The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  I watched the second hand complete another lap. ‘Is Jonathan all right?’ I said, addressing it to the clock.

  ‘He is,’ said Victor matter-of-factly. ‘My secretary, on the other hand, you almost gave a coronary. She’s on a fortnight’s leave to make up for it.’

  ‘I really did think—’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  Victor reached to throw my notes onto the bank of chairs beside him. ‘The police aren’t sure how you injured yourself. Do you remember anything?’

  ‘I fell,’ I said.

  ‘From what? The sky?’

  I had forgotten how much he liked his little jokes. ‘An escarpment,’ I said. ‘And then I hit my head. On the ground, I think.’

  ‘Well, that would certainly make sense.’ He inhaled, folded his arms. ‘They had to drag you out from under a pier. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All true, I’m afraid. You were in quite a state.’

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Where did they find me?’

  ‘A village down the road. I forget the name.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Hang on, I’ve got it written down.’ He arched his back to retrieve his notes, flipping through them. ‘Luss,’ he said. ‘Luss pier. L-U-S-S.’

  The breath went out of me.

  Victor was nodding at his page of scrawl. ‘The police said you were camped out under there. And it says here you stole the tarpaulin off a boat to wrap yourself in. They weren’t sure how long you’d been there. Any light to shed on that?’

  I could not even muster a noise.

  ‘Well, they tried to get you in the squad car, but you blacked out. So they put you in an ambulance instead and took you here. You’re lucky you were close to a good hospital. They got you on an IV right away.’

  Luss, I thought. L-U-S-S.

  ‘They got my name from a prescription in your pocket,’ Victor went on. ‘I told them to hold you here till I could get a train up. But they’ve been doing lots of engineering works—delays across the board. I had to drive up. It took me a while to arrange things. And by the time I got here, well, you’d already discharged yourself, so to speak. I wish I could have come sooner.’

  ‘Does Jim know I’m here?’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ His brow bent. ‘Jim?’

  I told him that I had been in Luss for Henry Holden’s funeral, and found Jim Culvers living there in the old cottage. I told him I had stayed with him for several months. He absorbed the news without much change in his expression. ‘So do I take it that’s where you’ve been holed up since I saw you last? With Jim Culvers?’

  ‘Not the whole time.’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘I don’t think I can explain it,’ I said.

  ‘Try.’

  ‘It’s hard to separate the truth from the rest of it.’

  ‘Well, I can work on that with you.’

  ‘Part of me still feels as if I’m there. I know I’m not—I know I can’t be. But it hurts to think I never was. Does that make sense?’ I could not tell where it was coming from, but a great swell of sadness came over me then. Tears hung fat in my eyelids and spilled.

  Victor put the notes down. ‘Shshhh, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take some time for things to level out. I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard.’ He offered me his handkerchief. ‘Go on. It’s clean.’

  I took it and dabbed my eyes. I could not take them off the clock.

  ‘I’ve got something that might help you,’ he said. Standing up, he took the leather wallet from his trouser pocket and sifted through it, lowering himself down again. ‘It was in here last I looked. Gah, where is it?—all right, phew. It’s here.’ He lifted out an oblong photograph, folded up to wallet-size. Passing it to me, he said, ‘We took that last summer. At our place in Norfolk. He didn’t want to pose for it, but Mandy got her way—I’m glad she did. Not so much of a pipsqueak any more, but you just try and get that costume off him.’

  In the photo, Jonathan Yail was no older than eleven. He was standing high up on a drystone wall, his arms outstretched and fists closed tight. The wind was surging through his hair. A clouded sky behind him. Sunlight on his face. He was dressed in a snug blue jersey with a sinuous cape. Across his breast, the yellow-red emblem of Superman, stitched on by hand. He had a look of purest focus. I was very glad to see his face.

  ‘The things I have to put up with, eh?’ Victor said. He turned the photo round in my hands, pointing at the caption he had written: Whooshing to the Broads, Aug. ’62. ‘He’s just about to start big school now. Still a bloody great pain in the neck, but I should think the world would lose all meaning if I ever lost him. I could never find a way to cope with anything like that. So whatever you think happened, just be happy that it didn’t. And keep thinking about that happiness until the rest of it gets easier.’

  The friendship I had worked on with MacKinney over time, the admiration I had felt for Quickman, the baiting closeness I once shared with Pettifer: such things are not easy to release when you have nothing to replace them with. But speaking about them was not denying their existence. I could accept the truth and still be grateful for my fabrications. And I knew that Victor would not belittle them.

  That afternoon in the day room—with the next infusion draining through me and another chalky therapeutic milkshake not quite finished in my cup—I felt clearer-headed but no less conflicted in my heart. ‘I understand that where I’ve been is not really where I’ve been,’ I found myself saying. It came so abruptly from the silence that Victor flinched. ‘But I can’t decide what’s worse: keeping that place to myself so nobody can share it, or letting it all out so it just disappears.’

  Victor had been mostly occupying himself with paperwork, and had now started on a crossword in the newspaper. He looked up. ‘Well, you don’t have to share anything that you don’t want to. But I would think it’s always better to talk about experiences than repress them. And you know how much respect I have for your imagination.’ He did not try to write notes. ‘I’m your doctor,’ he said, ‘but I’m also your friend. I’m here to listen when you feel ready. I won’t force it out of you.’ I nearly revealed it all to him in a rush, as Jonathan had once explained to me the world of Superman. Except I could not bring myself to voice it. I felt that if I spoke the word ‘Portmantle’ I would diminish it, and I was not prepared to let it go yet.

  Victor went back to his crossword. ‘Naturally, I’d like to bring you off the Tofranil,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘It might have been a huge mistake to put you on it in the first place. But you weren’t exactly sticking to the dosage.’

  ‘No one’s blaming you for this, Victor.’

  ‘I blame myself on everyone’s behalf.’

  ‘You did what you thought best.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s how I failed you—by not listening. I’ve made plenty of blunders in treating you. I’ll be reviewing all your notes when I get back, and seeing what I could’ve done better. But for now, I’m just glad you’re OK.’ He unscrewed his pen lid and sighed. ‘Fourteen down. Atavistic. Seven letters. What is that, “primeval”? Does that fit?’

  ‘Jim could still be there, you know,’ I said. ‘In Luss. At the cottage.’

  ‘Yes, the thought had occurred.’ He peered up at me. ‘But I’m not sure you’ve quite reasoned that one out in your head, Ellie. Keep resting. Let that thiamine do its job.’

  ‘I need to get back to that pier,’ I said. ‘I left something there. It’s important.’

  He ignored me. ‘“Primeval” seems to work. Seven down: Whittles. Six letters.”’

  ‘Victor, I need to go back.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you,’ he said, filling in the blank spaces. ‘“Carves” seems to be right, but that means I’ve got the other letters wrong.’

  ‘Victor.’

  He crossed his legs, eyeing me over his lenses. ‘I really don’t think going back there w
ill help you. It’s better you keep thinking ahead. Rest now and we’ll be driving home by tomorrow morning, all being well.’

  ‘It’s important to me—I need to find it.’

  ‘You aren’t listening now, Ellie.’

  ‘Please. If you come with me, you’ll understand why.’

  ‘Sit back and relax. We aren’t going anywhere.’

  ‘But I was painting again,’ I said. ‘I really was painting.’

  ‘You never had a problem painting, as I recall,’ he said. ‘Stopping was the issue.’

  ‘Well, I finished my mural.’

  This loosened something in him. ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday you were under a pier.’

  ‘Before then. Please, Victor. You have to drive me back there.’

  He pulled at the grey of his sideburn. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I left it on the beach somewhere. It’s the best work I’ve ever done in my life. I can’t just leave it there.’

  ‘What’s it of, this finished picture?’

  ‘It’s abstract. You just have to see it. I can’t put it into words.’

  ‘Would there be ships in it at all?’

  ‘No, not a single one,’ I said. ‘It’s pure abstraction.’

  ‘And how exactly did you get it down there? If it’s half as big as the mural I saw in your studio, it’s—’

  ‘I cut it off the frame and rolled it up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I could carry it.’ I stared at him, pleading. ‘What does it matter, Victor? If you don’t take me there, I’ll find some other way. I’ll take the bus. I’ll walk. Isn’t it better you come with me?’

  He shifted in his seat, folding his newspaper, casting it aside. ‘The ward doctor wants you here till morning. I can’t sign you out without his agreement.’

  I could sense that he was wilting, so I kept on at him. ‘Just take me when they say it’s all right.’

  He huffed. ‘I really must get back to London by the afternoon. I’ve appointments, other patients to see.’

  ‘Please, Victor. It’s important.’

  ‘I only planned on being here for one night.’

  ‘Then take me on the way home.’

  ‘You’re just like Jonathan, you know,’ he said. ‘I don’t respond well to this sort of pestering. It’s not how I prefer to do things.’

  But I could tell that he had already decided.

  The road took a dip and we were passing by the loch almost at the level of the shore. Boats and bright red buoys were moored out there in fitful patterns. Dinghies, sloops, and cruising yachts, tarpaulined. I did not want to ask Victor if he could see them, too. I just let them smear out behind the thickening treeline. One more turn and we approached a sign that welcomed us to Luss. ‘You’d better direct me from here,’ he said.

  We went on, past low stone cottages, slate roofs, farm walls shaped like pommel horses, barbed-wire fences. We left grassland behind us, firs and oaks and chestnuts, ivy-coated monsters. The hummocks bulged in the dimness, patchy brown and misted under clouds. ‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘Everything’s how I remember it.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘It’s not the place I thought it was, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t get what you mean.’

  ‘I know you don’t, Victor. It’s OK that you don’t.’

  The stuccoed barns of the Colquhoun Arms were on our left now. I told Victor to go right, and, braking quickly, turning, we came along the road that Geoff Kerr had brought me down after the funeral. Quaint beige cottages with steaming chimneys on both sides and so much green. Up ahead of us: the pier. A shingle beach and placid water. A vast sky darkening above the frosted hills on the far side of the loch. It was familiar and yet somehow meaningless to me, this scenery. A backdrop to a play I had not seen.

  ‘You ought to park up,’ I said.

  Victor rolled us slowly to a stop. We were right beside the pier now and I still felt so removed from what lay beyond the windscreen. I tried to think back to the night that I had left this place for Portmantle—when Jim had walked me to the bus that would carry me to Balloch. The way I still imagined it, I had travelled on to Glasgow, taken the train to catch a ferry at Dover, on to Calais, on to Paris, on to Milan, through Belgrade and Sofia, and into Istanbul. I could remember everything about that journey: from the noises of the Gare de Lyon to all the speckled china in the train carriages and the brief conversations I had held with other travellers. But the winter gloom of Luss was somehow less substantial in my memory.

  I left the car and Victor trundled behind me. There was a wood-panelled building at the nearside of the pier and a hard-worn boardwalk ranging out into the loch. The water was clear enough in the shallows to see the pebble-bed and, further out, it creased and eddied as though stirred by something deep beneath. I came sideways down the steps and onto the shingle. There was a hollow underneath the pier’s stilts, and I got to my knees to search around in all the sand and grit and goose muck, one-handed. My sling pulled at my neck. ‘Can you tell me what I should be looking for?’ called Victor from behind me.

  ‘It’s like a tube, about eight or nine feet long. Wrapped up in black plastic sheeting.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be hard to miss.’

  I scoured the damp and shadowed ground on both sides of the stilts. ‘Well, it isn’t here,’ I said.

  Victor’s hands were in the pockets of his coat. He was staring left and right along the shore. ‘This beach runs all the way round. It’s miles.’

  ‘It can’t be far from here.’

  ‘Let’s try that way.’ He pointed south.

  ‘The cottage is the other way. It’s more likely to be north.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘No, you’re right. The current might have washed it further out.’

  I went south, combing the shoreline with my eyes, until the beach thinned out and there was nowhere left to walk. Nothing was floating on the loch that I wanted to see. ‘Let’s head back,’ I said, and Victor tracked my footsteps quietly. He walked a few yards behind, observing my behaviour, only partially invested in my search. ‘How long?’ he called.

  ‘Huh?’ I was looking north along the beach towards the pier again.

  ‘How long until you give this up?’

  ‘You could help me, you know, instead of hoping I’ll fail.’

  ‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Let’s speed this up, Ellie. It’s getting late.’

  But Victor did not understand that darkness was our ally. If the plastic had ripped back from the roll, the gleam of the paint would vent out. We might catch a glimpse of blue somewhere in the pitch-black night and follow it.

  I peered down at the shingle, looking for a knoll or a raised edge where the mural might have been covered over, buried. There was nothing. I zigzagged up and down, checking the pavement side of the beach, walled off by cobbles. Nothing.

  We reached the pier again and I checked through the windows of the wooden outhouse to see if it had been found and left there, leaned up in a corner as lost property. But no. It was only a closet of boxes.

  Victor had stayed on the bank, propped against the bonnet of his car. He looked at his watch. ‘You haven’t checked up there,’ he said, thumbing north. ‘I’ll wait for you. My shoes are full of stones.’

  I went down the slope, along the strip of shingle. A few small dinghies were moored in the shallows. There were four of them, differently coloured and named, with mainsails scrolled around their willow masts, tied off. All but one of them was tarpaulined at the stern.

  Beside me, a partition of green hedgerows ran most of the way along the beach. Above that, a hummock bristling with tall trees. Cottages dotted the lip of the shore. I knew that Jim Culvers was not waiting for me in any of them. I understood that he had left me. I did not know precisely when, but he was gone. And there was nothin
g on the waterline for me to salvage, nothing that I hoped to see. So I turned back. Each dragging footstep on the shingle seemed to drain the spirit from me.

  Victor was already in the car. The windows were fogging and I could hear the throbbing voices of the radio news. He wound down the window as I approached. ‘Forecast is for thunder and lightning this evening,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be off the motorway by then, if I can help it.’

  I nodded, traipsing over. I did not want to think about the journey back to London or returning to my empty flat.

  He turned the engine on. My shoulder was aching. But then, coming up the slope, I took one last glance towards the pier and I noticed something bobbing and scraping underneath the stilts, halfway along it. A bulky cigarette shape.

  I went rushing for the boardwalk, forgetting the pain.

  ‘Ellie!’

  Reaching the middle of the pier, I lay on my good side, got on my back.

  ‘Ellie!’

  I slid under the railing.

  Victor caught up with me. ‘You’re going to do yourself another injury like that. Get away from there.’

  The peaceful loch was rippling under me. My legs were dangling over the boards.

  Victor must have seen it in my eyes then, because he came lurching forwards with his arms to grapple me. But I was already dropping.

  Victor waded to the shore, flinging water from his arms, peeling off his coat. His shirt was rinsed, translucent, and I could see the matted hairs of his torso underneath it. He had taken off his glasses to protect them, and was spitting the loch from his mouth, wringing his eyelids clear. I was on the gravel with my canvas roll beside me. I was soaked and tender, slingless. The pain was stabbing through my side, but I had enough relief in me to smother it. Victor had no such consolation—only the sight of me, safe and unharmed. ‘One of these days,’ he said, dripping at my feet, ‘I’m finding you a different therapist.’ He stooped to get his breath back, wheezing. ‘What the hell are you trying to do to me? I’m fifty years old, for crying out loud. I’m not cut out for this.’

  I was panting too much to hold my smile. ‘You didn’t have to come in after me.’