The Road From Langholm Avenue

by Michael Graeme

Chapter 23

  She did not invite me to her room and I was glad. We bade each other good night and parted on the landing at around eleven with little more than a smile and a wave. We seemed on good terms and had I not been weighed down with so much foreboding, I might have cherished the thought of the coming day, the day I would spend with Rachel Standish. But as I lay alone, a million miles from sleep, I could not see how any of this would ever work. She knew nothing of my feelings. She knew no more of me than in the days when my only reality had been to gaze upon the back of her head, as we'd studied the legacies of Newton and Galileo amid dark-wood labs and the smell of Bunsen burners. And how could she ever hope to know me? The person I had been, the youth, was gone and only in my wildest dreams were she and I the same.

  I sought breakfast bleary eyed. We had agreed to meet in the lounge at eight thirty but she wasn't there.

  "A message from Ms. Standish, sir," came a voice. It was the gent who’d checked me in me the night before.

  "Oh?"

  "Her apologies but she had to leave early. She left you this note."

  "Note?"

  I sat down to breakfast and tore open the envelope. There was a piece of Dunnet Arms note paper inside and a brief message. It was her handwriting I noticed first, and it shocked me that I should have known it. I remembered now stolen glances at her notes in those dark-wood labs, the memories coming back to me in flashes, and as always they were startling in their clarity, in their detail,… more than was surely normal. There were people I had worked alongside every day for twenty years, people who had gone from me now, died or retired to their sheds and whose names I could no longer bring to mind. So it seemed impossible to me that I could recognise the small and delicately ordered flow of a girl's hand from across such an immense void.

  Tom,

  I'm Sorry. I've had to go. My pager went off last night. A meeting has been called at Bexleys for eight thirty this morning. The bill's settled, so don't worry. I'll call you. I owe you a walk down a beach somewhere… . and very soon. I promise,…

  Rachel.

  Rachel! A simple enough word. Two syllables, six letters, beginning with 'R', but a word that had been an assassin's blade against my chest for most of my life, a blade thrust inward a fraction at every mention, a nagging reminder of the hopeless dreams to which we are all prone.

  Rachel - stab!

  Rachel, Rachel - stab-stab!

  Was it true, I wondered? Would she call? Or had I made a fool of myself and now she was avoiding me? She had rejected me perhaps, but like everything about this mad affair, I could not be certain. Then the waitress came up and asked if I would like my eggs scrambled or fried.

  "Scrambled," I replied. "Thoroughly scrambled."

  There was a cold wind blowing from the fells, a steady, unrelenting press of icy air. There was the bite of winter in it, but at least it was dry and the Midget fired up eagerly. She had not seen the car, had not been able to judge the substance of my spirit from it. It was as well, I thought, for in the cold light of day, the poor little thing seemed ever more fragile and shabby. My father was right. I should have kept the Rover with its good ride, its electronic ignition and its air-conditioning - a contemporary voice. The Midget spoke only of old dreams, of youth, of days when my life's ambition had amounted to nothing more than to fall in love, and have that love returned.

  I threaded the car down the narrow lane and over the hill, to Goredale, and as I drove, I felt a change inside of me. It was like a slow focusing of emotion and of thought, and with it came an awareness that I was perhaps reaching the end of my journey. I had travelled back in time, and I was looking out at the world from the treacherous landscape of my middle teens.

  It came to me then that I had not chosen the course of my life at all. I had not stood at a cross-roads, as I had imagined, and made a conscious choice of direction. Rather, I had drifted while still drunk on thoughts of Her and as the currents carried me, I had imagined my every move being made as if in a scene from a film with the caption: what would She be thinking if She could see me now? Would She be more inclined to love me?

  Slowly, I had been sucked into the world of work, a world revolving around Derby's, my life changing shape by imperceptible degrees until She had become just one piece of the foundation on which everything else was built. I had not stopped thinking of her, but my world had become filled with the curvaceous bottoms of regal secretaries and the filthy chatter of girls on the assembly line. Indeed, suddenly there had been a chorus line of girls, baring their milky breasts and shouting: "Look at me, Tom. Look at me!"

  Would I have done anything else if She had loved me? Would I have been pulled into a different orbit? I couldn't see how. My talents were already established when I had met her: my skill with a chisel edged pencil, my ability to form a three dimensional shape in my mind from a jumble of flattened views. Derby's cannon had already been primed and aimed in my direction. In that respect She was entirely blameless.

  So, I asked myself, what now?

  Few of us can face the future and know with certainty the way ahead, and in the absence of certainty, it takes courage to pick a course from a handful of choices, each one looking the same. There are those who will say one must choose the path that feels right, regardless of logic, but it seems to me as if that's just another way of doing what most of us do anyway and that's go with the flow.

  I supposed that was all I could do again. I had to simply push myself out into the current and see where it took me. But my journey had thus far been such a profoundly moving experience, I had been expecting some equally profound revelation at the end of it, as if for my endeavours I would be rewarded with a deeper understanding of my life. Anything else seemed like a ridiculous anticlimax.

  I parked by the roadside and followed a little path along a valley that cut deep into the open fell. The scene was bleak, the wind cold and buffeting as I made my way into the ever narrowing gorge. Finally I turned sharp right around a pillar of weathered limestone to find myself suddenly and dramatically drawn into the scar.

  It was stupendous, like stepping out of mundane reality and into the weird landscape of a fevered imagination. Goredale is a vast chasm, the limestone cliffs rising hundreds of feet and overhanging, dripping water upon the boulder strewn floor of the gorge. And before me was a wall of rock bursting with white water, with energy, the earth and the air vibrating with an intimidating roar.

  I approached timidly and looked up at the tumbled wall over which the water burst. There is a climb, in the thick of the fall, into a higher chamber, where there is more mad, roaring water. I had scrambled up it once, with my father, years ago. Now, the upper chamber seemed to beckon, but all I could do was stand paralysed by the roar of water as it spurted from every corner of the rock. I could see no way up. Then I spotted a man picking his way carefully over the last few boulders near the top. He paused and looked down.

  I felt a moment of confusion. "Dad?" But it was just some crusty old geezer out for a walk. I waved and he responded with a tilt of his head before disappearing into the noise and vapour of the upper chamber.

  There comes a point though when your brain tires of making sense of things, a point when it says: 'for fuck's sake'. I felt it then and chided myself, told myself to bloody well get a grip on things and sort my life out. Get a grip! How many times had my mother said that to my father in the depths of his despair? "For goodness sake, Jack. Get a grip will you?" But it had been futile and I understood now that certain forms of madness must take their course, that no amount of interference from our conscious minds, nor the straight jacket of prescribed medicine makes a jot of difference. There is a cycle, a slow working out of these things.

  I drove home slowly, feeling drained and disappointed. I would have to sleep soon, or surely Eleanor was right and it would make me ill. I thought about the kids, what I should get them for Christmas - wondered for a moment if I was allowed to get them anything, or if that was Alistair's place now. It was stupi
d, but I really didn't know - so far away from reality I'd been pushed.

  I thought of Annie then and wondered if she hated me so much, or if she'd just grown cold. And it horrified me the realisation that all the years we had been together I had never loved her, never known a moment of love. And Carol? There seemed a certain pragmatic desperation in our affair - two middle aged romantics, battening down the hatches and fixing to endure a storm in the comfort of a stranger's arms, if only because it's marginally better, I imagine, to drown in the embrace of another, than to drown alone.

  Metaphor, metaphor. I saw them everywhere that day until I began to wonder if it was the last resort of a soul on the verge of surrender, to seek meaning in the aerodynamic wash of mud splattered wagons and to read significance into the spontaneous waves of lone pedestrians from the tops of motorway bridges. I thought I was overdoing it when I finally arrived home to find a car blocking my usual spot outside my father's house. Blocking, obstructing, impeding,… a stranger! But no, this was no stranger, at least not quite. It was my uncle Eric.

  Eric? I hadn't seen him for years.

  He was standing in the doorway when I approached, a tall dour looking chap in his middle seventies with a full head of snowy hair. The last time we'd met had been the day of my father's marriage to Eleanor. I'd gone round to his house to persuade him to come, knowing it would have meant a lot to my father. But his last words to me had been that he thought my father, his brother, was bonkers and wanted nothing to do with it. I still burned with resentment every time I thought of that day. The same went for the rest of my family - my aunts, my uncles, the jolly souls who'd bounced me on their knees as a child and produced their shiny coins for ice-cream treats - all of them suddenly grown old and cold, and angry - because my father had dared to do something unconventional, because he had dared to please himself.

  They'd kept their distance since the wedding, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps still spiteful, so his visit today was even more puzzling until I read it in his eyes,… read it before he'd even opened his mouth, read it in the grey stillness that seemed to hang over the house, the street, the town.

  "Er,.. hello Uncle."

  He looked solemn and uncomfortable and there was the vacant stare of a profound shock still in his eyes. He placed his hand on my shoulder. "It's your dad," he whispered.

  Chapter 24

  We exchanged only a few words and my memory of them is vague. My had father suffered a stroke in the early hours of that morning. He was in hospital. Eleanor was with him. It was bad. I particularly remember Eric saying that as we drove over to the hospital and how he thought I should prepare myself for the worst.

  We found Eleanor by chance, wandering the sterile corridors. She seemed almost transparent, shuffling slowly as if sleepwalking.

  "Eleanor?"

  She looked up in a daze at the sound of my voice, then homed in on me, shuffling slowly but surely in my direction like a zombie. Then she draped her arms around my neck and I knew it was too late.

  "He's gone," she said. Then after a moment: "They say it's all right to see him. I'll take you."

  I didn't want to.

  "It might be better," she said. "You should see him, Tom."

  "No. I,… couldn't bear it!"

  My uncle graced Eleanor with only the most cursory of glances and went off alone. We took a seat together and remained for a while, staring at the floor.

  "What happened?"

  "It was this morning," she said. "I just thought he was having a lie in. It must have happened in his sleep."

  "Did he say anything?"

  "No. He never came round." For a moment, her daze seemed to crystallise into something more tangible and terrible. She stared ahead, wide eyed and held her hands to her face. "Oh God, Tom. Oh God!"

  She was shaken, and seemed even paler than usual - if that was possible. Her hands trembled - I saw how she had to keep them clasped together and I remember fearing that this was something that might break her - and I needed her to be strong, strong for both of us, because only Eleanor could get me through it. Only Eleanor could bridge the void that had suddenly opened up.

  It was not the first time either of us had passed this way, but it did not lessen the sense of having all the pieces of our lives suddenly scattered at our feet. And there were so many pieces, the task of picking them up one by one seemed too great even to contemplate. In the beginning and for a long time, I refused to believe he was gone. I should have taken Eleanor's advice, and seen him instead of sitting there, numb with shock, afraid to admit for even a second that any of it might be true. I knew the pieces would never go back as before. Sure, they would go back somehow, eventually, but in a different order because so much of who we are depends upon the people in our lives: my mother, my father, my children, Annie, Eleanor… Rachel… all of them, a strange brew, the essence of my life. Some I could touch, some were only memories. And if one was taken from life to be transferred into memory, all the others had to shuffle round to make up the difference.

  Eleanor had gone to the ladies room, to splash her face with water. I was alone, gazing at the flecked patterns on the floor tiles, when suddenly, intruding into my reverie came a pair of shoes, brown brogues, a little muddy and in want of polish. I looked up to see Eric leaning over me. He cleared his throat.

  "Why not come stay and with us, Tom? I mean - until - well, you know - things are settled, like."

  "Thanks, Uncle but I'm fine. It's Eleanor I'm worried about. She'll need someone."

  "Hasn't she got a brother or something?"

  "Sure," I said. "Phil. I'd better call him, let him know."

  "Yes. That would be best. If she went. I mean, to stay with her brother."

  "Well, I wasn't thinking that."

  "No, but it would be best, wouldn't it? I mean, like… "

  Best? Best? He was driving at something, always driving at something and in his pompous way always making a bloody mess of it. Was he nervous about me and Eleanor staying in the same house, alone, together? Did it disturb his sense of propriety? If that had been all then I might simply have laughed and told him not to worry, but I sensed there was more.

  "What is it, Uncle?"

  We spied Eleanor shuffling towards us again and Eric gave my shoulder a parting squeeze. "Never mind. We'll talk later, Tom."

  "Sure. But we'll be fine. Thanks."

  We buried my father because Eleanor thought he might want to be with my mum, in the same grave. I wasn't so sure, but in the end I didn't see how it mattered. After all wherever he was, wherever we went to when we died, it was not to sit in some hole in the ground.

  I'd like to think he was climbing Goredale Scar, or hurling bits of coal at baton wielding bobbies, and then writing about it in his memoirs. But in none of those activities did I see him hand in hand with my mother, who had always been more at home with her knitting and her Coronation Street, tut-tutting at his eccentricities. He was alone, always alone in his deeds and in his thoughts, as I supposed in the end I would be also.

  They all turned up for the funeral, a huddle of poisonous black and grey suits and dresses, gathered around that pitiful hole, amid a jumble of cockeyed and pitiful headstones. I hadn't been back to the parish church at Middleton since my mother had died, twenty years ago. And as we stood there, I remembered coming as a child, sitting through Sunday school, sitting through services in the ornate Victorian church believing in my innocence that since it was God's house He must have lived through the door behind the choir stalls, and if He did then why did he never come out to take the service?

  For all that early indoctrination, I was left with no sense of certainty that my mother or my father had actually passed on to another place. In fact, I was left merely empty in the knowledge that I had lost them, as surely as one might lose an essential a part of you, like an arm or a leg.

  The vicar was drawing it all to a close when everyone jumped out of their skins at the thunderous passing of an express train, conspicuous in its
red livery - the track ran along an embankment barely fifty yards from where we stood. I suppose it would have been too much to ask that they should have painted it black for the day, or had it pass by more slowly. The vicar ploughed on bravely, but his words were lost in the dreadful din.

  Life goes on, I thought.

  I looked up at the train as it rattled full pelt and I wondered what the lazy eyed passengers would think as they gazed down from their seats, upon our little gathering, our little drama, lost in the clamour of their world. Eleanor was hanging from my arm, hanging close as if she feared the others would block her out if she dared to let go.

  "How awful," she whispered. "We shouldn't have brought him here. There must be better places than this."

  I could feel the ground shaking, like at the waterfall in Goredale, a terrific wave of energy passing beneath us.

  "It'll stop him nodding off of an afternoon, that's for sure," I said, which made her snort with laughter, a gesture quick to draw daggers from the others.

  "It makes no difference," I told her. "He's not here. I don't know where he is and maybe all that's left of him is what we carry in our heads. But he's not here Eleanor."

  We hung together on the way back, during the long slow drive in the black taxi. Eric and Aunt Hilda, a small shrivelled woman, sat opposite, both of them mute but I read discomfort in their eyes. They had not accepted Eleanor as anything other than - as Eleanor had once put it - an old man's whore. They had not taken time to understand things in greater depth, thinking that by their prejudice they were somehow protecting him. They had known little of the insult and the hurt they had caused these past few years, the last few years of his life, and I found I could not forgive any of them for it.

  It was an equally forlorn little gathering in the function room of the Dun Bull - fresh salmon and cucumber on finger tea-cakes - the taste of death, of someone's passing, and the whole room was hung over by a pall of wretched cigarette smoke. It was Aunt Hilda's idea. My father had never been in the Dun Bull in his life but she said it was the proper thing to do - emphasis on the word proper with a glance at Eleanor. But Eleanor had been vacant with shock and insensitive to such subtle slights.