Park. For a while we ate in silence, watching the joggers – middle-aged men with tortured faces – and the mothers and au pairs with their babies. Then after a few minutes Charlotte put me through a kind of interrogation. First she wanted to know how many times I’d been unfaithful to Marianne. Only once, I replied, a few years ago, before Jessica was born. As I said the word ‘born’, I remembered how Marianne had told me the other day that she was pregnant again. I’ve been so busy that we’ve barely talked about it since and it hasn’t really sunk in – it struck me now that having a second child would in some ways mean an even more radical change than having the first: a couple with a child is still a couple with a child, but two children means a proper family.
Charlotte asked me lots of questions about my infidelity. But it was so long ago and had been so brief that I could hardly remember anything about it. She was Australian – she’d had that Australian habit of ending sentences on a rising note. She was about nineteen or twenty and on her year out from college, doing a stint in London at Bryant Allen. We’d slept together a few times in her cramped South Kensington bedsit which she shared with another Australian girl, who was sent to stay on a friend’s floor while I was there.
Charlotte wanted to know whether Marianne had ever found out about the ‘affair’. I said I didn’t think so. She asked if I thought Marianne would have left me if she’d found out and I answered, ‘How would I know?’ But didn’t you feel guilty, she pursued. I said no. Why not, she asked, didn’t I have any obligations towards Marianne, didn’t I want to make her happy?
I thought about that for a moment. Finally I answered that yes, certainly I have obligations, certainly I want to make Marianne happy, and that means that if I’m unfaithful I should keep it separate from our life together.
‘In other words, if you lie about it, it’s all right.’
Again I thought.
‘No, because if she ever confronted me outright, I’d tell her the truth.’
She was about to interrupt me but I wanted to pursue my line of reasoning. I told her it’s more subtle than that. Marianne essentially knows who I am, she probably realises I’m capable of infidelity but in the end she doesn’t want to know the details, because as long as it’s an abstract and not a concrete reality, she doesn’t really care one way or the other. Charlotte said she didn’t believe that. She said she didn’t believe there was a woman in the world who didn’t care one way or the other. And she said she didn’t believe either that deep down everyone knows what their partners are really like. She, for one, had never suspected that Nick was being unfaithful.
I didn’t answer her. Then after a pause she said she didn’t quite know what to make of me, but I was probably some kind of bastard. She said it half-jokingly, half-seriously. We both laughed and after that we didn’t talk any more. We looked at each other quite intensely and I noticed that her eyes were purple-blue, like a bruise. We kissed. The lunch had made me drowsy and I lay down on the grass. The sun slid behind a streak of clouds, but it was still warm … I stared up into the sky and thought I could make out the shadow of the moon, then I closed my eyes. Charlotte was resting her head against my chest. The weight of it had the effect of making me aware of my own breathing. I felt the air enter my lungs. I put my arm round Charlotte and could feel her chest rise up and down as well. I was so relaxed and it felt so good to have Charlotte’s head against my chest that for a bizarre moment I felt I almost loved her.
I walked Charlotte back to her flat, and while we walked she asked me a lot of questions about Marianne and her painting. She wanted to know how she was represented and did I think she might be interested in signing up for a better financial package. The trouble with a lot of the more thoughtful artists, she said, was that they were so show-orientated they tended to miss ‘the bigger picture’. They didn’t understand the need to ‘cultivate themselves