Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Two or three times’ he came into the house when they returned from the walk. A disquieting incident occurred after one of these visits. My mother was turning the pages of a photo album, and at a picture of her parents Lucas put out a hand to make her pause. It was the picture taken near Glastonbury Tor, by an unknown person, during their honeymoon; the tandem is propped against a post beside them; the Tor rises in the background. Lucas took the album from my mother, to examine the picture closely; he examined it as if he were a detective and had reason to think that this grainy and colourless image might contain a significant clue. Anyone might have worked out that the woman in the photograph was my mother’s mother, and from this it followed that the man was my grandfather. But Lucas somehow extracted from the picture much more information than this. ‘You’d have thought he had known her,’ said my mother, referring to the detail with which he was able to describe my grandmother’s personality. He warmed to her, as people generally had done when she was alive. Her husband did not seem to come into focus to the same degree, but salient aspects were sensed – the erratic temper, for example, and the tendency to moroseness, along with the devotion to his wife.

  This character-reading, however, was not the most remarkable thing. The shock came when Lucas said, peering into the face of my mother’s mother: ‘But there had been someone else, for her, hadn’t there?’ And this was true. So, now, I learned from my mother that my grandmother’s first love – her great love, she had come to understand – had been a young man named Harry Watkins, who had died at Calais in 1940, before they could become engaged. My grandfather, Harry’s closest friend, had comforted the bereaved young woman, and the comforting had soon become something else. ‘It wasn’t a bad marriage. About average. A bit lopsided,’ said my mother. ‘They were good parents.’ But Harry was irreplaceable, as her mother had confessed, some time after the death of her husband. And Lucas had read this in the photograph – not Harry’s name, but the essence of the story, the sadness of it, though there was no visible sadness in the picture.

  It made her feel queasy, what Lucas had done, she admitted. It was out of the question that she might, in some forgotten conversation, have mentioned my grandmother’s first love. After all, she had not told me about it until now.

  •

  For many years, Lucas had struggled with disappointment. On going to university, he had imagined that he was ‘setting off on a journey’ that would make a poet of him. By way of apprenticeship, he had committed Eliot’s Four Quartets to memory. ‘The whole thing,’ he impressed upon me. He had written quantities of philosophical poetry – ‘What I took to be poetry,’ he qualified, in affectionate mockery of the pretentious young Lucas. An obscure and soon extinct magazine had published an excerpt from a work in progress. ‘They would have published almost anything,’ he told me. The delusion lasted until around the age of twenty, and then he came to see his poems for what they were: anaemic pastiches; impersonations. A few scraps of his writing remained stuck in his memory, but he would not embarrass us both by quoting them. He still knew the entire Four Quartets by heart, he said, even though he no longer cared for ‘all that sermonising’. He recited twenty or thirty lines in demonstration; it did indeed seem that he could have continued for some time.

  Even Callum had been disappointed with himself, Kathleen had once revealed, to Lucas’s surprise. Lucas had always envied Callum, as he had envied Kathleen, he told me. Dedicated to his work and to his wife, Callum exemplified the integrity of the true artisan; he had an admirable evenness of temper, and a particular kind of pride – a ‘humble pride’, to quote Lucas. Yet Callum, like Lucas, had once been ambitious for a different kind of success. From his talent for carving, significant art would in time ensue, he had thought; his talent was the seed – with study, and practice, and encouragement, the art would grow from it, as surely as the growth of a well-nurtured plant. He applied himself; family and teachers encouraged him.

  Three years were spent at college, and at the end of those three years Callum knew what he was: he was a carver of stone and wood, and he respected only the old ways of working – giving form, by hand, to resistant and durable materials. A young man of his proficiency, he was told by a sympathetic tutor, would not struggle to find work. So accomplished a figurative sculptor would readily find commissions. But the prospect of earning a living by making likenesses of wealthy people did not appeal to Callum. And there was a more substantial problem: a backward-looking artist, he knew, was a contradiction in terms. He was, then, not an artist in the deepest sense of the word; this was what he had to accept, and he soon came to accept it, with less difficulty than he had anticipated, having taken up what proved to be his true métier – letter-cutting. Once in a while he would undertake something modestly sculptural: the carving of a bird on a slate sign, for example, or a small figure to replace a corroded original above the door of a church. But he was not an artist. He had an eye for the composition of beautiful lettering, and his hand could shape, unerringly, any letters that he could draw. The design of inscriptions, however, was the extent of his vision; he had no ideas.

  It irked him sometimes, though, that so many widely lauded artists had no ideas either – or no ideas that merited attention. It could be dismaying that these people had no command of their materials; that they depended on the labour of hired helpers to fabricate the things that bore their name. ‘Making their name is more important for them than making the work,’ said Lucas, speaking for Callum. It was a summer evening; the sun was no longer visible; we considered the inscription that Callum had cut into the tablet of limestone that was set into the garden wall – Domi manere convenit felicibus. The lettering was so fine, it might have been unearthed on the Appian Way, as Lucas remarked.

  Having been jemmied out of the wall by Erin’s father, the tablet is now an ornament in her sister’s garden, I believe.

  •

  I remember Lucas in full advice-giving mode; the grandiloquent gestures were augmented by the capacious sleeves of the big blue linen shirt – a birthday gift from Erin, worn on days of recreation throughout that summer. We were in deckchairs in the garden, each with a glass of Erin’s special lemonade. I had made reference to my thwarted ambition: I would have become an academic, had it not been for my inability to come up with any substantial ideas of my own, I told them – hoping, I’m sure, to gain credit for not sparing myself from criticism. ‘Originality is overrated,’ Lucas ruled. Besides, the academic world, though full of very intelligent people (‘by definition’, he conceded), was a ‘world unto itself’, a ‘small world’ in certain ways, ‘in the ways that matter’. The limitations of this world, as seen by Lucas, were the customary ones: hypertrophy of the brain, he seemed to believe, necessarily entails some atrophication of the essential human qualities. For every degree of intellectual excellence, there is a countervailing degree of social or emotional incompetence. I lacked much inclination to take issue. It was pleasant to recline in the sunlight, amid the profusion of flowers. There was no doubting the generosity of Lucas; the sincerity of his concern. I surrendered to the voice of Lucas, as I surrendered to the warmth of the day.

  Lucas understood the appeal of a life devoted to study. ‘I do. I really do,’ he said. To continue with his studies would have been the obvious thing to do, in his twenties; it would have been a decision that was in fact no decision at all. ‘I was good for nothing else,’ he joked. But one afternoon, an afternoon in the spring term, he had been sitting in the café on campus, with some friends, and something had happened that had made him choose a different path. He was seated at a window, and from this window he could look down, across a small courtyard, into the office of a lecturer who had taught Lucas earlier in the year. He was one of those who had encouraged Lucas to consider a postgraduate course. In the centre of the courtyard was a fishpond, shaded by a cherry tree. It was an ‘enchanting composition’, said Lucas: the pink blossom, sun-struck; the red fish cruising just
under the surface of the green-black water; the white paving stones. The lecturer’s desk was positioned against a wall, at a right angle to the window, under shelves on which books had been jammed to fill every last bit of space. Not enough of the sunlight got into the office, it seemed; a lamp was on, and a mess of papers lay in its light. The lecturer, reading one of these papers, put his hands to his temples, forming blinkers; his face was close to the pages. It was like looking down on a hermit in his cave, Lucas told me. Then the lecturer turned to look out at the courtyard. The man’s eyes seemed to see nothing delightful there. His face, his posture, his office – it all presented an image of drudgery, of ‘non-life’, said Lucas. He was aware, he told me, that he was to a great extent the creator of this image. Someone else, seeing the same man at the same time, might have seen instead an inspiring image of concentrated intellect. It was possible that the lecturer was in the process of refining a piece of work that would resound through whatever province of academia he had elected to serve. But Lucas saw what he saw, and it had a great impact. The scene spoke to him, like a fable, and what it told him was that he had to get out into the world. What he would do there was not at all evident, and this lack of clarity, he told me, became, immediately, as he looked down on the cherry blossom and the fish gliding within the water, something like a calling. ‘I had to choose the unknown,’ he said.

  He smiled benignly, appreciatively, in the direction of the apple tree, as if the finches that were frisking amid the leaves were emblematic of everything that the academic is obliged to renounce. ‘Do you know what I did, for a while?’ he asked; of course, I did not. ‘I fitted carpets,’ he said, hoisting the eyebrows. ‘It’s true. I fitted carpets.’ I would have displayed the requisite astonishment. Lucas had needed to ‘clear his mind’, he told me, and this undemanding work had allowed him to do that. There was a sense of reward in being of use to people – considerably more people than would have benefited from anything that might have come out of his studies. And he had found the work satisfying, in itself. For several years he had fitted carpets, and he had never ceased to get pleasure from the way a room was changed by what he did – not just the appearance of it, but the air, and not just the scent of the fresh material but the way in which sound was muted by the altered room, the way it expired. He was ‘acutely attuned to atmospheres’, Lucas told me, with no self-praise; he could have been disclosing a not particularly remarkable idiosyncrasy of his body, such as being double-jointed. It was a pleasure, too, to spend time in the houses of strangers, he said. Rooms can be read like faces, like pages of text. Pictures of course tell one a great deal – not just by their subject, but also by where they are displayed, and how they are displayed. Furniture is informative – its style, its age, its placement, its quantity, its condition. ‘One can interpret dust and damage,’ Lucas pronounced; the poetical phrase had not arisen spontaneously. He talked about a house in which tracks had been worn into the old carpet in the living room, from the door to the armchair that was set squarely in front of the television, and from the television to the window; from every wall, photographs of the husband looked on; the photos had become as pale as old watercolours.

  It was ‘good for the soul’ to learn some sort of skill, Lucas stated. Carpet-laying was a skill, albeit a small one; it had done his soul a small but measurable amount of good. There was, I believe, some mention of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘the real world’. Lucas spoke of his reverence for Callum and Kathleen, for their mastery of their crafts, and their humility; he assumed a voice of humility in talking of them. We admired once more the lettering that Callum had carved into the bar of stone set into the wall. Lucas could hear, as clearly as a song, the sound of Callum at work: three quick taps; a momentary pause; three quick taps; a pause; three quick taps. The rhythm was constant; one could have danced to it. Any mistake would have been irretrievable, but Callum’s touch was unerring and light; ‘definitive’ was a word that Lucas used. Kathleen had likewise possessed this absolute precision and economy of action. ‘Such certainty,’ Lucas marvelled. This I remember – ‘Such certainty,’ looking up into the sky, with a sigh that was tinged with envy, which may or may not have been sincere.

  Nothing more was said about the uncertain, non-substantial métier of Lucas. Erin came out to us, bearing plates. What she had prepared, I cannot remember. It would have been of restaurant quality, as ever. Lucas thanked her, and the gratitude had force. After Erin had put the plates in front of us, Lucas took her hand and touched his lips to the back of it. In all the years I knew them together, not once, I think, did I see him kiss her face. ‘You are a genius, my girl,’ he told her.

  •

  When Lucas arrived in her life, her ‘story suddenly made sense’, said Erin. Other people had often told her who she was, but Lucas had made it possible for her to discover her true story for herself. This was said after another meal, and what I remember was that she glanced at Lucas as she said that her story made sense now, but her glance was not that of a lover; neither was the intonation of her voice. She spoke the words not quite as an acolyte, but with respect; not quite as though Lucas were a teacher, but in acknowledgement that she had learned a great deal from him. And Lucas accepted the tribute with a small nod; not with self-satisfaction; simply in confirmation of what Erin had said, as if what she had said was merely something like: ‘Lucas bought this dress for me.’

  •

  Something I learned from Lucas: a delicious phrase – Delectatio morosa. It could be applied to my situation he said; the reference was to my preoccupation with Gwendolyn, and my reluctance to act decisively. Defined by Lucas, it signified the delight one takes in idle imagination. I have found a theologian who, citing Aquinas, writes of a ‘complacent dallying’ in voluptuous thoughts; a sin is committed if no effort is made to eliminate these delightful imaginings. Elsewhere, Delectatio morosa is defined as a pleasure ‘in the delay of satisfaction’. Another writer asserts that Delectatio morosa entails ‘rumination on one’s own worthlessness’.

  •

  Next time I was home for the weekend, said Lucas, Erin would cook for us again; it was more a notification than a suggestion.

  The meal was memorable: crisply fried slices of potato, with roasted onions and garlic, and sautéed spinach, poached eggs, cream and nutmeg, and a slathering of melted cheese. Again, Lucas congratulated the chef at length. Again, Erin was modest: if Lucas were inclined to cook, he would do it just as well, she told us. There was no suggestion that she resented his lack of inclination. That was simply how things were: Erin took great pleasure from cooking, and Lucas did not.

  But what I remember most acutely of that evening is that, by the end, it had become apparent that I had allowed myself to be misled by Erin’s apparent placidity. There was an episode of assertion, arising from a conversation – three-way; my mother barely contributed – about Lucas’s renunciation of meat. ‘Show them the video you showed me,’ Lucas said to Erin. After watching this video, he assured us, we would understand. Erin resisted. ‘Not now,’ she said, and there was a surprising force to the words. Her reluctance was overcome, however; inevitably. She brought in the laptop, and we watched the video. A donkey lay upon a mat of straw, in a corner of a barn; one could readily attribute dejection to this animal. Subtitles informed us that the donkey had for a year shared its stall and the yard with a horse that had belonged to the daughter of the family; when the daughter had left home, the horse had been sold. The horse had been collected by its new owners three weeks ago, and since then the donkey had not left its corner; it had eaten almost nothing; it was in mourning. And so, we read, the horse had been bought back, and we were about to see what happened when it returned to its true home. We hear a truck approaching and stopping, then the unfastening of a tailgate, then hooves on a ramp. At the sound of the hooves, the donkey lifts its head; it listens; it stands up, shakily. The camera follows the donkey to the stable door, so we see, in the moment that the donkey sees it
, the horse standing in the sunlit yard, at the water trough, drinking. Slowly the donkey crosses the yard; horse turns, and the donkey trots the last few yards, to press its muzzle to the muzzle of the horse. Minutes later, both are eating, side by side; an hour later, horse and donkey are running together in the paddock.

  Erin, having pressed the heel of a thumb to each eye, said to me, as if she were a nurse conducting some sort of health check: ‘Do you think this is sentimental?’ Before I could answer, she went on: ‘OK. You could say it’s a tear-jerker. It is. But you have to ask yourself what’s going on here.’ To dismiss the video on the grounds of sentimentality was to excuse oneself from addressing the issue. ‘Only one question matters: Can it suffer?’ she told us. The vehemence was new and irresistible. Lucas said nothing, but a small smile expressed something like pride.

  At home, my mother professed admiration for Erin’s strength of feeling, even if it had not perhaps been entirely appropriate to start ‘preaching’ to one’s guests at the end of the evening. She had things to say about Lucas. As one gets older, there is a general loss of mobility, in the mind as much as in the body. ‘Your mind settles,’ she said, ‘like the contents settling in a sack.’ This, she thought, was what the ‘thing with Erin’ was ‘all about’ – Lucas needed her to shake him up a bit, she said. ‘Just to be clear, though,’ she concluded, going up to bed, ‘I have no intention of living on potatoes and cheese for the rest of my days. You can forget about that idea.’

  •

  ‘But when were you happiest?’ Erin asked. As I recall, I answered instantly, because the question had come from her. There were so many possibilities, I said, scanning the roof, as if seeing there, arrayed like the heavenly host, the images of a hundred days of happiness.