What the Eye Doesn't See

by Alice Jolly

  The truth of this bursts on my mind. I step backwards. The tick of the clock is loud in my head. There’s a rustle of leaves being blown against the window. The palms of my hands are pressed back against the smooth wood of the clock. I can’t believe I didn’t know. Now Freddy has understood. Her face collapses and tears spill over her sagging lower lids and run down her face. ‘Why didn’t she tell us? What if someone finds out?’

  ‘No one is going to find out,’ Dad says.

  ‘The lady had cats,’ I say. ‘Cats like Maud and Agatha. And sunflowers.’

  Freddy is rubbing at her face with a handkerchief.

  ‘We can’t call a doctor now,’ Dad says. ‘All we can do is wait.’

  ‘At least it can’t be long,’ Freddy says.

  But somehow I already know that she’s wrong.

  When somebody you love is in pain every second becomes an hour, every minute a day, every hour a week. The clock moves but time doesn’t pass. I walk through the cottages – across the hall, Theodora’s sitting room, the kitchen, the corner where Nanda lies. Round and round, back and forth, like a spider spinning a web, leaving a knotted silver trail.

  Everywhere I can hear the sound of her pain. The whine and grind of machinery failing, a voice shouting from deep within a cave, the wings of a trapped bird battering against glass. I clench myself against it. I don’t want to think about Javier but my mind has come loose. I can smell him in my hair, my breasts are sore where he kissed them too many times. Underneath my clothes I’m naked.

  Dad and Theodora and Freddy move through the same spaces. Like planets we circle, pass, never meet. Nanda croaks the same words again and again. They come out from between her blue lips in sudden whispered breaths. ‘The ship. I’ve got to get the ship.’ Her sitting room is cold. No one wants to light the fire because the thought that it will burn on after her death is too much to bear. Her breath rasps and rasps. Sometimes she’s got a strength she’s never had before. She tries to get out of bed and Theodora has to hold her back. She is like someone possessed. I watch from the sitting-room door, seeing Dad and Theodora, their long shadows dancing on the wall, as they lean over her in the cramped corner of the sitting room. I just wanted to talk to her one more time.

  ‘What ship?’ I ask.

  ‘Presumably the Spanish Civil War ship,’ Dad says.

  Nanda sits up and her arms beat up and down, her sinews pulled tight. The rhythm is regular, like a clockwork rabbit beating a drum. She has twisted out of bed, and lies in the narrow space at the side of the fireplace, every muscle in her body tight and her arms still beating up and down. Her nightdress is rucked up at the back and I can see the red knotted veins in her legs. I begin to hate her. I want her to die.

  ‘You’d think at least these pills might have worked,’ Dad says.

  He kneels on the rug and tries to lift her, but the gap is narrow. She’s twisting and one foot sticks out behind where Dad is standing. It flaps up and down, translucent, like the webfoot of a duck. Again and again it slaps on the carpet. Dad gets hold of her and pulls her to him, picks her up, and gets her back into bed. I turn away, my hand gripped over my mouth. In Theodora’s sitting room, I walk round and round, then go back and watch from the doorway. There’s silence now and Nanda is quiet. I watch the shadows of Dad and Theodora as they move on the wall.

  I return to the grandfather clock, but not too often. I let a long time go by before I go to look at it then find that only ten minutes have passed. At eleven o’clock I open the kitchen door in Nanda’s cottage, just for somewhere different to go. Everything is the same as three weeks ago. A pan on the stove has got the remains of baked beans dried out inside it, a mouldy chunk of lardy cake is on the window sill. I put my toe on the pedal of the bin and inside I see the toast still lying there, green with mould. I sit down on the bench and finger a dried-out tea bag in a saucer. It has become precious because she put it there.

  I think about Adam and I want him here. But it wouldn’t do any good. You can love as much as you want, but still it will come to this. I hear Nanda again, her voice calling about the ship.

  ‘We must call the doctor,’ Freddy says. ‘We must stop the pain.’

  ‘Couldn’t we call the doctor, Dad?’

  ‘No. We’ll have to wait. Or we’ll have to explain about the pills.’

  What he means is that he doesn’t want me to have to admit to getting those pills. And so we wait, and the pain goes on. At two o’clock I open the back door and go out into the night. Everything is black, there are no stars and the wind is up. Sparks of red still burn in the field like the watching eyes of animals. The night is cold and I find one of Nanda’s cardigans on the back of a chair and put that on. Sap, talcum powder, sweat – the smell of her. Freddy comes outside, watches me in the garden and then goes in again.

  Around three o’clock Nanda is silent. Theodora and I sit beside her and watch her sleeping. Her arm no longer grips the chair. I can see her face, the face of a dead person. It’s so long since I last slept, my head lolls against the back of the chair. I dream – wine spilling on my dress, the feel of Javier’s hand inside me, Nanda’s yellow face. The tick of the grandfather clock keeps time in my head. I wake, jerking my neck straight, finding that the night is still going on and there’s no sign of dawn.

  Then the pain starts again and I can’t understand it because she seems dead, and yet the pain is still there. It has its own life now. There’s nothing left of her except pain. She’s still and silent, but struggling for breath, fighting and fighting.

  ‘Dad, Dad, do something. Please do something.’

  He comes to the bed and moves me out of the way.

  ‘Dad, please …’

  My hands are dragging at his shirt.

  ‘Dad, you’ve got to …’

  He puts his hand across my mouth to stop my words. For the first time I’m looking at him, really looking at him. The airwaves are clear. All the clatter has stopped. The world has become small. His eyes are ticking round and round. I see the moment when the decision is made. His face hardens into certainty. He takes his hand away from my mouth and touches my shoulder gently.

  ‘Maggie,’ he says. ‘I want you to look after Theodora and Freddy for a while. Take them outside or make them some tea. Whatever. Just make sure they stay out of here. All right?’

  I open my mouth to speak but he shakes his head. I go to Theodora who is standing by the door and I take her through to the sitting room in her cottage. Freddy sits silently in a chair by the fire. I shut the door behind us. Then I make Theodora sit down and I go into her kitchen and try to make some tea. My hands are rattling and I can’t do it. So I pour a glass of water. Then I go back to the sitting room. Freddy and Theodora are suddenly old. Pale and grey, they are fragile as moths. The life is going out of them. I give them water they don’t want and suggest that we should go outside but they say nothing. I kneel down on the rug near the fire and watch the door, the line of light along the hinge. I force my mind through that crack, press it against his mind. Will him to strength. The waiting is long. Let her die, let her die. I turn my head into Theodora’s skirt and press my head against her legs. Her hand presses against my hair.

  Then I cannot stay in the room any longer. I must get out into the air. A sob, an inhuman wrenching sob. His, not hers. Freddy wails like a wounded animal, her hands striking the air in tight gestures. Theodora is sitting in silence, her hands held out in front of her, staring into the gap between them. I burst outside and kneel on the path with my head in my hands. The concrete is cold beneath my knees and the wind is dashing across the Edge. The strength of it grows, and slackens, then grows again. There are no stars, and the red sparks in the field have faded, although the air still tastes of burning.

  I hear Theodora’s voice from inside then the creak of the front door behind me. I turn to see a flicker of movement. I shut my eyes, open them again and Dad is there. He’s holding Nanda but she’s not a person any more, just a bundle of rags co
llected in his arms. The porch light shines through her. The wind blows and I think it will take her out of his arms. Both are insubstantial as spirits. Dad staggers on his bad leg. Theodora goes in front of him, showing him the place. The rags tip from his arms onto the bank where the daffodils grow in spring.

  I get up and go to him but my foot catches in a rut and I fall. My wrist turns as I go down and I sit in the dew, holding on to my head. It feels as though I’ve been cut somewhere deep inside. Dad is close and I feel the solidity of him. His shoulders are hunched and his head is bent. He leans down towards me and lays his hand on my shoulder. His shadowed face is crumpled. He raises his hand to shield his eyes. This is the beginning of his death, the loss of his past. He’s kneeling beside me. For the first time we’re alone.

  Ahead of us a hem of grey edges the horizon. The air is damp. We’re sheltered from the wind, the silence is as deep as the sky above. It’s going to be one of those autumn days Nanda loved. The first day without her. Don’t let the sun come up. I don’t want to set off on the road away from her. Let me stay here in this day with the touch and smell of her still real. She’s on her back, stretched out, with her hair twisted around her. Her skin is as grey as the air above us. One arm is up over her head, her cheek rests against that arm. In the midst of a luxurious morning stretch, life has been peeled away from her. The grass where Dad stood, and where she lies, is flattened to the ground, and light green at the roots. Like everything else in this garden, she no longer grows upright. But her eyes are still open.

  SEPTEMBER

  Maggie

  In this world there are six billion people and none of them are her. She doesn’t get up in the morning any more. Six billion people, but the pattern is never repeated. The fire, the lies, I used to wonder what worse could happen, now I know. Mainly what I can’t understand is where she is. I expect a face to turn around in a crowd – Maggie, Maggie, there you are. But no. Here today, gone tomorrow. It seems like a trick or a comic turn. I could be laughing, but instead I’m left with loss, raw and jagged. Absence.

  When someone dies you’re not meant to think about their body. Everyone says – that’s just the shell she lived in. But that shell was what I knew best. So I think of her between the bed and the mantelpiece, with her head twisted up, and her webfoot slapping up and down on the rug. I think about her bones in the cold earth of Burrington churchyard, and her hair getting dry and dusty. And Freddy and Theodora – alone on Frampton Edge. Their trio become a duet. Waiting for death. Naively I hoped that death would be in brackets. Normal service will be resumed shortly. But death gets bigger the more you know it.

  After Nanda died, I stayed on at Thwaite Cottages for a few days. Dad had to go back to Brussels – meetings, lunches, committees, all of that. One evening, unable to bear the emptiness, I went up to Theodora’s room. She was sitting at her desk, quite still. Sadness had come upon her like the beginning of winter – the leaves turning brown at the edges, the birds flying south, the first glint of frost. When she turned towards me her eyes looked inwards instead of out.

  ‘Don’t give up hope,’ I said.

  She waved her walking stick at me in a sudden fury. ‘What good is hope?’ she hissed. ‘The person I loved for over seventy years is dead and you talk to me about hope …’

  ‘Sorry, sorry …’

  ‘Hope is for the soft-headed. Look around you in the world. What possible cause can you see for hope? What evidence can you see that anything is going to get better? Of course it isn’t. The people you love get old and die. That’s how it is. That’s the truth. There is absolutely nothing to be hopeful about.’ Again she stabbed her walking stick at me. ‘Defiance. That’s the best we can do. That’s how we survive. Defiance. Just give me a day or two and I will have recovered mine.’

  Later she came and apologised to me.

  ‘We are old now,’ she said.

  Only now I realise how we underestimated Nanda. That’s how it is in families – you stand so close to people that you can’t see them properly. It wasn’t until the funeral that I understood how much she was loved. There was an announcement in the newspaper – peacefully, at home, it said. You can always rely on Dad for a good lie. The service was at Burrington church because she’d left no other instructions. I said we should burn her on a bonfire and dance around the flames, whooping and beating our chests. Or dig her into the compost heap. But Freddy and Theodora allowed Dad to invite the vicar round and even made him a cup of tea. That’s how bad it was with them.

  It rained the whole day of the funeral so that the roads were half underwater but still people arrived from everywhere. Geoffrey came, and Theodora’s book friends, Jack from the garage with his son Dodgy Derek, and the Medlocks, and the men from the farm, looking scratchy in their suits, and flocks of Burrington people who Nanda had taught, their umbrellas crushed together in the porch. They came with their children, and their mothers and their grannies, and Colonel Bampton came, although Nanda hated him, and the postman, and mad Young Mrs Fitzgerald, with a hat as big as a flying saucer.

  Adam said there were famous people there – a Minister of Health from some long-forgotten government, a newspaper columnist, two well-known painters, and a chauffeur-driven-Rolls-old-geezer, who rants in the Lords about arms sales. Then hordes of bearded peace campaigners sloshed up the aisle in boots and mackintoshes, so we had to organise a relay up and down the road, through sheets of rain, to borrow extra chairs from the school. There were friends who’d stayed in the spare room, or slept on the orange sofa, and Rosa behind a pillar. People were standing around the font and crowds of children were sitting on the pulpit steps cutting and pasting with glue and scissors.

  Freddy and Theodora came late, moving up the aisle with the stately grace of a bride and groom. People put out hands to help them, which they never would have dared before. Freddy was wearing a floppy red hat that Nanda used to wear, and Theodora’s hair was a bit of a mess because now Freddy has to do it for her. There was a steamy smell of wet wool and all the lights were on because the rain made it dark outside. Water dripped down the inside of the stained-glass windows. Adam stood next to me, and James was on the other side, pressing sticky fruit pastilles into my hand. Theodora read poems – R. S. Thomas, Gerald Manley Hopkins. People didn’t understand but the words made the air tingle.

  After the funeral there was tea in the school hall. She had a good innings, people said. She lived life to the full. At least she didn’t suffer. She wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Now she’s at peace, they said. The last place she’d have wanted to be, I thought. Adam and I pushed through the massed ranks of old biddies together. Some old bloke said – yes, I remember, the granddaughter, an awfully good claret we had, the day you came to lunch. In my head there was a voice shouting – she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.

  Adam said – I don’t think you should be alone now, Maggie. Yes, I said, yes, and held his hand tighter but I thought about Javier burying his face in my hair, Javier undoing the back of my dress, Javier with his hands protecting the top of my head, as he pushed inside me, deeper and deeper. Then I felt guilty about not feeling guilty. Tyger, Sam and Dougie were nodding and winking, and giving me the thumbs up from the other side of the hall. Tyger in mafia-widow gear, and Sam with a purple swollen eye, and Dougie in a jacket like Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat. I wished they’d piss off.

  Dad was in fine form, with his hair combed into neat furrows, and a faint smell of aftershave. The room ebbed and flowed, back and forwards, from where he stood. The men from the farm were talking to him – subsidies, set-aside forms, and beef prices. He knows what to say because he gets it off the Archers. Then he was shaking hands with Bob Briston, their silver heads on a level, and their long noses the mirror image one of the other.

  Dad raised a hand, emphasising a point. Those hands … Nanda is not the only person I underestimated.

  Adam had to go back to London because of a deadline. I stood in the rain, saying goodbye,
holding his hand and feeling bloodless. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll be over in two days’ time.’ He unlocked his car door. ‘You know, with every day it’ll get easier. You just have to wait for time to pass.’ I nodded my head. But I didn’t want time to pass. I stood in the road and watched him go, and looked back at the church, its spire slicing the grey sky.

  Later there was whisky, as well as tea, because Nanda always liked a whisky. James came to find me, unsticking fruit pastilles from his teeth with his finger. I took him to the tea table to find him a sandwich. Most people had brought some food along. We stood for a long time looking at a cake made by one of the peace campaigners. There was icing on top of it, with a crooked picture of Thwaite Cottages cut out of marzipan. The fields around were marked out in green cochineal, which bled into the white icing. A plastic model of a black Labrador stood up near the front gate, which was made out of broken-up chocolate flake.

  Tyger dragged me down a corridor lined with children’s rainbow paintings to where Sam and Dougie stood under a corrugated iron porch. ‘So are you going to marry him?’ she asked.

  I looked out at the rain bouncing on the school playground, each drop a sudden flash of concentric rings. I shivered and drank more whisky. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Blimey,’ Sam said. ‘I hope you got rid of the trouser press.’

  Dougie coughed and spluttered as he smoked a damp joint. ‘Make sure you get a really big rock,’ he said. ‘Security for the future. When I was a kid my mum sold her engagement ring and we got a new car and a colour TV.’

  I sighed and squeezed up my mouth and dipped the toe of my shoe in a puddle. Then Sam put his arm round me and I started to laugh.

  ‘Problem is,’ I said, ‘there’s this other bloke, who lives downstairs …’