6
SOMETIMES I THINK he is the loneliest man in the world, Ella Evans announced one night at a dinner for the College of Surgeons’ executive committee. And everyone laughed. Dear old Dorry? she imagined them thinking. Every man’s best friend? Every woman’s secret desire?
But he knew she knew. He was alone in his marriage, he was alone with his children, he was alone in the operating theatre, he was alone on the numerous medical, sporting, charity and veterans’ bodies on which he sat, he was alone when addressing a meeting of a thousand POWs. There was around him an exhausted emptiness, an impenetrable void cloaked this most famously collegial man, as if he already lived in another place—forever unravelling and refurling a limitless dream or an unceasing nightmare, it was hard to know—from which he would never escape. He was a lighthouse whose light could not be relit. In his dreams he would hear his mother calling to him from the kitchen: Boy, come here, boy. But when he would go inside it was dark and cold, the kitchen was charred beams and ash and smelt of gas, and no one was home.
Dorrigo Evans did not view his marriage as a wasteland though. Far from it. For one thing, he felt strongly that it wouldn’t do to regard his marriage as a failure, or to think he hadn’t loved Ella. For another, in the practical manner of arranged marriages—admittedly, arranged by themselves—they worked at love. When he first met Ella, because marriage was so much on everyone’s mind, he saw Ella only through the prism of a prospective wife. In his youthful mind love was more or less marriage brocaded with lines of poetry. And, as a wife for a man who was clearly going to amount to something, Ella seemed to him perfect: loving, doting, more determined even than him to see him rise. Ella accorded with convention and mortised with literature. He presumed all this was love, and although after their marriage it quickly did not seem enough, he accepted it had to do.
And then, when Ella’s body had changed into lustrous circles while bearing their children, her full breasts and dark nipples a wonder, her thinking unexpected, her aura strange and anything but boring, he had loved her very much. Before the sum of his adulteries meant she could no longer bear to have him in bed with her, he would lean into her back, smell her and know a peace that otherwise evaded him. He did not bother explaining to her that to him sex was not infidelity, that sleeping with someone was. And that he never did.
Their three children—Jessica, Mary and Stewart—he loved more deeply the further away he voyaged from them. His attitude was one of benign neglect; he had not expected that they would act out his relationship with Ella among themselves. Their enmities and coldness to each other were to him unbearable; it broke his heart, he hoped it was not permanent, he begged them not to be cruel or callous when he saw them echoing the cruelty and callousness he showed Ella. He recognised himself as unfit for fatherhood but stayed the course, because staying the course was what he did in all things. He wondered if it was surrender to his own private terror.
He and Ella were at their best in company, and found the other at such times admirable—even, as he heard Ella say at one dinner, adorable. Adorable! And he admired her and pitied her for being with him. He heard her telling her friends in all sincerity that the war and the camps would not let him go. She seemed to want to make of him a tragedy, and he, who had seen tragedies, was angry that she would be so na?ve, so self-dramatising as to make her husband one more. He wished she would just damn him for what he had become—a bastard. But that would have been too straightforward for Ella, and, besides, she loved him in her way, which is to say she refused to give up on him long after he had given up on himself. She took to having her hair cut like Fran?oise Hardy and smoking purple Sobranies in an attempt at chic distance that perhaps she hoped might also prove seductive to him. Her fragility—which to him was always her most interesting feature—remained, though it was increasingly enshrouded in a perfumed smoke he found abhorrent.
What do you want? Ella would ask, taking the Sobranie from her lips, and that was the question to which there really was no answer. And when he lied and said Nothing, or he lied and said, Serenity, or he lied and said, You, or he lied and said, Us, she would say, But what do you really want, Alwyn? Tell me, what? What?
What indeed? he wondered.
Is it just their bodies, sex, is that it? she said, and her calm hurt him far more than any anger. Just getting your end wet? she said. Is that it?
Her calm, her vile candour, her inestimable sadness—was that what he had led her to?