Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  On the TV, the girl who was wearing the red bikini is sitting in the studio now. ‘Tell me about it,’ she says to the woman on the settee, but the woman doesn’t tell her anything. ‘It was totally amazing,’ says the girl, and the woman on the settee simpers at her. She switches the TV off, kisses the picture of her parents and says a prayer in their sight before leaving her room. With one hand inside her bag, clutching the envelope like someone in peril holding onto a cross, she hurries through the town, up the hill that leads to the Oak. Where the gradient of the hill begins to ease and the gates of the Oak come into view she breaks into a run, and she doesn’t stop running until she has reached the place where a wide space opens up between the road and the trees on both sides. On the right she can see through to the clearing where Mr Caldecott’s daughter was sitting yesterday. It was a surprise to see her there, such a surprise that she had gone past before she properly realised what she had seen, and now she looks to her right again, towards the clearing, to see again, in her memory, Stephanie sitting on the fallen tree, smoking a cigarette as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She lingers, imagining the episode altered, picturing the girl looking up and acknowledging her, but she cannot invent what might have happened then. Clutching the envelope inside her bag, she goes through the gate.

  Searching for Mr Morton, Stephanie thinks she recognises the sound of his voice, coming from beyond the hedge on her left. Reaching the gap where the path cuts through it she sees him, sitting on a bench with the Greek chambermaid, who has her hands on a letter which Mr Morton is also holding. The chambermaid is talking to him earnestly, like someone trying to press a sale. A reflex makes her step back, out of sight. ‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Morton is saying in the tone of a man giving in to the seller’s persuasion, if only to be left alone. She moves further away, until she can’t hear his words any more, and then, resisting the urge to take another look, she returns to the hotel, where she goes straight to the Randall Room to pick up a newspaper. She takes a chair out onto the terrace and reads there until she sees, over the top of the page, the chambermaid coming down the brick path. Seeming to notice the movement of the newspaper, the chambermaid raises a hand, giving her a strangely sweet smile.

  She walks across the grass to the gap in the hedge. Mr Morton is sitting where he was, with one arm lying on the arm of the bench and the other hand resting on the letter beside him. He doesn’t seem to have a recorder with him this morning and he looks at ease, facing the bushes like a man idly observing a placid expanse of sea, turning his head a fraction now, perhaps at a sound she cannot hear. Still she delays, until he tugs a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers and dabs around his bruised eye. Assured that she would not be disrupting his thoughts, she enters the little enclave of the garden. She calls his name.

  ‘Good morning, Stephanie,’ says Mr Morton, as if she had been expected, but with a hint of preoccupation.

  Now doubting that she has judged the situation correctly, she halts midway between the hedge and the bench, holding the newspaper to her chest. ‘I wanted to say goodbye,’ she explains.

  He does not reply immediately, perhaps thinking that they have already said goodbye. ‘That’s nice of you,’ he says, and that is all.

  She looks at the long smear of white cloud above the trees, at the letter on the seat, at the plum-and-yolk-coloured bruising above Mr Morton’s eye. ‘And how much I enjoyed yesterday,’ she goes on. Mr Morton smiles at her, but does not speak. ‘Our talk,’ she reminds him.

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘It gave me a lot to think about,’ she tells him.

  ‘Really?’ he says.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘OK.’

  What she should do is simply say goodbye again and leave, but instead she makes an inane remark on the weather.

  As he has to, Mr Morton agrees that it’s a little cooler today than yesterday. ‘Are you staying?’ he then asks. ‘Now, I mean.’ The question sounds like a plain request for information, as if he is simply curious as to what she is doing.

  ‘I don’t know if I should,’ she shrugs, impelled by his frankness to reply honestly.

  ‘You have no pressing engagements?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then stay. Sit down.’

  ‘You’re sure I’m –’

  ‘Let’s not go through that palaver again. Sit,’ he commands, patting the seat. ‘Is that a newspaper?’ he asks, with a nod towards her hands.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Tell me what’s on the front page. Foot and mouth?’

  ‘Foot and mouth,’ she confirms. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Educated guess. I overhear things.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘Another four thousand sheep to be slaughtered in the Brecon Beacons. Five new outbreaks reported yesterday, two of them in the Brecon Beacons. More than six thousand sheep destroyed there to date.’

  ‘Grim.’

  ‘Awful.’ On the page opposite the story about the sheep, a picture shows a pit filled with cows. Hundreds of legs, stiffened in death, stick upright like an enormous broken fence.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The girlfriend of the British tourist who’s gone missing in the outback – you know about this? She claims they were ambushed by a man with a gun, but that she managed –’

  ‘Yes, I heard it.’

  ‘You heard about her being hypnotised?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, she’s been hypnotised, because they think she might have post-traumatic stress. Lost her memory of what happened. So it might all come out under hypnosis.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘“No new information was gleaned,” says police spokesman.’

  ‘I get the impression they don’t believe her.’

  ‘Boyfriend disappears without trace, but the killer lets her get away, in the middle of miles of open country. It’s a pretty incredible story.’

  ‘It’s like the dingo baby,’ he comments, grimacing at the sky. ‘What was the woman’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know what –’

  ‘Before your time, of course it is. Before you were born,’ he says, shaking his head briskly, as if to rouse himself out of absent-mindedness. ‘Chamberlain, that was her name. Lindy Chamberlain. Claimed a dingo took her baby daughter from the family’s tent. The family was camping, by Ayers Rock I think it was. The baby was never found, but Lindy was charged with murder. There was no evidence that she killed the girl and plenty of circumstantial evidence that she didn’t, but she was found guilty. People just didn’t like the cut of her jib. She was a Seventh Day Adventist. A bit creepy for some tastes. Wasn’t behaving the way a mother should, in her situation. Insufficiently distraught. A bad mother telling a preposterous story. But years later some item of the baby’s clothing was found, and there was something about it – I forget what – that made the courts think again, and Lindy was released. But there never had been any proof that she hadn’t been telling the truth. They just didn’t understand her. A remarkable case. Made into a film, with what’s her name? Meryl Streep. Called –’ Pressing his hands to his temples, he tries to recall the title.

  ‘Can’t help, I’m afraid,’ she says, dismissing the notion that he might have meant something else as well when he talked about the mother who was not understood. She turns to the inside pages, to a story she’d been reading on the terrace.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he says, clapping his hands. ‘Ah well. Encroaching senility.’

  ‘Here’s a mad one,’ she tells him. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard it. A fisherman who fell in the river and impaled himself on his landing net. And it didn’t kill him. The stick went right through his leg, but he didn’t know what he’d done until he was pulled out of the water.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s here, in black and white.’

  ‘Unbelievable. It went right through him?’

  ‘Came six inche
s out the other side.’

  ‘Not possible. Read it,’ he says, calling her bluff.

  ‘From the beginning?’

  ‘From the beginning,’ he requests, so she reads, verbatim, the story of the self-skewered fisherman. And when she has reached the end he tells her that she reads very nicely, and asks her if she would mind reading him the first story from the foreign news section, which she does. ‘It’s hard to find good readers,’ he says when she’s finished. ‘They go too fast, or they mumble, or they don’t give you the sense of where it’s leading. But you’re good. Very clear. Thank you,’ he says, placing a hand on her shoulder, and she finds more reports to read to him, and while she reads an idea begins to form: that she might read to him again, in London, at his house, and they would become friends. She imagines calling on him every week, learning from him, learning some Italian or German, and has almost prepared herself to ask if she could visit him at his home when she sees her father on the path, coming towards them. She notices no embarrassment on his face when he sees that she is talking to Mr Morton; she notices no reaction of any kind, but of course that proves only that her father is the consummate professional. ‘My father arrives,’ she says to Mr Morton. ‘Ten seconds and counting.’

  Mr Morton turns towards the path, presenting an expression of welcome.

  ‘I came to say goodbye,’ her father announces, standing in front of Mr Morton with his hands behind his back, bending towards him. His shoes, profoundly lustrous, look as incongruous as ceramic animals on the grass. ‘Something’s cropped up,’ he explains. ‘I have to go into town to talk to the lawyers. I didn’t want to miss you.’

  The smile that Mr Morton offers her father, implying some understanding between them, is unlike any that she has seen from him before.

  ‘A taxi has been booked for a quarter past twelve,’ her father tells him.

  ‘And what time is it now?’ Mr Morton asks both of them.

  ‘Half eleven, nearly,’ answers her father.

  ‘That late? Time flies in convivial company,’ says Mr Morton, and at this compliment her father bows to her, like a gentleman at a ball, being introduced to a young lady he has just heard being praised. ‘A pleasant end to a very pleasant break,’ Mr Morton adds, which leads to a stuttering conversation between himself and her father, an exchange of remarks about the garden and the hotel, Mr Morton’s accident, the garden again, and Mr Morton’s book of poems.

  ‘I’ll send you a copy,’ Mr Morton promises. ‘If it ever gets finished,’ and he turns towards her, as if to say that only she would understand that this apparently offhand comment is no such thing.

  ‘I’d appreciate that very much. Thank you. I’m glad that your time at the Oak was profitable,’ her father replies, so smoothly polite that he sounds less sincere than she believes him to be. From his eyes and from the way he’s standing, with a respectful stoop, she can tell that he truly does like Mr Morton, just as from his eyes she can tell that he has no real interest in his book, and can tell from the tone of their voices, and the tiny pauses after each has spoken, that neither of them will say what he wants to say while she is there.

  She gets up to make room for her father, despite his urging her to stay. ‘Things to do,’ she says, gesturing at the vacated seat. ‘We were going to meet at two. Will you be back by then, or have plans changed?’

  ‘I’ll be back. I’ll make sure I am.’

  ‘OK. Mr Morton, goodbye. And thank you.’

  His hand is now, at last, lifting from the letter. ‘And thank you,’ he says with a stress on the last word, and he encloses her fingers in his palms.

  Puzzled, her father looks at their hands, then he sits down beside Mr Morton.

  On the terrace she reads her book for a while, until one of the chambermaids begins polishing the floor of the Randall Room, using a machine that makes as much noise as a dozen vacuum cleaners. There’s still an hour to kill before she meets her father for lunch, so she goes down to the pool, taking the route from the garden, along the basement corridor. Finding the cabinet of switches unlatched, and some of the switches in the On position, she listens at the door, but can’t hear anyone inside. She eases the door open and sees the lights glowing under the water. ‘Hello?’ she calls. ‘Hello?’ Her voice snaps back from the walls. ‘Hello?’ she sings, almost certain she is alone. The water is as beautiful as a gargantuan slab of diamond and she half-remembers a story about a woman who hid her diamonds not in the jewel box or in a safe but in a bowl of clear water. She tries to remember more, but recovers only a feeling that the woman was French, a French aristocrat. Giving it up, she lowers herself into the pool and swims a length languidly, on her back, raking her fingers slowly through the water. By the steps she holds onto the gutter to lean her head back, so that her ears become filled, then pushes herself below the surface. Staring into the pure light of the pool, she sits on the tiled floor, within the water, until she cannot remain there any longer. She springs up, crashing out into the air, and there, smiling down on her, is the boy who works here, the one who carried her mother’s bags to the car.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, with a faint smile, as if he had been waiting to see how long she would stay under.

  ‘Hello,’ she replies, reaching for the rim of the gutter, gulping like an idiot.

  ‘You’re Stephanie,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m David,’ he says, crouching close to the edge.

  ‘Hello,’ she says again, uncomfortable at being placed at such a disadvantage, and at the strangeness of his eyes, which are a girlishly delicate grey, a grey so pale that the pupils seem to stand out.

  ‘I work here,’ he explains, rubbing a hand across his stomach.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m the general dogsbody.’ He stands upright, lifting two imaginary overloaded suitcases. ‘Haulage a speciality,’ he says. Perhaps she is meant to admire the muscles of his arms and his stomach, but from his face it doesn’t seem that he’s trying to impress her, and there’s something bashful in the way he puts a hand on his chest and withdraws a step. ‘Anyway,’ he says, with another retreating step, ‘I’d better get on. Due back upstairs in half an hour.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll stick to the other side, OK? I won’t get in your way.’

  ‘No problem,’ she says, and she floats off from the side, doing a half-hearted backstroke as she watches David walking away. The wings of muscle that flare towards his shoulders are too much, and the vein across his calf is almost repulsive, like a lizard on a rock. His walk, though, is not a swimmer’s swagger. There’s a carelessness to his stride, a sort of innocence: he walks as if he were fully clothed, not on show. He stands at the end of the pool, aligns his toes with the lip of the tiles, flexing his back and rolling his shoulders, then he bends quickly and dives, sliding into the water straight, without a splash. Halfway down the length his arm emerges and his hand arcs back into the water in a glide, as though reaching to take hold of something fragile that’s floating just under the surface. At the wall he turns in a somersault that brings him back nearly to halfway. Water streams off his shoulders, and his legs rise and fall in a slow strong beat, as if he were swimming in oil, raising a low billow of water at his heels. His style is a horizontal lope, apparently without effort, but when he passes her again his face turns aside in the trough of the wave he’s pushing along, and though he’s looking right at her he doesn’t see her, such is his concentration.

  Though he doesn’t see her, his eyes startle her into an awareness that she’s being obvious and makes her move away. For every length she completes he swims three or four. Never raising his head above the horizon of the water, never stopping, he races from end to end, until suddenly, reaching the end where she’s resting, he hauls himself out with a twisting motion, rising from the water and turning to sit down on the side of the pool in a single fluid movement, like a gymnast. For a minute or so he sits with his head lowered, steadying his breathing. A decisive slo
w deep breath stretches the skin taut across his ribs, then he looks up, recovered.

  ‘Far too small,’ he remarks, waving a hand at the pool. ‘Makes you feel like a penguin batting around in the zoo. Three strokes, bang your head; three strokes, bang your head.’