•
The cosmos confounds us, Lucas said. Because we stand on what feels like solid ground, we believe that we live in a world of solidities. In reality, however, everything is insubstantial. Atoms consist mostly of empty space. Particles are not particles at all. That’s the reality, but it’s not a reality that we can live with. We have to believe that things are as they appear to be, on the surface. ‘The sky, when you really look at it, is unbearable,’ said Lucas. We were sitting in the garden, on a summer evening, two years ago. He raised a hand, as if the stars were a spectacle that he had arranged for educational purposes. Out there, a billion light years away, there are black holes that are thirty, forty times more massive than the sun, and they are revolving around each other two hundred times per second. ‘Two hundred times, every single second. Can you even begin to imagine such a thing? Can you imagine the distance of a billion light years? A single light year – that’s six trillion miles. So a billion times six trillion. It’s just words. The reality is inconceivable. It’s beyond what our minds can accommodate.’
‘Unbearable’ and ‘incomprehensible’ were not the same thing, I suggested. Something that could not be imagined was not necessarily something that could not be understood. One could understand the physics of the whirling black holes without being able to picture them.
‘We understand nothing,’ Lucas pronounced, taking pleasure from the inadequacy of human intelligence. ‘How did this all begin? How did something come out of nothing? The Big Bang – how could there have been such an event? How could there be an explosion in a void? How could there even be a void?’ Question after question was released into the air; there was no end to them; the debate, such as it was, would invariably end with one of Lucas’s questions. ‘How can we know that we are not living in a simulation of reality?’ he asked himself, and Erin looked at me, with a placid but challenging gaze, as if she doubted that I had the strength of character to become a true pupil.
•
The last day of my father’s life with his family: it has a date, but for me no reality. A Thursday in April; nothing of that Thursday can be recalled. Once a month his work would take him away from home for two or three nights; there had been no indication that his departure on this occasion would be permanent; perhaps the decision was made abruptly, on the first or second night in whatever hotel it was. This is possible. I have no memory of the car being loaded with more than the usual suitcase. He was going to stay in Birmingham; he had often had to stay in Birmingham.
At the weekend my mother talked to me: my father would not be back with us that night. In fact, he would not be back soon. It was not certain when he would be back. I think I remember the tone: something had gone wrong, but it was no emergency. My mother was not weeping; I know that. There was no great sense of upset, or of anxiety. We sat at the table, on opposite sides, as though we were about to play a complicated board game and she had to explain the rules to me. The sun was bright inside the house. On the sill above the kitchen sink, yellow flowers stood in very clear water, in a milk bottle; my memory tells me that I looked at the flowers for a long time.
Later, another conversation, this time sitting side by side. The television had been turned off so that my mother could tell me what she had to tell me. At the end, there were tears; both of us. ‘Your father and I cannot live together,’ she said, as if the reason that he was going to live somewhere else were a fact that was not personal, as if somebody had come to the house and told them that they could not live together, and she had accepted it because there was nothing they could do about it. ‘But you’ll still see him,’ she promised. What I remember: looking at our reflections on the murky dark-green TV screen, when we had stopped crying. I went to bed late, and the house was so quiet I had to get up and look into what was now my mother’s room. Not finding her there, I called out; she was downstairs, and none of the lights were on. This might have been a different night.
The wardrobe in what was now my mother’s room was no longer full. But in the rooms in which we lived there were few signs of my father’s absence. On the wall, near the front door, a small wooden plaque, with a colourful metal shield attached to it, hung on a hook; three little ships were on the shield, and their hulls were strangely shaped, like horseshoes. The meaning of the shield was unknown to me, but the three golden ships were a detail of the house that gave it character, like a signature. One afternoon, coming into the house, I saw, in place of the shield, a framed photograph of the harbour, as it had been a long time ago. My father had been in the house, it seemed, and I had not seen him.
But I did see him again, for a while. He said the same thing as my mother had said: ‘We can’t live together.’ The words were different when he said them: he seemed to be accepting that the failure was his. This, I think, was the day at the museum in Dorchester, when a feeling of pointlessness overcame me, at the thought that, when I was back home, I would not be able to talk to him about what we were seeing, and so the day would be incomplete, and the hours at the museum would fade out of my memory. Every two weeks I had a day with my father, before he moved to a different town. It was more than a hundred miles away, but he might not be there for long, he said; I would stay with him, soon. I did not stay with him. He moved house again, but not nearer. Then my mother did not know his address any longer, she said. That he was living in Manchester we knew from the postmark on the cards that came to the house at Christmas and on my birthday, for several years. Some money was enclosed, but there was never any proper message.
‘I don’t know,’ my mother said, when I asked her what had happened; she shook her head, gazing out of the window, as if a message were written in the sky but the letters were as vague as clouds, and it was not important anyway. ‘He doesn’t love us,’ she said; we were to harden ourselves.
•
Two years after his father’s death and the mingling with his father’s spirit, Lucas was granted proof that the scope of his talent would not be confined to his family. The revelation occurred at the house of a woman called Laura, a colleague of Lucas’s mother, a few years her senior, divorced. Laura had been a steadfast support in the months following the death of Lucas’s father. She was the most frequent visitor; sometimes the two women went shopping together; later, there was the occasional trip to the cinema. Bit by bit, Laura was drawing her friend back into the world. One evening, shortly before Christmas, she held a gathering at her house – a few friends and neighbours, and a selection from work. One of the neighbours, a man called Malcolm, at least separated and maybe divorced, had started to interest her, Laura confessed. She had seen signs that the interest might be reciprocated, though he was perhaps slightly younger than she was, and it was therefore probable that he was on the lookout – if he were on the lookout, that is – for a companion more youthful than herself, Laura acknowledged. ‘As is generally the way,’ said Lucas, submitting a guilty plea with a rueful twist of the mouth.
Lucas was invited too; other teenagers would be present, he was promised. Two other teenagers were present: a vapid and lumpen girl who never left her mother’s side; and a boy who talked loudly and at length about football, the only subject about which he was capable of talking. Lucas spent much of the evening on the outskirts of the event. Permitted a bottle of beer, he withdrew to the stairs to drink it; he took a second bottle.
It was while he was finishing this second bottle, waiting for his mother to conclude her goodbyes, that the extraordinary thing happened: he heard a word, whispered, so clearly that the sound made him turn. Nobody was near enough to have been the whisperer. But he sensed a presence, an obstruction of the air such as a body would make, though there was no body. Again he heard the word, quieter than before, but more urgent. Initially he had heard it as ‘Really’, but on its repetition he was less certain. The third time, though, he heard the two syllables clearly – the word was ‘Reenie’ or ‘Reaney’. The name meant nothing to him, and he did not know what it was that he had
heard. The sound had not arisen in his brain; it had come into his ears from outside. It was a whisper, and the voice was male. Perhaps, he decided, there was something strange about the acoustics of the staircase; perhaps what he had heard was a person speaking in a room at the top of the stairs. This was improbable. And why would the syllable have been repeated twice? Then came another whisper. ‘Letter Finlay’ was what he seemed to hear. It made no sense; perhaps it had been a fragment of a phrase or a sentence. He waited. A minute later, there was another repetition: unequivocally, simply, the phrase was ‘Letter Finlay’. The voice had an accent of some sort, he could now hear; it was not English. He was left with those two words, and an accent, plus ‘Reenie’.
Walking home, he told his mother what had happened on the stairs. She was sure that ‘Really’ was what he had heard, rising from the hubbub of conversation. As for ‘Letter Finlay’: the obvious explanation was that the words had popped into Lucas’s head, and his brain – perhaps tired, perhaps a bit blurred by the beer – had made it seem that the words had been spoken. ‘No,’ Lucas insisted. ‘I heard them.’ He insisted just once. His mother was not receptive. She had other things on her mind – Malcolm, for one, it turned out.
Lucas knew that he had not misheard. A few days later, at work, in response to Laura’s remarking that Lucas had seemed preoccupied – upset, even – at the end of the evening, his mother told her about the words that had seemed to be whispered to Lucas. ‘He says he heard something like “Reenie”’, she said, and Laura smiled. Her middle name was Irene, a fact known to few, but known to one person at the get-together – a woman called Joan – who had known Laura since their schooldays, and from time to time would use the diminutive that they had sometimes used at school: Reenie. That’s what Lucas must have overheard, she said. But then Lucas’s mother revealed the nonsensical phrase: ‘Letter Finlay’. At this, Laura’s expression changed in an instant: tears appeared, and the frown and the set of her mouth suggested that she had taken offence.
She had not taken offence, Lucas informed me. Laura’s reaction was one of consternation and distress and fear. She had once known a young man called Moray; he had fought in the war, and when he came home, injured, she had realised that she loved him. Moray had always called her Reenie, never Laura. He was ‘the love of her life’, she had come to understand, as she confided to Lucas’s mother. For reasons she would not talk about, they had not been able to stay together. Neither would she say why Letter Finlay, a tiny place in Scotland, in the Highlands, had been of such importance to them.
It had not been impossible for his mother to explain what had happened with Lucas on the day his father died. We all imagine, at times, our loved ones in peril. For all she knew, Lucas – a boy who was given to morbid thoughts – had worried himself constantly by picturing his father stricken. In the end, his imagination had coincided with reality. That’s all there was to it, his mother persuaded herself. With Laura and the lover she had lost, however, coincidence – though not absolutely out of the question – was less convincing as an explanation. His mother was disturbed by the incident in Laura’s house, said Lucas, and it was rarely spoken about again. For the following year’s gathering, Laura implemented an adults-only policy. And Lucas knew better than to tell his mother anything of his other moments of uncanny intuition: the weeping woman alone at the traffic lights, whose daughter’s voice Lucas could hear, for instance; or the man on the bus who stared out of the window as if under hypnosis, who was seeing all the time something that Lucas too could see, and nobody else. After what had happened on the stairs, a distance opened up between Lucas and his mother, he told me. His mother could not accept the truth of it. Her son had carried off some sort of trick, but how he had done it, and why he had done it, was incomprehensible. Sometimes, in windows or mirrors, or on the periphery of his vision, Lucas would see his mother looking at him, as someone who was not to be trusted, or resisted all comprehension.
•
After the funeral, I asked Lucas’s brother what he knew about the story of Laura and Moray, and what Lucas had experienced at Laura’s house. The brother knew nothing of this episode. He remembered a supportive colleague, but thought that her name had not been Laura. The sister likewise knew nothing. This may or may not be significant.
•
We can disregard what Father Brabham has said. Of course, he could never have approved of Lucas’s domestic arrangements. Not that he knew anything about the relationship between Lucas and Erin, other than that they occupied the same property. But that was enough. There was a whiff of sin. A similar whiff comes off at least two participants in Father Brabham’s ever-dwindling congregation. I could supply the names. Adulterers both, I know for a fact. But Father Brabham finds them more congenial, it seems. Bear in mind, too, that Lucas was in competition with Brabham’s business. One could argue that Lucas was the more successful. More people attended Lucas’s funeral than one would find in Brabham’s church of a Sunday. Many more satisfied customers over the years, I should think.
And there was a philosophical disagreement. In Lucas’s afterworld, everyone is saved. We float away into the eternal haze, all of us. Nobody is punished. The idea of hell, Lucas believed, was what had first attracted Father Brabham to the organisation. But if Father Brabham had read the original script more closely, he would have discovered that the lake of inextinguishable fire, supervised by Satan and his punitive battalions, is not in the Book, as Lucas once told him, or so Lucas told me. After hearing, from a woman of the Brabham flock, that Father Brabham had made, to her, an extremely disobliging remark about Lucas’s enterprise – having learned that another member of the flock, perhaps failing to find in Father Brabham’s sermons the solace she required, had decided to consult ‘the imposter’ – Lucas took the opportunity, on next encountering Father Brabham in the street, to request that he should refrain from passing slanderous judgement on what Lucas was doing. Father Brabham denied the charge of slander, but did not deny that he thought that Lucas’s ideas were incompatible with the tenets of Christianity. In reply, Lucas doubted that Father Brabham knew much more than nothing about the ideas that Lucas espoused, but did not deny that those ideas were opposed to certain aspects of Christianity, if by ‘Christianity’ one meant the doctrines propounded at Father Brabham’s place of work. Some of these doctrines, Lucas argued, were misrepresentations of the Word. In particular, the notion that sinners were doomed to never-ending torment and pain is not to be found in the New Testament. Lucas quoted John at him (‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to me’), and Corinthians (‘For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive’). If you care to look, said Lucas, you’ll find that Jesus said nothing about the devil and his lake of eternal fire. Father Brabham, reported Lucas, did not appreciate the lecture.
•
‘I think Callum really liked you,’ Lucas once said to me. This was a couple of years before I left home. I was to understand that I should be proud of having secured Callum’s approval. But why, I wondered, to myself, could Lucas only ‘think’ that Callum had liked me? Given that we were to believe that the spirit does not die, and that Lucas had been in contact, repeatedly, with the spirit of Callum, why was it not possible to ascertain Callum’s opinion of me? Why not a straightforward: ‘Callum liked you’? Lucas seemed to hear the unspoken objection. The spirit of Callum, now bodiless for several years, had journeyed too far to be audible, he explained.
•
The voice of Lucas – this is something to be considered.
I was in the kitchen, preparing the meal with my mother, when Dean Martin’s voice came out of the radio, and a few seconds later my mother joined in. This would have been during my second year at university. The song was ‘Sway’. My mother started to hum-sing, sotto voce. At the instrumental break she smiled, and the smile was of a sort that required a question. Lucas, she informed me, could do a perfect impersonation of Dean Martin, s
inging this song.
The story was as follows. Did I remember when the Websters left the house across the street? I did. And did I remember that Lucas and Kathleen had invited them round for drinks, with a few other neighbours, so everyone could say goodbye? I remembered. No other children were there, so I was allowed to go home. I climbed over the wall, I remembered; from my room I watched the adults for a while. They talked in the garden; Mrs Webster cried on Kathleen’s shoulder. Towards the end of the evening, I now learned, Lucas did his Dean Martin number, with props: a tumbler of whisky and a cigarette. It was, my mother assured me, ‘very funny’. This I found hard to imagine.
Lucas, it was later revealed, could not sing. In the kitchen, on Erin’s birthday, he stood beside me as my mother brought in the cake. We sang, and the sound he produced was an untuned baritonal rumble. The final line had only one note. His tunelessness seemed to embarrass him. Why would he have pretended to have no singing voice? For Erin’s birthday he would have done his best. Are we to conclude that Lucas as himself could not sing, but as a mimic of Dean Martin he could? ‘Perfect’ was no doubt an exaggeration, but the performance could not have been like the groaning of ‘Happy Birthday’. Pretending to be Dean Martin, he carried a tune. Perhaps the alcohol explained it, I think I thought.
When the instrumental break was over, my mother resumed her hum-singing. At the end, again, she smiled.
As I recall this scene, an image occurs to me: a shape in the depths of cloudy water, a shape so nebulous that it might be imaginary, but for a moment it seems to be rising towards the surface, then disappears. Did the possibility of my mother and Lucas rise in my mind in this way, then vanish, being scarcely credible?
•
‘This is the living, breathing man – the man in full,’ Lucas recited, from the back of the biography he was reading. It was a good book, he told me, but it was not ‘the man in full’. Though the subject was not long dead, and the writer had interviewed many people who had known him, the book was no more than a portrait, and a portrait is not a person. A portrait, he instructed me, was an image of the portraitist as much as it was an image of the person portrayed, no matter how ‘accurate’ it might be.
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