At her bedtimes they went on with the guide. Tuesday they toured Sorrento. Wednesday it was Calabria. By Thursday they had reached the northern coast of Sicily. She slept for ten hours a night, sometimes twelve, then another two hours in the afternoons. It was hard to believe that anyone could need so much sleep but apparently she did. This, surely, was the ‘copious rest’ Laura had spoken of, the calm in which confusion’s material base, its root in chemistry, was altered for the better.
At the health centre on Friday Clem was not invited into Crawley’s consulting room, though he had hoped he would be. He was left among the local unwell, leafing through creased magazines and noting how almost none of the patients who emerged from the passage after seeing their doctor met the eyes of those still waiting, as though they chose to forget as soon as possible the enforced neighbourliness of such places, the queasy knowledge that the body as it failed would be increasingly spectated.
He was at the back of the room rereading the health-advice posters when she came out. ‘How was it?’ he asked.
‘Hard,’ she said, biting down on the word, but when, on the walk home, she offered to help with the supper (Crawley’s suggestion?) he realised that ‘hard’ meant something more useful than simply difficult and tiring. He told her he’d found a little sage bush in the garden. They could have pasta with butter and pepper and sage leaves. Would she like that? She said she would. She was hungry, she said.
At the cottage she rested in her room, then came downstairs and made herself busy in the kitchen.
‘Jane was pleased with me,’ she said, crushing a garlic clove with the heel of a knife.
‘Jane?’
‘That’s her name. Jane Crawley.’
‘She’s right to be pleased.’
‘Is she?’
‘Of course.’
‘You think I’ve come a long way but you didn’t see me at the beginning. How I was then.’
‘No.’
‘Only Finola saw me. You don’t like her but she helped me when no one else did.’
‘I like her for that,’ said Clem.
‘You had your work to do.’
‘Yes. My work.’
‘I told Jane you bought the eye-drops.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘What would she say?’
He shrugged. ‘She might have been pleased with me too.’
At supper he introduced the subject of Frankie and Ray. ‘They’ll be down again next Friday,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I said I’d go into Bath with Ray on Saturday after they’d seen the vicar. Help him choose a new suit for the wedding. Why don’t you spend some of the day with Frankie?’
‘Is that what you’ve arranged?’ she asked.
‘You could have a girls’ day out,’ he said.
‘In Bath?’
‘Or Frome. Frankie wondered if you’d like to get your hair done. There’s a place Laura goes to. Donatello’s.’
‘This was Frankie’s idea?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to get your hair done?’
‘If you think I need it.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s not that at all.’
He was worried that he had spoiled the evening’s delicate mood, but after supper they sat by the fire together listening to the radio: a programme of film reviews, a preview of the weekend sport, then a comedy quiz that made her laugh, a sound that startled them both. On that night, as on all the others, he kept her away from the news—the hard news and that dark halo of analysis and opinion that surrounds it; kept himself away too, imagining well enough the material it carried, the echo and dull report of that mayhem Toby Rose had invited him to share.
Saturday afternoon, Clem called the island from the phone-box by the post office. His father was in Berwick. Clem left a message for him (he assumed whoever he was speaking to knew enough of the family story to make sense of what he said), a cautious update that hinted at progress, but gave no grounds for complacency.
The following morning, Kenneth appeared. He helped Clem to build a bonfire at the bottom of the garden: lopped boughs, pieces of the cold-frame, a dozen wooden pallets somebody had dumped, an old and rotten door, coils of bindweed. In the early evening Laura joined them and they cooked potatoes in the hot ashes, drank wine and talked about the past as though it were an entirely untroubled place.
‘Her skin is very much improved,’ said Laura, as Clem drove her and Kenneth back to the house at the end of the evening. ‘Don’t you think? You both look a great deal healthier than when you arrived. I can’t tell you how worried I was about you then.’
It was true. The dry, angry-looking marks on Clare’s skin had almost gone, and some of the telltale pallor from her cheeks. His own face had darkened from working in the sun. He felt fit; he liked it, and began to have thoughts about the future, ideas that came, it seemed, from quite a different mind to the one he had grown used to since coming back from Africa. Was he learning to forget? Was that possible? He felt as though, here at the cottage with Clare, with Laura, with Kenneth, with the appealing tedium of days spent doing simple chores, he was being borne away, slowly, on slow currents, from the stench of blood, the dead boy’s stare, those conclusions that Silverman had so determinedly shied from. Was he forgetting, then? It struck him (he was carrying breeze-blocks from a sledgehammered outhouse down to a far corner of the garden where they could be hidden) that forgetting might, in some way, in accordance with some law of paradox, be memory’s truest function, a means of great necessity and ingenuity for the slow erasure of experience and knowledge. He wondered—a pang—if he should tear open the brown envelope or look at the pictures in his wallet again, but he put the moment off, repeatedly.
The next week began with a curious dense mist, chill to the skin, damp, smelling of estuaries and the high Atlantic. The bells of the abbey and the village church sounded the hours with the flat clanging of warning buoys. Clare stayed in bed. Downstairs, Clem drank mugs of coffee and smoked. Even the radio reception was affected. It crackled, grew faint, then suddenly too loud. He swept out the grate. The ashes were exactly the colour of the mist.
By noon it had gone. The afternoon appeared, delicately blue, thin, cool, good to breathe. Clare came down in her coat and sat on a cushion outside the back door while Clem finished shifting the last of the breeze-blocks. (The hollow where he was hiding them, he realised now, was subsidence. He did not mention this.) A few bees still visited the honeysuckle. There were brown-green apples on the tree whose boughs reached over the fence from the neighbouring land. Clem picked Clare a sprig of rosemary. She pinched it between bitten-down nails and held it to her nose. He tested her on the names of the plants, though he knew them himself only because he had read the quarryman’s pegs. Most of them she named correctly. Then they recalled to each other, a conversation like some leisurely game of tennis, the garden at Bristol, a thirty-yard spit of meticulously tended land that had sloped from the back of the house towards the road, the park, the red-brick railway bridge. The lawn had been steep enough to roll down, and as you rolled you crushed the grass and earned the marvellous green smell of it. Their father had been—still was, no doubt—a useful gardener, but the garden was always Nora’s. Even when her sight had failed completely she would kneel on a hassock of yellow foam at the edge of a flowerbed, bare fingers winding between the stems and leaves, telling weeds by the feel of them, hoicking them out, her head turned to the side and slightly upwards, an expression of finely tuned abstraction on her face as though attending to that secret music only the blind are privy to.
‘You’re like her,’ said Clare, when Clem stopped for a smoke. ‘More so than me.’
‘Really?’
‘Single-minded.’
‘Stubborn, you mean.’
‘High-minded.’
‘Stubborn!’
‘Yes, stubborn.’ She smiled. ‘Horribly stubborn.’
‘I wonder what she would say if she saw us
now.’
‘It would sadden her.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘She’d chase us out with a broom.’
‘A broom?’ He laughed. ‘You’re wrong. Or we’remember her differently.’
The morning after this, a Tuesday, he suggested a picnic. Clare said she wasn’t in the mood. He repeated the offer on Wednesday and this time she agreed. They made sandwiches from whatever was left in the fridge—a scooped half-moon of Edam cheese, some onion chutney, lettuce leaves, ham paste from a little jar, half a beetroot, some coleslaw. They drove south, looped up the side of the Mendips, became increasingly lost at each unmarked crossroads, then parked on the verge by a wooden gate, climbed the gate, and walked along an overgrown footpath to the stump of a huge felled tree by the side of a pond. They spread a rug and sat down to eat. When Clare had finished a sandwich and drunk some mouthfuls of iced tea from the flask, she curled on the rug to sleep. Briefly, she cried in her sleep. Clem wondered if he should rouse her or if, in some way, the crying was necessary: grief, fear—whatever it was—expelled through the eyes like a toxin. He let her be; the crying subsided. For several minutes he watched a pair of dragonflies hunting over their reflections in the pond water, then grew drowsy himself and, with a pleasant sense of letting go, he slept with his back against the tree stump, his head filled with the monotonous cooing of wood pigeons.
When he opened his eyes, the light had deepened and the field was wound in shadows. Clare was crouching at the grassy lip of the pond, staring down at what, presumably, was her own face. Then she raked her fingers over the surface of the water and stood up, abruptly.
‘All right?’ he asked.
She said she was fine. They packed up the remains of the picnic and walked back to the car, not quite at ease with each other.
In the blue and yellow waiting room that week (the whole week orbited these sessions) Clem was nodded to by other Friday regulars. A young mother, a game old fellow with a heavily bandaged hand, a teenage asthmatic, a red-faced man of about Clem’s own age who looked like an actor with a drink problem. Greetings so restrained, so brief and embarrassed, they verged upon the subliminal. Again, he had hoped to be summoned into Crawley’s consulting room but after only twenty minutes Clare was out, and they were walking home in slants of evening sunlight, stopping now and then to pick blackberries out of the hedgerow.
That night, having been sold quite enough Italian towns and beaches, they started a new book, Cider with Rosie, a fifth-year set book of Frankie’s that Clem had taken from the shelf in her room when he returned the guide. There were no oily fingerprints on this one. The marginalia amounted to a few pencilled question marks, someone’s phone number, the word ‘bucolic’ misspelt at the top of page two. He read for half an hour (I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began...), then put off the overhead light, went down to the living room and washed the supper dishes.
At a quarter to one he put on the radio and listened to the shipping forecast, following the announcer’s voice, the vocal tread, clockwise around the coast, listening in particular for that reach of water—Cromarty, Tyne, Dogger—where his father was.
In the bathroom he cleaned his teeth and put in his eyedrops. The windows of his bedroom were open. He lounged beside them, hearing from somewhere the sound of flowing water, some small murmurous stream he hadn’t heard before, or hadn’t attended to. He smoked a last cigarette, scraped it out carefully on the stone below his windowsill and left the butt on top of the cigarette packet. A fox barked. He closed the windows, stripped off, and climbed into bed, pondering how he would survive a day with Ray, then finding himself in an idle half-dream about Frankie, how it would be to fuck her, this mature woman of forty-whatever he had fumbled with in the attic as a boy. Were her thighs as white as her face? What tricks had she learned with her older men? She had, it seemed, found happiness now, and like all happy people she made it look easy, a simple adjustment, like leaving the house through a different door or changing the parting in her hair. Had she earned it? Was she getting what she deserved? He hoped so, if only because it was nice for a minute, very nice and very soothing, to believe that such economies of cause and effect, of deserving and receiving, existed; that goodness, even quite a small and secret goodness, might be handsomely rewarded. He rolled on to his side and sighed contentedly. From far off he heard the anxious barking of the fox again, then saw, rising in swoops from the purple of his almost sleeping brain, the butterfly he had startled into flight that morning as he worked in the garden. And there before him, his long toes barely grazing the grass-tips, his great wings folded at his back, was Frank Silverman, a bottle of Four Roses in one hand, the other hand pointing like Plato’s to the sky where the lone butterfly had become many, tens of them, scores, brilliantly coloured and bobbing in the air like an infant’s mobile.
‘Didn’t I tell you, Clem?’ sang the older man, exultantly. ‘Didn’t I tell you how it is? Well, didn’t I?’
For several moments after he woke Clem was unsure which way he was lying, then realised he was turned towards the door and that the line of light at its bottom was not there any more. He kicked back the sheets and tried the switch above his bed. Nothing. He went on to the landing. There was no sound from Clare’s room. The entire house was sunk into a breathless hush, a silence that seemed to lean over him, self-suppressed, alert to him, listening to his listening. He went back to his room. By the milk-light of the stars he retrieved his lighter from the window-sill and followed its flame down the stairs to the hall. The fuse box and circuit breaker were in a cupboard under the stairs. He found the finger hole, opened the cupboard, and ducked his head inside. His thumb began to burn with the heat of the flame. He looked along a double row of black switches, saw one that was out of sequence and flicked it up; saw another, flicked it. Light fell on to his shoulders. He dropped the lighter, stuck his thumb into his mouth and ran up the stairs. He pressed his ear to Clare’s door, then opened it wide enough to see that the lamp was on but the bed was empty. He went in. Clare was squatting in the furthest corner of the room wrapped in her own arms, her stare fixed on a zone of air directly over her bed. He turned on the overhead light then knelt at her side. He didn’t touch her at first. In a steady voice he explained what had happened. He told her he was going to help her stand and walk to the bed, that they would do it together, that it was only a few steps. She had had a scare, he said, a bad one, but it was over now. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s light everywhere.’
From being rigid she became suddenly limp; he had to tighten his grip on her to stop her falling. He nursed her to the edge of the bed. She lay down. He pulled the covers up. She closed her eyes, then opened them again and stared at him.
‘How are you?’ he asked (the question he tried to keep himself from putting to her twenty times a day). ‘Would you like some water?’
She nodded. The glass by the bed was knocked over. He took it to the bathroom and filled it. When he saw himself in the mirror he realised he was naked. He went to his room and pulled on some jeans. She was weeping when he went through, but as soon as she saw him she wiped the tears away with the blades of her thumbs. She took the glass from him and drank the water in gulps.
‘More?’
She shook her head.
‘I’ll sit up with you,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to sit up with you?’
She shook her head again.
‘It’ll be morning before long,’ he said. ‘A few hours at most.’
‘Go to bed,’ she whispered.
‘Will you be able to sleep?’
‘I’ve no idea. But if I can’t be on my own—if I can’t even...’ Her breath caught on a sob. There was a box of tissues on the chest of drawers. He tugged out a handful and gave them to her. She blew her nose and pushed the tissues under her pillow. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Go to bed now.’
‘You’re sure?’
/>
‘Go to bed, Clem.’
He walked to the door. When he looked back she had turned on to her side, away from him. ‘I can put Frankie off tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tell her you’re too tired or something.’
She didn’t answer. He went on to the landing, stood there a minute, then went down again to the hall. What had she seen above her bed that frightened her so? A ghoul? A thing with horns and a flickering tongue? Or just the blackness itself, black as the hollow seams that fanned under the walls of the cottage? He sat on the carpet, his knees drawn up, the lighter in his fist, and pictured the sunrise as though—crude magic!—picturing it might bring it on the sooner. Then he remembered the sunrise he had watched from the fifteenth floor of the Bellville Hotel the morning after they had driven back from N—, how it had rooted him in front of the windows, and not just the routine magnificence of it, the way the sun ignited the edges of every leaf and building, the way the hills, instant by instant, reinvented themselves with such perfection, but that it could happen at all, that such a darkness, such a night, such a concentration of darkness, could be swept away like any other.
At ten the next morning he tapped at her door but got no reply. An hour later he went back with a cup of tea. She was lying in bed with her eyes open. She took the tea from him, muttered her thanks. They were due at Laura’s at midday. At a quarter past she came downstairs. She was wearing the glasses again but would probably have been wearing them anyway. She stood in the kitchen and swallowed her medicines.
The Optimists Page 16