Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  East London Crematorium

  Uncle Kaiser’s books and paperwork came to me – Howard’s End, Victorian Love Poetry, the Magazine Writers’ Journal – along with the scrapbooks, one of them chronicling his wrinkled testimony to advancement, which started with an account of prize-distribution day at Bombay’s Kishan-garh Mission in 1936 and ended with ‘City Slicker’, his contribution to The Golden Bridge, next to which was pasted Gaffur’s withering review like a death sentence. Uncle Kaiser wasn’t all that good as a literary hombre. In another scrapbook I saw a picture of a rod-stiff John Harn on parade with Mosley, each with the face of someone about to bite a lump out of the photographer’s head.

  Not even fascists, I guessed, would register more than a scowl at the sight of a ‘Paki’ in a place like that. In any case, I was well hidden among the spectres of the determinedly bereaved as Harn’s coffin was tilted on to a trolley and wheeled towards the conveyor belt. How do they do it? I almost spoke out loud. How do they pack a man into a casket who has changed shape from a snarling exclamation to a timid question mark barely able to support itself? Another item of lame symbolism, as Mr Gaffur might have spotted, yet typical of Uncle Kaiser as wishful thinker. There was enough gorilla support among the bearers to have shouldered that figurative change of heart. The strains of ‘Abide With Me’ seeped out, like thin blood. Then they burned him. Then he became one with all raddled occupants of the pyre.

  Grasmere

  ‘If he comes, he comes; if not…’

  Millie’s sentence trails away from its opening words, which remind her of a childhood game, the one where a name or a phrase is repeated over and over until gradually it loses its meaning and becomes a mantra with a new, undisclosed power.

  They are renting a house by the lake, she and Carl and Ziggy, their daughter. ‘Ziggy’ was Carl’s choice, something he saw in a newspaper report about a rock star and her husband with their first-born. She mostly goes along with Carl’s suggestions, not out of indifference but from a need to let someone else rebel for her. In darker moments, she puts this down to a lack of imagination, a willingness to be led. One of her primary school teachers said as much in an end-of-year report – ‘Millie is a bright pupil but she allows herself to be influenced unduly by others.’

  This holiday is out of season, out of the ordinary. The lake waters at the bottom of the garden support a flotilla of upturned leaves, like some Venetian festival seen from afar. The crowd is waving its coat-tails at late autumn. The trees have turned ink-black and gulls are swinging in from a heaving sea.

  ‘If he comes, he comes,’ she says. ‘If not…’

  ‘If not, it won’t make a blind bit of difference,’ Carl says eventually, spreading a map beside the Sunday paper on the floor as though he is a platoon commander. Ziggy is in front of the log fire, looking for nits in the hair of a rag doll.

  ‘I never know whether you are being resentful or innocent,’ Millie says.

  She is at the window, away from the other two. The mist has dropped a crown on the summit of the high fell across the water. Her breath is condensing for a mini-second on the windowpane.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

  ‘I was thinking of that test which is supposed to tell whether you are an optimist or a pessimist – is a bottle half full of water or half empty? Is the condensation trying to take over or is it being repelled by the flames?’

  She breathes gently again, this time prolonging the motion so that she has time to make her fingerprint before it goes away, like a quiet death. Luke is flying over from Paris and might already be in the country, on his way to them via the Midlands and the M6.

  ‘He said he’d come,’ she states, a little petulantly. ‘Or try to.’

  ‘There’s no telling with Luke. Perhaps he’ll phone, perhaps not. Let’s just enjoy ourselves, shall we?’

  ‘I want to feed the ducks,’ Millie interrupts, the resident doll now limp in the fireplace, discarded by yet another foster parent. She is struggling to put on her padded jacket with the hood, a miniature version of her mother’s. Carl takes no notice. His finger is moving north from Windermere to Ambleside, then east to the Langland valley. The map crinkles beneath its advance.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Millie says, without turning towards them. ‘We’ll scrunch up some bread.’

  Carl folds the map. Seconds later, he can hear the two of them in the kitchen: Ziggy the interrogator and Millie the woman with the answers to questions about ducks – where they come from, where they go, who feeds them when there’s no-one at the house, what they do at night. He lets them get on with it, then follows them to the lake’s edge and watches them scattering the crumbs on the water. Ziggy’s handfuls fall short on the pebbly shore. Millie kneels down to retrieve the bits. As her head lowers, the lake comes up to meet her and she realises the waters are lapping almost imperceptibly at her feet. It reminds her of someone whispering. Only down there, close to it, away from Carl, can she be privy to its message. Without dipping her fingers, she senses the water’s cold. Something about its clarity, the absence of muddying life, the precious stones waving under the ripples, tell her so.

  ‘Here they come,’ Carl says.

  The ducks have been swimming anonymously offshore, but are now heading towards them in V-formation. They are all dowdy females. One day soon, Millie thinks, Ziggy will want to know how a brace of mallards hanging from a butcher’s hook like aristocrats’ capes on a peg have met their fate. Ziggy will not comment on the explanation, just stare, seemingly at the inevitable. Just as Luke once did.

  Millie sees so much of Luke in Ziggy. And the more Carl learns about Luke the more Ziggy seems to him to be forming in her uncle’s image. There is a baby grand piano in a room built on to the side of the house, its dull walnut camouflage merging into the shadows. But the room is locked. They saw the advert for the house in the Sunday Times. Millie swears she didn’t know about the piano, which Carl thinks is probably true because there are other indicators of a house leased conditionally – tacit messages of prohibition – such as a drinks cupboard and an expensive hi-fi also barred. Not that Luke now plays much in company, even for his own uncomprehending family.

  Luke at the piano, fingers blurring across the keyboard. That’s what most people remember. A musician in full flow. But Millie liked it when he hunched himself over the keys, inspecting his fingers at close quarters as they printed a meditative chain of chords on the air. Words were like chords: both consisted of merged blocks of meaning. There are just two years between them. They did everything together, including learn to play the piano, but in most cases Luke out-distanced her, especially as a musician. While she, Carl and Ziggy were eating at motorway services earlier that day, a television was showing the advert in which toy bunnies powered by different makes of battery fall by the wayside until the fittest bunny overtakes the last powerless competitor and goes running on for eternity. She suddenly recalled the muffled sounds of Liszt, Chopin and Rachmaninov coming from the front room at home: Luke powering on to his Grade Eight as she remained mute, her interest and ability spent. She rarely went in to see him. The picture she retains is by proxy, an urchin in short trousers, his feet dangling from the piano stool in that now grainy documentary the BBC made about him and a few other, unrelated, prodigies. It all turned out to be sad and it was sad at the time in a strange sort of way.

  The ducks are frenzy feeding at two locations – one controlled by Carl, who is standing a few yards away, and the other by Millie and Ziggy, crouching head to head. Ziggy fancies she can see herself reflected in the ducks’ eyes.

  ‘Do you think he’ll arrive today?’ Carl asks. He is watching the cars on the lakeside road opposite, the only road, beyond the central wooded island. Some are turning into the village, others motoring on to Keswick and points in between. He often wondered what the locals did when the roads became snowbound. Just waited, he supposed.

  ‘Maybe. You know Luke. Today, tomorrow – whenever.’

&
nbsp; Carl picks up a disc-shaped pebble and skims it across the water. Luke’s visits are infrequent but they always make Carl miserable. Perhaps it’s because all rare visits are, by definition, badly timed. Some other day or weekend is always preferable or more convenient; some excuse for postponement always at hand. These days all their spare time seems to be occluded by others, even people they are delighted to see when they know the delight will only be appreciated at the time and in retrospect. Luke does all the things that Carl does – watches TV trash, drinks beer at the pub, talks about sport – but Carl always feels something is being kept from him to do with the realm Luke occupies, however reluctantly. What is worse, Carl wonders, being part of a dominion or harbouring the resentments of exile? These are Carl’s words. Carl is not bound by men’s talk. Millie tells him he impresses Luke but he doesn’t believe it. Another stone, this one plumbing straight to the bottom.

  ‘I want to go to the gingerbread shop now,’ Ziggy says, as the ducks start to lose interest. ‘And then I want to see the lion and the lamb.’

  ‘You can see the lion and the lamb from here,’ Carl says, turning his back on the lake.

  He looks up at the peak to the north of the village and searches for its whimsical outcrop. But the sun is momentarily blinding. He once lugged camera equipment to the spot for a five-minute scene in a film about the painter Kurt Schwitters, who lived for a while, and incongruously, in Ambleside. Perhaps because they had both been at different times on opposite sides of a TV camera, he tried to interest Luke in Schwitters, making the point that the discordant notes in the painter’s collages were musical, only for Luke to counter that no-one ever made the comparison for concordant images. Carl felt this meant that Luke thought him unmusical in the sense that only the negative view of art exercised those who had no real interest in it: the ‘I Know What I Like’ school, its adherents too much on the defensive to be interested in even their own entrenched positions. Luke was argumentative when he wasn’t sullen or ironic. Or elsewhere.

  Carl can feel Ziggy tugging at his coat. She insists on the gingerbread shop. It will still be open, its little jaw muscles aching before autumn’s trickle of tourists. Above them, a black cloud over Silver Howe is about to advance on the sun.

  They bypass the churchyard, where the plain tombstones of the Wordsworths are crowded in a corner like the markers of plague victims. Whenever Millie goes there, along the signposted path, she never stops but instead allows her fingers to run along the top of the iron fence, to feel its snagging scales of rust and the faint communication of pain beneath curative layers of paint.

  ‘It’s not our first visit,’ Millie tells the gingerbread woman. ‘We used to come with rucksacks when we were younger and we’ve brought Ziggy three times, haven’t we Ziggy?’

  The woman half-smiles at the child, as though curious about the relationships in front of her.

  ‘The weather has never been fine for long,’ Millie continues. ‘Perhaps we come at the wrong time.’ She recalls a few clear days followed by fog or gentle, restorative drizzle, through which the mountains stood like monstrous presences.

  More clouds are heading north so they decide to return. Ziggy is half asleep. Carl will normally drag her along rather than give in and carry her. She is heavy. But he relents. Next to his face her woollen jumper smells of stale bread and things she’s eaten in the previous two hours – prawn-flavoured Skips, liquorice wheels, chocolate. He thinks about the resilience of a child’s tummy.

  As they round the corner near the garden centre, the house can be seen in the distance. Millie notices that theirs is still the only car parked alongside. It will be two weeks before the clocks go back, yet the dark evenings are already in place, moving on, with clock-watching humanity in tow, its arms outstretched.

  Inside the house, Carl says no more about Luke. He removes the guard from the fireplace and stokes the logs. The sudden crackle lights up their faces. Ziggy is asleep on the settee, imitating a rag doll.

  ‘I’ll take her up,’ he says presently. ‘Then I think I’ll turn in myself. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll watch the fire die down. You go on.’

  They needn’t have lit a fire because the central heating is on all the time. It is just that Carl always does so whenever they stay in the Lakes, whenever there is a hoard of logs outside under a corrugated tin roof. Carl was once a Cub Scout, a sixer; Millie sometimes imagines him in short trousers and socks, with his green tabs sticking out below his knees like gold leaf raised by static electricity. Tiny pennants of flame issue now and then from fissures in the burnt wood. Millie sees them as pockets of resistance in some blazing conflict long decided. They hiss, snap for a moment, then are vanquished, unlike the patterns in the wood itself, those whorls, knots and ladders which have come through or been transformed by the dark. It is a cold land that has been laid waste and in it she becomes aware of the warmth of her own body, the sense of her shaping nakedness. Curled up on the chair, she feels hugely accommodating and wriggles into a provocative position, her legs apart. This has nothing to do with Carl. This is the domain she craves, her own warmth igniting things, having an influence. She turns towards the dying fire and coils her tongue round a loose strand of hair. It is night-time in the Lakes, when fellside lights burn with solitary cheerlessness and the past re-establishes itself noiselessly like the tide filling a shadowy creek. At motorway services she bought a wad of miniature Penguin paperbacks – Melville’s Bartleby; Goethe’s Letters from Italy; and the dirty stories of Anais Nin, the commission of a nameless voyeur. Carl will not approve of this last, but if he happens to pick it up and remonstrate with her she will probably feign innocence, as though it was something that crept unknowingly into the pile. He never reads her books, so they never fight over who will be the first to settle down with one. But she scans the first story, ‘The Woman on the Dunes’. It reminds her of a tinkling accompaniment to pleasure that is also its source, a paradigm of seduction.

  She hears a faint bump behind her. Ziggy is standing in the doorway. She has padded downstairs without the landing light on and is rubbing her right eye with the hem of her nightie.

  ‘Are the ducks in?’ she asks, sleepily.

  ‘The ducks are on the water, sweetheart, where we left them.’

  ‘I want to see them again.’

  ‘It’s a bit late, and cold. You should be asleep.’

  Ziggy picks up her jacket from the chair.

  ‘OK,’ Millie says. ‘Just for five minutes.’ She puts on her own jacket, dips her feet into her slippers and makes a crucifix with her forefinger and lips to crave silence before lifting the latch on the back door.

  It isn’t cold at all outside, and there is a taste of water on her tongue, earthy and mineral. She carries Ziggy across the strand of pebbles, stepping gingerly so as not to make a noise. Ziggy looks ahead and frowns, as if at some remnant of a dream. They are almost at the edge when the noise of splashing reaches them, a trail of surface slaps on the water that they can now see catching some hidden night light, perhaps from the moon lodged behind thick cloud. They look like prints, each with its tiny commotion of wavelets, and then at their head they see a duck treading the air before its wings begin beating their frantic message of flight. As children, staring into the bedroom’s dark, Millie and Luke would sit enthralled as objects issued slowly out of their background like things coming into being. Luke always saw them first. ‘Tallboy!’ he would snap, ahead of her.

  Ziggy wants to go further down the lakeside, away from the house. Millie looks back as they walk. Carl has not stirred. Moonlight picks out their car, which shines as if naturally luminous. Ziggy wants to see more ducks. The light that makes their car glow now settles on the boulders in their path.

  ‘Wait here,’ Millie says, sitting down on one of them, suddenly feeling weary. ‘It’ll come back.’

  ‘What will?’

  It is a desultory question. Ziggy is walking in circles on the stones. Millie looks down. She can see
that the pebbles are dry on top but seem to be embedded in water or damp sandy soil. She begins turning them over with her feet. They make a faint clacking sound.

  ‘The duck, of course. What did you think?’

  And far off, perhaps even as far away as neighbouring Rydal Water, they can hear the relentless flapping of wings. It is Ziggy who looks first. Before joining her, Millie sits staring at the upturned stones and the smaller ones exposed beneath them and the grains of sand still deeper. She cups the water, as if to drink; she knows it is only clear because it has been purged of life by acid rain.

  Then they are both on their feet, straining excitedly as the noise grows louder, their gaze fixed on the sky above the light-dusted treetops, which meander between Grasmere and Rydal. Coming towards them, arrowing downwards, are two ducks, separated by the meanest of distances. They’re racing each other, or the one is fleeing from its trailing partner, or the one behind is in pursuit of its victim. Drawing alongside, twenty feet above the water, they coast down, their urgent flapping done, and land together peaceably. Ziggy laughs at their self-congratulatory tail-wagging. It’s all over.

  ‘Time to go back,’ Millie says. Ziggy agrees. A tired Ziggy never argues.

  As they approach the house, a car in some sort of hurry comes racing up the lake road towards the house. But it passes after slowing. They can hear it on the side of the fell. Within seconds the mountain has enfolded it.

  The clouds are moving now, like emissaries charged with an urgent mission, and leaves begin to drift against the French windows of the music room.

  Mrs Kuroda on Penyfan

  Solemn over fertile country floats the white cloud.