Then there was the substantial number of children’s books, large and battered, showing the signs of many readings. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales and stories with large writing and bright illustrations. He opened a chunky volume with a black cardboard cover that was coming loose (Uncle Lubin and the Bagbird) and saw a wonky drawing in blue crayon on its title page: house, puffs of smoke coming from its tall chimney and a vastly oversized cat made up of two circles and an enormously long tail by the front door, lots of birds in the shape of floppy ‘m’s in the sky. Surely the grandchildren would want them for their own sons and daughters. You can’t throw out books you’ve loved as a child. How can you throw out books at all? He never had, not even his beaten-up copies of old thrillers he would never read again and that had sand between their covers, pages turned down.
He put all the children’s books to one side. The family could go through them on the birthday weekend – when he planned to be gone.
Before lunch, when the rain was easing, he biked to the nearest shop in the village a couple of miles up the lane. There was a dog – a stringy creature – tied up outside and it lunged at him and barked furiously. Peter made cooing noises at it, but it went on barking and galloping on the spot, the bristle of fur at the back of its neck standing up. Inside, the woman serving was leaning across the counter in animated conversation with an old man – presumably the dog owner. He looked a bit like his pet.
‘Good morning!’ He spoke loudly and pleasantly. He had the idea of making a proper effort to integrate himself into the local community. No good being a snooty Londoner, a convalescent outsider wearing strange clothes.
They nodded, faces unyielding. He persevered, his voice ringing out in the small space.
‘I’m new here. I arrived last night. I’m staying at Mrs Lee’s house up the road. Beech End. Helping her out.’
‘What can I do for you?’ asked the woman.
‘Oh.’ For a moment he felt mildly crestfallen. A welcome would have been nice. ‘Just twenty of those, please. And some matches,’ he added.
He circled round the yelping dog and biked away, singing tunelessly against the wind.
At lunch, which he didn’t take until well after two o’clock, he made himself a sandwich. The bread was fresh, presumably brought by the woman he’d seen laying the fire. There was clearly a system, a small team of people who brought in food and laid the fire and washed the sheets. In the spring and summer, someone must come and mow the lawn – or perhaps the family took it in turns. He went into the garden with his lunch. The rain had stopped and the grey sky had cleared into a miraculous blue. The trees glowed in orange and soft yellows. Peter went first of all to the front of the house, which had only been a shape in the darkness last night, his feet crunching over the gravel that was still wet from the night’s rain and gleamed in the autumn sun. It was built in lovely dark red brick with large square windows, but though it wasn’t as big or imposing as his imagination had made it, it was still too much for one blind woman to live in. Peter knew nothing about architecture, but he could see that it was a patchwork of old and new. It was asymmetrical, with tall chimneys and a buckling roof, a crack running up one side. There were weeds growing in the gutters, roses trained up the walls. The house had the air of struggling against age and decay. He saw that several roof tiles had fallen to the ground. The window frames were rotting.
He walked round to the side of the house, through the wooden door set in a low brick wall. Here there had once been a vegetable garden, but it had run amok. Nettles had invaded the rows of raspberry canes, ranks of weeds smothered the beds. There was a disintegrating fruit cage and a wooden bench that had lost half its slats and was green with moss. He snapped off a twig of rosemary from the bush that had thrived with neglect and sniffed it before putting it into his shirt pocket. Then he went to the back of the house, where he had smoked his cigarettes last night. The long lawn that ran down towards the glorious woods had been recently cleared of leaves, which lay in sodden heaps under the yew tree, but nothing else had been done to halt the march of nature. Dandelions pushed through the cracked patio paving stones; the hedge that marked the start of the lawn was ragged; the rose garden of which Mrs Lee was so fond was overgrown and full of bindweed and brambles, though a few late flowers still hung from their branches.
A path ran down the centre of the lawn towards the trees. Peter, finishing his sandwich and lighting a cigarette, followed it. The lawn petered out and turned to long grass and then scrubby undergrowth. He could smell mushrooms and dead, decaying leaves. Then he stepped into the woods themselves, and was in a different world, one that was silent, dim and cool, with light filtering down through the branches to lie in puddles and shafts on the ground. There were a few isolated notes of birdsong around him and, in the distance, a noise like a demented typist that he eventually identified as a woodpecker. The earth was springy underfoot, leaf mould and moss. What a place this must have been to grow up, he thought. A house full of secret corners and attics; a wood where you could have adventures and be lost; the sea nearby; at night darkness and a vast and starry sky. Peter shivered, feeling suddenly homesick – though not for home, wherever that may be, but for crowds, lamps, cars, streets where at each step you could look in through a different window and see another life framed there, the man at the cooker, the woman on the phone, a couple kissing. For the jabber and press of lives rubbing against each other.
With an effort, he turned back towards the house, rosy in the afternoon light. As he approached it, a car drew up and he saw Mrs Lee in the passenger seat, beside the woman he had seen that morning.
‘Hello,’ she said as she got out of the car. ‘You must be Peter.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Hello.’
‘I’m Esther. Eleanor’s daughter. I’m so glad you’ve come to help us like this.’
She shook his hand firmly, meeting his gaze. She looked formidable and faintly ironic.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he replied.
‘He seems nice,’ said Esther, after Peter had left them.
‘He reminds me of someone,’ said Eleanor, so quietly Esther could barely make out the words.
‘Who?’
‘Someone I knew a very long time ago. In a different life.’
5
Peter pulled on his running things and stepped out of the house into the early morning, not fully light. The last of the frost was still on the grass that crunched as he walked across it, and there were spiders’ webs glimmering among the roses. Polly came with him, trotting at his heels with her blunt muzzle lifted towards Peter and her tongue hanging out. He ran well this morning, he had known he would, and Polly moved softly and patiently at his side, never varying her pace. When he stopped to regain his breath at the top of the hill that looked out over the sea, she stopped too and waited. Her eyebrows were of a different colour from the rest of her coat, and bushy, and it gave her an enquiring look; Peter had never realized that dogs had eyebrows, or that they turn grey, just as humans’ do. When Polly lay down, she had a silky grey tummy and her muzzle was grizzled. How old was she? And where was she going to go when Eleanor went into her home? How would she bear it? He knelt down and stroked her and she lifted her head up and let her tail thump softly on the grass. On the beach, she found a rotting dead fish and gave it to him and he thanked her as if she could understand him, and then buried it.
In the newsagent, the woman serving handed him a pack of cigarettes without asking, then said, ‘You’re staying with Mrs Lee?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Mmm.’ She put her head on one side; her eyes were bright with curiosity. ‘It’s good someone’s with her, even if it is a stranger. To be living all alone there at such an age, and half-blind too. No one was surprised at the fire.’
‘She’s more competent than most people half her age,’ said Peter, who was surprised at hostility that spurted through him. He wanted to lean forward and jab the woman in the eye.
‘Is sh
e – you know?’
‘No. I don’t know.’ He waited for her to spell it out.
‘All there.’ She tapped the side of her head with her index finger. ‘They say she talks to herself and hits things with her stick.’
Peter stared at her until she reddened and then said in a cold, polite voice: ‘I have no idea what you’re suggesting. But if you’re asking if there’s anything wrong with her mental faculties, no there isn’t. She’s sane and clever and kind and generous in her instincts. Which you can’t say about most people, can you?’
He paid for the cigarettes, told her to drop the change into the charity box and sprinted back to the house, euphorically angry. Polly trotted at his side. When he went back to work, she followed him and sat looking at him in a friendly fashion for a while, as if he’d passed some test.
It took several more days for Peter to finish going through the books. During the day, he saw little of Eleanor, although he heard her in the house – sometimes with a visitor, sometimes listening to audiobooks, occasionally knocking against things in the kitchen, dropping things. And every so often, he would look up from his work to glimpse her in the garden, her shoes wet in the long grass and drifting heaps of leaves, and her cane moving deftly in front of her, guiding her through the place she knew so well. He saw her stop by the roses and stand with her head lifted as if she were smelling the flowers, though few hung there now. One morning, she went down the path to the woods and her fragile figure was swallowed up by the columns of trees.
Each afternoon, she played the piano. He didn’t recognize the music, but he liked the notes rippling through the old house like a stream, a river, skipping and merry and then sombre, meditative. He could almost see the light on the water. The same tunes over and over again, so that years later, hearing them, he was seized by an acute nostalgia for that time when he had been so adrift and so free. She got frustrated, though: he heard her crash her arthritic hands discordantly down upon the keys, bang down the lid. Once, in the middle of the night, he woke and heard the music rising faintly up towards him. He knew she slept little. She told him that she would sleep in her grave. She said it quite calmly. She said that death was a friend to the very old, who had already lost so many they had loved.
‘My children say I’m a tough old bird, that I’ll live for ever – but I feel like a feather just hovering on the surface. One breath of wind—’ And she made a gesture. ‘I would like to go like that, lightly. Not like my sister. She’s a burr; she’ll have to be prized off.’
Peter wanted to ask about her sister, but he had learnt that direct questions made her clam up. She told him things as and when she wanted, and then she talked in long paragraphs, following her thoughts easily, gathering them up like skeins of wool to plait together. So instead he said that the poet, John Donne, would sleep in his own coffin, to remind himself of death, and Eleanor nodded.
‘There was a time when I used to want to die,’ she said almost casually. ‘But I don’t now. I don’t crave death and darkness, but I don’t crave life either. Not the way I did, when I wanted things so bitterly.’
And she raised her head and smiled at the young man.
‘Could you not have what you wanted so bitterly?’ he asked, trying to speak lightly as if that would trick her into telling him.
She shook her head at him.
‘It wasn’t so simple,’ she said. ‘Beware what you wish for.’ She stood up with surprising agility and tapped the floor with her cane. ‘Tonight we will eat together, if you would like. You can help me make a lemon surprise pudding.’
‘Great. I’m not very good at puddings.’
‘I’ll teach you. It’s nice to pass things on.’
He had packed up the books into cardboard boxes that he had ordered on the first day, with her permission, and that were delivered as flat-packs that he assembled. Tomorrow, he would start on the photographs, and that evening, before they ate, they sat by the fire that Peter had lit and she told him about her family, while Polly laid her warm head in his lap.
‘There’s a photo hanging above the piano,’ she said. ‘Bring it here.’
Peter rose and lifted the large framed photograph from the wall, exposing a nest of cobwebs and dust behind.
‘You hold it and I’ll tell you who’s in it,’ said Eleanor. ‘I think I can remember who is standing where. I might get some of the grandchildren wrong but that’s all right.’
Peter put the picture on his knees and gazed at it. He saw Eleanor in the middle, old but not yet ancient, with clear eyes and her beautiful silvered hair gathered up in a knot. She made everyone else seem bright and impermanent. She was wearing a grey dress and she stood out from the group assembled around her, because while they were all smiling or making strange surprised grimaces, she looked serious and serene. She almost seemed as though she were standing alone, thinking about something, and the rest had been Photoshopped in beside her.
‘Obviously the man beside me is my husband Gil,’ she went on. ‘Gilbert. That was one of the last photographs ever taken of him.’
Peter examined Gilbert. He was tall, and had the appearance of a solid man who had suddenly grown thin. He had thick grey hair and a high forehead and he was looking not at the camera but at his wife with an expression that was obediently smiling but also supplicating. And Peter now saw that Eleanor’s hand was reassuringly on his elbow, as though she were steadying him.
‘He had cancer,’ she said. ‘He was not far from death. Everyone came for his birthday.’
Peter murmured something.
‘He was a good man,’ continued Eleanor as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘Much better than me. I don’t think I’ve ever met a kinder man than Gil. Everyone loved him. He died calling for his mother.’
‘Oh!’ said Peter. ‘That’s a fearful thought.’
‘Many people do,’ said Eleanor. ‘Didn’t you know? Gil said that in the war, he held countless young men’s hands while they screamed out for their mothers. I don’t think that I will, but you never know. Gil’s mother wasn’t a very nice woman, but I suppose that isn’t the point. He was very fond of gardening. And he loved trees. That’s why we bought the patch of wood down there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter.
‘What for?’
‘That he died.’
‘He lived a long, full life. It’s when people die before their time that you grieve the most.’
‘Of course.’
Watching her face, he saw an expression pass over it like wind over the surface of the sea. Then it was gone and she was calm again.
‘I hold him here,’ she said, laying her gnarled hand over her chest. ‘The dead go on living in our hearts. Now. Let’s see’ – briefly closing her unseeing eyes to make the picture out more clearly – ‘the man on my left in the suit is my son Leon. You will meet him soon. He likes to come and check the state of my feet and my blood pressure. Very scary. He’s a doctor too. He looks uncannily like his father used to. Dark hair and dark eyes and strong face.’
‘I see that.’
‘His wife, Giselle, is next to him. A Russian, and a very good painter. Love came to Leon like a thunderclap,’ she added. Peter wondered again if she talked to other people like this, or just to him because he was a ship passing in the night. He looked at Giselle and thought he could see Jonah in her dreamy face, though her mouth was opened as if caught mid-sentence.
‘Esther you know,’ said Eleanor.
And there she was, in a long flowery dress with her mane of hair.
‘Is she a doctor too?’
‘No. She was an academic, teaching History of Art. She’s retired now. She has several grandchildren who aren’t all in the photo, or I don’t think they are – it was taken too long ago. Beside her, her husband Luke. He left her for a woman half her age and half her worth and then had a heart attack and died. He was a weak fool,’ she added. ‘Men often don’t like strong, successful women. Esther’s never been malleable, never sweet and agreeab
le. She’s sour and fine, like a good red wine. Then I think it’s Quentin and Marianne. Quentin and Leon were very close but they fell out.’
‘Over what?’
‘Quentin became a born-again Christian and Leon’s a pugnacious atheist. He lectured Quentin and Quentin kept tenderly forgiving him in a way Leon found quite intolerable. They barely talk now. But they’ll have to at my party.’
‘Do you believe in God?’ Peter was surprised to find himself asking, but for once, she answered.
‘No. Not me. Not at all. Not for a very long time, if I ever did. Gil had some sort of respectable, civilized, undramatic faith – he was such an Englishman. Until the last months, that is, when he no longer believed in anything except pain and ending. And the ending of pain. You wouldn’t let a dog go through what he suffered.’
‘That’s terrible,’ said Peter. Then, ‘Who’s the man on his own?’ He was looking at a slender figure with silver hair and a bony face. He was smiling, but to something out of sight of the camera, and one arm was half raised. He looked like an ageing dancer.
‘Ah.’ Her voice softened and fell. Her hand went up to cover her chest once more. ‘That’s my Samuel, my eldest. I named him after my father. Flesh of my flesh.’ She corrected herself at once. ‘They’re all flesh of my flesh, of course, but he’s the one I always worried about. Grief is like an arrow to the heart when you have children, straight and true. It doesn’t miss its target.’
‘Why have you always worried?’
‘Some people seem to know how to deal with life. Even when they are going through difficult times, you feel they have a resilience and a sense of control. Samuel is not like that. There are periods of his life when I’ve feared for him.’
‘Has he been—?’
‘Now let me see.’ She pointed at the photo in Peter’s hands. ‘The jumble of children and teenagers on the ground in front of us are the grandchildren of course. I won’t tell you who they are. I can’t remember who was where, and anyway they’ve all changed so much. Grown tall, left home, found jobs and partners. Some of them have children themselves. Some of them are still adrift; who’d be young nowadays? I think we will have a family photograph when they all come for my birthday. What a lot of us there will be then. I’ve almost lost count, but then I was never very good at maths, even though I had to teach it sometimes.’
The Twilight Hour Page 5