Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  And the choices of Lucas: the day his father died, and their spirits mingled; the day he first saw Erin; and the third was ‘coming soon’, he said, as though alluding to a surprise that he was planning for us, and which he was sure would impress. No mention of Kit, I noted.

  •

  On the subject of his bravery, this should be recorded.

  There was no alarm when Lucas decided to turn back before we had reached the seafront. He was breathing heavily, but benign explanations were to hand: symptoms suggested a chest infection; also, he had become too fat. Subsequent walks were shorter; still some shortness of breath, but the cough had gone, and there was no pain, and still no loss of weight.

  Then, one afternoon, he beckoned and I went over. ‘I have news,’ he said, as we went into the living room; the tone was nonchalant. Even when he told me what the tests had shown, one would have thought that he was talking about a temporary inconvenience that had arisen.

  It was exemplary, the way he conducted himself on the approach to the terrible last days; again, the word ‘noble’ would not be inappropriate. He took a disinterested interest in what was happening to his body, the remarkable speed with which it was being overrun. The idea of courage perhaps implies that fear has been overcome; in that case, what Lucas demonstrated was not courage, because there was no fear – only regret that the future years that he had so often imagined would now never be more than imaginary, and compassion for Erin. Some guilt too; an increasing quantity of guilt. ‘She’s too young,’ he murmured, as if she were the dying one. His pity was entirely for Erin.

  He was fortunate, he insisted, in that he knew the end of the story. There was time to make the arrangements that had to be made. He saw the path ahead, and beyond. It was not a question of hope; he knew.

  •

  Near the end, Lucas told me about an occasion on which he had lied to a client. A woman had needed to know something from her husband, who had died three years earlier. In recent months the widow had come to hear of a rumour about her husband, a rumour that was causing great distress. It concerned something he was said to have done in the early years of their marriage, and if it were to turn out to be true, her memories of all their years together would be blighted. There was no signal, Lucas told me. But the woman was suffering, and he liked her, and he could tell that she had an illness that soon would kill her, and so he had decided to simulate a success – but only a limited success. As a man in the depths of a cavern sees only darkness for a long time, but at last something becomes visible, even if it is nothing more than a patch of lighter darkness, because no darkness on this earth is absolute, so he had detected a minimal quantity of information, the weakest of messages. A denial was what he claimed to have extracted from the air; a fading protest of innocence, from a voice exhausted by the effort of protesting, over and over again, unheard until now.

  Lucas seemed ashamed by his duplicity, more ashamed, I thought, than was warranted by the story he had told. Then, for a moment, I imagined a deathbed scene of cinematic grandeur – a total confession. It had all been a pretence, he was about to tell me. I prepared myself to receive it, and in preparing myself I realised that the disappointment would be intolerable, for me almost as much as for Erin. I wanted Lucas to see it through to the finish.

  Had there been such a confession, would I, eventually, have told Erin about it? No, I would not. I would have committed that sin of omission, of course, to protect her.

  •

  The death room was small and furnished monastically: a narrow bed, a table beside it, two chairs. It could not have been the room in which Lucas usually slept. The bed was set beside the window, from which he could see the sky and a portion of the street. His head, lying in the hollow of the topmost of three or four pillows, was the head of a hermit saint. The beard had been allowed to grow; illness had made pits of his cheeks; his arms rested on top of the bedding, flat and straight, as if in rehearsal for burial; the hands were bloodless and the fingers too long. In just two weeks he had become an old man.

  ‘How have you been?’ asked Lucas. His words were barely audible.

  As I answered, he moved a hand towards the edge of the bed, and turned it over. Again he smiled, and closed his eyes.

  ‘What are you working on?’ he asked.

  I was working on a book by a retired businessman who had relocated from London to a village on the Tarn, and there become fascinated by the story of the beast of Gévaudan; it would be self-published, if published at all.

  ‘Go on,’ said Lucas.

  I told him about the scores of victims, mostly girls and women. I summarised the possibilities: a monstrous wolf or several wolves; a werewolf; a madman; a lion; a hyena.

  ‘A hyena? In France?’

  ‘Escaped from captivity, maybe. The exotic pet of a local lord.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lucas.

  I told him about the villain of the book, the hunter Jean Chastel, who – the author believed – had mated a mastiff with a wolf to create the beast. Witnesses reported that the monster, whenever it encountered resistance, would retreat from the victim for a while, assessing the situation, before returning for the kill.

  ‘Could have been trained,’ Lucas remarked. He was listening closely and understanding, only days from the end.

  ‘Exactly.’ And I told him about the hunt of June 19, 1767, when Jean Chastel – using silver bullets, he was said to have claimed – shot a huge animal that was found to have human flesh in its stomach. Thereupon the killings ceased, after more than a hundred grisly deaths; and Chastel’s reprobate son – rumoured to be a werewolf – promptly turned to God.

  ‘Suspicious,’ Lucas agreed.

  ‘Our author thinks so.’

  For some time Lucas did not speak; his breathing was embattled. ‘Quite a story,’ he said at last. ‘I’d like to read it.’ Now he opened his eyes; he regarded the nondescript sky. He gathered air deeply into his chest; this provoked a spasm of coughing. ‘I’m making progress,’ he said, when recomposed. ‘As you can see.’

  None of the things I had thought to say could be said. I stroked his hand.

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said, almost whimsically. Before I could ask him what he meant, he said: ‘The next bit.’ Then clarified: ‘What comes after.’

  This seemed to be, on the threshold, an admission of uncertainty.

  I said: ‘I’ll be expecting to hear from you.’

  The smile that this produced was expressive more of pain than of amusement. He closed his eyes now, and his face, through some effort, assumed an expression of severe serenity. ‘You’ll need to look after her,’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and received a look that seemed to be a granting of permission.

  •

  Yes, there was some confusion in the last few days of his life; the medication had that effect. But we had this conversation; he followed the story of the beast of Gévaudan. And he knew what he was doing when he gave me the watch.

  He asked me to call Erin, and when she came he asked her to bring his watch. She placed it in his palm, then Lucas tipped it into mine. ‘No more time for me,’ he said; his laugh was like the cracking of a small sheaf of straw. Erin, crying, left us again.

  It is a man’s watch, a heavy antique thing; I was the obvious recipient. I did not ask to be given it.

  *

  Said Cicero: ‘to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die’. If this is so, then Lucas was a successful student of philosophy, we might decide. Or the creator of something one might term a philosophy.

  •

  The final scene began with a call from Erin: Lucas wanted to see me that evening. The call lasted no more than thirty seconds; what the message signified was not made explicit, but it was understood; her voice was quiet and level, as if she were a nurse, speaking in a room in which people were asleep.

 
On opening the door, she said nothing other than my name. She had been crying, but did not cry. Looking down, she stepped back to allow me into the house. I followed her up the stairs; a silent procession of two.

  ‘It’s Joshua,’ said Erin, and Lucas turned his head towards me; the movement was slow, of hydraulic smoothness; his eyes were held in pockets of thin grey skin. ‘My boy,’ he murmured, and smiled; the phrase had never been used before.

  Erin withdrew, so quietly that I didn’t notice she had left us until I sat on the chair that had been placed beside the bed, and looked to the door.

  For the last time, I put my hand in his.

  He said: ‘In conclusion.’ The voice was barely audible, but these words were clear. They had a tone of a commencement, but nothing followed. Sleep was overcoming him. I pressed the hand, and at that he looked at me, and said: ‘Speak to your mother.’ In his mind my mother was still alive, it seemed. It was hard to make any sense of what he was saying. He talked to me for a few seconds as if I were his brother; he mentioned a woman whose name meant nothing to me, and wanted me to say something to her. He thought Erin was no longer with him. After four or five sentences, or utterances, in which everything was confused, he became quiet, and clenched his eyelids, in a great effort of concentration. ‘You and your mother,’ he said again, with what I thought was a smile. ‘I loved her,’ he said, twice, as the smile became a grimace, and he moved his hand towards mine. I lifted it, and his fingers turned into a grip that was stronger than I would have thought possible. There was a sustained look, asking if I knew what was being said, and a nod of the head, very slight, a tremor.

  More confusion followed. I became his father, I think. When I placed his hand back on the sheet, there was no resistance at all, and no acknowledgement when I left him.

  Downstairs, Erin spoke to me. He would not see anyone else after tonight. She spoke like a doctor to a relative. It would have been wrong to touch her; to maintain this control of herself required the maintenance of distance.

  ‘I’ll take my leave on Saturday,’ Lucas had told her, a few days earlier, as if talking about a trip that he had been planning. On the Saturday night, Erin rang. She had experienced something extraordinary, she told me, then she reported the wonderful thing that Lucas had said: ‘Death has the face of a friend.’

  •

  Chloe, the sister, does not like me; this needs to be understood. She was predisposed to hostility. This was apparent at the first encounter, a couple of days after Lucas’s death. I had glimpsed her a few times, when she was visiting Erin, while Lucas was away on business, but we had never met. I went to the house and it was Chloe who opened the door. I knew her view of Lucas – or her view of Lucas as relayed by Lucas. Although disreputable and far too old, he did not, as far as she could tell (on the basis of two or three evenings in his company), present a physical danger to her impressionable sibling. The relationship would end within the year, Chloe was sure, and when it was finished, she persuaded herself, Erin would have learned something valuable from the experience. We all learn from our mistakes, as I’m sure Chloe has often remarked.

  Chloe had taken charge of the situation, the stance announced; there would be no invitation to enter the house. I enquired after Erin; it would have been apparent that I was a close friend.

  ‘I’m sorry. She’s not seeing anybody today,’ the sister told me. There was not a grain of apology in this ‘sorry’.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked, and added: ‘I’m Joshua.’

  The name made no observable impact. ‘As one would expect,’ she answered.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. The door to the kitchen was slightly ajar; a shadow moved on the panel of frosted glass. Raising my voice by a decibel or two, I said: ‘Could you tell her I called?’

  ‘I shall,’ she replied. The demeanour suggested that I was some sort of appurtenance to the unhealthy life that Erin had been living here, ensnared by Lucas; I was implicated.

  I thanked her. ‘You must be Chloe,’ I was about to say, when the inner door opened and Erin entered the scene. She was wearing a T-shirt that might have been slept in, and her hair was awry; under her eyes, the skin looked like pencil shading on paper. Her smile was effortful; it told me that I had to accept, for the interim, that she had ceded control to the sister.

  ‘Hello Josh,’ she said. Then to Chloe: ‘Joshua’s the neighbour.’ What, I wondered, should I make of the definite article?

  A slight movement of Chloe’s head acknowledged receipt of the information.

  ‘This is my sister,’ said Erin. She stood behind Chloe, as behind a shield.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, putting out a hand.

  ‘Yes,’ is all she said. Her hand was as light and fine and small as Erin’s, and a lot of work had gone into its maintenance. The softness of the skin was remarkable, and the coolness – it was like being stroked by water; the nails were opaline.

  ‘We’ll talk soon,’ Erin promised.

  ‘Whenever you like,’ I replied. An embrace would have been appropriate, but for the impediment of Chloe.

  ‘Thanks, Joshua,’ she said; there was so much in the way she spoke my name.

  ‘Yes. Thank you,’ the sister confirmed. There was nothing but sound in the way she said it. I was no more than ten feet down the path when she closed the door.

  •

  It was at Lucas’s request that I spoke at the funeral. Erin was present when he asked me to give the speech; he wanted her to witness the moment of commission. He knew I would speak respectfully of him. But I was required to submit the text for approval; this idea, I am certain, was the sister’s, not Erin’s. For the assessment, I was directed to the damson velvet armchair – Kathleen’s favourite. The sisters took the sofa. The distressed leather armchair, Lucas’s throne, was occupied by the negative presence of Lucas, as it had once been occupied by the negative presence of Callum. For many months after Callum’s death, Lucas told me, neither he nor Kathleen could sit in that chair. It was evident that nobody had sat in it since the death of Lucas; the nest of crushed cushions was a cast of his hips. Elsewhere in the room, however, a new order was already being introduced. The surface of the coffee table was clear; no slew of newspapers and books. No obstructions of any kind on the floor.

  When I passed the pages to Erin, Chloe intercepted; she asked me to read it aloud. I went slowly; I was aiming for an effect of mastered emotion, of words well chosen. At the sentence that referred to Lucas’s generosity and ‘deep interest in people’, Chloe glanced towards the window. When I spoke of the kindness that Lucas had shown to me, particularly after the death of my mother, the composure of Erin began to falter. I came to the passage about the house, and ‘the love that one sensed in it, immediately’. Here I observed a hardening of Chloe’s gaze, but Erin took a deep and trembling breath; tears appeared. Her sister reached an arm around her and pulled her towards the supportive shoulder; Erin did not immediately yield.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Erin, freeing herself. ‘Go on.’

  More tears at the conclusion: ‘I am extremely glad to have known him.’ Erin, weeping, smiled at me; she and I were the ones who had known him.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Chloe. It seemed that I had passed the audition. She was not sure, though, that there needed to be any mention of Kathleen. The ‘Kathleen thing’ might be an unnecessary complication.

  I asked her what precisely might be meant by ‘thing’.

  Erin wanted to retain the reference to Kathleen. ‘She was important,’ she said, to me. And she had one other revision to suggest. She would like me to say: ‘He brought comfort to a great many people.’

  I would say exactly those words, I promised.

  ‘Because he did,’ Erin told me, as though I were one who might doubt it. Then she said: ‘I’ll show you.’

  Her sister watched her walk out of the room, as one might watch a person
who is washing her hands for the tenth time in a single hour. Left alone with me, Chloe said not a word. She looked up at the ceiling, tracking Erin’s footfall.

  Erin returned with a clutch of letters. One by one, she displayed a dozen pages to us: expressions of gratitude – ‘boundless’, ‘eternal’, ‘heartfelt’, ‘inexpressible’. There were many more upstairs, she told me. ‘Aren’t there?’ she said, turning to Chloe for verification.

  Her sister nodded, not meeting Erin’s gaze; her opinion of Lucas was validated by the fact that he had filed all this fan mail. When Erin talked about how difficult it would be to live in the house now that Lucas was gone, her sister’s advice was emphatic. ‘You’ll need to move on,’ she said, as though she had made a study of such situations and all the evidence led unequivocally to this conclusion.

  I offered, not forcefully, a different view.