But given these limits, I remember those summers as the happiest of my life. When I think of the word ‘childhood’, the first, most pleasant associations that spring to mind are the gold summer light on the beach outside Patrick’s house; the smell of candy-floss at the Barnstable County Fair; the tingle of a mild sunburn; my father and uncle squabbling over the barbecue; the cold, cold water of the Atlantic Ocean. These were my real inheritance. A happy enough childhood is the capital that supports you during your adult life.
About two years after that first Christmas, Lydia left Patrick for another man. My father told us we should remember Patrick in our prayers because he wasn’t well. I suppose this was his way of saying Patrick had had a nervous breakdown. Lydia’s departure marked the beginning of the closeness between Patrick and my father that lasted until I was about sixteen. They were both in effect now widowers, and I think they must have found the symmetry reassuring.
The idea of Patrick’s being jilted by Lydia got mixed up in my mind with a book I was reading at the time. The memory of his big white doorknob was still very fresh, and I’ve never quite shaken off the idea that my uncle was in fact the Dong with a Luminous Nose, abandoned by his Jumbly Girl, and searching for her by night over the Gromboolian Plain.
*
The battery in the Triumph was almost completely dead, so I found a charger in the shed and set it going.
Patrick’s car had played another role in the history of my family. The need for spare parts from England – they were unobtainable on Ionia – had been a link between Patrick and my father. I don’t know if it prevented them from falling out sooner than they did, but we stopped shopping for wine gums and wiper blades just before my sixteenth birthday. And it’s from then that I date the break-up of my fissiparous family.
If brothers can’t get on, my father once said to me and Vivian after we’d quarrelled, what hope is there for anyone? Of course, it doesn’t follow. Brothers – sisters I’m not qualified to speak about – are brought up to want the same things. Hence the emulousness, hence the contention.
And who was Dad to preach? For the last twenty years of Patrick’s life, he and my father did not speak. My father claimed it was Patrick’s fault. Patrick claimed it was my father’s fault. Who knew? I never got to the bottom of it, and I felt that to attribute blame to one side or the other just perpetuated the split. In any case, it seemed obvious that a quarrel as permanent as theirs didn’t arise from a single cause, any more than a man banging in a tent peg over a seismic fault causes an earthquake.
*
I got a clean towel from the house and walked across the marsh and down the powdery sand dunes to the beach. I was finally glad for not being in London. The sea was as clear and green as it had been that day in May. Another month of sun had warmed it slightly, but when I jumped off the jetty, the cold water squeezed my skull like a metal band. After a few moments it eased a little, and I struck out, swimming over a patch of long seaweed, like a stand of pine trees under water. I turned on my back and the sea closed over my ears. I wondered if this was what it might be like to be deaf: was it silence, or the close gurglings of your own blood, or some other sound which, never having heard another, you could never put a name to?
Even on a still day, the sound of the sea was everywhere on Ionia, but the Fernshaws and the other deaf Ionians dwelled in a place where sound was absent. Their island was a place of light and movement: the quick glittering of the ocean, the changing clouds, the vast blue sky. Perhaps their pleasure in these was all the greater as a kind of compensation. I thought of the surprising grace of Mrs Fernshaw’s pointing fingers, and the fluidity that seemed out of keeping with her age and size.
The battery would take about twelve hours to charge, which was too long to wait for a cup of coffee, so I dug out an old bicycle which had not much wrong with it apart from flat tyres and brakes that rubbed slightly. I managed to get it more or less roadworthy and then set off for the Colonial Market.
Once I had started cycling, I had a moment of enthusiasm for my new home. The sun was right overhead, and I could smell the tarmac baking in the heat. Butterflies winked their colours at me from the long grass by the side of the road. By the junction of the main road to Westwich, where a bridge forded the creek that drained the marshes, a child had set up an iced-tea and lemonade stall with a hand-lettered sign. I was encouraged to stop by the thought that Patrick would have stopped: he unfailingly supported children who sold lemonade, yard sales and anyone selling vegetables from a shack with a sign saying, ‘Home-grown produce’.
The hub of the bicycle ticked as I rode one of the pedals to a standstill. I saw that the boy was Mrs Fernshaw’s son, Nathan. Boxes of saltwater taffy were stacked under the table to stop them melting in the heat.
‘How’s business?’ I asked him.
‘I only just got here,’ he said.
After the turnoff to Patrick’s, the road we were on continued along the edge of the island to the War Bonnet Cliffs – supposedly named by the first English settlers after the headgear of the indigenous people they displaced from the island. Patrick used to say that the original inhabitants of Ionia were a pacific, agrarian people whom the English had softened up with whisky and imported diseases and then bilked out of their land. I doubt this story, and not just for patriotic reasons. The settlers were Puritans and more likely to hand out Bibles than firewater. But it is true that the War Bonnet Cliffs got their name long after the last full-blooded Ionian Indian had succumbed to cirrhosis – or old age – on the mainland. The cliffs were the island’s most famous beauty spot, and the farthest point from the dock at Westwich.
I’d only been to the cliffs once, and I remembered them as a big disappointment. My father had insisted on cycling the entire forty-mile round-trip on rented three-speed bicycles. I was twelve. We barely had time to down a soft drink before turning the bikes around and pedalling back. Patrick had wisely refused to contemplate the outing.
The cliffs had been much less garishly coloured than they were in the souvenir photographs. In fact, the high point of the day was the incredulous reaction of the man in the rental shop when we got back to Westwich and told him where we’d been: ‘War Bonnet? On bikes?’
Visitors to War Bonnet went on rented scooters and in air-conditioned buses like the one that was now pulling up on the verge and discharging a gaggle of tourists.
They streamed past me towards Nathan Fernshaw’s stand, snapping his photo and buying up boxes of saltwater taffy as fast as he could stack them on the table. It struck me that his resemblance to a child in a Norman Rockwell painting was not accidental, but shrewd marketing. Somehow, Nathan had grasped that he was really a vendor of nostalgia, as bogus in his way as the people at Plimoth Plantation who wore buckled shoes, churned butter, and pretended to talk in Elizabethan English. It was a reminder of another anomaly: while Ionia and the Cape were my New World, for many Americans they had more in common with the Old.
The driver was last off the bus. He gave the boy a wink. ‘Hiya, Nathan. How’s your mother.’
‘She’s good.’
‘Let me have some of that tea.’
The road which had been empty a moment ago was alive with people. The driver stood apart from them, slurping his iced tea from a polystyrene cup. He was in his forties, florid-faced, with a crew cut that looked like it came out of an old L. L. Bean catalogue. He saw me looking at him. ‘How you doing,’ he said, without giving it the intonation of a question.
‘I’m Nathan’s neighbour,’ I said.
‘Oh – you’re the English guy from the Captain’s house.’
I must have looked surprised because he threw his head back and laughed. ‘You know what island people are like.’ He made a gossiping beak with his thumb and forefinger.
‘I only arrived yesterday.’
‘Here for the summer?’
‘We’ll see. I may stay through the fall.’
‘Oh, fall’s beautiful here. Well, I’d better r
ound up my people.’
When I cycled back that way an hour later the road was empty again. The midday sun was beginning to bear down on the island, wringing a little heat haze out of its seams, like whey from cheese.
Nathan Fernshaw was packing up his things, moving slowly in the heat. He didn’t look up. The tsk-tsk-tsk sound of the headphones he was wearing seemed to follow me along the road for more than a quarter of a mile. I kept hearing the same noise at intervals for the rest of the afternoon, which puzzled me, until I realized it was the whine of insects from the marsh.
THIRTEEN
TIME PASSED SLOWLY on Ionia. Without the incident of office life and the distractions of other people, the days seemed empty. I didn’t exactly miss my job, but I realised that it had been my strongest connection to the world. Even when I had hated it, it had given me a feeling of being involved in a flux of events – wars, peace talks, elections, natural disasters – that I took to be the life of the planet. Following them, if only remotely, from the newsroom had been a way of navigating through time: it gave a form to something that was otherwise infinite and blank. For a while in Ionia I felt as though I’d fallen off the map.
I made myself as busy as I could. I set myself the task of painting a series of views from the widow’s walk – one in each direction – and I bought paints at an art supply shop in Westwich as soon as I could get the car to start. My first attempts were poor but I told myself not to worry; the gift shops on Ionia were full of bad local art. And the weather was good for seven days straight from the moment I set up the easel. I wore long sleeves and a sun hat to protect myself and took a pitcher of iced tea up to the roof. As I painted each morning, I could hear the ice cubes cracking in the jug, and the smell of the acrylic paint grew more intense as it warmed up in the sunshine.
Bit by bit, I began to establish a routine that made me feel less adrift. I bought a shortwave radio to keep in touch with the world beyond the island. I thought of my colleagues in the television newsroom hustling to produce the bulletins. For a while I wrote down the headlines in a notebook, as a way of marking off the passing days. But it made me feel like a prisoner scratching lines on the walls of a cell, so I stopped.
The wind always changed direction in the midafternoon and then picked up, making the wood of my eyrie creak. That was my signal to go downstairs, have a martini and cook myself spaghetti on the two electric rings I’d bought from the hardware store. Each evening, I read in Patrick’s library until my eyes began to close over the pages. I found that I slept better and I dreamed more – or remembered more of my dreams, anyway, which seemed healthy.
I spent almost two days searching the house for something that would explain the fragment of writing I had read on the plane. There was nothing, not a trace, although in a filing cabinet in the basement I found manuscripts of Patrick’s novels along with carbon copies of correspondence.
In one folder I found a letter on Harvard stationery inviting a priest – let’s call him Father Xavier – to give a talk to the Harvard Theological Society. The letter was fulsome; it praised the priest’s work, his publications. It even hinted that he would be paid generously for the lecture. Father Xavier’s response was not included, but from the next letter it was obvious that he had taken the bait. Patrick’s second letter was a derisive attack, written on the same stationery, in which he called the priest an ‘intellectual stick figure’. ‘When we need a jug-eared ass-kisser to address the society, rest assured you will be our first port of call.’
There were some unspeakable letters to my father; a crazy letter to Nancy Reagan in the White House in which Patrick called her ‘a one-titted witch’. In another letter – apparently in response to a request for an interview from a prospective biographer – Patrick bragged about having a wealthy patron to support him in a libel action and stopped just short of an outright threat to break the recipient’s fingers.
Some of them were funny, but too often you felt that Patrick’s attack was out of control. It was shocking to feel the force of his hatred, even second-hand. What made them so potent was that the venom was allied with an acute sensitivity to people’s weaknesses. He knew where to stick the knife and how to twist it. Even when his attacks went wide of the mark, there was something so concentrated, so spectacularly ruthless in his efforts to offend, that the effect was still unsettling. Everything was thrown at the attackee: crimes, sins, birthmarks, poor grades, big ears, bad debts, flat feet, buck teeth, homely relatives. You sensed Patrick thought somehow that he was always on the side of the angels; somehow, he was the one victimised and misunderstood and therefore justified in whatever he flung back at his tormentors. I couldn’t face reading more of them. They were an unworthy epitaph: his brilliance, his humour, his erudition, his empathy – all subjugated to the desire to wound. And I knew – because I had known him – that they weren’t the whole story.
Patrick and I had been working in his garden once. An apple tree had fallen down in a storm. Its silvery trunk was blistered with lichen the colour of oxidised copper – a very soft green. We dragged the sawn-off branches up the garden. ‘Jeez, you’re a strong sonofabitch,’ he said. This made me brim with pride – particularly as I was thirteen and undersized for my age, with arms and legs like pipe cleaners.
When we were finished we picked cherry tomatoes from the small vegetable garden on the lawn. They had a very herby and intense flavour. We sat outside the summer kitchen eating them from a colander. ‘Do you ever give the finger to God?’ he asked me.
‘Not really,’ I said, wondering what my father would make of this blasphemy.
‘You don’t ever want to throw up the window, flip Him the finger and say, “Eat me!”?’
I shook my head. He looked mildly surprised as he popped a handful of tomatoes into his mouth.
Another time we went rowing together off Pilgrim Point. We had rowed out about a mile and half on to the black water of the open ocean when the current seemed to alter. It began in one corner of the sea in front of us – a little patch of waves dancing up from the flat water – then it spread, until it was all around us.
‘Know what I think, Skipper?’ said Patrick, as a wave slopped in over the side of the boat.
‘That we should get out of here?’ I said.
The rowboat had two sets of oars and we pulled like madmen for the safer waters of the point. Patrick explained that the trick was to keep the waves abaft us and not to take them beam on, or we would capsize. Even at that moment, when we were both fearing for our lives, I liked the sound of those unfamiliar words: ‘abaft’, ‘beam on’, ‘capsize’.
When we got to shore, Patrick made me promise not to tell my father what had happened. I was a little proud of myself: there was a bond between us – first of shared fear, and now a secret.
I didn’t know which was stranger: to be remembering so much about Patrick, or to have forgotten so much in the first place. My uncle had been indispensable – whatever his faults, his love and curiosity had softened some of the austerity of my childhood. He was a spokesman for the importance of small things, enthusiasms, hobbies, games, puzzles, jokes, words, hot fudge, cream cakes, fried dough – all helpful talismans in a cold and draughty world that seemed to belong on the whole to people like my father.
I wasn’t the only person who felt like this – it’s why people over and over again were prepared to forgive him when he acted out of a child’s untempered indignation and wrote them one of those letters, or told them to their face that they were a pain in the ass, or berated them for some peccadillo.
I often dreamed about Patrick – not surprising when you think that the whole house vibrated with his presence. I encountered it everywhere. It was apparent in the look of the house, the possessions with all their associations – any visitor would have noticed that. But living there gave me a more pervasive sense of him. Over time, his preoccupations became my preoccupations: I fretted over the low water pressure in the shower; I worried about cutting the grass; I kept
milk and drinks cold in a box-cooler that Patrick had left under the kitchen table. The house bore the impress of Patrick’s personality so strongly that by fitting myself into it, I began to resemble him.
I didn’t notice it at first; the feeling stole up on me. Then one afternoon I was queuing in the post office to send some letters back to London and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the counter. Because it was a nuisance to drive into the town to do laundry I had got in the habit of supplementing my clothes with Patrick’s – I borrowed a shirt or two, a pea jacket to wear on cool evenings, an old pair of trousers for wearing when I painted or cut the grass. I was shocked by the reflection partly because it was out of step with the image I had of myself: my hair had grown and was unkempt from my fingering it at the easel; I was unshaven and my clothes looked ragged. But I was also shocked that I looked so much like Patrick. And I thought I detected a watchfulness behind the postmistress’s breezy efficiency.
That afternoon I drove up to the running track behind the high school. It wasn’t just morbid curiosity. I wanted a clue. Perhaps the scene of his death would provide it.
Heat haze shimmered above the edges of the running track so that it looked as though it were cooking on an enormous griddle. The school’s sports grounds had been carved out of a scrubby pine forest that was making halfhearted efforts to regain territory. Long strands of creeper reached almost to the one-hundred-metre start line – the straight bit of track that was joined on to the circuit like the tail of the letter Q. Poison ivy was growing thickly among the grass, some of it green, some of it brazen or bright red. Come September it would all be chased back to the woods, but for now it was permitted a temporary reconquest.
The main building of the high school wasn’t old – a geometrical castle of pink bricks – but the extremes of temperature had weathered the track. On summer evenings it was a popular place to run, but it was relatively early and though I could hear the hollow thwack of tennis balls from the court on the other side of the softball pitch, the running track was empty.
The Paperchase Page 9