– I’d say we’re a lot alike, you know, he said, you and me.
A flock of starlings rose from the trees and flew over our heads in a rush of wings, briefly darkening the air. My mother came to the front door of our house and stood with her sleeves rolled, watching us. Felix met her baleful stare with a mockingly apologetic smile. I turned my back on her. She went inside again, and slammed the door. Felix stretched himself, yawning. He considered the sky, the rooftops, the delicate green of the trees.
– But seriously, he said, figures, now, that’s very interesting. Mr Kasperl is very interested, really.
When I went into the house my mother said nothing. I went up to my room. My books, papers, pencils, were on the table, by the window. They wore somehow a knowing air.
I began to go out regularly then to Ashburn. My presence was accepted without remark, I might have been part of the household. Felix and I played cards at the kitchen table, and ate Sophie’s stews. I walked with her in the grounds, or explored the house with her. Mr Kasperl paid me no heed at all, except that sometimes when we came face to face unexpectedly he would give me one of his remote, dull stares and frown vaguely, as if he thought he might vaguely know me.
My mother wanted to know where I was spending my time now. She had preferred it when I shut myself away in my room, that silence above her head had been less alarming than these inscrutable absences. But at home these days I felt like an exile come back on a brief, bored visit. How small it all seemed, how circumscribed. At Ashburn the horizon was limitless. I moved in a new medium there, a dense, silvery stuff that flashed and shimmered, not like air at all, but a pure fluid that held things fixed and trembling, like water in the brimming jet of a fountain.
I brooded on Sophie as one of Mr Pender’s more difficult puzzles. She would not solve. There was a flaw in her, a tiny imbalance, that would not let the equation come out, it showed in the slope of her shoulders, in her delicate, long, lopsided face. Her walk was a swift, strong swimming in air. She favoured her left side, so that at every step she seemed about to veer away impetuously to the right, as if there were things out there clamouring softly for her attention. She was always moving, always ahead of me, I knew intimately the shell-like hollows behind her ankle-bones, the fissured porcelain at the backs of her knees, the syncopated slow wingbeat of her shoulder-blades. She seemed built not on bone but on some more supple framework. Her thumbs were double-jointed. She could pick up things with her toes. She was given to rushes of playful violence, she would turn on me suddenly with a gagging laugh and give me a push, or hit me hard on the shoulder with her sharp little fist. She had a way of stiffening suddenly with a gasp and clasping herself in her arms, as if to keep herself from exploding. Even at her stillest she gave off ripples of excitement, like a huntress poised behind a pillar with bent bow. She was a sealed vessel, precarious, volatile, filled to bursting with all there was to say. She might have been not mute but merely waiting, holding her breath. Her deafness was like vigilance. She would fix on the most trivial thing with rapt attention, as if anything, at any moment, might begin to speak to her, in a small voice, out of that huge, waveless sea of silence in which she was suspended. She communicated in an airy, insubstantial language consisting not of words but moving forms, transparent, yet precise and sharp, like glass shapes in air. When I was away from her I could not think how exactly she managed it. She seldom resorted to the sign alphabet, and then impatiently, making a wry face, as if she had been forced to shout. However, these quick, deft displays never failed to surprise and impress me. They seemed a sort of sleight of hand, adroit and faintly jubilant. Mr Kasperl, though he appeared to understand what she was saying, would make little response, but stand before her with his head lowered, looking at her blankly from under his brow, his mysterious thoughts elsewhere. Felix just laughed at her, waving his arms to fend her off, as if she were making preposterous demands of him.
– Listen to her! he would say to me merrily. She’s mad, mad!
And she too would laugh, and mime exasperation, shaking a playful fist in his face.
Felix was always busy, in a vague, haphazard way. He never seemed to finish anything, or to have started anywhere, but was always just doing. The keys he had been sorting the first time I came to the house lay for weeks on the kitchen table. He would walk up and stand looking at them, his hands in his pockets and his chin sunk on his breast, and heave a histrionic, weary sigh before wandering off to tackle some other obscure task. He spent hours prowling about upstairs, rummaging in closets and under beds, or going through the wardrobes that stood, like broad sarcophagi, in dank dressing rooms and faded boudoirs, still thronged with clothes, the moth-eaten relics of generations of Ashburns. He would salvage odds and ends of antique outfits – a pair of check plus-fours, a mildewed dinner jacket, a cricket umpire’s floppy hat – and wear them around the house with bland aplomb. I came upon him one day in the grounds, strolling through the trees in baggy tweeds and a norfolk jacket and carrying a rusty shotgun.
– Thought I’d take a bang at the birds, don’t you know, he said. Care to be my loader?
It had been raining, and now a sharp sun was shining. The drenched woods glittered. We walked along a winding path. There were rustlings and slitherings all about us in the grass, under the leaves. I had not rid myself of a faint unease in his presence. I always answered his remarks too eagerly, smiled too quickly at his jokes, as if to hold him at arm’s length. He made fun of everything. He pulled faces at Mr Kasperl behind his back, imitating his matronly walk. He would throw back his head and feign loud laughter, as if someone had said something wonderfully funny, until Sophie, with the inept cunning of the deaf, began to laugh along with him, then he would put up a hand and hide his face from her and chuckle, winking at Mr Kasperl and me. Yet it was not his mockery I feared. We came to a viridian field. The verdure shimmered. A little band of grazing deer saw us and fled silently into a copse. We paused, and Felix looked about him, beaming.
– What a paradise it seems, all the same, he said. I sometimes wonder if we deserve this world. What do you think, bird-boy?
He laughed and sauntered on, hefting the shotgun in the crook of his arm. We walked along the margin of the field until we came to the high hedge and the drive. The house was handsome with the sun on it, the windows ablaze. Birds swooped through the rinsed air, the great trees stood as if listening. For a moment I experienced a pure, piercing happiness, unaccountable, fleeting, like a fall of light. A delivery boy was coming up the drive behind us on his bike, pedalling leisurely, with one hand on the handlebar and his knees splayed. I knew him. His name was Clancy, a short, muscular fellow with a swatch of coarse black hair and a crooked jaw, and a bad cast in one eye. He wore big boots with cleats, and a long, striped apron. He had been in my class at school years ago. He was a dunce, and sat at a desk by himself in a corner. The teachers made fun of him, holding up his copybooks for us to see his slovenly work, while he crouched in his seat and looked around at us murderously out of his crooked eye. Sometimes on these occasions he would break down and weep, shockingly, like an adult, in pain and rage, coughing up jagged sobs and clenching his inky fists helplessly in his lap. Now, spying me ahead of him, he stopped whistling abruptly, and the front wheel of his bicycle wobbled. Felix halted, and waited, watching him. He dismounted and crossed to the other side of the drive, and plodded along slowly, bent low and pushing the bike, frowning to himself as if a very important thought had just occurred to him. The bicycle was a sturdy black machine with small thick wheels, and at the front an enormous wicker basket filled with parcels.
– You there, Felix called imperiously. Who are you?
Clancy stopped, and peered about him with an elaborate air of startlement. He used to wait for me on the way home from school and knock me down and pummel me, sitting on my chest and breathing his feral breath in my face. His fury always seemed a sort of grief. In time a hot, awful intimacy had grown up between us. Now, stricken with embarrassm
ent, we avoided each other’s eye, as if we had once committed sin together. He opened his mouth, shut it, then coughed and tried again. He was eyeing the gun cradled in Felix’s arm.
– From Walker’s, sir, he said thickly. With the messages.
– Messages? Felix said. What messages?
Clancy began to sweat. He licked his lips, and pointed to the parcels in the basket.
– Them, sir. The messages that was ordered.
Felix turned to me.
– What is the fellow talking about? he said. Have you any idea?
– The grocery messages, Clancy said, raising his voice. The ones that was …
– Oh, groceries, Felix said, with a little laugh. I see, yes. Well, have you the list, then?
– What, sir?
Felix looked to heaven and sighed.
– The list, sor! The list that was given to the shop. Have you it with you?
Clancy blinked slowly and wiped his nose on a knuckle.
– I’d say I have, all right, he said guardedly.
He leaned his bicycle on its stand and produced a fistful of grubby papers from the pocket of his apron, and began to leaf through them unhappily with a thick thumb.
– Well, read it out, man, Felix cried, read it out!
A dark flush appeared on Clancy’s pitted brow. He licked his lips again and bent over his bits of paper, scrutinizing them with a stolid, hopeless stare. Felix groaned in annoyance.
– Come on, man! he said. What’s wrong with you?
Clancy, his face on fire, looked at me at last, like a wounded animal, in fury and a sort of supplication. He was not able to read. A moment passed. I looked away from those beseeching eyes. Felix chuckled.
– Oh, go on then, he said to Clancy, take your stuff around to the back door.
Clancy thrust the papers into his pocket, and mounted his bike and pushed off towards the house, crouched over the handlebars as if battling against a gale. Felix grinned, shaking his head. Suddenly he tossed the shotgun to me. The weight of it was a surprise.
– Go ahead, Barabbas, he said. Blaze away.
WORKMEN BEGAN arriving at the house, singly, with a fist in a pocket and one arm tightly swinging, or shouldering along in silent groups of two or three. Sophie and I watched them from the upstairs windows. They grew steadily foreshortened as they approached, as if they were wading into the ground. They would knock once at the front door and step back, holding their caps in their hands, quite patient, waiting. They wore shapeless jackets and white shirts open at the neck, and trousers larded with grime. Their faces and the backs of their necks glowed, I pictured them bent over sinks in cramped sculleries at first light, scrubbing themselves raw. One had a bald patch, pink and neat as a tonsure. They were roadmen and casual labourers, and a few factory hands laid off from the brick works or the foundry. Mr Kasperl interviewed them in one of the big empty rooms downstairs. He sat at a battered, leather-topped desk before the window, fiddling with a stub of pencil, while Felix walked up and down and did the talking. The men, standing in a knot in the middle of the floor, avoided looking at each other, as if out of a sort of shame. They pretended unconcern, hitching up their belts and glancing around them at the damp-stained walls and the crumbling cornices. Felix harangued them jovially, like a fairground barker.
– All right, now, all right, he said, show us your muscles there. We only want good strong types, willing to work. That right, boss?
Mr Kasperl looked at him silently, twiddling the pencil in his heavy hands. The men grinned and mumbled, shuffling their feet.
In the end they all got hired, even the one with the bald spot. One morning I arrived and found them gathered in front of the house, with shovels over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and muttering among themselves. A lorry with its engine going stood on the drive, a clumsy, upright model with a sort of chimney sticking up, and no mudguards. It shuddered like a sick horse, belching up black spurts of exhaust smoke. The tailgate was crusted with traces of dung, the mark of a previous life. Felix got down from behind the wheel and herded the workers aboard. He winked at me, and mimed exhaustion, drooping his shoulders and letting his jaw hang sideways. Mr Kasperl, in dustcoat and overshoes, paused in front of the house and looked about him at the bright morning with a grim, disparaging eye, then descended the steps with his mincing tread and hauled himself, grunting, into the cab. Felix ground the gears and swung the wheel, and the lorry moved off falteringly in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes. One of the workmen standing in the back gave a halfhearted whoop, and then grinned sheepishly and stared hard ahead. The noise of the engine died away in the direction of Coolmine, and the heedless song of a thrush, that had been there all the time, welled up in the stillness.
There was a sense of airy emptiness in the house. I climbed the stairs as if ascending a rope into the blue. Sophie was above me on the landing, looking down at me, hands braced on the rail, her face suspended in a vault of air, like a trapeze artist poised to leap. We wandered through the attic. The floors were tense as trampolines under our feet. I thought of all those rooms below us with no one in them, the sky going about its enormous, stealthy business in the windows, the sun inching its complex geometry across the dusty floors.
In Sophie’s room we sat down on the bed. I had tried to teach her something about numbers here, showed her match games, and tricks with algebra, laying out my gift before her on the quilt. I had entertained high hopes. How could she resist these things, their simplicity and elegance, the way move by move the patterns grew, like crystals assembling in clear, cold air? But it was no good, she looked at the numbers and at me, her eyes empty, her face a smiling mask. Her silence was a kind of absence. And so I gave up. Now she raised herself on one knee, stretching to peer out the round window above us. She had brought up the box of marionettes and was repairing them, they were strewn on the floor among paintpots and brushes and jars of glue. She tapped me on the shoulder, wanting me to look at something down on the drive. When I made to rise she lost her balance for a moment, and fell against me in a flurry of hands and breath and tumbling hair. Her skin was cool, I could feel the heat of my own suddenly flushed face reflected back at me from her smooth brow and shadowed cheeks. She drew away from me with a little, gurgling laugh. She had kissed me, or I had kissed her, I don’t know, so lightly, so fleetingly, I thought at first I had imagined it. My heart wobbled, like something swaying on an edge and about to fall. She had raised herself to the window again and was looking out. She turned and smiled, not at me this time, but in the direction of the doorway. Felix was there, regarding us with a glint of amusement.
– Please, don’t get up, he said slyly. It’s only me.
He ambled into the room, casting a sideways glance at the marionettes on the floor. I had not heard the lorry returning. His boots had black mud on them, and there were faint black streaks, like traces of war-paint, on his forehead and his jaw. He said:
– Hell down pit, lad.
Sophie was motioning him excitedly to the window. He came and stood behind her, craning to see where she was pointing. Below, on the gravel in front of the house, Jack Kay was standing, hatted, in Sunday suit, leaning on his malacca stick. He was looking up, I wondered if he could see us, our three heads crowded in the staring window high above him. Felix turned his face to me, a grinning indian.
– Who’s that, now, I wonder? he said. Looks familiar, I think.
Jack Kay was climbing the steps, then we heard his distant knock at the front door. Felix put a finger to his lips. He sat down on the bed, and Sophie knelt behind him, leaning eagerly over his shoulder. He reached into a pocket of his jacket, then turned up his hand to her and opened it slowly. A tiny brown mouse crouched in his palm, its whiskers and the pink tip of its nose aquiver. It turned this way and that, sniffing the air with little jerks of its head. Sophie, delighted, tried to take the creature in her hand, but Felix held it teasingly out of her reach, until she made a lunge and captured it. She lifted it level with he
r face, and mouse and girl studied each other. Then she leaned forward quickly and touched her pursed lips lightly to the quivering snout. Felix laughed.
– Oho! he cried, look, beauty and the beast!
Jack Kay was hammering at the front door down there. Felix heaved a sigh.
– All right, all right! he muttered.
He went out, and presently I heard him below on the steps with Jack Kay. The old man’s voice was raised. Sophie sat on her heels on the bed, with the mouse in her lap, stroking it rhythmically with her fingertip, from head to tail, pressing a groove into the fine fur. At each gently dragging stroke the pink cleft at the tip of the creature’s sharp little snout opened a fraction and closed again wetly. Sophie bowed her head, her dark hair falling about her face. Her fingernail, gliding amid the parted fur, gleamed like an oiled bead. The room was still. Jack Kay was shouting. The front door slammed. Sophie looked up at me with an intent, attenuated smile, as if she were vaguely in distress. The mouse lay meekly in her lap, minutely throbbing. I took a step forward, it seemed a kind of lurching fall, and reached out a hand to touch the tiny creature. Immediately it sprang from her lap and scurried down the side of the bed. Felix, coming into the room again, said lightly:
– Ah, you haven’t the knack. We’ll have to teach you, won’t we?
He bent down by the bed and coaxed the mouse back on to his palm. He wandered with it to the window and peered out.
– There he goes, he said. Fierce old boy, I must say. He was looking for you, you know, cob. Told him we’d never heard of you. No Swan here, my man, I said, our swans are all geese. Did I do right?
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