Bright Air

by Barry Maitland

  I picked up a book lying among the remnants of Marcus’s meal and checked the title—Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner. Anna had opened the doors onto the terrace and I followed her out. Further down the steep slope we could see a kind of amphitheatre formed in a hollow in the hillside, accessible from Marcus’s house by rock steps winding down between the boulders. To one side of the terrace a shade-cloth conservatory had been built beneath the overhang of a sandstone outcrop, with ferns and other plants dimly visible inside.

  We turned and saw Marcus limping into the room, and went back inside. He almost stumbled on a book on the floor, and I caught his arm and steadied him, startled by how light he felt. I took the bottle from his free hand and found three empty glasses.

  He eased himself with a sigh down into another piece of furniture I remembered, a heavy dark wooden chair he called his throne. ‘So how are you guys?’ he said, examining us in turn. In that more haggard face his gaze seemed brighter, more intense, but his manner was less certain, almost as if he’d become withdrawn, unused to being with people, reclusive, or maybe just drunk.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Anna said. ‘I work over in Blacktown, and Josh has been in London.’

  ‘Ah, the merchant banker, yes. London?’

  ‘Right, I’ve just got back.’

  ‘Four years,’ he said. ‘Of course, of course.’ As if that was terribly significant.

  I smiled. ‘How’s the uni these days?’

  He lowered his eyelids, raised his wine cautiously to his mouth and drank. ‘I don’t work there any more, Josh. They decided they could do without me—very wisely no doubt.’ Some wine spilled onto his knee.

  Anna said, ‘But you were a great teacher, Marcus. And your research …’

  He gave a dry laugh that turned into a cough. ‘After the accident, well, someone had to pay. Inquiries, suspended from teaching, research grants withheld. They made life impossible for me, drove me out.’ He shrugged, wiped his knee absently.

  I was shocked, by both his story and how he looked, and said, ‘I’m sorry. Where are you now?’

  ‘Um? Oh, I’m working on my own private research program.’

  ‘No more students?’

  He gazed at his feet sombrely, then shook his head.

  I raised an eyebrow at Anna, who took over.

  ‘We wondered if you’d heard about Curtis and Owen, Marcus?’

  ‘Curtis and Owen? No, I haven’t heard from them for a while. What about them?’

  I hadn’t noticed a newspaper or a TV in the house.

  ‘They were killed in a climbing accident in New Zealand last month.’

  He cocked his head forward, peering at her. ‘No …’ He looked confused, and I wondered if he might be on medication as well as booze. ‘A climbing accident?’ He shook his head, not upset but more as if this just couldn’t be right. ‘Another climbing accident? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I went over there as soon as I heard. I was with Owen when he died in hospital.’ Anna was leaning forward, speaking slowly, watching his reactions. ‘Just before he died he told me something very disturbing. He said that Luce didn’t die the way the inquest had heard. He said her death wasn’t accidental.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He said, We killed her.’

  Marcus looked startled, opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Finally he said, ‘No, that’s … that’s … crazy.’

  ‘Is it? You weren’t actually there when it happened, were you?’

  ‘You’re not serious.’ He began tapping a finger on the arm of the chair. ‘There was an inquest, a full investigation.’

  ‘Which relied on what Curtis and Owen said.’

  He hauled himself abruptly upright in his seat, glaring at her. ‘This is crazy, Anna. Tell me again, the whole thing.’

  While Anna did so I looked at the books lying around my feet. There was one called Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, which I thought might have been about climbing until I saw that the author again was Steiner. There were others by him—The Being of Man and His Future Evolution and Cosmic Memory—and a thick tome called A Guide to Anthroposophy. The books had Dewey classification numbers on their spines from the university library, and I wondered if he still had access, or if he’d stolen them.

  ‘Thank you for telling me this, Anna. I had no idea.’ Marcus drained his glass and I got up to refill it for him. ‘Have you told anyone else about it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Marcus seemed agitated, preoccupied. ‘The fall,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Owen’s mind … He was obviously deranged by his fall.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s possible he could have been telling the truth?’

  ‘What? No! Of course not.’

  I said, ‘How about Luce’s state of mind, in those last days before the accident?’

  ‘Luce? State of mind?’ He focused his eyes on me in that intense way he’d had before, as if he wanted to burrow right into your brain and find out what you were hiding in there.

  ‘Yes, I mean, was she depressed? At the inquest several people said they thought she was. The police investigator even asked you all if she might have killed herself. I just wondered what you really thought.’

  ‘No, Luce would never do that … Ah, I think I can see where you’re coming from, Josh. She still had a photo of you inside her wallet, and you’re wondering … Am I right?’

  I felt the colour rise in my face, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that. A bit subdued maybe, towards the end of the trip, but not suicidal, no, no.’

  Anna said, ‘One of the witnesses said there was a disagreement between Luce and other members of the team.’

  He turned to her, then slowly shook his head. ‘No, Anna—no disagreements.’

  I said, ‘What about Curtis and Owen, how were they getting on?’

  ‘Fine, we were all getting on fine.’ He shook his head, impatient with these questions.

  ‘Were they lovers?’

  He glanced at me, eyebrow raised, as if reassessing me. ‘You know about that, do you? No, that was over long before, as far as I know. And even if they were—what difference would it have made?’

  ‘Luce felt protective towards Suzi and the baby. I think she felt that Curtis should have left Owen alone.’

  ‘Was that how it went, Josh? I don’t know. It was none of my business. And Luce never mentioned it. Look …’ he waved a hand at us, pale and bony as a turkey’s claw, ‘this has stirred up old memories, but nothing sinister happened. I promise you that. It was just a terrible accident, terrible, terrible. If there had been any hint of anything else … I miss her too, you know.’ He nodded towards a bookshelf on which we saw a small framed photograph of Luce. ‘Every day I think of her and blame myself.’

  He took a deep breath, a glint of moisture in his eyes, and then added with a kind of choked sob, ‘I saw her, you know …’ He waved his hand at the French windows onto the terrace.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘About a year ago, out there … Beautiful as ever.’

  Anna and I exchanged a glance of alarm.

  ‘A year ago?’ I said.

  He turned his face back from the window to me and said quietly, ‘Have you wondered why you’ve come back now, Josh?’

  I looked at him in astonishment. ‘Well, it was just the way things turned out, with my job and so on …’

  He shook his head and smiled as if I was being incredibly naive. ‘You were looking at my books,’ he said, pointing to the pile beside my feet. ‘Rudolf Steiner, a great man, a great scientist, who realised the limitations of conventional science and moved on further—much, much further. The man and woman who designed this house were great followers of his. They studied his books, his philosophy, his discoveries. It took me a long time to realise … The people they designed it for were my grandparents, who left it to me when they died twenty years ago, but it’s
only in the last year that I’ve begun to realise that they were all into it, the people who came to live here, including my grandparents. There was art and dance, and everyone joined in; anthroposophical festivals in the open-air amphitheatre down below us here in The Scarp …’ he pointed to the French windows, ‘by the light of flares. Tell me, how many rooms are there in this house, Josh?’

  His rambling was becoming more and more confused. I shrugged. ‘No idea, Marcus.’

  ‘Seven, arranged in three overlapping suites. Now, look at the carving of the stone window surrounds, the patterns of glass in the French windows, the design of the fireplace—all repetitions of seven elements in three overlapping groups, at many different scales. You see?’

  ‘Oh yes, right.’ I looked at Anna again, eyebrows raised.

  ‘One of the things, the fundamental things, that Steiner discovered was that we have seven parts, seven kinds of self. The house, you see, is the philosophy made flesh, Josh. It is a template, a model, an embodiment of the human spirit itself, as revealed by Steiner. He was the Darwin, the Einstein of the spiritual world, and this was one of his great discoveries. When we die, Josh, only the first member, the physical body, is destroyed. For a few days its companions, the astral and etheric bodies, cling together, after which the astral body separates itself and goes on its way without the etheric, which also dies. Now the person goes through a painful process of purification, retracing his or her life experiences and purging them in what Steiner calls “the consuming fire of the spirit”, until at last the whole of their earthly life is distilled to an extract, a quintessence, which the Ego carries forward into the spiritual world, the Spirit-land.’

  He was becoming more and more excited, eyes wild, and he suddenly reached out to grab my arm. ‘Josh, Steiner tells us that the process of purification takes about one-sixth of the time the person spent on earth. Don’t you see? For Lucy that would be four years. Four years! That’s why you’re disturbed, why you’ve come back to this house now. You were close to her, you sense her being at the time when she must move on into the land of Spirits!

  ‘That’s why she returned here. It was a dark night. I came into this room, and switched on the light, and there she was, out there on the terrace, a pale figure, but absolutely clear, unmistakable, illuminated by the light from the room. I cried out her name and went towards her. I wanted to speak to her, ask her forgiveness, but she disappeared. She’d come back to this house, Josh, to seek out the blueprint of her future life, to find her way forward into the Spirit-land.’

  ‘Forgiveness?’ I said sharply. ‘Forgiveness for what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you wanted to ask her forgiveness. What for?’

  ‘Oh …’ He became a mass of confusion. ‘I felt responsible. She was my student …’ Then he turned on me. His frown might have been puzzlement, or concern, or perhaps no more than a struggle to concentrate. He repeated my name a couple of times, ‘Josh … Josh,’ then his face cleared and he said, ‘I understand—you’re suffering, right? Shit, you feel guilt … despair, right?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘I felt exactly the same, until I discovered the truth.’

  ‘The truth? You know the truth, about how she died?’

  ‘Ha!’ Now a beatific smile lit his face. ‘But that’s the point, Josh, that is the point.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘She isn’t dead.’

  We left soon after, exchanging promises to catch up again another time. As we made for the front door Marcus, returned now to a more prosaic spiritual plane, said to Anna, ‘On morphine, was he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Owen, when you saw him.’

  ‘I suppose so, something like that.’

  Marcus nodded, as if he knew all about morphine. ‘Messes with your brain, Anna. People believe all kinds of stuff.’

  We stepped carefully through the obstacles on the living room floor, and I recognised a Lloyd Rees print on the wall that Luce and I had admired on one of our visits. The memory brought back just how much energy and life there had been in this house then, and how neglected it now seemed. I felt sorry for Marcus. He’d been an intriguing and generous man to know, and he’d made our student lives more interesting, more vivid. Now he seemed utterly lost.

  When we reached the front door, Anna led the way up the path between the rocks, but Marcus put a hand on my shoulder and stopped me. He was uncomfortably close, his breath foul on my cheek. ‘Josh,’ he murmured, ‘you don’t want to get into all this. Really. I understand how fond of her you were, but believe me, there’s no conspiracy here.’

  I nodded, embarrassed to see what looked like a tear in his eye. He was so close I couldn’t avoid noticing the unhealthy colour of his skin, the tufts of bristle he’d missed shaving beneath his chin.

  ‘Anna’s got it all wrong, you see. You should put her straight. Don’t let her make trouble. Bad for everyone.’

  I didn’t mention this to Anna as we drove back to Central, where she wanted to catch a train. On the way she said, ‘Poor Marcus. I can’t believe how much he’s altered. This thing has really done him in, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, pretty much. He’s a changed man all right. Did you believe what he said, about the accident?’

  ‘Yes, I did, though he wasn’t there of course, when Luce fell.’

  I had believed it too, until that last little exchange at the door. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  We agreed we’d have a think about things and talk again soon.

  9

  I wanted to think about something else, and Mary helped by giving me a new list of jobs that needed doing around the place. I got stuck into them, and was rewarded later with a lobster dinner and a bottle of wine. After the meal I lay on my bed with a crime novel one of the guests had left with us. She’d recommended it highly, and the reviews quoted on the back cover were all ecstatic, but it annoyed me. It wasn’t that it was unrealistic, at least concerning the technical aspects of murder—DNA profiling, gunshot trauma, the action of bacteria in buried corpses, autopsy procedures and all the rest—in these things it was grossly realistic. But I just couldn’t relate to the characters. They were so incredibly resourceful and resilient; the more they were beaten up and shot and misled, the more determinedly they returned to the fight and the more brilliantly their brains worked. Real people aren’t like that—they’re very easily frightened and confused, their motives are boring and selfish, and when trouble comes they have a tendency to curl up into a little ball until it all goes away. I know, because I’m one. But of course that doesn’t make for a very interesting read.

  I had been confused by our visit to Marcus all right, and unsettled in ways I couldn’t quite define. The house had been part of it: claustrophobic, chaotic, a chamber of memories and ghosts. And Marcus himself, diminished and turned in upon himself. I thought about that performance of his, my mind coloured by the book I’d just been reading. In crime novels, of course, every fact, every event may be significant, carrying the germ of some revelation. Life may not be like that, but the more I considered Marcus’s mystic blustering, the more dubious it seemed, like an elaborate cloak he’d felt obliged to gather around himself. I began to become convinced that the cloak concealed something. A secret. And I wanted to know what it was.

  On Monday morning Damien phoned and invited me to have lunch with him. It was a very swish place on East Circular Quay, with a stunning view of the Opera House, and I felt a little out of place among all the corporate suits, but pleasantly so. I really didn’t want to be like that again.

  Damien was expansive and friendly, but also, I felt, pointedly assertive as he ordered this and that, as if establishing a certain position of authority. I let him come to the point in his own time, as we were halfway through our fish.

  ‘I got a call from Marcus Fenn at the weekend,’ he said, dabbing his mouth with his napkin.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘He said you and Anna paid him a visit,
at Castlecrag.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘It was a bit of a shock, frankly, seeing him again. He’s really gone downhill, hasn’t he? The house was a mess, and he didn’t look too fit.’

  Damien nodded sadly. ‘You’re right. I’ve watched it happen. The university treated him very badly, you know. Really beat him up. He’d made a lot of enemies over the years, especially within his own faculty—well, you know how sarcastic he could be. The dean hated his guts and saw the accident on Lord Howe as a way to get rid of him. Rumours circulated—that he hadn’t organised proper back-up for the team, that he was indifferent to safety procedures, that he was spaced out on drugs when it happened—all discounted by the police investigation, but no matter. They made life as difficult for him as they could, and when he accepted a package they refused to give him a reference. Then Luce’s dad went for him.’

  ‘What? Her father?’

  ‘Mm, Fred Corcoran, tough old bastard. He saw Marcus’s quitting the uni as an admission of guilt and when the coroner cleared him of any negligence, Corcoran took a private action against him. It dragged through the court for a year. In the end it failed, but it cost Marcus his university payout in lawyers’ fees. The court sympathised with old man Corcoran, even though he was wrong, and didn’t like the look of Marcus, so they didn’t award him costs.’

  ‘Hell.’ I shook my head.

  ‘What was so unfair was that Marcus really was devastated by what had happened to Luce, but he just refused to show it, and people didn’t like that. They thought he was arrogant and didn’t care.’