‘You could still dance,’ said Peter boldly. ‘You move like a dancer.’
‘I will never make love again or share my bed with anyone.’
He blinked and was mute. That hollowed-out, stripped-down, flayed body.
‘Eat your bread and cheese. There are knives over there.’ She floated her hand. ‘Then we can sit by the fire in the living room and we can talk about what you are going to do for me.’
Peter found the knives – blotchy silver with cracked bone handles – and sat. The dog sat beside him, hopeful. He put out a tentative hand and dabbed her upturned nose in an approximation of a stroke; her tail thumped gently on the floor. Then he spread some of the cheese on the stale bread and took a mouthful. She stood beside the dying fire and seemed to watch him. There were crumbs everywhere, and he felt scrutinized.
‘How long have you lived here?’ he asked.
‘Oh. More than sixty years, though we had a flat in London as well, until we retired,’ she said. ‘This was where we came at weekends and during holidays. Especially the long summer holidays with the children. I know it by touch and by heart. I know instinctively how many steps there are on the stairs and how many paces it will take for me to cross the living room and stand by the bay window that looks out over the lawn. Many rooms I never enter any more. I live here and in the living room and my bedroom. Sometimes the library: I can smell the books. Paper, leather, dust, sunlight, wood. When I first came,’ she continued, ‘I was young and I had young children. Each room was full of noise – and the garden, too. Tomorrow you shall see the garden. I can tell you the names of all the roses, though I can no longer see them. I am very fond of roses.
‘The tide comes in,’ she was saying, quietly so that he had to strain to hear her. ‘And the tide goes out again. The children left, of course, as children must, but then later there were often grandchildren here too. I hung their little clothes on the line and remembered what it was like to be a mother. But then they grew up as well and had their own lives. And my husband died. He died many years ago, you know, and although he was old when he went, I have lasted many years without him. I have outlasted everyone. Moss has grown over the gravestones of most of those I have lost.’
Peter gazed at her, knife suspended. How could she speak to him like this, when she’d only met him a minute ago? Perhaps when no one was there, she talked like this as well, her soft voice murmuring in the empty rooms, like waves on a shore. Was this what loneliness did?
‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t know what else to say.
‘But now they think I can’t cope here,’ she continued, as if he hadn’t interrupted. ‘They worry about me. That I will set fire to the house and myself – well, I suppose I’ve already done that so they have good reason. That I will chop off my fingers with my sharp cutting knife, that I will fall down the stairs or slip in the shower, forget to take my pills, not wash, not eat, not drink, not look after myself.’ Her voice was rising in strength. ‘How old do you think I am, young man?’
‘Call me Peter. I don’t know. I can’t tell.’
‘I am ninety-four years old.’
He had thought her older, over a hundred.
‘I am ninety-four years old and if I fall down the stairs, that’s my concern. If I climb on the roof, then let me. There are worse ways of dying than falling from the roof. The world shrinks.’
‘That’s a sad thought,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry. Poor boy, you’ve just come to sort out papers. How’s the cheese?’
‘Very nice. Thank you.’
‘Is it too runny?’
‘It’s runny, but—’
‘You don’t need to be polite, you know. I was far too polite when I was your age – but how old are you?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Twenty-five. I was married and a mother by your age. In my day, women were expected to be very polite when they were twenty-five. You could do monstrous things as long as you minded your manners. Have you finished?’
‘Yes.’
‘Put the plate in the sink and we’ll go and sit by the fire.’
Peter, the dog at his heels, followed her out of the kitchen, and then up three broad steps and into another room, where there were sofas and, at one side, a piano. None of the lights were on but a fire blazed in the hearth and the old woman walked with unerring steps to an armchair and sat in it, laying her cane carefully on the floor beside it. The flames threw flickering lights over her creased and folded face and glinted on the keys of the piano. Peter felt as though he had walked into a strange dream, and waited for what she would say next.
‘Would you pour me some wine?’ She pointed to a table in the bay window, on which stood a bottle of wine, half-drunk, and several glasses. ‘And do please join me.’
‘I’d like that; thank you.’
‘They open bottles of wine for me when they come, though I think I can manage. I’ve had the practice. I don’t like the idea that they can keep track of what I drink – not that I drink so very much and if I did, why would that matter? They know what I drink, what I eat. They open bills and official correspondence. They know how much money I have in the bank.’
‘Here.’ Peter handed her a glass of wine, touching its rim against her hand so that she could grasp it. ‘Who’s “they”?’
‘Helpers, carers, call them what you will. You lose privacy when you’re old and blind. People arrange your life for you.’
‘That must be hard.’ He took a sip of the red wine; ripe fruit. Old and dark. He watched the way she drank hers in bold gulps, as if she were thirsty.
‘You’re on display. Sometimes I sit here and I think that anyone could tiptoe in and just watch me. Watch me sitting here. Watch me walking from room to room, touching things. Watch me when I spill food or smash at things with my cane.’
‘You smash at things with your cane?’ A ripple of admiration ran through him.
‘Wouldn’t you, in my position?’
‘Probably. I hope so.’ He smiled at her, before remembering that she couldn’t see it.
‘Do you like fires?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Though I’ve never lived in a house with an open fire in it.’
‘No?’
‘I’ve always been in flats or modern houses. Nothing like this. I like it a great deal. It makes a room alive.’
‘Mmm. You can spend hours staring into a fire. Listening to the bubbling, crackling noises, seeing shapes, letting thoughts drift through you. My husband, he used to make bonfires. He’d be outside all day, feeding branches into the flames. All day,’ she repeated. She passed a hand across her face. ‘When he died, I had to learn how to make a good fire. Now, someone else has to do it for me, of course. Like so much else. In the morning someone comes and makes sure I’m not dead and brings in shopping and meals, clears the ashes and makes up the new fire, and in the evenings someone comes in and makes sure I’m still alive and calls me “dear” and asks how we are. What do you look like?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What do you look like?’
‘I don’t think that I know exactly. It’s not something that anyone’s ever asked me before.’
‘You know what I look like, although I can hardly remember my own face. I used to gaze at it. I used to stand in front of the mirror and stare into my own eyes and smile at myself and make myself ready for the world. It’s hardly fair that you can see me and I can’t see you.’
‘I don’t think I look very extraordinary.’
‘Nonsense. Everyone looks extraordinary in their own way. What’s your way?’
‘I—’ He reached up and touched his face. ‘Well. I have reddish-coloured hair.’
‘Ah. Red like a carrot or red like a fox?’
‘A fox, I think. Or perhaps an apricot.’
‘I’ll take the fox. Freckles?’
‘When I was a child. Not so much now. I have fair skin. My grandma used to tell me that I looked like an Irish sprite; something that live
d in the woods.’ He felt startled by the gush of happiness that ran through him.
‘What colour are your eyes?’
‘Green.’
‘Green. That’s good. Do you like the way you look?’
Peter considered this.
‘It depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘I don’t know. I think it depends on how I am feeling about myself: if I like myself then I like my face. There are times when I am a stranger to myself. Mostly I think that this is simply who I am. I don’t see myself.’
‘Mmm.’ She nodded, considering this.
‘Shall we talk about what I’m supposed to be doing here?’
She turned her face towards him.
‘Of course. I’m asking you too many questions. What did Jonah tell you?’
‘He said that you were moving house and that you had decades of papers, books, manuscripts and photographs that needed going through. Some he said you could give to a university since they might have cultural or historical importance. Some that were more personal to you would be distributed among your family. Some—’ He hesitated. ‘Some you might want to keep.’
‘Even though I’m blind, you’re thinking.’
‘And he assumes there will be quite a lot of stuff you’ll simply want to throw away.’
‘Yes. I think that covers it. I’m not a very organized person, I’m afraid. Or at least, I’ve kept everything, for it’s hard to throw away your past, and I’ve let it get into a mess.’
‘That’s all right.’
There was a silence and she stared into the flames, unseeing.
‘There is a reason I do not want my family doing this for me.’ Peter waited. ‘Some things I would prefer to keep private.’
‘I understand.’
‘Funnily enough, I believe you do.’ She passed her hand across her face, then asked: ‘Is this what you do?’
‘Do?’
‘For a living, I mean. Are you someone who catalogues things? A cataloguer of other people’s lives. Well, why not? It’s more important than packing up furniture and china, isn’t it – packing up precious memories. The things you might find; the secrets you might spill and break.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Peter said. He took a mouthful of wine, spicy and rich.
‘I’m sure you’ll be careful. You sound like a considerate young man. Perhaps you are a librarian or an archivist?’
‘Jonah didn’t say?’
‘No. He’s a man of few words, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. But I’m not a librarian.’
She waited. Peter shifted in his chair.
‘I’m not really anything at the moment,’ he said eventually.
She looked with kindness at the space just to his left.
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘I’m between things.’
He expected her to ask what he was between, but she didn’t. She simply nodded and said, ‘The place in between is a very important place. You must be tired.’
‘Not so much.’ For he felt both weary and entirely awake. The journey, the bike ride through a misty darkness to this old house near the sea, the old woman all alone here like a creature, sweet but a bit sinister, out of some German fairy tale, filled his brain with shifting confusion and excitement.
‘Well, I’m going to bed,’ she said, feeling for her cane and rising with a surprising grace from her chair. ‘Don’t smoke inside the house. I know you smoke, I can smell it on you, but please not inside the house. You could lean out of the window, I suppose, like my grand-daughter Thea does, and she thinks I don’t know. Or she climbs up on the roof.’
‘Where am I to sleep?’
‘Ah. I’m sorry. I was forgetting. You follow the stairs up to the second floor. Your room is the one with the sloping ceiling. I always liked it. I occasionally used to sleep there when I came to the house on my own. It feels rather like a secret place, an eyrie. You can see a patch of the sea from the window and sometimes you can hear it too. There’s a shower and toilet next to your room, and they put a towel out for you. I thought it best for you to be self-sufficient.’
‘I think I’ll have a cigarette in the garden before I turn in.’
‘Don’t lock yourself out. Use the back door.’
‘What time shall I begin tomorrow?’
‘What time? Why, whatever time suits you. I am always up early and then I can show you where everything is.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No, thank you, young man.’
‘Peter, please.’
‘Peter. And I am Eleanor.’
‘Good night, Eleanor.’
Eleanor reached out to check that her radio was at hand, for when she woke in the small hours. The World Service helped her through into morning. Wars, economic crashes, the farming news. Then she turned on her side to sleep in the position she had always slept in – knees drawn up, arms gathered underneath her chin, like a tiny child. Sometimes when she woke in the night she forgot who she was, or when; she thought she could hear her mother talking softly in another room, and tears of warm happiness would gather under her closed lids. In the night, memories flow back. You live in them. The future is short and the past is long.
He was very close to her tonight. She could see his face and feel his body, not far from hers. She could feel his eyes watching her and because he was watching her, she was beautiful again and full of fresh, fast joy. She talked to him. She told him the thoughts and half-formed impressions that drifted through her mind, like petals, like ash. She told him things that she had not known she was feeling. She couldn’t have said if she spoke out loud or if they were words in her head. For years, she had been silent, silent as the grave; she had allowed him to leave her, or perhaps it was truer to say that she had left him. What else could she have done? She had once called him heart of my heart; she had once told him that she would die without him. But she had gone on without him. Only in dreams had he sometimes been returned to her and then she would wake with a heart that beat so loud she thought it must wake the whole house and boom out her secret to them all. Such treachery. She would lie in the soft darkness and listen to the sounds of the night outside her window and she would wait patiently, diligently, until the dream faded and her heartbeats calmed. That was one lesson life had taught her: all things pass. Sorrows pass, like dreams. Pain leaves centre stage and stands in the wings. You hold on to the self you have forged; lie in the bed you have made for yourself; wait for morning. The light that will creep through the curtains, the cockerel that will crow and the sounds of the ordinary day that will come again.
The clock in the hall struck the hour. The wind rattled in the window frames and outside, small animals crept into the undergrowth among the dry dead leaves.
She saw a face. It was always the same face nowadays: grey-green, wide-apart eyes, slightly hooded, mink-brown hair, thin lips in that curious half-smile that had always made her heart turn, sharp cheekbones; an agile, watchful, waiting face. Young, of course. The world ahead of him with suffering hidden in its folds. And she was young too, as she lay in the twilight world between waking and sleep, because old people are also young. She had tender eyes and elastic skin; her heart was foolish and full of hope and terror, her body flooded by longing. She wanted him so badly that a small cry escaped her parched lips. She wanted everything.
‘My love,’ she said. ‘What a journey.’
4
She was up long before him. He woke to the smell of coffee and burnt toast. Music was playing from the kitchen. He passed by the living room, where a young woman was clearing out the ashes in the fireplace and re-laying it with fresh wood and kindling. He raised a hand and she looked at him incuriously and then returned to her task.
Standing in the hallway, Peter saw how the house was shabbier than he had realized the previous evening. The ceiling was stained, a suspicious crack running along one side. Damp flowered on the walls. The paint was fading and the paper blistering.
Some of the boards under his feet had split; small balls of fluff had gathered in the corners. The curtains were bleached by decades of sunlight and a vast spider’s web hung from the end of the pole. He examined the photographs that lined the walls, several of which now hung askew. A few of them were obviously recent – in colour, unfaded family groups, everyone lined up and smiling for the camera. There she was, a few years younger, in the centre of a crowd of descendants. How extraordinary it must feel to have been the source of all those people, who looked very different from each other – dark and fair, chic and grungy, each one a little world in themselves. Peter himself came from a tiny family: a mother but no father that he knew of or had ever cared to look for, one childless aunt, no cousins, no grandparents left – so paltry compared to this population of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There was Jonah, a teenager but unmistakable with his sardonic smile and his blank sloe eyes.
He paused in front of another photograph, much older, in black and white. A collection of young people. The men wore hats and ties, the women had skirts below their knees. Was that her? He peered through the dusty glass at the face, slightly out of focus but still – it might be. Slender and upright, with narrow shoulders, her chin was lifted, as if in defiance. She had dark hair and high cheekbones. Her eyes were wide apart and her mouth was smiling. Her hand was on the shoulder of another woman, shorter than her. He moved on. This must be her, formally posed on a sofa with a baby on her lap. The baby looked too big for her; it was bald and round-headed with plump arms, dimpled fists and a mutinous expression on its face (Peter couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl) – but Eleanor looked radiant, glancing sideways at the camera with her bright, searching eyes, a small smile on her painted lips. She had shapely calves and a sharp collarbone. So she had been lovely, he thought, this old woman whom he could hear in the kitchen, banging pans, burning toast, talking to herself above the music that was blasting out from the radio. He pushed open the door. Polly lifted herself, padded towards him and subsided at his feet, rolling over on her back and waving undignified legs in the air.
The Twilight Hour Page 3