The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  She invited me to their wedding in Cambridge, and I think five years must have passed after that (for me) painful occasion before I heard anything more than the most commonplace scraps of news about them—that they were in America; that they were working together, making important discoveries; that they had one child, a son—and so on.

  Then they returned to Cambridge and the news became harder, and darker. Soon it was generally known that their marriage was on the rocks and they had separated. Claudia had custody of their little son, Michael, but Jack, who was now living with another woman, took him two or three times a week when Claudia came to London where she had her own small flat and a part-time teaching post in one of the colleges of London University.

  I heard all of this from former Cambridge friends, and I remember noticing that whenever her name was mentioned there was a moment when I felt as if I were short of breath. I did nothing. But I waited in hope and fear—hope that she might get in touch with me, fear of how it would affect me if she did.

  Finally there was a meeting, just one, at which nothing happened, and everything happened; and soon afterwards she was dead.

  The biography traces in detail her final two weeks of life during a vacation when she could choose to be either in Cambridge or in London. It describes how she became depressed, couldn’t stand her London flat, moved in with this friend, then that friend; how she went back to Cambridge to be with little Michael, but two days later returned him to his father and came down to London again. They quote her friends’ descriptions of her—distraught, confused, rambling (and sometimes ranting) about Jack’s infidelity; taking pills by the handful to make herself sleep and then, on waking, more pills to combat her depression.

  The last few days are accounted for almost hour by hour; but there is a brief hiatus which the biographer has not been able to fill. One day Claudia made a phone call from a friend’s house, after which she seemed more cheerful. She dressed carefully in what the friend called ‘a nice dress’, did her hair, put on makeup, and vanished for most of the afternoon. When she returned she was silent, shut in on herself. She gathered up her things, saying she was returning to Cambridge, but that is not where she went. Next morning she was found dead in her Paddington flat.

  I have never visited Claudia’s grave but I’m told it’s not unlike Katherine Mansfield’s in that it names her as Claudia Maria Strange, but then as wife to Jackson Francis Gibbs, from whom she was already estranged. He has defended this on the grounds that they were not divorced, and that he still hoped for a reconciliation. But the more famous Jack became the more he was attacked as a thief of intellectual property, and virtually a wife-murderer. I met him once in the late 1970s when this onslaught was at its height and getting maximum publicity in the newspapers. He was bitter, of course; but more than anything, he was bewildered.

  Jack, some have said, has been too polite to speak in his own defence—the perfect gentleman. That is partly true, I suppose, but I wonder whether he has really had any choice. To defend himself would have involved saying things against Claudia, complaining about her extravagances and outrages (the occasion, for example, when she burned some of his most important research notes), and that would have been, in effect, to conduct their private quarrels over again in the public arena at a time when she could not speak for herself. It would have been said that he wished to deny her her posthumous fame (which of course he did not), and would only have put further weapons into the hands of his enemies. He would not have been able to deny that, while Claudia had loved him passionately and faithfully, he had left her for another woman. And as for his being a scientist who had used, and profited by, his wife’s intellectual brilliance, that was a matter for which he had himself frankly provided the evidence.

  So while her case has been made by others, ever more extravagantly (and they are extravagances for which Claudia cannot be blamed, and which she would certainly have deplored), Jack, almost of necessity, has held his tongue.

  THE CALL I HAD HOPED FOR and dreaded came at one of those wonderful winter moments when the day, for hours unrelentingly grey, had all at once begun to release a brilliant shower of snow. One wants to say that things are like other things—a sky like lead, or pewter, and the snow falling out of it like confetti, or the petals of white roses. But if you grew up, as I did, in a place where snow never falls, then perhaps you recognise more clearly its uniqueness. That kind of sky is like nothing but itself; and snow falls only like the falling of snow. For the phone to ring at just that moment, for the voice to be the only one that had always caused a momentary shortness of breath—these were circumstances that seemed to promise to a thirty-year-old academic, weary of London and faintly homesick, new life, adventure, escape.

  She said, in her imperious way, that she wanted to visit me at home—now, at once—and though the prospect made me nervous I said of course she must come. By the time she reached my flat (in the same lane, but larger than the original bedsit) I had been out for fresh coffee and biscuits, and pâté, cheese and good bread in case she stayed for lunch. I have a vivid memory of our conversation, she sitting on the floor on an Indian rug with her knees up, I on the edge of my chair. It was hardly a conversation at all, more a monologue, a catalogue of woes and wrongs, to which I contributed appropriate exclamations of surprise and sympathy.

  She talked about the woman for whom Jack had left her. ‘It’s not her fault,’ Claudia said. ‘I know that, but I hate her.’ Claudia was, she assured me, burning in the hell of jealousy. ‘This is where I feel it,’ she went on, and she grasped her crotch with both hands—‘Here.’

  There was no doubt what she wanted, and it would be a feeble euphemism to say she wanted me to make love to her. She wanted me to fuck her; and not for her pleasure, nor for mine. At that moment I did not exist except as an instrument of revenge against Jack Gibbs.

  It would perhaps earn me a few poor marks for good conduct if I wrote now that I was too high-minded to let her engage in an act which, when it was over, would have left her no happier, no nearer a solution to her problem. But I don’t think that thought, though a good and worthy one in retrospect, occurred to me. In the simple physical sense I had always wanted her, and still wanted her. Why then, if at last she had a use for me, should I not have a use for her? That thought would have been uppermost but for something else—a small practical impediment.

  It was something so trivial, so much a matter of chance, it belongs only to the category of the absurd. The snow which had so brilliantly showered down just before her phone call had stopped, and there was even a slight break in the unrelenting grey of the sky. Not full sunlight but new light was on Claudia’s head, and the glint of it in her brown hair reminded me that the heavy curtains, and the gauze ones which protected my domestic interior from eyes in the windows directly across the lane, had just that morning been removed by my landlady. They were to be dry cleaned and would be returned, she promised, before nightfall.

  So mixed with, even dominating, what might be presented as a profound moral dilemma, an occasion of high drama, one of the determining moments in the final days and hours of a woman who has become, and deservedly, something of a modern icon, there was a calculation going on, unspoken and never finally resolved, in the head of a person who was then, and is now, of no importance in Claudia’s story. I was like the torturer’s horse in the poem by W.H. Auden, scratching its innocent backside against a tree while the dreadful martyrdom runs its course. Could we, I was asking myself, make love—could we fuck—on that bed, in full view of the maisonette window slightly higher than mine and just across the lane, where the woman who took such an interest in everything on my side was working at her kitchen bench? In the new century the answer might have been yes; but this was 1963, and I was not only ‘skinny’—I was shy.

  Claudia read my hesitation as unwillingness, my silence as cowardice—a fear of saying no—and her response was predictable. There was in those days (has it really changed?—again in the new century I
suppose it has) a rule, or perhaps not so much a rule as an unavoidable truth in human relationships, that in such encounters, where there was an invitation to sex, a woman might say no and give no offence—indeed the refusal was often expected—but a man to whom a woman offered herself was almost obliged to accept. To say no to one who had so generously and courageously put herself beyond the pale of propriety would be deeply insulting.

  Claudia was an original thinker but she was also a woman of her time and her anger was huge. It didn’t express itself in shouting or breaking things. It simply expanded like a cloud, the black genie emerging from the bottle of her wrath—so dark, so pungent, so negative that, if some solution to the problem of the missing curtains had at that moment occurred to me, it would have been too late.

  As she got up to go her silence was saying, ‘I needed you and you failed me’—and it was true. That silence has gone on saying it ever since. She did not need the particular person who answered to my name, but she needed significant action as a release from her torment. She needed a sense that she had some power left—that she could hit back at Jack, and that she had done it. What would it have mattered whether it was a wise action or foolish? What would it have mattered if the woman across the lane had watched us, or if I, troubled and embarrassed by these circumstances, had proved a less than wonderful lover? Something should have happened—anything—to fill her mind, to make her feel relief from the accumulated pain Jack’s desertion had given her, and from the depression it had caused.

  I have thought about her often in the intervening decades, and what strikes me always are the ironies—that the woman who demanded brawn, and died for love of a man, should have become a hero of radical feminism; that the man who made the world aware of her genius should be represented as the thief of her fame; that the survivor, Jack, should be silenced by the death which has given her a public voice; and even (this is not something I can believe, or want to believe, but which hovers there like dark laughter) that I, who had neither power nor influence in her life, might have saved it if only my landlady had not removed my curtains.

  It is not just traditional literature that asks for heroes and villains. Ideology clamours for them even more, while perhaps reality, if we can only see it clearly, permits of neither. That evening, after her visit to my flat, Claudia went back to her friends’ house, then to her flat in Paddington where she ate a meal, wrote several messages and postcards, including the last of the long and brilliant letters to her sister which have since been published, and went out to post them. She drank some whisky and water, took a handful of her sleeping pills, went to bed with her little handgun under her pillow; and then, perhaps waking later in the night, or possibly as she was drifting asleep, she shot herself in the head.

  There was little publicity about her death, and since my relationship with her was hardly known (she liked to keep her life in discrete compartments) no one told me of it. So when two days after her visit I received a card from her, I took it to be a sort of olive branch, mocking, but also forgiving. I was just then on the brink of a visit to the United States, so I took off thinking that perhaps when I returned we might re-establish our friendship. This time, I resolved, I would do better. I would behave more like a man of substance; a man who might be (as the New Life Superstore’s machine so recently put it) ‘light’ in frame but one who had bulk of character.

  I still have the postcard, of course, along with my other few mementoes of Claudia. It reads,

  M.—

  One weepy tramp went for a wimp. He escaped. No regrets, —C.

  It is a long time ago, and all that is left composes itself now as in a marble frieze. Claudia shines—she has her glory in death. Jack is there—he has life, and his fame, still slightly tarnished but less so as the years pass. Those who played a part in the tragedy, loving or hating, helping or failing to help—they all have their places in the picture. And right at the edge, already turning away, there is the insignificant fellow who was once made anxious by an absence of curtains. He has his anonymity—and his story.

  Last season’s man

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO, when Mario Ivanda’s obituary on the Kultura page of Zagreb’s Vjesnik spoke of him as ‘our supreme man of the theatre’, there were still some who wondered whether the phrase was meant in a tone of unequivocal enthusiasm; or was it to be read as meaning he was very good at a lot of things—writing, acting, directing, movie-making—and fell just short of the best in all? Had he moved up into that category of ‘supreme’ just by outliving one or two of his contemporaries, and in particular Tomislav Buljan? Or was he truly one of the ‘greats’?

  Most however were impatient of all such equivocations. We saw them as provincial, a flashback to the bad times when we Croatians lacked belief in our own talents.

  Now the last remaining equivocators seem to have fallen silent, and today, when Mario’s bronze statue was unveiled in the town woods close to Dubravkin Put, one heard nothing but good things about the man, and about his films and plays that are being shown in a week celebrating his lifetime’s achievement. Springtime for Mario Ivanda!—the trees over his bronze head in full leaf, the market tables by the Zagreb railway station scarlet with strawberries. Will Judge Time confirm his place? Who knows, and why should we care? For those of us alive now in the new, liberated, self-confident Croatia, the matter is settled. Mario is ‘our very own Bergman’. He is ‘among the immortals’!

  That, anyway, is what the Minister of Culture said to Mario’s widow after she had unveiled the statue and spoken briefly, with feeling and dignity, of the man and the writer as she remembered him in the final decade of his life.

  ‘The immortals,’ she repeated, faintly amused perhaps at the extravagance, but certainly not displeased. ‘Thank you, Minister. I hope so.’

  IT MUST BE AT LEAST twenty years ago that Tomislav Buljan wrote his famous article, ‘Last season’s man’, which Mario was sure was meant to end his career as a writer and kill him dead as a force in the theatre. And because it hit hard, even with a certain devilish and unarguable accuracy, it very nearly succeeded. Mario didn’t respond. He knew that self-defence would only draw more attention to the article, and that it was best to behave as if he hadn’t felt it, didn’t care about it, was indifferent, impervious.

  Tomislav was twenty-eight at the time while Mario was already in his forties—not a great difference but enough for Tomislav to feel that he and his two or three closest associates were ‘the new wave’ arriving to sweep away what was already ‘old-fashioned’ in the theatre. Tomislav was tall, well built, Byronically handsome and charming. Everyone loved him and talked about him. He was ‘in fashion’ and could do no wrong. You saw him at book launches and art openings, and at BP, the jazz club which had become a meeting point for Zagreb’s intellectual community. He was relaxed, smiling, witty, knowledgeable. If it seemed to Tomislav that someone, either in what he wrote for the theatre, or in what he did there as a director, was (as the deadly article said) ‘causing an obstruction in the fast lane’, then you had to listen. In the end you might disagree; but you could take it on trust that Tomislav would have acted without malice, in the interest of what he saw as progress and the greater good. He was truly ‘a nice guy’. That he was also capable, not of malice, but of a certain critical ruthlessness amounting in effect to cruelty, took everyone by surprise. There were gasps; and then praise for his courage in telling the truth as he saw it.

  But that was not as it seemed to Mario Ivanda. He thought a younger man was attempting to destroy him. His confidence was shaken. He was deeply hurt and full of rage. He imagined meeting Tomislav at a party and punching him in the mouth without warning; or going to his door and doing it. And then there were dreams in which he seemed to be kicking him to death in a dark alley close to Zagreb’s Gavella Drama Theatre where their two plays had been put on, one after the other, and where his rival had won superlative reviews for a work that seemed to Mario shallow and insignificant.

  We are
a small country with a tight intellectual community. If things go against you, as they did for Mario Ivanda, you can be left like the chicken in the enclosed yard all the other chickens turn against, your skin bleeding and your feathers plucked.

  What made it worse was that this occurred right at the time when Mario was going through the break-up of his second marriage. He was sensitised, precarious, in need of a secure place of retreat and the support of a loving wife. Before the article appeared theatre people, those ‘in the know’, had been divided, some for Mario, others for Katarina. After it, the balance swung against Mario. It was as if he no longer had the protection, or the excuse, of his talent. He was just one more unfaithful husband (‘a casting-couch director’ was the common gossip), and Katarina had been right to send him on his way.

  She had kept the house and their two children, and changed the locks. He was out on the street with nowhere to go but the home of friends, a couple whose welcome was genuine but troubled, affected by the climate of the moment. And with the end of that marriage Mario had lost also the financial certainty of a wife who was a middle-ranked civil servant, and whose income had given him freedom to take risks in the theatre. He needed security in his professional life and felt now there was none.

  Mario had long since given up on the church, but at this time he used to go into a side chapel of the cathedral at unusual hours and light a candle, which he was always careful to pay for, in case the magic didn’t work, and which he would add to the forest of lights at the foot of the painting of the Virgin. On his knees there, his brow in his hands, he would pray for the death of his enemy. ‘Holy Mother, if you can make Tomislav’s decline long and painful, so much the better. But if I have not earned this bonus, if it must be sudden, a heart attack, a traffic accident, at least, I beg you, give me his death. And please, before his last moment let him know that I, the rival he tried to destroy, live on, still writing. Let him go to Heaven if he has earned a place there, but let him know first, and beyond any doubt, of his earthly failure.’