“Apparently some conveniently sturdy Irish nuns took charge of me, carried me down the hill and then took me to the monastery—the only obvious source of help for miles. This constituted step two.” He coughed modestly.
“By the time they’d dragged me down the mountain, it was almost dawn, and the monks in St. Catherine’s were blowing out the candles at their icons as the first light stepped in at their windows. How do I know? Because, in the end, I saw it, because it happened every day. Just as every day they baked bread and then gave it away to the poor, just as every day Brother Stephen—or at least his mummified corpse—guarded the bones of their dead in the ossuary, just as every day all seven living brothers guarded the oldest library in the world.
“Which is why I fell.” He gripped her hand now, as if he were falling with her, into what only he could see. She felt a tug of inertia in her thought before it tripped forward to join him. “There was no other way to reach it. I had to hope I’d be brought to St. Catherine’s and taken in, that I would be well enough to live, but ill enough to lie there for a while. In fact my fever rambled on for more than two days in Greek and Aramaic, Latin and English and Welsh, Hebrew and Arabic. Something I hadn’t counted on, that—the way my head unravels, once vigorously tapped. By the time I’d recovered, they already knew that I was a scholar and that we shared certain beliefs. I confessed my plan and they forgave me and granted me access to their books—access at a price.
“Think of it: a collection founded before Alexandria burned, and they allowed me seven days to read it: one day for every brother I’d tried to deceive: just enough time to fully understand how little I would learn before they sent me on my way, no coming back. They made my pleasure my punishment. A little trick they learned from God—Nathan would say.” He smiled, almost drowsily.
“They let me drink from Moses’ Well and they let me study in the building that anchors Jacob’s Ladder, which was centuries old before the First Crusade. Every morning, I would walk past a cutting taken from the burning bush and realise I now believed everything and nothing. I will always love them and never forgive them for what they offered me, hour after measured hour spent reading and reading and keeping away from sleep. I read the true Book of Zerubabel, I read unknown psalms from the Essenes, I read texts I could hardly imagine, that I promised I’d never name, and I read the only existing full manuscript of the Sefer Yetzirah.”
The heat of his grip was almost unpleasant and Mary felt her concentration turning, beginning to protest.
“The Sefer Yetzirah—it’s the manual for creation. Other copies exist, but they are incomplete. It states, among other things, that there are thirty-two paths necessary for the making of heaven and earth, of life and hell. These paths are the twenty-two Hebrew letters and the numbers from one to ten. Which means God wrote all reality and numbered its parts, just as any author would. The Sefer Yetzirah explains this. In fifteenth-century Prague, Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel used it to make the Golem. And before him, R’Hanina and R’Oshiya used it in the fourth century. They made a calf with three heads.”
Joe faced her, open-eyed now, assessing. “How long did you believe me for?” He swallowed a laugh. “Mm? For a while, surely. For a while?”
“For as long as you were believable.”
“Ah, well.” He beamed and squeezed most of the feeling out of her palm. “We always have to rely on the author to make truth credible.” Another laugh glimmered in his throat and subsided. “Of course, there are some aspects of the truth which are consistently unfeasible. The thing to remember would be . . .” Joe couldn’t resist a wink. “No really, this is true— or something to think about, in any case, and is what I actually intended to tell you today . . .
“In the desert you’ll never quite know what things are, not at first. The absence of scale and the presence of heat will tend to mislead you: one man standing might just as easily be a rock, a truck, a camel, a tent: you can’t tell. Unfamiliar elements will beguile you, but your best course is still to proceed. You’ll only know if you go. And see. Then everything will show you itself, will tell you its nature, when you’re close enough.”
“This is a metaphor, right?”
“If you’d like, Mary Lamb, if you’d like. Or a small token of my esteem on the occasion of your making your start with words. A clean, indoor job—you might like it—writing.” Joe freed her hand into the relative cool of the sunlight and offered her an almost melancholy grin. She realised she trusted his touch—it had none of the anxious reserve she found, for example, in Nathan’s pats and wincing hugs at her.
“Not that you need these things from me. The man who picked you out will be more than adequate.”
“The man who . . . ?”
“Picked you out—Nathan. We all agreed, from your work, that you should come, but he was the one who first suggested you. He didn’t say?”
“No.”
Too fucking right, he didn’t.
“Well, he can be shy.” Joe punched his voice up to a mild shout. “Can’t you, Nate?”
Nathan, easing through the kitchen door, let loose a small squawk of surprise. He was finding himself unsteady, unhandy: a young child with its legs clipped round his waist, its fingers footering behind his neck. Eckless sleeked around his feet and past, gentle as a shadow.
“Now, if you tickle, I’ll drop you.” Nathan sounded, he thought, pitifully keen to play the part of The Man Who Often Carries Children, something of shame and eagerness combining to make him bolt and mumble phrases. “You’re too big for this.” The girl answered with a spine-jangling tightening of her multiple holds. She sighed happily with a series of minor, but instantly familiar motions that made him want to faint. This was how daughters felt. Always.
“Nate?”
Mary watched, amazed, as Nathan spun cautiously to face the bench, hands cradling a little girl. His face seemed vaguely shocked and he almost flinched when he recognised both of the garden’s occupants.
Nathan met Mary’s eyes, suddenly, almost ominously, breathless, and wheezed out, “Not mine,” as the girl slipped to the grass and ran for Joe.
“No. Mine.” Joe took his daughter’s hands. “My Sophie.” Father and daughter paused to enjoy a mutual smile, a mutual appreciation, while Nathan swayed beyond them, rubbing inside his collar with a fretful hand. Then Joe scooped Sophie up and they made themselves completely busy, completely closed inside all the patterns of noise and touch that let them know each other, claim each other.
Without any formal agreement to do so, Nathan and Mary withdrew. They drifted until they could both stand and stare at the rowan, which grew near the bottom of the garden. Mary felt Eckless nudge a greeting at the back of her knee, before he sat at Nathan’s side.
Mary made the first assault on their silence, aware of the shudder faintly visible in Nathan’s arms.
That can’t be just from carrying her. Unless he is really ill, more ill than he says. He doesn’t much look it, though. I’d have said he was quite fit. Nervously fit.
“Who is she?” Mary noticed she sounded almost aggrieved when, in fact, she wasn’t aware that she cared if Joe Christopher had a daughter.
“His daughter.” Nathan was trying for something more bullish, the manly deadpan.
“Well, I’d worked that out. But I wondered . . . you know . . .”
“As clear as ever in your use of language.” But he smiled at her quickly, to soften his meaning. “Joe gets to see her in the summer—‘when the island’s safe,’ as his ex tends to put it. She’s called Sophie. The daughter.”
“Already knew that. Needless repetition.”
Nathan grinned in earnest. “Yes, it was. To continue, I’ve just brought her over in the boat. She’ll be staying for a while. She’s a good kid. You’ll like her. She’s the one who pruned my dog’s name.”
“How do you mean, then?”
“I mean that Eckless used to be Reckless—a perfectly adequate name for a dog. But when they met, last summer
, Sophie wasn’t overly good at ‘r’s. So now my poor boy’s Eckless—which doesn’t even make sense.”
“But Reckless . . .”
“Yes?” Nathan tugged at one of the dog’s ears, scratched under its chin.
“Well, did that make any more sense?”
Nathan kept his head down, now just holding Eckless, his voice constricted somewhere. “It might have done. It might have.” He straightened, began to move back to the house: a heaviness, tiredness producing a strange resistance to his progress, as if he were wading through water. “Call a dog Reckless often enough, maybe he’ll be that way.” He clapped at his leg and Eckless came faultlessly to heel. “We had high hopes for both of us.”
Mary watched them both slip inside, neither of them attempting a goodbye.
I didn’t mean . . .
Well, go, then, I don’t care. But I didn’t make you. I didn’t do a thing to make you go.
Behind her, Joe and Sophie were singing something. She didn’t recognise the tune.
Mary was lying in sand, held by it, enjoying its slightly warm support from her skull to her heels. A handful of hot, salt sky was visible through the cave wall above her head, but otherwise there was shadow, old rock forms tongued by long-departed seas, the reddish surface of a high and dry, glacial beach. Llangattock had found the place first, widened the entrance, shored it up and fitted it—no one knew why—with a short, blue-painted door.
If she looked left, she knew, chips and sparks of light would be squeezing in around the door frame, but the seal was still more than adequate for her. Llangattock had paid for her to be here—she felt she should also inherit his cave.
If Bryn caught me here, I know exactly what he’d say. “Lovely day like this— you should be out.” Every summer, the same thing, he’s up and standing in the garden still wearing his dressing gown, trying to decipher any clouds, or to feel if rain is lifting, or thinning out, or to check if immaculate skies will stay that way. “You can never overestimate the benefits of sunshine. Nec solem proprium natura nec aera fecit nec tenues undas. Sun, wind and waves, girl, made for everyone—Ovid, knew his stuff.”
But Morgan hates it all. He only ever sits out in it for Bryn—to keep him company while he turns himself as brown as Cary Grant. That’s the shade he says he aims for, anyway. Poor Morgan, I have a photograph of him sitting outside on one day in a desperate heatwave with a handkerchief over his face, his hands clenched together, trying to squeeze his mind away from the nagging of sweat and the pain. There’s a livid triangle showing where his unbuttoned collar has left his neck exposed and the sun has crept down and scorched him, same as ever. But he’s doing his best, all the same, sitting it out and staring at his personal white cotton sky and—I suppose—imagining sunset and camomile lotion and asking Bryn to help him smooth it on.
Then she realised.
No, that isn’t a photograph I have. They’ve kept all the pictures. I should get some, the next time I’m back.
Mary listened to the gla-gla-gla of seabirds close by the other side of the cave wall. She was high in the cliff here, east of the Lighthouse, surrounded by rabbit holes full of shelducks and a squabble of fulmars and gulls. The air she breathed was moistly warm, comforting, private and she now hoped that tucking herself underground in it with her notebook and clearing her mind would mean that she could write. She had been almost certain this would work.
But not to panic if nothing happens immediately. It makes sense, it’s only natural, to be expected that now you’re allowed to write, you don’t want to.
Can’t.
Never mind can’t. Don’t want to. It’s because I’m used to speaking. Nathan made me speak and now I have to make me write and that takes a bit of getting used to, that’s all.
A quiet fear settled in her chest. It itched and snipped her concentration, itched again. She had the brief and sickening impression that her head was no more than a bony goldfish bowl—that nothing inside it could catch a grip. Information seemed to float in ugly clots behind her eyes while little flicks of life mouthed by, too short of memory to be anything more than consistently and moronically amazed.
No. I’m here to learn. They don’t expect me to know what I’m doing, yet I’m here to learn. This is a change, that’s all, another change. I just have to get used to making paper speak to someone who isn’t there.
Which must be one of the more ridiculous things that anyone would want to do.
She tried to find something positive to sustain and found herself quoting Nathan.
He said I was doing well. I think he meant it. I don’t think he lied, there would have been no point.
Her thoughts eddied and pooled. She let them, hoping this would drift away her island preoccupations. Having Nathan too clearly in her mind seemed to make her embarrassed, shy of breaking out in an ugly sentence, in some sign of her inadequacy, of her unsuitability, or of whatever other sad quality he seemed to search her for, almost every time they met.
She made a move for kinder company.
The Uncles—they say they’re fine when I ask them, and I do want them to be fine without me . . .
Really?
Yes.
But are they fine? Are they both all right?
Foal Island drew her back.
Will the Fellowship send me away if I’m no use?
Am I no use?
Shut up.
Does Nathan really hate me?
Does Nathan really like me?
Does Nathan ever really like anything?
If I can ever do this—write—
The clarity of the verb flooded her for a moment.
If I ever can, if I am ever any good, will I be good enough ? Will I be better than other people? Will I get away with it?
Will I succeed?
Do I want to succeed?
Of course.
And then, frictionless, irresistible, came the questions beneath the questions—their gentle shapes and then their stony impacts, waiting to repeat.
Is he with anyone now?
Does he still love me?
Did he then?
Why do I want to know any more? Why is this still any business of mine when there’s nothing I can do to change things? Why not accept that it’s totally stupid to care? Why not understand that Jonno isn’t here? That I’m not there?
A filming sweat of need hugged at her, kissed her forehead, mouth, both palms. There were still whole passages in seemingly random days when the air around her buckled and ached for him in a way that was so real it could start to persuade her that, finally, they would have to be each other’s, that this was intended. She hated it, the smart grip of involuntary fantasy. But worse was the moment when it left her, when the hot choke of frustration seemed lovely, because what came later was always simple and unbearable despair.
She wanted his small, irreplaceable, unimaginable facts. She wanted now, exactly now, more than at any other now, to just hold his hand.
No. I want him to hold mine. Just the good surprise of that.
Men on the brain, that’s what she had: Nathan watching her, Jonno lying down in wait: the two bookends between which she could not think, or safely dream, or write. Somewhere, she knew, was the understanding that she could give them the slip if she really wanted to, but to feel herself alone with no more than her words would make her too lonely. She couldn’t face it.
She shifted against the dead sand and hoped that she might cry, but this particular pain was too quick and changeable for that. Reflectively mineral powders hung in the narrow thrum of incoming light and the sea breathed, tireless, far below.
And perhaps Mary thought herself close to a sleep, or perhaps she was dazzled by a pursing memory of Jonathan’s lips, or perhaps her attention had simply crept away without her—Mary could only be sure that, when Lynda disturbed her, she felt both guilty and unreasonably exposed.
“Hello. Hello?”
Initially, she didn’t quite understand the voice. Her heart jolted w
ith faint surprise and she blinked herself a little more awake. Raw day was ripping down into the cave from the opened doorway, Lynda’s shadow the only relief from a blast of illumination that made Mary’s skin hurt.
“Mary? You are still here? Aren’t you?”
Lynda. This was Lynda’s voice and so this was, therefore, Lynda.
Fuck.
It wasn’t that Mary didn’t like her—not exactly. Lynda always tried to be friendly, forthcoming—Mary couldn’t fault her on that. Unless it was to wish that she should try less and either be more genuine or not bother. Every time they met, Mary could guarantee, Lynda would nip in with a slightly barbed compliment. If Mary was leaning through a wet gale, wearing Foal Island–issue wellingtons, three jerseys and Bryn’s hat and hadn’t been able to wash her hair all week, Lynda was sure to say how pretty she was looking with perfectly eloquent insincerity.
Pretty, clever, little—anything she can think of that’ll fit with girl.
This time it’ll be, Well, how clever of you to find such a nice little cave and how pretty you look in it. Well, what about—
Mary sat up, reached for her notebook, as if it might represent some kind of defence.
—fucking right off?
“Oh, there you are.” Lynda turned and then peered towards her, shut the door with an odd, small stammer of hesitation. The dark clapped back in about them both, disorientating.
Oh, thanks a lot. And what the hell are you up to by the way?
“I had hoped—” Lynda stumbled on the uneven floor and Mary heard a hollow, plastic impact. “Shit. Dropped the torch.”
“You won’t need it. After a while you get used to the darkness.” Mary saw, almost felt, Lynda’s shape move nearer and then stoop to sit. A tight silence settled, Lynda seemingly unwilling to break it.
Everything You Need Page 17