Sheer Blue Bliss

by Lesley Glaister

  First, cut out portrait and article. Think later. Next drink milk from white mug. Next, roll fag. Light up, breathe in. Ah yes, smoke hot and clean. Queen Queen Nicotine.

  And then the rap rap rap of Donna’s knuckles, must have heard him on the stairs, the door’s bang. Roll-up pinched in the corner of his mouth he opens the door.

  ‘Well, I’m off.’

  ‘Right.’

  She stands as if waiting for something. What? Hair is pulled back from her sallow face so tightly that her eyes look slanted. The only bright thing about her is the flash of her red glass ear-rings. Looks dressed for a frigging funeral otherwise.

  ‘So, aren’t you going to say good luck?’

  ‘Sure … good luck.’

  ‘And you’ll water my plants and that. Got the key?’

  ‘Sure, oh yes, best of luck.’ It comes back to him, something medical, gynaecological, some operation.

  ‘Nervous as hell!’ She laughs and holds out her hand to demonstrate the tremble.

  ‘You’ll be fine. Hey, look at this.’ He steps back and picks up the cutting. ‘Recognise anyone?’

  She peers, frowns, shakes her head.

  ‘It’s him, Patrick.’

  ‘Oh … great.’ She smiles. Light through a glass ear-ring makes a floating red stain on the skin of her neck.

  ‘You’ll be fine. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Long as I feel better after. Come and see me?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Ha ha ha. See you, Tony.’

  ‘See you.’ He nearly calls good luck again, doesn’t, shuts the door. Isn’t it the surgeon who needs the luck, the steady hand? He goes to the window and watches her emerge below him in the street. She moves well, Donna. She’s plain close up, nothing special, nothing striking, but watch her walking and you can see she’s got … some quality, walks like a dancer, small head erect, walks from the hips, her centre. Where the surgeon will put his knife. Ugh. Hates that women’s stuff. Withdraws squeamishly from the window.

  He catches Patrick’s eye. Must get to that exhibition and see that portrait. Constance Benson, the lover. Must get to her. This is it, what he has been waiting for, living this waiting life for. With the scrap of paper in his hand he knows, it’s like the right key fitting a lock. You have to be aware, alert. And Tony is. She’ll recognise him all right, recognise that Patrick has guided him to her, that he is the one she can trust with the elixirs, the one Patrick meant them for.

  And then? But there is no need to think about and then. Because it will be plain after that. Plain sailing.

  FOUR

  Evacuation. First it was just a word at breakfast time, a word among many others, scarcely registered. Mother, Father and Alfie all eating their sausages, Alfie talking and talking and being asked please not to do so with his mouth full while Connie watched the light dance on the cut-glass sugar bowl. Connie tended to be dozy in the morning, a night owl, Mother said, while Alfie was always up with the lark. White milk in a green tinted glass, a minty colour or pistachio like ice-cream at a party once – pistachio, made her think of long curly moustaches though it’s a kind of nut which Connie had never seen. But still, the milk tasting thick and cowish so she had to swallow quick without breathing. She hated milk but children must drink it. She was fourteen and hardly a child, yet there was the tall green glass of milk by her plate each morning.

  War. That word made her sit up straight, made her skin prickle with fearful pleasure. Alfie was full of it, of course, with his toy soldiers and his drawings of cannons and guns. We are at war, Father declared solemnly one morning and Connie flinched, waiting for the sound of a bomb or a gun, but there was nothing, only mother’s spoon chinking in her cup and a bicycle-bell pinging on the road outside.

  But evacuation was a word that became common and crucial: discussions for and against. Tears came to Mother’s eyes at the very idea. Alfie was against. He didn’t want to leave his home, his friends, his toys or Matty the Persian cat. But most of all he didn’t want to miss the war, he wanted to be in it. ‘I will not go,’ he proclaimed, his ten-year-old jaw set. But Connie was not so sure. Not that she was afraid of war. She could not believe in it, an abstract thing. War. Thrilling. A fact, yes, but where was it? Autumn turned to winter as usual. The signs of war seemed artificial, blackouts a hysterical reaction yet exciting, too, all that velvety black and the glorious comfort of shut-in light. Christmas came just the same and went again leaving the frosty ash of January. White ferns and feathers on the window for her to copy in her book but no pencil was ever fine enough to catch the detail and breath melted it when you got up close enough really to see.

  She wasn’t scared of war but evacuation seemed like a door opening into another chance. Chance of what? Connie was ready to step through that door whatever. Home was happy and ordinary, loving and predictable. School had become dull to her. Not that it was any duller but her focus had changed. Instead of solids she saw the gaps between them or the light on surfaces, windows, the shiny complex hues of her friends’ hair or the apricot fluff of light on their cheeks. She saw how the shadow of her pen fell across the white page and lost her concentration, lost her sentences halfway through. Her marks began to plummet but she hardly noticed or cared. Her body was suddenly aware of itself, aching with the novelty of becoming a woman, the swelling and tingling, the secret wisps of hair and dark of blood – yet she was still a child who had to drink milk and go to bed in summer when the sun was bright against the curtains.

  If they were to be evacuated it would be done privately, within the family. Mother would not hear of them going to strangers and Father had a relative. Connie had never heard mention of this relative before. He was a very distant one, second cousin once removed or something. He was a black sheep and he was famous.

  ‘Hardly famous,’ Mother said. ‘He’s written a book or two, something esoteric …’

  ‘Esoteric?’

  ‘Not something most folk would ever bother to read. Some fanciful nonsense about plants. Married to an artist. Sachavarelle Mount.’

  Connie gasped. ‘I’ve heard of her. There’s a picture in the class-room, it’s wonderful, a kind of tunnel through trees. You never told me we were related to her.’

  ‘Well, there you are then.’

  Connie felt a breeze blow through the opening door. ‘Where?’

  ‘Derbyshire … near Bakewell … look on the map.’

  ‘Why is the relative …’

  ‘Patrick.’

  ‘Patrick, why is he not gone to war?’

  Mother shrugged. ‘Must be some health thing,’ she guessed, ‘writing, messing about with plants, that’s hardly what you’d call a reserved profession, not like your father’s.’

  In June of 1940 Father procured petrol from some mysterious source and the family drove north to visit. Just to get the feel of the place, Father said. Connie felt her heart lift as the hills lifted around her. The green was so dazzling, so lush and delicious that she had to swallow and swallow against the saliva that flooded her mouth. Driving through the dappled green of a road overhung by a long arch of trees, spots of sunlight floating in her eyes, she wanted to howl and beat her fists on the leather back of Father’s seat. ‘This is what she was trying to get in her painting!’ she cried.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh nothing.’ It was so fragile and trembling, how could she ever catch it and make it stay? How could she ever catch the green underwater ripple and the swimming spots of gold?

  The house was approached up a long bumpy drive. A square grey house, simple like a child’s drawing, symmetrical. It was like a town house but planted on a green rise miles from any town. ‘Very exposed,’ Mother said, frowning. The walls around the fields were made of piled stone. A sheep ran bleating in front of the car for several yards, wiggling its woolly bottom. Alfie laughed. ‘It runs like Connie!’ he cried and Connie thumped him before she could be stopped.

  No one came to the door to greet them though the car’s engin
e and the grate of tyres on the loose gravel of the track must have announced their arrival. Alfie flung himself out of the car first and a collie bounded round to the front of the house its whole body wagging with excitement. Connie unfolded herself from her seat and stepped out. The air was like champagne, like she supposed champagne to taste, clear, precious, heady, and it was still, so suddenly still and quiet after the noise of the car that the silence was almost deafening. And then there was the sound of a sheep bleating and the squeal of a swooping bird – swallow?

  By the front door was a lilac bush. In London there was blue lilac in the garden, finished by then, but this was white and in its full fragrance. Connie cupped a warm, heavy bloom between her two palms and breathed deeply.

  Mother and Father stood by the front door looking ill at ease, the first time Connie had ever seen her father seem uncertain. It made her impatient somehow. ‘Why don’t we knock?’ she asked. The door-knocker was a big fist, fashioned out of black iron. Father grasped it in his own hand which was made to seem small and pale in comparison, and knocked. Flakes of paint fell from the door but that was the only response.

  Connie let go of the lilac bloom. The car glinted black in the sun, black with white, blue, grey, green deep in its sheen. In the boot were two suitcases, one for Alfred, one for herself. If they liked it here they could stay, as a sort of trial. ‘There is no compulsion,’ Father said several times on the journey. Connie felt pity for her parents for the first time in her life. They were scared, more scared than she was. Horror stories of miserable homesick evacuees had scared them. Ill-treatment, exploitation, lack of understanding and then the unspeakable horror of the sinking of the City of Benares which had almost decided Mother against letting them go. ‘We’ll hardly get sunk in Derbyshire,’ Connie had snapped. ‘But if you don’t like it, don’t like Patrick or Sacha or anything then you must …’ ‘Let’s wait and see,’ Connie said, determined she would like it, like them, like everything. And now, just from standing in the champagne sparkle, the lilac-scented stillness, she knew already that she did.

  ‘They should be expecting us.’ Mother looked at Father.

  ‘We could just go in,’ Alfie said. The dog whined and scratched with one paw at a deeply ridged patch of door.

  ‘We could open the door and call.’ Mother bent as if to squint through the keyhole. She got hold of the handle, turned and pushed. The door swung open with a long squeak and the dog walked in.

  ‘Spot of oil on that,’ Father muttered.

  ‘Hello-o,’ Mother called into the dim hall.

  ‘I’m here,’ shouted Alfie. They stepped inside. The hall was cool and filled with shoes, boots, coats and a piano piled high with hats. It smelt of dog.

  ‘Look, a note,’ Alfred said snatching up a folded sheet of paper from the piano. Father took it from him and read it. Do make yourselves at home – or come and find us, we’re in the garden behind the house. S and P.

  ‘Do you think it’s meant for us?’ Mother said.

  ‘Well, it’s not meant for Father Christmas, is it?’ said Connie.

  Her mother gave her a long look.

  ‘Sorry,’ Connie said.

  ‘Well, I think we should make ourselves at home then. Gordon?’

  ‘Suppose so,’ Father said.

  ‘I’ll go and find them.’ Alfie hared off through the hall to the back of the house. Connie pushed open a door that led into a big shabby room where dust-motes twinkled in a shaft of sun between half-drawn velvet curtains. The wallpaper was red, the chairs dumped with clothes, a dog basket with hairy blanket and a bone was positioned in front of the ashy fireplace. On the floor was a pile of papers, the top one a water-colour sketch of trees in their shimmering spring green.

  Connie looked up and caught the glances that passed between her parents, the I-don’t-think-so pursing of her mother’s lips that answered her father’s lifted eyebrow.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ she said.

  ‘You think so?’ Her father regarded her curiously.

  Connie hugged him. ‘Wonderful.’

  FIVE

  A MEMOIR BY PATRICK MOUNT

  I consider myself to have been misunderstood in my life’s endeavour – the development of a principle and system by which mankind can perfect itself. I have been regarded, I am well aware, as something of a crank. I can only hope that in some more enlightened time my ideas may come to be appreciated. I offer this memoir, not as an apologia to a life, but as an explanation which might be of some interest to the open-minded, perhaps like-minded reader. I will attempt to set down the ‘shaping experiences’ which led me to develop my principle, philosophy and habit of being.

  One morning in my tenth year I awoke to fever. There had been symptoms on the previous day of sore throat, rash, swollen glands and failing appetite but on this morning, in the summer of 1908, it became apparent that this was no trifling childish ailment but a serious illness. I have only to close my eyes to recall the sun shining through the mesh of the muslin curtains and the way the light dazzled even my closed eyelids and beat against my hot temples. Memories are fragmented. There was the sun on the white sheet and sometimes the smell of newly cut grass floating in. There was the sensation of heavy blankets on my hot and aching limbs. My mother would sit beside my bed and wipe my head with a cool cloth. When I raised myself to drink there was always dust floating on the surface of the water even if it was freshly poured. The glass had a design of geometric shapes cut into it just below the rim. The doctor had a red moustache although the hair on his head was dark. I remember the moustache vividly although not the remainder of the man’s face. On some occasions the soft drooping red whiskers were stuck together at their ends with moustache wax. One I noticed crumbs of food stuck in the hairs. This doctor had a pleasing smell like cough sweets and liniment. He never failed to address me as ‘my little man’. I was confined to bed for a period approximating six months between spring and autumn, missing the splendid summer of 1908.

  A crushing disappointment to a small boy was that my father had promised that I might accompany him to one of the Olympic athletics events at the great new stadium at White City. It was to have been an outing to celebrate my tenth birthday. Instead of which my birthday was spent miserably in bed suffering the illness – the diagnosis never quite clear – I had aggravated symptoms of both measles and mumps – which was to leave me with a weakened heart.

  I have often pondered that time and the influence it cast over the life that was to follow. If I had spent that summer with my companions in the fresh air, if I had been allowed to go on the annual summer visit to the Isle of Wight, if I had been able to attend the Olympic Games with my father, if my heart had remained sturdy, how differently might my life have progressed?

  I would have fought in the Great War, of course, and my life might have ended, like that of so tragically many of my contemporaries, there. Like many a young boy before me, I had a war-like spirit, not averse to battles in the shrubbery, toy guns and cannons. Perhaps that spirit of war was sweated out of me that long summer of fever?

  One event of that time remains most vividly in my memory, one that certainly had its effect. The summer of 1908, as I have said, was a remarkable one, weeks of hot sunshine hardly interrupted by a cloudy day. But the heat became oppressive towards the end of the summer and one night there was a storm. I remember my mother opening the curtains – which were kept closed against the brightness that might hurt my eyes – to show me the sky that had turned the colour of clay; I remember the leaves squirming and darkening on the horse-chestnut tree outside the window, the leaden sound of distant thunder coming closer and closer. My mother held my hand as we listened to the storm’s approach and my heart beat with excitement, my weakened heart. We counted the miles between each crash of thunder and each flash of lightning. I can still see the way the flicker of lightning seemed to illuminate the bones beneath her skin. And then it came and it struck the horse-chestnut, the crash and the flash occurring simulta
neously, the crack and split of the tree seemed to rip through my own veins and my mother cried out and held me to her breast.

  The storm that struck and split the tree is the great event in my memory of that summer and it coincides in my mind with a newspaper article read to me by my father – as was his habit each evening while I was confined to bed – concerning a professor of botany who claimed that plants have eyes and can see. Forbidden to leave my bed I would nevertheless creep to the window whenever I was left unattended to look at the tree. I understood that the eyes were not like human eyes and naturally no eyes were visible to me but it occurred to me to wonder if the tree had suffered pain at the strike that had riven it to its waist, twisted it so that the taut yellow of its sinews were twisted against the grain. This I sincerely believe was the germinating moment of the theoretical system I call the Phytosophical Principle and the related practical system Seven Steps to Bliss which I have dedicated my life to developing and refining.

  Tony puts down the slim memoir which he has read until he knows it almost off by heart. He stands up, draws the curtains and switches on the light. It’s getting dark earlier, he hates that, the shutting down of the year very slow and cruel and leading to what? Leading to Christmas which is fucking shit. Dying trees stuck in pots and covered in tinsel and all that crap. Can’t stand tinsel, Tony, puts his teeth on edge.

  Time to cook his meal. Feels nearer to Patrick than ever today, feels an odd fizz inside him. What is it? Rinses the white fish fillet under the tap, the water runs cloudy, a fleck of blood escapes from between the dense wet flakes of flesh. It’s excitement but not just that. It’s … vindication. The onion he slices finely, pushing his finger into the slices to make frail rings. It’s a mild onion and his eyes don’t water. Pours sunflower oil into the pan and tips in the onion, stirs it around as it sweetens and softens. Vindication for this waiting life. Sometimes he has been struck with doubt – cardamom and powdered coriander, a pinch of chilli – waiting for a sign that it is time to move into the new, the Patrick life, sometimes that certainty of vision, whatever, has wobbled and sometimes Tony has wondered what the fuck he’s doing here in this Brixton flat, what the fuck he’s waiting for. Get a life is something he’s heard said, the sort of thing that gets to him if he lets it. Small tin of pineapple in its natural juice, hard lump of creamed coconut which softens as it warms and the white slides under his spoon combining with the fruit juice and the spices. Smells fanfuckingtastic. It will be delicious and anyway, he has a life, the sign has come, the waiting is almost over and it’s time to put the fish in, set it gently in the fragrant sauce, simmer till it turns opaque.