Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

  ‘That’s what my dad keeps saying.’

  ‘Sounds like a wise man,’ says Vern lightly, smoothly, preparing to bounce on with this family testimonial incorporated into the pitch. But McLeish has put down his knife and fork, hunched his shoulders up, and twisted his face into a grimace Vern doesn’t realise immediately is supposed to be an imitation of someone.

  ‘Och, think aboot yir future, Joe!’ says McLeish in sudden parodic Glaswegian – baritone, geriatric, phlegmy, smoker’s-cough Glaswegian, with rumbling pops under it like a Geiger counter gone rogue. ‘The footie’s no’ a bad wee racket while yir young, but whit aboot whan yir knees gi’ way, eh? Whit aboot whan yir twenty-five and yir bosses think yir an auld man, eh? Whir’ll the money come from then, eh, tae keep ye in yir shiny wee suit and tie?’

  The mimicry is sharper than Vern would have guessed the boy was capable of, and he also can’t quite read the level of resentment in it.

  ‘Bit of a ray of sunshine, then, is he?’ he says, playing it safe with all-purpose irony.

  ‘Oh, he’s not wrong,’ says McLeish, sighing. ‘He’s just so bloody pleased about it.’

  ‘What does he think you should do, then, after?’

  ‘Go on the trains, like him. Settle down. “It’s guid work – unless ye think yir tae guid for’t.”’

  ‘And you don’t fancy it.’ Safe ground now, for who at nineteen at the beginning of their adventure, their sudden flight, would welcome the thought of crashing back to earth.

  ‘Not much, no.’

  ‘Well, you could certainly do better.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah! Course you could. D’you mind me asking how much they’ve got you on at the moment?’ Vern of course knows the answer to this question, to the penny. Finding it out was one of the most important parts of setting today up.

  McLeish looks wary, as anticipated.

  ‘Why d’you wanna know?’ he says.

  ‘Just as a for-instance. But don’t worry, I don’t wanna pry. Lemme guess, all right? I’m thinking … about … thirty quid a week?’

  Flattery. The players’ strike three years back, also a vital precondition for this conversation, has removed the wage cap that applied for decades, but Millwall isn’t rich, and McLeish isn’t much of a star yet, and they’ve got his youth as an excuse, so he’s on twenty-six pounds ten shillings right now.

  ‘Thereabouts, yeah,’ says McLeish.

  ‘Not bad,’ says Vern. ‘Good for you. But you know what? In essence, in the final analysis, when it comes right down to it: chickenfeed, son.’

  ‘You what?’ says McLeish, not sure whether to laugh or be offended.

  ‘I mean obviously, compared to British Rail, that’s excellent. Compared to what you could be getting, with the world’ – he circles the spectacle of wealth that surrounds them with a finger – ‘just ripe to be given a squeeze, if you know how; compared to that, you’re on poverty pay, mate. You haven’t got two bob to rub together, really.’

  ‘I’ve got enough that you want some!’ says McLeish.

  ‘Pardon?’ says Vern, allowing a wrinkle of confusion to appear midway across the slab of his forehead.

  ‘I’ve got enough that you’re after me to put some money in your – you know.’ McLeish is tapping the business card on the tablecloth.

  ‘What – you think I want you to invest?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ says Vern, trying to look both apologetic and amused (but not too insultingly amused). ‘No! Oh dear, oh dear. Total cross purposes there, mate. No no no; I’ve got my backing all lined up. That’s all in hand, and to be honest it’s coming outta pockets a lot deeper’n yours. No offence.’

  ‘You don’t want any money from me?’

  ‘No. Obviously I haven’t been very clear; sorry ’bout that.’

  ‘Then – what …?’ asks McLeish.

  Vern tuts his tongue, and looks modestly down. ‘Well,’ he says, rubbing at a non-existent spot on the tablecloth with a forefinger, ‘I was going to lead up to this, you know, subtly. But fat chance of that, eh. All I’m after—’

  At this point he looks up, to give McLeish as planned a double eyeful of sincerity. But instead his gaze snags on a sight behind the boy’s head. There, stepping off the spiral stairs with a couple of brilliantined continental smoothies in attendance, is a face he last saw minuscule and fifty feet below him on the Covent Garden stage, pouring out song that soared to the six-shilling seats in the gods, and took him by the heart, and twisted. She looks older without the tragic-heroine outfit, and her face is unfamiliar in its mild off-duty sociability. But it’s her. Just there, a few feet away. That woman, there, is the key to a compartment of feeling inside him that he keeps secure even from himself. When he gives himself the opera, he doesn’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. He goes behind his own back. He slopes off on the quiet to the West End with his own mind averted from the certain knowledge that later he’ll be wiping his eyes with his hanky, he’ll be sitting up under the golden roof at Covent Garden leaking silently down both cheeks. His eyes prickle now.

  He should be launching into this lunchtime’s patiently developed coup de grâce. All the goads of greed and humiliation and flattery have been deployed. It’s time to close. And, somewhere far off, he is still talking. McLeish is nodding. But it’s as if Vern has split. A Vern kept locked privately away, a Vern who trembles at beauty, a Vern who does not know what he wants or how to get it, a Vern tenderly incapable, has with truly terrible timing emerged to divide the attention of the Vern who needs at this minute to be driving events to their destined destination with as hard a hand as he possibly can. Out of the chrysalis of the usual him has crept this damp-winged other Vern, who only wants to stare. Who wants to hang his mouth open and gawp. Who doesn’t want to speak the lines insisted on by the plausible fat man in the blue suit. Who almost resents him, in fact, with his grubby little scheme. And meanwhile the Vern who has worked so hard is feeling hollow indeed. His strength is failing, his energy is dipping, his delivery of the last part of the pitch going from fiery to watery. Where’s the conviction? Where’s the belief he should be infecting McLeish with? Gone AWOL. Distractedly lingering over the sight of the diva being served consommé on the other side of the room.

  ‘So, right, it’s just your name I wanna borrow,’ he is saying. ‘People know you, and I wanna use that to raise the profile of the firm; give it a bit of glamour, while I get it going. If I can do that, I’ll put you on the books and give you a cut. Which could be worth a lot, later. When I’m doing the skyscrapers.’ Ghost of a joke at the end there, but that’s got to be the limpest attempt at a closing ever recorded. Surely no one would go for it. Fat chance, Vern. Fat chance. His wavering gaze slips off McLeish’s face, and past it: past it so obviously that McLeish can’t help but notice.

  ‘Fuck,’ breathes Vern, more in despair than in awe.

  McLeish turns his head to see what the big attraction is. But all he can see is a skinny, foreign-looking woman in her forties with black hair. When he looks back, he finds that Vern has put his hand over his face and is looking at the world through the gaps between the bars of his fat pink fingers.

  ‘What?’ he says, somehow compelled to drop his voice to a churchgoing whisper.

  ‘You know I said you get famous people here,’ says Vern very quietly. ‘Well, that’s one of them. That’s Maria Callas.’

  ‘Sorry, I dunno who that is,’ says McLeish.

  ‘She’s a singer. She’s – how can I put this?’ Her vocal cords are like Bobby Charlton’s feet, he ought to say, or something like that, something pat and funny that will make sense of her to McLeish. But he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to connect these two worlds up; he doesn’t want to build any kind of jokey bridge between what he feels when Callas sings ‘Vissi d’arte’ and what he’s doing here today. They don’t match. He doesn’t want them to match. ‘She’s … amazing,’ he says lamely.

  �
�You’re a fan, ain’tcha?’ says McLeish. The boy is smiling at him. Not scornfully – kindly. Encouragingly. It occurs to Vern that McLeish has probably seen the odd person go tongue-tied and shy when meeting him. ‘You know what, you should go and say hello. G’wan. Now’s your chance. She won’t mind.’

  ‘No.’

  Coaxingly: ‘Go on!’

  ‘No.’

  McLeish holds his hands up in mock-surrender, looking indulgent and puzzled. ‘Fair enough, fair enough. No one’s gonna make yer.’

  He looks at his chunky steel watch.

  ‘I should get going, really, Vern. So – just my name? No money?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And you won’t be doing any of that Rack-man stuff ? Nothing dodgy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right, then. Don’t see what I’ve got to lose.’

  ‘Great,’ says Vern. ‘That’s … great. I’ve got some papers for you to sign, then.’

  ‘Okey-doke,’ says McLeish. ‘Gotta pen?’

  Vern has a pen. Vern passes McLeish the pen, and McLeish obediently signs there, there, there and there, without stopping, just as Vern would have been busting a gut to induce him to do if he were not in this enfeebled state. Consequently, without McLeish noticing that what he signed on page three was a mortgage guarantee.

  ‘There!’ says McLeish. ‘Fingers crossed, maybe you’ll keep me off British Rail. Cheers, Vern.’

  Vern pays the bill and McLeish leads the way back up the stairs, past the flunkeys, through the mystic portal of wealth, out again blinking into London daylight. Vern does not look back at Miss Callas. Vern uses his last pound note to send McLeish off in a taxi. Wave, wave.

  Then he totters away towards the bus stop. He feels very tired. He only has the sixpence left he needs to go home to Bexford on the number 29, and it takes an age, but somewhere along the way, around Waterloo, it begins to sink in that it worked. This morning he wasn’t a property developer. Now he is. He stops trembling. At the Elephant and Castle, a gaggle of schoolboys boil up onto the top deck towards his seat at the front but he gives them the look the speedball gets and they retreat. About halfway up the Walworth Road, he starts to whistle bits from Tosca under his breath, badly.

  Ben

  The mist has lifted from the tussocky outer field. Now, instead of the bare trees rising from whorls of slow white, Ben sees from the tall ward window that each stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat. A few last leaves, small as halfpennies or candle flames, cling on to twigs, tugged at by the wind. The Largactil affects a lot of things but not Ben’s sight. He can see these fluttering holdouts as clearly across a hundred yards as he’d be able to pick out the separate grains in a palmful of seashore sand. (They say it’s all one colour but it’s not, it’s got orange in it, and chocolate brown, and stray flecks of bottle green.) He’d like to stay by the window till the wind plucks one down at least – loses the halfpenny, snuffs the candle flame, sends the yellow speck twinkling end over end to land, indistinguishable, in the shadow of colour the bare tree casts.

  He has resisted Sid-the-postman’s constant invitations to play ping-pong.

  ‘No, th-th-th-thanks,’ he says every time, letting go of his left hand with his right hand, and holding it up to show the tremor. ‘T-too sh-sh-shaky.’

  Also too s-s-s-slow. They had tried a match once, and with Sidney bouncing about on one side of the table and him on the other extending his shaking bat to return the serve at roughly the pace of a glacier, a Parkinsonian glacier, it could not be called a success.

  ‘Oh, right!’ says Sid, equally surprised each time. ‘Right right right. Gotta ciggy, mate?’

  ‘Mm,’ says Ben. He does. He lowers two fingers into his shirt pocket and traps a bent Gold Leaf between them. ‘There y-you … are.’

  ‘Thanks!’ says Sid. ‘You’re a pal.’ He puts it between his lips, mouths it, thinks better of it; sticks it behind his ear, thinks better of it; puts it between his lips, thinks better of it; puts it down on the tabletop next to where Ben is sitting by the window. Goes off to try to tempt Mr Neave into ping-pong instead.

  Ben tilts himself to get the Gold Leaf centred in his vision and dispatches a patient hand in its direction, a wobbling probe elongating and growing less convincingly his own as it gets further away. Yet by a process of adjustments and corrections, he closes in on it, he pins it down, he retrieves it. He brings it all the way back to his pocket and drops it in, ready for the next time Sid asks.

  Is this time-consuming? He couldn’t say. It does not seem to leave him with less time for gazing at the trees, any more than Mr Neave’s interruptions do, when he comes over to Ben and, tapping on his knee for attention, lays out his documents on the table. Always the explanations, with Mr Neave. The slightly patronising smile, the reminder that he is an educated man, a trained solicitor, who can consequently be expected to perceive more, to understand more, than a simple bus conductor such as Ben. (‘No offence taken, I trust? None intended, my dear fellow.’) It is true that Ben does not follow the web of implications Mr Neave draws from arranging the last letter he had from his wife next to the reply he had from the hospital’s chairman when he appealed to him under Section 26 of the Mental Health Act 1959. Or that he quite sees why Mr Neave then deals out in a circle surrounding them an ever-varying mixture of library fine notices, old menus from the noticeboard and certificates from the Gardening Club. It is also true that he does not try very hard. All Mr Neave needs is a nod and a frown from time to time. Otherwise you can go on gazing at the trees.

  Largactil congeals time. It makes everything seem to move very slowly, from one point of view, and yet to make great expanses of time slide by with undetectable sameness, until one day you look out of the ward window, and suddenly it isn’t summer. Ben doesn’t know how long he has been here. Many days, that’s for sure; and he doesn’t think he has ever seen the leaves fall before. But thinking about this is difficult, because thinking about anything is difficult on Largactil. It swathes your thoughts, it muffles them, it swaddles them up, as if they were all wrapped in dustsheets like furniture in an empty room: still there, underneath, but with their hard edges and definite outlines all hidden, and difficult to get at, without a great deal of determined fumbling.

  And why would you want to do that? Because muffled away under one of those heavy, shapeless wrappings is The Trouble. It has not gone. All the time Ben is awake it can still be heard as a remote muttering, mercifully indistinct. If it were allowed out, Ben is sure, it would swell right back into the horrible, unstoppable circuit of thoughts that had taken over his mind before he came to hospital. Vile link after vile link in a vile chain, going round and round, round and round, never stopping. With nowhere to go to get away from it, because how can you ever get away from your own head; and impossible to turn away from, because how can you turn your back on something frightening? It isn’t safe to turn your back on the dark thing, the thing that walks beside you on the road. Only you are the road, and you are the dark thing too. It’s confusing. Best not to think about it. Even to glance at it like this makes the muttering louder. Naming calls: so don’t name it, don’t look, don’t think. And Largactil makes this possible.

  Ben doesn’t like everything here. He doesn’t like the nights in the dormitory, with Mr Neave’s mews of distress in the bed to his left, and Derek from the next dormitory bursting in, in search of something Mr Neave has borrowed, and upending Mr Neave’s collection of borrowings all over the hard floor with a clatter.

  ‘Give me back my Vosene, you bastard!’

  ‘It’s not – no, no – hands off – oh, how can you? I need it. I need it. Oh, Primrose, they won’t leave me alone.’

  In the bed on his right Mr Corcoran breathes angrily. Mr Corcoran is never not angry, waking or sleeping, and Mr Neave does not borrow anything from him. Mr Corcoran transferred here from Broadmoor, and Nurse Fredericks has read something about him in the Daily Mirror. They keep him dos
ed up day and night. Dull reddish-blue tides of fury crawl under the bristles of his face.

  It’s worth it, though, all this is easily worth it, to keep The Trouble wrapped away. Largactil is a kind of bliss that Ben is steadily grateful for. He totters to the OT Room and (very slowly) makes raffia baskets and wobbly pots. He eats pork luncheon meat and baked beans followed by blancmange. He goes outside when the weather is sunny. He tries not to worry about the back wards, glimpsed on his way to the vestibule for outings, where lost souls in too-short pyjamas drift in madness decades deep – and Largactil helps him with that, too. He sits by the window and watches the trees.

  Look: each stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.

  But there are some things you can’t avoid.

  ‘C’mon, Ben, ward round,’ says Nurse Fredericks, a large kind tired man who gives out jumpers his wife has knitted, and who has only ever been observed to give anyone a slap under extreme provocation.

  ‘Mm?’

  Mostly ward rounds involve the doctors conferring with the nurses about who’s been prescribed what, and how they’ve been behaving. Only occasionally are the patients directly involved.

  ‘They want you in Room 3.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘I don’t know why. Up you get, young man. Chop-chop.’

  When Ben reaches Room 3, just beyond OT, he discovers with a slow coiling of unease that it is full of people. A horseshoe of chairs has been set out, with an empty one at the head of the horseshoe, next to the briskly smiling Dr Armstrong: Ben’s doctor, in theory, though he has scarcely ever spoken to her. All the other chairs have medical students in them, an unmistakable array of white-coated boys (and a few girls) with notebooks and biros. They must be about the same age as Ben but they gaze at him as if he were a member of a different species. The only reassuring face in the room belongs to Nurse Fredericks, who follows Ben in and, finding that he himself hasn’t been given a chair, leans against the closed door, his shoulders outlined against the wire squares in the door glass like a graph of an Alp.