‘It flies.’ He smiled omnisciently.
‘So does a daddy-long-legs.’
‘It’s a bird in so far as it flies and a mammal in so far as it is viviparous and suckles its young. Consider yourself lucky that you don’t have to classify it.’
Then he told her that, joking aside, he greatly admired her plants, that if humanity had their gift of photosynthesis, the world would be more efficient, more orderly and more humane.
There was no ignoring him. Even when she was in the back office with Cookie, she was aware of Joey below in the shop and of a quirky, unconventional commentary that could only have come from him. The good side of his face reminded her of Alicia’s, because both faces expressed a conscious containment that seemed to hint at a passionate and tortured life within.
She switched off the light and got into bed, knowing that she would not sleep. Impulsive yearning was what gave her emotional life its character. The yearnings came and went in a hundred different guises. Last summer she’d heard an American girl telling her boyfriend about three white leopards sitting under a juniper tree. The phrase had an extraordinary effect on her. She kept imagining them white and feline in the dark shade of the tree, and she told herself that she must flee the hotel and the headland because she would never find them here. She stayed put because she knew that no matter where she went there would be loss. The life of the headland and the hotel was the only life she knew. Even if she should find the white leopards in another place, she would lose the afternoon light coming into her bedroom in summer, all brightness and reflection, as if the sea below had become the sky above. She would lose the September sunsets, too, the western sky full of golden clouds, far off and smooth, brushed into haunting forms that threatened to turn into spotless leopards.
Going away now would mean deserting Gulban, and that she could not do. Once she had feared him. Since his illness she had come to feel affection for him. On his sick-bed he had made her respond to the passionate life still left in him.
She dozed and woke again, wondering if the nurse had called her. The hotel was quiet. Her pillow was wet with perspiration and her back felt stiff and cold. In her dream she’d been naked, and no matter how she dressed, her clothes always melted away. In the distance she heard the clip-clop of hooves in a gallop. She looked round. There was no horse. She was walking briskly along a dusty road with a tussocky moor on each side. The hooves were ringing behind her again. She turned and saw sparks but still no horse. She began to run, her body naked and her loose hair flying. She ran faster and faster with the clip-clop-clip-clop still behind her. She was out of breath and weak at the knees. She saw a stakelike rock by the roadside which she embraced with both arms to keep herself from falling. Then she felt a forefoot on each shoulder and a pulsing warmth against her back. She looked round again, and all she saw was the straight white road laid ribbonlike over the ugly moor. After a while her strength of will and limb returned. She crossed the road to a still pond in order to wash the hot slime from her back before day finally yielded to night. Kneeling, she cupped her hands and again felt the weight of the forefeet on her shoulders. Afraid to look round, she groped with her right hand and found a slack and wrinkled belly pressing against her buttocks. Further down her hand encountered a moist and loamy morass, palpitating and hotly protruding. She retched twice in revulsion. The invisible horse that had been pursuing her was a mare.
For a long time she lay with the bedclothes over her head trying not to think of her dream. She pictured white leopards, whiter than newly shorn sheep, and she thought it would be amusing to make them jump over a stile one after another until … Then Cookie was stretched in the bed behind her, embracing her closely, holding her breasts and kissing the nape of her neck. She had no idea how he had come to her bed. He did not speak, and she turned and kissed him warmly on the mouth. It was a kind of miracle, a celebration of wholeness and rightness after the unspeakable horror of her dream. The bed was warm and sweet, and their lips made no sound as they moved. She became aware of far-away music, the sound of a river flowing and frothing between worn stones with summer breezes in the gorse above. All sense of withholding left her. She lay open to sunlight, a landscape on a day in summer. The day passed without her knowing and she became a still water full of still reflections, all of them whole and perfect.
He went without word or sound. The door closed behind him. She listened for receding footsteps and heard none. A sweet languor had spread thickly through her limbs, yet she felt neither weakness nor weariness, only an intoxicating sense of rightness and ripeness. A dry, hard capsule had split open and discharged its toxic contents. For a moment loss was forgotten. All was gain. She fell asleep on her back remembering the uncompromising firmness of his body in the bed and his hesitant presence in the back office during the day. She dreamt that she had confessed their sin to Father Bosco, who, before giving her a light penance with a wink, diagnosed her spiritual malaise.
‘You’ve spent all your life possessed by only one devil. Now at last you know what it’s like to be possessed by seven, one for every day of the week. What you needed all along was a man with the two cardinal virtues, energy and lunacy.’
‘I love my devils, Father Bosco. You must never attempt to cast them out.’
‘Of course I shall cast them out,’ he reprimanded. ‘And when I do, seventy times seven devils will take their place and your state will be seventy times better than before.’
‘Oh, Father Bosco, Father Bosco, in heaven you’ll set the Lord’s table on a roar.’ She thrust her hands deep into the slit-pockets of his soutane and hugged his buttocks with innocent gratitude.
‘Now, you must tell me who put the seven devils in you, so that I may go and shrive him right away. It was Cookie, wasn’t it? Tell the truth.’
‘Not Cookie.’ She tried not to blush. ‘It was Slash Gildea.’
‘I should have known,’ said Father Bosco gravely. ‘All the others see love as a game that’s been played before. They sit down at the table only to find that the cards they’ve been dealt bear the thumb-marks of more skilful and daring players. Slash alone had not heard of Paolo and Francesca, Tristan and Isolde, and Héloïse and Abelard.’
‘It made no difference.’ She laughed brashly in his face. ‘He knew all about Adam and Eve.’
She woke again, certain that she’d heard the click of a door closing. She pulled on her dressing-gown and crossed the landing to Gulban’s room. Gulban was still slumbering and the nurse was dozing in her chair.
‘No change,’ she said sleepily. ‘He hasn’t moved since you looked in before.’
On the way back to her room, a strip of light under Father Bosco’s door caught her eye. She returned and asked the nurse if she would like a cup of coffee. The nurse pointed to a thermos flask on the night table and said that she’d just had a cup of tea.
‘Has Father Bosco been in to see Gulban since bedtime?’
‘No,’ said the nurse.
‘He’s in the next room. If there’s any change in the patient, let him know at once.’
She went back to her own room and stood by the window in the dark with the curtain pulled round her hips. The flat ground below and the hill beyond were enmeshed in shadow that glimmered with little pointed patches of light. Fort Knox had become a white box in a cardboard enclosure, and, where the river banks were low, the water flashed intermittently in the moonlight. The scene was an oil painting that showed a bulging seine of silver herring, dreamlike and unreal. Her midnight visitor had come out of that mysterious landscape. He had come and gone, leaving behind no visible sign of his visit.
Father Bosco was kneeling beside his bed with his head in his hands. He had heard footsteps on the landing. It was after three. The night was endless and the fire which Pauline had lit in the grate had gone out.
‘Please, God, keep my mind sweet,’ he prayed. ‘Through middle age and old keep my thoughts pure.’
After arriving at the hotel that afternoon, he had
seen her going up the stairs. She was wearing a light green dress with buttons up the back, and the stress on the fabric seemed so great as she climbed that the buttons looked in danger of coming undone. Slightly breathless, he had turned away and peered out between her cheese plants at the calm, solid hill beyond. The world was a sane and orderly place. A place of objects and of people as objects. All the chaos in the universe seemed to be concentrated inside his head.
After she’d wished him good night, he could not sleep. The hotel fell silent, and he saw himself stealing naked to her room where she lay on her back on a cold slab that did not in the least resemble a bed. With his thurible he walked clockwise round the slab, going chink-chink-chink as he incensed her naked body. He disliked incensing. He was over six feet tall, and it made him feel slightly ridiculous. He bent down to kiss the little lappet of flesh below her navel and found that what met his lips was the smooth, cold slab itself, which had shrunk to the size of an altar stone. He raised his eyes, expecting to see her enshrouded in the fading cloud of incense smoke above his head. Then he found himself lying face downward on the slab, his body rigid, his legs and arms outstretched. He levitated until he seemed to balance on the top of an upright spindle that pressed painfully into his belly. An invisible hand gave his feet a shove. He began to revolve, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. He became a spinning top, yet strangely his head remained clear. The spindle penetrated his intestines. He came to rest on the slab with the spindle deep inside him. Pauline appeared by his side, and with a ceremonial stoop kissed the nape of his neck in the V of his priest’s collar.
‘I’ve been revolving on my own axle,’ he explained.
‘Not axle, but axis, Father Bosco. An axis, as Joey will tell you, is an imaginary line about which a body rotates. Don’t feel ashamed. No one will ever see your axis.’
He woke up hot and disconcerted, questioning the subtle deceptions of the spirit at the mercy of hungering flesh. He tried to pray in bed. Then he knelt beside the bed with the window open so that the austere night air might purify his thumping heart.
‘If only I were open to sweetness,’ he said. ‘A man who is open to sweetness is open to grace. A man who is not can only know self-loathing and defilement.’
He got into bed again. The sheets were cold and stiff with starch. He lay rigidly on his back, forcing himself to make an inventory of things that had no seed of carnality in them: jagged rocks, iron filings, missals, monstrances, knives and forks. When he ran out of items, he thought of Joey as a boy torturing small creatures. He would build miniature dams beside rivers and watch them burst their banks and carry kicking beetles away. As he grew older, he became more sophisticated in his cruelty. He would play on his victims’ greed, and sometimes in a spirit of generosity he would arrange his ‘catastrophes’ so that his prisoners might escape by using their intelligence. Though he no longer contrived natural disasters, he hadn’t changed. He was blind to beauty and spirituality, and he was a bad influence on Cookie. It was impossible to envisage a role for either of them once the hotel became a home for old priests. Pauline, on the other hand, was industrious, level-headed and loyal. Her management would ensure that the accounts showed a credit balance. There were dangers, of course. Spiritual dangers. Yet they must and would be overcome. He would not flee temptation, he would face it.
Before falling asleep, he made a kind of declaration. ‘I am a soldier of Christ,’ he said. ‘My ideal of conduct must always be perfect steadiness under fire.’
Chapter 25
In the moment of waking she heard the cuckoo calling from across the river. The clear-sounding notes gave no sense of repetition but rather of a gloriously antiphonal celebration. Her awakening was a reawakening to the beauty of sound, shape and movement, to the mystery of the familiar made unfamiliar, to a landscape that had been moulded by dreams.
When she went downstairs, she found Cookie making toast in the kitchen. He smiled a casual good morning and, with his back to her, ground a handful of coffee beans from the big glass jar on the shelf above the work top.
‘You look tired,’ she said.
‘I woke at four. I couldn’t get back to sleep.’
‘I had a look at Gulban around three. The nurse says that he’s had a peaceful night.’
There was silence as Cookie buttered his toast. He was the most handsome of the brothers. His sandy hair and thinly freckled nose, and the light, golden fuzz on the back of his hands, communicated a sense of luminosity that made her think of a cornfield by the sea. She waited self-consciously and self-critically, determined to make him speak.
‘The last nine months haven’t been easy for you,’ he said at length. ‘It’s time you had a break from the sick-room.’
She felt a stab of puzzlement. She thought of touching the hair on his arm to see if it would dispel the fog of non-communication in the room.
‘I wouldn’t mind an evening out,’ she admitted. ‘Why don’t we eat in town for a change? We’ve eaten here every evening since Christmas.’
‘We could go to the Atlantic Grill this evening.’
‘I’ve eaten there before. Let’s try somewhere different. What about one of the hotels?’
He drove her to town in the Land-Rover and they ate in a hotel overlooking the sea. There was a patch of beach, a low cliff and a stone breakwater from which two boys were fishing. They sat by a window watching the light of evening on the broken water. The conventional menu required little study and the main course came with an abundance of insipid vegetables from the hotel freezer. She sipped her wine abstemiously and tried to forget the excesses of her last evening out with Jack. Cookie was relaxed and detached. Unlike Jack, he did not chaff the waitresses. When he’d finished the entrée, he commented wrily on the absence of haute in the cuisine.
‘Have you finished your thesis?’ she asked.
‘I’ve finished the writing. I’ve still got to check the footnotes.’
‘You haven’t finished it, then.’
‘I may never finish it. When I look through it now, I feel that I’ve outgrown it. I began with great enthusiasm, I felt my insights were original and true. Now I know that all I’ve been doing is coating the crumbling old edifice with a different shade of emulsion. It could well get me a doctorate, but even if it did, I wouldn’t feel inclined to call myself “Doctor”. The word has been devalued somewhat since Samuel Johnson’s day.’
‘A doctorate might get you a lectureship.’
‘That sounds like putting out to sea. I’d prefer to wait for a better tide. In a sense we’re all in the same boat. Gulban is slumped in the stern and he hasn’t released his grip on the tiller.’
‘You should be making plans, none the less.’
‘I may stay here or I may go away. If I go away, I shall go so far that coming back will be out of the question. Gulban can’t have long to live. I’d like to stay on for what little time he has left.’
‘I know you’re fond of him, though you don’t show it.’
‘Neither does Joey. Father Bosco is the only one of us who performs his filial duties with a flourish.’
His ironic laugh dispelled all possibility of ambiguity.
‘It’s a pity he gets such short shrift from Joey. He means well, he never does less than his best,’ she remarked.
‘Joey sees Bosco as a cunning hunter, a man of the field. He sees himself as a plain man, dwelling in tents.’
‘Where does that leave you?’
‘Neither in the field nor in the tent, which is where I wish to be.’
‘All three of you have been wounded in different ways.’
‘You and I have been wounded in the same way,’ he said. ‘We have both experienced possession and suffered loss.’ His alert brown eyes registered neither hope nor regret.
‘After loss should come retrieval.’
‘Not always. Life can be loss, loss, loss. It can also be loss, search, search with no possibility of retrieval.’
‘You�
�re a cheerful soul,’ she smiled.
‘The great thing, Pauline, is that we’re not as old as Gulban. There’s a grain of hope in every year that’s still to come.’
He drove home carefully. At Undercliff the moon formed jagged fragments that gleamed on the wrinkled water, and the graveyard wall cast a deep shadow on the slope above the sand. It seemed to her that Cookie himself was surrounded by another such shadow. Over dinner he had been affable and amusing in a way that Jack could never have been, yet he had left her with the feeling that she was still the little girl who came up to the hotel to play and went home thinking about the marvellous things that went on behind the tall, bland windows. He was not the man who had come to her room while she slept and had stolen away again soundlessly in the dark.
He pulled up in front of the hotel and switched off the headlights.
‘The dinner was no good but I enjoyed the conversation.’ He gave her a playful peck on the cheek.
‘I enjoyed the evening, too.’
‘We’ll do it again, then, and do it differently.’
As she climbed the stairs, the evening seemed to fade away. She went into the bedroom next to Gulban’s and locked the door behind her. The empty hot-water bottle lay on the night table. The bed had been made, the previous day’s newspaper formed a funnel in the waste paper basket. She lay on the bed while a moth circled the light above. It went round and round the lampshade, a big, heavy moth rising and falling, going out wide and coming back in without any discernible pattern. Her mind whirled, too, climbing and swooping, as if she’d had too much wine.
Twelve years ago Bosco took her to the swing-boats. He was only a student then. They sat face to face in the narrow boat and he pulled her higher and higher till she could see the upturned faces below from above the crossbar. He nodded without speaking, and she tucked in her billowing dress between her knees. Cookie and Joey were still in short trousers then. Joey had a chemistry set in his room. He spent the afternoons playing with little pillboxes of sulphur, charcoal, iron filings and lycopodium powder, and he was saving up his pocket money to buy a Bunsen burner. Cookie spent his time reading; he knew Palgrave’s Golden Treasury by heart, not to mention Lyrical Ballads. At that time the world was one. Now it had been broken up into cantles, and the cantles would never come together again. Now there was rivalry, discord and denigration. Only a week ago Joey, the plain man who dwelt in tents, had spoken to her all too plainly.
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