Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  Cleaver was in the dark now. He listened. Surely this is the quietest it has ever been in Rosenkranzhof. No running water. No branches rattling. Very occasionally the flakes make a soft tapping on the windowpane, as if Olga were asking to be let back in. The mountains are full of ghosts. Really to be rid of them, you would have had to burn them, Cleaver thought. But they weren’t mine to burn. Then you’d have caught yourself scattering their ashes.

  He could hear Uli’s faint breathing as he slept. It was quite dark now and they still hadn’t called for him. Cleaver was sure he would have heard. Perhaps the clocks have been moved back, he thought. He listened hard. Something sparked in the fire. They’ll come tomorrow, he decided. They won’t want to come down in the snow tonight. He remembered listening hard that night in the house with Angela and Craig. The truth of the matter was that you didn’t want your daughter to lose her virginity to a Negro. Somehow it seemed important to use that harsh word. To watch my father’s documentaries, his elder son had written, and then to hear the views he fielded at the dinner table, was to live in the crossed wires of chronic hypocrisy, to breathe the acrid smell of the moral short circuit, of repelling poles forced into contact. What guff. Yet at the same time you were having an affair with an Indian woman, Cleaver reflected, a small dark southern Indian woman, perhaps the only affair you ever had that could honestly be described as passionate, the only real alternative to the life you have lived. Priya means beloved, she once told him. He had loved her. With Priya everything was simple and easy. Their conversations had been quiet. No torment. There wasn’t even the need to avoid confrontation. The times they spent together were always a pleasure. Those dolls lining the stairs of Frau Schleiermacher’s house were my old girlfriends, Cleaver suddenly told himself, the roll-call of my women. He remembered the bright smiling faces and Tyrolese headscarves on the first-floor landing. Every one the same. Why do I have thoughts like this? You should have counted them, he chuckled. Only Priya wasn’t among them. They were all rosy-cheeked. I liked Craig, though, Cleaver told himself now. The boy had seemed articulate enough, if only I had left him a little more space to talk. It was funny that he had Amanda’s Scottish accent. Certainly he could play the guitar.

  Cleaver had lain on his bed in the house in Chelsea, listening while his daughter and her new boyfriend jammed together in the basement. Angela put down a few simple rhythms on the keyboards and Craig played guitar. This young man is a very serious guitarist, Cleaver realised. He woke up. Priya phoned to say she was sorry if she had sounded sulky. Guy’s a hell of a guitarist, he told her. Seems Angela’s dying to sing in his band. It’s just I’m jealous of your children, Priya said, you know, the way they have your unconditional affection, the way they will always be part of your life.

  Towards midnight the music had stopped. They’ve moved to the TV, Cleaver thought, the sofa. He waited. The dog was padding about in the hall. Priya had said she thought it was sweet he was black. Amanda phoned. She’s checking that I’m really here, Cleaver decided. An improvement on the last troglodyte, he told her. He said nothing about the colour, or the accent. Apparently Larry felt they needed more of a sense of movement in the film. A lot of the footage was rather static, not nomadic enough. He wanted a shot of caravans on the move, some traditional dancing, by firelight, in the snow hopefully. He was trying to arrange something with the head man. Cleaver lay awake thinking what a prick Larry was. The gypsies had been parked in that field in County Clare far longer than Cleaver had ever lived in any house.

  Then they were coming up the stairs. Lying in his bed in Rosenkranzhof, Cleaver could hear the sound of his daughter’s giggles. They passed his room on the first floor and headed for the second. Ivan’s tail was slapping against the banister poles. Angela had promised that Craig would sleep in the guest room. Cleaver had promised he wouldn’t check up on them. She had never slept with a man. Her father was only there for her safety. Is she a girl or a woman? Cleaver wondered. How on earth could Loach say the family was such a repressive institution? Are there institutions that are not repressive? He heard whispering and doors opening and closing. They were pushing out the dog. They’re whispering because they think I’m asleep, Cleaver realised. It’s a sign of respect. He climbed out of bed, dressed, crept silently down the stairs and drove to Priya’s.

  Cleaver felt for the torch on the floor by the bed. I must have left it in the kitchen. That was stupid. He hadn’t expected to stay up in the bedroom till dark. He had imagined himself hobbling down to meet the Stolbergs come for their dog. But it didn’t matter. He has the whisky bottle to pee into. He could empty it out of the window. Downstairs, the stove was well fuelled. The house is as warm as I can make it, he decided. All the same, even wrapped in the three blankets and the sleeping bag he couldn’t get properly warm. He shivered. Have I got a fever? The hole in the bag didn’t help, but it surely wasn’t just that. Olga and the troll will be blocks of ice, Cleaver thought. Uli had curled up among the dirty clothes in the bottom of the wardrobe.

  During the night, Cleaver dreamed that a chair in the kitchen was provoking some strange psychic activity. You sat on it and things moved around. The drawers flew out of the sink unit and cupboard doors opened and closed. It was the kitchen in Wandsworth. It was the chair Angela had sat on at dinner with Craig in Chelsea. She sat down and Craig took her hand for a moment across the table. It was a charming gesture. How could his son have written that she was rejecting her sexuality when she cropped her hair? They had made some kind of casserole. Cleaver was telling a story about when he had interviewed Pete Townshend. Suddenly, the chair sprang back across the room and hit the wall. There’s a poltergeist in this house! Cleaver cried. He had always known there was a poltergeist. That’s why I worked in the shed at the bottom of the garden. He went round the table and moved the chair back to its old place. It sprang backward and flew into the wall again. The fridge door swung open. The room filled with cold. Only then did they realise that Angela was gone. Angela! they started calling. Craig too was alarmed. Angela! It was a poltergeist. The air was chill. Cleaver sat in the chair himself: It will take me to where she is, he said. I’ll go and get her. I’m not afraid. It didn’t. It behaved like a perfectly ordinary chair. It allowed itself to be pulled up to the table. There was Angela’s plate full of casserole, a glass full of wine. Cleaver stood up and the chair shot back and slammed against the wall. Food began to fly out of the fridge. Milk cartons. Graukäse. The room was freezing. A cold wind was blowing. In a torment of anxiety, Cleaver shouted, Her bedroom! He ran up the stairs. The carpet was loose. He tripped and fell. He had hurt his ankle. But she was there. Angela is alive. She is sleeping peacefully in her bed. Her young face is soft and absorbed in sleep. Cleaver bent down to kiss her and woke up.

  It was an old dream. Tonight’s variations didn’t alter the substance. Cleaver climbed out from under a pile of bedclothes. His heart is beating fast. The poltergeist dream. Ow! He had forgotten the bad ankle. He felt in the dark for the bottle to pee into. Now he has forgotten the sore finger. Christ! There was definitely something under the nail.

  He limped across to the old Nazi’s room and tugged open the window above the clearing. The snow was still falling. There was a strange luminosity. Perhaps it isn’t that late, he thought. They have put back the clocks. Seffa, Cleaver called softly. Seffa! The silence swallowed up the sound. For miles everything is deep in snow. Ulrike, he shouted. Angela!

  He put his elbows on the sill. Angela! The cruel thing about the poltergeist dream was the extraordinary relief he felt on finding his daughter safe and well in her bed, followed at once by waking, by reality. He had broken his promise coming home at dawn that night from Priya’s. Very softly, he had opened the door of her room and peeked in. Amid the usual chaos, Angela was sound asleep, her face turned to the black youth’s naked back, the dog on the rug beside. Cleaver looked at his daughter. There was a small tattoo on her shoulder that he had never seen before. A butterfly. A year later Craig was drivi
ng her back from a gig when they hit a truck. The child was Craig’s, Cleaver knew. I would love to have been your daughter, Priya whispered. She was in tears at the funeral. I wish it had been me, she said. It was the end of their relationship. Staring out in the dark through the drifting flakes, Cleaver whispered: Imagine a female figure coming out from the trees, she is walking to you across the snow. He stared and stared.

  Cleaver’s lips are icy now. I want to die, he said softly. He closed the window and limped back across the bedroom and sat at the top of the stairs. Lowering himself carefully, he bumped down on his backside. Achtung at the fourth! He gripped the banister. In the sitting room there was a red glow. Cleaver caught a glimmer in the eagle’s eyes. That too would have to go. It’s you or me, he told the bird. We’re the last. Why do you ham this eternal jocularity? he wondered. It must be the result of those years of TV patter, all that automatic familiarity. My father liked to boast that he could chair a TV debate in his sleep, his elder son had written. Which is pretty much what it sounds like to me, Mother replied. You couldn’t say they didn’t keep their dinner guests entertained.

  Eventually he found the torch on the windowsill in the kitchen and the first thing he saw when he switched it on were mouse droppings. There are mouse droppings on the draining board, and between the burners on the oven. Cleaver swung the beam rapidly across the table, the shelves. No sign of the beast. But they were definitely droppings. This show has been running longer than The Mousetrap, Mother used to say.

  Cleaver went back into the sitting room and stoked up the fire. An interminable double act, his son had written. No wonder my sister turned to loud music and pills. Uli appeared on the stairs, whining. It was dead of night. Six weeks ago, Cleaver thought, two months, three, you were mainly interested in Iraq, the presidential election, global warming, the fate of Blair. Then as soon as you were alone, your family invaded your mind. They possess me.

  Could it be, Cleaver wondered, staring into the fire for minutes at a time, that people’s political passions, their ideological take on events, their commitments and hobby horses, were in fact nothing more than the displacement of some family embroilment, a different manifestation of the same ghosts? Mr President, may I put it to you that all your political adventures have been an obsessive emulation of the father figure whom you both admire and feel the need to outdo. How reductive!

  Cleaver brought the chair as close to the fire as it would go. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be more surprising if things were otherwise, if people actually held their opinions, as it were, purely, out of mere rational and intellectual conviction – what could that mean? – and then, having arrived at those opinions purely, they set about working out the consequences in public life, engaging in politics and charities and pressure groups on the basis of the most scrupulous ratiocination. Amanda’s thing with the gypsies was definitely a provocation in my regard, Cleaver decided. I always sensed that. No doubt Ken Loach had been through some shit with repressive parents. When asked to explain what was meant by political correctness, his elder son had written, my father would say: Political correctness means not being able to say what one really thinks of gypsies. Yet his film No-Mad was surely one of the most sensitive portrayals of gypsy life we are ever likely to see. Such was the conundrum I grew up with, his son had written: There was simply no space that my father didn’t occupy, no opinion he didn’t simultaneously hold and reject. If you don’t catch that mouse soon, Cleaver told the eagle, you’re out on your arse with the others. He had always hated, he decided, the kind of journalism that had the presumption to deploy the first person plural.

  XIV

  WRAPPED IN HIS ski jacket, hat crushed on his bald spot, Cleaver had eventually fallen asleep with his feet on the grate. Now he woke to the smell of scorched socks. Ow! Jumping up, he quenched his burning soles on the cold stone floor. Oh Christ! His ankle hurt. But at least I didn’t dream anything. He hobbled across to the window and found it beautifully patterned with frost. How long is it since you saw that? He ran a finger round the crystal shapes, then pulled the window open.

  Dawn was breaking and the air was empty now. Just a few flakes were blowing about. Across the clearing, everything was softly curved, blue and grey. Cleaver boiled a pan of snow for tea. I’ve nothing to give you, he told the dog. Uli followed him about snuffling. The Stolbergs will be here soon. He found four biscuits he had forgotten in one of the cardboard boxes he had brought that day with Hermann. The mouse had got there first. The wrappers were shredded. We’ve got to get this mouse, he told Uli. The dog padded about whining and sniffing.

  Cleaver spent the early morning examining every inch of the walls, the floors, the backs of cupboards, looking for a small hole. The Stolbergs didn’t come. Only now did he realise that the moss between the planks on the first-floor walls must have been laid there on purpose as a form of insulation. The soft green cushion grew into the gaps, feeding on the damp and blocking the drafts. Eventually he found a knothole in the bottom of the kitchen cupboard. There was a suspicious smell. Trying to think what to block it with, he remembered the cat in The Tailor of Gloucester who traps mice under china teacups. There was a snowstorm in that story too. He put a Tyrolese beer mug over the hole. Gnash your teeth in outer darkness! It had been Phillip who loved The Tailor of Gloucester. Finally a memory of Phillip. Their youngest child liked to copy the drawings in all his storybooks. He was hopeless at school. Unlike the others, Phillip never competed. He was quiet, but not mute, a great copier of pretty drawings, a happy boy. Caroline too had always seemed happy and composed in her studies. To the point that I hardly noticed her. Would the mouse be able to move the mug? Cleaver wondered. An interesting experiment, he promised Uli.

  For lunch Cleaver gave Uli half the remaining ragout and drank the Chianti. It’s folly to drink all of this, he thought. There were still a few flakes sifting down. Soon it will start to thaw. He floundered as far as he could along the track he had shovelled the day before and shat in the snow. It was sad to soil such gleaming whiteness with a great turd. Acting on a strange impulse, he hobbled back inside the house and collected together every single item that he had brought with him from London. Everything left over from your old life, he muttered.

  On the bed he laid out his dark suit, the bright pink shirt, lemon tie, green socks, blue underwear, his watch, a leather coat, the two mobile phones, gold cufflinks, a signet ring, patent leather shoes. He stared at them. Something inside him is hungering for a symbolic act. Burn them. Don’t be ridiculous.

  In the jacket pocket he found his passport. Look at yourself! Cleaver saw the intense, clean-shaven, pork-pie face that had been so effective on TV. He shook his head. In his wallet were credit cards, driving licence, a wad of cash, receipts, two theatre tickets, his Wood Lane security pass. Cleaver liked to carry cash. And Angela’s photograph. His elder son hadn’t mentioned the fact that he kept Angela’s photo in his wallet. Perhaps he resented it.

  Cleaver studied the picture. She looks quite different from Ulrike Stolberg. He knew the face too well. It was just an old piece of cardboard. My lips, Cleaver muttered. Angela had her father’s round full cheeks. All the more so with her hair cropped. He tugged at his beard. What on earth do I look like? Uli? All this crazy growth. Now he had got out all his old things he couldn’t decide what to do with them.

  Outside the afternoon was uncannily still. It had stopped snowing but there was no sign of a thaw. Going out to fetch more wood, Cleaver noticed tracks on the snow. You’re not alone, he thought. If you sat quietly enough at the window you would see deer and marmots. Perhaps a fox. You could set snares. He remembered the hiker looking for a place to shit. Only a man of monumental vanity could have assumed that the first casual intruder was an investigative journalist. Put them in the Nazi’s wardrobe, Cleaver announced out loud. He opened the fresh whisky bottle and hobbled upstairs again. Life alone isn’t a meditation but a constant back and forth, up and down stairs, clothes on and off, piling logs on the fir
e, cleaning out the ash.

  Clambering over the broken stair, Cleaver couldn’t decide whether his ankle was worse or better. The pain was sharp, but I’m used to it. I will not trap animals, he decided. He picked up jacket and trousers and hobbled across to the little room. I don’t want a new life. There were no hangers in the wardrobe, but pegs driven into splintery pine. It was strange seeing his clothes hanging next to the old Nazi’s. There were half a dozen rough blue shirts, brown overalls. He felt in the pockets. He knew there was nothing there. He had felt in them before, three or four times. The first time he had found a bird whistle. Where did I put it? By the window. Perhaps I should try the overalls on, then I would get a sense of how big the man was.

  Cleaver shivered and shut the wardrobe door. I could put planks across and nail it shut, he thought. I need never see those clothes again. Drinking directly and deeply from the whisky bottle, he thought how strange it was he had never got some kind of cancer, or a heart condition. Both his parents had died of cancer. Actually, that was quite an attractive death your son invented for you, Cleaver decided: the gunshot through the lacquered door. He sat down in the room’s one chair, rickety and straight-backed. I should be grateful to my son for having dispatched me so elegantly. Though I would have made a more persuasive appeal to the idiot with the gun. What would you say, Cleaver asked himself now, to an older man who was about to shoot the young mistress who wants to leave him? Think of her as your daughter, I would say.

  For some time Cleaver sat very still, staring at the small bare room. What had it been used for? There were two wooden boxes full of junk, some books. Why had they locked the door, he wondered, if there was nothing to hide in here? Why was there a lock on the door in the first place?