Helen was reading a magazine when he went in to wake her. He’d wanted her to rest. Nobody realised how tiring all this was for her. She didn’t tell them and they didn’t have the wit to guess, because she could make any activity appear to involve no effort. She was born to be that way – no visible effort. Which didn’t mean she didn’t work, didn’t mean he hadn’t felt the difference in her muscles every night since this started. Sometimes she would tremble, caught in an extended movement, no room to be anything other than visibly weak.
Perhaps he just didn’t like Twyford, the director. Maybe it was only ill-feeling that made him think the overall intention of the exercise was to ease Helen just a little more quickly on her way. The final documentary would be made, the old dancer in her kitchen, buying a magazine, pacing nostalgic sprung flooring in some godforsaken hall and then she could die neatly, sufficiently immortalised. They were carving her memorial around her, already bending tiny incidents into myth. Sam had watched Twyford yesterday – the illustrious Ben Twyford – thinking himself into sparkling-eyed silence while Helen mashed out tinned sardines on to Rudolf’s dish. The cat had sensibly boycotted the whole touching affair and the room was diving steadily towards some kind of scaley epitaph, Twyford chewed at his lip, his eyes reeling back and forward over a moment of senile fondness for a possibly imagined feline. He had sardine eyes.
Sam drew the blind up gently and let the grass and the daffodils in.
‘Morning Mum. I thought you were having a late lie in.’
‘Couldn’t sleep, Dad. It’s all the thrill of the filming. Last chance to shine.’
‘Oooh, you are a card, Mum. You know you’re used to it, really.’
‘Not any more.’
He felt the depth of the carpet muffling underneath him as he came over to the bed. Funny how bedroom carpets always seemed the softest, he supposed it must be lack of wear.
‘Don’t be silly, you always shine. Like a film star, look at her – just awake and perfect hair, you wouldn’t think she’d slept in it at all. Some people are lucky.’
She pursed her lips, disapproving and pleased. ‘Sssh.’
‘Show me something.’
Now her face cleared, almost emptied, except for the eyes. There was a tick of wariness there, or the fear of a future hurt.
‘Go on.’ It was important that he held her gaze while she rolled back the quilt. She had to be sure that he loved her from the inside out before he could break away and look at her powder pearl skin, the skinny girl limbs. He knew her all over – sometimes taut, like a teenage endurance runner, or suddenly damp, malleable as a new calf, all long bones and soft blinking. Time had finally breeched her lines, making her translucent and even more of what she had been always, the woman who was more air than substance. One morning she would be nothing at all, he knew it.
‘That’s Helen.’ He winced at the clumsiness of his voice.
‘What’s left of her.’
‘Now, now, Mum. Don’t be morbid. Not when you can’t see what I see. I would tell you if you weren’t still beautiful.’
‘Fibber.’
‘Suit yourself. They want to have you walking in the garden, gliding through the spring bulbs, glimmers of light through the daffodils bending at your heels. Something like that. I don’t think you should – it’s raining.’
‘I’m waterproof, Dad. Not a cripple yet.’
‘I was only saying you might be miserable. You know how they make you stand about. See how you feel when you’ve had your bath, it’s running.’
‘Thank you, Dad. You’re a lamb.
In the end she pleased them and went out to the garden. The rain was too insubstantial to show up on film. Only she would know she was wet which made it oddly all right. Sam went for another walk in the fine, washing morning. He’d been walking a lot lately, getting out of the way, out of any trouble he might cause.
He took an easy ten minutes, padding along clean streets of pastel and cream Victorian iced dollhouse buildings. It was quiet here and smelled very faintly of spring, wet brickwork and new paint. A young woman with casually mountainous hair overtook him, a tiny dog squeezed backwards under her arm like a miniature set of sniffling bagpipes. He watched the wink and fall of the gold inlay at the back of her heels and wondered how long her shoes would last. They were more like carpet slippers, belligerently delicate, a wonderful little proof that walking and pavements need no longer be a part of life. Then he was turning and fitting himself to the flow of the main street, a slow burst of pedestrians from the underground.
Because it always made him feel uneasy to be here, he ducked into a cafe for an early lunch. Three men sat round a table at the back, all wearing hair unsuitable for countries with weather.
‘Have you seen the menu?’
He managed a hungry smile for the waitress.
‘Yes, could I have the shepherd’s pie?’
He would always say it that way – never ‘I would like’ or ‘I want’, but ‘could I have’. As if one day he would be told that the shepherd’s pie was too good for him, that he shouldn’t be there, that he couldn’t have anything, go away.
‘The shepherd’s pie is really lovely today.’
Which made him instantly feel disproportionately wise. Without help, he had chosen the one dish on the menu that was really lovely today. He knew that, when he paid for his meal, another girl with assured hands and confident eyes would ask him how his shepherd’s pie was and he would tell her it was really lovely today. The girls and meals and restaurants were interchangeable, but everything would always be really lovely and today.
He smoothed down his moustache with the ball of his thumb and felt a real smile coming. There must be some Calvinist in him that he couldn’t just enjoy this. Down in the blackened stump of a soul he imagined for himself, there must be something that longed to be uncomfortable. He should plunge into this whole whinnying gush of a city, watching it consuming and creating unsustainably, gleaming and floating on and on, blatantly unscathed for the simple reason that this all was so impossibly, wastefully, triumphally and enormously stupid that no one could even grasp enough of it to be angry.
He was angry, though. Even the nice steely blue they had managed for the sky outside made him angry. Today’s walk wasn’t going to calm him. He would stamp home, giving the man who sold the paper for the homeless too much money and offending him, being charitable and guilty and of no use.
‘Well then, Sam. I just want to put something on film from what we discussed yesterday. Is that all right?’
Twyford gave him a paternal smile and crossed his legs with girlish ease. Sam found himself wishing that Twyford was gay – his affectation might have seemed likeable if it could have come from something human, something vulnerable. Or perhaps not.
‘Is that all right?’ The smile had been adjusted to brotherly but concerned.
‘Yes, that’s fine. Whatever you like.’
‘Feel free to smoke, if you’re nervous.’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Down to business, then.’
If Sam had thought, he would have turned the radiators off, the lights were making the room almost unbearably hot. In the tropical conditions, Twyford seemed to swell and bray. His questions circled in and in, a hunting flicker in his fishy stare.
‘It certainly seems odd. Helen Carlisle, of the shipping Carlisles, finishing school and then ballet school, an astonishing career, and you – a painter, you might say a rather minor painter, a socialist realist from a Liverpool Irish family.’
‘We both had fathers in ships. One way or another – you know?’
‘You met in London?’
So he wanted the whole deal, all the unexplainable business of how they met. Sam knew what always seemed miraculous to him would sound like self-interest to Twyford. He felt his voice lose its definition slowly, vowels wavering.
‘It’s such an old story. It was luck, that’s all. Luck I was working down here, or not working down her
e and a mate of mine had a job at the theatre where Helen was performing. That was the last season she danced, working with Bently as choreographer and partner, he was a youngster then – not ballet, new dance, very experimental in one way or another – I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. And there I was in the stalls and there she was on the stage. That was that.’
‘So simple?’
Even with Twyford watching, even with the black box eye of the camera watching, Sam was moving away to the first curve Helen had made in the air that evening. It had felt like an embrace, a woman in her forties, flinging her soul out to a younger, somehow less alive, man – matching his bursts of effort with something much slower; a huge, delicate power.
Every performance Sam could beg or buy a seat for, he’d been there, like an idiot. Like a mascot. Daft. And even then, he’d felt something slipping away from him. The plan he had made for his life, for all the important things he would do, it scattered, there wasn’t even time to mourn it, until it was too long gone.
‘Yes, it was very simple. My friend invited me to the last night party and pointed me out. I’d seen the show probably too many times, she was very nice about it, my faithful attendance.’
‘And she invited you for tea?’
‘That’s her way of meeting people, she invites them for tea. Her health means she does it less often now, but that’s still her way.’
‘But you’re the only one she married.’
‘That’s right. I don’t know why that happened, but I’m glad it did. Maybe she remembered me because I didn’t fit in. I was wearing several other people’s clothes. I didn’t have the kind of wardrobe you needed to have tea with ballet dancers in.’
As he’d left, Helen had held him back, her hand very firm around his, her mouth very close to his. She had told him, ‘If you were a puppy, I couldn’t take you in. Just look at the size of your feet. You’d have eaten me out of house and home, before you grew into them.’
Then she had dipped away from him a little, snatched a glance at his face and blushed which of course made him blush, too.
‘I’m sorry, that was a silly thing to say.’
‘No. No, it wasn’t silly. But I won’t grow any bigger, my wisdom teeth are through. I’m just not built in proportion to my shoe size.’
That had made her giggle and pat at the small of his back. Sam hoped Twyford had filmed Helen’s giggle, her laugh, her smile. That would be something valuable. Sam tried to focus again on the prying little voice. It sounded like toothache.
‘I’m sure. And your painting?’
‘I don’t do it any more. I still work now and then for myself, but I don’t paint for other people. I have nothing I want to say – no, I have nothing I am able to say. I stay here with Helen and keep the place tidy, do the shopping, that kind of thing.’
‘You look after Helen.’
‘Helen looks after herself. And she keeps me – I’m a kept man. Don’t know what Mam would have thought of that.’
‘But as she gets older . . .’
‘Oh, I suppose things will change, I don’t know. In the end I’ll go back to painting.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. When she dies, I’ll paint.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, when she dies, I’ll paint. This place will become mine, although I don’t know if I’ll stay here, and I’ll paint. Something like that.’
‘Some people might find that rather mercenary.’
‘That would be their right. I find it rather necessary. Every day I think of Helen dying and of what I will do when she does and that makes it possible to stay here without being frightened. I couldn’t wake up every morning afraid of being surprised by her death. I appreciate the time I have with her and I try to keep it real.’
Twyford failed to raise any suitable smile.
‘When I saw her first, I knew, you see – from my throat to the pit of my stomach and down the insides of my arms, like that, I could feel it – I knew something had happened. It was out of my hands – I would stay with her until she died and that would be the best way I could occupy my time. Nothing else was possible any more. After this, I’ll do something else until I die and that may mean I paint, or sell papers, or devote my life to saving endangered donkeys. More and more, I think that the dying will be the important thing – not what I do at all. Do you ever think that?’
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘Well, I look out of the window behind you there, for instance. Lovely red brick and white plaster or whatever the hell it is, very pretty, very perfect – the leaded windows facing out on it all and our awfully nice, well-regulated garden down below. And it’s all been here for – what – a hundred years, a bit more. But I see all that and it seems it must have been there forever – forever and flawless – not an expression of power, or wealth, but a power in itself. After a while I’ll start to feel a little bit crazy, I’ll dream about blowing things up, just to prove it’s possible to get some movement here, to make it real and decaying like the people. I mean I wouldn’t bomb the people, just the place. You won’t use that bit, will you?’
‘Some viewers might find it offensive.’
‘I suppose so. In any case, I mainly think about dry rot, wet rot, woodworm, subsidence – the slow kinds of explosion. I mean, people are so good at ignoring things here, they don’t even really notice the bombs any more – they’re just something else nasty on the street. Inconvenient. Even I believe this is all invulnerable now. Guy Fawkes didn’t change it, Hitler didn’t change it, nor will I. It’s an island in an island here, we make it like that in our heads. I know I do. Now the only way I can relax and live with myself is to think that changes will happen more slowly than I can see. What I find most important is that thinking of death – Helen’s and mine – makes it quite possible to be alive. I get a sense of perspective this way and I don’t worry so much. It doesn’t drive me crazy to be here and not be able to do anything much about anything. Paint or don’t paint, dance or don’t dance, film or don’t film – it doesn’t matter, does it?’
That sounded final enough to Sam, but Twyford rallied for one last lunge at Sam’s Socialist principles, his artist’s need to communicate and lead the way. Sam could only presume he didn’t have these things any more because nothing Twyford said seemed to even touch them. Inside, he felt peculiarly peaceful.
‘You’ve never thought of leaving; the age difference, there’s never been a strain?’
One late jab.
‘No, Ben. I’ve never thought of anything like that. If you knew Helen, you wouldn’t either.’
‘Well, thanks, Sam. I don’t know how much of that we’ll be able to use. It will certainly give us another perspective on Helen, but she will always be in the focus.’
‘That’s always fine with me.’
Twyford’s eyes shut down and he patted his jacket pockets for the lighter he had left on the arm of the chair.
Sam went into the bathroom, locked the door and filled the sink with sour London water. He pressed his face down through the cold thick of it until his eyes began to prickle and his ears roared and then he gulped back and up, taking in long, aching gasps of air. His reflection blinked and dripped, its nose running, then smiled and sank to the water again. This time the overflow splashed his feet. When he was finished he would put on dry clothes and clear up the mess, but for now he was washing his brains and he didn’t know a way to do that and be tidy.
‘Well, Dad, they’ve gone, then.’
‘No more attention.’
‘All for the best, Dad. It would have gone to our heads.’
‘There would have been no talking to us. Still, we’d better watch it – it’ll prove we’re real. Nothing like being on the telly to make you real.’
‘He’s doing something in Surbiton next. Or Serbia, one or the other.’
‘Wouldn’t be Serbia, Mum. Very messy and nasty out there. Who would want to do with that?’
They would sit on the red sofa and watch Mr Number-thirty-five drink his whiskies and talk about the filming tonight. That would get it out and over with, no need to mention it again. Sam kissed her throat and felt the movement of her voice.
‘Is it next month, we’re on, Dad?’
‘The one after.’
‘Think we’ll still be here then?’
He slipped his arms around her, his palms against her ribs, holding her breath.
‘I wasn’t thinking of leaving. Were you going somewhere, Mum?’
‘I’m not sure. Such funny things happen, Dad. I never know.’
‘Nice to be here for the show, eh? Early to bed and keep healthy, we’ll probably both be here.’
‘Then maybe we’ll watch it together, then.’
‘Yes, Mum, we’ll do that.’
She smoothed his cheek, close and slow so that he could hear her touch, the faintly electric disturbance of muscle and finger joints, the sound of her mechanism working.
MIXING WITH THE FOLKS BACK HOME
MY DEAR DAUGHTER,
I can imagine you may have been wondering why I never did explain about you and your father and why it is that you are not related.
We spoke about it one time before, I know, and I said – the same as always – that another time would be more suitable. Now the days and the years have gone by and that suitable time never has come along which is why I decided to write you and get this done.
‘You want this thing done, then go right ahead and do it, get it done.’ That’s what your father says and I agree with him.
Well, this all happened a long time ago and a long way from you and me both. I was in another state. The State of Matrimony.
No. That was a joke. But I was married, sure enough, and living in a little place far away from here, but pretty much the same. We had more frogs there, is all. A lot of years, I’ve thought about it and that’s the only difference I can come up with. More frogs and maybe less folks which is about the way I like it. You know I never was the social butterfly type.
One summer I was the age you are now, or darn close to it, and it seemed like the whole world was fixing to lay down and die. Everywhere you looked, nothing but yellow dust and white dust and the husks of bugs and now and then some unfortunate critter, flat down and dried up and dead. I lifted a big old catfish once, right up out of the creek bed, didn’t weigh more than a handful of leaves and so stiff and dry it snapped clean in two just like a week old piece of corn bread. Except it was a different shape and colour than corn bread, of course.
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