‘He can look after himself,’ Peter said, cheeringly. ‘He’s not dull. Perhaps he’ll contact me. I hope he will. Perhaps there are things he needs to sort out.’
I think Peter silently acknowledged my equally tacit recognition of the hint of exclusion in this last remark. Molly was hovering at my shoulder. As if catching it too, she signalled me to hand her the receiver.
‘Why couldn’t he have discussed it with us?’ she asked. ‘There’s nothing wrong – nothing.’
She stared at the wall, then handed Peter back to me, her fellow conspirator.
‘There was a bit of bother a while ago,’ I explained. ‘Or so we think.’
He listened without interrupting as I told him about the incident in the park. I think it was knowing that he was not alone in ignorance of the facts that he remained calm – a case of parents still exercising their right to information, no matter how old their children.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘The police up here might be able to help. But don’t forget that he’s gone of his own accord. They usually aren’t interested.’
I somehow felt that he was speaking from a kind of wearisome experience. He tells us horrendous tales of school-mastering in the slums.
When we sat down, Molly and I, it was obvious that she had expected more from Peter, such as an immediate tour of north London with his jazz-loving friends. I couldn’t see it myself. I thought instead of Peter gazing briefly out of the window, telling his pals about a rebellious brother, then palming another exercise book from the unmarked pile. I don’t know why I thought this. With independence, some things have to be taken for granted. A certain coolness prevails, encouraged by distance, other worlds, the very stuff of striking out on your own from where those who have nurtured you come to terms with the difference between love and the memory of love. I couldn’t help considering that snipping the apron-strings, as one must, leaves one totally lacking control, that studiously avoiding overbearance in life turns loved ones into, albeit favourable, strangers.
Molly and I saw to it that Jed, Maria and Peter would be there when Mick arrived home for the first time. We all managed to mask our different feelings about what had happened. It wasn’t exactly the best arrangement for discovering why Mick had run off. He seemed, outwardly at least, well-adjusted, if a little downcast at the anxiety he had caused. I got the impression that, in some odd way, Mick had done the right thing. Chastising is almost foreign to me and Molly; it’s just the way we are.
‘If there’s anything we can do, just say,’ Molly told him when she cornered him alone in the house on that half-celebratory weekend. But little any of us said actually sounded as if it connected with what he must have been feeling inside. Then he left again, without ceremony and almost without warning, before we had embarked on a long discussion. Maybe the threat of an ensnaring adult superiority was what made him go.
I wouldn’t say Molly lost interest in Mick’s wanderings from then on, because the rest of the family also grew resigned to his peculiarity, if that’s the word. We kept the postcards. Within Molly and Jed there developed an unspoken indignation, which I think they found supportive. I have always been uncomfortable about taking unwarranted offence. Of course, I pitied Molly in the place where she was exposed as uncomprehending. Just before events took their surprising turn, I began trying to make sense of what was happening. For a start, I understood how difficult it is for us to communicate the predicament of a third party to others.
When I recall Molly’s story of seeing Mick in the park with his mysterious comforter, it is the image which persists, inviting surmise, and there are moments when I would prefer this evocation to be all there is, like the picture I retain from my father’s testimony of my uncle (a boy then, later to die of rheumatic fever) sprinting bare-chested like a lunatic around my unemployed grandfather’s allotment, his shirt billowing behind him as dusk and dampness infiltrated their sustaining half-acre; it was in the Depression, that dewy antithesis of joy and innocence.
I was at home nursing a cold the day Mick’s airmail letter from Marrakesh arrived. I saw it float towards the doormat as I was going downstairs to make myself breakfast. It was addressed to me. Its thin, blue paper belied the visual gravity of its contents, which, on being unfolded, seemed to demand to be read aloud. ‘Dear dad’, it began, ‘As I write this, the imam is calling the faithful to prayer…’ The rest was nothing less than a story, a fascinating story. I imagined Mick in a white, loose-fitting garment, exuding the confidence of one totally assimilated by place. He shares a home with others, by the sea. The tall palms bend a little before the on-shore winds. There is trouble with Allal, the gardener. Allal is trying to get his boyfriend moved into the house, which is owned by a Frenchman with a pointed beard. But the Frenchman won’t allow it on the grounds that Allal will want to live in, too, and thus neglect his duties, which involve keeping the grounds tidy for prospective buyers – the house is always up for sale but the Frenchman is a laconic vendor. It is Mick’s problem because the Frenchman has appointed him unofficial custodian in his absence. One of Mick’s jobs is to see that Allal turns up on time and completes his allotted hours. Mick has clearly risen in some loose hierachy, some distant confederation of the languid. Instead of wondering what Mick was thinking of in sending such a disarming, guilt-free missive from that house beside the sea, I tasted brine on my tongue and began to worry about overgrown funerary urns. When Molly arrived home from the nursery, I betrayed what might have been an expected confidence by telling her about the letter. She shook her head while reading it.
When I told Jed and Maria, I merely indicated that we had received a message from Morocco to say that Mick was well. This seemed to satisfy them, though perhaps I interpreted satisfaction as lack of curiosity. Peter’s greater inquisitiveness never exactly pinions you, but I knew that holding nothing back would pre-empt further questioning. Then a second letter arrived, and a third, each addressed to me. Molly took no offence at this partiality; she was glad I had pocketed the problem. Just when we were getting used to Mick’s odd lifestyle in the same evasive way we diminish madness by calling it eccentricity, his story grew darker. Allal moves in with his boyfriend, and the Frenchman is murdered. This was not the sequence but inverting it helps me remove a connection. Though Mick made none either – the killing is remote in all senses of the word – I felt ill at ease, especially as the Frenchman’s prophecy had been fulfilled, his garden now, I supposed, an imminent wilderness accommodating the shadows of two men at play. I began to fear for Mick as I never had before. I saw a storyteller about to be engulfed by the events he was witnessing. There followed an appeal for money, and the first hints of friction between Mick and Allal over the state of the garden, the future of the house. With the Frenchman gone, I could imagine anarchy displacing a nominal, exotic order. There is talk of occupying the building. A lawyer’s emissary is seen off by Allal and his companion amid much laughter. Others move in. Mick sends a letter of disturbing incoherence. Then a postcard from Algiers. Then nothing. Some of this I share with Molly and the rest, and I suppose that what I don’t share is the magnitude of the difference between us. There is little we can do. Little I can do.
Molly and I often stand on the landing as evening closes in, gazing through the stained glass window for Mick’s next unannounced homecoming. That dotty architect designed things so that the declining sun, summer and winter, strikes the glass, filling the top of the house with diffused, kaleidoscopic colour. At other times, and these depend on one’s momentary feeling or point of view, it is the affect of the glass on our external surroundings – the garden, the road, the meadow, the tree-fringed mountain, the silvered estuary nicked into faraway cliffs – which appeals to us as we hold fast to our anchorage.
Peter, with his metropolitan unconcern and his deepening imperviousness to shock and surprise, tells us not to worry. Jed and Maria, now parents themselves, are absorbed totally with child-rearing and have neither the time nor the desire to po
nder the bothersome forms of its end result. (In any case, Jed has been promoted, and it seems to me that if one is involved in betterment and its spiralling elevations, the plight of those who have free-fallen into life cannot inspire by their example or move by their weaknesses and shortcomings.)
It’s almost a year now since any of us heard from Mick. Molly and I keep the postcards in an album, slotting them into polythene cases so that we can view the scene and read the message, itself never expressing more than a holiday-maker’s transient pleasure. We keep the few airmails tucked away. I don’t blame Molly for continuing to remain perplexed, a state in which indignity and anguish keep colliding. Yet, when I re-read the letters and scan the postcards, particularly the first one of Trafalgar Square, I can’t help thinking that each is an affirmation of intent like nothing we will ever know. It searches us out. When we glimpse it, the effect is unnerving, and we step back, secure in our foothold. Ours is one house, one family, one refuge. But it goes on and on in our imagination, enfolding other families, other refuges disturbed by waywardness and pain and other windows looking out on peril and adventure under open skies.
Unfinished Symphony
Billy can hear the sea in the distance. It’s not a roar, but something grumbling. It sounds especially wretched because now, an hour after sunset, no one is taking any notice of it, certainly not the rest of them up at the house. Below the marching pines, waves are flaying Breakers’ Point against their will and he imagines that the retreating surf is the blood of the headland, seeping into the mist.
The garden – not much more than a lawn with a concrete path at the side and some wind-bent bushes – slopes towards the water after jutting straight out. The man who sold them the house said it would make a fine terrace, though why he hadn’t created one in the twenty years he’d been there was a mystery. Perhaps he had no money to pay anyone to do it. He seemed odd – spindly and slightly overbalanced, like his shrubs – and dressed as if to go out to somewhere official. His mind seemed to be elsewhere, certainly not on gardening. Billy notices how the cusp of the lawn, the middle section which bears the brunt of the wind off the sea, is parched. His father said the man was going into a home. That’s perhaps why he was dressed up, Billy thinks. For the journey. There were two other men with him who said a few words to his father and mother before taking away their prisoner. In the empty garage, there’s a light patch on the floor where the man’s car, a grey Riley Elf, once stood, and in the middle of it a pool of oil still being soaked up by a scattering of sawdust.
Billy reaches the bottom of the lawn, where deep steps take him to a sloping buttress of stones medalled with ochre lichen. In front of him the pines loom. The way ahead looks steep but it isn’t: with care, it’s possible to descend to the coastal path. There’s a stupid gate on to this path with nothing either side of it, so that the garden really extends to the cliff’s edge above the Devil’s Whirlpool and its boiling water. But Billy knows this from a previous visit with the estate agent.
Now he’s more interested in the garden next door. Unlike the one behind him, in front of his new home, it has been planted with palms and other bushes in different shades of green, and this effort to stall the runaway land has made the grass look healthier. Here and there are dark sculptures – some freestanding, others on plinths – which look as if they have been hauled up from the whirlpool, plundered from the Devil. Some have holes in them, others resemble human forms not quite come into being from their stony tombs. An effort has been made to encompass the first twelve feet of falling land in the area of the pines, in this case more densely planted, and it is here, in the half-light, that Billy sees a real human figure start walking away, like something wild revealing its camouflage by the meanest of movement. He gets the impression that he has been watched. He can hear twigs cracking faintly underfoot and what sounds like whistling and singing becoming softer and softer. Then, through a hole in one of the sculptures, a tiny silhouette appears and stops for a few seconds before vanishing over the brow of the land.
‘Billy!’ his mother shouts. ‘Tea’s ready. Spencer’s here.’
He can see her on the upper horizon where the lawn starts its seaward curve. Everything about her is billowing, like a flag in a gale – her long brown hair, her dress, her woolly cardigan. It’s as if she has come not to retrieve him but to form an alliance with him against some enemy not yet visible behind her. Because of this, he rushes up the hill so that she can see that he’s heard her summons, at which point she turns and heads back to the house.
For Spencer’s benefit, they arrived in time to see the sunset. Spencer was late, but in any case the spectacle fizzled out in a bank of cloud moving up the channel. The anticlimax brought darkness forward by an hour and the lathering sea below the garden grew ominous. Billy doesn’t mind admitting fear of the dark, of the shadows, but he wishes it wouldn’t change things. Behind him, the waves are wilful and flinging their spume madly.
Spencer Lockwood probably hates him – ever since he came home early from school that afternoon with the sniffles and found Spencer and Meryl playing horse and rider in her bedroom. This was in the other house. Spencer was angry: he stood silently above him, zipping his trousers. ‘Don’t you dare say anything,’ Meryl scolded. There was an odd smell in the room. They were going to get married once Spencer started teaching. Billy thinks he wouldn’t fancy being in Spencer Lockwood’s class, not after he’d caught him shagging his sister. As the house wobbles closer, he chants under his breath, ‘Shagger Lockwood, Shagger Lockwood.’ He spots Spencer’s car, a sky-blue sports job, parked at a crazy angle, as if about to shoot off any minute towards the Devil’s Whirlpool. He imagines the car spinning in the water and Spencer, trouserless, threatening him unavailingly as he sinks deeper, going round and round like a blurred Catherine Wheel.
‘And what have you been up to?’ Meryl asks. Spencer, his mouth full of chocolate cupcake, smirks at him as he passes. He ignores his sister’s inquiry by walking away, so that his own question floats free for anyone to answer: ‘Who lives next door?’
His father is standing near the table, taking a stethoscope apart. Already, there’s a sign nailed to the gate: Roderick Mahon, MD, BCh. Billy has never heard anyone except his mother call him Roderick, only Roddy – Dr Roddy Mahon. His mother calls him Roderick when she’s uptight and impatient, which has been pretty often of late.
‘Her name is Alice Westerway,’ his father says. ‘She’s a composer.’ He supplies the information indifferently, as though already the woman has entered his circle and, in due course, will be introduced to the new doctor’s twelve-year-old son.
‘I’ve seen her,’ Billy says. ‘She’s creepy. What do you mean, a composer?’
‘What do you think he means?’ Spencer asks.
They are all like this, never telling him anything, always expecting him to give an answer so that he can prove that either he’s not stupid or they’re superior or both.
‘She writes music,’ his mother says, passing by on one of her motherly tasks. He senses that she doesn’t like these games the others play with him. She brings them to a close before they can get properly started.
By ‘music’ his mother probably means the gramophone records his father plays in the evenings. Mostly it sounds gloomy – when it’s not rattling the walls. He has seen his mother go up to the hi-fi without being asked and turn the volume down. His father never complains about this: it’s as if he has simply forgotten to do it himself, though he never says ‘Thank you’. Spencer likes traditional jazz. When he talks about it, his father remains silent, nodding as spittle slides down his pipe stem. ‘Trad’ jazz is always muffled, and comes from Meryl’s bedroom when Spencer is visiting.
A few days later, Dr Mahon calls Billy to the living room. On the radio is a piece of music by Alice Westerway called ‘Ocean Murmurs’. As Billy listens, his father stares at him, looking puzzled, before starting to make a repeated figure eight with his right palm. It sounds to Billy like the mus
ic he hears at the cinema, except now there’s no-one in the clinches, no galleon with Gregory Peck aboard, no pictures whatever, except his father towering over him in a trance. When the music ends, ghostly people begin to clap.
‘I expect she wrote it after listening to the sea down below,’ his father says. Billy is expected to accept this opinion as the last word. His father picks up The Cornishman and hides behind it, as he always does when there’s no more to be said – about anything. Smoke signals rise above the newspaper.
Billy’s bedroom window overlooks Alice Westerway’s garden. For hours, he never sees her, though lights go on in the house at night. She has an old car that sinks down at the back: Spencer says the springs have gone. When she starts the engine, it farts clouds of grey smoke. She never goes out after dark. He wonders whether she will become one of his father’s patients.
‘Your father cannot go collecting people like butterflies,’ his mother explains when he asks. ‘But if she wants to be on daddy’s list, I expect he will accept her.’ He has heard them talking about patients after surgery or after his father has had to rush out late at night following a phone call. His mother does most of it while his father rests his head in his hands. He thinks of his grandmother at these times, how she used to ask him if he’d lost his tongue. She must have said it a lot to his father as well, when he was a boy.
He is thinking of this when Meryl announces that she and Spencer are getting married. He feels this should be a happy moment but Spencer stands in the background fidgeting and looking serious. Later, from his room upstairs, Billy can hear his father’s raised voice as an argument starts below. His mother runs up the stairs and slams a door behind her. Tiptoeing towards it, he can hear her sobbing. Then, from the landing, he sees his father rushing to the front door. As he fumbles with the knob and eventually pulls the door open, Alice Westerway is standing there. She is small, like a jenny wren, and her bony hands are clasped in front of her chest.
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