Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  As to which area of the world Bill might choose as the ground for his self-preparation, there was never much doubt. His father had a weakness for Italians, a weakness attributable in part to his mother’s enthusiasm for Verdi (she had wanted to be an opera singer, but her parents – joy-resistant Baptists – regarded a career on the stage as being but an iota less reprehensible than prostitution) and in part to his admiration for Italian automotive engineering. Close to his father’s office there was a food shop run by a man from Palermo, who, whenever Bill’s father dropped in on his way back from work, would sometimes slip into his hand a small gift for the boy: a pastry or some licorice sweets or sometimes a postcard of somewhere in Sicily. (Always Sicily: ‘I am not an Italian. I am a Sicilian,’ the man insisted, fiercely jovial; Bill didn’t understand what was meant by this distinction, but it enhanced the mystique of the island.) The cards were pinned above Bill’s bed: Etna in full spate (with hand-coloured plumes of smoke); mosaic peacocks; a donkey-drawn cart loaded high with grapes; a wilderness that looked more like Africa than Italy; a row of mummified bodies hanging on a wall, all wearing suits, with eyes like leather buttons. One of these cards – a stupendous girl sitting on the base of a wellhead – was produced from Bill’s wallet and displayed to Charles, on the evening on which he disclosed his obsession with Sicily. It was the one place that he absolutely had to see before he surrendered to a life of drudgery, he said. There followed, at idle moments, invocations of a land of sun-blasted olive groves and blue seas and buxom nut-brown girls – visions so attractive that when demob at last arrived there was no need for any discussion as to what they might do with their allotted free time and cash. Within a fortnight of ditching the uniforms Bill and Charles were on the ferry.

  They didn’t reach the blessed isle. Even had Bill not been diverted in Milan, they might not have reached Sicily, because before they had reached the Italian border his insistence (having resources somewhat deeper than his friend’s) on paying for the odd night in a decent hotel or a proper meal (they weren’t yet halfway through France when Bill decided that these would be required every day) had depleted the kitty considerably more quickly then had been estimated. Then Bill went and fell in love in Milan. They were sitting in a café, making their coffees last an hour, when Bill, hearing high-spirited laughter, looked up to see two young women at a nearby table, one of whom – the more demure of the pair, laughing with a hand to her mouth (lovely fingers; no rings) – was without question the most astonishing creature he had ever seen outside of a cinema. Mustering as much suavity as could be managed in his state of smittenness, he nodded to her, and observed in response what he took to be an encouraging glance. Never a chap to hesitate, Bill sauntered over to the girls’ table, where, through the use of mime-work and a self-mocking medley of English, risible French and worse Italian, he succeeded in ingratiating himself with Rita and her sister Anna. Charles, beckoned over by his friend, did his best to make himself agreeable, but he found his inarticulacy an insurmountable barrier to enjoyment (faced with young women who looked as good as this pair, he would have been inarticulate even had they been English), and soon withdrew. By the evening Bill was a man in the grip of a passion that had obliterated all thoughts of the purpose of their expedition. He wanted Charles to hang around with him in Milan. They could make a foursome – he’d got the impression that Anna might not be averse to a bit of fun with Charles. How he’d got this impression was unclear, but even assuming that Anna’s apparent indifference had been a mere guise, Charles would not have been in the slightest bit interested in having fun with a young woman he knew he would never see again once he’d left Milan.

  (As Bill was to tell Charles’s fiancée, Charles was the straightest bloke he’d ever met. This on the whole was a good thing. Charles was the one man he knew he could rely on in an emergency: once, going completely against character, Charles had even forged a Warrant Officer’s signature on a 36-hour pass, so Bill could have a long weekend with a girlfriend. But sometimes, as was the case with Anna, Charles was too bloody straight for his own good. My mother was told this story within a couple of hours of making Bill’s acquaintance, shortly after she and Charles had become engaged. She wasn’t greatly bothered by the idea that her husband-to-be might once have been tempted into dallying with a pretty Italian girl, but she didn’t much appreciate the clear implication that she was a far less exciting proposition than the Italian girl had been, and neither was she charmed by Bill’s inability to get through ten minutes without recourse to bad language. The tale of the forged signature likewise reflected well on Charles (it surprised her that he’d been capable of the subterfuge, but the incident just went to show how high a value her Charles placed on friendship – even if this friend wasn’t likeable now, having failed to grow up as Charles had grown up), but the smacking of the lips at the mention of the girlfriend did not charm her (whereas Charles’s embarrassment at the story was very endearing). All in all, even though much of his swearing was intended to emphasise the absolute decency of Charles, she didn’t warm to Bill: he was a boaster as well, and he spoke rudely to his wife (who did not remain his wife for much longer – Bill, they were soon to discover, had another woman). After that evening, they saw Bill infrequently. Although she’d made an effort to be courteous, and had said nothing to Charles about how she felt about his friend, Charles nevertheless understood the situation, and was himself cooling towards his one-time best friend, as he would later admit. In 1963, by now divorced for a second time and bored to insanity by his job in car insurance, Bill emigrated to Australia, where he became a boat-repairer, married a much younger woman, had six children and built himself a large house by the beach. For a couple of years he and Charles corresponded, then two successive letters from London received no reply and Charles was happy to let it lapse.)

  So, Bill remained in Milan to woo the splendid Rita while Charles went on alone to Venice, where, though the weather turned wet and frigid, he passed every day in a stupor of delight. The canals were picturesque, of course, but what thrilled him was to be in a city where almost every square inch of land had been built on. Venice was the apotheosis of stone and brick. Swaddled in every item of clothing he had brought with him, he chugged up and down the Grand Canal, marvelling at the palaces that rose shoulder to shoulder from the water. He gazed at wooden ceilings that had the shape of upturned boats, at staircases wide enough to drive a car up, at ancient pavements of kaleidoscopic stone. More than any other building it was San Giorgio Maggiore that stirred him. (This is the word he used: ‘stirred’ – uttered as if the experience had caused an unprecedented turbulence of mind.) For much of one afternoon he sat in the nave of the great white church, uplifted not by any apprehension of the presence of the Almighty (God had been expelled from the Brennan household: like Janina’s father in the later war, his father had undergone a reverse conversion, but his had proved to be irreversible; two good friends, calling to him across a wall when a shell struck, had in an instant, in a geyser of red mud, disappeared from the face of the earth), but by the perfected order of space and light, by the sensation of being in some way changed, if only temporarily, by the exactitude of this man-made place. By the time he left Venice to rejoin his companion he knew that in an ideal world he would have been an architect. And he knew that there was no possibility of his ever becoming an architect: the idea was a fantasy, and my father had little tolerance for fantasies, even his own. This imaginary career was mentioned to his fiancée once or twice, as something that had momentarily seemed appealing, one among many whims of his youth. Thus she was startled by the forthrightness with which – the idea having lain dormant for more than a decade and a half – he declared (this is some time around Christmas; neighbours have joined us for drinks; I’m eleven years old, perhaps): ‘The one thing I always wanted to be was an architect.’ For the children this was an arresting announcement: to none of us would the notion have occurred that our father should ever have wanted to be anything other than wh
at he was. He was as fully and necessarily himself as a tree is itself.

  (Bill – to finish him off – had failed to get what he wanted from Rita, chiefly (so he told Charles immediately upon his return to Milan) because she never ventured out of her family’s apartment without Anna in tow. Had Charles stuck with him, things would certainly have gone differently, because Charles could have taken care of Anna, leaving Bill to focus the full force of his charisma on her sister. Reunited at around five in the afternoon, the friends had a falling-out at eight, after too much wine. In the morning, killjoy and wastrel went their separate ways: Charles caught a train north; Bill struck south, determined to cure his hangover from Rita by the only method that was guaranteed to succeed: another dose of the same. In Rome he was duly re-smitten: at the Trevi Fountain he met a young lady named Clio who was very nearly the equal in looks of the Milanese tease. The flirtation ended when – having been informed by Bill that he would have to think about getting back to England soon and couldn’t afford to pay for a meal for both of them that evening – she threw the brooch he’d bought her (in fact removed from an unguarded coat on a park bench) into the river, with a sneer so magnificent he didn’t know whether to applaud or protest.)

  And now, when I think of the holiday of the pony-boy and Charlie enthralled at Carrara, what I see is a painted chapel. My mother is keeping me entertained by pointing out the marginal details (the boy falling out of the window, the monkey on the camel’s back, the blue angel above the trees); Celia, holding a leaflet, is making sense of the scene for Charlie. The disintegration of my face has begun: growths have appeared in the nasal area, a couple elsewhere. A guard sits on a folding wooden chair, reading a newspaper, which is lowered a few times, to permit a surreptitious inspection.

  And it occurs to me that Charlie’s love of wine is yet another area in which we must acknowledge the paramount importance of paternal influence, and that our father would trace his own penchant for fine vintages to a moment in Treviso, where he changed trains on his way back to rejoin Bill. Having some time to kill before the next Milan-bound service, he wandered into the centre of the town and stopped at a café, where he ordered a roll and a glass of rosso. He sat at a table in the window. Across the street, workmen were putting a roof on a bomb-damaged building. For some reason – uncharacteristically – he lost track of the time. Perhaps he was unsettled by the ambivalence he now felt at the thought of rejoining his friend; perhaps he was conscious of some loss of enthusiasm for the future that awaited him. It was a fine day, cloudless and cold, and maybe he was prompted – consciously or not – to make the most of what would be the last occasion on which he would sit alone, on a pleasant day in a pleasant Italian café, watching people going about their business. He called for a second glass, whereupon the barman, seeming to have taken a liking to him, said, ‘You have this’ and poured a measure from a different, and by implication more expensive, bottle. Across the street, the arm of a crane swivelled through the perfect light-blue sky. He sipped, and it was the most wonderful taste he had ever experienced, a taste he could never describe. He should have asked the barman what it was, but there were other people at the bar now and he would have been embarrassed to ask in front of them, and then the barman went out and a different man took over, someone much older and less approachable, so he never found out what it was he had drunk. As he used to tell it, our father’s enthusiasm for wine began as a search for a bottle that would match the taste of Treviso. He sampled many that were similar and many that were marvellous. None, though, was ever the same. It took him a while to realise that the search was futile.

  Charlie digs around in the family archive and finds, in a wallet of our father’s old photos, the monochrome group shot of the baggy-suited young men. I show it to Ellen, pointing out my father and Bill Cowdrey, next to him. Leaning over Ellen’s shoulder, Charlie says: ‘No, that’s not Bill – that one’s Bill.’ He’s indicating the man beside the one I know is Bill Cowdrey, and he’s adamant that he’s right. He empties the wallet, searching for a corroborating picture of Bill. There’s no picture of Bill, nor of the man Charlie thinks is Bill. There are seventeen photographs of our father as a young man, none of them labelled; in five of them he’s with other youngsters, male and female, well-dressed and self-conscious, as if in rehearsal for middle age. Neither Charlie nor I have any idea who most of these young people might be, though Charlie is fairly sure that the young woman in the cardigan, with the corrugated hair, was a cousin. And then we find, lying in the bottom of the box, in its own sleeve of thin paper, the snap of Uncle Neville, standing in the jungle with a rifle in one hand and floppy hat in the other. ‘Haven’t seen this for a while,’ says Charlie; he studies it for a couple of minutes, before slipping it back into the box.

  Uncle Neville, my father’s older brother, was a soldier – one of the very few professions their father regarded as an acceptable alternative to running the family business. Neville spent a long time in Malaya, where he was wounded and received some sort of medal. As a young man, our father had looked up to Neville – revered him, or so Charlie gathered. But then, when Charlie was eight years old, Neville did something terrible, and our father never had anything to do with him again. None of us knows what it was that Neville did. For a time the story our mother told us was that he’d gone to live on the other side of the world and they’d lost contact with him. Charlie suspected this wasn’t true, and later it was admitted that there had been a big argument. It bothered Charlie very much that there was this lost member of the family, but he learned not to persist with his questions. ‘He’s washed his hands of us and we’ve washed our hands of him. That’s all you need to know,’ our father once told him, and his eyes were furious – so furious that Charlie has not forgotten the look of them to this day. He can also remember, dimly, a day when Uncle Neville came to visit. It was a sunny day and Uncle Neville and his wife and sons arrived in a huge black Citroën that Uncle Neville allowed him to sit in, so he could pretend to be driving. In the garden, his uncle sat him on his lap and showed him the bullethole in his arm. That’s all Charlie can remember of Uncle Neville, and of his wife – Aunt Clare – there’s nothing left but the memory of her amazingly thin shins, and a flowery dress that Charlie could see through when she stood against the sunlight. The two boys, Alexander and Philip, are almost completely forgotten, except that Charlie thinks that the elder, Alexander, had a very peculiar haircut, like a tight-fitting hairy helmet. Charlie has done a few internet searches for Uncle Neville, but there’s no trace of him. Even Freddie has had a go, and he can’t find him.

  5

  Stephen has been renovated in the eight months since we last met: the teeth have been whitened at great expense, and he’s switched his custom to a new hairdresser, London-trained – not cheap, says Stephen, but you could easily pay more for a mediocre meal. A wing of grey is spreading above each ear, which augments the dash of the hairstyle. The roll-neck top – midnight blue, merino wool – impresses Janina, who is first in the queue to greet him; a double kiss from her, and a compliment on the aftershave, which she identifies correctly as a Guerlain concoction. Ellen next: ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he says, shaking her hand; Ellen charmed by the light gallantry. ‘Danny,’ he calls; ‘Mr Siveter,’ I reply; he throws his arms out wide and I walk into them, to press my head to his chest. Ellen touched and embarrassed.

  The atmosphere around the table is light and good-humoured. Janina in a vivacious mood – flirtatious, even. Much approval of Stephen’s wardrobe, and teasing of Charlie’s. ‘Just look at his shoes,’ she says to Stephen, pointing at hubbie’s feet as he goes to fetch a bottle from the kitchen. Charlie is wearing a battered old pair of suede loafers, whereas Stephen’s shoes are beautifully cared-for brogues, in ox-blood leather. ‘Appalling,’ Stephen sympathises. ‘Comfort before all things,’ says mellow Charlie, taking a bow. ‘You must take my husband shopping. He won’t let me help him,’ Janina tells Stephen, taking his hand. I slide my trainers out
from under the table: ‘You can tell a lot about a chap from his footwear,’ I mutter to Ellen.

  In the garden, Stephen philosophises. Why is it, he wonders, that we can happily contemplate the time that preceded us but not the time that will follow us? Logically the two extents of time are identical, in that they are immeasurable and we are absent from both, so why should the latter disturb us? Perhaps it’s because we are not in fact entirely absent from the former? The year 1860 passed without me, but I know it as the year in which Garibaldi’s army won the battles of Calatafimi and Milazzo and Volturno, in which Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the USA and South Carolina seceded from the Union, in which Chekhov and Albéniz and Mahler and J.M. Barrie and Paderewski and Billie the Kid were born, and Schopenhauer died. So the past is not a void as the future is a void. Next year I shall not be here, and I can never know anything of it. I am deprived of it entirely, yet it is so close to me. Is this an aspect of the answer? More thought needed, we agree. Might delegate the thinking to Stephen.