Staring At The Light

by Fyfield, Frances

  ‘Look, Cannon, whether she is or she isn’t, this whole charade is at crisis point. We don’t just wait any more. I’m going to see Julie now. You’re going to come with me. You’re going to march in there without thinking of who might be watching. The hell with it. Why should anyone be watching? Then we sit down and talk about plans, four of us, like civilized human beings capable of making them. Then we either take Julie home or arrange to take her another time.’

  ‘Home?’ he echoed. ‘Home?’

  She shook him impatiently. ‘Another apartment. I’ve got one lined up. My home if you want. Anywhere’ll do.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Johnny’ll find us.’

  ‘If I hear that one more time … So you say. So you’ve always said. And what if he does? You barricade the doors. You call the police—’

  ‘Who won’t believe a single thing I say. I’m a con, a liar, a thief who cheated my own brother … The police were never an option.’

  ‘Of course they are. For Christ’s sake, if they didn’t weigh in for liars and thieves, they’d be out of a job.’ She paused. ‘Are you a liar, Cannon?’

  ‘No.’ Without hesitation. He was sober without being depressed, sitting still and thinking, a rare state of stability for him.

  ‘Good, just checking.’ You lied at your trial; I helped you. ‘Shall we go, then?’

  ‘Wait a minute, let me think …’

  ‘Don’t think, Cannon. You either don’t think at all or too much, without any good results either way. Come on, Cannon.’

  ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  The crowds en route to somewhere else had gathered momentum; the traffic growl increased; they were leaning close together, heads almost touching to hear themselves speak.

  ‘This flat … How will Julie manage?’

  ‘A bit of rudimentary furniture, enough. More than you’re used to.’

  ‘Only I don’t want her lifting things.’

  Cannon stood decisively, brushing himself down as if what he did would make any difference to the state of his dreadful coat. ‘I’ll have to go back to the attic. Get some money. Come with me?’

  She hesitated, furious at his assumption that she should. She did not want to go back there; shuddered at the thought of the place; wanting to keep a strong hand on his arm, but gripped with repugnance for that grim place and the torn drawings. She wanted to say, ‘Never mind about the money,’ but she had little enough to give him, twenty maybe, sufficient for the taxis, not more than that from a bank account looking a little leery at the minute. Surely he could go alone; no sense in duplicating tasks. And what was it he’d said about William? No time to ask. She fished in her bag for cash. ‘No, thanks. You go, quick. I half promised Pauline I’d be there at half five. The nuns are out, more space. Meet you there, OK?’

  He nodded. She watched him lope across the square, scattering more of the pigeons. He gave a hop, skip and a jump, twice, took chocolate from that everlasting pocket, threw it. Optimism rewarded.

  Perhaps her own would be rewarded, too. Sarah did not want to move; she stretched inside her coat and closed her eyes. There was nothing but the roar of the traffic and the insistent splashing of the water. She calculated the differing time it would take at this crowded hour to reach the convent. Taxi or tube? She thought of economy as much as speed, rose stiffly, listened to the raucous music of a cacophony of horns and descended, like a thousand others, down to the trains.

  He was absurdly happy and he was not going to be afraid ever again. He opened the window of the taxi and let in the cold air and the noise. He wasn’t going to be afraid any longer because this settled it. New life settled it, redefined everything, because there was going to be a child with his blood and his bones, and that made all the difference. Because a man could love his wife with his body and his mind, which he did, and more, but his soul would enter his child. The child would be the ally to make him strong. A male, surely; a little man. He would hold the child like a shield against Johnnyboy; the child would be the final proof that he was gone from Johnny for ever. Gone from being buggered, gone from the intimacy, living on a different planet from the one they had shared. The child would be proof that he had become not merely a defector but a different species, a new kind of animal altogether; no longer, in Johnny’s eyes, simply an experimental lover, indulging himself in an affair that Johnny would find unspeakably repellent and thought he could squash to death like a bug; Johnny would see what he was. Look what I’ve made, Johnny. Look what I’ve made. Now do you see I can’t come back?

  There was a pause for self-recrimination in the back of the cab. Was he so little and so cowardly in himself that he had needed this promise of new, innocent life to confirm his own certain footsteps? Was he as feeble as that? Was his passion for his wife not sufficient all on its own? He chewed his nail and watched the blurred passage of the world outside; someone ran across the front of the taxi as it slowed for lights; the driver swore. Oh, yes, love for Julie was enough; it was everything, but perhaps not quite enough to quell that greatest fear of all. The fear that, one day, Johnnyboy would be diabolically clever and try the simple expedient of seeking a reconciliation through charm and guile without any threat of force. He hadn’t learned a thing, Johnnyboy: his cruelty was powerful, his need insatiable, his kidney punch the worst on earth, but the power of his affection and his tears and his longing, if ever he admitted it, well, that put any kind of threat into the shade.

  The taxi lurched round a corner. He was thrown back against the seat. Remembered Johnny with a hand pressed over his mouth, both of them hiding; the fear all the time that Johnny would beg him back, plead with him. That he would forget to hunt and bully, that he would crook his little finger in some awful act of kindness and tap into the common sap that made them. That was the real fear.

  But not now, not any more: now this had happened, and Johnny had left the ultimate threat of sweet persuasion too late. He would never win now, because there was so much more to lose. Yes! He bounded up the steps and into the shabby house, which hid its dereliction rather well, careless for all his thinking. The office workers of the street were in full, colourful exodus, hats and scarves donned, the girls with silly shoes incapable of keeping out cold or wet; he had a fleeting memory of kissing Julie’s feet in her practical slippers, feeling the thin skin of an ankle. He ignored the faint scent of Johnny inside this house, because it was impossible to explain and he wanted to concentrate on things he could explain, but it was there all the same. Definable only to someone who had slept with the brute for all those many years, knowing every smell of his body from the peculiar stench of his sweat to the gentle aroma of a freshly soaped chest. No, he had not been forced to love Johnny; not at first. It had been as natural as breathing …

  He could hear Johnny breathing in here, the pulse of the house; ignored that, too. Crashed through the door to the attic, wishing he had asked the taxi to wait. More haste, less speed, Cannon, my lad.

  His stash of cash was under the beam, above the portrait of Sarah without her clothes. Sarah, another convenience, how generous she was; wouldn’t he love to do without her, like they wanted to do, shedding Granny when she tried, in vain, to keep them in order? And, Christ, how was he going to earn enough to keep a wife and a child? Haste made him clumsy; the boards creaked. He glanced at the painting of Sarah: it was good, very good, provided he did not compare it to Bonnard, and that way lay the death of all endeavour. He had talent; he had to believe it; there was a child to consider and the child had talent to be nurtured, too. He yanked at the beam, fingers exploring impatiently for the plastic bag secreted up there with the survival money inside. Didn’t trust banks: you couldn’t when the State said you owed it money. He fetched a chair to stand and reach better.

  There was only the one wooden chair, a spindly thing suitable for a bedroom. He stood on it regardless, reached again, heard the leg of it snap, clutched at the beam and hung there for a moment, thinking, This is
funny. Then the beam cracked, broke, fell, hit him a sneaking, soundless blow on the back of the head as he landed; sent him crashing forward, colliding with the makeshift easel, both of them spinning down noisily. Then he was lying on the floor with a dead weight across his shoulders, plaster and dust cascading into his hair like hailstones. He tried to lift himself up; could not; tried to breathe; could; lay where he was with the cold imagination of having been hit by an explosion. Stay still, think about it; no pain yet; blurred vision, his heart pounding. Remembered, quite inconsequentially, a remark Sarah had made about this room. It’s rotten, she had said, but not that bad. And there’s not a single beam high enough for a man to hang himself. Such faith she had in him. He felt delirious, ridiculous, with some half-remembered sense of happiness and optimism. He closed his eyes against the grit, reached forward, exploring with his fingers, finding, to one side, particles of plaster and dust, pieces of torn paper, which were oddly unexpected, and then straight ahead, the canvas of the portrait.

  The last thing he remembered for a while was that the surface of it was still slightly soft and sticky. Oil paint took a long time to dry.

  Sarah rang the bell at the door of the convent and wondered idly how many times she had done this – dutiful visits to her aunt, when she was a child and Pauline in some other institution, nearer what was then home and a long way from London, a place with a similar door, but attached to a school. The convents she had known, her own school included, melded into one another in a single sensation of smells, lack of comfort and a deceptive façade of gloom to hide what was behind: laughter and warmth often enough, charity, devotion, talents and tensions, a code of conduct that kept everything in place.

  She noticed the dearth of lights in windows; two, far left, for the two sisters currently bedridden, the rest in darkness, sure sign that most of them were out. Off to the Cathedral, Pauline said, to hear the Cardinal in the afternoon, busloads of them from all over the place, but I’ve heard enough from priests so I’ll keep the home fires burning. In virtual darkness, it seemed. No-one here would ever leave a room empty with a light burning: they had a second sense for a switch. They closed doors quietly and turned off the light behind them, like polite guests in someone else’s house, ever aware of cost. Sarah had lost almost every aspect of her convent training; all she could remember was the habit of quiet movement, so ingrained that it was natural unless she made herself stop, or some mood of hilarity prevailed with the housework, some excitement overcame the well-absorbed reserve. It was not much to have taken from a moral education; a small souvenir out of otherwise comprehensive rejection. She had not lost it all. There was still that belief in redemption … for others.

  She remembered, also, the slight and controllable sense of claustrophobia that preceded her like a high-noon shadow as soon as she came here, some memory of small rooms and scoldings, Sarah Fortune, you are beyond hope … a feeling of inadequacy because she could never, ever get it quite right. Could manage the decorum, but not the obedience; found the rude books about sex and made sure the other girls read them. Stop sniggering, will you? She rang the bell again, turned to survey the off-road parking space and the road beyond while she waited for someone to come from the back of the house to the front. A car moved slowly down the quiet road, pausing, as if looking through the trees for a number on one of the great big houses that flanked either side. The door opened. Pauline made a mock bow and ushered her in with a flourish.

  ‘Cannon shouldn’t be long,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Ah, a double pleasure.’

  To Sarah’s relief she detoured away from the parlour. It was a room that echoed; it was more suitable for a summit conference than a cosy chat; she could see visiting dignitaries snoring in there on the pristine moquette, sleeping out of self-defence against the dizzying patterns of carpet and curtain. She followed to the kitchen, where the warmth hit like a soft blow. Julie was by the industrial oven, her face flushed. There were trays of clingfilm-wrapped food on the table, cold meats and bread and butter, a pan of soup to one side of the hob. ‘They’ll be hungry as horses when they get back,’ Pauline said cheerfully. ‘A good sermon from a high-ranking cleric always does that for them. Say hallo, Julie.’

  She isn’t a child, Sarah wanted to shout. Let her speak for herself.

  Julie smiled a greeting, which lit her face, turning it from interesting to beautiful, despite the fatigue. Sarah turned to Pauline. ‘You’re a tyrant. Julie’s a paying guest, remember?’ She did not add, paid for by me. ‘You make her work too hard.’

  ‘I do not. You try and prevent her. I can’t.’

  ‘Stops me thinking,’ Julie said. ‘I’d rather not think.’ She tucked her hair behind her ears; it was damp. ‘Can we go somewhere else for a minute? It’s so hot in here.’ It was warm, certainly, without being uncomfortable, but then Sarah had not been labouring over a hot stove. Hers was the easy life: she could see it in Pauline’s eyes.

  ‘We’ll say a prayer in the chapel, shall we?’ Pauline suggested brightly. Julie nodded and moved ahead of them. Pauline and Sarah followed. ‘She likes the chapel,’ Pauline whispered to Sarah, irritating her with the assumption that Julie might not mind being talked about within earshot, like a deaf old relative. ‘She feels at home in it, these days.’ Was this new, or a piece of invention? ‘Cannon likes the chapel, too,’ Pauline added.

  It was chill enough in here to reduce a fever. Sarah had left her coat and regretted it; the other two, a unit, did not seem to notice. It struck her for the first time that there was a purpose to Pauline’s voluminous clothing: it was the equivalent of wearing an adaptable blanket at any time. She herself was dressed for an overheated office, skirt and blouse inadequate for these more Spartan conditions, and there were further advantages in being a holy nun like Pauline, such as never having to worry about co-ordination, whether the shoes would go with the skirt, the skirt with the blouse: she could simply stick to the shroud and put the equivalent of the handbag in the pockets, without vanity as if she had none of that commodity. Which she did have, the darling, in plenty, but vanity of a heavily disguised kind properly belonging to a producer of a play who might dress with deliberate insignificance in the knowledge that it was he who was pulling the strings and creating the scenes. Sarah tried to suppress the suspicion with which she regarded both Pauline’s inscrutable face with the marble skin and Julie’s guileless exhaustion. How melodramatic to insist on the chapel, as if it were a lay-by on the road to Damascus and Pauline, if not the embodiment of Paul’s vision, at least the official breakdown van who collected him for the next leg of the journey.

  ‘There, now,’ Pauline said, making sure they were all uncomfortable. ‘Julie and I have had such a lovely quiet day together, haven’t we?’

  Why this dreadful condescension? Was it saint to sinner? Or was it Pauline, mother appointee, becoming overprotective on the discovery that her darling little flower was in a delicate condition? Sarah looked at the statue of St George around which they seemed to be marshalled, wondered what the pursed-lip princeling thought he was doing waving that stick.

  ‘I told you Cannon’ll be here any minute,’ she said. ‘Can you hear the doorbell from here?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There’s a pager on the wall, a quiet one …’ That was Julie, confident in these surroundings. A waitress with slightly buck teeth, marvellous eyes and enormous dignity. Sarah felt foolish. There was no disingenuity in either of them; there was only her intense irritation at feeling so much at a loss, that convent feeling of guilt and powerlessness. She had her arms crossed over her chest, defensively, less against the cold than the sensation of their innate superiority, married woman and professional celibate. Maybe all tarts felt like this in such a place. Maybe it was Pauline being so condescendingly motherly to her new charge. You always were an attention-seeking child, Sarah. Still jealous at thirty-five, are we?

  ‘Look,’ Pauline said, ‘you’ve got us wrong.’ The us hurt. ‘We like the chapel because we like the chapel,
right? And it’s perfectly fair to sit here if we’re waiting for Cannon to join the discussion, isn’t it? He’s far more likely to come in the back way than he is the front, if he follows established custom. Never quite took to the parlour, did he, Julie? Prefers the clandestine.’ Julie nodded. ‘If he can’t get in the front, he’ll get in the back. So don’t worry about Cannon. You didn’t say you were bringing him anyway; the later he is the better. Gives us more time to sort things out.’

  ‘Are you pregnant for sure?’ Sarah asked, avoiding Pauline’s eyes and staring straight into Julie’s tired face, fascinated by the changing expressions that altered it so much it could have been a different face; she would be similarly and dramatically altered by different clothes, another chameleon. They had something in common then. It was difficult to describe the change of mood: a sad face in repose; utterly attractive in laughter; the huge eyes of a madonna, mirroring the amazement of discovery. She would be divinely patient with child and husband, given her chance. How they would all grow together, like a twisted and fruitful apple tree.

  ‘Pretty sure. Sure as I can be, short of an announcement from the Archangel Gabriel. And Cannon won’t have any reason to think the thing a supernatural object rather than his own, his very own.’

  There was a note of irony, foreign to her, a new tough self-assertiveness. Perhaps the result of a day with Pauline, to whom ironic understatement was second nature. Sarah could not see Julie being ironic with Cannon: he would not comprehend it. With Cannon she was sweetness and light, not sickly sweet, but firmly indulgent of his primary status and her integral part of his life as the decoder of his language and his needs; his passport to reality. There was pride in the symbiosis, the being the other half; she made it admirable. Feminist claptrap about finding oneself would find as much house room in Julie’s repertoire as it would in that of any of the sisters here. Her kind of love made its own ultimate demands and she would obey them completely. Seen in the context of Julie’s generously self-sacrificing soul, perhaps a temptation to include love of God into the equation was not so surprising. Pauline had said it once: if you love completely, the heart expands, and calcifies. She always made it sound like a disease.