What the Eye Doesn't See

by Alice Jolly

  I was alone and I lay in bed, torn and bleeding, with my hands gripped across my empty stomach and again and again Max’s angry screams splintered the stillness of the night. He would not give up. Oh, how those screams went on, brutal and twisted, so I had to go to him, and I looked at him, writhing in anger, and I could not touch him, and I cried to be released from him, yet still he would not stop and although I lay with my ears blocked against him, his screams went on and on, rising and falling in a bitter, hollow moan.

  Then it was early morning and a watery light rippled over the room and I struggled up from the bed on paper legs, and went to look in the box on the floor, and Max was white and transparent, with blue veins and blue eyelids, and I looked down and saw the front of my nightdress stained with milk. His eyes were shut but he held up his hands, like newly bloomed flowers, and as I put out my finger to him, his hands clapped together, then he gripped my finger tight with both hands, and there was a shock in his touch, so that I swallowed my breath, and he opened his newborn eyes. He was heavy in my arms and his head lolled forward and I could not stand, so I lay down on the floor and I pulled open the front of my nightdress, and felt his hand touch my flesh.

  It was a long, long time that we lay there, and the world was still as death, and my eyelids heavy, as his mouth tugged at me. Then above us the ceiling of the cottage was lit by the sun, and I stared up at all its lumps and stains, and my eyes followed every branch of every crack. Perhaps I slept, I do not know, or perhaps my eyes were closed, but in my mind that ceiling became a map, and the lumps and cracks and stains turned into mountains, and forests and rivers, so that finally it was as though the whole world was spread out above me, and he and I were there at the centre of it.

  It turns out that death is a game of what one should tell and what one shouldn’t. The days pass and Freddy, Theodora and I get on with our various projects, and I write letters which make no mention of what is to come, and talk about plans for the future as though I will be there. Yet there is a tension, an awareness of a monster which lies below the quiet surface, and must not be disturbed and anyway – perhaps all this does not matter so very much for why would one want to continue in this landscape of yearning, in this place of longing, endlessly unfulfilled? This world is surely playing out its final scene, and has become a place where people’s attention span is no longer than thirty seconds, a place where there is no food you have to chew, a place where one may feel only those emotions sanctioned by celluloid, a place where people are embarrassed by excellence …

  Now Freddy stamps in with coal from the shed, and as she opens the door an Arctic draught blows, and the letter I was writing floats to the floor. She has the coal scuttle by the scruff of its neck and shakes it over the fire, licking spit from her chin, then she pushes coal down into the grate with the sole of her boot. The knees of her corduroy trousers are caked with mud and she is fractious, and more determined than ever to needle me.

  Theodora has finished her writing for the day, and sits in a chair by the fire. Usually she does not like to come to my cottage, because of the mess, but recently she has made an exception and always we only have one fire lit between us, as it is easier to keep warm together. Theodora is currently re-reading all of Proust – evidence, if any more were needed, that she has been on this earth too long. From the windowsill, Theodora is watched by four narrow yellow eyes, which belong to Maud and Agatha, her two Burmese cats, who sit in their sleek blue-grey coats, with smiles on their spiteful faces, and their snake tails wrapped around their paws. The telephone rings but we do not answer it for we prefer to decide who we want to talk to, not the other way around.

  Now Theodora raises her head from her book. ‘Is this the post?’ She pokes at a pile of envelopes on the hearth with her walking stick. I have already looked to check that there’s no letter from Max, or from Maggie, but I take the post up from the hearth because Theodora cannot, or will not, bend for it herself. We shake our heads at the state of it, as Bullseye, who is surprisingly nimble for an elderly and overweight Labrador, decided to take charge of it this morning, and I had to get down on my knees to lever it out of his foul-smelling mouth, but fortunately it’s the electricity bill that has taken the brunt of his attack.

  ‘So haven’t you started the supper yet?’ Freddy snaps. She finds this weather difficult, as she is best suited to the outdoors and does not like to be confined, and now she blows her nose, as loud as a trumpet, into a handkerchief.

  ‘If you want to see Max,’ she says, ‘I don’t know why you don’t just write and tell him to come.’

  My hands slip on the butterfly handle of the tin opener. ‘If Max wants to see me, he knows where I am.’ Freddy puts the tomato soup to heat on the metal plate above the fire and the tick of the grandfather clock echoes into the corners of the room. Always there is wind here but tonight it must be bad because I feel myself braced against it as it thrashes at the windows. I pass a cup of tea to Theodora and, as she leans towards me, her long hand brushes mine and she smells of face powder and eau de Cologne and she raises the long curve of her eyebrows at me, shakes her head, and adjusts her pink wing-shaped spectacles.

  I sit down and Bullseye settles against my feet and levers a back leg round to scratch his ear, flapping it back and forwards, then he rests his grey muzzle on my knee and his tail sweeps back and forwards across the rug. He gets up slowly and his head is on one side now, and he moves stiffly and he can’t get up the stairs any more, so recently I’ve started to sleep downstairs on the sofa to keep him company. I shall have him put down before too long, for it is only fair that he should go first.

  ‘I do think we’ve got to accept some responsibility for Max,’ Freddy says. I turn my face away from her. How she has fallen into the clichés of old age. She rambles on, and she loses everything, and there are whiskers on her chin, and now she takes bread from a plastic bag, pierces it with the toasting fork and holds it out to the fire. I don’t want to discuss Max with Freddy for she understands nothing, nothing. I sit down in my chair and pretend to read.

  ‘It was that school,’ she says. ‘He should never have gone to that school.’ This last is addressed not to me but to Theodora, who lowers her book and looks at Freddy, but without making any comment, as this subject has already been exhausted long ago. It’s true that I made a mistake about the school. The truth is that I didn’t want Max to be ordinary, that was my crime, and I have paid for it. I knew that he was exceptional and I wanted him to have an exceptional education, so twice a week for four years, after he had finished potato-printing and ‘Jack and Jill’ at the village school, I drove him to Oxford for private lessons in Greek and Latin and it was a long drive, all across the top of the Cotswolds, and every half hour I had to stop to refill the leaking car radiator, and often the car broke down altogether, and once when that happened we could find no one to help, and Max and I spent the night lying on hay bales watching the stars.

  Then when Max was thirteen I organised for him to sit the scholarship exam for a public school and Freddy and Theodora would not speak to me for weeks, but I insisted and, of course, Max was offered a scholarship and I decided he should go. Freddy and Theodora could not understand, because schools such as that are against every principle we have ever held, but then they are not mothers so they do not understand the limits of the rational.

  ‘And he shouldn’t have gone to Spain,’ Freddy says.

  Now she draws closer to the mark, but she will not mention Lucía’s name.

  There’s a smell of carbon and a twist of black smoke rises from the toast. Freddy jerks the fork back from the fire and swears under her breath. ‘Not that I blame you,’ Freddy says. ‘You mustn’t think I blame you.’ She examines the toast and passes it to me.

  I turn it over and it’s black so I break it into pieces while Freddy watches me, then I reach down to Bullseye, who stares up at me through milky eyes, and feed him the toast, his tail thumping against my leg. ‘I should certainly hope you don’t blame
me,’ I say. ‘All this modern rubbish – encouraging the weak and stupid to deny responsibility for their own deficiencies, allowing them to lay the blame for every problem at their parents’ door. I don’t accept it. People should take responsibility for their own actions.’ I brush crumbs from my lap and pat Bullseye’s dusty black flank and Freddy turns away and stabs another piece of bread with the toasting fork.

  Theodora stretches out a hand to me but the distance is too far and her diamond ring winks for a moment in the light of the fire. She speaks as though she’s consulting the authoritative work on the subject. ‘Max’s problems have nothing to do with us, or with his education.’ Her eyes are staring into the fire, her hand moves back to the arm of the chair and her fingers tap up and down, then she purses her lips and closes her eyes and I know that she’s thinking of the Wheelbarrow Afternoon, so many years ago, for it was then that we lost him, but of that we never speak.

  After Freddy has gone to bed, Theodora and I sit on alone, watching the fire.

  ‘Nobody really has a deathbed scene any more, do they?’ I ask.

  ‘No, not really,’ Theodora says. ‘I’m afraid that Dickens must take the blame for that. He overdid it so badly with Little Nell.’

  I know that Theodora is angry that I must go first and she wishes all this to be organised without too much inconvenience, and I find that I am much the same. I stand and try to go to my desk to finish writing a letter, but the pain starts – that pain which has become so familiar that I know all its patterns, and how for long periods it hibernates, and then it awakes and becomes restless, turning within me, the first gentle twinge like the kick of an unborn child, then twisting and thrashing, bone clashing against bone, worse and worse …

  And thoughts come to me of Max and, oh, how I long for him to come home. Just after the fire he came to see me, late one night, and he was in the most terrible state, nearly as bad as the Wheelbarrow Afternoon and I tried to talk to him, yes, I tried – to open the doors to the past, but he only wanted to talk about the immediate problem, what he should say, what he should do, and then I’m afraid that I got angry and finally was very little help to him, and he has not been to see me since. Those one loves, one is least able to help.

  Theodora can see the pain in my face, and she wants to offer some assistance, but all she can think of is a cup of tea, and as I do not want to be left while she goes to the kitchen, we go together, and the floorboards creak beneath us and we avoid the patches where the carpet is worn to string. As we reach the step Theodora lays a hand on my shoulder to steady me, although she is the one who walks with a stick. In the kitchen I sit on the bench, bent forward with pain, while she stands with the lidless teapot dangling from her hand, and looks at the kettle on the stove.

  Then I start to laugh, because the truth is that she doesn’t really know how to make tea, having never done any domestic tasks all her life. I manage to get up and try to take the teapot from her, but she will not let me, and pokes at me with her walking stick, and we stand holding the teapot between us, her hand on the handle, mine on the spout, laughing. Then I make her sit down on the bench and I turn on the stove, and find the tea bags, working with one hand, my other elbow locked against my side.

  ‘You know Old Mr Medlock?’ Theodora says. ‘Guess what he told me once.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His wife – you know she got very bad at the end?’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  Theodora leans forward, and pronounces the words carefully. ‘Well. You’ll never guess what …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He smothered her.’

  ‘He never did.’

  I feel a creaking laugh starting up inside me and Theodora bounces her hand up and down on the top of her stick and starts to laugh as well. ‘It took ages apparently … ages.’ Our laughter crashes around the room, breaking into every dusty corner, flushing the silence out, then I laugh so much that the pain starts, and I have to lean against the sink.

  ‘You know, perhaps you should ask Max to come home,’ Theodora says. ‘If only because if we do need someone … he has had some practice in that line …’ Theodora rocks back and forwards on her chair, and I remember all the long, long years, and how much we have laughed.

  ‘But I can quite understand Mr Medlock,’ I say. ‘After all, one doesn’t want to go into hospital.’

  ‘Certainly not. Think of all those germs.’

  We both look at the state of my kitchen and then laugh again, until our cheeks are wet with tears and I’m tired of the old, old lie that we will be redeemed by love, for laughter, surely, is more likely to be the cause.

  When finally we are silent, I turn away and look out of the window into the blackness. ‘Mind you, I’m sure there are easier ways.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘One must consider.’

  Theodora moves her head up and down by a fraction of an inch.

  ‘Yes, one must consider.’

  Bullseye and I go to bed downstairs on the sofa for we find it warmer near the embers of the fire, but Bullseye has never been the easiest of bedfellows and always the night begins with him as the pencil and me as the starfish, but it is never long before the situation is reversed. And so I lie awake, with him pressed against my legs, and thoughts come to me of that poor silly American girl, burnt up by her own delusions as much as any fire. How can I explain her? The human mind is strange beyond all reckoning. A person can be, to all intents and purposes, stupid and shallow and yet they can have a few of the higher mental faculties developed to an abnormal degree. That was the case with Tiffany. An idiot savant, I suppose you would say, or a wise fool and, oh, such people are dangerous beyond all measure for they have the propensity to lay people bare, to stumble senselessly across forbidden ground. Maggie and Max mocked her, and she was easy to mock, but the truth is that, without even knowing it, they were scared of her.

  One day she came here with Max and Geoffrey and I remember it well, how she had that kind of beauty which is so obvious that it obscures whatever might lie behind. I pitied her for that because, in truth, beauty has more in common with disfigurement than is commonly supposed and she, poor dear, was that kind of woman that men watch but do not see … and being an American she had no sense of irony, no sense of humour. At first I thought that she simply admired Max, but then she began to talk to me about him, and we were alone together, because Max and Geoffrey were inside, listening to the news on the radio, talking politics, and she asked a great many questions about Max, and I was telling her this and that – I can’t remember really – and then I said, just in passing, that Max has never been very punctual … And it was then that I saw it, in her reaction to that, for she jumped at me as though I had poured acid on her, and she was full of angry explanations, and justifications, telling me that I did not understand, that I should not be so harsh. I felt a tenderness for her then and I would have liked to talk to her more openly, but for all her apparent directness, that would not have been possible. For she thought I understood nothing of what she felt but, oh, I understood, yes, above others, I understood …

  Maggie

  To tell him, to tell him not. Voices babble in my head, rehearsing the arguments back and forth. Slowly I make my way to Geoffrey’s house which is in Chelsea near the river. The street stretches away from me narrowing towards a low, metallic sky. It is lined by leafless trees, stretching out black and stunted arms. I stand outside Geoffrey’s dog-eared house. At the downstairs front window the curtains are shut.

  I wouldn’t have to tell Geoffrey directly. I could just write to Tiffany’s lawyers. I found out their address through my old job and I keep it written on the back of an envelope, folded up in my bag. I can feel it there all the time. Sometimes in crowded places I wrap my hands around my bag, as though making sure the hidden dynamite doesn’t accidentally ignite. I go up the steps to Geoffrey’s front door.

  I imagine all of us – Dad, Geoffrey, Fiona, James, Nanda, me – and
we’re roped together on the edge of a cliff. My foot slips and I lose my balance. The rope pulls tight. They try to hold me but they can’t. One by one, slipping, sliding, screaming, they’re pulled over the edge. And then we’re falling into a void – friendships drowned in bitter silence, love revealed to be illusion, divorce, prison. My finger stabs at the doorbell.

  Geoffrey opens the door. A smile loops across his face like a Christmas streamer. ‘Maggie, how wonderful to see you.’ He’s doing well at the Normal Life Game – except red cracks run through the whites of his eyes as though they’ve shattered but not yet fallen apart.

  I open my mouth, my lips start to make the words – so how is Tiffany? Then just in time I remember and pull the words back inside. I can’t believe I nearly said that. But it would seem so natural to ask. I still don’t really believe she isn’t here. Into the perilous silence I babble greetings.

  This is the first time I’ve seen Geoffrey since the funeral. That was two months after the fire, when the police released the body. Really, there can’t have been a body to release but at the funeral there was a proper coffin and by then I’d got into the habit of believing the impossible and so I thought of her inside the plastic oak, pale and perfect, probably still wearing a baseball cap.

  She would have enjoyed the funeral. Dad and Geoffrey, milk faces and dark suits, no tears, that would have been in bad taste, but flowers from the American relatives, as thick as a jungle and smelling of sugar. There’d been discussion about a poem to be read. The fundamental rule is that you can’t have anything that’s been on a tea towel – that’s what Dad said. It was the first joke he’d made for a long time.