Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  One candidate made itself prominent, a day that was by then eight years old – or, to be precise, fifteen minutes of that day, at most, around 2pm, late July, at the abbey of Le Thoronet. The exactitude was expected of me. With similar detail I set the scene: cloudless sky; temperature in the high eighties; the air scented by heated earth, heated stone, the wood of an ancient olive tree, and a trace of herbs. Already I had spent an hour in the abbey. The building had raised my spirits to a high pitch of receptivity and contentment, or words to that effect. I talked about the perfect severity of the Cistercian architecture – a building of exemplary simplicity, devoid of all inessentials, charged with pure light, et cetera, et cetera. Now I was sitting outside the church, on a low wall. A lizard, ten feet away, crouched motionless in the heat; the ceaseless and unvarying sound of the cicadas augmented a sense of the suspension of time. I was leaning against the pale stone front of the church. The grain of the stone, the slight yet infinite variations of colours in every block – the wall absorbed my attention like a painting, I told my audience. Then, the element that raised the experience to a plane of even higher exaltation: the music. Four men – two quite young, two not – had gone into the church ten minutes before, each carrying a score. Now they were singing. What they were singing I did not know until later – it was a piece written in Paris, in the thirteenth century, to be sung in Notre Dame. I never knew what words were being sung, but the spirit of them – a spirit of serenity and celebration – was, I reported, ‘overwhelming’. I corrected myself: the sound was overwhelming. The church itself was, to an extent, the conductor of the music, and a participant: the massive stone walls and the plainness of the interior, I would have explained, created an echo which obliged the singers to keep the tempo slow. From the doorway of the church, out into the heat and sunlight, came the long slow flow of the four indivisible voices – nothing I had heard since that afternoon had affected me so deeply, I confessed to Erin, and to Lucas. Those minutes had been an extraordinary surge of happiness; of joy, even. They had made the day one of those days that makes you want to thank somebody, I said.

  I had been verbose; perhaps precious. For a few seconds, nobody had anything to say; one might have thought that I had made a confession of quite a different kind.

  Eventually Erin asked: ‘Were you there on your own? Or with a girlfriend?’

  I had been with my mother, I answered.

  Erin nodded; something had been confirmed, she appeared to believe.

  Lucas remembered the trip that I had undertaken with my mother. ‘They drove all round France, down to the Alps,’ he explained to Erin. He even recalled the principal points of the tour.

  While I told Erin whatever she wanted to know about our tour of the country, Lucas observed me, as though I were occupying the psychiatrist’s couch. Now, when Erin had heard enough, he finally remarked: ‘Interesting.’ What was interesting was what I had told them earlier, about the afternoon at Le Thoronet. Once again, he said, I had revealed a ‘hankering’ that I seemed to be determined to resist. Was it not significant that of all the days I could have picked, I had picked that particular one, at that particular place? Why, he wondered, had the music – music of a special kind – been the ingredient that had made the episode one of ‘transcendence’? I was of the spirit’s party, and did not know it, he joked. I had a yearning for a time when God was still alive.

  But Lucas too had misunderstood. The pleasure of that moment at Le Thoronet had been entirely of that moment. The sound and the sunlight and the building had combined to produce a strong reaction, but the state of mind that had been produced by this reaction was not the same as the one from which the music had been created. In my reaction there had been no yearning for a time I imagined to be better than this; I had imagined no such thing. This was the only time possible; there had been no transcendence. The past had become present as nothing more than a ghost. ‘A ghost of otherworldly sound,’ I said to Lucas.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Lucas. ‘Perhaps.’ I was to see that he was unpersuaded.

  Erin smiled, seeing that Lucas had entangled me. The smile invited me to argue my way out.

  Instead, I invited her to nominate her day of maximum happiness.

  ‘The day I came here,’ she announced, immediately, with a gesture that encompassed the garden, the sky, the house. Then, looking at Lucas, she said to him, almost in the tone of a parent: ‘It’s OK. You don’t have to join in.’

  Lucas nodded his thanks for the exemption.

  ‘But you could, if you wanted to,’ she coaxed.

  Again Lucas nodded, but this time thoughtfully; he was assessing the possible cost of answering truthfully. ‘It would be the same as yours,’ he decided.

  ‘He has to say that,’ Erin told me.

  ‘Or, maybe,’ Lucas went on, considering, ‘the day that Laura Henson kissed me.’

  Leaning back as though from an unpleasant and sudden smell, Erin asked, blinking: ‘Laura who?’

  ‘Henson,’ answered Lucas. ‘Laura Henson.’ He made a wistful cadence of the name.

  ‘And who might Laura Henson have been?’ The curiosity had a particle of annoyance in it.

  ‘First love. But it didn’t work out. I was too young,’ Lucas lamented. He gazed into the sky, in a mist of regret. ‘Nine,’ he confided to me. ‘She was already nine. I was only eight. Too young,’ he said, and shrugged.

  After a quick examination of his face, she decided, uncertainly: ‘You made her up.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Lucas. ‘It was a Dante and Beatrice situation, but with an older girl,’ he said, raising his head and turning slightly, into a pose of grave nobility, but Erin was not to be amused.

  •

  A few days after the day at Le Thoronet, on our way home, we stopped for a night in Bourges.

  I stayed in the cathedral some time after my mother had seen enough; we would meet later, at the hotel, before eating at a restaurant that was more expensive than our customary choices – her compensation for being required to accompany me into so many churches. She thought she might take a stroll down to the river; we drew a route onto a map of the town.

  An hour later, I came out of the cathedral, into air that was warm and bright; I too would stroll to the river; the afternoon was conducive to meandering. Not a hundred yards from the cathedral, crossing the road, I looked to my left and there was my mother, sitting outside a café, with her back to me, in the shade of an awning, and not alone. On the other side of the table, facing me, was a man of more or less her age, perhaps a little older, casually and expensively dressed, and deeply tanned. He wore a Prussian blue shirt, open at the neck, and white trousers; a sockless foot, in deck shoes, dangled in the sunlight; his hair, thick and grey and quite long, was swept back from an impressive forehead; everything about his style and his manner marked him as a local man. This was strange, because my mother, acutely shy as soon as we arrived in France, had barely spoken to anyone other than her son in the preceding ten days; I had been the spokesman in every social interaction.

  Now, however, she was not merely no longer shy – she appeared to be entirely at her ease; in fact, I could not recall ever having seen her in so expansive a mood with someone she did not already know. Seeing these two people in conversation, one would have thought that they had been good friends several years ago, and had encountered each other here, unexpectedly. The man was loquacious and amusing. Lighting a cigarette, he gestured at his belly and said something that made my mother laugh; I did not often see her laugh. She was drinking what I assumed to be water, but then her companion, indicating his glass of wine, raised an eyebrow invitingly; a waiter was beckoned, and a minute later a similar glass was placed before my mother. This was unprecedented – a drink before the evening.

  I became conscious that I was spying on my own mother; but what concerned me most, I suspect, was the possibility that she would see me. I continued to the riv
er, passed a pointless fifteen minutes there, and went back to the corner at which I had been standing. The diversion had taken up half an hour, and there she was, still. The man was evidently a raconteur; at no moment of this holiday had my mother seemed as happy as she did now. There were two empty glasses on the table, and two full.

  At another vantage point, obscured by trees, I awaited the end of the conversation. Eventually, indicating his watch in apology, the man stood up. Standing almost toe-to-toe, each thanked the other. The handshake devolved into a loose holding of hands, and then the gallant man, after a shrug, and a hesitation, stooped to put a kiss on my mother’s cheek; she smiled, and nodded, as the man said something to her that made her smile. The smile implied gratitude.

  They walked off in opposite directions; I expected one of them, at least, to turn, but neither did. I followed my mother at a distance, until she turned out of the street. She glanced at every window, and upward, towards the roofs, to left and right. Everything, it seemed, was newly of interest to her.

  Only at the restaurant did she say, as if it had slipped her mind: ‘I was talking to a very interesting man this afternoon.’ He was an engineer, in aeronautics, a local man, with four children: one a pilot; one a fashion journalist; and twins at university in Paris and Oxford. ‘Charming,’ she said. ‘But not very happy.’ She suspected that all was not quite right at home; the drinking was a clue.

  After the meal, we rambled around the town again. We watched bats flying around the cathedral. At a shop window she stopped to look at the clothes; but what she was looking at, more, was her own reflection, I could tell. Soon I would be leaving home, and I felt guilty for it, that evening.

  •

  We were in the second hour of our game, and Lucas was giving protracted thought to his position, and was thus distracted when Erin, of her own accord, brought in two glasses of her lemonade. Glancing up at her, he said, assuming a voice of deferential gratitude: ‘Why, thank you, Héloïse.’

  This prompted a flash of displeasure, a demi-second’s fierce widening of the eyes and a tightening of the mouth – a glare such as I never saw again, just as the name was never heard again. It was not Erin’s middle name, I knew, without being told. It was an endearment, a name for private use, and could only have been an allusion to the famous Héloïse.

  What did the allusion signify? Perhaps nothing more than beauty of a kind that one might take to be of a spiritual register. And Erin did, that afternoon, have an aura of the beatific. She wore an oversized white shirt, and the hair was pulled severely back; she had appeared beside us soundlessly, almost; I do not think she spoke; there was something of the handmaid of the lord about her, it could be said.

  The name might also have been prompted by the seniority of Lucas. Some have maintained that the real Héloïse was still in her teens when Abelard, then in his late thirties, appeared in her life. This is improbable, given that the real Héloïse was esteemed as a scholar of Greek, Hebrew and Latin before she met Peter Abelard, but it’s possible that Lucas knew only the version in which Héloïse was a brilliant and lovely adolescent.

  Another factor: the antipathy of the family. Fulbert, uncle and guardian of Héloïse, had done his best to ruin her lover’s reputation; his cronies then castrated the man. Would Lucas have known that? Possibly. It’s widely known. Abelard, gelded, came to regard his relationship with Héloïse as a sin against God. Héloïse had ‘preferred love to wedlock’, she once wrote. She wondered: ‘What man, bent on sacred or philosophical thoughts, could endure the crying of children?’ Would Lucas have known this? Was he aware that Abelard had been a proponent of ‘understanding through reason’, in opposition to Saint Bernard, for whom faith alone sufficed? Our intentions rather than our actions are what will be judged, Abelard had argued. Did Lucas know that? Perhaps he did. But it’s more likely, I thought and think, that the endearment signified nothing more than high-toned devotion, both his and hers, and Lucas’s image of himself as a man of a metaphysical cast of mind, with a touch of the medieval spirit, as he imagined it.

  •

  ‘He’s an encyclopedia,’ said Erin. ‘I learn so much from him.’ We were in the kitchen, washing up. Lucas had retired to the living room. Having driven back from Yorkshire that day, he needed to rest; the kitchen, in any case, was not his domain. Restful music, selected by Lucas, became audible.

  That evening, Lucas had discoursed on the subject of Ulysses S. Grant; he had been reading a biography. ‘In the entire history of the United States, has there ever been a more remarkable life?’ he wondered. Other candidates were proposed by Lucas, and adjudged less remarkable. The biography would have been one of half a dozen books that Lucas was reading that week. He always had several books in progress simultaneously. ‘They could be about anything’, Erin told me, in admiration.

  The restful music, on the evening of Ulysses S. Grant, was a mass by Josquin des Prez, or perhaps Dufay, or Ockeghem. I’m not sure. A bit of Franco-Flemish polyphony was often his way of unwinding at the end of a long or stressful day. It was, in Erin’s terms, one of the many things that Lucas knew about. It could be said, however, that his knowledge was not really knowledge of the music. He had his favourite recordings, and what he liked was the sound that the music made. It was a sound that befitted the calling of Lucas. Which is not to say that the pleasure he took in it was not sincere.

  It also signified his affiliation with Callum and Kathleen; a trio of elevated spirits. In this respect, though, the affinity with Callum was stronger: whereas Kathleen had always worked in silence (one would never hear music in a Japanese workshop, she had told me; nothing should interfere with the artist’s attention), Callum had needed the constant presence of music – this music in particular. One of the first CDs he had ever bought was a recording of Josquin’s L’homme armé masses; the Agnus Dei of the later mass, he had once told Lucas, was ‘the music of eternity’. Lucas was inclined to agree. He often selected it.

  One evening – not the evening of the Grant book – I had something to say about the structure from which those wonderful sounds proceeded: the theme of the Agnus Dei was being sung simultaneously both forwards and in retrograde, I explained. Lucas had not known this; he listened again, but could not distinguish the backwards-running line of the music, he admitted. Neither could Erin. One did not need to be able to understand the construction in order to be moved by the music, just as one did not have to be a builder to appreciate the splendour of Chartres Cathedral, Lucas proposed; this comparison settled the question for them both. Erin could enjoy this sort of music, but the occasional small dose was enough. For her, she confessed, it was hard to tell the difference between one old mass and another. It was amazing, all those voices singing together, so exactly, so sweetly; she could hear how complicated it was. But before long it all began to wash over her; she needed more variety. The voices became like a perfectly blue sky, she said – ‘after a while, you crave a cloud.’

  I was tempted to ask Lucas if we might anticipate some clouds in the life to come. Instead, sympathising with Erin, I said something about how, for a long time, I had been unable to imagine the Christian heaven, the choirs of the blessed singing praise to the Creator every waking hour – and in heaven, after all, every hour would be a waking hour. Reading Dante had corrected my imagination – E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace, et cetera. I recited that line; I encouraged her to at least look at Dante, knowing that Lucas had not read him. Perhaps I had a notion that she might begin to see that ideas such as those in which Lucas professed to believe belonged to the medieval world. It is certain that I talked too much.

  Said Lucas, when I was finished: ‘The thing is, Josh doesn’t believe in God. He only believes in Dante and Josquin des Prez.’

  To which I had to reply: ‘Touché.’

  •

  The car was a disgrace, Erin complained one evening, after Lucas had brought it back from the garage, where yet more rep
airs had been carried out. ‘It is,’ Lucas answered; for him, disgrace of this kind was an achievement.

  Erin was not in the mood to indulge him. ‘Either it goes or I go,’ she said, as if there were no audience. Had the scene been filmed, and ended with these words, the ultimatum might have seemed a serious one. The exasperation was genuine. The car was ten years older than any other car on the street, she protested.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Lucas, exaggerating the pride.

  ‘And looks older.’

  ‘Has Baba Yaga been at you again?’ Lucas asked – Baba Yaga being the woman at number 7, whose huge Mercedes gave the on-street parking a tone that was severely compromised by Lucas’s vehicle. Lucas himself, and his child bride, lowered the tone of the street. Whenever the woman smiled at her, said Erin, it was like the smile of someone being polite, but not quite polite enough, to a host whose food was making her feel ill.

  Baba Yaga had nothing to do with it, Erin answered.

  Lucas embarked on a solo on the topic of Baba Yaga’s husband, whose advice on the cleaning and polishing of one’s vehicle he might seek, he told us. On alternate weekends the husband of Baba Yaga could be observed at work on the mighty Mercedes. The procedure required an arsenal of specialised products. Employing one of a number of colour-coded cloths, he would rub away imperfections that nobody else could see. The routine was more than thorough – it was indicative of some deep disturbance of the psyche. In cleaning the car to excess, he was trying to rid himself of something that pained him, Lucas proposed. It is possible that this analysis was correct: one day the Mercedes was missing; the maniacal cleaner was no longer living at number 7, and nobody knew what had brought about his expulsion or flight, not even Lucas.

  ‘It needs more than a polish,’ Erin told him. ‘It needs to be a different car.’

  A new car would send the wrong message, Lucas argued. It would advertise success of the vulgar kind, like those American TV preachers who live in houses that should have film stars living in them.