He didn’t show up until more than a year later. He walked into a Westwich bar in his uniform. He’d thrived under the army’s benign discipline and, away from unfavourable comparisons with his brother, discovered he had a knack for soldiering.
Why had he come back? Mrs Diaz wasn’t sure. Perhaps he just wanted a chance to show the islanders how he’d made good. Perhaps he wanted to take responsibility for his baby daughter. Perhaps he wanted to marry her mother and make a life together.
In any case, it never got that far. His brother, who had spent his life overcompensating for his twin’s shortcomings, had married the woman himself.
Richard heard all this from one of his old friends. He found Harriet, who refused to let him in to see the baby, so he got drunk and went looking for his brother. Luckily – or unluckily, who’s to say? – he never found him. Zac was away at sea. Richard went back to the mainland, swearing he’d come back for revenge.
‘And did he?’ I asked.
‘Oh no. He got his. Fragged in Vietnam.’
‘Fragged?’ I wondered if it was like ‘fagged’ at English public schools. It would have been a justly bathetic end if this glamorous hood had spent the Vietnam War making toast for more senior officers and shining their shoes.
‘As in “fragmentation bomb”,’ explained Mrs Diaz. ‘It means he was killed by his own men. I guess he was too much of a hard-ass, a disciplinarian.’
As for Zac and his new bride and his stepchild, against the odds they were happy. He learned his wife’s rare language and made a decent living fishing for tuna. ‘They’d take the catch into P-town and sell it to Japanese buyers right off the dock. He made good money. I suppose the fish ended up as sushi.’
After ten years together, the couple had a child of their own, a boy named Nathan after Zac’s dead father. But Zac himself didn’t live to see his child turn one. He was hiking with a couple of friends along the coast at Nawgasett on the mainland when he lost his footing on a rock. A wave – not even a large one – splashed over his foot and caused him to slip into the water. He struggled against the current but like a lot of the older island fishermen he wasn’t much of a swimmer. One of his friends ran to fetch the Coast Guard but Zac was dead even before he made it back.
This is the distillate of a conversation that bubbled on for an hour and a half until Mr Diaz came into the room with his wife’s painkillers. Although I was never bold enough to ask her what was wrong with her, from hints she dropped I guessed that the operation she’d had had been a hysterectomy.
Seeing her with her husband, I noticed for the first time that she was older than him by about five years and possibly more. He was sweetly uxorious: bustling around her, fixing pillows and draping an afghan over her lap. She allowed herself to be a little crotchety with him, but in a way that suggested a deep affection. I took the interruption as my cue to go.
Something like nuclear fission had taken place. The fictional villain of my uncle’s story had split into two people: Zac and Richard Fernshaw. There was no question of a murder, because there was no victim. What had seemed like a story about an abusive husband had its roots in a story about two brothers.
I had asked Mr Diaz to show the story to his wife. ‘It’s a what-if,’ she said, when I asked her about it. ‘It’s kind of like the good brother never saved her. What would have happened then? What kind of a father would Dick Fernshaw have made? A terrible one, obviously. Luckily old Mycroft is around to take care of business.’
‘Don’t you think the violence in the story is excessive?’ I said.
‘Excessive?’ The word sounded a bit precious when she repeated it. ‘I suppose it is.’
*
I bought some flowers from a shop in town before I drove home, and put them in front of my uncle’s self-portrait as an expiation. I told myself I’d visit his grave on the mainland before I left the country for good.
I understood that since there was no victim, there could be no question of a murder, or a murderer. There was only a murderous rage, an anger without an apparent location that was the story’s most troubling feature, and which had lured me into the false assumption that the events it described were real.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IT TOOK ME FOUR MORE days to get my affairs in order and make my arrangements for leaving the country. My flight was scheduled to leave Logan Airport just before midnight on a Sunday, three days before what would have been Patrick’s sixty-fourth birthday, so I decided to have a barbecue to celebrate my last day on the island. It would be both a leave-taking and an anniversary.
I called Aunt Judith in Boston to invite her too and apologised for not having kept in touch. She mentioned that Vivian had been shooting something in Vermont and was threatening to pay her a visit in Medford. She didn’t use the word ‘threatening’, of course. She would have been pleased to see him. I said to let him know he was welcome to come, too. Throughout our conversation I was thinking that Judith’s reliable Christmas presents were almost all that remained of the invisible links that once held our family together.
I didn’t expect my brother to turn up. I just wanted to send the message that, on my side at least, I was dismantling the barricades. I was realistic enough not to expect that we’d become bosom buddies – we’re too different for that.
The Saturday before was overcast and humid. Nathan helped me manoeuvre the barbecue – the one with a tall black hood like a blast furnace – out of the shed and up the hill to the house. He had the idea of putting it in the pony trap to move it more easily. We laid the barbecue on its side and lashed it down, then each of us pulled one of the shafts of the trap. I told Nathan how Captain Scott and his team had pulled their sleds to the South Pole the same way. It struck me as I was telling him that I had heard the story first from Patrick: The Worst Journey in the World was one of his ten favourite books.
But talk of Antarctic weather was out of place the following day. By eleven it was clear that it was going to be one of the hottest days of the summer. The sky was a searing blue – like balloon silk.
The first guests to come were the Fernshaws, who brought with them a giant Tupperware bin of potato salad. Winks hopped across the lawn behind them on crutches.
I had invited everyone I could think of. Mr Diaz was there, Mrs Diaz sent her regrets, but Stephanie the paralegal came, as did Officer Topper, whom I invited on a whim. Mrs Delamitri brought her friend from up-island, who in turn brought some guests she had staying, including a whey-faced Englishman in his late forties called William Ricketts who worked for the United Nations and turned out to have been a pupil at my boarding school. ‘I met your uncle once,’ he told me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he mentioned you.’
Mr Ricketts insisted on reminiscing to me about our alma mater while I tried to cook the burgers and the chicken thighs on the barbecue.
It annoyed me that he singled me out as a co-conspirator. Not only was I preoccupied with the temperamental barbecue, but I also thought his cliquishness compared badly with the geniality of my American guests, who were swapping anecdotes and doing their best to overcome the communication barrier posed by the Fernshaws’ deafness. It was a reminder of what was waiting for me back in England – guardedness, reserve, insularity – and it was an affirmation of the regrettably English parts of my own character, because William Ricketts was the person at the gathering I most resembled.
But I was enjoying myself anyway, partly because the event was so improbable. I liked overhearing Officer Topper holding forth on genealogy to Winks, and seeing Nathan interpreting one of Mr Diaz’s rambling anecdotes in gestures to his mother. And I liked the continuity that it implied with the celebrations I remembered here from my childhood.
I think a family is made up of people who are bound together by habit more than by ties of blood. My evidence for this is that a family can die while its nominal members are all still living. Mine did. But that afternoon, I got the feeling that I’d managed to reincarnate it. Its old habits h
ad been revived – as though a group of people had got together and learned to speak a dead language.
I’d set up Patrick’s croquet hoops on the flattest part of the lawn. It wasn’t real croquet, it was a variant, a dialect of the game that Patrick had half remembered and half made up. But since we had never played anything else, it had always been croquet to us.
After we’d finished eating and had a short rest, I explained the game to everyone who wanted to play. Winks couldn’t, Officer Topper had to go back to work and Mrs Fernshaw didn’t want to, but everyone else was up for it. Only William Ricketts raised objections to the unorthodox rules, but he was too hesitant to offer an alternative and just carped quietly from the sidelines as I ran through my version of them.
I teamed up with Mrs Delamitri and Stephanie the paralegal; Nathan with his sister; William Ricketts with Mrs Delamitri’s artistic friend, whose house guests played as a threesome with Mr Diaz.
I suppose we’d been playing for about half an hour when the sound of an engine must have become audible from the driveway. I say ‘must have’ because I didn’t hear it myself. I was wrapped up in the game and while I tried to retain a relaxed and casual appearance I was determined to batter William Ricketts’ ball into the salt marsh.
There must have been the sound of an engine, logically, because a car was arriving. But the first I was aware of it was when I saw my Aunt Judith’s head peering around the side of the house, shortly followed by her waving hand and then the rest of her body. Just behind her was her husband, Lynde, a retired high-school gym instructor, who had been a silent and unfathomable accessory at family reunions for as long as I could remember.
I was surprised to see them – I wasn’t sorry, but I knew it must have been a long trip and I had invited them more for the sake of form than in the belief they’d really show up. But I was more surprised to see that my brother Vivian was bringing up the rear.
But I was pleased, almost in spite of myself, to see him loping across the lawn behind them. There was an uncomfortable moment when I forgot to detach myself from my croquet mallet to shake his hand, but the greetings over, I was able to conceal my awkwardness by officiously discharging my duties as host.
My brother had driven down with a friend – a bit of blonde eye-candy who was younger and more silent than Terry Fernshaw. My brother was looking tanned and muscular. I caught him admiring his own biceps as he held a cup of iced tea in front of him. Why a film director should want to emulate a leading man, I don’t know. I would have thought that one of the perks of the job was being able to exude some status-related sex hormone without going to the trouble of breaking a sweat at the gym. Anyway, he made me feel very pasty and English.
It might have been my paranoia, but I think that a slight buzz went around the garden when he arrived. People are like that about celebrity; and they’re noticeably less good at concealing their interest when the person in question is someone they think they ought to know but can’t quite place.
‘Was October Conspiracy one of your brother’s?’ William Ricketts asked me discreetly.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Oh, that was jolly good. Yes, I enjoyed that.’
He worked up his courage to pass on the compliment to my brother, who was obliged to inform him that he’d had nothing to do with it.
Most of the guests began to disperse around four. Several were returning to the mainland as I was and had long journeys home. But the Fernshaws and Winks and Mr Diaz had gone down to the beach for a swim. I walked down to tell them I was getting a lift to Boston with Vivian.
I said goodbye and exchanged a wordless farewell with Mrs Fernshaw, who gave me a hug. As my cheek brushed the side of her head, I found myself looking at the silent zone around her ear. Even if we had shared a language, I wouldn’t have been able to say much more than goodbye, or begin to explain that something I had found in her story was sending me across the world to find the conclusion of my own.
As I left the beach afterwards, I turned back for a last look. A mass of clouds had formed over the eastern end of the island – their undersides were just touched with pink as the sun dipped on the other side. Terry and her mother were scouring the lower part of the shore for sea glass. Mr Diaz and Nathan had taken the turtle boat into the water and were floating it in the shallows between the shore and the sandbar. Winks had rolled up his trousers and was hopping at the water’s edge with his crutch. Occasionally he used it to point at something – the moat of water around the sandbar was full of starfish, sand dollars and flickering shoals of minnows – and the crutch cast a long whisker of shadow along the beach.
For a brief moment, there was one of those special conjunctions of the season, and the weather and the company – all of them, even William Ricketts – that brought the present into sudden communion with the past. That could almost have been Patrick playing in the water, or my grandmother collecting sea glass. It was as though the past had been brought to life in front of me – the past that at all other times was no more than a handful of August afternoons as faint and distant as the lights of a remote constellation.
TWENTY-EIGHT
VIVIAN HAD SOME KIND of Japanese off-road vehicle that seemed only slightly smaller and less robust than the amphibious vessels they used for landing troops on D-Day. Even so, he cringed when I closed the passenger door and complained that I’d slammed it.
‘Do you want to slam it a bit harder?’ he said. ‘There’s a woman in Provincetown who didn’t hear you that time.’
I opened the door and shut it again as delicately as a surgeon lowering a new heart into a patient’s rib cage. ‘Better?’
‘I bet you don’t shut the door of your car like that,’ he grumbled as we turned out of the driveway of my uncle’s house for perhaps the last time in our lives. ‘Not that that shit-box would ever have made it as far as Boston.’
I began to regret having accepted the lift, but the alternative would have been a taxi and then the bus.
We drove mostly in silence to the ferry port at Westwich.
Vivian’s prepubescent girlfriend fell asleep on the back seat with her feet on the sofa-sized armrest that separated me from my brother. She remained comatose all the way to Westwich, slept through the ferry crossing, and only opened her eyes briefly when we arrived on the mainland.
I felt a slight ache at the thought of leaving. The dense pine trees that stretched away on either side of the highway and the dusty golden light of late afternoon on the Cape seemed so familiar that I found it painful to think I might revisit it again only as a memory.
‘Dad was ill,’ Vivian said, apropos of nothing, as the car rumbled up Route 6 towards Boston.
‘Judith didn’t mention anything.’
‘I imagine he didn’t tell her. You know what he’s like.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s over it now. I had my assistant call you at the time but she said some fucking Russian guy kept answering the phone.’
‘You had your assistant call me?’
‘You never return my calls anyway, so what difference does it make?’
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘He had a medical in Boston while he was over for Patrick’s funeral – he must have felt he was next in line for the big guy with the sickle. He called me up afterwards to brag.’ Vivian lowered his voice in an impression of my father’s drawling mid-Atlantic accent: ‘“Blood pressure one forty over eighty-five, they said I had the eyes of a fighter pilot, I could have run on that treadmill all week. Nothing wrong with your genes, Vivian.”’
I laughed in spite of myself. Vivian smiled. When he was funny, he was also strangely remote from me: it reminded me of the distance between us.
‘Turns out he didn’t quite get the all clear. They ran tests on everything, you know what American doctors are like: fingers up the back-bottom, checking the old chap, cholesterol levels, chest X-rays, blood sugar and God knows what else. He had some sort of discoloration on his arm
and they wanted to check that out, too. Anyway, the stool sample showed up little traces of blood, so they had to have him back for a colonoscopy, and found a tumour.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, that was my reaction. He was in hospital a week while they removed it. They did what’s called a “resection” – they just cut out about fifteen centimetres on either side of the lump and then join the two ends together. The procedure itself is no big deal, actually. I went to see him a couple of times, including on the day of the operation. I was with him when they wheeled him into the operating theatre. He was all groggy just before he went under. I was holding his hand and he kind of whispered something to me. I had to bend down to hear it. I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you can guess what it was.’
‘“Veni, vidi, vici”? “It is a far, far better thing …”?’
‘That’s two guesses and they’re both wrong.’ He paused for dramatic effect. It was a serious story and my suggestions were unwelcome. He paused, as though waiting for my flippant remarks to disperse. ‘He was whispering, “Bolder than Mandingo”. Bolder than Mandingo! Remember that dumb game? He was making a joke. They could have been his final words. I was proud of him.’
‘I’ll have to ask him about it when I see him,’ I said. I knew that Vivian hadn’t been trying to make me feel like a disloyal son, but I did anyway. I wanted to tell him that I was going to see our father now, but I was afraid it would have sounded defensive, or like a boast.
Vivian stretched forward over the steering wheel and then settled back into the seat. ‘This reminds me of when you slashed my arm with your Swiss Army knife,’ he said.
I found myself repeating the explanation I gave at the time. I had been sixteen, and travelling up to Maine with Vivian and my father. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to cut you. I was just threatening you with it.’
‘Just threatening me? Just threatening me? Ha!’ He laughed to himself for what seemed like a long time. ‘Just threatening me. Did you hear that, honey?’ Lolita in the back said nothing. She was listening to a Walkman. ‘I must remember that.’
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