‘Very well,’ I said, ‘let me see.’ I filled the tumbler and took a large sip. I sat down and declared in a loud voice, ‘There was a young man lost in a desert sandstorm …’
‘I want to hear about Cécile.’
I stood. Mr Rafferty had begun to nod his head, waiting for me to speak, as though my words would stay his grief. Suddenly I wanted to leave his bedside. I had read about a gorilla at Edinburgh Zoo. A child had fallen into her enclosure, and had died from the impact. And yet for several minutes, until the zoo keeper arrived, the gorilla had cradled the child in her arms. I didn’t move. Mr Rafferty must have sensed my uneasiness because he looked at the floor. He had been leaning against the metal bedstead, which had made a raw impression on his cheek. After a while he said, ‘Nothing will cure my grief.’
‘You’ve your work to be getting on with.’
‘I’m distraught.’
‘Your melancholy will pass.’
He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘When the doctor broke the news of her illness,’ he said, ‘I would not believe him … although Cécile knew. The afternoon we found out how advanced the malady was, we came here, to this sitting room, and we cried together.’ Mr Rafferty closed his eyes and disappeared beneath the duvet. We were quiet for several minutes.
‘Monsieur Breguet!’ I said. ‘Would you care for a walk?’
‘Why not?’ He was covered by the duvet. ‘I will only sink further if I remain in this house that was yesterday brightened by Cécile’s happy gaze.’ I grabbed his swimming bag. He rose unsteadily and rubbed his eyes, which were circled with red.
Outside it was clear and cold and buildings stood out keenly against the sky. Unseen, through the sharp light, birds flitted and sang. We set off down Mankind Street. Mr Rafferty wore a long overcoat whose pockets sounded with loose change. Soft, squat, clock-faced, with busy hands, he shuffled over the paving stones. It took all my strength to guide him in a straight line. Soon we turned on to Morningside Road, with its row of shops and wide heath, and he became fearful of the cars. He tried to run off, but I managed to keep hold of him. We approached a homeless person with a bandaged face. Mr Rafferty came to a stop, produced a fistful of coins and placed them in her upturned cap. ‘Alms for your plight,’ he said. I wrapped my arm around his arm. We set off again, beneath the cloudless sky. At the Dominion we turned right and proceeded along Terrace Grange. To our backs rose Blackford Hill. Now he had begun to walk with confidence, and I thought he had forgotten Breguet. Of course I was relieved, for I was able to guide him without strain. Yet if I let go of his arm I knew he might begin to follow the cats, one of his favourite diversions. We proceeded down past the cemetery. Once or twice I attempted to start a conversation, but he didn’t answer. We stopped beside a tramp sitting on an applecrate. Beside him lay his mongrel. Mr Rafferty sought the beggar’s blessing and threw coins into his hat. We walked on. I intended to take him swimming, and now I suggested it. Mr Rafferty stopped, recoiled, thrust fists into his pockets. But I know how much he loves the water. Again I suggested it. He shook his head. People were beginning to stare. I had an idea; I told him I would throw coins, that I would let them sink to the bottom of the pool, and that he could dive for them. He changed his mind, as I knew he would. The attendant at Warrender Baths knows us, and, since the men’s changing room was empty, she allowed me to help him into his kit. We entered the swimming area, myself in my swimming suit, he in his large trunks and yellow goggles.
Immediately, in the open hall, I noticed a shift in the atmosphere. Every movement – the sweep of swimmers’ arms, the nodding cork-lined rope, the attendant swaying on his high perch – seemed precise, lazy, stretched out, and every sound reverberated in the high space and dampness of the air. Mr Rafferty stepped down into the water. I stood to the side and wet my toes. Only a few bathers occupied the baths, all of them swimming lengths, and each, strangely, practising the back crawl. A trio of toddlers flapped their orange-banded arms. I stood listening to their cries – echoing – and the extractor fan – a low hum. Then, mid-pool, I dropped six penny-coins. Mr Rafferty swam back and forth for a few minutes, then sank below the surface. A few seconds later his head appeared, and his chest and arms; he was clutching a coin. I stepped down into the pool. Mr Rafferty glided to the edge and was beside me. His eyes shone. I swam for a while, then dived. I found a coin he had overlooked. Above me, I caught a flash of yellow from Mr Rafferty’s goggles then heard a swifter resonance and saw bubbles rising from his mouth. I myself surfaced. Now he was standing. He pointed upwards. ‘Look,’ he said. The roof of Warrender Baths is made of glass, and the panes are framed by a domed latticework of iron. The building was enveloped in a blue haze, as if it were open to the air. And occasionally, as at that moment, a shaft of sunlight would stream through the glass and splinter on the water.
In the foyer everything seemed dark and sapped of colour. I bought Mr Rafferty a chocolate bar. I myself had a cup of tomato soup. Outside, I was surprised to find that it was still light. It was like coming out from watching a matinee performance. Mr Rafferty walked in silence, eating his chocolate bar and making a mess of his upper lip. I had forgotten to dry my hair and the cold air gnawed my scalp. We crossed the road on to the Meadows, over the humpy grass. By Jawbone Walk we sat on a bench. A fine rain had begun to fall. It made no sound. Mr Rafferty had sucked off the chocolate and was crunching the biscuit centre. It was some time before he spoke. ‘Barbets have downed,’ he said. I smiled in answer. There was a group of children in the distance; they were kicking a ball. ‘What was Mother’s star sign?’ I said. He didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes followed the movement of the ball. At that moment I wanted to throw my arms around him, although I knew it was impossible, because he doesn’t like to be held. Without turning his gaze, he said, ‘Who are you?’ I didn’t answer. We were quiet for a while. I looked across the Meadows, whose grass was silvered with rain. A little later I took him back to the institution.
The sky was starting to pink over and darken. Clouds, great zeppelins of amber and grey, crept across the horizon, as if, though lighter than the air, and floating in it, they were composed of a substance of great weight. Yet their edges were thinned and stirred, whisked almost. These clouds called up ponderous thoughts, but threw no shadow, and I had a notion it was not yet time to go home. So I took a diversion. I visited the zoo. Dusty from the evening’s sweep-out, and aided by the rain – rain so fine it might have been a mist – the air smelled strongly, sweetly of truffles. I looked over the railing to the gorilla enclosure and saw a dark form among the knotted timber. I walked down into the monkey house and pressed my face to the glass. And there she was, sitting on a cement outcropping, a mighty weight, perfectly balanced. As I approached she seemed to raise herself a little on her haunches, her black fingers husky, charred, her skin sparsely coated and patched with silver. Her eyes, a shade of deep red I have seen on a certain type of berry, stared coldly through the glass. Even colder was her indifference to my gaze, and the obvious might in her arms, with which she had held the child, but used now only to balance her movements and worry a welt on her thigh. I saw in her eyes, in their unconcern, something I did not wholly understand, but which linked, in my mind, the cement in her enclosure and the boy in the doctor’s story and also the light of the swimming pool and my awareness of that light.
Travelling home, I looked through the window of the bus. The clouds had turned to ash, and ghosts of embers were scattered across the horizon. Below the sea and the tall-funnelled tanker with its row of lights slanting from masthead to bow, a string of beads, winking. The water was black; the wash inaudible. Not the engine of the bus. It throbbed in my chest. I turned my thoughts back to my history. I started to recall my mother’s funeral. By the time I reached Gullane the clouds had disappeared, and a few stars were out. Now I am seated at my desk. The pocket watch ticks (from now on, unless I state otherwise, the pocket watch is always ticking); cars wash by outside; the mice are asleep in their holes. In t
he familiar quiet, I will press on with these stories of my past.
…
It was raining as the small group of mourners arrived at St Saviour’s Church on Ikoyi Island. The priest was waiting below the pulpit. Thick-necked, with skin that had bled from his shaving, he stood with his arms spread before him, palms upturned. Pallbearers, Yoruba from the mission, set my mother’s coffin to the priest’s left; Ben, who bore my cot, placed me to his right. Mourners filed in, perspiring, occasionally coughing. Their footsteps clattered on the floor. Father approached last, worrying the scar on his chin and hauling his big frame with metre-strides. He thanked the men and took his place in the front pew. Lying on my back, I examined the ceiling. It was many-domed, of a dark wood that showed signs of swelling from the damp. I focused on a panel between two arched beams. As the priest began to speak, I kept looking – I could not move, the sheets cosseted me – and I saw that Christ was painted on the ceiling. His face was lean; the cheekbones high; his body wasted and pale; the ribs raised corrugations on his chest. No one attended him, not Mary his mother, nor St John, nor the captain Longinus, nor angels or thieves. A single bead fell from a wound in his right flank. Christ was dead, yet his eyes, an inordinate blue, were open. And for this reason, and the fact that the artist himself could not have set eyes on him, I felt that he was very beautiful. As I followed the play of brightness and shadow from the candles on the ceiling, Christ stared down at me, his face fading and rekindling by turns. I imagined what he would have seen from up there: the floor of black-and-white lozenge-shaped tiles, the rows of pews sparsely peopled, the apse depicting in stained glass his journey to Golgotha. But more vividly, I thought, he saw the two of us, my mother in her open coffin and me in my cot, lying side-by-side, directly in his line of vision; my mother’s eyes closed, as if she had shut her lids to the warm light of the sun, the skin paler above her cheek bones, almost transparent; my eyes round, dry, wild amid my flushed and wrinkled face. And it struck me, as I listened to the priest, who spoke of the glory of the afterlife, that my mother could not have died in vain – to have perished so would have been an affront to Christ. The rain rattled on the roof. A candle hissed and was extinguished, and the priest told the story of the Passion, following the sequence from the Stations of the Cross to the Resurrection.
‘Evelyn’s untimely death,’ he said, ‘reflects Christ’s own, for did he not, like Evelyn, who has given us a wonderful baby daughter, did he not also pass away in order to bring life into the world? Christ taught us that in nature every moment is new,’ he said, ‘that the coming is sacred.’
How right he was! It was then I hoped for a miracle. I willed my mother to wake, she who like me faced the painting of Christ. And if she would not enact a miracle, she might show a sign of forgiveness. Perhaps she would find a way to speak to me! I could not believe she had died for no reason. Even as I willed it, however, I sensed her lifeless form. The priest said, ‘Let us pray.’ I did not close my eyes or listen to his words. Instead I thought of my mother, urging her to speak. I felt there was something inside her that wanted to come out. But she did not speak; the stillness of her coffin, and the horrid heat in the church, and the dull responses of the mourners, only expressed the meaninglessness of her death. I closed my eyes and uttered my own prayer. From the grave comes life, I said to myself, from the coffin the cot, from death, birth. I itched under my sheets. Mother, I said, forgive me. Tell me you died for a reason. The rain continued to rattle on the roof. But my mother was silent.
When I opened my eyes Christ had disappeared; his chiaroscuro face eclipsed by Father’s, equally shadowed. He had moved from the front pew and stood, head bowed, between the coffin and my cot. I saw his eyelids pulse, but his face was taut. As the tear slid from his cheek and struck my forehead, his expression did not change.
I turned, hot with fury. Why, I thought, did my mother have to die to bring me into the world? Where is the glory in death that the priest spoke of? Mother was not glorious. She was cold and mute and the heat in the church was putrefying her.
‘Her soul is in heaven,’ said the priest, ‘filled with glory.’ Mother is miserable, I thought, and she cannot say otherwise. The tear burned on my forehead. Mother’s silence was something I could not fathom.
9
Unnamed
As a child I learned about the men who collect unica, a term which signifies objects that are the only one of their kind. Examples include: the stuffed corpse of Nipper, the Jack Russell depicted with his head cocked to the left, listening to the gramophone on the HMV record label; the tendrac Dasogale Fontoynanti, the sole specimen of which was caught in Madagascar in 1878; certain postage stamps, for instance a penny black printed with the queen’s head upside-down; a disc featuring the singer Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, the only one of his kind to have had his voice recorded. Collectors of unica operate under the oddest of circumstances. Not only are the objects handled by gangs of unscrupulous agents, they are much sought after, and thus the collector, almost always an optimist, is often duped into buying a fake. These men, with their combination of passion and gullibility, fascinated me as a child: perhaps I saw in their vain but somehow necessary activity a symbol of my listener’s art. It was because of those men that, as a child, I etched the word ‘unica’ on to the side of a biscuit tin. And in the tin, which sits before me now, I stored my favourite unique things. The tin measures twelve inches across and eight inches wide. Although the paint has faded one can make out a design of red-and-white arabesques in whose centre stands an elephant, her trunk gripping an identical tin which bears the same design of arabesques and elephant, tin in trunk, ad infinitum. Inside are some two-dozen items: my caul, my first tooth, a photograph of Father as a child holding tightly to a swing, a matchbox containing a pair of earplugs, a postcard entitled ‘First Snow in Port Suez’. Of these – a gathering of objects unique to me, a positive companion to my history – I will speak later. The tin marked ‘unica’ also contains less tangible traces of the past, marked by their absence, a kind of negative impression of my life, like the brightness on a wall where a portrait formerly hung. I include them in my collection precisely because they ought to exist, unique because they are not there. The most conspicuous absence is my birth certificate.
…
Immediately after the funeral, Mother’s coffin was burned. I was brought to our house in Ikoyi from where, the following day, Father left for England. He took a mailboat and buried her ashes in Botley cemetery, Oxford, to the right of the war dead. Before his departure, however, he overlooked one thing: he failed to name me.
I lay in my hot room at the back of the house. The sun fell between the shutters, describing a thin corridor of light from which I shrank. Why, I asked myself, had I not emerged after nine months? I had delighted in my gestation, in the sounds, diffuse and uncertain, that had filtered through into the womb. It was this same happiness, the happiness of the partially formed, that had fostered my unwillingness to be born and had killed my mother. Now – my thoughts continued – on the outside, I was assailed by a simultaneous spectacle of light, scent, flavour and noise. What disappointment! What fear and exhaustion! Having switched elements, mimicking the first creature to have crawled from sea to shore, I missed my spawning ground, that fecund soup out of which I had writhed and slithered and found myself breathing. I was, I thought bitterly, just like that Devonian creature: part fish and part creeping-thing, longing for water yet breathing air. I ached for the womb’s familiar dark.
But I had emerged. And it was so.
I lay in my cot, wide-eyed and unmoving, like a stuffed animal. Every morning I heard the Lagos clock strike seven, accompanied by a siren that called workers from their beds (whilst simultaneously, across the city, night-workers were travelling home to pit and cellar, obscure quarters where they would sleep through the daylight hours to which they were no longer accustomed). Already at that hour, the air was stifling, smudged with insects. The town centre was teeming with t
raffic pushing upward dust, currents of heat and smoke. To reach our house in Ikoyi, the European quarter on the east island, the sound of the clock and the siren surged through the streets, together with the noise of the traffic. Like a tide the wind gathered the rising sounds of Lagos: the music of wireless sets, the cockerel’s cry, trains heaving out of Iddo terminus and railworkers stamping their heavy boots; the noise travelling between brick walls and plywood, through the shanty town, where playing cards are slapped on crates and children play before the time of the greatest heat; the current of sound passes by way of the Jankara market, where hawkers’ voices compete for attention, drawing with them the grating of a carpenter’s saw, continuing east past the Saro quarter, the district of returned slaves, and proceeding over the Macgregor Canal and into Ikoyi; where by the roadside a sheet of newspaper flaps, its print bleeding on to the tarmac. The noise of the paper joins the morning chorus, which now flows past the racecourse, past Riley’s Import Merchants and to the lagoon at the edge of our garden. – From the shore the lawn climbed towards a thicket of rose bush; there the ground levelled and extended as far as the rear veranda, strung with bougainvillea, that fierce vine whose leaves obscured the sun but could not stem the yellow tide of dawn.
I lay by the open window, pale and withdrawn, like an etching of myself. Now I had broken from the confines of the womb, I was struck by the different acoustical qualities. The new brightness of tone, as when a pianist takes her foot from the dampener pedal, interested me keenly. I noted in particular the higher registers, birdsong and the tinny melody of a radio. I attempted to locate myself in space. But since I had no name, and had few ways to distinguish my thoughts from the noise about me, they – my internal life and the life of the town – became confused. I began to bleed into my surroundings and my surroundings bled into me, like the sheet of newsprint flapping on the street. We – the town and I – took on aspects of one another.
The Echo Chamber Page 10