by Bruno Noble
About the Author
Bruno Noble was born in Beirut and educated at Oundle School and Southampton University where he read French and philosophy before moving to London. This is his first novel.
A Thing of the Moment
Bruno Noble
This edition first published in 2018
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© Bruno Noble, 2018
The right of Bruno Noble to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-912618-37-8
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912618-36-1
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The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing.
– John Gray, Straw Dogs (2002)
Contents
About the Author
[Dear Reader Letter]
Super Patrons
[Frontispiece]
[Epigraph]
Prologue
Isabella
Mie
Sharon
Isabella
Mie
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Isabella
Sharon
Mie
Isabella
Sharon
Mie
Sharon
Mie
Isabella
Sharon
Mie
Isabella
Mie
Isabella
Mie
Isabella
Sharon
Isabella
Mie
Sharon
Isabella
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Patrons
Prologue
Isabella’s mother hanged herself when she was six months pregnant with Isabella’s sister. Isabella was nine years old and her brother Cosmo was two.
She discovered her mother’s body hanging from the single beam in the garden shed, a pine kitchen chair on its side as though averting its face and a damp patch on the beaten earth floor a spotlight on a vacated stage. A butterfly, a male brimstone, had alighted on her mother’s lips and flexed his yellow wings like a bellows,
as though attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Moving closer, she could observe the brimstone’s proboscis inserted in a corner of her mother’s open mouth.
Actually, her mother wasn’t there, Isabella said. Her body was, but her mother wasn’t: a body that went from being her sister’s source of life and sustenance to her coffin in two heartbeats. A doll within a doll, matryoshkas made of flesh. She felt her mother’s absence, in the musky warmth of the shed, with all the intensity of a presence. She said she thinks that that was why she wasn’t immediately upset – that, and the butterfly. That and the kernel of resentment that took seed within her immediately, tenacious like a foetus, ugly like a grey, knobbly puss moth chrysalis for its evident unfairness.
She would come to feel more alone in the world for the loss of a sister she had never met than of a mother who, she couldn’t help but believe, had abandoned Cosmo and her. In her sister, had she been born and lived, she would have had an ally, a same-sex sibling whom she could have shielded from the worst of things and in whom she could have saved herself by proxy. She had anticipated her sister’s birth with such longing that she felt cheated of the role she had prepared herself for and that her mother hadn’t had the courage to assume.
Her mother, her dear hand-wringing, self-deluding mother, had believed that neither seeing nor hearing evil might guarantee its absence, that the world could be a better place by the power of hope alone. Isabella would come to think that her mother had died long before the day of the brimstone’s embrace, at around the time she was pregnant with Cosmo, when life’s baton had been passed from her mother to him. Then, when Cosmo and she had needed their mother most, she had left for good.
She could see her mother’s logic: having failed Cosmo and her, she would save her baby. She could see her mother’s desperate hope, too: having taken her own and her baby’s lives, she would draw attention to her children’s plight, raise questions about the probable cause of her action and, so, rescue them.
The deaths were in vain: it would be left to Isabella to raise a flag, and so she would begrudge her mother her unnatural death despite herself, old enough both to despise herself for doing so and to understand what only she, with the possible exception of her father, could guess to be her mother’s motivation.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘who I hated, resented, bore grudges against and forgave, who I loved, loved carnally, these were the things I would have control over. Sebastian, you wouldn’t be here in bed with me otherwise.’
Isabella
My father was the elder son of a clergyman, theologian and lepidopterist, who, surrounded by his wife, sons and daughters, looked intently into my father’s study from a framed photograph positioned on the left end of the study mantelpiece. My grandfather and grandmother are seated side by side in wicker armchairs in a large, luxuriant garden with their two sons standing behind them and their three daughters at their feet, all of them framed within the frame by the grey stone vicarage in the middle distance. Although taken in the 1950s, the photograph has a faintly Edwardian air in its formality, in the men’s ties, in my aunties’ billowing chiffon dresses that settle on the grass, in the leaky, fading colours. The picture contains its contradictions at closer inspection: it is a family photo in which no one is smiling; the garden appears lush and the bleaching noonday sun fierce, and yet the men wear their jackets buttoned up and my Aunts Mary, Linda and Patricia wear cardigans while, discreetly in the background, the vicarage chimneys smoke. My grandmother seems absent, perhaps embarrassed or even ashamed to be a part of this staid troupe; no matter how closely and frequently I examined the picture I could never catch her eye. Close up, her eye sockets, the spaces beneath pale eyebrows, are featureless and devoid of pupils. My grandfather sits forward, one hand gripping a chair arm, as though intent on missing nothing that goes on in my father’s study, keen to hear every word, to see every coming and going and to savour every indiscretion. His eyes are black pinpricks below a centre parting. Behind him, my uncle James grips his father’s chair as though he would overturn it and he and my father, too, standing uncomfortably in a tweed suit behind my mother, look at their father with a mix of hatred and contempt – or so it appeared to me. It was hard to tell, really: the picture quality was poor and contrasted with the opulence of the silver frame it rested in.
My mother’s family was German, so my mother and I and, later, Cosmo, would visit her parents in Paderborn once a year. We would see my mother’s older sister, who travelled South America to satisfy her wanderlust, and her younger one, who taught German in Japan, even less frequently.
On the rare occasions of paternal family reunions, which were held with a degree of reluctance and only, it would seem, for the sake of keeping up appearances, a sense of wariness and unspoken resentment would fill the air. My grandmother would retain a fixed smile as though in apology for an oversight or, perhaps, the perennially dry cucumber sandwiches and stale meringues, and would sigh whenever presented with her granddaughter to kiss, cuddle or commend. Every time I greeted her up close, I would start with surprise that she had eyes, after all. She would direct them somewhere either above my head or at my feet as she blessed me, my dear, and handed me back hastily to my mother as though anxious that I might regurgitate my lunch on her or she disgorge her secrets on me. Our family reunions were always in the summer and outdoors, as though to permit flight, as though in fear of the results of close containment, of what confinement might lead to. My father, uncle and aunts would circle their parents and each other cautiously, apprehensive not so much of what others might say or do but afraid of what they themselves might. They appeared as terrified of forgetting themselves in laughter and reminiscence as they were of finding themselves in pairs and open to confidences. They would wade through those hot summer days as though through treacle, deliberately and incapable of sudden movement, or as in an elaborate slow dance that my mother and her brother-in-law, Aunt Patricia’s husband, were not invited to join. My father and his siblings orbited that central, stationary point of their father, neither daring to get too close to him nor capable of distancing themselves entirely from his pull. He was the sun and the father, the puppet master, the orchestrator of their poisoned lives from whom they had to buy the antidote repeatedly, thereby keeping revolt and hatred in check. His children beat their wings in vain against the slow death he had ensnared them in, illustrated so brilliantly by the rows and columns of butterflies behind glass in every public room of the vicarage that he would talk of with pride and no small degree of malevolence.
Well before my father and Uncle James had reached their teens, my grandfather had bought them each a fine denier butterfly net, a heavy-duty card display box, a magnifying glass and minuten pins and declared himself ready to instruct them in the art of lepidoptery. I imagine they expressed enthusiasm, though whether feigned or sincere I can only guess. Whatever the case, my father’s interest in butterfly collecting grew while his brother revolted against it at the earliest opportunity – on leaving home after school to take up an army commission, much to the chagrin of his father.
‘Bloody butterflies. I hate them. No I don’t. I love them. Why do we have to kill them to love them? That’s what I don’t understand. Bloody Father. He kills everything he touches. I know, I know. I joined the army. But that’s because there were people I’d rather kill than butterflies.’ Uncle James spoke in short sentences and in the clipped tones of a military officer even after his nervous breakdown and demobilisation.
Of all of my father’s siblings, Uncle James was the nicest to me. He would stand to attention and then drop to his knees to talk to me earnestly, seemingly impatient for me to grow up – not in order to save his knees, one of which cracked as he knelt and stood, but to have me at an age at which he could uninhibitedly give me the guidance he was plainly aching to deliver. His eyes were like my father’s, brown, but where my father’s seemed to suck light in, Uncle James’ seemed to emanate it; he radiated warmth and affection and concern only just held
in check for form’s sake. His goodbyes were extended.
‘Look out. Look after yourself, won’t you? If you ever need anything. You’ll let me know, won’t you? Well, you know where to find me. Take care. You have my number? Goodbye then.’
I hadn’t Uncle James’s number and I would have had no idea where to find him but I would nod, unable, such was the intensity with which he held me by the shoulders, either to raise my hand for a handshake, as instructed by my father, or to kiss him on the cheek, as encouraged by my mother.
My paternal aunts were indistinguishable from one another. They neither looked nor dressed alike, but all three wore the same anxious mask, of fear and of perpetual apprehension, as though a serpent lay behind every smile, a bear in every hug and a Boo behind every door. They evinced, at best, an indifference or, at worst, an antipathy to my mother; it was embarrassing to see her trying to ingratiate herself with her sisters-in-law whose contempt for her grew proportionately to her efforts to gain their favour. Unfortunately, my mother’s English was fluent to the point that one forgot she was German, so that her few errors jarred and made her appear stupid rather than clever enough to have learnt a second language so well. Her unforgiving sisters-in-law would exchange round-eyed glances and speak condescendingly to her in the same tone that they used with me. Aunts Linda and Mary may have considered Aunt Patricia’s unexpected marriage to an executive of the Oxford and District Water Board a betrayal of their sororal ménage à trois but, if proof were needed that blood is thicker than water, Uncle Neville’s enrolment in the Bicourt family provided it, in that the sisters’ emotional ties proved stronger than the couple’s wedding vows and he and my mother found themselves forever bemused outsiders to the Bicourt clan, frustrated visitors to a house with no doors.
Our house had doors but they were always kept shut, even the internal ones, on the pretext of excluding draughts; the air in the hallways was musty – made all the more so, or so I imagined, by people only exhaling in them if, like me, they took care to inhale deeply before entering. My father had bought the semi-detached red-brick Victorian house in Summertown, due north of Oxford town centre, furnished it, with the exception of one room, and, casting his eyes about him for the one last missing item of furniture, proposed to my mother. She had come to England as a German language assistant and, despite a promotion to teacher, had finished by finding employment in an administrative capacity in one of the university’s many faculties. She had never enjoyed teaching as much as she had hoped, her love for her pupils remaining unrequited, and decided that if she couldn’t improve young people’s lives from the front line by teaching them the joys of the German language, she would assume her position in the supply train from where she would do her best to ensure their institutions of learning were efficiently run. A photograph of my mother and father on their wedding day rests on the right side of the mantelpiece in my father’s study. She clutches his arm with one hand and holds a posy of flowers with the other and wears an elbow- and knee-length white wedding dress, white high-heeled sandals, a raised veil that hangs all the way to the small of her back and a childish expression that mixes relief, hope and anxiety. Her face is at the same level as the carnation in my father’s buttonhole and nearly as white. His suit is blue, its trousers and his nostrils flared, its lapels and his grin wide, the latter in self-congratulation. He looks smug. He has the demeanour of a man who has successfully pulled the veil over his wife’s and society’s eyes, who has achieved his aims and ticked this next – the marriage – box on his way to ticking them all. My father had dutifully studied theology at university and, over the three years that followed, acquired a doctorate in philosophy, specialising in and, eventually, lecturing on ‘the ancients’ or ‘the Greats’ or even ‘the Greeks’, as he called them.