by Rose Tremain
‘And she told me something I never understood till now. Or rather, I misinterpreted it. She said: “I see a river.” She was positive about this. She said a river would definitely be part of my future. I always thought it was a river in England called the Alde, but I was wrong. It’s this river. The Cumberland. And she said everything in my life would lead me here.’
Bentwater had listened attentively, then rubbed his eyes with his hands, like a man suddenly dog-tired. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Or could be not. I never believed I got my life written down on my hand. My life’s inside me, waiting. It ain’t noplace else.’
Walter liked this. He thought about it now in his room at 767, staring at the empty window. Bentwater Bliss was fifty-three but he could still feel his grand future in his heart, waiting its time.
Mary:
I went back to see Sterns. He was in mourning for his axolotl which had died unexpectedly. The name of the axolotl had been Ken. Sterns said: ‘We shouldn’t give creatures names. It’s the name that breaks your heart.’
I told him about my guineafowl, Marguerite, taken away in a sack. He said: ‘You might have considered replacing her, or you might still consider it.’ He said: ‘Newts are good company.’
I was grateful for the dark and the sighing of the fish tanks. I sat there for a while, not speaking. I could feel my wounds aching and my head filling with a black sea.
‘Well,’ said Sterns, ‘you have something to tell me. What is it?’
I said: ‘I want to die.’
Sterns got up and walked around in the room with his face turned away. Then he sat down again. ‘Go on,’ he said.
I didn’t want to say anything more. I just wanted to sit there and not move.
Sterns waited. He is a person who can hold himself so completely still you can’t even see him breathing. He is like Ken in this respect.
I closed my eyes. I was remembering how my father’s faulty hearing used to be cured by the sound of my crying. I said aloud: ‘My whole life has been absurd.’
People say things like this to Sterns all the time. That’s what his job is – to listen to the absurdity of everything. He’s so used to it, he doesn’t even look startled. He just watches the fish, their colours and their graceful swimming, and nods his head.
He got me to speak by getting up and going out of the room, leaving me alone. The moment he’d gone, I felt lost and abandoned. I felt as if I were in a pot-hole, beyond reach of every human thing. I imagined Sterns letting himself out of the house and walking away down Ladbroke Grove. I wanted to call out to him but the feeling of being in a hole was so intense that I knew I wouldn’t be heard.
He hadn’t abandoned me. He’d just gone to the lavatory. When he returned, he sat down on the far side of the room and blew his nose on some apricot-coloured toilet paper. He said: ‘Why do you want to die?’
I told him about Pearl.
I described what happened. I said: ‘I knew she had a secret but I didn’t know what it was going to be.
‘The secret was Timmy. My brother. He took everything of mine when I was a girl. Everything. Except Pearl.’
So I told him everything I felt about Pearl, my precious thing. I told him how much I wanted to protect her from drowning. I told him that I’d always loved every single thing about her, including her snoring and her ambition to be a dental nurse. I said: ‘In the future that I’d imagined she was going to be there. As Martin I was going to love her properly and protect her from other men. And she would love me back. That’s what I’d always planned.’
‘And now?’ said Sterns.
‘There is no now,’ I said. ‘I’ll never see her again. Or her family, who were kind to me. Never. I can never see her or want to see her. Ever. Because she’s engaged to Timmy. This was her secret. Timmy’s going to go into the Church. He’ll be a curate somewhere and Pearl will be his wife. She won’t even get to be a dental nurse. She’ll have a lost life.’
Once I’d started talking I didn’t want to stop. I kept remembering things: Montgolfier and the universe, the Flying Gumards of the coral reef, the definition of transillumination.
And I saw that these things were the highlights of my life, like my life was the room we were in and these times with Pearl were the fish tanks, illuminating the empty space. And so I said: ‘When I see it like this, it’s not surprising I did what I did.’
When I left Sterns, I found it terrible to walk in daylight. The air hurt me. I thought, I’ll go to where I can be killed by light alone.
It was a March day. You could smell breaths of spring. You’d turn a corner and suddenly get a waft of something beautiful and fierce.
I walked to the Serpentine. I found the boat attendant who had called me ‘lad’, the very same one. I said: ‘I’d like to take a boat out, please.’
The wind was buffeting everything. The trees looked startled. They would have liked to flee.
My boat wouldn’t stay still. Swans bumped by, regarding me. They seemed to have purpose and a destination in mind.
I lay down in the boat. I examined the sky. It was empty of everything but atoms of blue expanding out and up into meaningless space. Then I saw a white shape floating, miles high. I thought, it could be a seagull or it could be Livia turning and turning in her glider, looking for the one living or inert thing she hadn’t wearied of. Turning and turning and not finding it. Finding nothing.
I’ve never tired of Pearl. I would never have tired of her. Even her round writing I love and her white plimsolls. Every hair on her body. Her amazement at treefrogs. Her terror of water. Everything. And I know this – know it without knowing it: that for one person to love every last and least thing about another isn’t as rare as you might believe. What is rare is for all that to bring the person happiness. What it brings is exhaustion.
I didn’t see this till the night of Pearl’s secret. I deluded myself that my life as Martin, holding Pearl in my arms, was going to come one day. I’d always believed it without once saying it. This was the name of my future, Martin and Pearl, Estb. c. 1976.
It wasn’t surprising then – not to me – that when she told me about Timmy I flung a lamp at her and then a book and the vase of cornflowers and all my invalid’s pillows. And then I flung another much more terrible thing: I flung myself.
The lamp knocked Pearl over and she fell onto the floor. Then the vase landed by her head and broke into fragments and the water spilled into her hair.
She tried to get up. She kept saying: ‘Don’t, Martin! Don’t!’ but I told her to shut up. I said I didn’t want to hear any words from her mouth ever again unless they were words of love for me.
I knelt over her. Using all my strength, I took her thin wrists in my hands and pinned them down behind her head, among the pieces of broken glass.
I could feel my two triangles of wounds tearing and starting to bleed into my bandages, but I thought, mouths are wounds worse than these, the pain of what mouths say is worse.
I opened my mouth and put it on Pearl’s. She tried to twist her head away from me but where her head moved, mine followed. My head is as heavy as stone. It’s so full of longed-for things.
I kissed her. I put my tongue into her mouth and sucked all her sweetness. I drank her. My head grew light with the sweetness of my precious thing. And I laid my pain on her breasts. My blood came through the gauze and stained her.
She was weeping. Her face was hot with sorrow. And gradually I felt it transferred to me, her burning misery. One moment I was giddy with the sweetness of Pearl and the next I was heavy and inert and on fire with shame.
I stopped kissing her. I knelt between her legs. She was sobbing. She put her hands over her face, blocking me from her view.
‘Pearl,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me. You’re my precious thing …’
She got to her feet. She began putting all her belongings into her suitcase. It was night. I tried to warn her not to go anywhere but she paid no attention. All she kept sayi
ng was: ‘I am not a thing. I am not a thing. I am not a thing!’
Thing. Person. Beloved. What matters is that she was precious to me. It’s not only the naming of something that makes us love. It’s everything entire.
Now, she’s gone. I lie in my boat and ask the universe to fall on me and crush me in its freezing glitter. But there’s no sign of the universe. It has moved on.
My life is lived from hour to hour: an hour with Sterns, an hour out here on the water. My boat’s number is one. When my hour ends, the attendant hails me through a megaphone: ‘You in Number One, Sir, come in.’
I didn’t want summer to arrive. Or autumn. I tried to slow down time. In summer or in autumn – I didn’t know which – my brother was going to marry Pearl. I wanted to be dead by then.
I sat in the Liberty office doing drawings of rice fields and grazing oxen with napalm bombs about to fall on them. I put myself anonymously into every picture.
Tony was gone. Rob was in love with a girl called Electra. I told him: ‘I feel as if we’re all in a Greek tragedy.’ He said: ‘Mart, keep a hold on what you still have, hey?’
Zorba’s closed. I don’t know where everyone went, Nico and Ari and so on. I just arrived there one evening and the restaurant was gone and the front was covered with fliers for demos and rock concerts. I stood and stared at it for about ten minutes and then I went home and ate a marmalade sandwich and remembered Irene. I said to Rob the next day: ‘There’s not a lot to keep a hold on, you know.’
I started counting the things I had left. One of them was Cord. I hadn’t written to him for a long time. I’d been too cowardly to tell him what I’d done to myself. I thought, the sight of me with a wispy beard would be more wounding than the sight of some geese making an arrow in the sky.
But now I wanted to see Cord. He was seventy-eight. I wanted to sit in an armchair opposite him and drink Wincarnis and talk about history. Not the Hakluyt kind of history but my own. I wanted to know the minute-by-minute truth about Livia’s death, where and how she went and why. Because I’d been thinking, it’s not too late to take glider lessons; I still have most of Miss McRae’s money; she may even have known I’d need to get out of this world.
I wrote to Cord. I described myself. I said: ‘I’m more Martin than when you last saw me. I wear horn-rimmed glasses, like Ringo Starr. The hair on my face is brownish. My chest is flat but scarred. The next operation will be to remove my womb.’
He wrote back straight away, using the old green ink. He said: ‘Is it a sad business or is it a happy thing? That’s all I care about. Which is it, bad or good?’
I didn’t write an answer to this. I got on a train to Norwich and Cord met me in his new car which was called an Austin Allegro. He said: ‘I drive it so slowly, I call it the Andante.’
He didn’t comment on my appearance. I expected him to faint when he saw me or run away, as if I were a trunk road arriving to obliterate the water-meadows of Gresham Tears, but he didn’t. All he said was: ‘Martin Ward, I presume?’
During the drive in the Andante, he asked: ‘Is it for the better, then? That’s the thing.’
I looked out at the hedgerows of south Norfolk here and there green, here and there not. I said: ‘Yes. Except that it isn’t finished and never can be, really.’
‘No,’ said Cord. ‘That stands to reason.’
Then a little further on, as we were going through the town of Bungay, he said: ‘We’re all something else inside. Old Varindra explained that to me. But he said it’s a mistake to think the inner thing is fully formed. It can’t possibly be. Nothing grows properly in the dark.’
When we arrived at Gresham Tears, we had a meal of boiled beef, followed by mandarin oranges from a little tin. Cord was addicted to mandarin oranges. He said: ‘When you grow old you need sweetness in things, heaven knows why. As that Dylan chap used to say, the answer’s blowing about somewhere but nobody finds it.’
After supper we sat by the fire, drinking. I’d brought something to give Cord. It was Livia’s silver locket with a piece of her hair inside. I said: ‘I kept it for all the years I was a girl. Now I want you to have it.’
He put it down on the frayed arm of his chair and stared at it.
‘I remember this,’ he said. ‘It’s not Livia’s hair, you know.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘My mother used to tell me it was Livia’s hair.’
‘No. It’s Sophia’s hair, Livia’s mother. Your great-grandmother. Liv had it since she was a child.’
‘Why didn’t my mother know that?’ I asked.
‘I expect she forgot,’ said Cord. ‘What belongs to whom gets obscured by time.’
I was silent for a minute, drinking my drink, warming my feet. Then I said: ‘Livia’s dying has always been obscured by time. I’ve never known about it properly, like where was she going in the glider?’
‘Nowhere,’ said Cord.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘She wasn’t going anywhere. She was just circling. She took off from the field and – ’
‘Which field? Where?’
‘Place called Ashby Cross. Ashby Cross Glider Club. Not far from here.’
‘And?’
‘She was doing a circuit, that’s all. Floating on thermals. Turning.’
‘And then?’
‘She was on her second circuit. She lost height very suddenly. I wasn’t watching, thank God. I wasn’t there. But she lost her thermal and she started to come down and down. People at the club said she could’ve made it in except for the wires.’
‘What wires?’
‘Pylon wires. Electric. I mean, that’s why I said to those chaps at Mountview, don’t do this electric stuff to my daughter. Once was enough.’
‘She flew into the electric cables?’
‘Yes.’
‘She was electrocuted?’
‘Yes, old chap.’
‘Why wasn’t I ever told that?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I imagined it all wrongly.’
‘Did you? What did you imagine?’
‘An impossible thing: that she just floated into the sky and disappeared.’
‘Well,’ said Cord, ‘there you are. What we dream up is invariably better, eh?’
We had a game of Scrabble. Cord made the word ‘quietude’ on a triple, using all his letters, and scored a hundred and thirty-three in one go. We carried on drinking. I had the letters y, a, a, x, t, l, l, in my tray and was praying to be able to make the word ‘axolotl’ by some miracle when Cord suddenly looked at me and said: ‘Now that you’re here, Martin, I think it’s time for you to go and sort things out with Estelle.’
I didn’t look up. I moved my letters around. ‘Is she at Mountview?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Cord.
I gave up on ‘axolotl’. I put down ‘tilly’.
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ said Cord.
‘A lamp,’ I said. ‘A gas lamp.’
‘It’s got an e,’ said Cord. ‘T-i-1-l-e-y.’
‘Not always,’ I said. ‘That’s an alternative spelling. I can’t see my mother, Cord. Don’t ask me to.’
‘When, then?’
‘I don’t know. Never, probably. Everybody in Swaithey is in the past. That was another life and it’s finished.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Cord. ‘Est isn’t in the past. She’s sitting in the dark, watching television and waiting.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.
‘She won’t say what she’s waiting for. Perhaps it’s for you. For your forgiveness.’
‘Don’t, Cord,’ I said. ‘Don’t say anything more. Quietude, please.’
An awful thing happened then. Cord began to cry. He looked exactly like he’d looked at Mountview, when my mother had wiped her face with her hair.
I wanted to put my arm round him, but I just sat there. I removed ‘tilly’ from the board. I let him cry on.
‘Listen, Cord,’ I said after a whi
le. ‘Tell her I died. Then she won’t wait.’
I went back to Sterns.
I told him that in my dreams I made identity parades of everyone I’d once loved and shot them to pieces with an automatic rifle. Pearl became a thousand particles of matter.
He said: ‘Consider this, Martin. The mind can get tired of both the internal and external landscape. And I believe yours is exhausted with both. I want to recommend that you leave England for a while.’
‘To go where?’ I said.
‘It probably doesn’t matter where.’
‘Do you mean a holiday? Mine isn’t the kind of life you have holidays from.’
‘No,’ said Sterns, ‘I don’t mean a holiday. I mean a long period of time away. I can get you in to have the hysterectomy done as soon as you feel up to it and once you’ve recovered from that I believe you should go and look at another place, another bit of the world. All you’ve ever experienced is England. Buy a globe and look at it, Martin. Remind yourself how small England is and how vast all the rest.’
I didn’t say anything. I felt astonished.
‘Well?’ said Sterns.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’
‘Think about it now. You say you want to die because there’s nothing left in England that’s precious to you any more. You’re twenty-seven. Go and find something new.’
I said: ‘The problem is the summer. I don’t want to live through that.’
Sterns made a note on his pad. Beales used to write everything down; Sterns only wrote things down now and then.
‘You can have your surgery in the summer,’ he said. ‘We can cradle you through it in that way. As you know already, surgery alters time.’
That evening I borrowed an atlas from Rob. We knelt on the floor with our bottoms in the air, turning the pages.
‘Trouble is, Mart,’ he said, ‘you know no one anywhere, except Tony in Sydney and he betrayed us for that bleddy Bella and her crazy hair.’
‘Knowing people doesn’t matter,’ I said.
‘Yes, it does,’ he said. ‘You’ve never been an exile. I have. I know what matters and what’s of no consequence.’