Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  Staff at the nursing home in which Muriel Attwater had passed the last weeks of her life confirmed that her nephew had been with her in her final hours. It was noted, however, that Mr Dodd had rarely been at his aunt’s bedside until the very end. Mr Judd, on the other hand, had been so regular a visitor, and been regarded by Mrs Attwater with so much affection, that he was assumed to be a favourite relative.

  Matthew Dodd, the nephew’s son, had put in a single appearance; with his business commitments, he had barely had a spare hour. His sibling, Rachel, had accompanied him; she too had been unable to visit her great-aunt more than once; this was because, as Lucas told me, she had a ‘phobia’ of hospitals and any other places in which one stood a risk of being obliged to observe the sufferings of the infirm and the ailing.

  According to Melvin Dodd, his aunt had been ‘particularly fond’ of Rachel. On her deathbed, apparently, she had made repeated reference to her affection for the young woman. And of all the family, Rachel had been the one who had been most attentive to the elderly Muriel. This was not disputed. The motive for this attention, however, was not a charitable one, Lucas reported. Rachel was the family’s ‘scout’, Muriel told him, or ‘the advance guard’. Her solicitude was entirely tactical, Muriel believed. Always there would be a little gift for the old lady: a scarf, perhaps, or something exotic and edible. They came from airport duty-free shops, Muriel was sure; Rachel and her boyfriend – a dealer in vintage sport cars – seemed to take a remarkable number of holidays. ‘I can see right through that one,’ said Muriel. ‘I can see through the lot of them. Dirty windows, the whole bunch.’

  Rachel’s father did not deny that there had been some friction between himself and his aunt, and that this friction had not been a passing episode. It was, however, a thing of the past, as its cause had been the hostility of Muriel’s husband, a man who, as he approached retirement, with a paltry pension in prospect, had seemed, increasingly, to take the nephew’s prosperity – anyone’s prosperity, for that matter – as some kind of personal affront. But with Jack’s passing, a rapprochement with Muriel had been effected, Melvin maintained. Bygones could not entirely be bygones, of course; there were still some ‘issues’, on both sides. But aunt and nephew had both made considerable efforts to repair the relationship, and these efforts had been largely successful. Which was why the bequest to Mr Judd had been such a shock. There was only one possible explanation: her hand had been forced; her mind had been befuddled by the messages that Mr Judd had plucked out of the air.

  The rapprochement was a fiction, Muriel insisted. True, Melvin had driven down to see her half a dozen times since Jack’s death, which was approximately half a dozen times more than in any preceding year. But whatever Jack had thought of the ethics of property speculation, Muriel agreed with him. The ‘friction’ may have been less noisy, with Jack gone, but it had not ceased. Melvin liked to think of himself as a sharp operator, but he was ‘just a very little shark’ in the ocean of filthy money, she joked with Lucas. As soon as Melvin stepped out of his ridiculous car, she could see him measuring up the house; coming through the door, he was imagining what he could do to the place. And Melvin’s wife was even worse: formerly a model, she had no discernible interests other than consumer durables, and her contentment seemed to be entirely dependent on Melvin’s ability to underwrite the perpetual refreshment of her wardrobe. Engagements of a vague nature tended to prevent her from visiting the old woman with her husband; the squalor of the cottage was too much for her, said Muriel, who had reasons to suspect, as well, that her nephew’s business was no longer thriving as it once had. She sensed that the wife was ruffling her feathers; her first husband, Muriel had learned, had been promptly ditched as soon as his revenue stream had begun to dwindle.

  As evidence of the worrying deterioration of great-aunt Muriel’s intellectual faculties, Rachel Dodd spoke of an increasing forgetfulness: for example, Rachel had turned up at the house at lunchtime one day, as arranged, only to find that Muriel was not at home; she had forgotten all about it. But in fact she had not forgotten, Muriel told Lucas; she had pretended that it had slipped her mind. The truth was, she had been unable to face the unlovable Rachel, and the pretence had amused her, just as it had amused her to feign an inability to remember certain simple words. Rachel was a dull child, and ‘not as good an actor as me,’ said Muriel. Similarly, with her nephew she had affected some moments of absent-mindedness; she had repeatedly been unable to recall his wife’s name; it was a way of making the time pass more agreeably.

  No neighbours could be found to support the assertion that Mrs Attwater’s mind had been in decline. Lucas produced a letter, dated three weeks before her death. The handwriting was tremulous, but the writing was cogent. ‘I will soon be with Jack,’ Muriel wrote. There were remarks about the Dodds – ‘the vultures’, she called them. Most importantly, she informed Lucas that she had instructed her solicitor to amend her will. Whereas it had been her intention to leave the entirety of her estate to a variety of charities, she would now be leaving much of it – the house included – to Lucas, ‘my one true friend’. The charities would still receive a decent percentage. There was no suggestion in the letter that it had ever been her intention to bequeath anything to her wretched nephew, and it seemed clear that Lucas had hitherto known nothing of the terms of Mrs Attwater’s will. The solicitor confirmed that the subject of Mr Dodd and his family had never arisen in any conversation between himself and Mrs Attwater; indeed, for many years he had been unaware that a nephew existed. At no point in his dealings with Mrs Attwater, the solicitor testified, had he observed anything that might have caused him to question her intellectual competence. Neither had he had any reason to think that she had in any way been coerced into altering the document; Mrs Attwater was not a woman on whom coercion would work, he ventured.

  The judge was of the same mind. Although Mrs Attwater’s faith in Mr Judd’s paranormal talents might be taken by some people as being indicative of a certain degree of credulity, he had heard nothing that might incline him to think that Mrs Attwater’s testamentary capacity had been in any way impaired. As for the accusation of coercion, there was no reason to believe that it had any basis in fact. It may well have been the case that the communications that Mr Judd purported to be relaying from the deceased Mr Attwater had played some part in persuading Mr Attwater’s widow to modify the terms of her will, but persuasion should not be mistaken for coercion. All the evidence supported the conclusion that Mr Judd had shown ‘immense kindness’ towards Mrs Attwater. The relationship between Mrs Attwater and Mr Judd had, furthermore, been entirely a professional one, contrary to an insinuation made by Rachel Dodd. There was no merit to the argument that the doctrine of donatio mortis causa should be applied in this instance. Had the claim of Mr Dodd been upheld, the greater part of Mrs Attwater’s estate would have passed to someone who had never been named as a beneficiary in her will. Accordingly, the claim was dismissed.

  Rachel had been an interesting case, Lucas told me. She would have become a much better person had she removed herself from the intimidation of her appalling parents. Muriel had not been entirely fair to her, he felt; perhaps there had been some envy of the attractive young woman. Though Rachel had dressed too ‘operatically’ for his taste, turning up for her day in court in an outfit that would have been more appropriate for a bout of shopping in Knightbridge, she was an ‘extremely presentable girl’, Lucas told me. But Rachel’s parents were dreadful people; ‘heartless bastards’, the pair of them, the father particularly; he had ‘the personality of a hammer’, and Matthew Dodd was just as bad – he was nothing but the clone of his father. A letter had arrived that very morning from Matthew Dodd. He showed it to me, directing my attention to the word ‘chancer’, underlined twice. Lucas pushed the letter deep into a bin, as if cramming a fist into the gullet of an aggressive animal.

  We came to the beach. Wielding a bat of driftwood, he tossed up pebbles to him
self, and smashed them into the water. ‘Bastards!’ he cried, and smacked a stone. A dozen stones were dispatched, in a dozen strokes. The indignation had become comedic by the ninth or tenth stone. Another newly revealed aspect of Lucas: the remarkable hand-eye co-ordination. Every stroke was sure and strong. I asked him if he had played cricket when he was younger.

  ‘But of course,’ he answered. ‘What a loss to the game,’ he lamented, and another stone went arcing into the deep water. ‘Give it a go,’ he said, passing the battered length of wood. ‘It’s tremendously therapeutic.’

  He lobbed a pebble; I swung at it, and missed. I missed twice. The third one flew half the distance of his worst shot.

  ‘Good man,’ he said, applauding, as my stone hit the water.

  •

  When giving my speech at the funeral, I noticed, seated near the back, a woman who did not quite seem to belong to this congregation: for one thing, she appeared to be in her twenties, and thus of an age well below the median; for another, her demeanour did not suggest that her interest in Lucas had been that of a client. She looked more like an observer than a believer. As if aware of my curiosity, she approached me, back at the house. She had liked the speech, she told me, then she remarked that it was a pity that the ceremony had not taken the form of a Quaker gathering. Her sister had married a Quaker, and their wedding had been, for her, a rather wonderful event, because at one point in the proceedings there had been an opportunity for any guest who felt so inclined to stand up and say something about the couple who were about to become married. Had this been possible during Lucas’s funeral, she would have spoken, she told me, because she knew something about Lucas that she would have liked everyone present to know. Her story concerned something that had happened three years ago. She had been involved at that time with someone she should not have been involved with. On this particular night, they were on their way back to her flat when they started arguing. The boyfriend was drunk, and had decided that she had been giving the eye to another man in the pub, a man who in fact didn’t interest her in the slightest. The argument quickly turned nasty, and he slapped her. At that moment, a car swerved across the road and stopped ten yards away, with its headlights aimed squarely at them. She was dazzled, and then, out of the glare, came this gentleman, not young, with a stick in one hand. The boyfriend warned him to back off, but the white knight was not to be deterred. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her, and on being told that she was not, he offered her a lift home. The way he brandished the stick, when the boyfriend took a step closer, suggested that he might know how to use it. Another car now pulled up, and the boyfriend retreated. Not only did Lucas give the young woman a lift, he stayed with her for a while, just in case the boyfriend decided to call round. The next day, and a few times after that, he rang her to check that she was safe. So that is something I learned about Lucas, and it should be recorded. And would I have done what Lucas did? I think not.

  •

  My mother was impressed that Lucas could admit that he was sometimes unsuccessful. As many as one consultation in four produced no satisfactory result, he once told her, it seems. In Middlesborough, for example, he had failed to achieve contact with the father of nine children, six of whom had convened for the attempt, with their mother. The chances would have been good, one would have thought, with so many targets for the mind-beam of the deceased to hit. But the size of the gathering might have been a hindrance. Some diffusion or dilution of the signal might have occurred, somehow. Another factor to be taken into account: two of the siblings, it quickly became apparent, were not in accord with the others. Two of those who were present, that is. Of the absentees, two were overtly hostile to the endeavour, and the other was not prepared to travel up from Kent. Lucas suggested that the resistance of the non-attenders could have reduced the chances of success. Certainly the presence of the sceptics made things difficult for him. Emanating suspicion throughout the evening, they polluted the environment with a kind of white noise, Lucas explained. It was almost impossible to achieve receptivity in such circumstances. One would not ask a musician – a master of a delicate instrument; a flautist, say – to perform in a tin-roofed shed in a downpour; this situation was comparable, he said. All that came through – but it came through strongly – was a sense of something unresolved, a disagreement of some seriousness, involving the father and one of the daughters and ‘perhaps’ one of the absentees. Lucas said nothing to the group about the discord that had come to his attention. In the absence of any countervailing good news, he had thought it better to report that nothing had come to him. Further proof of his kindness and honesty. ‘It would have been so simple for him to lie,’ my mother said to me, overlooking the fact that, by Lucas’s own account, he had in fact lied to his clients. But what she meant is that Lucas could have easily and convincingly feigned the transmission of an uplifting message from husband to widow. A benign untruth would have made the woman happy, and secured a good payment. The woman, despite the disappointment of the outcome, had wanted to pay Lucas for his trouble, as did some of the offspring. He had, after all, driven a long way and paid for a hotel room. Lucas would take nothing, not even a contribution towards the cost of the petrol. He had been unable to help; therefore, there should be no reward.

  Lucas’s self-denying attitude towards remuneration seems to have enhanced his prestige with those who called on him. He never charged anyone for his services. If people wished to make a voluntary donation, he might accept, according to circumstances. Sometimes, if he thought the offered sum too generous, he would take only part of it, I was told. It was ungenerous of me, my mother said, to point out that Lucas himself was the source of this testimonial to his virtue. His pricing strategy was a canny one, I suggested; after all, none of his customers would want to be thought miserly. The word ‘customer’ was inappropriate, said my mother.

  The humility was beneficial to Lucas’s image. He seemed to have taken some vow of poverty. This was indicative of integrity, an integrity akin to that of the priest, and of the scientist, as opposed to the presumptuousness of some who lay claim to spiritual distinction. Each session was an exploration, a test, an experiment. As with any true experiment, the outcome could never be certain. Making a connection with those who have left us was not like attaching a hose to a tap, as some would have us think.

  The faith of Mrs Pedley, for example, seemed in no way weakened when Lucas failed to hear anything from Mr Pedley. Though he had been provided with a variety of items that had been of acute significance to the departed husband (pen, watch, mother’s locket, photo of Mrs Pedley in her wedding dress), these conductors did not attract a single strike. Lucas became conscious of an aura of love and happiness, akin to a change in the air pressure before a storm, but no words. The aura appears to have been enough for Mrs Pedley. For a full four hours Lucas had made himself available, and she was grateful for the effort. She seemed to imagine the afterlife as some sort of celestial grassland of perpetual mild sunlight, on which the dead all milled around, in a stupor of contentment. What were the odds of finding one face amid that unimaginable multitude? Mr Pedley had died three years earlier, so was almost certainly too far back from the foreground by now. Three hundred million people had followed him into the hereafter in the intervening period. That is one hell of a crowd.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Lucas said to me, ‘I look at the words that have come to me, and I cannot work out what they might mean. Sometimes nobody in the room can make sense of it. It happens,’ he said, opening his hands in acceptance of the mystery. There were several ready explanations: playfulness on the part of the deceased; obstructiveness; or Lucas might have misconstrued. ‘And sometimes,’ he said, ‘the message really isn’t worth reading.’ The deeply obtuse do not suddenly become perceptive people after being translated to the beyond. ‘With some people, you could send them on a tour of China, and when they got back you could ask them what they had made of it all, and they’d say: “Big place. Didn’
t much like the food.” And that would be it, pretty well. Nothing to say. Same with some of the dead,’ he said, laughing. ‘Being dead is lost on them.’

  •

  Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in 1924 to his friend Oliver Lodge, enclosed with his letter a photograph taken at the previous year’s Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph. Lodge, like Doyle, had lost a son in the Great War. A fog of some sort was visible in the picture. Within this fog Doyle could discern the faces of some of the fallen. ‘My son is certainly there and, I think, my nephew,’ he wrote. Lodge, a key figure in the development of wireless telegraphy, was a Christian Spiritualist, and for two years served as the president of the Society for Psychical Research. After the war he attended several séances in the hope of receiving messages from Raymond, his son. Messages were duly received. In 1916 he published Raymond, or Life and Death, which became a bestseller.