by Francis King
He shakes his head, smiles. The smile irradiates the shrunken face. ‘Perhaps for my daughter,’ he says.
‘Yes, of course, dear.’ There was a time near the beginning of his stay when she called him ‘dear’ and he shouted at her ‘I’m not your dear.’ Viciously he then added: ‘Get that, dear?’
‘I’m glad you’re getting on so much better with her. She’s a decent soul – and such a good nurse.’
‘Yes, she’s a marvel.’ I am amazed.
He is rambling on to me about a holiday that we once took, all
of us, to a rented house in the hills above Menton twenty, thirty
years ago. ‘Do you remember the yacht …?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I say eagerly.
Suddenly a series of increasingly violent tremors pass through
his body. Is he having a fit, is he dying? I jump to my feet. But
now, breathing regularly, his face serene, his eyes shut, he lies
seemingly asleep.
Are you really glad?
Really glad? What do you mean?
That Beryl and I are now such good friends?
Of course I am. I hated it when you used to shout at her and
insult her.
I often call her my best friend. To myself, to her. Does that
surprise you?
No.
Does that make you jealous?
Of course not.
Are you sure? Of all of you, you were always the closest of my
children.
Of course I’m sure.
His sufferings are becoming unbearable to me.
As soon as I have taken off my coat and sat down, he says: ‘There’s something I want to say to you at once.’
‘Yes?’
‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘Anything. What is it?’
‘I want you to speak to the specialist – what’s-his-name – the one with the house in the Algarve.’ His memory has begun to flake away in disconnected shards.
‘What about?’
‘I want you to ask him to give me an injection.’
‘An injection?’ I suddenly feel chilled. ‘To finish me off.’ ‘I can’t do that.’ I shake my head from side to side repeatedly. ‘Please!’ ‘No, no! He’d be horrified at the suggestion. And in any case –
how could I, your daughter …?’
‘Doctors do those things. You know they do those things.’
‘Sorry. No. No, certainly not.’
He gives a dry, gasping laugh. The effort of it contorts his face,
his teeth suddenly seem far too large for his mouth. ‘Ring up the
vet then!’
He must be joking, I tell myself. But I cannot be sure.
Later, as I gaze across at his motionless body, the silent
interrogation resumes.
I have another idea. Couldn’t you do it?
Me?
This is hell and I am in it? Quotation. Where’s it from?
Faustus.
Oh, clever girl! You were always the cleverest of the brood.
Don’t you want to release me from my hell?
Oh, father … I hate to see you suffer. But there’s this taboo.
It’s too strong.
Taboo? What taboo?
It’s as though you were asking me to have sex with you. I – I
just can’t help you – much though I want to. Oh, please understand.
It would be so easy. Wouldn’t it?
That’s what makes it so difficult.
I am thinking die, die, die, willing it but incapable of bringing it about, when Beryl enters the room. She looks at me, she looks at him. Then she crosses over and takes his wrist in her hand. She takes away the hand and places it on his forehead. She is staring at me.
‘It’s horrible to see him suffer like this.’
‘The trouble is that he’s so strong,’ she says. ‘That’s the trouble. I was reading in the paper the other day of a man who was in the Foreign Legion and then took to crime. The police cornered him and he shot at them. So they shot back. It took six bullets before they’d killed him. He’s like that, your poor dad.’ She looks down at it him. Appraising him, a miracle – or freak – of nature.
There is a long silence, as we stare at each other. She pulls out one of the pillows from under him, pats it vigorously and then replaces it. She pulls out the other pillow, but, instead of patting it and replacing it, she holds it against her ample breasts with both her hands. It might be a child to which she is giving suck.
Then the silent interrogation begins, no longer between him and me but between her and me.
Have you reached the end of your tether?
Yes, yes, yes! I can’t take any more. And he reached the end of his tether long, long ago.
Do you want me to do it for you?
Please. Oh, yes, please.
Truly?
Yes, truly.
Now?
Now. At once. Please, please.
Time had stopped. Now it resumes. She moves towards him with the pillow. Her face is calm, tender, determined. She lowers the pillow. I turn away my head.
At the graveside she is on the other side of the grave. I hardly hear the priest’s valedictory words. I scare across at her. Most of the family are in dark clothes. My own coat is black. But she is wearing a tent-like sky-blue coat wrapped round her generous body and a white hat with a sky-blue feather in it. Her high cheekbones are glistening as the sunlight shines on them. Is she sweating or is she crying?
I slip around the grave, away from Roy and the children, and stand beside her. Yes, she is crying. I put out my hand. She takes it. She imprisons it.
Death by Water
Luke had never been interested in art – in photography, yes, with all the ardour of a besotted amateur, but never, never art. What changed that was Lydia’s postcard.
His first thought was how odd it was that, rather than writing a letter, she should have scribbled her condolence almost diagonally on a picture postcard. But then she had always been odd and had become increasingly so since their divorce, amicable though that had been. With no preamble, the message at once began: ‘I can’t stop thinking about you in your tragic and truly ghastly loss. Don’t hesitate to call on me, please, please. I never had any bitterness towards Joy, none whatever, please believe that. Such a lovely person. Fondest thoughts. L.’ Underneath she had scribbled: ‘Carrie joins me in this.’ Carrie was their daughter, of whom Lydia had custody.
When he had turned the postcard over, Luke thought Lydia’s behaviour even odder. It showed a drowned woman, floating on a stream with her hands raised as though to welcome or even, yes, supplicate imminent death. The picture was a famous one but he did not recognise it. He peered. It was in the Tate Gallery, he read. It was entitled Ophelia. The painter, whose name was vaguely familiar but of whom he knew nothing at all, was given as J.E. Millais.
That she should have chosen that picture, whether consciously or unconsciously, made Lydia’s perfunctory condolence not merely odder but also, all at once, disturbing. What was she at? Don’t hesitate to call on me. That was something that, after such a postcard, he would never, ever do. And yet … Did she perhaps imagine that that serene, resigned image of the pale face and even paler arms surrounded by all those summer flowers and by the outspread clothes that kept the lifeless body afloat, would bring him some kind of consolation?
He chucked the card into the waste-paper basket. He had kept all the other expressions of condolence but that card he would not keep. Then he stooped, retrieved it, and with panicky, violent gestures, tore it into scraps. As soon as he had done so, he wished that he could undo the action. He wanted to look again at the woman with the pale, uplifted arms and the pale, serene face.
He climbed the narrow, precipitous steps up to the attic that he now always called ‘ the photograph room’. It was a Saturday and he had decided to devote the whole of the weekend to work that he planned
to submit for an exhibition of photographs of the borough in which he lived. But he could not concentrate, he kept making mistakes. He thought, with both bewilderment and rising indignation, of Lydia’s choice of that picture to express her condolences on the death of the woman who had usurped her. Then, repeatedly, however hard he attempted to halt them, images began to flash on and off on the retina of his memory, like photographs projected in rapid succession on to a screen. Seen from every angle, they were of that body once so familiar to him and then, when he had had to identify it in the morgue, all at once grown strange and threatening.
The morgue was little more than a squat concrete shed, stinking of formaldehyde and lined on one side with what looked like outsize, rusty refrigerators and on the other, mysteriously, with a row of upright chairs set out as though for spectators yet to arrive. Joy had been horrendously battered and bruised by the waves that had hurled her against the rocks. Her body was swollen and livid with a rainbow of colours – green, yellow, red, purple. Having made the identification, he had rushed outside into the searing sunlight, there to vomit beside a gaunt, straggly bush, a hand clutching its stem while two barefoot urchins in ragged clothes, a boy and a girl, watched him with dispassionate curiosity. The violence of his retching brought tears to his eyes.
In a corner of the attic there was a dilapidated chaise-longue. It had belonged to Joy’s mother. Although it was in such bad condition, Joy had insisted that they keep it after her mother’s death – ‘It has memories’, she had said. What those memories were she had never specified and he had never asked. He had always felt vaguely uncomfortable with Joy’s mother. He now felt uncomfortable even with her memory. He went over to the chaise-longue, sank down on it, and covered his eyes with his hands. But the images persisted.
‘Excuse me – is that your lady? Yes?’ The Moroccan official with the dull, sleepy eyes, the lethargic gait and slurred intonation that had made Luke briefly wonder if he were drunk, had put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Yes?’ the man had repeated.
Luke had wanted to say: ‘No, it’s not my lady.’ How could that swollen, lacerated mass of multi-coloured flesh be the woman to whom he had made love only the night before? But he had eventually nodded. ‘Yes,’ he had whispered. Then, having cleared his throat, more loudly: ‘ Yes.’
Now he saw the image that, of all the many images, had shocked him the most. It was a close-up. In black and white. Teeth smashed, nose flattened. She had had such beautiful teeth, large, regular. They had given her ready smile its extraordinary radiance. Resting his head against the tattered, dusty grey velvet of the chaise-longue, he pressed his fingers against his eyeballs as though to squeeze out the ghastly ghostly image lodged behind them.
He heard the official ask: ‘Excuse me, sir. Your wife – did she go out alone?’
‘Yes, yes. There was something wrong with my camera – one of my cameras. I was trying to repair it. She said that she wanted to go for a walk.’
‘Perhaps she climbed up some rocks and fell into the sea.’
‘Perhaps. It would have been dark.’
‘It was foolish to go for a walk in the dark. A lady. Alone. That is not a good place in the dark.’
The questioning had continued, with other officials, some more sympathetic, some less so and some blatantly hostile, asking their questions. Why, why, why? He did not know why. They had not even had a quarrel before she went out. She had kissed him on the cheek and then on the forehead, bending over him. He had had the camera in his hands. The kissing had distracted him – and, yes, faintly irritated him. He must get the winding mechanism of that old Leica to work properly. Otherwise his holiday would be ruined. It was his favourite camera. If he could not fix it, then it was unlikely that he would find anyone in this little town who could do so.
With a tardiness that now, back in England, amazed him, it had taken him a long time to realise that all these seemingly random questions were directed to one monstrous end. Had he himself killed her? When they finally gave up, he knew that they had done so not because he had convinced them that he was innocent but because they could not prove that he was guilty.
Again, fingertips pressed against his eyes, he tried to stop the flicker of horrific image on image. Think of something else. All at once he thought of Lydia’s postcard. He had looked at it for only a few seconds before tearing it into fragments, but miraculously he could remember every detail. That was how death should be: serene, resigned, even welcoming, with the waters showing no violence to the body consigned to them but only a tender acceptance. Yes, that was how it should be. Easeful death should be easeful. He opened his eyes and stared up through the skylight at the clear, pale-blue sky. For the first time since his visit to the morgue, he felt miraculously assuaged. He thought of his convulsive vomiting outside the morgue. It was as though a similar bout of vomiting had now at last relieved his body of all the poisons that had caused him so much agony and malaise over the past five weeks.
He sought out Millais on the internet, and was amazed that there should be so much about someone of whom he – an educated man, he liked to think – knew absolutely nothing. He even summoned up the image of the picture on his screen. Repeatedly he ran forefinger and middle finger over it, caressing now the pale face, now the pale hands, and now the body encased, as though after an embalment, in all that rich fabric. The screen felt hard to the touch. It felt cold when, in a moment of crazy abandon, he put his lips to the face at its centre.
He went to the Tate, not visited since the days when he and Lydia, both students, would go there on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon if, for one reason or another, they could not play the tennis that at that time was their chief recreation. The long, high-ceilinged room was empty except for the black male attendant at the far end of it and an elderly American woman, with coarse grey hair and a pronounced stoop, talking to him in a loud voice not about the pictures but about her problems with London Transport. Motionless, he stared fixedly at the white oval of the face, with the eyes open in what might have been a trance, not death. Again, as on that day when Lydia’s postcard had arrived, the image had an extraordinarily consoling and assuaging effect on him. He would like to have touched it, as he had touched and then kissed the face on the computer screen. ‘ Yes,’ he whispered. Then more loudly: ‘Yes, yes!’
The attendant and the woman halted in their conversation and, heads turned, peered down the long gallery at him. Then the woman shrugged, pulled a little face at the attendant and resumed what she had been saying.
From a book purchased on the internet from a second-hand dealer in Boston, he learned that Millais had painted the background of the picture by the Hogsmill River, near a place called Ewell. What had then been a remote village had now become a grindingly busy suburb of London. In search of the right setting for what many believed to be his masterpiece, Millais had taken up residence in the village with another painter, Holman Hunt, who, like Millais himself, had never been more than a name to Luke. Many years later Hunt had recorded how Millais for a whole day had ‘walked along beaten lanes and jumped over ditches and ruts without finding a place that would satisfy him’. Then he had come on exactly what he wanted: overarching trees, scarcely stirring waters, a richness of grass, reeds and flowers. He had cried out to his companion: ‘Look! Could anything be more perfect?’ Hunt remarked, as many were to do, on Millais’s luck in coming on the place on his first day of searching. Throughout his life Millais was generally acknowledged to be a spoiled favourite of luck.
Having learned all this, Luke was overcome by an obsessive longing to find the place. He planned to go on the very next Saturday, but then was obliged, because of the illness of a colleague, to agree at the last moment to show a Hampstead house, several months now on the market, to a prospective buyer from France. He was conscientious about his work. He knew that a partnership in the long established firm of estate agents was almost in his grasp. He must not jeopardise that.
He thought of the Sunday but Carrie was d
ue to spend it with him, as she did once every four weeks. Couldn’t he put her off? No. He was conscientious not merely about his work but also about his erratic and often clumsy relationship with this nine-year-old girl who could never forgive him for, as she saw it, abandoning not merely her mother but also herself. So it had to be the following Saturday.
Of course he took his two favourite cameras, the ancient Leica and the new digital Canon, a scientific miracle. In his biography, Millais’s son had quoted from a letter written by his father to a woman friend. In it, the painter described how, day after day, he had sat in extreme discomfort under an umbrella, ‘being blown by the wind into the water’, and so gradually becoming ‘intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that lady sank to muddy death.’ But as Luke stepped off the train at Ewell – a totally unremarkable place, he thought – there was not a breath of wind and the sun was hot and dazzling. He felt a surge of excitement flood through his body, making his cheeks flush and his finger-tips tingle. He might have been on his way to some long awaited, desperately wanted assignation.
He knew by now that a young and beautiful woman had lain for hours on end in an enamel bath tub filled with water inadequately warmed by a lamp placed beneath it, to model for Ophelia. She had caught pleurisy and it was thought that that might well have precipitated the pulmonary tuberculosis from which she had suffered for the rest of her cruelly short life. Nonetheless, Luke all but expected to come not merely on the reach of water that had provided Millais with his setting but also on Ophelia herself, her eyes wide open, her lips slightly parted, and one of those white, raised hands grasping a water-lily.
He repeatedly paused as he followed the winding course of what often became little more than a stream. Could this be the place? This? This? Each time he decided: No. One curve seemed exactly right. But in the distance some youths, most them stripped to their waists, were playing football, shouting to each other in a language that Luke could not understand or even identify. Their strident voices and the thud, thud, thud of the ball robbed the location of any intimacy or peace. It was the same at a stretch where the foliage was particularly green and luxuriant and the trees arched over the water exactly as in the picture. But on the opposite bank two people, a girl and a boy, were lying out on the lush grass with a transistor radio blaring out. A male voice seemed to be bawling ‘Wow, wow, wow!’ endlessly over and over again. Luke hated that sort of music. As students and later in the first years of their marriage, he and Lydia had stood stoically evening after evening at Promenade concerts throughout a whole scorching summer. At each ‘ Wow!’ something huge and cumbersome jarred within him, making him feel vaguely giddy and nauseous.