Derek started to laugh. He seemed quite shaken.
Ed raised his eyebrows. He was similarly affected.
Derek’s voice was thick now. ‘You took us by surprise there, Philip.’
They started to giggle. Ed leant on his arm, averting his gaze.
Derek wiped an eye and held his hand over his brow.
Philip focused on the view. He felt a frisson. Time was not straightforward. Every particle of the view settled exactly on memory.
He laughed softly and then crumpled down sideways, his head falling into the grass. For a moment he watched the flask changing hands, saw Ed’s chin and cheek against the sky, then he looked at the grass - out of focus - close to his forehead.
He guessed at what he would have to go through. Nothing so simply agonising as grief. A calamity had happened out there in time and he had somehow to find a way of making it happen inside his head. He had to find a way of allowing it through his mind like a toppled tree being dragged, branches and all, through the middle of a house, scratching and ripping at floors and furniture, detritus everywhere until the damn thing is hauled through to the other side, and then the damage is done. He was daunted by the concurrency of this problem with his everyday life. This had been going on for years, side by side with his plans and routines, bulking larger all the time; and now here he was at the centre.
He sat up again, took a rolly off Ed, checked the garden, what could be seen of it. Beyond the drive the lawn had turned to meadow. It was a green haze of thistle and dandelion. The gravel was carpeted in grass. All the roses and shrubs were overblown. The hedges tottering. On the edge of pastureland it took no more than a couple of seasons for nature to scramble over everything, choking borders with nettles and bindweed. The barns seemed embedded in the sloping ground.
Only the fields beyond were the same - fields manicured by chomping cows and nibbling sheep.
Ed was behind him as he walked through the thick grass to the orchard. The camera was not intrusive. There was nothing to intrude upon. He tracked and panned, following point of view, but Philip was drifting now, almost unaware of himself. He had no objection to the documentary. Self-consciousness had deserted him. The public were welcome to whatever they could gain from this spectacle.
This was where he had stood before, between leaning apple trees in autumn, noticing with a crush of pleasure a cluster of rosehips against the blue sky: red on blue, sharp in the morning light, a hyper-vivid miracle. It was a solitary moment, allowable then, a childlike discovery. They had parented him, he knew that, but the house and its garden seemed to nurture him, too.
He wondered by what means they had allowed him to share in their Eden, offering him the run of the place en famille, and the right to survive their fate.
He found a sapling Metasequoia suffocated by grasses, reduced almost to a trellis by rampant weeds, its needle clusters thin and sparse. He had planted it and now he disentangled the branches with tender futility.
They were present all of a sudden, as if he had seen them yesterday, Peter coming across the lawn with his tousled hair, white shirt and jeans - a Pan-like figure; Clarissa wafting around the house, snipping rosemary and thyme. They displayed the happy purposefulness of people who had found their nest and had the talent and temperament to make the most of it.
Derek peered out from behind a giant hogweed. He seemed troubled by the abundance of vegetation. He raise a thumb at Ed and framed with his hands the idea for a shot over Philip’s shoulder towards a hump-backed hill. ‘Elgarian. Sort of.’
Derek was more sensitive and poised now. His movements deferred, drew on, yielded. He had the dissimulated alertness of someone who has caught on and is nervously determined to get the goods.
‘D’you have photographs of this place?’
‘Probably.’
‘Then-and-now effect?’
They paused at a gate, Philip wondering where to go, where to look.
‘Why come here today?’
Philip opened his mouth, shook his head. He felt a little giddy.
‘This happened a while ago.’ Derek looked over his shoulder. ‘It’s odd to rake it up. What made you . . . all of a sudden . . . want to come back?’
‘I . . . I owed them a visit.’
Derek appeared to digest this. He nodded, bit his lip. ‘You think of them as still here?’
Philip was open to the suggestion but could not confirm it.
Derek waggled his finger at Ed, who was side-on a few feet back.
‘The sudden non-being of someone you know is mysterious,’ said Philip.
‘Hard to accept?’
‘I couldn’t have come here before now.’
‘Too painful?’
‘Of course it was too fucking painful!’
Derek suffered the impatience without blinking. He seemed ready to be given something.
‘I mean . . . either you say, “Shit happens.” Forget it, get on with your life, because there’s no point . . . Or you say, “I have to acknowledge it. Until I let it overwhelm me, I can’t say I’ve survived.” ’
They stood, the three of them, on the drive, shade playing in their faces. A pair of dragonflies jiggered past.
The shadow of a branch swayed against the brickwork of the barn.
He was crying now. He fingered away the tears, panted in air, against the sobs trapped in his throat.
Derek drew the cameraman away, averting his own eyes.
Philip gestured, hoping the gesture would help him, but nothing came of it.
Derek glanced along the driveway, debating something.
From here the house was out of sight, concealed by the barn. The three men gazed at the light-shot opening beyond the canopy of trees.
Philip moved off along the drive, slowly drawn back. The other two stood behind him checking their equipment. Eventually they followed at a distance.
This time when he cleared the barn and the fringe of willow leaves the house looked more simply awful than before. Some builder should by now have bought the plot and redeveloped it. He went closer, feeling strange pity for the house.
He gazed through a kitchen window at the dim mess inside, walls flaking and peeling, like a degenerating womb. He glanced back at the men and slipped in through a door to the annex, former scene of wellington boots and curls of mud on the floor. In the kitchen the ceiling plasterboard hung loose and gaping in places. The counters were intact, Formica curling; the floor tiles were covered in a scree of dust and rubble. Over the sink there was a trap-door-size hole in the ceiling. Philip came under the aperture and looked up at the rafters of Katie’s bedroom. It seemed as if the squarish manhole had been neatly cut by firemen to gain access to the room above. He levered himself on to the counter, stood up on the old units and made his way around to the sink to get a better look. Standing on tiptoe his eyes came just above floor level. He was nose to nose with the leg of a bed. As far as he could tell the fire had not penetrated this room. The walls bore smoke-stained wallpaper, but the door had shut out the flames from the landing. The massive central chimney stack had protected this chamber from the worst of the heat.
He braced his arms and levered himself up, boards creaking, plaster crumbling away and clattering on the sink. He pulled through slowly, wedged a knee on a rafter and rolled sideways on to the bedroom floor.
There was the same smell of smoke, but as he got up, dusting his knees and elbows, he saw that the room was intact. He looked around in a kind of dull wonder, and slowly he realised what he was staring at. Everywhere there were toys, children’s books, fluffy animals. Her possessions were on the chest of drawers, the shelves, the mantelpiece. Sticker books, a fairy calendar, a pink plastic hairbrush, the bedraggled queue of toy rabbits and giraffes, sitting patiently on the floor. He turned with a lurch in his heart to see her dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. The men had come in to get her, come too late, of course, taken the poor thing out through that hole, but nobody could face climbing up again to
clear up her things. He caught his face in his hands and sat slowly on the end of the bed. The room had been waiting for him all these years, waiting for him to come and see what had happened.
He sat in a trance, as if trapped by a spell, the cluster of memories coming at him from every corner of the room, through stale air that still carried a bouquet of the past, so close now, so concurrent, so rivingly familiar. His eyes rested on everything in turn, every single object he could find to notice and take in. She was there in his mind so suddenly, and this was the difficult thing. These little icons of childhood were imbued with her child self, the lilac toy mobile, the scrap of ribbon, the crayon. How real she had been, little Katie, having her crack at existence with such zest! He could hear the sound of her singing to herself between bossy mutterings as she managed the mermaids or the rabbits. His heart had flowed towards that little girl, whom he thought of as his child only because he loved her so much for herself; he loved the premise of her character, the fact he had known her since day one, had seen a brand-new original human being enter the world, and what was excruciating now was the vividness of this child in memory. She was there. In his mind’s eye she was seconds away.
One could almost believe the rest of the house was intact. He dared not open the door on to the landing: a black cavern, no doubt. He noticed how a clothes-rack pole slanted across the wall, barring the window and rescue.
He realised, this was it, yes, because he could not remember, not voluntarily, could not bring himself to picture them, the whole dear family in this house, in this garden, until he had seen for himself that they were gone. Until he had forced this charred ruin into his mind, this rank shell, this dusty, musty death-trap; until he had seen with his own eyes how things stood in reality, and got into his head the stark fact of their awful deaths, the past was closed to him, an unreachable dream. He could not even do Katie the justice of calling her to mind. Had not been able to, had not dared to. And yet in his mind they were everywhere now, so close, just the far side of a corner in time.
He lay on the bed, lips parted, caving in slowly, mildew hanging in his nostrils, dust in his hair, silence sitting on him like a press, a weight that would ease the breath out of him, a flattening weight that crushed away thought and sense and self.
When he opened his eyes, he felt not quite himself. He lay on the mattress without turning his head.
Before descending through the hole he put his hand on a fluffy rabbit and waited a second. He stroked the rabbit but left it where it was. Sliding down into the kitchen the smell of smoke hit him like a wall, a bitter stink you could almost taste.
Outside on the lawn the brightness was dazzling. Everything seemed whitened by sunlight. Ed and Derek were standing in the grass by the stream. They were talking and nodding easily.
A cow in the field flicked its tail.
They looked at him as he came out, but he kept his distance, crossing to agate by the field.
Ten minutes later he was up on the hill, the poplars behind him hissing like surf. He stared at the wide yonder of fields, catching his breath. The hills were a lattice of light and shade. Woodland tributaries flowed off the slopes and met in the valley. In the flat distance the limbs of a beech tree magnificently erupted. He stood there with mouth agape, letting the emotion run out of him, sorrow out, sensation in, a glut of it, his tears flecked by the wind.
He gazed up at the long length of the poplar’s trunk, to the net of leaves and to the burning blue above.
Chapter Seventeen
The consultant had been slow and careful, leading in gently, placing the results before him as evidence to be made use of. His face was alert to the impact of words, his forehead lined with sensitive concern. He spread his hands across the papers on his desk as if conjuring prognosis from an array of sources. There were results, and there were inferences, a joining-together of the elements in a picture. As he spoke and Philip listened he somehow managed to convey the normality of a life-threatening illness, describing it in terms of wear and tear, as though Philip’s body were the inside of a used car and the consultant a mechanic who knew what he could and could not do.
He was full of restless energy. It was a beautiful summer’s day outside and he wanted to be in Hyde Park walking across the grass.
‘Look on the angiogram here. These vessels are tumour-specific. Obstruct them and you starve the growth.’
He touched the translucent sheet with a forefinger. The vessels were like a mesh of steel wool around darkness.
‘By surgery?’
‘And subsequent therapy.’
He inhaled sharply. One had to be grown-up about these things. ‘So keyhole’s out?’
‘Given the shape and distribution of tissue, yes. We’ll need to open you up and have a proper look-see.’
He nodded slowly. It was all very intelligible.
‘Is the operation hazardous?’
‘Twenty years ago these sorts of interventions were impossible. Nowadays more is known about the vascular structure of the organ. It’s relatively routine.’
There was bedside reassurance here. The dark mystery of the body, its secret deeds and processes, science illumined with daylight clarity. The situation was drastic but Philip had allies. Dr Lewis was a veteran in the wars against cancer, wise to the wiles of his adversary. He had the knife, chemicals, radiology, scanning superiority. His team could frazzle tumours, napalm metastases, smoke out rogue cells. He was a doughty fighter and a shrewd tactician. Of course there were outcomes other than victory in this sort of conflict. Against that particular foe one might not survive valorous battle. Doctors were warriors of a sort, but threshold guardians, too. Cancer treatment hovered ambiguously between steps towards cure and strategies in a process of dying.
‘How long do I have to wait?’
The consultant coughed. ‘Two to four weeks.’
He had a call into Ursula. This development would make things easier to explain.
‘Recuperation?’
‘The incision can be sore for a week or so. You’ll need to take it easy for a bit.’
He felt the G-force of violently accelerated mortality.
‘Then chemotherapy?’
He nodded. ‘Then chemo.’
Philip patted his leg. The oncology wing of a London hospital was not a club he wanted to join. The in-patients belonged no longer to themselves but to endgames of sickness and the curriculum of terminal care.
‘What are my chances?’
The consultant seemed to acknowledge this was a necessary question. ‘We’ll know more after the operation.’
He was impatient now. He wanted to be doing something else. ‘How little time might I have?’
‘Mr Morahan, I think you should be positive.’
‘I’m a concert pianist. I make commitments years in advance.’
‘Make your commitments!’
‘I need a timeframe.’
‘I can’t imagine a prognosis worse than six to nine months on any set of facts. The more likely scenario is two to five years. As I say, my hope would be for a full recovery.’
He let the information travel through him. ‘Thank you.’
Out in the corridor he took the up lift instead of the down lift and got wedged behind a trolley and two paramedics. Up on the fifth floor sunlight rushed in through the plate-glass window and dazzled him. He stood aside as a pair of surgeons walked by. He pressed the lift button and waited impatiently as more staff sped the other way. A nurse with succouring body-curves under crisp uniform held a bag of plasma to her chest as she reversed through a door.
Back on the ground floor he found himself trailing past a shopping mall of coffee machines and sandwich vendors and confectionery stalls. Patients from a ward at the end of the corridor were shuffling past with expressions of institutional self-pity. For a moment he had no sense of the time of day. He stared at his watch, unable to concentrate. This was his predicament: a succession of acute and unfamiliar mental states that he would
need to ignore. One had to press on and stick to the plan. Action would help him metabolise thoroughly bad news, which anyway he had expected.
He crossed the lobby and went through automatic doors into the city air, past the cabs on the concourse that led to Praed Street. Light cut across the upper floors of neighbouring buildings, throwing huge diagonals of shadow over the hospital wing. Pigeons hopped on the pavement, a black porter stood over a drunk, who had fallen on the entrance steps.
He felt momentarily bodiless. He kept going, senses greeted by construction noise, the colours of advertising placards, the acridity of exhaust. He decided to walk down Edgware Road, past the Arab banks and Lebanese restaurants, the Halal stores and casino fronts. In the park he strolled around, gazing at the ruff of trees that collared Park Lane between Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner and at the hotels and embassies rising above the tree-line, crenellating the sky unevenly.
He would collect some sheet music from Boosey & Hawkes and go down to HMV. He wanted to see what Serebriakov recordings they had. He remembered to switch on his mobile. Ursula might call at any moment. It was a long time since he had felt the urge, let alone the capacity, to be charming. John would be more difficult. His agent could dissimulate forgiveness and fellow-feeling if pushed, which he would be. Unfortunately for poor old John he must do a lot more than hug and brush away a tear. He must think the unthinkable and get on with it.
He was dizzy now. The walking made him feel light-headed. Serious illness was so preoccupying. One had to sidestep back into the routine feel of things. Too easily with this kind of news everyday reality lost its immediacy. Plans and interests went flaccid. One felt poorly, persecuted, weak-willed. The solar plexus cracked up. Not for him. None of that nonsense for him.
Fifty-two years of memory, of experience, of living personal history and mental culture, the streaming individual mind was supported, it turned out, only by the frailest wisps of bodily health.
Striking back across the park he recalled Peter’s line about heaven, and the likely absence thereof. How to have your heaven in this life was the issue. Without the lure of a hereafter all that Protestant work-ethic propaganda went out the window. Unhappiness, loneliness, angst. Leave all that to the grave and beyond.
The Concert Pianist Page 19
