The day was forecast to be wonderfully midsummer and he had brought along a book to read in sight of the Camera, as dopey and tourist-like as such an activity might be, but that was to be after. He had a pencil for sketching, though in his heart he knew it would remain mint. This was all in aid of a trick, to convince himself that the journey was a minor one. A Saturday of leisure, visiting an acquaintance the way typical people visited their typical acquaintances.
He could picture the vulture circling the scorched plain, so I surely still equalled V over R.
The traffic was flowing smoothly now and Radford had to remind himself to lower his foot on the accelerator. A small convoy had banked up in his rear-view mirror: he deployed his apology wave and reluctantly brought his Marina up to the limit and heard its reliable parts hum their moving song.
The village, like all but the truly remote, had come to resemble all the others, with their identical supermarkets and newsagents. There seemed to be a betting shop for every last man, woman and child. Radford finished these unoriginal thoughts. He’d been doing more of that lately: autopilot thinking that drifted towards crankiness. He was determined to keep the habit in check, it being the horse that perpetually grumpy middle-age rode in on.
He turned off the car’s radio, thinking its noise might be replaced by some pastoral hymn, but rising in its place was only the chorus of tyres on bitumen. He played at the gold ring hanging by its chain around his neck.
The house was a couple of miles outside the town centre. Its cream pebble brought a satisfying sound as Radford parked. He had cross-checked his notebook’s address with the letterbox number and made the decision to pull in, rather than stop a more cautious distance up the street. This was intended to mean he couldn’t sit idly at the wheel pondering the wisdom of the excursion but, having arrived in plain view, sit and ponder he did. Several minutes passed and he remained in his seat. It was a sweet, overgrown house. Ivy scaled its walls, closing in around the windows and climbing onto the lip of its steep slate roof. The lawn was spotted with delicate yellow flowers. Radford reached into one of his brown paper bags and found an iced bun. He had purchased too much from the bakery. He would eat the bun and go in: this was acceptable, he told himself. The sugar would focus his mind, fuel conversation.
Two loud raps on the window caused him to jump and choke.
It was Teddy at the car door, his face smiling an inch from the glass. ‘Coming in?’
They sat in the conservatory making unproductive attempts at the great riches of food. Teddy had baked biscuits, scones, lemon tarts and an apple cake. He had Radford carry in a third small table from the next room to accommodate the addition of the bakery parcels.
They talked of small things and Teddy pushed open the glass doors. Behind was a garden consisting of a narrow path cutting through a profusion of sunflowers. They stood as a peaceful army, well above the height of the old man who had gone out to join them with his arms stretched high, all pulsing blonde. The path led to a small clearing with a sundial atop a stone plinth, and beyond that a young, plush oak occupying the far corner. When the tree was grown, Teddy explained, it would flood the garden with shade and cast the sundial into retirement.
‘They’ve come well this year,’ he said as they returned inside, flicking his hand in the direction of the flowers. ‘Was the mildness of the season just gone.’
Daylight was toasting the earth into scent. All was honey on grass and split cinnamon, and Radford found himself speaking more easily. He was a grown man and so, he reasoned, it should not be difficult to speak to another of his kind. Teddy’s age was still impossible to gauge and now seemed irrelevant. The two most recent decades – Radford recoiled at the idea that his memories could be measured in decades – had blunted Teddy’s voice but not his gaze. It had been twenty full years since the two of them had spoken. Slightly less than that since Radford had seen the photographs of Teddy in the newspapers. The attention had been fevered for a time, though abandoned once the truth of the matter was decided on. In the pictures Teddy had seemed alone with his fate.
‘Lou would rather I rip up the sunflowers and let her have her country garden,’ Teddy said, sitting for the third time. ‘Cornflowers and roses, and an old fogey’s bench. It will happen eventually, of course, but I’ll hang on as long as I can.’
‘Lou?’
‘Louise, my wife.’
‘Teddy, I didn’t know. Congratulations.’
‘Some time ago now. Wedding was, ah, that summer of ’76. Yes, ’76.’
They toasted their apple juices and looked out as a bee made its way across the garden. It would hover at the flowers’ feast, burrowing its head briefly before skirting to the next, devoid of competition.
‘How are you?’ Teddy asked.
‘Not married.’
They looked into each other and laughed.
‘No,’ Teddy said, ‘but you have people?’
Radford came forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees. His smile was falling though he felt no sadness. ‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Friends? Good friends?’
‘Teddy, yes, of course I do.’
‘Good.’ Teddy’s face reflected a little of the colour from his flowers. ‘Good. That is all I hoped.’
‘That’s about all I have though,’ Radford said.
‘If you have that, you have a lot.’
They toasted, again, to their unremarkable fragility, and a breeze ran through the house.
‘And you, Teddy?’
‘Not as many as I might like.’ They chuckled, though with less gusto. ‘But some, yes. And Lou, of course.’
Teddy put his hands together and placed them between Radford’s palms. He closed his fingers around Teddy’s hands and they sat like this, embraced again, for some stretch of time. Teddy began to speak, just as Radford noticed the small button of tears that had formed in the folds of the old man’s eyes.
‘Boy, I’ve done you wrong.’
At once Radford wanted to voice his disagreement, but he kept his mouth shut. This was not the time and he was perhaps not even the one to make the point. He had, after all, promised to remain silent.
‘I’ve done wrong by giving you this burden. That’s how I’ve come to see it,’ Teddy said. ‘I can only say I believed I was doing the best by you, truly. If I’d left you there, I can only imagine how things would have gone. I’ve thought about it all so much and I’m left only with the hope that it all would have been much worse. It’s a selfish conclusion but we invent ways to get by, don’t we?’
Radford kept his grip.
‘Time was I would pray for your forgiveness,’ Teddy said. ‘And then I’d pray it never came and you would live all your years gloriously in spite of me.’
The bee had come inside now and was bothering the apple cake. Teddy smiled hard as his tears came down.
‘The house was to be a brief truce,’ he said. ‘I knew what had come before, for you all, and I suspected what was to come after. It was just to be some little peace, that you might carry with you. Good grief, I’m saying too much and too little. All this time and I’m still unprepared – you’d think I would’ve rehearsed.’
Radford watched the anarchy of the bee, wondering what it must think of all the sweetness before it.
‘There was a very real way I let you down.’ Teddy rubbed at his watering eyes. ‘I had the menial task of keeping you all alive and in the end the failure came by my own hand. I care less that the Manor was dismantled. That was merely a great shame and I have not earnt the right of being sentimental.’
A little age had brought Radford opinions, and not only the ones on supermarkets and betting shops. He had come to some conclusions on the workings of history, that time could turn some memories solid in the same slow way wood petrified. Others it would make brittle and they would go to dust. The house stood.
From the direction of town a bell tolled and they paused at its sound, their hands releasing. It seemed a sign to stand and they moved outside.
‘Funeral, at the church,’ Teddy said patiently.
The brass song floated towards the hills and its distant colony of birds. Perhaps they would be jealous when they heard it, of what graceful thing could make that note. Radford was smiling. He made a face of such pleasure that it would have appeared he was in agony.
There would be no daydreams of changing weather, of rest, of returning home. Instead – unprompted, in sunshine – he thought of West. For the first time in many years he forced himself to remember in detail and was surprised that this brought with it no pain. He had known so little of the boy, this was the truth of it. Though he did know the kindness of a friend and how it had sustained him. That this was all that could truly sustain.
Fragments returned, kid voices:
So what’s the point?
Who promised you a point?
The path set out by the Manor was a dangerous one, but all ways were dangerous and at least its way demanded it was not taken alone. Much had occurred since those days. A life, Radford trusted. He had held and released the hands of many others. Yet after everything that came, it was still that winter of the Manor that illustrated him most truthfully, for it was incomplete.
‘You made other promises, you forget,’ Radford said and straightened Teddy’s stuck collar, giving a soldierly bump on the shoulder. ‘Ones as great as keeping us alive. You told me that you weren’t to be our friend. Yes? So it would be a failure if you and I were to be friends?’
Radford inhaled from the candied atmosphere and stepped back inside, beginning work at the largest wedge of cake. From the front of the house came the sound of keys and the door unlocking.
The old man nodded.
‘Then yes,’ Radford said, offering to cut a piece for Teddy. ‘In that alone we are agreed. You have failed. Failed miserably.’
A companion to the memory of West arrived, the question of that winter of their youth having abandoned them so abruptly. In time he had come to accept its wordless departure as disapproval, but now, facing the sunflowers and their mild earth, he remembered the depth of cold that was possible in his bones. It now seemed so obvious. The great cold had left no message at their parting for it had never left him.
All that was shaded and hurtful had been silenced. A path made itself clear, one that ran ahead recklessly, seeking company ahead of certainty. The light directed to such obvious things, to friendship and its protection. One had people and so one had duties and this was a miraculous thing.
It was the conclusion of a child, but then we are forever children.
They shared this final secret as someone came into the kitchen. She deposited bags on the counter and continued through to the conservatory, where she introduced herself as Louise and stood behind Teddy, her hands all love around the trunk of his neck.
‘So, what have you boys been gossiping about?’ She planted a kiss on Teddy’s bald crown.
The old man smiled now and Radford turned to the flowers and rejoiced. At trouble unfixed. At Winter’s return and the ringing of a bell.
First published 2018 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
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Copyright © Robert Lukins 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
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Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
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Author photo by Eve Wilson
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978 0 7022 6005 6 (pbk)
978 0 7022 6121 3 (ePDF)
978 0 7022 6122 0 (ePub)
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