Her naivety was radiant.
When the family gathered around the table, Lucas made contact directly with Tom. Through Tom, he saw a scene: an expanse of tarmac; a large area of grass; a lighthouse – specifically, a lighthouse next to something like a fortress, a small fortress; a lighthouse painted with black and white hoops. He didn’t recognise the locale, but the family knew where it was, and they knew what Lucas was seeing when he saw a beach of pebbles, in darkness, with an obelisk and another obelisk behind it, a bigger one, some kind of monument – he was seeing where Tom had been found.
But what had Tom said to them, via Lucas? Erin apologised – she couldn’t tell me that. The tears informed me that the message conveyed by Lucas had been profound.
It was a significant evening. It marked a new closeness, between us all. The telling of the story was like the opening of a gate.
•
A month after the death of Kathleen, at home from university for Easter, I spoke to Lucas in the street. Amiable, in no obvious way different from the Lucas of the previous year, he made no mention of Kathleen until, at parting, he said: ‘We could play a game. In memoriam.’ What this meant, I thought, was that Lucas, now alone, required company for an evening.
In the house, it was as though Kathleen might return at any moment. Nothing was different, other than her absence. By the back door, her gardening shoes stood on a mat of newspaper; a cardigan was draped on the newel post. In preparation for the game, Lucas made a pot of coffee; he assembled a plate of toast. He moved around the kitchen as if being appraised by the spirit of Kathleen, as if the sequence and form of each action had to be precisely as it had always been.
There was some conversation, a little of it about Kathleen, most of that about her work. Mid-game, considering his move, he sat up from the board to turn aside, towards the bowl that still occupied the small round table; it always occupied that table. His gaze rose from the bowl, to roam in the air of the room. ‘She’s here,’ he said, in the tone of a naturalist of greater experience and expertise than his companion, intuiting with absolute certainty the presence of the hidden creature that they have come to observe. Then, with a smile for me: ‘Unfortunately, she’s not helping me out.’ He would lose; he always lost; it was his role to lose to the younger man.
‘One day, one day,’ he would sometimes threaten, at the end of the game, examining the disposition of the pieces. His demeanour was one of appreciation and bewilderment, like a man in a museum examining a stone that is carved with letters of a beautiful and incomprehensible script. He would play and lose with good humour; the development of the contest, of his disadvantage, intrigued him, as might the inevitable outcome of a complex experiment. But once, having – as I was aware – watched me for some time, as I studied the array of the stones, he said, when I had finally made my move: ‘Is victory always absolutely necessary?’ He regarded me steadily, for two or three seconds, then laughed, and turned his attention to his failing position.
Lucas was correct. Some of the pleasure of these games was the pleasure of winning. But the ritual in itself was pleasurable: the gloss of the amber wood, the tenuous scent of it, the ticking of the tiny stones, the silences. It gave pleasure, also, to show consideration for Lucas, now that his companion had gone, even if it was not certain that Lucas was in any need of the gift of my company. The invitation to play was always made lightly; occasionally I was not free on the suggested evening, and this caused no disappointment for Lucas, or none that I could see. Sometimes, on leaving, I sensed that he thought the game had been more to my benefit than to his; that he had things to do now, which he had set aside for the evening, to please me. From my window I would see him in the garden, seated, not reading, not looking with any intent, not overtly dejected; simply Lucas on his own, in the condition that his vocation entailed; an image of philosophical solitude, which perhaps he wanted me to observe.
With the arrival of Erin, the games ceased for some time; when they resumed, they occurred less regularly than before. A confession must be made: there was a satisfaction in being seen to overcome Lucas, although Erin showed little interest in the contest. Entering the room, she might ask how the game was going. ‘The massacre is proceeding,’ Lucas answered one evening, and she nodded, and – I remember – gave Lucas a small smile, as though she believed his defeat to be deliberate.
Once I suggested that she might play. Lucas said to me: ‘Erin is not one for games.’ This meant nothing more than that Erin did not care for this sort of pastime; perhaps there was a slight tone of regret that this was so.
Erin laughed and took up the phrase: ‘No, I am not one for games,’ she agreed, with self-mocking self-importance. Then added, with a glance that seemed to accuse me of some injustice: ‘I just like the pretty patterns.’
•
One evening, some time before Erin’s residence, I was playing badly. ‘There’s a risk I’m going to win this one,’ said Lucas. He looked up from the board and said: ‘Something is on your mind.’
A girl was on my mind – a second-year, whose room faced mine across the court. I was dithering over making an approach, I told Lucas, then I gave him her name: Gwendolyn. And at this a semi-smile appeared, and the movement of an eyebrow signified a slight and pleasing surprise.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
Gwendolyn, Lucas informed me, after minimal reluctance, had been the name of a girl that my father had known, before marrying my mother; it was to be understood that the relationship had not been trivial. Perhaps I was to think that there was some significance to this coincidence, but the coincidence was a matter of indifference to me. What concerned me was that I had never heard of this Gwendolyn, whereas Lucas had. During the time that my father had been with us, Lucas had only been a visitor, occasionally, at the house of Kathleen and Callum; there had never been any reason to think that he had known my father in any meaningful sense. The only explanation, then, was that my mother for some reason had told him about this Gwendolyn; and for some reason had not told me.
‘That’s strange,’ I responded, as if there might indeed be some occult dimension to the recurrence of the name.
There was little more that Lucas could tell me about my father’s Gwendolyn, he regretted. He believed that her family had owned a shop and that she had been very attractive. ‘I think he was rather fond of her,’ he said, as though talking of a broken-hearted friend of his youth. It was not true, obviously, that he knew no more than this.
When, that evening, I mentioned to my mother that Lucas had surprised me, there was no immediate reaction. She nodded, and gave the name some thought, then seemed to see, vaguely, the figure to whom the name had belonged. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, as the figure became more distinct. ‘The sporty girl.’
She had known her only by sight, she told me. A lot of people knew Gwendolyn by sight. The legs were the main attraction, as she recalled. ‘Very long, and usually on show. I envied the legs, I imagine,’ she conceded. Other than that, Gwendolyn had not left much of an impression. My father had been ‘seeing’ her for three or four months, at most, and then Gwendolyn had moved to another town – somewhere in the Midlands, possibly. It had not been anything serious. Gwendolyn, she thought, was not a girl with whom anyone could be very serious. Saying this, my mother’s voice, momentarily, had something of a smirk about it. ‘He had a few girlfriends before he met me. An attractive man,’ she said, wistful, for once. ‘And I had a few boyfriends, hard though that might be to imagine,’ she added, gesturing at herself with both hands turned inward, descending from shoulders to hips, and her face fixed as though disgruntled with the body that had been allotted to her.
•
Taking her place at the table one evening, during the Easter break, my mother remarked on the care with which I had presented the food, and the placement of the cutlery and the beaker of water. She was reminded of the way Kathleen had always set the table. The single flower in t
he slender white vase was a Kathleen-like touch, she remarked. The poise of Kathleen was recalled; the idiosyncratic clothes, which would have looked drab and baggy on anyone else, but on Kathleen were subtle and stylish. My mother would be happy if she could grow old with anything like the dignity with which the elderly Kathleen had carried herself through the last years of her life, she said. There was no mention of the gossip-attracting cohabitation with Lucas. This admiration of Kathleen was an implicit withholding of admiration from the young woman who now occupied the house.
The subject of Kathleen having been exhausted for the time being, a lull ensued. Then my mother smiled, inviting me to enquire as to what it was that had amused her. She was remembering the morning she had thought that the house had been burgled while we slept. The lights were on in the living room and things had been moved from their customary places. But nothing had been knocked over or damaged. The lamp stood a few inches from where it should have been; the bowl of fruit was now on the floor; an armchair was closer to the wall than it had been when she went to bed. In the kitchen, too, the lights were on. Every drawer was open, and open to exactly the same extent. The chairs around the table had all been pulled out a few inches, squarely, apparently with care. And on the tabletop, every knife, fork and spoon had been laid out, in three perfectly straight lines, aligned with the long axis of the table, with the knives uppermost, then the forks, then the spoons, organised by size, diminishing from the left. ‘You did it all without waking yourself up,’ she marvelled. ‘Then you crept back to bed, and I didn’t hear a thing.’
I know this incident only through her retelling of it. It seems that I went walkabout several times in the years that followed the departure of my father, but in my memory all that remains of that period of delinquency is a recollection of lying on the floor of the living room, amid saucepans, and another of being carried into the house by a man who was not my father. ‘But I remember being found outside,’ I tell her.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, putting her hands to her face, as if in the after-shock of that night. ‘How on earth did you stay asleep? You were frozen.’
Once again the traumatic night was revived: the knock on the door, past eleven o’clock; her son, who had gone to bed hours earlier, and whose bedroom door was closed, was now presented to her in the arms of Mr Robertson, asleep. I had been found a hundred yards from the house, heading into town. Mr Robertson had come upon me as he walked home from the White Swan. On catching sight of a small person in the distant gloom – a small person wearing what seemed to be a striped suit – he had not immediately understood that he was seeing a boy in pyjamas. When Mr Robertson had spoken to me, I had answered him with nonsense, and my eyes were half-shut.
‘He was a nice man,’ my mother remarked.
Now, a new nuance was introduced to the familiar story. An interesting possibility was raised by the slight alteration in my mother’s demeanour when she told me this; a suggestion of fondness was to be heard in the phrase ‘a nice man’.
I took the plates to the sink; above the sound of the running water I asked, addressing the wall: ‘Is there something you’d like to tell me?’
‘About what?’ she asked.
‘About Mr Robertson.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Might you care to develop the idea of Mr Robertson’s niceness?’
‘In what way?’
‘In whatever way you choose.’
‘He was nice to me,’ she said. A game had commenced; she was willing to be teased.
I glanced at her, then reapplied my attention to the dishes. ‘I have the impression that there is more to be said.’
‘Not really. He liked me.’
‘As do many people. You are likeable.’
‘He knew our situation. He was kind.’
At no point during that evening did the possibility of Lucas occur to me.
•
It was shortly before Lucas’s birthday, and Erin told us that it was difficult to surprise him, because Lucas, when he put his mind to it, could tell what she was thinking. He would look at her in a particular way, and it was as if he were gazing through a window into fog, and whatever she was thinking was like a person becoming recognisable as she approached the window. For example, a few days earlier, apropos of nothing, he had looked up while they were eating, and told her that she was thinking about Venice, which was exactly what she had been thinking about, only a few minutes earlier. A while ago they had talked about the idea of a holiday in Venice, but she hadn’t said anything about it recently – certainly not in the previous day or two. Yet Lucas had known that the idea of Venice had just popped into her head. ‘It’s a bit creepy, sometimes,’ she said, and Lucas glanced at her; he seemed uncomfortable for an instant.
‘What?’ she demanded, smiling at him. ‘Not surprising, is it?’
My mother had listened to her with an attention that had some condescension in it; she might have been listening to a story related by a child who was not quite as enchanting as her parents believed her to be. This was, I think, the last time the four of us ate together. She turned to Lucas and said: ‘So can you tell me what I’m thinking now?’
Lucas looked at her studyingly, as if examining a painting that might have been a copy. ‘Possibly,’ he said. The examination was prolonged for a few seconds more. ‘Yes,’ he said, becoming confident. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Go on then,’ my mother challenged him, in the tone of someone dealing with a boaster, but a personable one.
He shifted forward, put his elbows on the table to prop his head, and directed his gaze, full-force, into her eyes. She held them wide open, as though for the scrutiny of an ophthalmologist.
It was embarrassing. Erin touched my hand to divert me; we should respect the intimacy of the procedure.
‘Relax,’ Lucas instructed my mother, who was already relaxed. She blinked three or four times, and exhaled, signifying compliance. ‘All right,’ said Lucas. He urged her to concentrate on what she was seeing with her inner eye. He peered, as if through the chinks in a wall of loose stones, then a smile grew. ‘I think I know,’ he told her. ‘Flowers, yes?’
My mother nodded, frowning.
Further scrutiny was conducted. ‘Specifically, peonies,’ Lucas decided. ‘The peonies by the front door.’
My mother paid him with a gratifying display of astonishment. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head, like a woman waking up. ‘Amazing,’ she said. Then: ‘Try Joshua.’
I demurred, and Lucas was very prompt to excuse me. ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ he said, whereupon I changed my mind.
We followed the same rigmarole: relax; picture something; concentrate. While my inner vision was appreciating the face of Erin, Lucas trained his gaze into my head. A narrowing of his eyes suggested that, with this one, he wasn’t getting a clear view through the gap in the wall. He smiled questioningly, encouragingly, but I was not to be encouraged. ‘No,’ he said, surrendering. It was not, however, an admission of defeat; it was an expression of disappointment. He could not understand why this young man, his neighbour’s son, should be putting up such resistance. ‘You don’t want me to know,’ he explained.
My mother was embarrassed: by me, not by Lucas. Back home, I suggested that Lucas had prompted her in some way. ‘He didn’t say anything about any flowers,’ she pointed out.
‘Not that we remember,’ I answered. Anyway, the prompting had not necessarily been verbal. The peonies were, after all, rather luscious and conspicuous; she would have taken note of them as we waited for the door to be opened; given her interest in gardening, he would have known that she was impressed; he could have directed her attention to them, without her being aware. ‘I could have been thinking of anything,’ she told me. ‘Why do you have to try to explain it away? It’s what you always do.’ Rather than discuss what she had just said, and what Lucas had done, she wen
t to bed.
•
When I left home, for university, Lucas was immensely kind to my mother, she told me. Of course, Kathleen was kind too. Kathleen sympathised, but she could not empathise as Lucas did; she was not a maternal woman. Yet Lucas understood, without being told, that what she was experiencing was a kind of grief. Now alone in the house, she was surprised at the vulnerability that came with the situation. Her thoughts became morbid. At work or out shopping, she would suddenly, with no prompting, find herself imagining catastrophes that would leave her son or herself bereft. As if she had aged two decades overnight, she took elaborate care when crossing the road; she drove the car as cautiously as someone who had passed her test only a week before. Her heart would flutter when the phone rang. To shorten the evenings, she went to bed too early. Time often passed too slowly when she was on her own, and yet there were days when she would panic, because it was as if she had been living for twenty years with a wall around her, and that wall had now been breached by her son’s departure, and the days were flowing away too fast.
Lucas’s company was beneficial, she told me. Occasionally they would take a stroll together, and she found that something of his ‘inner calmness’ was transmitted to her wordlessly. He had an aura of contentment that was not the same thing as complacency; it was like the contentment of a monk, she would have me believe.
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