The Bellwether Revivals

by Benjamin Wood

  ‘I work at a place called Cedarbrook. It’s a nursing home,’ he told her. ‘But you don’t have to pity me—I know how to read and write and everything.’

  ‘Pity you? Christ, I envy you,’ she said. ‘Cedarbrook. That’s the lovely old building on Queen’s Road, isn’t it? They have all that beautiful wisteria growing on the walls.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s the place.’

  ‘Well, anyone who can make wisteria bloom like that every spring deserves a trophy. I walk past that house quite often, just to look at the gardens.’

  ‘I can’t take any credit for the wisteria. Not my department. But I’ll pass it along.’

  She looked down at the scuffed black toecaps of her shoes, rocking on the edges of her feet. ‘This is my little corner of the world. I’m a King’s girl. Medicine, second year, if you can believe it.’

  ‘Must be hard work.’

  ‘It’s not too bad really. Not all of the time, anyway.’

  Oscar could only try to imagine the way she lived. He’d been in Cambridge long enough to know the hours the students worked, to see them on the other side of library windows late at night, red-eyed, ruffle-haired. But he knew as little about the everyday lives of Cambridge students as they knew about the daily machinations of Cedarbrook. What went on inside the closed-off doorways of the colleges was an enduring mystery to him. He only knew that it was better to be near to these places, to walk by them and imagine what high-minded discussions were unfolding inside, than to be somewhere like home, where every conversation was audible on the high street and the only landmarks were shopping centres.

  When he asked for her name, she replied: ‘It’s Iris. Like the genus.’ And he laughed—just a short vent of air from his nose, but enough for her to step back and say, ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Most people would say like the flower, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’m not most people. I’m not going to say it’s like the flower when I know perfectly well that it’s a genus. And I’ll tell you something else.’ She broke for a gulp of breath. ‘I know exactly which variety I am. Iris milifolia. The hardest one to look after.’

  ‘But worth the effort, I’m sure.’

  She gazed back at him proudly, the lights of the college buildings reflecting in her lenses. Though Oscar could feel the tiredness more than ever now, weighing down his eyelids, he didn’t want to leave. This was where he was meant to be, talking to this strange pretty girl, with her clove and bergamot scent and her copy of Descartes. He wanted to stretch the moment out as far as it would go, tauten it until it broke apart.

  ‘Listen, this might sound a little, y’know,’ Iris said, letting the sentence drop away. She scratched the side of her arm and glanced at him. ‘It’s just, my chamber group has a recital later this week, out at West Road. If you’re not doing anything on Sunday night, would you like to come? We could really use all the support we can get.’

  He didn’t need a second to think about it. ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Won’t be hard to get a ticket at the door, believe me,’ she said. Then, for reasons that weren’t clear to him, she laughed out loud.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘It’s nothing. It’s just—you’re really going to go, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But you don’t even know if we’re any good. I haven’t even told you what instrument I play. I could be the world’s lousiest trombonist, for all you know.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything else that night. And if your brother’s an organ scholar, you can’t be all that bad.’

  ‘How inductive of you,’ she said. ‘Do you even know what an organ scholar is?’

  ‘No, but it sounds important.’

  ‘In the college, yes. In the real world, no.’ She told him that two scholarships were awarded every couple of years at King’s. There was great competition for places amongst undergraduates, and usually a first-year and a third-year were appointed. Her brother was one of the only students in the history of the college to be awarded a scholarship twice. ‘A normal person wouldn’t want all the extra hassle in his final year, but that’s my brother for you. He’s irregular.’ It was the organ scholars’ job to play at the chapel services; they worked on a shift rotation: one week on, one week off. They also assisted the Director of Music in his duties. ‘If the Director can’t make it for some reason, the organ scholar has to conduct the choir. It hardly ever happens, though. Maybe once a year. My brother’s always hoping something horrible will befall the Director, but he’s healthy as an ox.’ She stubbed out her clove on the drainpipe. ‘Anyway, I’ll be very glad to see you on Sunday, if you still want to come.’

  ‘Are you an organist too?’ he asked.

  ‘Me? No. God, no. I play the cello.’ She gave a little sigh, as if she’d been saddled with an instrument she had no interest in. As if one day in a school music lesson all the triangles and tambourines had been doled out, and her teacher had handed her a hunk of wood and said, Here, play this until I find you something better. ‘I haven’t been practising much recently. Not the recital pieces, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because studying medicine is quite demanding of my time.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And in my free time I read stuff like this.’ She raised the book. ‘Things my brother tells me I should be reading. I suppose I’m a glutton for punishment that way. The Passions of the Soul. Tell me honestly: am I wasting my youth? Should I just be out there getting drunk with the rest of them?’

  ‘That would be a bigger waste, I think.’

  Her face slackened. ‘My problem is, I’m too easily steered off course. Have to be doing several things at once.’

  ‘You’re a butterfly catcher,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what my father would call you.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s a kinder phrase than hyperactive. He must be more patient than my parents.’

  Oscar just nodded, peering at the ground. It was strange to hear someone speaking well of his father, because he rarely thought of him that way. He could only recall the rain-soaked building sites where he spent most of his school holidays, helping to heave plasterboards up narrow flights of stairs, and all the weekends he lost stuffing insulation into wall cavities, filling skips with office debris. He could remember the bitterness of his father’s voice when they used to argue on the job: ‘Go then. Leave me. I’ll do it myself. You’ve always got somewhere better to be, don’t you? A butterfly catcher, that’s what you are.’ This was not patience, Oscar knew, but a resentful kind of endurance.

  By the time he turned back to Iris, her attention was elsewhere. She’d noticed something over his shoulder and was gathering herself to leave, fixing her scarf, patting down her coat. The remains of her cigarette lay trodden at her feet. ‘My brother’s here,’ she said. ‘I better go.’

  Oscar heard the gentle tinkling of bike spokes, and spun around to see a man in a pinstripe blazer wheeling a shiny Peugeot racer, dynamo lights strobing on the path. His corduroy trousers were turned up at the ankles, and a mass of wavy hair was spilling from the edges of his bike helmet. There was something ungainly about the way his blazer hung on his body—shoulders and elbows still prominent beneath the fabric, like a sheet thrown over an upturned table.

  ‘Just a sec,’ Iris called to him. She took off her glasses and pushed them into the top pocket of her coat. Without them, her face was more evenly proportioned. ‘Here,’ she said, tossing the Descartes to her brother. ‘Say what you like about French philosophy, but it’s no good when you read it in the dark.’

  Her brother caught the book and stuffed it into the back of his trousers. ‘I’m not letting you off the hook that easily. You’re getting it back first thing tomorrow.’ He squinted at Oscar as if appraising an antique. ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘This is Oscar,’ she told him. ‘We
’ve been shooting the breeze, as Yin would say.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? About what?’

  ‘Religion, flowers—all the big issues.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Did you know the iris is a genus?’ she said.

  Her brother lifted an eyebrow. ‘I think I knew that in utero.’ Propping the bike-frame against one knee, he leaned to offer his slender hand to Oscar. ‘If we wait for her to introduce us, we’ll be here all night. The name’s Eden.’ His grip was solid and unforgiving. ‘Thanks for keeping her company.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Oscar said. He couldn’t quite see Eden’s face—it was partly drawn over by the shadows of the chapel spires—but he could tell that his skin had the texture of a seashell, smooth yet flawed. ‘Was that really you playing in there? I’ve never heard an organ sound so good.’

  Eden glanced up at the sky. ‘Oh. Well. Thank you. I try my best.’

  ‘You couldn’t save his soul, though,’ Iris said. ‘He’s a non-believer.’ She perched side-saddle on the crossbar of the bike, placing an arm around her brother and kissing him softly on the cheek. ‘Shall we go?’

  Eden received the kiss, barely reacting. ‘Yes, let’s,’ he said, ‘before the porters catch me on this thing. I’ve already been warned about riding through.’

  ‘I don’t know why you insist on cycling. Just take a cab.’

  ‘It’s become something of a battle of wills. First man to blink loses. Can’t let that happen.’ Eden lowered his voice to say something into her ear and she laughed, hitting his arm playfully. ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Don’t say that.’ Then, with a stiff movement of his legs, Eden started to pedal away. ‘Good to meet you, Oscar,’ Iris said.

  ‘Yeah. Same.’

  ‘See you Sunday.’

  ‘Yeah. Sunday.’

  They were quite a sight, the two of them: Eden pumping hard at the pedals just to keep the bike upright, and Iris with her long legs stretched out a few inches above the ground. As they approached the Gatehouse, where the lawn turned at a right angle, she called out into the hazy lamplight, but Oscar couldn’t quite tell what she was saying.

  Dr Paulsen was sleeping in the leather armchair by the window. His head was limp against his shoulder, heavy as a lettuce, and the sun was edging across his face. ‘How are we this morning?’ Oscar said. He gathered a pillow from the bed and waited for the old man to stir. It was after nine a.m. and he knew that Dr Paulsen would want to be woken; unlike the other residents, he was not a man who was happy to sleep the day away. He didn’t like to waste time on television the way the others did, or spend a whole week assembling a jigsaw that only revealed a picture of a sunny foreign vista he was too old to visit. (‘I’ve never understood the concept of the jigsaw,’ he once said. ‘I mean, the picture’s already on the box—where’s the mystery?’) His room was very different from the others: bright with natural light, dense with furniture and books, and the scent of urine was fainter here than anywhere else in the building. Oscar put this down to the extra care the nurses took in emptying Paulsen’s bottle—the old man was so cold to most of them that they were terrified of spilling a drop.

  Dr Paulsen lifted his head, a web of drool caught against his chin. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, looking at Oscar, dew-eyed. ‘Is it that time already? I was having a wonderful dream about … well, about something. I think Rupert Brooke was in it. Somebody was swimming naked in the Cam, anyway. If I were thirty years younger, I would’ve found it all quite arousing.’

  Oscar placed the pillow behind the old man’s neck. ‘Are you coming down for breakfast today? Or are we still keeping ourselves to ourselves?’

  ‘I haven’t decided.’ Paulsen sat upright in the chair. ‘The more I look at these same four walls, the more I feel like Edmond Dantès. A heroic bearer of injustice.’ He narrowed his eyes at Oscar. ‘You’re very chirpy this morning. What’s got into you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Rubbish. Did you get a pay rise?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. The rates here are already extortionate.’

  Oscar smiled. With a groan, he lifted Paulsen up by the elbows, and when the old man was steady on his feet, he said: ‘Actually, I sort of met somebody last night. A girl.’

  ‘Hand me my dressing gown, would you?’ Paulsen said. ‘I have to process this information.’ Oscar retrieved the old man’s silk robe from the hook and held out the sleeves for him. Slowly, Paulsen reached his arms through and, with knotted, arthritic fingers, made very hard work of tying the cord. ‘Okay, let’s pretend this imaginary girl you’re talking about is real. Tell me about her. I’ll humour you for a moment.’

  ‘Oh, she’s definitely real.’

  ‘Convince me,’ Paulsen said.

  Oscar tried to describe Iris in every last detail—the glossy whites of her eyes, her cigarette smell, the gentle drape of her hair against her neck. When he told him about the book she’d been reading and where she was studying, the old man interrupted: ‘Warning lights are flashing now. But go on. Tell me you got her phone number.’

  ‘I didn’t quite get that far.’

  ‘You’re hopeless,’ Paulsen said. ‘It’s a good job she’s imaginary.’

  Dr Paulsen was the only resident at Cedarbrook whom Oscar could talk to. He was born in Oxford but had been an English professor at Cambridge and a Fellow at King’s College for over thirty years. He kept a library in his room, hardbacks stacked alphabetically by author on dark wood shelves. There were more books in his room than anything else, in fact; more novels and poetry collections and anthologies than stripes on the wallpaper. He wouldn’t let the other nurses touch them, but he allowed Oscar to read them in his company, and, for a year now, he’d been letting him take home a book at a time.

  They had an understanding between them. Oscar was the only nurse who recognised Paulsen’s need for privacy. The others tried to force him to be sociable; they’d set a place for him at the dinner table and wonder why he wouldn’t come downstairs, meal after meal after meal. The old man could be gloomy, abrasive, downright rude. But in the few years Oscar had been working at Cedarbrook, he’d found a way to overlook Paulsen’s fits of temper, because he knew he was capable of genuine kindness. And he was learning so much from the old man, simply by reading the books he recommended. In the last six months, he’d read novels by Graham Greene, Herman Hesse, the collected stories of Gianni Celati, Katherine Mansfield, Frank O’Connor, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and essays by George Orwell. He had almost forgotten how much he loved to read; the private cadence of the words as his eyes passed over them. His parents were the kind of people who owned bookshelves but no books. They didn’t understand the pleasure of reading and never thought it was something they needed to encourage. In their lives, books were optional, things foisted on children at school by dishevelled English teachers. Oscar was raised to believe that if he stayed in his room reading about made-up worlds it meant he didn’t appreciate the life he had, the possessions his parents had worked hard for, like the TV and the video and the newly turfed back garden. If he read books, his father would ask him if he was okay, if he was feeling unwell, and whatever happened to that friend of his who came over once for tea. Back on his parents’ estate in Watford, life was easier if he didn’t read. So he trained himself not to want to.

  But ever since Dr Paulsen invited him to borrow from his library last year—’Choose something. Anything. I don’t do recommendations’—Oscar had begun to recall the joy of reading. Sometimes he could get through three or four books a month if things were slow at Cedarbrook, more if he worked nights. There were evenings when all the residents had been put to bed and the nurse-call buttons were no longer chiming, and he could spend long hours in the empty parlour, reading in the lamplight, his fingers dry against the pages, smelling of antibacterial soap. These were the times when he was happiest.

  ‘Alright, let’s go and see what they’re passing off as breakfast,’ Paulsen said. ‘Might as well start making an effort.
’ He held out his arm, like a gentleman asking a lady to dance. Oscar retrieved the old man’s walking stick from the foot of the bed and placed it into his hand. ‘Should I expect a red carpet or what?’

  ‘They’ll be sounding the trumpets for you.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  Oscar led him down the dim corridor. After a few steps, the old man spoke into his ear: ‘Listen, you want to be careful.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About fraternising with Cambridge girls. Their daddies don’t like them being with boys like you for too long. They consider it a waste of school fees.’

  ‘Well, I’ll keep my wits about me.’

  ‘Make sure you do. Besides—’ Another resident, Mrs Brady, stepped out into the hallway and Dr Paulsen went quiet. He stopped walking. She peered at them both and creased up her face, confused. There was a silent standoff between them, like two old cowboys meeting in the thoroughfare of a pioneer town. Then Mrs Brady turned, disappearing back into her room, and Dr Paulsen started walking again. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Besides.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Besides, Cambridge students are very strange people, in my experience. They know so much about science and literature it makes them have peculiar habits when it comes to other things. Like dancing, and decorating their homes. You’re best away from people like that. Stick with the salt-of-the-earth types like me.’

  ‘I would,’ Oscar said, ‘except you’re the strangest person I know.’

  They reached the top of the stairs. He took the old man’s cane and heaved him safely into the stair lift. Paulsen said: ‘I should have a copy of the Descartes somewhere. It’s yours if you can find it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Just don’t go scribbling love hearts in the margins.’

  Oscar smiled. He placed the cane across the armrests, as if it were a drop-bar on a roller coaster, and when he was sure that Paulsen was secure, he pressed the green button and watched him descend, gradually, noisily, to the floor below.