The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  I have no idea what my mother wrote in her letters to Leonie Sutton, but the fact that they existed were proof to me of something mysterious: that my mother had a private inner life that had nothing to do with me and Dora and perhaps was even kept secret from Henry.

  Dora had been dead less than three months when my mother told me she was going to visit Leonie Sutton in Australia. She said she would be gone for six weeks.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she said. “Leonie has always wanted me to go.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time she had asked me how I felt about something. Since Dora’s death we had lived side by side in the Greenwich house as usual but more than ever we had communicated through Henry. There was no hatred, no blame, no dislike, even – just nothing, and nowhere to go. I looked at her, this strange, scrawny woman with the fuzz of dark hair so like Dora’s, and thought suddenly how pitiless her life had been. I still knew almost nothing about her.

  “Of course I don’t mind,” I said. I gazed at her hands, the still beautiful tapering fingers, the opal ring. “Opals come from Australia, don’t they?”

  She smiled, and her eyes were bright. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, they do.”

  It was Henry, of course, that helped her with the form-filling, but she showed me the visa when it came, the crested document in its plastic folder with her photograph, and VIOLET JANE PULLINGER blocked out in inky black capitals. There was something different about her, a nervous excitement. There were points of colour in her cheeks and I realised with a shock that she was happy.

  Henry and I went with her to Heathrow. I kissed her on the cheek and watched her walk towards the barrier. Henry caught her by the wrist, whispered briefly into her ear then let her go. The next time he saw her, she was an Australian citizen.

  She turned back once and waved to us. She had her hand luggage with her, a new flight bag in red leather with gold zips and a turtle motif. She had never owned anything like it, and I felt startled each time I saw it, thinking she had picked up someone else’s luggage by mistake.

  She looked dauntingly young, as if the whole of the last twenty years had been wiped out. My heart turned over. Dora’s absence struck me like a physical blow.

  Dora had set her heart on going to Cambridge. She was going to read physics and maths. She had exchanged a couple of letters with one of the fellows of Clare College, a Dr Rosine Gerstheimer who had done work with Schelling and Auel. She seemed nervous about the interview. I told her she would walk it. The idea that they might turn her down was laughable.

  I didn’t really want her to go. We had never been separated for more than a couple of hours and I knew that if she went to Cambridge everything would change. I dreaded change. I equated it with destruction.

  She showed me a photograph of Rosine Gerstheimer in the Clare College yearbook, a surprisingly young-looking, tall woman with her hair gathered softly at the nape of her neck.

  “She worked in engineering for ten years before she went into teaching,” said Dora. “I really want to meet her. She won a prize for her book on Sophie Germain.”

  The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it. I leafed through the rest of the yearbook, looking at photographs of the chapel and the Backs and the frontage of Heffers Bookshop and the Fitzwilliam Museum. I knew the museum had a small but interesting collection of clocks and watches, including a key-wound London pocket watch that had supposedly belonged to Beethoven.

  I went to Liverpool Street and picked up a railway timetable. I kept telling myself that Cambridge was less than two hours away by train.

  The weather over Christmas was mild but January was icy and three girls in Dora’s class went down with glandular fever. Dora looked tired and pale. Sometimes when I went to her room after supper I would find her already in bed.

  With her eyes closed she looked barely alive. My mother wrote a note to her form tutor, saying that Dorothy was unwell and would not be attending classes for the rest of the week. It was so unlike my mother to interfere in anything Dora or I did that when I saw the letter in its long white envelope I felt a stab of anxiety. The fact that Dora made no objection worried me even more.

  “How do you feel?” I said. It was a question I had rarely had to ask.

  “Like stone,” she said. “Like I’m wading through treacle.”

  I sat on the bed and read aloud to her from the crime thriller we had both been reading, Arkady Solovey’s Muczinski Boulevard. It was set in a future Warsaw, a convoluted epic about a stolen necklace and the series of murders that resulted from the theft. It was over a thousand pages long and we had been racing each other to the finish, but now I had to ration it out at one or two chapters each night. Sometimes she would fall asleep without me noticing, and I would have to do a recap the next day.

  She returned to school the following week and seemed a little better for a while. In the evenings she worked on her maths problems, copying down equations from a thin red pamphlet Dr Gerstheimer had sent her from Cambridge. She seemed closed in on herself, almost frightened. She liked to have me sit beside her but often hours would go by without either one of us speaking. Before this had seemed natural, a kind of telepathy, but now it was as if each of us were hiding something.

  At the end of a month Henry and my mother took her to the doctor. I stayed at home in my room, feeling terror for the first time in my life. There was a sour taste in my mouth. The air felt sharp at the edges, too painful to breathe. I didn’t know why I hadn’t gone with them. I didn’t know what to do.

  It was a rare form of leukaemia. They tried giving her a blood transfusion but it didn’t work. The doctors said afterwards that there was no point in trying again, because the new cells were being killed off almost from the moment they entered her bloodstream.

  “Virulent,” they called it. I couldn’t get the word out of my head. When I offered my own blood the surgeon shook his head, a quick, embarrassed gesture, a dismissal of a suggestion that had already been considered and found to be useless.

  “You have a different blood group from Dorothy,” he said. “Didn’t you know that?”

  I hadn’t known. I had never thought about it. He might as well have told me my blood was soiled.

  There was a noise in my head, white noise, as if somebody had clipped me hard around the ear. I walked home, cutting through the self-generating miasma of wharf-side developments, industrial estates and sports centres that rimes the south bank of the Thames. Amidst the welter of glass and concrete the inns and terraces of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe hung on regardless, like a time stream in a different universe. An old man walked his dog, a grey and grizzled Jack Russell terrier. Three children, two boys and a girl, chased a leather football across the street. The girl had long red plaits and a t-shirt that said cannon fodder in white letters on a black background. I had always felt at home in this corner of London. There was an unbending spirit in the place, a filthy-cheeked defiance that I found both subversive and consoling. But that morning it seemed as if the city itself had abandoned me, had turned its back in embarrassment at such naked emotion. The walk back took me more than three hours. By the time I got home there were huge blisters on both my heels and another on the sole of my foot, a tapering isthmus of red-tinged transparency that visibly distorted the curve of my right instep. I went to the bathroom and burst the blisters with the edge of my fingernail, rinsing off the pus under the tap. The outermost layer of skin came away, leaving ragged patches of red too tender to touch. I felt giddy with vertigo. It came to me that I had been out of the house for hours; hours in a sequence of days and weeks that now by some hideous accident appeared to be finite.

  I went to her in her room. I slammed the door hard. The reverberations ran down through the walls and into the floor, spreading beneath my feet like ripples on water. She was wearing a loose grey shirt dress with a cardigan over. Her hair had been brushed down smooth. I clung to her, digging my fingers into the flesh of her shoulders. I felt that so long as I held her fast
she could not leave.

  This is how you stop it from happening, I thought. You have to stay awake, stay on guard. I pulled her down onto the bed and tugged the cover over our heads. I touched her face in the dark. The rim of her cheek was damp with perspiration or tears.

  I kissed her breasts and belly, stroked the curves of her buttocks and thighs. I had never touched her like this before but I had imagined it so many times that her body felt familiar under my hands.

  “It’s all right,” said Dora. “I want us to do it. I want you to try and make it last for hours.”

  I pressed my palm against her pelvis and slid my hand between her legs. Then I kissed her, biting her lips, grinding my mouth against hers and tasting blood. She was breathing heavily through her mouth, as if she had a cold. Her odour was stronger than usual, acrid as seaweed. I began to tug at her clothing, hitching up her dress around her waist. I pulled down her knickers and slipped two fingers inside her. She was slippery with mucous. When I finally entered her it was over in seconds. I shouted and pulled at her hair.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s all right.” She tightened her arms around my waist and pulled me up hard against her where we were joined. Her body gave a brief, tight hitch, as if she were stifling a sneeze. Then she lay still. I had a sudden, painful sense that I had injured her in some way. Then I remembered she was dying.

  I got up and went to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face and wet back my hair. The face in the glass seemed not to belong to me. I put out my fingers to touch it, half expecting it to ripple and dissolve.

  In the final two months of her life she became fragile, brittle-boned, with a translucent pallor that made her beautiful in a way she had not been when she was well. She was always tired, even from the moment she woke up. She seemed not to know the difference between night and day. Sometimes she was asleep and sometimes she was awake and that was all. It was high summer by then. The morning light was painful, bright as a spear.

  “I feel so angry,” she said. “I feel like setting fire to things.”

  I remembered her on the beach in Brighton, a sturdy girl in a blue sailor dress with sun-reddened dimpled knees. Henry had friends in Brighton, a female couple, both teachers, who lived in one of the post-war prefabricated bungalows not far from the seafront. Their names were Judith and Myra. We had jokingly called them the Aunts. Judith had given Dora a red plastic bucket and spade to make sandcastles with. I remembered how Dora had applied herself to the task, diligent and careful as a stonemason. When the tide came in and drowned the castles she had looked away.

  “Do you remember the Aunts?” I said.

  “Judith and Myra,” she said. “Myra had golden eyes, like a cat. I remember the Circus Man.”

  The Circus Man had been Dora’s name for the middle-aged beach bum who went up and down the promenade dressed always in the same shabby pinstripe suit and straw boater. He walked with a stiff, shuffling gait, leaning heavily upon a cane. The cane was black, with a silver handle in the shape of a horse’s head. The Circus Man would sometimes flap the cane about and swear at the tourists, but apart from these occasional outbursts he seemed harmless enough.

  The sight of him had always unnerved me a little but to Dora he was an object of endless fascination.

  “I don’t believe he’s real,” she said. Once she went right up to him, gazing in wonder as if he were an exhibit in a museum. Then she put out her hand and touched his knee. At first he seemed not to notice, then he leaned down very slowly and stared into her face, as if he were marking her out. For some hours afterwards I felt cold inside, somehow tainted. My sense of him had faded with the years, but I remembered him now.

  In the end Dora stopped eating completely. I told her I had sent a letter to Rosine Gerstheimer, explaining that she had been unwell.

  “I told her you would write to her again once you were feeling stronger,” I said. I tried to get her to drink, but she would only let the water moisten her lips.

  “I don’t want us to tell each other lies,” she said. “We’re stronger than that.”

  “It’s not a lie,” I said. “We can beat this.” I put my face close to hers. A fine down had begun to grow on her upper lip. The hairs were silky and almost colourless, shading to a silvery grey at the very tip.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “I know I won’t be frightened if you’re here.”

  Her final days were spent in hospital. She was semi-conscious most of the time, her lovely mind made dull and heavy with morphine. I don’t know how much she was aware of. The drugs made her unable to speak. When she died I was in the hospital cafeteria getting myself a coffee. My mother was on the phone. Only Henry was actually with her. He tried to speak to me afterwards but I refused to look at him.

  We came back to Calvert Road. I still felt no real pain. She was still too close, too present. I dreaded what I knew was to come. I held on to the dusk, exhausted but afraid to sleep because I knew that when I woke the separation from her would have become permanent.

  The sheets still smelled of her. I lay down on the bed, watching as the sky turned from Prussian blue to the faded, sequined black that passes for night in the city. The extruded beams of car headlights criss-crossed the ceiling. I heard a door slam further along the street. I took off my watch and held it by its strap in front of my eyes. Its slender luminous hands stood at eleven o’clock. It was such a graceful thing, so lovely. I held it next to my ear, trying to soothe my heart with its familiar tick.

  I lay there for what seemed like a long time, but the hands of my watch scarcely moved. My thoughts ran unchecked through channels and intersections that remained obscure to me. Sleep seemed impossible. I wondered if my watch had developed a fault, some kind of irregularity, a heart murmur. Tachycardia, that was called. From the Greek, meaning swift, or fast.

  I remembered a physics class I had been in where the class brain Lindsay Ballantine had asked Mr Gibbon about tachyon particles. Lindsay Ballantine was so good at science that a lot of the teachers were scared of him. Gibbon had gibbered something about tachyons being particles that travelled faster than light but even I could see that he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

  “Is it true that tachyons are time particles?” asked Lindsay Ballantine. “That they’re too unstable to exist in the known universe?”

  “We haven’t got time for this,” said Mr Gibbon. “It isn’t part of the syllabus.”

  I wondered what such particles might look like, whether they drifted about in a shapeless mass like a temporal fog, or whether they were fiery and glistening, streaking across the sky fast enough to smash a hole in the side of one universe and right through the wall of another.

  I remembered a painting I had seen in the National Gallery, ‘The Fall of Phaeton’, by Johann Liss. It was a large painting and rich in colour. It told the simple story of a boy who borrowed his father’s car and wound up dead.

  What would happen if the sun fell out of the sky? I thought. What would happen if I forgot how to sleep?

  Time was a treacherous thing. It moved on when you least expected it. But it came to me that in the strange hinterland between one day and another it was possible to bend the rules. I raised the crown of my watch and turned the hands backward eight hours. It was late in the afternoon and Dora had still been alive. Tomorrow she would be a memory. I closed my eyes and listened. At the far end of the street I heard the crash and rattle of a metal dustbin lid falling onto concrete. There was a burst of stifled laughter, the rapid sound of running feet.

  “That’s it now. We’re in deep excrement.”

  “You dorkus.” There was more laughter. The voices were hushed to stage whispers but I could hear them quite clearly, as if the exchange had taken place in the hallway outside my room. The footsteps disappeared along the street. For some moments afterwards there was silence, and then I heard the sound of someone calling my name.

  I understood at once that it was her. She spoke in an undertone, as i
f she were afraid of waking the neighbours. I went to the window and looked out. I could see her quite plainly. She was wearing her old parka. It was zipped right up to the neck, and I thought how she didn’t really need it, that it was warm outside. Then I remembered how ill she had been and decided it must be that.

  “I’ve lost my key,” she said. “Can you come down and let me in?” Her face was upturned towards the window. The light from the streetlamp opposite smoothed her features, making her look like a ghost girl, an alien spirit with Dora’s familiar face.

  She folded her arms across her chest and jigged around a little on the spot. “Hurry up,” she said. “I’m getting cold.”

  Dorothy means gift of God. In that moment of seeing her again I loved her more fiercely and tenderly than in all the years leading up to it. I understood completely what love meant.

  I ran downstairs and opened the door. The night air brushed against my face, warm and soft and redolent with the perfumes of dried nettles and frying onions. There was a car at the kerb, a blue Citroen. The street was empty.

  I went back upstairs and closed the curtains. Then I undressed and got into bed. I put the Longines under my pillow and closed my eyes. In the silence of the morning I could hear the watch ticking. Its sweet voice soothed and caressed me, taking me down.

  MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

  My brother died before I was born, but that didn’t stop him looking out for me. He was my earliest companion, my closest friend. His name was Stephen. My mother missed him terribly but he never appeared to her.

  “What good would it do?” he said. “It isn’t going to bring me back.”

  Stephen’s best friend was Rye Levin, who was the same age as Stephen and five years older than me. If Stephen had still been alive they would have been in the same class at school. Rye’s full Christian name was Rainer, with the ‘ai’ pronounced like ‘eye.’ People couldn’t cope with that though, they insisted on calling him Rayner, so in the end he stuck to Levin or simply Rye. I admired Rye for his independence but I was afraid to approach him in case he gave me the brush-off. Rye didn’t care to make friends. The only person he would tolerate was Stephen.