The kitchen table was carried outside and covered with newspaper secured by three tarnished silver candelabras, dripping trails of melted wax over the printed stories of yesterday and beyond. By the time we’d carried out the glasses and the wine and the trays of crabs and langoustines, the sky had turned dark, a fearsome dark, and we huddled around the candles like a pack of strays. We were about to start, but then we realised that someone wasn’t with us and so we shouted her name until out of the darkness she appeared, like a beautiful wandering ghost dressed in a white silk shirtdress, the buttons of which were undone so low it was hard to decipher if it was going on or coming off. And as she strode across the dew-soaked lawn like the character in her new TV series, Detective Molly Crenshaw (Moll to her friends), her swagger was now a cop swagger, as if her gun was hidden somewhere awkward, and only the lucky few knew where.
As she reached the table she triumphantly held up two bottles of champagne as if she herself had picked and fermented those grapes and had bottled them all in the space of a day, and we couldn’t help but cheer and applaud this feat. The sound brought an unmistakable glow to her cheeks, dismissing instantly the lie that she had taken her last bow in Theatreland.
‘Let us begin,’ she said, and as if on cue the quiet of the Cornish air was fractured by the sounds of shattering shell and the first ‘Ah’s as the sweet white claw meat found its way to our mouths.
‘You’re quiet,’ whispered my father as he leant across to refill my glass. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Of course,’ I said, as Nancy reached across Arthur for a large langoustine. It was decapitated in seconds, its jacketed skin parted and cast aside and its flesh dipped into a pungent bowl of aioli, before the ascent towards open mouth. She licked her fingers and said something but it was lost in the chewing, in the licking; she said something like, ‘I’m thinking of getting married,’ and a sudden silence fell upon the table.
‘What?’ said my mother, trying hard to disguise the horror in her voice.
‘I’m thinking of getting married.’
‘You’re dating someone?’ I said.
‘Yup,’ she said, filling her mouth this time with bread and dark crab meat.
‘Since when?’ I said.
‘A while.’
‘Who?’ my mother asked.
Pause.
‘A man.’
‘A man?’ my mother said, no longer bothering to disguise the horror in her voice. ‘But why?’
‘Hold on there,’ said my father. ‘We’re not all bad.’
‘Tell me – it’s not Detective Butler, is it?’ said Joe.
‘It is,’ said Nancy, giggling.
‘No way!’ said Joe.
‘Who’s Detective Butler?’ asked my mother; her voice getting higher, the more agitated she became.
‘The really hot, young one in the show,’ said Charlie.
‘But he’s so queer,’ said Joe.
‘He’s not queer,’ said Nancy. ‘I should know, I’m sleeping with him.’
‘You’re queer,’ said Arthur.
‘That’s different, Arthur,’ said Nancy, pulling apart a large claw. ‘My sexuality is fluid.’
‘Is that what you call it?’ said Arthur, randomly hammering at a crab’s head.
‘But why?’ asked my mother, filling her glass with wine and draining it almost before the answer had been given. ‘Why after all these years?’
‘I’ve changed, and it feels nice. We feel nice.’
‘Nice?’ my mother said, refilling her glass, her face pale and tortured in the flickering candlelight. ‘Nice? Nice has never been grounds for marriage,’ and she sat back, folded her arms and excluded herself from further discussion.
Nobody said much after that. There were a couple of banal comments about the size of the crabs and a discussion about whether whelks could ever rival oysters in gastronomic cuisine, and it would have stayed like that all night had my mother not softened and leant forwards and gently said, ‘Is this a phase, Nancy?’
‘Mid-life crisis, more like,’ said Arthur. ‘Why don’t you buy a Ferrari instead?’
‘I have.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nancy, reaching for my mother’s hand. ‘All the best women are taken.’
(My mother suddenly looked a little happier and blushed, although I can’t be sure of that because of the light.)
‘And,’ Nancy continued, ‘he doesn’t speak about his feelings, he doesn’t cause any dramas over exes, he doesn’t want to go shopping with me, he doesn’t wear my clothes and he doesn’t copy my hairstyle. It’s refreshing, to say the least.’
‘Nance, if you’re happy, we’re happy. Aren’t we everyone?’ said my father, and the table answered him with a pathetic scattering of ‘no’s and ‘suppose so’s.
‘So, congratulations,’ he said, ‘and I can’t wait to meet him.’
‘And neither can we!’ said Joe and Charlie a little too enthusiastically.
We raised our glasses and were about to toast the queer union, when all of a sudden we were interrupted by the sound of a heavy splash coming from the riverbank; a sound that propelled our drunken selves to the water’s edge.
We shuffled carefully along the jetty, huddled behind my father as he held the candelabra over the water, illuminating the black river with yellow. The overhanging trees danced grotesquely. Shadows of reaching arms and groping fingers came towards us. We heard another splash. My father turned to his left and it was then that we saw the frightened darting eyes; not the eyes of an otter this time, the size, the stroke of its paddle all wrong; no, what we saw was the gently lined face of a baby deer struggling to hold its head high above the water. It went under. Re-emerged. Its eyes terrified, staring into mine.
‘Get back, Elly!’ my father shouted, as I jumped into the shimmering cold.
‘Elly – it’s dangerous! For God’s sake get back!’
I waded towards the drowning beast; I heard another splash behind me and turned to see my brother thrashing towards me, water spraying as he kicked out towards me. The deer panicked as I drew near and it quickly turned and flailed towards the opposite bank. Its hoofs soon connected with an unexpected sandbank that had formed in the channel of the shallower waters, and I watched as it stumbled up the muddy edge, exhausted. It disappeared into the shadows of the forest opposite, just as the candles flickered and drowned in their own liquidity. We were left alone in the black.
‘Idiot,’ said my brother as he flung his arms around me. ‘What were you trying to do?’
‘Save it. What were you trying to do?’
‘Save you.’
‘If you didn’t want me to get married, Ell,’ bellowed Nancy across the Cornish valley, ‘all you needed to do was tell me, honey, not try to fucking kill yourself!’
‘Come on,’ said my brother as he guided me back to shore.
I sat in front of the roaring hearth and watched the men play poker badly and loudly. My mother bent down and filled my wine glass. Maybe it was the angle or the light, maybe it was simply her; but she looked so young that night. And Nancy must have noticed it too, because I caught her looking at her as she carried in a tray of teas, and it was a gaze, I could see, that extinguished all thoughts of her erratic marriage (a marriage that, incidentally, would never happen due to Detective Butler’s shameful ‘outing’ by National Enquirer magazine).
Later, as my mother entered my room to say good night, I sat up and said, ‘Nancy’s in love with you.’
‘And I’m in love with her.’
‘But what about Dad?’
She smiled. ‘I’m in love with him too.’
‘Oh. Is that allowed?’
She laughed and said, ‘For a child of the sixties, Elly . . .’
‘I know. Bit of a letdown.’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘Never. I love them differently, that’s all. I don’t sleep with Nancy.’
‘Oh God, I don’t need to know that.’
‘Yes you do
. We play by our own rules, Elly, always have. That’s all we can do. For us it works.’
And she leant over and kissed me good night.
The following day, the partial eclipse began just before ten. The sky was overcast, which was a shame, because the lessening of light became a subtle phenomenon rather than the dramatic occurrence of ancient times. We were out in the bay with other boats, surrounded by cliff tops dotted with hundreds of observers, their faces looking towards the cloudmasked sun, protective mirrored viewers held up like 3D glasses. Gulls were singing, and land birds too from the island haven, but there was chaos in their voices, melody gone. They were sensing the unusual, I was sensing the cold. The diminishing light felt like the approach of a storm, like something harmful, inexplicable. And then just before eleven fifteen, the last of the sun disappeared, and the darkness and silence were total, and the cold descended upon the water, and us, and the whole bay locked down into this ravenous silence; the birds quiet, confused into sleep.
I thought this is how it would be if the sun died; the gentle shutting down of an organ, sleepy, no longer working. No explosion at the end of life, just this slow disintegration into darkness, where life as we know it never wakes up, because nothing reminds us that we have to.
The sun started to reappear a couple of minutes later, slowly, of course, until colour once again saturated the sea and our faces, and birdsong filled the air, songs this time of joy, of relief. Cheers rang out from the cliff tops and the ra ta ta ta of applause. Yet we were all quiet for so long after, touched by the magnitude, the beautiful unfathomable magnitude of it all. This is what we are connected to. What we are all connected to. When the lights go out, so do we.
A month later, Arthur woke up at six like he did every morning; and yet on that particular morning his eyes didn’t. I looked out from my window and I saw him stumble onto the lawn like a drunk. I ran down the stairs and into the fresh morning air and caught him as he knelt groping for direction.
‘What is it, Arthur? What’s happened?’
‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. ‘I’m blind.’
Non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy – that was the term the specialist used; an optic nerve stroke that lessened the blood supply to the eyes and instead deposited large shadows across both fields of vision. It was something that happened to older men with heart disease; one of those tragic, unfortunate things.
‘Heart disease,’ scoffed Arthur. ‘It must be something else.’
My mother reached for his hand, held it tight.
‘But I’m fit. I always have been; have never had any problem with illness whatsoever, and certainly not with my heart.’
‘But your results say something different,’ said the specialist.
‘Then you can shove that difference up your tight little arse,’ and he got up to leave.
‘Come on, Arthur,’ said my mother, leading him back to his seat.
The specialist went back to his desk. He looked at his notes, then out of the window; allowed his mind to wander back to similar occurrences and strange side effects filed under Coincidence, rather than the red of WARNING. He looked at Arthur again and said, ‘Do you take a drug for erectile dysfunction?’ At which point, seeming to know what the answer was already, my mother got up and said, ‘All yours, Alfie,’ and she left the room, leaving my father to deal with the sexual fallout of octogenarian practices.
The answer, apparently, was Yes; for a whole year now. He’d been one of the first to take it, of course, and had waited for its arrival like a child waits for Christmas. The specialist believed there was a link; the ‘something else’ that he’d heard about before, but he had no proof, so it was goodbye to the pills, Arthur, and a slow hopeful wait for sight.
They came back the following day, tired but relieved, and I waited for them in the kitchen, mugs filled with Scotch, not with tea, because it was late in the afternoon and only Scotch would do.
‘I’m sorry, Arthur,’ I said.
‘Don’t you worry.’
‘It’s not necessarily permanent,’ said my mother. ‘The specialist said your sight could come back at any time. They know so little about this.’
‘But I must prepare for it not to,’ he said, reaching for his Scotch and finding the salt cellar instead. ‘I simply like having erections. I haven’t been doing much with them, but I find them a comfort. Rather like a good book. It’s the anticipation, really. I don’t even have to get to the end.’
‘I know exactly what you mean, Arthur,’ said my father, before being cut short by a withering look from my mother. ‘You’re not a man,’ he added bravely. ‘You can’t possibly understand,’ and he leant across the table and held Arthur’s arm in solidarity.
I led Arthur back to his cottage, which was warm and smelt of the previous day’s coffee, and I helped him to his favourite chair, which we’d positioned by the small hearth, now that autumn was upon us.
‘A new chapter, Elly,’ he said, and sighed deeply. And a new chapter it truly became; a chapter when I became his eyes.
I’d had years of practice as a child, when he’d led me down to the river or into the forest to describe the seasonal changes and the smells each brought with them. I told him about the increased migration of egrets and described how they behaved, white and sullen, in the scrub oaks beyond. And we picked fungi in the woods and he truly smelt for the first time their earthy scent and felt the spongy sensation between his fingers and we fished, quietly at first, in the river waters until he could almost sense a fish upon his hook, as his fingers played on the line, like gently strumming fingers on a guitar string.
And it was my eyes, too, that led him nervously to his book launch that cold December night, as a sharp wind blew through Smithfield, chasing stragglers to the warmth of a bar. And it was my eyes that led him through the long, white entranceway of the once-upon-a-time smokehouse, through to the high minimal surrounds of the restaurant where everyone was waiting for him, and where his hand tightened around my arm as the sounds of voices and echoes and movement descended upon his ears in a crescendo of disorientation. I felt the fear pulse throughout his body until my mother came up to him and whispered, ‘Everyone’s saying such wonderful things, Arthur. You’re a bit of a star,’ and his grasp relaxed, and his voice relaxed, and he said rather loudly, ‘Champagne pour tout!’
It was late. Most people had gone. My father was cornered by a young artist who’d come down from dinner and I heard them discussing the importance of depression and jealousy on the British psyche. My mother was tipsy, flirting with an older gentleman who worked for Orion; she was showing him how to make a chicken by folding a serviette. He was engrossed. As I came up from the bathrooms, I looked around for Arthur, and, rather than seeing him crowded by people, I saw him sitting alone by the exit doors, a forlorn figure part hidden in shadow; a deep frown set across his brow. I thought it had been the anxiety of the evening that had ambushed his ebullience; the anticlimax of a project completed, and completed well. And yet as I approached, I could see it was something else, something much deeper; its resonance present, frenetic and cloying.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’
He smiled and nodded.
‘It’s been a good evening.’ I sat down next to him.
‘It has.’ He looked down at his hands; ran a finger along a vein, plump, swollen, a green worm buried under his skin.
‘I’ve run out of money,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve run out of money.’
Silence.
‘Is that what’s worrying you? Arthur, we’ve got plenty, you know that. You can have as much as you need. Tell Mum and Dad.’
‘No, Elly. I’ve. Run. Out. Of. Money,’ he said, clearly intonating each word, wringing out meaning until he could sense the understanding and implication spreading across my face.
‘Oh my God.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Who else knows?’
‘
Only you.’
‘When did you run out?’
‘A month ago. Six weeks.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Exactly.’
Pause.
‘So you’re not going to die?’
‘Well, I am some day,’ he said rather grandly.
‘I know,’ I said, laughing. I stopped. He looked sad.
‘I’ve become mortal again. Human. I have the not-knowing again and I feel scared.’ A solitary tear ran from his eye.
We sat like that, quietly, until the stragglers left; until the cavernous room echoed with the sound of table-clearing and chair-scraping, rather than the sound of good times, good cheer.
‘Arthur?’
‘Mmm?’
‘You can tell me now. How was it going to happen? How were you going to die?’
And he looked towards the sound of my voice and said, ‘A coconut was going to fall on my head.’
I rose with the sun and had my cofee on the roof, wrapped in an old cashmere cardigan that Nancy had bought me years ago – my first adult possession, a cardigan that cost more than a coat. As I watched the meat market close down for the day and the workers discard their whites and head instead for a breakfast pint before sleep, I read again Jenny Penny’s letter and finished the ‘Lost and Found’ article for that week.
7 September 2001
Elly . . . I’ve been making some extra money doing my tarot readings again. It gives people hope. I try to explain that its not just the reading itself, but the psychology behind it. But some people have never looked back you see. For some its simply too far to see. I’m quite popular with the lifers you know! I’ve recently been seeing ‘freedom’ in whatever cards they choose be it Strife or the Princess of Wands or even Death. I never see freedom in Justice though. Justice is a difficult card for the imprisoned.
I pulled a card this morning – a random card – one for me and a moment later, one for you. I usually get Adjustment or the Five of Cups. But this morning I pulled The Tower. The Tower! And then I pulled it again for you. Two towers Elly! One after the other. What’s the chance of that?
When God Was a Rabbit Page 19
