Of the Englishman, I can only recall his beautiful car, his pipe, his occasional ruffling of my hair, and his friendliness. I never saw him again. I heard some time later that he had been driving home from the club one dark night when his Triumph crashed into the back of a garbage truck parked without lights in the middle of the road. The pipe he had been smoking was rammed by the force of the impact into his throat, and he died instantly.
The drama of his departure did not disturb my memory of the apparently carefree comradeship I had been permitted, albeit so very briefly, to share with my father, who had never spent time with me alone. After all, I was then a child; the young man had been a stranger. Yet years after the deaths of both my parents, I came across a curious reference to a ‘visitor’ from England, a hockey player identified only as ‘James’, in the diary my mother kept at that time. Although the evidence is tenuous, even ambiguous, it appears she might have had a brief liaison or affair at the club with this unidentified man. If such an indiscretion took place, it can no longer be confirmed or denied, as all the witnesses are long dead. I sometimes wonder if that conversation on the playing-field that day was related in some way to this revelation in the diary. And I know I will never know.
But that way madness lies. Life is too short for pointless speculation in the hopeless watches of the night. If we must be possessed by our memories, let it be by those of sunlight and clarity and trust, and not those of shadowy suspicion. T.S. Eliot’s words are apposite here: “Midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.” The past devoid of clarifying context is indeed a dead geranium. Only a madman would seek to shake sense out of it.
