The inspection, though it was the work of no more than two minutes, seemed to demand a great deal of mental energy from Lucas. Exhausted, he sat back and rubbed his eyes, breathing deeply, as though he had won, after hours of unremitting concentration, a game of chess against a stronger player. Now he was his normal self again. He turned off the recorder, quickly made some notes, and then began a conversation about what had occurred.
But before Lucas left them, Erin told me, he did something else that amazed her. The sister had to be somewhere else, and said goodbye; the father and mother left the room, to fetch the payment. Thus, for a minute or two, Erin and Lucas were left together. The moment the door closed on them, Lucas said something to Erin that made her shiver. Precisely what he said, she could not disclose; just in speaking of it, she was quavering. The essential facts, however, are these: that Erin had for some time been involved with a young man to whom she was by this point not so much attracted as submissive; and Lucas, with no preamble whatever, turned to her and uttered a few words that were sufficient to convince her that he had intuited every nuance of her situation. He advised her, with some force, to reject the boyfriend forthwith; he understood that she had come to feel powerless, but she must overthrow this subjugation, difficult though this would be; and he could absolutely promise her that, were she to do it, she would very soon find herself loved genuinely by someone whom she would in turn come to love. She understood him to be referring to somebody she had yet to meet; there was ‘nothing personal’ in his manner, she said; he spoke to her like a doctor giving his diagnosis.
At ‘love’, the tears appeared; she wept soundlessly. I offered a handkerchief, laundered and pressed in anticipation. It was permissible, I saw, to console by taking a hand. She looked at our coupled hands as though they were a gift, but was not quite sure what kind of thing this gift might be. As soon as the tears had been staunched, I released.
Yes, I wanted to hear the voice of Lucas at work. It was not possible, however, to ask if I might listen to that tape. Even had she not been crying, I would not have asked. That evening, I did not ask. Later, just once, I did; and I accepted the refusal immediately.
•
We leafed through a book that had once belonged to Callum, a hefty volume from which, as I drew it out from the slip-case, a sweet scent of ageing paper was released. At a page that showed the cloister at Sénanque, I paused. No picture could do justice to this place, I told Erin. I waffled about the architecture, the setting, the atmosphere. The air at Sénanque was delicious. I had a lot to say about the air and the light, about how one is changed by the experience of the building, even if only for as long as one is inside it. The experience was a sensual one: it tempts you to believe in God. But the God of Sénanque was not the God of all churches – certainly not the God of, say, a Baroque church in Rome. The God of Sénanque was as severe as the unadorned walls, yet the building was filled with light and scented air, which could be taken to be the light of heaven and the air of love. On the other hand, the God of the Baroque is the extravagant master of the cosmos, the ultimate winner, the glorious One. He overwhelms us with gifts, and at the same time threatens us, I proposed, and then I starting talking about a question that had first interested me after I had spent some time in the church of Santa Sabina, a question that still interested me, and which nobody could answer conclusively, or so I thought. The columns of the nave were what had fascinated me – they had been scavenged from an ancient temple, dedicated to the goddess Juno. How should we interpret them? As signs of the triumph of Christianity over paganism, perhaps. As trophies of war, or captives, imprisoned forever in this huge temple of the one true God.
I became aware that, in trying to advance my position, to secure myself in her affection, I was talking to Erin as Lucas might have talked; I was lecturing. I could not simply stop, however; it was necessary to conclude properly. I went on: the columns may have no symbolic meaning at all. Practicality and aesthetics could be the whole explanation. The columns offered a quantity of ready-made and durable material, and the quality of the handiwork was superior to anything the Christian builders could have produced, so why not just recycle them? They served a purpose, that’s all. The supposed meaning was something we were reading into them. It was an intriguing question, I assured her, bringing the monologue to a halt.
Erin looked at me and smiled; the smile confirmed that I had been holding forth. ‘Heavy,’ she said.
I am aware that I lack lightness at times. So it was not the meaning of the remark that triggered a silent objection: it was the banality of the word, its laziness; and also, perhaps, that the remark had come from someone who had been the companion of Lucas – Lucas, of all people; a man of weighty conversations. I was disappointed by the cliché of that single word, but the disappointment, such as it was, brought some sort of reprieve, for a moment. Mildly aggrieved, I had some respite from the difficulty and unhappiness of loving Erin.
Then Kit woke up, and Erin fetched her, and at the sight of Erin the mother I was captured again.
•
In the course of an evening’s conversation with Maxim Gorky, the renowned mystic Anna Nikolayevna Schmidt discussed her previous incarnations as Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia. Furthermore, she explained how it had been revealed to her that Christ had returned to this world in 1853, taking the form of the scholar-philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, with whom she was destined to beget a heavenly son, by whom this world would be eradicated. Reporting their conversation for the newspaper that employed him, Gorky wrote that Anna Nikolayevna had spoken ‘ancient words belonging to the seekers of perfect wisdom and inexorable truth’. Gorky was also impressed by Madame Blavatsky.
Everything in the universe is a form of light, Anna Nikolayevna Schmidt maintained; our flesh is nothing but condensed light. In his Fragments from My Diary, Gorky proposed an idea that bears some similarity to Schmidt’s: ‘At some future time all matter absorbed by man shall be transmuted by him and his brain into a sole energy – a psychical one. This energy shall discover harmony in itself and shall sink into self-contemplation – in a meditation over all the infinitely creative possibilities concealed in it.’ He expounded this theory to the poet Aleksandr Blok, ‘What a dismal fantasy,’ Blok commented.
•
A fisherman and his wife live in a cottage on the edge of an extensive bog that lies between the house and the bay. This is in Connemara. Each evening, when the husband returns, she sees the light of his lantern a long way off. There is no straight route across the bog: he must pick his way from stone to stone, tussock to tussock. The crossing takes a long time. When it first appears, the light of the lantern shines in the left-hand part of the window; when the wife looks out ten minutes later, the light is in the opposite part; ten minutes later again, it is in the centre, still tiny; the man himself is not yet visible; it will take him another hour to reach his door. When I read it, this appealed as an image for Erin, approaching by an indirect and perilous path, across the bog of nonsense.
•
I came down to the beach for the last hour of sunlight. The sky at the horizon demanded attention: a long low range of ash-and-iron cloud, with streaks the colour of pomegranate juice. The surface of the sea was gorgeous too: under the breeze and the glancing sunlight, the water was a jostle of violet, black, silver, apricot, white, blue-grey – all of these colours and more. And at the water’s edge, two dots of fuchsia stood out – the matching sunhats of Erin and Kit.
Staying on the higher part of the sand, by the fallen rocks, I walked beyond them, and onward for ten minutes. I walked back with the water almost touching my feet. The hats were still there, and I raised a hand as Erin turned. She waved; I was being invited.
I talked to Erin, about nothing memorable, while Kit pranced out of the little waves and in again and out. Then Kit sat down, to let the water flow over her legs. She scooped the sand around her, and on the third or fou
rth scoop uncovered something; she picked it out and showed it to us. We crawled to take a closer look: a bean of sea glass, pale green, frosted. I rinsed the sand from it, and put it in Kit’s palm, and folded her fingers gently over it, to secure the treasure. A few times more she scoured the sand, but discovered nothing else. She made a small mound, and placed the bean of glass on its summit, with great care.
The affection with which I watched Erin’s daughter was wholly genuine, but the manner of the watching had an element of artifice. The expression, I hoped, would elicit the question: ‘What are you thinking?’
The question arrived, and my answer was: ‘Some other time.’ But within a minute I was telling her – or proposing – that we should learn from the happiness of Kit. The experience that we were witnessing was immeasurable; it was infinite. Then I stepped over the threshold. ‘This is eternal life, right here,’ I pronounced. ‘Life and death are completely separate things. They do not mix. They cannot mix, by definition.’
‘Yes they do,’ said Erin. ‘Of course they do.’
‘No,’ I insisted. ‘If one lives in the present moment, with the greatest possible intensity, one lives eternally,’ I told her, as if the thought were mine, presenting the proof of her daughter.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Josh,’ said Erin. ‘You really want to be talking to Lucas,’ she said, then she gathered Kit up, and brushed the sand from her legs, too briskly.
•
At the seafront, one night last year, in weather much like tonight’s, a memory of my father presented itself, with the power and suddenness of an apparition. Spray flew up against the darkness and in an instant I saw his face, or I remembered his face as though he had been beside me only minutes earlier. He had been standing beside me, holding my hand as we looked across the water. The wind was making me stagger; my hair was drenched. Over the years, this scene has often come to mind, or elements of it, in various combinations: darkness, noise, waves, my father and I standing together; an atmosphere of thrilling tumult, even peril, but peril at a distance. What is being recalled – or so my mother told me – is a night on which a boat ran aground. We had all walked down to the seafront to see what the storm was doing, she told me. There is no longer any boat in what remains in my mind of that night, and my mother is never there either, though in reality she was. I have a sense only of my father’s presence, a presence which, one night last year, became abruptly acute, seconds after it had struck me, with the dash of seawater, that I was standing where my father and I had stood. Momentarily the image of his face was apparent. Against the blackness of the sky his face looked at me – a glance of solidarity, a fortifying smile, as though the storm might worsen but we would confront it together and would see it out. The face was my father’s, vividly, but it was perhaps not his face as I had seen it on the night during which the forgotten boat had foundered on the beach. It could have been a face of my imagining, derived from a photo, transposed to the flimsy theatre of my memory. Yet my father in some form had appeared, with more substance than I could make him appear tonight, though the scene was prepared for him, as I stood where we had stood on the night we had all gone down to the beach to watch the waves. The wraith would not be summoned. I had only the memory of having remembered him strongly.
•
The boyfriend who had preceded Lucas had imagined that he would be famous by the time he reached the age of twenty-five. He was the lead guitarist and vocalist in a band with two ex-schoolmates and a drummer who was a few years older and had been booted out of a couple of bands already, partly on account of his drinking, but mainly, Erin thought, because he was ‘a colossal arsehole’. The boyfriend also wrote songs. One of them, inspired by Erin, was called ‘Ellen’. It was embarrassing, she told me. Even if it hadn’t been embarrassing she wouldn’t have liked the song; it sounded like something that any of fifty other bands might have produced; most of the boyfriend’s songs sounded familiar. Once in a while the band played a pub gig, and the set always finished with ‘Ellen’. She was required to be present at every gig, because she was the main man’s muse. ‘That was my job,’ she told me. In addition to providing inspiration, she was also required to serve as the boyfriend’s counsellor and lightning conductor. Acclaim was being withheld from him, while the talentless were prospering wherever he looked. ‘Sex was his way of letting off steam, and he had a lot of steam to let off.’ She actually told me this. We talked about the violent sex to which she had been subjected, until Lucas had rescued her.
She said to me: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not all that interested in sex.’ She was not abashed; it might have been merely an expression of personal taste.
Perhaps, I thought, hearing this, I had not been entirely wrong, after all, in how I had imagined her relationship with Lucas to be. And I would, I suspect, have flattered myself with the idea that I, at some imprecise point in the future, might be the person to make Erin think differently; I would be the gentle corrective, the belated antidote to the poisonous boyfriend. The pleasure of sex was so brief, she said, and so selfish. Assuming a confessor’s face, I assured her that I understood what she meant. I hinted that this understanding might owe something to my relationship with Miriam.
The thing one had to know about Lucas, she told me, was that respect for other people was for him a fundamental principle. He respected all the people – or very nearly all the people – who asked for his ‘guidance’ (this was the word she used), and he had respected her, as the boyfriend had not. ‘We’re meant for each other,’ the boyfriend liked to say; to reinforce the point, he gave her a ring that was made of two interlocking rings. Lucas, on the other hand, ‘found nothing more depressing’ than couples who were – or wanted you to see that they were – a perfect fit for each other. The ‘cult of completion’, as he sometimes called it, implied an excessive self-regard, Lucas believed, according to Erin. She was not the ‘right person’ for Lucas, she told me. ‘For a start I was too young, obviously,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have a brain like his. I am not an intellectual person.’ This is what so many people had misunderstood: the differences between them did not disprove their love – the opposite was in fact the case. A lot of people are capable of loving only their mirror image, Erin told me. Lucas knew better. Lucas knew what love meant. His life was an example of what love really was.
Again I encouraged her to talk about Lucas. Talking, perhaps, would bring her sooner to a state of mind in which she could begin to free herself. I listened, the hypocrite, like the truest of friends. Recently I had read something for which I thought I might be able to find some use. Now I deployed it, altering the words to take possession of the idea. The relationship with the boyfriend had been a mistake, Erin said, but I replied that no relationship should be regarded as a mistake: our false loves are the necessary preliminaries to the real one; they enable us to recognise it. And I had more to say: there is another kind of love, which, rather than excluding all others as the one real love comes into focus, widens out continually to encompass everything. This spiritual love, I implied, was also what Erin had been talking about, when she talked about Lucas and what love really was.
‘Yes,’ said Erin. Her gratitude was overpowering; I hated myself, or so I told myself. ‘Yes,’ she said again, as though I had been revealed as one of the few who could comprehend.
•
I was at work in my room, around ten at night, six months after the death of Lucas, to the day, when I saw Erin outside, by the kitchen door, mug in hand, gazing into the garden. She looked up, at my window, and nodded; when I waved she smiled, and the smile was an appeal. I went down to ask, over the wall, if she would like to talk.
No sooner had I sat beside her than she said: ‘I’m lost’. It was said loudly, to the room, as if appealing to an audience of many people, ranged in ranks around her. Then she told me what had happened that day.
She had gone into town, as soon as the shower had sto
pped. Overhead, the clouds were coming apart; the mixture of charcoal clouds and bright blue sky was alluring; she stopped to appreciate it. Minute by minute the gaps between the clouds were widening. The edges of the clouds dissolved in the blueness. ‘And then it began to go wrong,’ she said to me. Something made her feel that it was necessary to wait until the sky had become entirely clear. So she waited and watched. When only a few rags of cloud were left, she became aware that the streets had become busier; there were too many people, and the way that they were moving was not quite right – they were like actors in a crowd scene. A change had occurred. Then, a hundred yards away, approaching, there was somebody she knew. It seemed that he had not yet seen her. Erin did not know what to do. An encounter was imminent. Should she make herself distracted, and allow him to walk past? She had a bag over her shoulder. At this point, should she open it, and take something out? That would allow her to avoid contact. But it was possible that contact was supposed to occur. If that were the case, would there be a greeting, or even a conversation? If they were to talk, what was she to say? She looked around, and everyone she saw was moving with purpose; those who were speaking knew what to say; the listeners knew their part as well. Because she had no words to speak, her feeling was that she should do something with the bag. Opening it, she glanced up, straight ahead, and saw that the man she knew had crossed the street. Now there was no need for any business with the bag. This might have been the moment for her to leave the scene. If so, which way was she to go? The answer did not present itself. It was as if she had yet to receive an instruction. By what means this instruction would be delivered, she did not know. Even more people were on the street now; all knew where they were going. Right in front of her, two people walked towards each other, with arms raised; the embrace happened smoothly. Erin could find no reason to move in one direction rather than any other. There could be only one answer: she had to wait. Through some agency other than her own, the situation would be rectified. ‘My head was a mess,’ she told me. Some thoughts made a noise in her head, but the thoughts were not hers. A woman was standing in front of her. She placed a hand on Erin’s arm, and said: ‘Is anything wrong?’ And Erin answered: ‘It’s all right.’ And suddenly it was.
Live; live; live Page 22