Work at the mine was going slowly. There had been roof-falls and flooding. The men were not happy, I would meet them trudging home at evening, begrimed and sullen, the whites of their eyes flashing. Felix was fed up.
– Time to move on, he said. Nothing left here. Look at it.
We stood on the edge of the ramp, above the pit-head. Men were coming up out of the hole, others were going down. The lorry sat drunkenly at the side of a dirt track, where it had broken down one day, never to go again. We could see Mr Kasperl sitting in the cab, with his charts and his cigar. A grey wind swarmed up the ashen slope, bringing us a whiff of sulphur from the railway yards beyond the road. Off in front of us there was a broad salt marsh, and beyond that, in the distance, the sea. All wrong, though, surely, this geography, or do I mean topography? It doesn’t matter. Felix beat his hands together in the cold.
– Yes, he said, time to get out.
We walked along the ramp. Below us, at the foot of the slope, a trickle of water slid between banks of smooth blue mud. Once I had seen a kingfisher there, a flash of opalescent silk, skimming the surface. Today the water reflected an iron sky.
– What about you, bird-boy? Felix said. Fancy coming with us? You could be with your Leda. We could go, oh, anywhere. Foreign parts. See things. Wild horses on the plain of Muscovy, camel trains in the Sahara. The jungle, nigger girls stamping around a fire stark naked. Or what about the far north? Eskimo women are slippery as eels, they’ll put their tongues anywhere.
He laughed.
– What do you say?
I said nothing. We went down the slope and along the track in the direction of the gate. I was thinking, I was thinking about – oh, nothing, I was thinking about nothing. Suddenly Felix laughed out loud and clapped me on the shoulder.
– Oh, Malvolio! he cried. Your face!
Mr Kasperl was eyeing us through the murky windscreen. Felix waved to him gaily.
– Get away from him, too, he said, his beck and call.
He took my arm.
– And you, he said, you should get away from him as well. Seriously, I mean it. He’s too … too negative. Me, now, I’m for positive things, rules, order, certainty. That’s how we’re alike, you and me. You don’t believe me? Well, you’ll see. The world is wide. I have plans.
We heard the explosion then, or felt it, rather, a sort of shiver under our feet. For a moment afterwards all was still.
– Oops! Felix said softly, and snickered.
A confused shouting arose. A puff of smoke climbed rapidly into the air above the pit-head, turning itself inside out. It looked oddly festive. Mr Kasperl was scrambling down from the lorry. Figures had begun to totter on rubber legs out of the mouth of the mine. We ran towards them. I wanted instead to run away, but I could not stop myself. How vivid the blood looked, on their blackened faces. They were making an odd, wailing sound. A man whose trousers had been blown off knelt in the mud, weeping, his hands clasped as if in prayer. Another stood and cursed, swinging his fists at anyone who came near him. I noticed he had lost an eye, there was just a purplish mess where it had been. Smoke was pouring out of the mine, and down in the depths someone was screaming steadily, in short bursts, like a baby, going ah! ah! ahh! Mr Kasperl stood stiffly atop a hillock of shale, in a statuesque attitude, fists clenched at his sides and head thrown back, looking at the scene about him with an expression less of shock, it seemed, than a sort of scepticism, as if it were all a show got up to fool him, and he had seen through it. He turned a suspicious eye on Felix, who lifted up his hands and stepped back with a laugh, shaking his head.
– Don’t look at me, boss, he said. I have an alibi.
Some sort of gas had exploded in one of the tunnels. Two men had been killed, a dozen were maimed. The story was in all the papers. They misspelled Mr Kasperl’s name. Felix was not mentioned, which provoked one of his rare bouts of rancour. For days he would speak to no one, but kept a sullen, injured silence.
SPRING CAME EARLY that year – no, I’m wrong, it came late. But when it came it was glorious. I recall the jonquils blowing on the lawn at Ashburn. All work at the mine had stopped. The roof supports rotted. People said the place was haunted, ghostly rumblings were heard underground, and sometimes at night a bluish radiance was seen flickering above the pit-head. Each morning at nine Uncle Ambrose arrived in his car and sat outside the house for an hour, and then drove slowly, sadly away again. Mr Kasperl kept indoors, creaking up and down the stairs and through the empty rooms. I would come across him in old corners, standing motionless, like a stalled automaton, glazed, absent. A sort of paralysis had settled on him. He would sit in his room with the black notebook open on his kness, staring blankly at the pages. He looked strange, not like the rest of us. He might have come from a country where no one else lived.
One morning early I arrived in the attic and found Felix crouched in the corridor outside Sophie’s room. He put a finger to his lips and pointed. Her door was ajar. She was still in bed, lying on her side, with a hand under her cheek and her eyes closed. A luminous white mist pressed in the circular window above her, lit by a pale sun. Her clothes were draped untidily on a chair beside the bed. Mr Kasperl stood a little way from her, as if sunk in thought, palping his fat lower lip with a finger and thumb. Outside, under the eaves, a pigeon sounded its soft, lewd note.
– Watch! Felix hissed gleefully, gripping my wrist. Watch now!
Mr Kasperl took a step forward to the side of the bed and paused, watching Sophie’s face. Then, laboriously, his boots groaning, he knelt down by the chair and gathered her clothes in his arms and buried his face in them, snorting softly. Felix let slip a little moan of laughter, and clapped a hand to his mouth. Mr Kasperl was oblivious, nosing deep in the bundle of silks, devouring their secret fragrances, his fat old shoulders trembling. Sophie had opened her eyes, and lay unmoving, watching him. Now she looked towards the door and saw us there, our faces pressed to the crack. She smiled.
– Oh, look at him, look! Felix whispered in ecstasy. Oh, the dirty old brute!
Felix too was lying low. There had been a row at Black’s, when relatives of one of the men who had died tried to attack him, and he had to escape out the back way. He was indignant. Why were they after him? It wasn’t his fault. Probably one of those dolts – maybe that very Paddy or Mick himself, or whatever he was called – had lit up a fag down there. But feelings were high in the town. My mother listened to the talk, and decided the time had come to act. I arrived home one evening to find her ironing her best dress, her white cotton gloves, banging the iron down on the board with angry strokes. Uncle Ambrose was there, flushed and frowning, staring at the floor and trying to control the jitters in his knees. My father cocked a wary eyebrow.
Next morning Uncle Ambrose called for them in his car. My mother was already waiting, sitting by the window in the parlour, with her handbag and her hat and her white gloves. It was a Sunday in May, I remember the sun in the window, the heavy reek of her face powder. My father, shaved and brushed, limped down the stairs, muttering. Uncle Ambrose wrung his hands unhappily. He cast a furtive glance at me, his adam’s apple working. We had both been seduced by Ashburn, after all. He seemed strapped into his tight suit. The three of them stood on the pavement in the sunshine for a moment, confused a little by the light, the gay breeze, the trees delicately coming into flower. Then Uncle Ambrose led the way to the car, and settled himself in the driving seat with his accustomed care. He held the steering wheel at arm’s length, as if he were afraid of it, and pumped the pedals and fiddled with the choke while the others got in. My father sat beside him, my mother took the back seat. She was saying something to me, but the window was shut, she could not work the winder, then the car shrieked as Uncle Ambrose trod on its underparts, and the last thing I saw, behind the reflected stage-set sliding on the glass, was her blurred face speaking without sound as she was borne away.
It was Aunt Philomena who came for me. At first I thought she was drunk. Her mouth w
as askew, and a strand of hair hung across her cheek. When I opened the door she was already speaking. Her voice was thick with what I took for manic laughter.
– I don’t know a thing! she warbled. They phoned me up, they wouldn’t tell me a thing!
We hurried through the town. The Sunday streets were deserted. A blinding disc of sunlight bowled along beside us in the shop windows. Aunt Philomena tottered on her high heels, sweating and muttering.
– Are you a relative? she kept saying. Are you a relative? that’s what they asked me. A relative, indeed! The cheek!
The hospital was a big white building on a hill, impressive in the spring sunshine, like a grand hotel in some southern clime, its windows awash with the sky’s festive blue. Another species existed here, different altogether from Aunt Philomena and me, fragile, etiolated beings, ennobled by their secret wounds. Even the visitors coming down the steps had a special air – thoughtful, solemn, a little dazed – as if they had gone in tipsy, but were sober now. The entrance hall smelled of tea and floor polish. At the reception desk a nun in an elaborate, winged head-dress was writing in a ledger. Aunt Philomena and I waited, standing on the gleaming parquet in the midst of a huge silence. Presently a nurse arrived, a tiny person with red hair and pretty, pink-rimmed eyes, and a watch on a strap pinned to her breast. I noticed her neat white shoes. She told us her name, which I forgot immediately, and shook hands with us tenderly. Her hand was warm and dry, she pressed it into mine like a little present, looking at me in silence, with a kind of gentle fervour. She led us down a corridor and up a curving flight of stairs. A wide window looked out over the town to a distant strip of dark-blue sea. A life-sized statue of the Saviour stood in a niche on the landing, glumly displaying a ruby-red heart in flames. The face was that of a bearded lady, creamy, smooth and sad.
We entered an enormous ward filled with light and noise, like a gymnasium. My father and Uncle Ambrose lay on their backs in adjoining beds, still and pale as a pair of marble knights. Each had his right hand resting on his heart, and his left arm extended at his side and connected by a tube to a bottle on a stand. Their skulls were wrapped in bandages. They breathed lightly in unison. Uncle Ambrose’s nose jutted up out of his face like a stone axe-head, I had never noticed it was so large. He opened his eyes and looked at Aunt Philomena and me with a mild air of surprise.
– Mr Swan! the nurse shouted with startling force. You have visitors, Mr Swan, look!
But he made no response, and after a moment closed his eyes again with a fluttering sigh.
My father calmly slept on.
A doctor appeared, a stocky young man with restless eyes and a lank lock of fawn hair lolling on his brow. He had been at his tea, there were crumbs on the lapels of his white coat, and his breath smelled warmly of cake.
– Windscreen, he said, smacking a fist into a palm. Like that. They were lucky. Big black dog, he says, ran right under the wheel.
Aunt Philomena turned aside with a strangled sob, crushing a wadded handkerchief to her mouth. The doctor looked at his shoes and frowned. In a bed in the opposite aisle a large elderly man in striped pyjamas sat and watched us intently out of an inflamed, avid eye.
– Well, the doctor said briskly, you’ll want to … ?
Aunt Philomena, still chewing her hankie, shook her head violently, giving another muffled sob.
I followed the doctor out of the ward, down the stairs past the simpering statue and the panoramic window. The rumble of tea-urns and the clatter of crockery came up through the stairwell. The doctor went heavily ahead of me, his knees working outwards like elbows and his white coat billowing. He told me his name, but I forgot that one also. A hunchbacked porter in a green hospital coat walked past the foot of the stairs. The doctor called out to him and he stopped and looked up at us warily, one hand resting lightly in his coat pocket, as if it were holding a gun. He had coarse oiled black hair, and thick glasses with heavy rims that seemed a part of him, like a bony armature growing out of his skull.
– Whassa? he said.
The doctor spoke to him quietly, and he nodded and led us away down a corridor, taking from his pocket an enormous bunch of keys on a metal ring. I could not take my eyes off his hump. We entered a curving, dull-green passageway with little round windows like portholes set high up in the wall, and came to a grey metal door, where we stopped and waited while the porter sorted through his keys. The doctor hitched back his coat and put his hands in the pockets of his trousers.
– Sunday, he said, with an apologetic shrug. They lock up everything.
The door swung open on a small, high room lit by a dangling bulb. A large press with steel doors was set into the wall. The porter threw it open, revealing three chilled corpses neatly stacked on sliding shelves. I looked at the tops of their heads, their bleached ears wreathed in wisps of frosty smoke. The porter leaned down and read the name-tags on the shelves, screwing up his eyes behind their thick lenses and baring his side teeth.
– No, he said, not there.
He shut the press and slouched into a farther room, beckoning us to follow. There was a sink in the corner, and a desk with a stool, and a tiny window through which there streamed an incongruous thick gold shaft of sunlight. Our shoes squealed on the rubber floor. A trolley. A shrouded form. The doctor belched softly into his fist.
– There’s a formality, I’m afraid, he said, in a confidential tone. Identification. We have to have it, in a case like this. You just say it is her, and that’s it. Right?
The porter folded back the sheet.
– Now, he said, giving a professional little sniff.
The woman on the bier did look somewhat like my mother. She was older, she had a narrow forehead, and her hair was different too, but there was a resemblance, all the same, and for a moment I did not know what to think. Could it be that this really was my mother, and they had arranged her face all wrong somehow? Was that why they needed me to identify her, so they could make the necessary readjustments? I shut my eyes. No, no, impossible. Then there was the problem of what to say. Embarrassment opened its jaws and breathed its hot breath in my face. I felt a fool, as if in some way it were all my fault. The moment stretched, thinner and thinner. The doctor was beginning to fidget. I stepped back a pace. I had to cough to get my voice to work. No, I said, no, I did not think, there must be some, this was not … The doctor blinked.
– Not … ?
– My mother. No.
He turned swiftly to the porter, who scratched his head and frowned. Then he opened his mouth.
– Oh, jay, he said, hold on.
He crossed the room, and from behind a screen, almost with a flourish, he wheeled out on its rubber wheels another trolley, on which my mother’s body was laid, wrapped in a tartan blanket. Her hands were folded. She was still wearing one white glove. Her face was turned aside, her cheek pressed against her shoulder. Her eyes were not quite closed. I could see no marks of the crash save for a small cut on her forehead. But there was something in the way she was lying, all bundled up like that, as if she had been snatched up and shaken violently, and everything inside her was broken and in bits. I caught a faint whiff of her face powder. The doctor was hovering at my shoulder. I nodded dully, identifying what was not there, for this was not my mother, but something she had left behind, like a mislaid glove.
Things are confused after that. There are gaps. I remember sitting in a cramped little room, a dispensary, I think it was, with a mug of grey tea going cold in my hands. There were coloured posters on the wall beside me, showing cross-sections of lungs, and seething stomachs, and an enormous, crimson heart with all its valves and ventricles on show. I felt a deep calm, as at the end of some daring and exhausting exploit. Part of my mind had been working away by itself all this time, suddenly now, as if out of nowhere, a solution to one of the equations in Mr Kasperl’s black notebook came to me, in three smooth transformational leaps, tumbling through the darkness in my head like a spangled acrobat executing a faultle
ss triple somersault. In the corridor Nurse Er was talking to Doctor Blur. Without warning I began to weep. It was like a nosebleed. My sobs were a kind of helpless, inward falling, as if a huge hollow had opened up inside me and I were plunging headlong into it. The storm ended as abruptly as it had begun. I wiped my eyes, startled, a little sheepish, and yet obscurely proud of myself, of such lavish, all-embracing grief. Then the doctor went off, and I followed him. We climbed the curved staircase again. It was evening already, I could hardly believe it. A vast, garish sunset was sinking on the horizon, like a disaster at sea. My father and Uncle Ambrose were still sleeping. Aunt Philomena’s face was blotched and crooked. She leaned on my arm and we left the ward. The entrance hall was ablaze with thick sunlight. The nun with the head-dress was gone, had winged away, leaving the ledger open on the desk. No, there was no nun, I invented her. We walked home slowly through the deserted streets. The sky was pale blue, ribbed with red, so high, immensely high. Aunt Philomena snuffled and sighed. I wanted to get away from her. The trees were in blossom in the square, pink and ivory, purest white. A crow flapped past low overhead, clearing its throat. The key was under the mat.
SHE WAS BURIED IN the old cemetery at Ashburn, in the same plot as her mother and Jack Kay. I walked behind the hearse. It was a hot, hazy day, one of the first of summer. The hawthorn was heavy with may, and there was columbine in the ditches, and poppies, and wild honeysuckle. People turned up whom I had never seen before, big broad-beamed women in ugly hats and elasticated stockings, and gnarled old men, agile as woodsprites, who jostled for position among the overgrown tombstones, eager not to miss a thing. A shovel was stuck at an angle in the mound of clay beside the grave. The priest was a short, stout, florid-faced man. His voice rose and fell with a querulous cadence. All about us the fields sweltered. The air was laden with fragrances of hay and dust and dung. Aunt Philomena wept loudly, standing with shoulders hunched and her elbows pressed to her ribs, as if to keep something from collapsing inside her. My father and Uncle Ambrose stood side by side at the foot of the grave. Their bandaged foreheads gave them a faintly piratical air. Uncle Ambrose smiled to himself and murmured under his breath. The crash had damaged something in his head, it would never mend.
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