There, in their cracked and crumbling Olympus of weirdly glinting stars and bottomless night, gargoyles of cloud vomit in play over bat-winged cherubim; there lesser imps disport upon the backs of sky-borne behemoths. And there in the teeming loneliness and the howling silence, Leah’s prayer could be heard.
Something wonderful had occurred to the boy. He did not need to hide and watch any longer. So far his love had simply been the act of seeing. Now he could step into the picture of his own love. It was a simple matter, and yet the plan the boy had made was such that he began to feel himself walking in that other world to which Leah already belonged, a fateful world where all deeds were as the language of the gods. All he had to do was to show Leah her own beauty. He was the only one who could show it to her because he was the only one who understood it. The savage emptiness of Leah’s lot was real. It revealed how small her life was. It broke off all the possibilities of the infinite and left something merely incomplete. It was unbearable. But the fact of its unbearableness turned what was small once more into an infinite platform for beauty. It was not a real beauty as the emptiness was real. Not yet. But if he showed it to her it would be. He could not speak, but if he only gave Leah the gift of her own beauty their hearts would not need words. Then something would happen that had never happened before in the history of the world.
Somehow this plan was so awesome that the boy just could not hurry to carry it out. To hurry was not in the spirit of the thing. Then, suddenly, Leah stopped appearing at her window, and the boy was plunged into misery. He was afraid that she might already be dead, and that his chance was gone forever, and he cursed himself for his slowness. But as he sat on the doorstep of his house, his head in his arms, lost in his dreary pain, without word and without vision, he heard the footsteps of people passing and a bright voice chirped, like the sun piercing a sky packed with a cumulus of grey clouds.
‘Yes. Not a whisper of her illness. It’s just like she woke up one day and it melted away.’
‘It makes you wonder, don’t it? Maybe we could all cure ourselves if we just woke up in the right mood.’
‘Yes. Straight away she said she wanted to work on the farm again.’
The voices disappeared off down the road. The boy lifted his head from his arms in joy. All around him now was that bleak no-man’s-land that might be autumn or winter, and the cold stones of the town. But to him it was spring and birdsong. Without waiting he leapt up and ran over the hills to the farmhouse. Leah, it seems, had just finished milking and was carrying two steaming pails from the barn, her soft cheeks flushed in the cold air. Watching from his habitual hiding place behind a stone wall, it seemed to the boy that Leah’s renewed health was even more precious than her illness had been. She looked more beautiful than ever. He noticed the strange flowers still grew by the door. If he could carry out his plan now, with Leah restored to the world, perhaps there could even be a lifetime of . . . of what? Of that unimaginable state the plan was to bring about. But when to do it? The timing must be right. And then it struck him as obvious. For something of such magic and moment he must choose the most magical date on the calendar. It must be Christmas Day, buried deep in the folds between autumn and winter. It was not long now. He only had to wait a few more days.
Christmas Day dawned. It was still early, and the cold of the air and the white of the snow made everything seem fragile. Something of the deeper blue of night stained the edges of the sky, fading to a very rare blue, almost tremulous, if a colour can be said to tremble. It was a blue that the boy knew in his heart.
From the lintel of the door there hung icicles. Under a dusting of snow the flowers still bloomed, as if they lived on the darkness and cold as some flowers do on sunshine. The boy knocked on the door. What would he do if it were not her? But it must be her. Who else could come to answer when such a blue was in the sky? There were no voices from within, but there were movements. Someone was coming. His heart beating in happiness, the boy knew it was her before she opened the door. Sure enough, she had been the only one awake so early on Christmas Day.
She looked at him, puzzled, but with a sense of pleasant anticipation, as if anything that happened today must be part of the day’s festivities. She was not wrong. The boy had never seen her so close, and now the freshness of her beauty startled him, so that he realised it was not an easy thing he meant to do at all. But he wanted to now more than ever. This was the moment. After a few seconds of flustered silence he took his left hand from behind his back and offered something to her. She looked down. In his grasp there was something beautiful, an opalescent flower, just like the ones that grew by the door. . . . Her eyes widened for a moment and then she fainted away, as lightly as a snowflake falling to earth, in a swoon of death.
What happened on that Christmas morning became my greatest secret, and one that has guaranteed my silence all these years, if any such guarantee were needed. Perhaps it is best I can never tell this tale, and not merely because my guilt is thereby hidden. Since it will never meet the harsh air of the world, in this tale, at least, something of the magic of those far-off things, happy or unhappy I no longer know, will be preserved.
Now I am old and hoary. I have enough wit to tend to my bees and sell their honey and keep myself warm in my shed. My eyes are still clear, and my hearing keen, and every day more is added to my store of secrets. In secrets I am richer than any man that ever lived. And though I am old, the sun on the grass looks the same to me as it ever did, and the grass beneath my feet feels the same. I have no need to envy the spring. I have not opened my mouth to speak, and what is inside me has remained the same and ever-young. Perhaps I am the idiot the world says I am, for every day the world’s cruel wonder leaves me speechless. And I know that even if I tried to speak, even if I forced a sound, with the first, painful birth-cry of my voice there would start a wailing, weeping howl that would go on forever.
Cousin X
Cousin X possessed a sort of disembodied existence as rumour before he ever entered upon the stage of Sasha’s life. It was not that there had always been a Cousin X. On the contrary, the rumour of his existence had appeared one day in the nest of her mind like a cuckoo’s oversized egg, and its unfamiliarity had been a source of some unease. In retrospect it is hard to say exactly when that egg appeared, but the sense of intrusion that surrounded it surely meant it had come at some time as something essentially new to Sasha’s heart. She must have heard her parents talking about him. In fact, she certainly would have, and this is, besides, the only reasonable explanation.
Cousin X had come into the world like a threatening, brilliant cloud, escaped from some Pandora’s box just to harass his poor parents’ hearts with the lightning of his mind. That is, while being a source of unignorable worry, he exhibited no behaviour that might easily be called either backwardness or delinquency. If anything, he was a kind of prodigy, effortlessly coming top in all his classes. Prodigies are apt to have problems also, but it was felt that this was not the whole story. It was simply that his behaviour was so strange as to be disquieting.
And so, perhaps because there were no definite terms her parents could use in discussing Cousin X’s peculiarity, the cuckoo egg in Sasha’s mind was of a whiteness and blankness that was grotesque and ominous. She could not imagine what it might hatch into.
There are all kinds of seasons that pass beside the yearly ones, and families are often inclined to think it is time they caught up with each other, and so it transpired that one particularly momentous season had its advent in the early twilight of Sasha’s life. This was when, for reasons that had nothing to do with Sasha, her paternal uncle visited with his family.
Her parents told her beforehand of the visit, and amongst the considerations of accommodation for the guests, Cousin X was one salient detail. To warn Sasha of his presence must have been on their list of preparatory measures, but when it came to it, they were not at all sure what they were warning her about.
‘Your cousin is not like other
children,’ said her father, as he stood by the kitchen counter, munching a sandwich. ‘Try not to bother him too much. And be nice to him.’
Well, which do you want me to do? thought Sasha, not bother him or be nice to him? Also, it was not at all clear from these embarrassed, stultifying warnings whether it was she who should be afraid of him, or he of her. Exactly who was being protected from whom?
The day of arrival had been set for a Wednesday at the height of summer, and preparations had been made as for a large and protracted picnic. Sasha’s family inhabited a leafy corner of the world, an imaginary bower like a dreamberry trembling plump and tender and sweet amongst the briar of reality. This was the waiting country destination at the end of the visiting family’s long drive.
Summer blushed with sun and Sasha was still in her petticoats. She was a girl in the whispering, eavesdropping, tiptoeing world of so many of her age and sex. Hers was a world of hide-and-seek, a ball of one. If the adult world was the greatest of all stages then Sasha was left to linger in the wings, playing with unused costumes and props. So that the adults, in their busy exits and entrances, did not trip over her, she was required to be seen and not heard. But more often than not, wrapped up in a heavy curtain, listening to the adults delivering their important lines, she heard and was not seen. That she was not seen is strange and even miraculous. Her hair was a honey-blonde wavy fleece trailing around her face and shoulders in perfect keeping with her secret playful world of curtains and petticoats, and her skin an erubescent radiance. But then, many radiant things scattered about us seem to become invisible when we grow tall and upright and direct our gazes ahead of us, and perhaps the incipience of sex in our bodies banishes all but the grosser senses.
The mere expectancy of the visit was enough to lay a strange tension on Sasha’s solitary games that day, so that she drifted into a drawn-out, aestival boredom. When there finally came the conclusive sound of a car pulling in off the road at the front, her playing was already as desultory as the dust suspended in the sunlight. Her parents went to welcome the guests and help them with their luggage. But she was still in a daze. A silky indifference settled on her, and she loitered where the French windows opened onto the back garden.
Just as children’s games can exhaust adults, so to children there is something deadly dull and overcast in adults talking all together, gaggling about the incomprehensible grey practicalities of their business. So perhaps it was natural that Sasha should hang back from the hateful trivialities of luggage and so forth, and equally inevitable that Cousin X should seek a similar escape.
Sasha was watching the sun splashing on the rough stones of the patio, like soundless trills and flourishes on a piano’s ivories, when from the direction of the garden there was a movement. Her first impression was that it was the hopping of a crow in the grass. Something told her this was not right, however, and she looked up. In the moment of bewilderment she experienced when she realised she was not alone, she quite forgot who the person approaching the French windows must be. She saw only a rather gaunt boy with gibbous eyes. Even though they were adrift in the middle of the summer holidays, the boy was wearing his school-uniform. He had his back to the sun, so that his face was hooded by grey shadow. His presence was as if made of this shadow, which spread to infect the very sunlight he walked in. He was about level with the sundial now, whose sky-pointing gnomon he resembled in thinness and sense of silent purpose. It was this oncoming silence, this lack of any declaration, that struck Sasha as sinister, and which in turn silenced her, unable as she was to find the key question that would return thought and voice to her. Perhaps she stopped breathing. Later in life, when she was to learn the meaning of the phrase déjà vu, it was this memory she referred to first, if only fleetingly, to relate the phrase to her own experience. That moment was full of a sense of premonition, though of what if not simply itself was hard to say. The boy stepped up onto the patio, his head and shoulders shrugging off the shadows of the garden as if they were merely his cloak. He had arrived like a messenger. The message was only this suffocating hush. Sasha’s throat closed up and for the first time in her very short life she fainted.
So Sasha and Cousin X met, as it were, without any formal introduction. They were discovered by their parents minutes later. Sasha was still crumpled softly upon the floor, a certain gossamer lightness to her form suggesting the magical, intoxicated sleep of a fairytale heroine. Cousin X was standing ineffectually by the French windows where the gauzy curtain flickered in the slight shallow breeze. His eyes rolled nervously and tickishly downwards. As soon as he walked in on the scene, Sasha’s father, Barry, bristled visibly. ‘What happened?’ He shouted the question directly at Cousin X in a tone devoid of all the layers of consideration that adults usually place between themselves and children.
Cousin X made a stuttering sound. Barry put down the luggage he was carrying and rushed to the supine form of his daughter. There was something in her lolling limpness that showed nakedly that darling nature which strikes to the heart of a doting parent. Barry felt the helplessness of her attitude was not for the sight of strangers and his sweeping down upon her was partly a blanketing protection from other eyes. There was a brittle hardness to his concern which everyone present knew was anger, though the knowledge lay just beneath the surface of thought, unformulated. He shot a glance up at the cringing boy. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded shortly. By this time his wife, Lynn, was at his side. Cousin X looked variously at the adults, a stunned expression of appeal on his face.
While Barry was glaring at the boy, goaded by his fecklessness, Lynn was checking Sasha’s pulse and putting her hand softly to her cheek. The parents’ alarm had been premature, it seems, for Sasha began to revive at these simple ministrations.
Kevin displayed a rather etiolated protectiveness, placing himself between Barry and Cousin X and asking the same question as his brother in an overly reasonable voice.
‘What happened here?’
Cousin X once more hiccoughed on the silence stuck in his throat, and then, ‘She just fell down like that.’
‘Are you okay, darling?’ asked Lynn in response to her daughter’s murmurs.
In a trice Sasha was sitting up and frowning in puzzlement.
‘What happened, Mummy? Everything just went dark and then I had a funny dream about . . . I can’t remember.’
She looked ever so briefly at her cousin as she said this.
What little Sasha could say about her experience tallied in full with what little Cousin X let fall from his lips. In retrospect Barry saw that he had over-reacted. He had been all too ready to anticipate Cousin X as the source of some unspecified trouble, and this had, after all, deeply affected his judgments. He had bullied a child, and half of him was full of shame and contrition.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, laying his glowing eyes heavily on his younger brother, ‘I wasn’t thinking. I just saw Sasha lying there, and . . .’
He let Kevin imagine whatever was suitable. The irrationality of parenthood was an oft-used and multi-purpose excuse. He could not bring himself to look at or apologise to Cousin X himself, however. The truth was, he had been thinking—it was what he was thinking that had been the problem. And anyway, wasn’t it at least a little peculiar for the boy just to stand dithering over his daughter like that?
‘No, no. I understand,’ said Kevin. The parents cleared up the little scene like the bad luck of broken crockery. It was on the back of this scene, as if using it as a convenient cue, that Kevin made an inquiry.
‘Do you, by any chance, have such a thing as a broken wireless? In fact, it doesn’t have to be broken. A spare one will do.’
‘A radio? What for?’ asked Barry.
‘It’s just that he loves taking things apart. It’s all right. He puts them back together perfectly. He amuses himself for hours.’
Apparently, ever since receiving an electronic kit for Christmas, dismantling things had become something of a mania with Cousin X. H
is parents had found no reason to discourage him, and he had even mended one or two household appliances in the process. Barry realised that his brother was also embarrassed and was offering him a complicit way of allaying the worries of both.
‘Will a clock do?’
‘Yeah. That’ll be fine.’
Had a third party been present to witness the two admonitions that passed from parent to child while Cousin X’s family settled into their room, they might have found it interesting to compare their content.
Downstairs: Barry went out to where the wood was piled at the side of the house to chop fuel for the stove. Lynn fell to working at the chopping board in the kitchen. It was Lynn who was to speak to her daughter. Sasha had been rather subdued since recovering from her faint. There had been something overwhelming in the kind and degree of attention she had received from her parents. She was used to parents as figures of autocratic authority. It was an authority typified by voice, a raised and constant voice forever laying rules in her path with such arbitrary suddenness that she bounced back off them as if off a force field, feeling a numbing shock of embarrassment and chagrin. There was no predictable pattern to these suddenly materialising rules. Indeed, some of them were downright orders, flung out on the moment, as the voice and the word is a thing of the moment. Her parents, quite simply, held an unchallengeable monopoly on power, and she had to do her best to appease them. But since she had awoken from her faint those irritable voices had become solicitous with a soft and insistent probing that made her uncomfortable. When they asked her if she was all right it felt to her as if they were down on their knees begging for something—forgiveness, perhaps. She felt as if she were looking down at them from above. It gave her a sense of vertigo. She was not sure she liked this feeling at all. She had been made aware of something at the edge of her vision—the power of her helplessness.
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