by Ali Smith
After the right amount of time talking about houses had passed, Elisabeth asked after Daniel.
Won’t have any help in the house, her mother said. Won’t have meals on wheels. Won’t let anyone make him a cup of anything or do his washing or change his old bed. The house smells pretty strong, but if anyone goes round there offering anything, offering to help out, he makes you sit down, then makes you a cup of tea himself, won’t hear of anyone even doing that for him. Ninety if he’s a day. He’s not up to it. I had to fish a dead beetle out of the last cup of tea he made me.
I’ll just nip round and see him, Elisabeth said.
Oh, hello, Daniel said. Come in. What you reading?
Elisabeth waited for him to make her the cup of tea. Then she got the exhibition catalogue she’d found in London out of her bag and put it on the table.
When I was small, Mr Gluck, she said, I don’t know if you remember, but when we went on walks you sometimes described paintings to me, and the thing is, I think I’ve finally managed to see some of them.
Daniel put his glasses on. He opened the catalogue. He flushed, then he went pale.
Oh yes, he said.
He leafed through the pages. His face lit up. He nodded. He shook his head.
Aren’t they fine? he said.
I think they’re really brilliant, Elisabeth said. Really outstanding. Also really thematically and technically interesting.
Daniel turned a picture towards her, blue and red abstracts, blacks and golds and pinks in circles and curves.
I remember this one very clearly, he said.
I wondered, Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. Because of our conversations, and you knowing them so well, the pictures. I mean they’ve been missing for decades. They’ve just been rediscovered, really. And no one in the art world knows about them, except, from what I can gather, from people who knew her in person. I went and asked about her at the gallery where they showed these pictures, like seven or eight years back, and I met this woman who knew someone who used to know Boty a bit, and she told me that the woman she knows still sometimes just finds herself in floods of tears, even nearly forty years later, whenever she remembers her friend. So, I was wondering. It struck me. That maybe you knew Boty too.
Well well, he said. Look at that.
He was still looking at the blue abstract called Gershwin.
I never knew till now she called it that, he said.
And when you look at the photos of her, Elisabeth said. And she was so incredibly beautiful. And what happened to her in her life is so sad, and then the sad things that happened after her own sad death, to her husband, and then to her daughter, just tragedy after tragedy, so unbearably sad that –
Daniel put one hand up to tell her to stop, then the other, both hands up and flat.
Silence.
He went back to the book on the table between them. He turned the page to the one with the woman made of flames, and the bright yellow abstract opposite it, reds, pinks, blues and whites.
Look at that, he said.
He nodded.
They truly are something, he said.
He turned all the pages, one after the other. Then he shut the book and put it back on the table. He looked up at Elisabeth.
There have been very many men and women in my life whom I hoped might, whom I wanted to, love me, he said. But I only, myself, ever, loved, in that way, just once. And it wasn’t a person I fell in love with. No, not a person at all.
He tapped the cover of the book.
It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren’t yours let you see where you are, who you are.
Elisabeth nodded as if she understood.
Not a person.
Yes, and the 60s zeitgeist, she said, is –
Daniel, his hand up, stopped her again.
We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.
But a coldness was shifting all through her body, wiping her into a clarity much like a soapy window by a window cleaner from top to base with a rubber blade.
He nodded, more to the room than to Elisabeth.
It’s the only responsibility memory has, he said. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They’re foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.
Elisabeth will have looked like she was listening, but inside her head there was the high-pitched hiss, the blood going round inside her making itself heard above any and every other thing.
Not a person.
Daniel does not –
Daniel has never –
Daniel has never known –
She drank the tea. She excused herself. She left the book on the table.
He came hobbling after her into the hall holding it out to her as she was unsnibbing the front door.
I left it on purpose, for you, she said. I thought you might like it. I won’t need it. I’ve handed in my dissertation.
He shook his old head.
You keep it, he said.
She heard the door shutting behind her.
It was one of the days of a week in one of the seasons in one of the years, maybe 1949, maybe 1950, 1951, in any case sometime around then.
Christine Keeler, who’d be famous just over a decade later, being one of the witting/unwitting agents of the huge changes in the class and sexual mores of the 1960s, was a small girl out playing down by the river with some of the boys.
They unearthed a metal thing. It will have been round at one end and pointed at the other.
A small bomb will have been about as big as their upper bodies. They knew it was a bomb. So they decided they’d take it home to show to the father of one of the boys. He’d presumably been in the army. He’d know what to do with it.
It was mucky from being buried so they cleaned it up maybe, with wet grass and jumper sleeves, first. Then they took turns carrying it back to their street. A couple of times they dropped it. When they did they ran away like crazy in case it went off.
They got it to the boy’s house. The boy’s father came out to see what all the kids outside the house wanted.
Oh dear God.
The RAF came. They got everybody out of the houses all up and down the street, then everybody out of the houses in all the streets around the street.
Next day those kids got their names in the local paper.
That story comes from one of the books she wrote about her life. Here’s another. When she wasn’t yet ten years old, Christine Keeler was sent to live in a convent for a while. One of the bedtime stories the nuns told all the little girls there was about a little boy called Rastus.
Rastus is in love with a little white girl. But the little white girl gets ill, and it looks like she’s going to die. Someone tells Rastus that she’ll be dead by the time the leaves have fallen off the tree at the front of her house. So Rastus collects up all the shoelaces he can find. Maybe he also unravels his jumper and cuts the unravelled wool into pieces. He’s going to need a lot of pieces. He climbs the tree outside the girl’s house. He ties the leaves on to the branches.
But one night a really wild wind blows all the leaves off the tree.
(Forty years before Christine Keeler was born, but presumably at a time when a lot of those nuns who apparently told stories like this one to the little girls in their care were growing up or were young adults, Rastus was a name popular in blackface minstrel shows. It became a character-name, a racist shorthand for someone black, in early films, in turn of the century fiction, across all the forms of early media entertainment.
In the States, from the start of the century till the mid-20s, a black figure named Rastus was used to advertise Cream of Wheat breakfast cereal. He wore a chef’s hat and jacket in all the photographs of him and in one particular illustration an old and white-bearded black man with a stick stops to look at a picture of Ra
stus on a poster advertising Cream of Wheat For Your Breakfast and the caption underneath reads: ‘Ah reckon as how he’s de bes’ known man in de worl.’
In the mid-20s, Cream of Wheat replaced the character-name Rastus with the character-name Frank L White, though the illustrations on the posters and in the adverts stayed much the same. Frank L White was a real man whose facial image, in a photograph taken around 1900 when he was a chef in Chicago, became Cream of Wheat’s standard advertising image. It’s not recorded anywhere whether White was ever paid for the use of his image.
He died in 1938.
It took another seventy years for his grave to be officially marked with a stone.
Back to Christine Keeler.)
There’s another story she tells about herself in the couple of books written by her and her ghostwriters.
This one is from another time in her childhood. It’s about the day she found a fieldmouse. She brought it home as a pet.
The man she called Dad killed it. He did this by standing on it, presumably as she watched.
Same as all the other times, Daniel is sleeping.
To the people here he is maybe just another shape in a bed they keep serviceably clean. They are still rehydrating him, though they’ve let Elisabeth know they’ll want to talk to her mother about whether to cease rehydrating or not.
I want you, my mother and I both completely want you, especially my mother does, to keep rehydrating him, Elisabeth said when they asked.
The Maltings Care Providers plc are very keen to have a conference with her mother, the receptionist tells her when she arrives.
I’ll tell her, Elisabeth says. She’ll be in touch.
The receptionist says they’d like to flag up as gently as possible with her mother their concern that payment provision for the accommodation and care package for Mr Gluck at The Maltings Care Providers plc is shortly going to fall into default.
We’ll definitely be in touch about it really really soon, Elisabeth says.
The receptionist goes back to her iPad, on which she’s paused a crime serial on catch-up. Elisabeth watches the screen for a moment or two. A woman dressed as a policewoman is being run over by a young man in a car. He runs over her on the road, then he does it again. Then he does it again.
Elisabeth goes to Daniel’s room and sits down at the side of the bed.
They are definitely still rehydrating him.
One of his hands has come out from under the covers and gone to his mouth. It has the rehydration needle taped into the back of it and the tube taped along the side of it. (A thin taut string breaks in Elisabeth’s chest at seeing the tape and the needle.) Daniel touches, still deep in the sleep, his top lip, but lightly, brushingly, like someone would if he were clearing away breadcrumbs or croissant crumbs. It’s as if he’s feeling, in the least conspicuous way, to test or to make sure he still has a mouth, or that his fingers can still feel. Then the hand disappears back down inside the covers.
Elisabeth sneaks a look at the chart clipped on to the end of Daniel’s bed, the graphs with the temperature and blood pressure readings on them.
The chart says on its first page that Daniel is a hundred and one years old.
Elisabeth laughs to herself.
(Her mother: How old are you, Mr Gluck?
Daniel: Nowhere near as old as I intend to be, Mrs Demand.)
Today he looks like a Roman senator, his sleeping head noble, his eyes shut and blank as a statue, his eyebrows mere moments of frost.
It is a privilege, to watch someone sleep, Elisabeth tells herself. It is a privilege to be able to witness someone both here and not here. To be included in someone’s absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.
No. It is awful.
It is fucking awful.
It is awful to be on the literal other side of his eyes.
Mr Gluck, she says.
She says it quiet, confidential, down near his left ear.
Two things. I’m not sure what to do about the money they need you to pay here. I wonder if there’s something you’d like me to do about it. And the other thing. They want to know about rehydrating you. Do you want to be rehydrated?
Do you need to go?
Do you want to stay?
Elisabeth stops speaking. She sits up again away from Daniel’s sleeping head.
Daniel breathes in. Then he breathes out. Then, for a long time, there’s no breath. Then it starts again.
One of the care assistants comes in. She starts wiping at the bedrail then the windowsill with cleaning stuff.
He’s quite some gentleman, she says with her back to Elisabeth.
She turns round.
What did he do in his good long life? After the war, I mean.
Elisabeth realizes she has no idea.
He wrote songs, she says. And he helped out a lot with my childhood. When I was little.
We were all amazed, the care assistant says, when he told us about in the war, when they interned them. Him being English really but going in there with his old father the German, even though he could have stayed outside if he’d chosen. And how he tried to get his sister over, but they said no.
In-breath.
Out-breath.
Long pause.
Did he tell you that? Elisabeth says.
The care assistant hums a tune. She wipes the doorhandle, then the edges of the door. She takes a long stick made of white plastic with a white cotton rectangle on the end of it and she wipes the top of the door and round the lampshade.
He’s never talked about any of that, not to us, Elisabeth says.
Family for you, the care assistant says. Easier to talk to someone you don’t know. He and I had many a chat, before he went off. One day he said a very fair thing. When the state is not kind, he said. We were talking about the vote, it was coming up, I’ve thought about it a lot, since. Then the people are fodder, he said. Wise man, your grandad. Clever man.
The care assistant smiles at her.
It’s a lovely thing you do, coming to read to him. A thoughtful thing.
The care assistant wheels her little trolley out. Elisabeth watches her broad back as she goes, and the way the material of her overall stretches tight across it and under her arms.
I know nothing, nothing really, about anyone.
Maybe nobody does.
In-breath.
Out-breath.
Long pause.
She closes her eyes. Dark.
She opens her eyes again.
She opens her book at random. She starts to read, from where she’s opened it, but this time out loud, to Daniel: His sisters, the nymphs of the spring, mourned for him, and cut off their hair in tribute to their brother. The wood nymphs mourned him too, and Echo sang her refrain to their lament.
The pyre, the tossing torches, and the bier, were now being prepared, but his body was nowhere to be found. Instead of his corpse, they discovered a flower with a circle of white petals round a yellow centre.
I’m thirteen years old in that one, her mother was saying. Seaside holiday. We went every year. That’s my mother. My father.
The next door neighbour was in their front room.
It was just after Elisabeth had told him she had a sister. Now she was worried the neighbour would give the game away and ask her mother where the other daughter was.
So far he hadn’t said anything about it.
He was looking at the family photographs of her mother on the wall in the front room.
Now those, he was saying, are completely fantastic.
Her mother hadn’t just made coffee, she’d made it in the good mugs.
Forgive me, Mrs Demand, the neighbour said. I mean, the photos are lovely. But the tin signs. The real thing.
The what, Mr Gluck? her mother said.
She put the mugs on the table and came over to have a look.
Call me Daniel, please, the neighbour said.
He pointed at the picture.
Oh, her mother said. Those. Yes.
There were hoardings advertising ice lollies in one of the old photographs, behind her mother as a child. This was what they were talking about.
6d, her mother said. I was still a very small child when decimalization came in. But I remember the heavy pennies. The half crowns.
She was speaking in a slightly too loud way. The neighbour, Daniel, didn’t seem to notice or mind.
Look at that wedge of dark pink on the bright pink, Daniel said. Look at the blue, the way the shadow deepens there where the colour changes.
Yes, her mother said. Zoom. Fab.
Daniel sat down beside the cat.
What’s her name? he said to Elisabeth.
Barbra, Elisabeth said. After the singer.
The singer her mother loves, her mother said.
Daniel winked at Elisabeth and said, but quietly, down towards her like it was a secret so her mother, who’d gone to the CD shelf now and was going through the CDs, wouldn’t hear, as if he didn’t want her to know,
after the singer who once, believe it or not, sang a song I wrote the words for, in concert. I was very handsomely paid. But she never recorded it. I’d be a trillionaire, had she. Rich enough to time-travel.
Can you sing? Elisabeth said.
Not at all, Daniel said.
Would you actually like to time-travel? she said. If you could, I mean, and time travel was a real thing?
Very much indeed, Daniel said.
Why? Elisabeth said.
Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.
He opened his eyes wide at Elisabeth. Then he put his hand in his pocket, took out a twenty pence piece, held it in front of Barbra the cat. He did something with his other hand and the coin disappeared! He made it disappear!
The song about love being an easy chair filled the room. Barbra the cat was still looking in disbelief at Daniel’s empty hand. She put both paws up, held the hand, put her nose into it to look for the missing coin. Her cat face was full of amazement.
See how it’s deep in our animal nature, Daniel said. Not to see what’s happening right in front of our eyes.
