The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘I’ll get someone to have a look at the wiring,’ said Clem. ‘There must be somebody in the village.’ Privately he considered that if they could not depend on the lights then they could not stay. How was either one of them to have any peace with the nightly prospect of a melting wire—a wire thin as a hair—plunging them into darkness?

  Frankie and Ray were sitting on Laura’s lawn, holding hands and smoking. Ray had on a white shirt buttoned to the neck. Frankie wore a lemon trouser suit with peppermint-coloured beads and peppermint shoes with cork soles. They had had their talk with the vicar, who had called it a getting-to-know-you session and explained some of the ground rules to them. No confetti and no rice, please. Confetti got among the gravestones, which apparently upset people; rice attracted vermin. ‘We’re going to ignore him, of course,’ said Frankie. ‘You can throw whatever you like. Grape seeds, peacock feathers. You could throw money if you wanted to, in envelopes.’

  As they moved to the cars Clem caught her elbow and held her back. He told her that Clare had had a bad night.

  ‘We’re only going to the hairdresser’s,’ said Frankie. ‘She doesn’t need to sparkle.’

  ‘She’s in your hands,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Well, Ray’s in yours.’

  He intended to say, Ray’s not sick, Frankie, but then wondered if in fact he was. Was Ray sick? Something was wrong. ‘You needn’t worry about him,’ he said, more gently.

  At the end of the drive the Spider turned left towards New Colcombe. Clem turned right, passed the cottage, the post office, then twisted through a mile of high-hedged lanes to the main road, the old Roman road. Ray found one of Nina’s clubland cassettes in the glove compartment He put it on and turned up the volume, his little body jerking to the beat as they drove into Radstock, then up the hill towards Peasedown. Watching Ray from the corner of his eye, Clem pictured him as a boy in a tightly buttoned duffel coat being led up the steps of various Victorian hospitals by a harassed woman. Polio? Something hormonal perhaps, something that had stopped his body growing as it should have. His head was out of scale with the rest of him, and there was a flush of colour in his cheeks as though he suffered from some chronic low-grade fever, but his eyes were bright, and his brown hair and ragged brown moustache grew vigorously. He talked about Frankie; Clem hardly recognised her. His cousin had profound thoughts, acute insights into other lives. Had Clem seen her with animals? Babies?

  ‘What about this interior-design thing?’ asked Clem. ‘Are you going to be part of that?’

  Ray shrugged. ‘I’ll probably just envisage things,’ he said. ‘Back-room stuff.’

  ‘I wish you luck,’ said Clem.

  ‘Your sister,’ said Ray. ‘Wow!’

  ‘Wow?’

  ‘Those books.’

  ‘You’ve read them?’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘She’s this close,’ said Ray, holding his thumb and first finger an inch apart, ‘to greatness. And she’s still young.’

  ‘Tell her that. About being young too.’

  ‘You think I’m full of shit?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Your photographs are some of the best I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ said Clem, laughing.

  They came down the Wellsway into Bath. The city below them—a place Nora had never quite liked or approved of, a Tory stronghold she called it, a den of blue-rinse admirals and trinket-sellers—held the afternoon sun in thousands of tall windows and on the windscreens of thousands of parked cars. Clem left the Ford in a multi-storey by the river. When they got out of the car Ray took a small pile of postcards from his shoulder-bag, divided them like a playing pack, and gave half to Clem. Clem looked at the gold writing on the top card: the story of Russian sweethearts reunited after fifty years of searching for each other.

  ‘Just leave them where people can come across them,’ said Ray. ‘There’s a knack to it but you’ll soon get the idea.’

  They had bacon sandwiches in a café by the railway station, then walked to the good shops on New Bond Street and Milsom Street. ‘No dark colours,’ said Ray, fingering the suits on their rails. ‘No black or navy.’ He tried on green suits, sky blue, silver. While Ray was changing, Clem left cards in the pockets of unsold jackets or slipped them between the Cellophane of new shirts. One, good news about increasing life expectancy in Mexico, he slid like a press card into the hatband of an expensive snap-brim trilby. In the fourth shop they found a white cotton three-piece with a lining of poppy-red silk. Ray thought John Lennon had married Yoko Ono in something very similar. When he tried it on and stood in front of the mirror (the salesman behind him pinching the slack cloth) he wanted it. Clem told him that it cost almost four hundred pounds. ‘Do you have four hundred pounds?’ he asked. Ray didn’t think he did.

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘I can stretch to sixty,’ said Ray. ‘Sixty-five.’

  He changed out of the suit and they went to the Marie Curie shop, then tried Oxfam and the British Heart Foundation. In the covered market by the Assembly Rooms there was a stall called ‘Dudes and Debs’. They had a second-hand plum-coloured suit with big lapels that cost seventeen pounds. The trousers were long but the jacket fitted well. Ray bought it, then bought a lilac shirt and a plain green tie with some of the money he had left. They went to a pub to celebrate. Clem got rid of his last card in the pub toilets, propping it on top of the urinal where the successful réintroduction of sea eagles into the Hebrides could be read about without the use of hands.

  It was half past five before they got back to the car. They put more music on and wound the windows down. Ray talked about the life he hoped for after the wedding, of the flat he and Frankie were trying to buy in Poplar. Clem, he hoped, would often stay with them; Clare too, of course.

  ‘Were you happy as a child?’ asked Clem, who had again seen the little boy, this time with his face pressed to the window, watching other children at play in the street.

  ‘I was loved by inarticulate people,’ said Ray. ‘You?’

  ‘Mine were articulate all right. Just busy.’

  ‘People do what they can,’ said Ray. ‘I find it helps to think of them as slightly better than they are.’

  ‘You do it well,’ said Clem.

  ‘You’ve no idea the practice I’ve had,’ said Ray, baring his teeth in a grin.

  At Laura’s, the Alfa was in the drive again. Clem helped Ray with the bags. Frankie was in the drawing room, mixing something in a tall glass filled with ice. Over her shoulder she told Clem that Clare had gone back to the cottage and that he would like very much what the woman at Donatello’s had done with her.

  To the cottage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’

  He went to the car, waved to Kenneth, who was mowing the grass around the feet of the concrete boy, then reversed into the lane. Though he was nettled by the slackness of Frankie’s manner, by how coolly Frankie-centred she was, he remained in an excellent mood after his day out with Ray. The dark thoughts occasioned by the previous night’s broken sleep had left him entirely. And if Clare’s day had gone well? Perhaps then there would be no setback, no lost ground for them to make up.

  He called her name as he came through the front door, leaned into the living room, then went up the stairs. The door to her bedroom was wide open. The bed had been stripped, the blankets folded neatly on the mattress. On the chest of drawers, next to the tissues and the halfdrunk mug of tea he had brought her that morning, were her dark glasses. He tugged a hair from one of the plastic hinges then went to the window. In the garden the evening shadows were stretched over the grass. A fine evening, warm still, though he saw how the trees in the fields—quite suddenly it seemed—had all begun to turn, to have among their green some flare of red or brown. He went back to the chest of drawers and picked up the glasses again. A coldness he could not check spread along his spine to the tight s
kin at the back of his skull. He went from room to room looking for some sign, something to tell where she might have gone, something to return the moment to its innocence, but there was nothing. He got into the car. As he started the engine the dashboard clock said ten to seven.

  In the drawing room, Ray was wearing the new suit. Frankie was on her knees in front of him pinning the hems of his trousers.

  ‘He looks like a god,’ she said to Clem, taking a pin from her mouth. ‘You’ve both been unbelievably clever.’

  ‘When did Clare go to the cottage?’ asked Clem.

  ‘When we got back,’ said Frankie, her voice shifting pitch as she took in Clem’s expression.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. An hour and a half ago. Two hours.’

  ‘Did something happen?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Between you?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘She was in your fucking hands,’ he said.

  ‘I could hardly tie her to a chair. Clem? Clem!’

  When he reached the driveway he stopped and looked around the lawns as if he might spot Clare, entirely at ease, reading under a tree. Frankie touched his arm and he flinched. ‘Clem?’ she said. He saw that he had frightened her. He was glad. He wanted her to be frightened. Then Ray came out in his plum-coloured suit, and behind him Laura in a dress of billowing white cotton as though the wedding were already under way.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Laura.

  ‘Clem’s angry with me,’ said Frankie.

  ‘Clare?’ asked Laura.

  ‘She’s not here,’ said Clem. ‘She’s not at the cottage.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she just be having a walk?’ asked Frankie.

  Laura shook her head. ‘If Clem’s worried then we must assume there’s a problem.’

  ‘Search parties?’ said Ray.

  ‘We’ve got two cars,’ said Laura. ‘I wonder if the old Volvo would start?’

  ‘I could tinker with it,’ said Ray.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Laura.

  ‘Leave him alone!’ cried Frankie, furiously.

  The lawnmower revved, sputtered, and fell silent. Kenneth bent to unhook the full bin of grass at the front of it. Laura, stick in hand, swung over to him. The others followed. Kenneth put the bin down and straightened up.

  ‘Clare,’ said Laura. ‘Have you seen Clare?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Did she tell you where she was going? Kenneth? Did she say anything to you?’

  He paused for several seconds as though in his head film of the recent past were screening frame by frame. Then, with slow hands, he began to draw small circles in the air in front of his belly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Clem.

  ‘It means swimming,’ said Laura.

  ‘Swimming?’

  ‘The quarry,’ said Frankie. ‘Where else could she swim?’

  ‘Then we must drive there,’ said Laura, becoming shrill. ‘We must drive there right away.’

  To Clem, Frankie said, ‘You remember the way across the fields? You can be there quicker than a car.’

  He was running. Laura called something but already his head had filled with the noise of his own blood. He found the stile into the fields and ran down to the farm in the crease of the valley where a dog in the yard barked madly at him from the end of its chain. Then the way climbed, more and more steeply. His pace slowed. Had Clare come this way? He was sure she had: it was the way they had always come as children; she would remember as clearly as he did. He stopped, his hands on his knees, mouth open, hauling in the air, then he clambered over a metal gate and on across the next field, struck now with the loathsome fantasy that a woman was running just ahead of him and that the woman was Mary Randall. The quarry was beyond the woods at the top of the hill. He stopped again and spat between his feet, wiping a thread of drool from his chin with the back of his hand. The woods were only a few hundred yards away. He pushed on with gritted teeth, sprinting the last stretch and staggering into the sudden coolness beneath the trees.

  From here the path was roots and stones and beaten earth winding upwards under crossed branches. He strode, then jogged, brushing the evening insects from his eyes. The track broadened: he saw the old engine, a piece of quarry hardware left behind when the works were abandoned, massy, bright with rust, like some lame plated creature that had crawled into the bracken to die. The trees drew back. There was the sour smell of wild garlic, the furtive damp-ashes smell of teenage campfires. He waded through spikes of willowherb to the edge of the quarry. He had forgotten how big it was: the roads for miles about had been built with its rubble. On the western side the water was black; on the other, blue and rose from the sunset. He cupped his hands and called her name, then started down the rock steps to the side where the water was still touched by the sun. By the bottom step, on the ledge that circled the inner wall, he saw a plastic bag with a bundle of clothes inside. In the water nearby, a man’s head floated on the blue surface, watching him.

  ‘Have you seen a woman here?’ asked Clem, panting. ‘Tall, forties...’ He was going to describe her hair but realised he didn’t know what it looked like now.

  ‘The one you were calling for?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was a young crowd up on the car park,’ he said, ‘but they’ve gone.’

  Clem could not see how the man was staying afloat. He did not appear to be treading water, and the water below him was at least sixty feet deep.

  ‘She would have been on her own,’ said Clem.

  ‘I don’t pay much mind to comings and goings,’ said the man. His head slowly turned until he faced out across the water. ‘There was some girl bathing nuddy in the shadows over there.’

  ‘Long ago?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘An hour?’

  ‘I’m not a timepiece, friend.’ His limbs stirred. He began to drift further off.

  Clem ran to the line of shadow, a violet penumbra, shifting by the minute, where the light was eclipsed by the height of the quarry walls. From here he had to go more cautiously. He called again and cocked his head. Twenty paces ahead of him he saw the corroded metal uprights of an old ladder. He heard the water pooling there, then a white hand reached out and gripped the ladder’s topmost rung. She pushed the water from her eyes and looked up at him. Her hair had been cut to the curves of her shoulders. She was smiling.

  ‘There’s a man over there,’ said Clem, ‘who knows you’re skinny-dipping.’

  ‘Have I set off the alarms?’ she asked.

  ‘Some.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was calling you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You should come in,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason for us to be shy any more, is there?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason.’

  He left his clothes beside hers, curled his toes over the rock and dived, gasping with shock and pleasure as he parted the water. He swam a half-dozen strokes under the surface. When he came up, the sky above the walls seemed immensely distant. He found it very strange that ten minutes earlier he had been running through the woods thinking his sister had drowned herself.

  ‘I’ve got lots to tell you,’ he called.

  ‘Good,’ she called back.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’

  ‘Not yet. Are you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  He looked across to the lit side to see if the man was still swimming there, but the light, packed into a narrower crescent, had grown more brilliant, as though the water were sown with thousands of small golden flowers. It dazzled him and he looked away. From the car park he heard the slamming of doors. A moment later three shapes of colour appeared and three small faces peered down from the quarry ramparts. ‘Coo-eeee!’ cried Laura. Clem, laughing, waved to her, then filled his lungs with air and floated on to his back, his limbs
in a star, the water slowly turning him.

  20

  She climbed from the quarry’s water as though from one of those healing pools or rivers in the myths. Lethe? Acheron? Stepped on to the rock ledge with long white dripping legs and dried herself, unselfconsciously. Back at the cottage she slept for eleven hours, then came down in the morning and cooked scrambled eggs, eating them out of the pan with a wooden spoon, wiping her lips with her fingers, and laughing at Clem’s expression as he watched her through the kitchen window.

  Later she went for a walk. She did not say where she was going and did not ask him to join her. He considered following her, but how did you follow someone through empty lanes? It was ridiculous.

  When she came back she ran a bath. Clem, standing half-way up the stairs, heard her singing. ‘Clare?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All right in there?’

  ‘Of course!’

  After three days of this he called Ithaca, dialling the number on Pauline Diamond’s card but somehow getting routed through to Boswell. The doctor was delighted to hear from him. There was no reason, he said, for Clem not to believe the evidence of his eyes. An improvement was what he had expected. Had he not said he was optimistic?

  ‘She seems a little manic,’ said Clem.

  ‘Only, I would suggest, by comparison,’ said Boswell. Clem must encourage her to keep up her medication. When patients started to feel better they sometimes thought they could manage without it. That would be a mistake. ‘A pill a day keeps the doctor away.’ He chuckled. ‘And tell me, how is the male half of the Glass team progressing?’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Or yourself, indeed?’

  ‘Nothing clinical,’ said Clem.

  Boswell laughed again, more loudly. ‘Heaven forfend! But next time business brings you this way, why not stop by for a chat?’

  The morning that followed this conversation, Clem, having failed in his attempt to discover a village electrician, went shopping at the ironmonger’s in Radstock (by far the most interesting shop in the town) and bought a pair of battery-powered lamps called Easy Lites. If the fuses failed again, the Easy Lites would stave off darkness for a guaranteed four hours. He was pleased with them. He put one beside Clare’s bed and another on the landing by the top of the stairs, then showed her how to turn them off and on, aware that she was regarding him with an expression of exaggerated patience, regarding him, he thought, as though he might be losing his mind.