Алан Джадд - The Devil's Own Work

He put on more weight and became a heavy, bloated figure although his basic good looks could still be traced beneath the distended flesh. His skin became red and shiny, his hair silvery and thin but his eyes kept their colour €blue and white islands in a red and wrinkled sea. He stared unblinkingly at whomever spoke to him, still giving the impression that he was concentrating the full force of his attention. His movements became stiff and slow and he would often simply sit and stare. He developed a sort of woodenness and I kept expecting to see him with a stick, which I never did despite his adopting a blue blazer and cavalry twills. Eudoxie of course was unchanged and if she sometimes wore the clothes of an older woman it was, one felt, in deference to Edward's ageing rather than from any need to acknowledge her own.

And still the books came, if anything at a faster rate than before. Whether from Bali or Belgrade, Auckland, Rome or Ruidoso, they tumbled out, along with streams of interviews, articles, prizes and occasional news stories. He became a more public figure though his appearances were punctuated by wanderings in remote places. Sometimes his whereabouts would be unknown for months at a time, but Eudoxie never left him and the travelling, given his condition, could not have been arduous. I suppose he could afford to make it comfortable.

The books of his last years were his most popular and even now, when his work is so out of fashion, some are still read. Products of his restless journeyings, they have at their best an elegiac quality, a blending of fact and fiction that soothes because it discourages judgement and makes criticism seem out of place. It never is, of course, and they do not really work because they are not the real thing; at the base of all that fantasy is heartlessness. It is curious that we who deify the concept of the individual should devalue people, encouraging conformity, starving imagination. We no longer imagine in order to see more deeply, only to block off, to escape from having to see at all, and the essential evil of all Edward's fantasies is that under the pretence of illuminating, they in fact diminish. Not that they were really his, of course.

I cannot read them now. At the time I read most of them but the late ones I ignored. By then I would have found it pretty hard to read anything by Edward, even if it had been truly good. Being cuckolded is doubtless a more common experience than is realized and, like other upsets in life, its effects are not always what might be thought. When Chantal told me I didn't feel anger or even great surprise. I waited for both as if, until I had felt them, I hadn't properly reacted. What I did feel was an inner blankness from which no echo came; later a prolonged and growing disappointment which lasted for years and turned many things bitter. In so far as the past is your life and your memory is what you are, the discovery that large chunks of both are not and never were what you thought demands a pretty fundamental revision if you are to go on with any sense of self intact. I had always been afraid that I was incapable of anger — which lack is not a virtue, though control of anger would be — and this confirmed it. I was also afraid that even in youth I had been a bit of an old fuddy-duddy who bored people, and this did nothing to reassure me.

Mind you, the way it came out was hardly dramatic and natures more volatile than my own might still have suffered only a delayed reaction. It was many years after the episode — I still have difficulty with the word 'affair' and Chantal mentioned it in a moment of such deep unhappiness and self-concern that any immediate response I might have made was neutered; she probably wouldn't have noticed. It happened on the night after the wedding of our younger daughter. Our elder daughter was married already and the younger had been living away from h6me for some time, but she had always been Chantal's favourite. I imagine the marriage confirmed what Chantal must have known but had not wanted to face — that her children needed her no longer, that the chicks had flown the nest. It must be hard for many women to find that after years of being demanded of and depended upon they are simply left, thenceforth to be remembered, if they are lucky, with polite consideration and occasional affection. At any rate, when we returned to our flat after a long and tiring reception it was uncomfortable to be alone and silent. Chantal wept. I tried to comfort her but her weeping became increasingly uncontrolled until eventually she said, between sobs: 'I haven't felt like this since Edward left me.'

The whole story did not come out then, but I shall spare you the detail and myself the memory. She had always been what she called 'interested' in Edward although the business did not begin until after the incident with Catherine. She had been seduced — I use the word deliberately into it by Eudoxie. So too, I suspect, had Catherine and most of Edward's women. Eudoxie pimped for him, which was another way of maintaining control; no doubt she enjoyed herself at the same time. Bur what began as flattery, excitement and dalliance became for poor Chantal a passion. I call her 'poor' because that is how I used to make myself think of her, as a way of getting over it. She was swept Out to sea by an undertow she had never known before, helpless, guilty, wanting to stop, wanting to go on, a prisoner of Eudoxie's keen attentiveness and Edward's supine, tantalizing indifference. It was clear to me that she never mattered to him, that she was just another apple from which he took a bite, but she could never believe it. She convinced herself that he and Eudoxie went abroad because he could not bring himself to finish with her while she lived nearby. I did not disillusion her but I know that he never gave her a thought, that she played no part whatever in his own unhappy self-concern. Curiously, it helped me to know that because although I had not the emotional generosity to feel any great pity for her I was able to make a show of it; and she was pitable. But I think she sensed the truth despite herself, and that broke her utterly.

I could have remained in France but I wanted a complete break from old associations. Chantal stayed in Antibes and the two girI:; lived with their husbands nearby. That suited them all. I went to London and did a series of supply-teaching or temporary jobs. For a while I didn't even read newspapers in case I saw something about Edward.

It was a pretty wretched time but I wanted to be alone and uncommitted, rootless, with no background and no past, and I came close to realizing it. People are surprisingly incurious once it is clear that you do not wish to be forthcoming; I suppose they find it not worth the effort and, anyway, they have their own lives to live. London is a good city if you want to be alone.

After about eighteen months of this I began to come out of it and started applying for permanent posts. The rapid accumulation of rejections was a dispiriting sign of how much I had aged. So many years outside the English educational system meant that it was useless to seek jobs of the seniority I should have achieved and I discovered that I had suffered irreparably in pension terms. Eventually, I was invited to interview for a post in Knaresborough, Yorkshire. This cheered me because I didn't usually get as far as an interview.

I liked Knaresborough from the moment I got off the train. It is still attractive despite recent expansion, with some solid old buildings, a market square, a river and a ruined castle. I stayed overnight in a small hotel near the square and late the following afternoon, after my interview, I went for a walk around the town. I felt I had done quite well and now at last I dared hope that I could stop being the permanently temporary, grey visitor of staffrooms, the one for whom another cup had always to be found.