Black Dogs Read Free Page A

and never comes to rest. In Bernard’s company, I always sensed there was an element missing from his account of the world, and that it was June who held the key. The assurance of his scepticism, his invincible atheism made me wary; it was too arrogant, too much was closed off, too much denied. In conversations with June, I found myselfthinking like Bernard; I felt stifled by her expressions of faith, and bothered by the unstated assumption of all believers that they are good because they believe what they believe, that faith is virtue, and, by extension, unbelief is unworthy or, at best, pitiable.
    It will not do to argue that rational thought and spiritual insight are separate domains and that opposition between them is falsely conceived. Bernard and June often talked to me about ideas that could never sit side by side. Bernard, for example, was certain that there was no direction, no patterning in human affairs or fates other than that which was imposed by human minds. June could not accept this; life had a purpose and it was in our interests to open ourselves to it. Nor will it do to suggest that both these views are correct. To believe everything, to make no choices, amounts to much the same thing, to my mind, as believing in nothing at all. I am uncertain whether our civilisation at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me. But I would be false to my own experience if I did not declare my belief in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life. I dedicate this memoir to my wife, Jenny, and to Sally, my niece, who continues to suffer the consequences of her childhood; may she too find this love.
    I married into a divided family in which the children, in the interests of self-preservation, had to a degree turned their backs on their parents. My tendency to play the cuckoo caused some unhappiness to Jenny and her brothers for which I apologise. I have taken a number of liberties, the most flagrant of which has been to recount certain conversations never intended for the record. But then, the occasions I announced to others, or even to myself, that I was ‘on the job’ were so rare that a fewindiscretions became an absolute necessity. It is my hope that June’s ghost, and Bernard’s too – if some essence of his consciousness, against all his convictions, persists – will forgive me.

Part One
Wiltshire

     
    T HE FRAMED PICTURE June Tremaine kept on the locker by her bed was there to remind herself, as much as inform her visitors, of the pretty girl whose face, unlike her husband’s, gave no indication of the direction it was set to take. The snapshot dates from 1946, a day or two after their wedding and a week before they set off on their honeymoon to Italy and France. The couple are arm in arm by the railings near the entrance to the British Museum. Perhaps it was their lunch break, for they both worked nearby, and they were not given permission to leave their jobs until a few days before they set off. They lean in towards each other with a quaint concern for being cut off at the edges of the picture. Their smiles at the camera are of genuine delight. Bernard you could not possibly mistake. Then as always, six feet three, outsized hands and feet, a preposterous, good-natured jaw, and jug-handle ears made even more comical by the pseudo-military haircut. Forty-three years did only predictable damage, and that only at the margins – thinner hair, thicker eyebrows, coarser skin – while the essential man, the astonishing apparition, was the same clumsy beaming giant in 1946 as in 1989 when he asked me to take him to Berlin.
    June’s face, however, veered from its appointed course much as her life did, and it is barely possible to discern inthe snapshot the old face benignly wreathing into welcome when one entered her private room. The twenty-five-year-old woman has a sweet round face and a jolly