The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  Wheezing a little, he led Clem to a guest room on the top floor of the house. The room was tiny and Spartan. A bed sized like those in the dormitory, a small wash-basin, a dark, varnished wardrobe like an Italian confessional. The window looked over the front garden. Someone was wheeling a barrow with a creaking axle. Above the bed, suspended from the white wall by a nail, was a small reproduction of a medieval icon or screen painting. In a scroll at the bottom of the picture: ‘Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous’

  ‘St Dorothy?’ asked Clem.

  ‘I think that’s St Odile,’ said his father. ‘Founded an order in Alsace. You don’t mind her being there, I hope?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘No one’s going to push religion down your throat here.’

  Clem nodded.

  ‘You’re tired,’ said his father. ‘Shall I leave you to rest?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Clem. ‘I expect you go to bed early.’

  ‘Nine thirty in winter. Ten in the summer. According to the light.’

  ‘Then I’ll wait.’ He looked around, though there was nothing much to look at. He couldn’t think for a moment how it had happened, the precise chain of events that had brought him to this room.

  ‘Well,’ said his father. ‘Have you lost some weight? I think you have. A little.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure of your movements work-wise. Whether you were free.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I imagine you’re having a well-earned break.’

  ‘A break?’

  ‘Recharging the batteries.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The agency looking after you?’

  ‘That’s not really their job, Dad.’

  ‘Finding you enough work, though?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like to think I don’t miss much of it. You know that when I’m in Berwick I always have a look through the papers. The serious ones, at least.’

  ‘Don’t you find that a distraction?’

  ‘Too much of the world, you mean? We’re not stylites here, Clem. We don’t live on pillars in the desert.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need to be.’ He turned on one of the basin taps, let it run for a few seconds and turned it off. ‘Africa was obviously appalling. All that senseless killing.’

  ‘It wasn’t senseless. They killed for a reason.’

  ‘Neighbour against neighbour is usually the worst.’

  ‘Only one of the neighbours was armed.’

  ‘You’re saying it was slaughter.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now the others will have their revenge, I suppose.’

  Clem looked into the garden again. ‘There can be no forgiveness,’ he said. ‘Be clear about that.’ He shut his eyes for a moment. He didn’t want this conversation. The words would pull things up by the roots and he didn’t know what would happen then. ‘What about Clare?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said his father. He drew a hand across his brow.

  ‘The letter?’

  ‘I can fetch it for you. Do you want to see it right away? It’s just that we’ll be called for tea soon.’

  Clem nodded. ‘Later, then.’

  ‘After tea.’

  ‘Yes.’

  His father reached for the door handle. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Clem. Glad you made the effort.’

  ‘No great effort.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘Have I got time to wash?’

  ‘Another ten minutes before the gong. It’s eggs tonight. Egg salad. I don’t think you have any trouble with eggs?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And there’s plenty of bread and butter. I can probably break out some jam too, if you wanted it.’

  ‘I’ll have what the others are having,’ said Clem.

  ‘That’s settled, then. Come down when you hear the gong.’ With a quick half-wave he left the room. Clem listened to him go, the cautious descent, the creaking of the steps; then he filled the basin with cold water, and several times, with measured, deliberate movements, drew the water to his face and pressed it there.

  The brotherhood ate at a long refectory table, bought, along with the beds perhaps, from some extinguished local public school. Space was made for Clem between his father and a man called Simon Truelove, one of the founders, who smiled at Clem from small, pink-lined eyes. After grace, the meal was eaten without any conversation. Tea was poured from large brown pots, each man pouring for his neighbour. Requests for salt or milk were whispered or anticipated. They must have known each other as well as wives, these tidy, conscientious eaters. Their old teeth ground the lettuce leaves. They dabbed their moistened lips with handkerchiefs. There was a mood of forgiving each other for the embarrassment of their bodies, the occasional gurgle, the stubborn clicking of a mandible. Then, with the teapots drained, the cutlery neatly paired on the heavy china plates, the last of them, Simon Truelove, rattled his cup onto his saucer and the meal was over.

  William Glass was on the rota to wash up. Clem offered to help but his father suggested that he wait for him in the library, a room at the front of the house on the far side of the stairs. Here at least were some of the home comforts conspicuously absent from the rest of the building—armchairs, lamps, a tiled fireplace, some rugs. Shelving ran the length of the back wall and he browsed the spines of the books there hoping to find something that had nothing to do with religion.

  After ten minutes he pulled out a small rose-coloured volume, a 1926 illustrated guide to the counties of Somerset and Gloucestershire, a vestige of someone’s remotest youth that now shared a shelf with The Five Glorious Mysteries, We Preach Christ Crucified, Lives of the Bartholomites. Glued between the book’s middle pages (next to a puff for the Channel View Hotel, ‘separate tables and electric lights throughout’) was a fragile, intricately folded map that Clem opened out at the table by the window. The counties were shown as nets of fine grey lines with faded blue-green dots depicting bodies of water. Some of the place names, those nearest to Bristol, were well known to him. Others he had driven through or heard spoken of. A surprising number he had never heard of at all, as though, some time in the last sixty years, they had sunk into the ground. He crossed Somerset with his fingertip until he found Frome and Radstock and Shepton Mallet. Old market towns—old mining towns too, for the whole county was humped with the sealed and grassed-over workings of former industry. He was looking for Colcombe, the village where Nora’s sister, Laura Harwood, had a house, a place where he and Clare had spent a dozen holiday weeks and weekends while Nora busied herself with those meetings and marches, the endless talking that in the end had worn her to nothing. Leaving the children at Colcombe had been a convenience for her, but not one that Clem had ever resented. He had liked the house, its lawns, the tarmacked tennis court (sticky in summer), the kitchen with its muddy dogs sprawled by the side of the Aga. Oddly important things had happened there. He had ridden a horse for the first time, drunk gin for the first time, swum in the eerie chill of a flooded quarry. And in the attic one afternoon he had touched, as part of a dare or game, the secret whiteness of his cousin Frankie’s thirteen-year-old breasts while she lay, a little Maja undressed, among the bound piles of Punch and Country Life, the enormous ribbed packing cases.

  He found the village, a dot in a wrinkled labyrinth of B roads, the abbey marked to the side of it, another cross showing the old Colcombe church, the ‘plague’ church that stood on its own a mile from the village in a field of yews. Strange that a map—a thing so utterly abstract—should return to him, in such bright sequences, a time he had not thought about in years! It made him suspicious (he was a practised distruster of woolly-minded reverie) but he let himself enjoy it for a minute, his own childhood almost persuasive as a term in the argument opposed to the new understanding he had, the new certainty.

  But how was Laura now? He had seen her only once since Uncle Ron’s funeral, tea and fancy cakes at Harvey N
ichols when she was up in Town two years ago, an appointment in Harley Street. And Frankie? And what about her brother Kenneth? Did he still plod behind Laura, wide-eyed, dumb as a flower? As far as Clem knew, the pair of them still lived together.

  He was returning the book back to its slot on the shelf when his father, hands pink from the hot water, called for him and led the way to the garden. They sat on a bench. Fifteen yards away two of the old men, in gumboots and shirtsleeves, were bent over a bed of freshly turned earth.

  ‘Sowing beans,’ said his father. ‘Carrots, lettuces, onions, peas, rhubarb.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve even been planting trees.’

  ‘Where do you keep the chickens?’

  ‘On the other side. You’ll hear them in the morning. Rhode Island Reds mostly. A few white Leghorns. Did you want to see them?’

  ‘Another time.’

  ‘As you like.’ He reached into one of the side pockets of his corduroy jacket and took out an envelope, the lip ragged where he had used his finger as a letter knife. ‘You might as well have this now,’ he said.

  ‘You want me to read it here?’

  ‘It’s only a few lines.’

  Clem took the letter from the envelope. It was a single sheet written over with hurried pencil strokes. Each full stop had pierced the paper.

  Daddy

  I am writing to tell you I have become ill again. Why it should have happened now after so many years I have no idea. You believe in sin and the devil and judgment. Am I being punished for something? For weeks I have tried with all my strength to continue a normal life but that is no longer possible. Tomorrow, to forestall the inevitable, I will admit myself to a private clinic. I cannot go on a public ward like the one at Barrow. I am not 24. I would not survive it. Let people call me a hypocrite if they want to—I am beyond caring what others think. YOU MUST NOT TRY TO SEE ME. There is NOTHING you can do and seeing you would only make this INFINITELY harder than it already is. My friend Finola Fiacc will communicate whatever is necessary. You can speak to her at the department. I have put her home number at the bottom of this page. I don’t want anyone’s pity, certainly not yours. If I could make people forget me I would.

  Please RESPECT my wishes!

  Clare

  Beneath her name was a drawn heart struck out by a single line. No love? I cannot be loved? My heart is broken?

  Clem folded the paper and slipped it back into the envelope. When he turned to his father he saw that there were tears in his eyes. ‘You’ll go to her, won’t you, Clem?’

  ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll phone this colleague of hers. Arrange something. Do you want the letter?’

  ‘You keep it.’

  They sat a minute, watching the old gardeners press the seeds into the soil and water them.

  ‘Has she been overworking?’ asked his father, speculating aloud. ‘I don’t think she eats properly. Do you?’

  ‘She never had much of an appetite.’

  ‘More of an appetite for books than food. For paintings! And where do you think this clinic is? In Dundee? Edinburgh? You’d be amazed at the number of private clinics there are in Scotland. I’ve done some research at the library in town. Most of them are for drinkers, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll find it,’ said Clem.

  ‘She’s too far north. There’s not enough light for her. Not enough warmth.’

  ‘The first time was in Paris.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m talking nonsense.’ He smiled miserably. ‘Shall we walk a little? A walk might do us good.’

  In the village, most of the tourists, other than the few staying the night in bed-and-breakfasts, had left. The tide was in, the causeway sunk under the waves, the island an island again. They walked out along a promontory towards the castle, then came back and crossed a shingle beach where the weathered hulls of upturned fishing-boats had been made into sheds and workshops. At the end of the beach the path led steeply upwards to the lighthouse. They climbed and stood at the base of it, the wind on their faces. They were quite alone.

  ‘Travelling from here,’ said his father, pointing along a line of latitude, ‘you’d come eventually to the coast of Denmark. And beyond that to Moscow, the Aleutian Islands, Canada.’

  ‘And back here again.’

  ‘Yes, eventually. But I’m not like you, Clem. My travels are all in my head. Unless you count going to Berwick once a week. Do you know I’ve never even been to the Americas? A whole continent I’ve never set foot in!’

  ‘Is that where you’d like to go?’

  ‘I think I’d prefer to go to India.’

  ‘You could still make it happen.’

  ‘Well, in dreams, perhaps.’

  Far out, where the blue was darkest, some vessel in the shipping lanes had switched on her navigation lights. They watched her glinting on the horizon until the wind made their eyes water. ‘I always have the oddest temptation to wave to them,’ said his father. ‘As though they could possibly see me.’

  ‘Shall we go back?’ said Clem. ‘It’s getting chilly.’

  The path down the bank was all in shadow; the old man took hold of Clem’s elbow, letting go of him once they were on the beach again.

  ‘I went into the little chapel,’ said Clem. ‘There were two of your friends there. I’m not sure if they heard me.’

  His father told him not to worry. ‘There are always two of us in there. We do a two-hour shift and swap over.’

  ‘All through the night?’

  ‘Day and night. You get used to it. It’s the heart of the house.’

  ‘What do people pray for?’

  ‘There are no rules on that. You can pray for whatever you wish.’

  ‘Can I ask what you pray for?’

  ‘Me? Oh, for understanding.’

  ‘Always that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling to himself and slipping his hand again under his son’s arm as they came on to the road. ‘Always.’

  8

  The next morning—Sunday—Clem caught the eleven thirty-three from Berwick, changed at Edinburgh, and crossed the Tay at a quarter to two, the train skimming above the water towards roofs that gleamed and grew dull again in broken sunlight.

  He had called Finola Fiacc from the telephone in the office of Theophilus House. She had sounded flustered at first, caught off guard, but having no real objection to make and no time to think of one, she had agreed at last to meet him. She would know him, she said, from photographs Clare had shown her (this detail was interesting: his sister showed people photographs of him!) but it was Clem, coming out of the station ticket hall, who identified her—no one else there looked likely to own such a name—a tall, middle-aged woman in a tracksuit and vulcanised raincoat, scanning, through horn-rimmed lenses, the faces of the twenty or so passengers who had left the train at Dundee.

  ‘Fiacc,’ she said, as Clem appeared in front of her. ‘I am Finola Fiacc, and you might as well know from the start that I am a recovering alcoholic. I have not taken a drink in four years and four months, thanks, in great part, to the kindness of your sister.’ She paused as though offering Clem the opportunity to make a confession of his own, then added: ‘I have taken in her cats. My van is over there.’

  They crossed the car park towards a camper van, a green Volkswagen streaked with rust, an old sticker—‘A Dog is for Life’—hanging, half peeled, from the glass of the sliding door. In the windscreen was her Dundee University car-park badge.

  ‘You called her?’ asked Clem, as Fiacc strong-armed the van into reverse gear.

  ‘She has decided to see you.’

  ‘And we’re going there now?’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘You haven’t told me what this place is called.’

  ‘You haven’t asked.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Ithaca.’

  ‘Ithaca?’

  ‘On the Arbroath road.’

  She drove in attit
udes of rage, gunning the van down the hills, then leaning forwards and pressing the wheel as they crept up the slope of the next. Clem made no attempt to talk with her and this seemed to suit them both. He was bemused to be travelling between these oddly titled communities, and found it hard to imagine his sister as the friend of this ungainly woman whose eyes flickered behind the lenses of her glasses. The weather turned to squalls, rain raiding off the side of the van; then the clouds swept past leaving a fine washed blue, until more clouds turned the world dark again.

  ‘You mind if I smoke?’ asked Clem. She bared her teeth then said that she would smoke too, though not one of his machine-made cigarettes. ‘They’re full of poison,’ she said. ‘Ammonia. Gunpowder.’ She had a tin of tobacco in the glove compartment, untreated stuff, which also happened to be cheaper. Clem passed it to her, watching from the comer of his eye as she rolled a cigarette while steering the van with her elbows. Strands of tobacco dangled from the end of the finished cigarette. When she lit up, the strands fell in fiery curls to her thighs where she beat them out with a free hand, though not before two or three tiny burns joined the dozen others that speckled the nap of her tracksuit trousers.

  ‘A rainbow,’ she said bluntly, gesturing with her cigarette to where a half-arch stood out over glistening hills. ‘Not that they mean anything.’

  They turned off the main road, accelerated through a huddled village, climbed past soaking fields, glimpsed the sea, then descended into a valley, Fiacc pumping the brake with her plimsolled foot before swerving on to the gravelled forecourt of a large white house.