•
I had a sense of loss, certainly, but I would not say that it was grief. Lucas would not be disappointed to learn this. Grief, after all, was what he worked to erase, or at least assuage. After the death of his father, he had overcome his grief more quickly than his sister thought decent. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she had demanded, distraught, of her dry-eyed brother. So he told me. She could not understand his calmness: he was only fifteen, and had been closer to his father than either of his siblings. ‘Exactly,’ Lucas answered. His father was with him, he told her. She decided that Lucas was in shock, a diagnosis confirmed when he returned to school more tightly focused than ever; he was still in denial years later, she thought; why else, having gained his first-class degree, would he have taken a job for which no qualifications of any kind were needed? He was continuing to suppress his emotions, she told him, and this was dangerous. But he was suppressing nothing, he replied. His life had been diminished greatly by the physical removal of his father, but he still lived ‘in his father’s love’, and vice versa. His sister, on the other hand, was too attached to her grief. ‘She did not want it to end,’ he said.
•
The crematorium chapel was transformed into the church of Lucas; not a single unoccupied seat. The congregation was as colourful as a tinful of wrapped sweets; black had been banned; we were here to celebrate his life. Directly in front of me, Erin sat rigidly upright, attending to the speech keenly, as if she might learn something from it. The sister sat alongside, holding Erin’s hand throughout, transmitting dignity. The sister’s dress, a luscious shade of blue, was conspicuously expensive and well cut; the most stylish of the mourners, without question. One other woman drew the eye – a handsome and very tall West Indian, sixtyish, wearing an intricate hat with ribbons of magenta and gold intertwined. She appeared to commend what I had to say. When I came to the lines that I had inserted without the sister’s prior approval – ‘The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen amongst us’ – the behatted woman smiled powerfully at me, as if no tribute could have touched her more deeply. I too became moved. While I spoke, my self-accusation was suspended. The speech was not insincere; the words were being spoken sincerely by a version of myself who had come into existence for the occasion.
When it was over, Erin could not speak; we embraced. The sister spoke on their behalf. I had surprised her, it seemed. Then the handsome woman with the complicated hat thanked me; she took me to be a servant of Lucas’s mission. We walked back to the house together. Her name was Neriah, she had been born in Trinidad, and had been working as a hairdresser when Lucas helped her, twenty years ago. The salon belonged to her sister, Neola, who had died very suddenly. ‘Lucas could tell me so much,’ Neriah told me. It was as though he had known Neola for years, and Neriah herself. Lucas was a wonderful gentleman, the kindest of men, a better man in fact than her husband had been. A man of great charity. He could see that she didn’t have much money and he would not have taken a penny from her if she hadn’t made a fuss about it. He even sent her a present on her birthday. She wept demurely, from recollected happiness, it seemed.
The most beautiful thing that anyone had ever said to her was said to her by Lucas. ‘We all walk in mysteries,’ he told her. Every day, on waking up, she repeated those words to herself, like a prayer. ‘He was a very special person,’ Neriah concluded, on leaving me for another conversation, as we entered the garden. ‘Just look around,’ she said, and I looked around, at the evidence: a company of forty people, perhaps more, and nearly all of them women. The mood was unfunereal – it might have been the audience of a serious-minded film that had just finished, and which everyone had hugely enjoyed. In the farthest corner of the garden, half a dozen people were listening to a woman who had intrigued me, when I was addressing the congregation: the profusion of unfettered russet-and-grey hair had caught my attention, as had the scarlet patent leather boots, and the two young women flanking her – her twin daughters, obviously, with auburn hair as wild as their mother’s. The mother had seemed enraptured during the ceremony; her style of narration was ebullient. She ended her anecdote in a crescendo of mock indignation, in which I heard: ‘Yes, but her tits are from Brazil!’ And everybody laughed, including Erin’s mother, who was attending without her husband; her demeanour suggested an unhappiness that had been in place since long before the death of Lucas. She did not spend a great deal of time with Erin; it appeared that she could talk more easily with her other daughter. I did not feel inclined to approach.
The twins, while their mother entertained her audience, were charming Owen, the brother of Lucas, who had commandeered a bottle of wine, from which he overfilled the glasses of all three.
As I passed behind him, a voice on my other side murmured, almost in my ear: ‘Nice speech.’ It was Gabrielle, sister of Owen and Lucas, also not sober. Chinking her glass on mine, she said: ‘I recognised you.’ My incomprehension gratified her. She clarified: she had once visited Lucas, during the period when he had lived as ‘the potter’s lodger’, and on a walk through the town, with Lucas, she had been introduced to my mother and me. ‘What is your mother’s name?’ she asked.
‘Monica.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right.’ Her smile was negligible and unpleasant, and might or might not have been intended to mean something. ‘You were living there,’ she said, waving her free hand in the direction of my house.
I was living there still, I told her.
‘Really?’ she said. The word should have been garnished with a single upturned eyebrow, but the whole brow, it appeared, had received some sort of treatment; it was like a plate of pale fibreglass. I explained the situation. The fact that my mother was no longer living made no discernible impact on her. In lieu of a response, she took a deep draught of her wine, then said: ‘Wasn’t a terrifically successful tête-à-tête, that one. More bridges burned than built. Odd set-up, I thought, him and the potter woman. Clammy.’
I had liked Kathleen very much, I told her. ‘An interesting person,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, drawling the syllable. She said something about Lucas and his ‘old dears’. After another substantial sip, she informed me that she and Lucas had never been on the same wavelength. ‘Eight years is a rather large gap when you’re young. We never really closed it.’ She ascertained that I had no siblings; this, she proposed, had its advantages. Then, with a nod towards the group in which Erin, with the sister at her right hand, was receiving condolences from Neriah and others, she demanded: ‘So, what do you think?’
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘I like her,’ she said; the implication being that this was a decision that had been reached after prolonged consideration. ‘She’s very young, but I like her.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ I responded.
‘She says she has some idea about opening a restaurant.’
‘She does.’
‘Would she take advice from you?’ she asked, scanning the garden, as if in readiness for excusing herself.
‘Depends.’
‘Don’t let her do it. Please, don’t let her do it. She hasn’t a clue. It’s the high road to bankruptcy and madness.’
And here Owen stepped in, with: ‘This sounds interesting.’
He introduced himself, transferring his glass sloppily to the left hand, for a handshake that was like the yanking of a chain.
‘I was just saying how much I like little Erin,’ his sister answered.
‘Nice young woman,’ Owen agreed. ‘Very nice. He did well there. Lucky man.’
‘And who are the lovelies?’ Gabrielle enquired, indicating the twins, with no attempt to make the gesturing subtle. ‘You seemed to be enjoying yourself.’
‘I was, thank you. I was,’ he answered, stroking his cheeks. In silhouette he was similar to his brother – perhaps a stone heavier. The face was likewise a version of Lucas; the eyes, though, were blandl
y genial; the gaze blunter. The cheeks were as smooth and pale as veal. ‘The lovelies are Cyan and Aria. You heard correctly. Cyan and Aria. As in the colour and a song. And that’s their Mama,’ he said, aiming a finger towards the red-booted woman. Her name was Kate Burtenshaw; it had no resonance for either of the siblings, and I did not reveal that it had a resonance for me. ‘The life and soul of the funeral,’ he called her, before telling us what the daughters had told him: Lucas had once been of assistance to their mother, and on the anniversary of that happy day Lucas had sent her a card, every year without fail. It seemed that his memory, as Cyan put it, was ‘like a computer’. Owen mimicked the starstruck smile of the guileless young woman.
‘I’m sure,’ said Gabrielle, but Owen was not sceptical. His brother was the cleverest of the family, he told me, perhaps slighting his sister. Lucas’s memory, when he was a boy, was ‘quite phenomenal’. As evidence, he reminded Gabrielle of what had happened with the school production of Twelfth Night. The first-choice Orsino had proved to be incapable of remembering his lines, but it was very late in the day when this incapacity was acknowledged to be insuperable. Just a week before the opening night, in fact. So Lucas was recruited as the emergency Orsino, and he succeeded in memorising every line in the course of a single weekend. ‘Couldn’t act,’ admitted Owen, ‘but that’s not the point.’ Lucas was a shy boy, and was not a natural actor. It took a lot of persuasion to get him to accept the part.
‘The teacher got him on board by telling him he was a genius,’ Gabrielle explained. ‘Lucas always thought we undervalued him.’
‘Perhaps we did,’ said Owen.
‘Maybe,’ Gabrielle conceded, casting a begrudgingly appreciative gaze over the house that her brother had acquired.
‘Strange how things turn out,’ said Owen. ‘We always thought he would become a lawyer.’
‘We did not,’ his sister stated. ‘For a time one of us thought he might become a lawyer. I didn’t. I thought he had the makings of a rogue.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Owen.’
‘But a lovable rogue,’ said Owen. ‘It is in the nature of the rogue to be lovable, isn’t it?’ He emptied his glass, and, with a grin that one might have taken to be rogueish, offered to replenish mine as well. I declined, as Chloe, looking over her sister’s shoulder, directed at me a glance that made me feel like a conspirator. Then one of the widows tiptoed in, thrilled to have the opportunity to meet the brother and sister of Lucas, and I moved away.
That evening, I helped to clear up; I was the last to leave. Alone with me for a moment, in the kitchen, Erin told me that she had intended to give something to Lucas’s siblings, although he had omitted them from the will. They were his family, after all. But now she was not sure what she should do. ‘The thing is, I didn’t like them very much. Did you?’ she asked. ‘The sister thinks I’m an airhead, and the brother is grim.’
‘You don’t owe those people anything,’ I advised.
By the next day, she had decided I was right. Her sister had agreed.
•
Not all of Lucas’s female clients had been ladies of a certain age, not by any means. Some were young or youngish, and with some of these – I don’t know how many – a relationship ‘arose’. Lucas’s word: ‘arose’. As if the relationship were a thing of its own volition. He talked about a woman he named Stella, who had lost a sister. Stella was ‘preternaturally beautiful’, he told me, with something like a smirk, a smirk of confession. We were talking man to man, Lucas believed.
•
Erin’s father appeared a couple of months after the funeral. Looking out of my window, I saw activity in the garden – a man wearing jeans and a dirty grey T-shirt, of Lucas’s age, approximately, but considerably leaner, attacking the vegetation in the lee of the wall. For some time, the garden had been neglected. First thought: Erin had hired someone for the day. But he did not go about the work as a professional would have done. There was no evidence of method. The aim, it seemed, was simply to reduce the volume of greenery, in the shortest time possible. Without discrimination, he took shears and secateurs to everything; he ripped stuff away with his bare hands. Within fifteen minutes he had filled two plastic sacks with debris. Then Erin came out, carrying a mug, which he took from her, with a terse smile; she did not meet his look, and in that moment, though there was no obvious resemblance, I understood who this was.
He indicated the sacks and made a remark that seemed to be intended to amuse; Erin nodded, avoiding his eye. There was a sense of long familiarity, and discord.
When Erin went back into the house, the father surveyed the garden, assessing what destruction still needed to be achieved. Like a drinker at closing time, he tipped up the mug and emptied it in a gulp. He even wiped the back of a hand across his mouth. Refreshed, he seized the shears. In a dozen rapid cuts, he inflicted substantial new damage. His pleasure was obvious. There were moments at which he appeared to be carrying out an assault.
Erin returned, wearing a sweatshirt and tough gloves. She set to work on the honeysuckle, in the corner farthest from the father. She proceeded slowly – editing the plants, rather than hacking. There was no conversation. At one point I looked up from the computer to see that Erin had paused. In one hand she held a pair of scissors, in the other a sprig, at which she was looking, evidently reminded of something. The father, noticing, eased up. He put down the shears, on top of a sack, with care, as if out of respect for his daughter’s delicate state of mind. She had her back to him, and did not turn when he approached. As he put his hand on the nape of her neck, she flinched. The reaction was small, but I saw it. And the way he touched her – what were we to make of it? Erin’s neck is fine and narrow. The father’s thumb slid to one side and the fingers to the other. More a gesture of possession than of love. It could immediately become a grasp, a clamp. The father was re-establishing his claim.
•
She knew that Lucas had not died, Erin told me. In spirit form, he was still alive, and would always be alive. She knew this. But she knew it, she said, in the same way that she might know that a certain star is so many trillions of miles away, or that this room is filled with billions and billions of particles that cannot be seen. Memories of him were helping her, of course. There was not an hour of the day in which he was not in her mind. Sometimes a memory would burst in as if it came from yesterday rather than seven or eight years ago. But a memory of Lucas was not the same thing as the spirit of Lucas. The only person in a memory is the person who is having it, she said. I very much wanted to kiss her. Wiping her eyes, she looked around the living room. ‘His absence is so strong,’ she said. In every room his absence was present. It was like the negative of ghost. Every room felt wrong. ‘This room,’ she said, waving a dismissive hand, felt like a replica of the room in which Lucas was alive. ‘The building is what’s dead, not Lucas,’ she said. She thought she might not be able to stay in the house much longer.
I sympathised. ‘It won’t always be as bad as this,’ I assured her, or some equivalent banality. For months after my mother died I had felt that I no longer belonged to the house. It had become an immense memento. In the morning, the silence into which I awoke was something to be overcome. And so on.
The pain of the separation from the body of the loved one cannot be expunged, Lucas had once said to her, she now told me. He could help to reduce the pain, but he could not eradicate it. Once, at work in a house, fitting a floor, he had abruptly experienced the loss of his father as a shock almost as strong as the grief of the funeral. This grief was in a sense unwarranted, of course, yet it was real. The house in which he was working in no way resembled any place in which he had been with his father, but something – perhaps a sound of which he had not been conscious, or some quality of the light – had bereaved him afresh. He had wept, he admitted. ‘I missed him,’ Lucas told Erin, and now she smiled at the simple honesty of
the statement. The spirit of his father was often present, but the man who had been his father had gone. ‘I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t see him. And on that afternoon I needed to see him, to touch him,’ he had confessed. Bereavement is a perpetual earthquake, Lucas had said, said Erin; the aftershocks go on and on, becoming weaker, but never ceasing.
•
Erin consulted a woman in Newton Abbot, name unknown. Of all the candidates within a sixty-mile radius, she was the one with most consistently positive customer feedback online, Erin told me. It would appear, then, that Lucas had never spoken highly of any other practitioners in his field, or at least none within sixty miles.
The visit was not a success. The door was opened by a nervy little woman, fiftyish, who seemed to be the live-in assistant; she conducted the client to the room in which the business would be done, then withdrew to the kitchen, to prepare refreshments. The room stank of patchouli, and thin curtains of cheap purple fabric were drawn across the windows. Purple was also the dominant hue of the medium’s wardrobe – a kaftan, overlaid with wispy scarves. There was even a double-string necklace of silver beads. ‘Everything but the crystal ball,’ said Erin. She knew within a minute that this was going to be a disaster. Taking Erin’s hand, the woman sandwiched it lightly between hands that were very large and very soft and quite horrible, like two miniature hot-water bottles, overfilled. ‘Let’s begin,’ she said; the manner was patronising. It was as if the oracle had condescended to give an audience.
In the front room’s overperfumed, overheated twilight (the radiators were working full blast, to induce a receptive drowsiness, Erin surmised), the spirit of Lucas was invoked. The invocation was something like a summons, said Erin; the woman pronounced his name as though commanding him to step out of the assembled legions of the deceased. With barely any delay, the spirit made its presence known. ‘He is here,’ the woman announced; one sensed that the spirits were always obedient when she called. Her eyes were closed, her arms folded; taking dictation from beyond, she conveyed the good tidings from Lucas.
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