‘Ithaca,’ she said, switching off the engine and slumping back in her seat, apparently exhausted. Clem climbed out of the van. The air was cold, a day like the beginning of March, or the beginning of March in London. Ahead of him was a blue front door, a pair of bay windows on either side of it, their lower panes hung with netting. A new two-storey wing had been added at one end of the house. Everything was in good order, smartly painted. A line of old trees, their tops bowed by the prevailing wind, screened the house from the road.
‘Four hundred a week,’ said Fiacc, joining Clem on the gravel, ‘and that without extras.’ He saw she had put on some lipstick, a bright red that made the rest of her face look bled out, like French veal.
‘What kind of extras?’
‘Hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, yoga. Sure they’ve got it all in there.’
She rang the bell. After half a minute the door was opened. A man in a green Paisley dressing-gown blocked their way, a balding, sack-like figure who widened his bloodshot eyes like the villain in an operetta. ‘If you’re the bloody press,’ he hissed, ‘I’ll set the bloody dogs on you.’ He scowled at Fiacc. ‘I know you,’ he said.
‘And I know you,’ she answered, pushing past him.
‘Room for two more inside!’ bawled the man, swinging the door shut. ‘Ding ding! Ding ding!’
They were in a type of lounge, a day-room with armchairs, mint-coloured walls, large ashtrays, pot plants, a fire extinguisher. A young woman with wavy grey-blonde hair appeared through a doorway at the rear of the room, her ID clipped to the waistband of her jeans. ‘Oh, Raymond,’ she said, ‘Raymond, dear. Are we getting a wee bit loud again?’
‘I, am, dying, of, fucking, boredom,’ said the man, though in a quieter voice. He sat down.
The young woman turned to Fiacc. ‘You’re come to see Clare?’
‘This is her brother,’ said Fiacc. ‘Clement Glass.’
‘Pauline Diamond,’ said the woman, shaking Clem’s hand. ‘One of the care team. When you’ve seen Clare you might like a chat with Dr Boswell. That’s his office there. He’s on all afternoon. We’re great believers here in the family input.’
Clem signed the visitors’ book, then followed Fiacc to the end of the new wing and up a flight of carpeted stairs. Clare’s room was at the back of the house. Her name—first name only—was written on a piece of card slotted into a Perspex holder on the door. Fiacc knocked but, getting no response, nor, it seemed, expecting one, she opened the door and leaned inside. ‘Just me,’ she cooed, a voice quite distinct from the one she had used on Clem. ‘And I have your brother here. If you’re feeling up to it.’
Clare was sitting on a straight-backed chair between a table and the window. Fiacc put an arm round her shoulders and drew her into a quick, one-sided hug.
‘Hello,’ said Clem. He bent to kiss his sister’s cheek. Their eyes met for a moment, then she looked towards the window. Fiacc took off her raincoat, wiped away some marks from the mirror over the wash-basin with the comer of a piece of tissue, then sat on the end of the bed. For ten minutes she kept up a flow of talk about the comings and goings at the university. Clem leaned against the wall by the window-sill. He did not know if Clare was listening to anything; she gave no sign of it. He tried not to stare at her. He had of course expected her to look poorly, to be thinner and paler, but this listless woman with her drab hair limp over the bones of her shoulders, shadows like bruises under her eyes, flakes of dry skin on her brow, was more than he had prepared himself for. She was dressed as though for mourning—black woollen tights, a black dress, black cardigan. In her lap her fingers, ringless, plucked at each other, the pulse of some continuous, unassuageable disquiet.
‘I saw Dad,’ he said, when Fiacc paused. ‘He sends you his love.’
She nodded and drank the last of the water in the glass on the table.
‘Would you like some more?’ he asked. He carried the glass to the basin and refilled it. When he set it beside her she mumbled something; he bent closer.
‘Door key?’ He looked across at Fiacc.
‘Now didn’t we talk about that before?’ said Fiacc, addressing the side of Clare’s face in tones of mock-admonishment. ‘There is no key, dear. The door has no lock at all.’ To Clem she said: ‘It’s the fire regulations.’
Clem went back to the window. ‘Have you been out today?’ he asked. He had no idea what to say to her. ‘We saw a rainbow on the drive over.’
‘The people in the next room,’ said Clare, ‘are at it all the time.’
‘At it?’
‘And at night someone runs up and down in the corridor. Up and down, up and down, up and down. All night.’
‘I met someone downstairs,’ said Clem. ‘Pauline? She seemed nice.’
‘The medicine makes me thirsty,’ said Clare.
‘But it’s making you better,’ said Fiacc, loudly. ‘Are you not having fewer frights now?’
Clare looked up at Clem again, frowning slightly as though she could not yet make sense of his being there, could not yet decide how she felt about it. ‘I couldn’t stop,’ she said, shifting her gaze again to the floor by her feet. ‘First one thing. Then another. You lie to yourself. Then everything goes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clem. He watched her face crease up but there were no tears. After a moment her expression settled.
‘Shall I have a go at that hair of yours?’ asked Fiacc, standing and bustling over to the little dressing-table where Clare’s toiletries were laid out. ‘You’ll be having birds in it if you’re not careful, like your man in the poem.’
Clem looked down into the garden. There was a t’ai chi class in progress, a half-dozen men and women in a slow-motion struggle with the air.
‘No need for you to wait,’ said Fiacc, starting to jerk the brush through Clare’s hair. ‘We’re just going to do girls’ things. You could take a look about the house, why don’t you.’
He nodded, then stepped forward and crouched by his sister’s knees. ‘You got better before,’ he said. ‘You’ll get better again.’
‘You’re coming tomorrow?’ she asked, a simple question, neither anxious nor expectant.
He held her hands and briefly pressed them between his own. ‘If I can,’ he said. ‘Is that all right?’
He went down the stairs and out of a door at the end of the new wing. There was a pathway there, leading from the forecourt to the back garden, and he squatted by the wall and started smoking. The man in the dressing-gown came out and asked for a cigarette. Clem gave him one and the man hunkered down beside him, emitting little ‘ahh’s of pleasure each time he exhaled.
‘A word to the wise,’ he said. ‘The eating disorders and the depressives are all right. It’s the bi-polars and the drunks you have to watch for.’
‘Which are you?’ asked Clem.
‘A drunk,’ said the man. ‘And you?’
‘Just visiting.’
They finished their cigarettes. Clem went back to the day-room and knocked on the doctor’s door.
‘Come in, come in,’ sang the doctor. ‘Pull up a pew.’ He had Clare’s file ready on his desk. He wanted to check the address of her next of kin. He had Fiacc’s address—‘but she’s more kith than kin, isn’t she?’ Clem gave his father’s address. ‘A lovely part of the world,’ said the doctor, writing with an old-fashioned fountain pen. ‘No way, I suppose, of getting hold of you?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Busy busy, eh?’
‘Work,’ said Clem.
‘Thriving?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Excellent!’ The doctor jotted something down then sat back and dragged off his glasses. ‘I think,’ he began, ‘that we’ve got Clare through what might be called the acute phase. She’s not, for example, hallucinating any more. Far less confusion than when we first saw her, less obvious distress. Typically, however, it’s more of a challenge to treat the negative symptoms. Apathy, emotional blunting, et cetera. Still lots of things
for us to try. New drugs coming on line all the time, and much better than what she would have had before. As you probably know, the old neuroleptics could have pretty nasty side-effects.’
‘And the new ones?’
‘Dry mouth, blurry vision. Some people get spasms. And of course with the newer drugs we don’t always have the long-term story. But this is looking on the dark side...’—he squinted down at the file—‘... Clement. We’re learning more all the time. Social influences, brain chemistry, genetics. There’s a real explosion of new knowledge in the neurosciences. I’m very optimistic.’
‘Why did it happen?’
‘Why?’
‘Why now?’
‘The short answer is I don’t know. Some patients have one attack, a single episode, and that’s the end of it. Others suffer chronically. Clare seems somewhere between the two. The fact is, if someone has a predisposition to these symptoms there is always a risk, however slight, of a relapse. Even after years of being perfectly well. Very unfair, of course.’
‘How long will she have to be here?’
‘Tricky,’ said the doctor, grimacing. ‘The only real answer I can give is that Clare can stay for as long as she needs us. Some weeks certainly. A month or two.’
‘She seems worried about her door. There’s no lock on it.’
‘Pauline said she had been expressing a concern. I think that has to be seen as part of a general pattern of paranoid behaviour.’
‘She’s always been a very private person.’
‘Everyone here is going to respect that a hundred and ten per cent.’
Clem nodded. The doctor’s room was hung with expensive-looking paintings. Country views. Portraits. A nude. A beautiful acrylic of a red-haired girl on a mule, the pair seeming to have surfaced from a dense fog that might, at any moment, reclaim them.
‘Father’s alive and well but mother passed on...?’
‘Twenty-seven years ago.’
‘Anyone in the family with a history comparable to Clare’s?’
‘No one I know of.’
‘And the last time she was ill was when she was in Paris?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see her then?’
‘Not until she was home.’
‘Boyfriends?’
‘I suppose.’
‘But you haven’t met any?’
‘One or two.’
‘And girlfriends?’
‘I don’t think she’d advertise it. Not to me.’
‘Would you describe your relationship with Clare as close?’
‘She’s my sister.’
‘The two don’t necessarily follow.’
‘We grew up together.’
‘What’s the difference in age?’
‘Five years.’
‘Your big sister then.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did Mother die of?’
‘A cerebral haemorrhage.’
‘Must have been quite a shock for you all. How did Clare react?’
‘She got on with things.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘She ran the house. She was studying for her A levels. She kept herself busy.’
‘Tears? Tantrums?’
‘We’re not that kind of family.’
‘Not demonstrative.’
‘No.’
‘But Clare looked after you?’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot of responsibility for a very young woman.’
‘I suppose we thought of her being like Nora.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Capable and strong?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet it’s the women who have succumbed, if I can put it like that. It’s the men—you and your father—who have turned out to be the survivors.’
‘We had an easier ride.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. I understand Mother had a visual impairment?’
‘Glaucoma.’
‘Glaucoma?’
‘She never stopped long enough to have it properly treated. When she did it was too late.’
‘An active woman?’
‘Always.’
‘In the house?’
‘She was a lawyer. A campaigner. Her life was politics.’
‘Making a better world.’
‘Trying.’
‘And Father was... different?’
‘Yes.’
‘Less of a force?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ineffectual?’
‘He’s who he is.’
‘And why wouldn’t he be, indeed? Sorry about the third degree, Clement.’
‘Is there more?’ He could hear Fiacc’s voice from the day-room loudly asking someone if he was still in with the doctor. ‘We have to get back,’ he said.
‘Of course you do.’ The doctor stood and shook Clem’s hand. ‘Very good to meet you, sir. You know where we are now.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Any questions, just pick up the phone.’ He came round the side of the desk and walked Clem to the door. ‘Like art?’
‘You mean the paintings?’
The doctor nodded. ‘It’s a mystery to me. I mean, quite genuinely a mystery. A power beyond reason.’ He patted Clem’s arm and smiled at him. ‘Until next time,’ he said.
9
Clare’s flat was on the hill above the station. Clem followed Fiacc up four flights of stone steps and stood behind her as she took the keys from her raincoat pocket, a long key for the mortise, a small brass key for the latch. Inside there was a warm, sweetish smell of dust and carpets, and something untraceably organic, like fruit peel or dead flowers. Though he had not been to the flat before—for years now all their meetings had been in the south—he immediately recognised some of her old possessions: the picture over the telephone, the art-deco lamp, the bureau in the alcove at the end of the hall. More than this, he recognised her way of setting things out, the orderliness, the few good pieces, the expression of a taste more refined, more artistic, than his own.
He dropped his bag in the hall and went into the kitchen. Here there was a tall window that looked over the station roof and out across the river. Fiacc was watering the plants on the window-sill. Clem sat at the kitchen table.
‘What happens to her mail?’ he asked.
‘I take it to her.’
‘What does she do with it?’
‘She gives it back to me. I deal with whatever I am competent to deal with. The rest can wait.’
‘It’s warm in here,’ he said. She didn’t answer. He looked at the stuff on the table. A pair of chemist’s reading glasses, a travelling alarm clock, a pack of electric bulbs in a torn polythene wrapper. Also a Sunday supplement that he knew contained some of the photographs he had taken in the spring. He turned back a comer of the magazine, flicked through, saw a corner of one of his pictures, flicked past.
‘Will they catch him?’ asked Fiacc, pointing to the magazine with the spout of the watering-can.
‘Catch who?’
‘The man responsible.’
‘Ruzindana? I don’t know. We looked for him. He’d fled. Half the country’s fled.’
‘Did you give up on him too quickly?’
‘You would have gone on?’
‘To confront a man like that. You must have wanted to?’
‘Of course.’
‘Put his crimes to his face.’
‘Did Clare see these pictures?’
‘The magazine is hers.’
He nodded.
‘I’ll make up your bed,’ said Fiacc, putting down the watering-can.
‘There’s no need,’ said Clem. ‘If you show me where things are...’
‘It’s what she asked me to do.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
He followed her across the hall. He would not have minded a row with her, a spat to put her in her place, make dear to her that there were limits to what
the family would tolerate. He leaned against the door of his sister’s room—the only bedroom in the flat—watching Fiacc bending over the tin trunk at the foot of Clare’s bed, rummaging through the linen there. What was it Clare liked about her, this big, mannish woman? Her loyalty? Or the knowledge that she too, in her way, was a casualty, and thus lived, as Clare lived, as Odette Semugeshi lived, as the Spanish girl would live, in some interminable aftermath?
‘I can make my own bed,’ he said.
‘One would hope so,’ she answered, ‘at your age.’ She straightened up, the sheets in her arms, and walked past him into the living room. Clearly, then, he was not invited to sleep where his sister slept, but he hung back a while, stepping into the middle of the room, curious to try to read the place. It was on the far side of the house from the kitchen and so faced north-east, the narrow window letting in a sober light like the white-grey of clear, still water. Twelve or fifteen dresses dangled from the chromed bar of a Habitat wardrobe, six pairs of shoes on the boards below, toes to the wall. On the mantelpiece, under a silvery watercolour of morning or dusk, there was a line of sea-shells. The dressing-table was uneventful: hairgrips, a bottle of perfume, a tub of hand lotion, a blister pack of evening primrose oil. He slid open one of the side drawers and found an old white-bordered photo of Nora in her Chiang Kai-shek glasses. But nothing in the room was more interesting, more suggestive, than the robe of lined scarlet silk that hung in dense pleats from a hook on the back of the door. He touched it; the material had a coolness entirely its own. Half a month’s salary there for sure. Or a gift? Not, he thought, a garment for a woman who had given up on the sensual world.
‘Have you finished in here?’ asked Fiacc.
He wondered if the reason he was not permitted to use the bed was because Fiacc herself had used it. Was that what Dr Boswell had guessed? What he was hinting at?
‘Why all the bulbs?’ he asked. There were four more in cardboard jackets next to the lamp on the bedside table.
‘Against the darkness,’ said Fiacc. ‘She couldn’t have it at all by the time she left.’
‘Couldn’t?’
‘Was afraid to.’
The Optimists Page 5