“I have to confess a slight addiction.”
We both laughed, more heartily than the joke deserved, and the deal was done.
Mrs. Williamson wasn’t my only visitor that day. There was another, virtual this time, not visceral. Fiorella in my inbox.
Hi, Mr. Author. I do wish you’d update yourself. Email is so yesterday. Thought I’d let you know I saw Karl today. He was with his boss doing stuff in my gran’s flat. I don’t know what you’ve all been going on about. He didn’t look one bit ill. In fact, he looked in pretty good shape to me. Really, to be honest, I quite fell for him all over again. But please keep this to yourself or I’ll never forgive you. I went so far as to invite him for a game of chess tomorrow but he said he was too busy. DOING WHAT? I ask you, because he wouldn’t tell me. And I am consumed with curiosity. Please tell me. I’m sure you’ll know. I asked him about you. He said you’d been out for a day together. I was somewhat jealous but suppressed this unworthy reaction. Please please PLEASE tell me what he’s doing. I promise not to let on to ANYONE, least of all Karl. I mean, I’ve just trusted you with a secret. You can trust me. I’m really really agog to know. And what do you think? Should I try and get together with him again? Do you think he wants that as well? Do you think what happened when we were away was an aberration? A one-off? Has he said anything about it? He’s so lovely. I’d welcome your advice. With love from Fiorella desperado.
It was an email that switched off my reply button. Let it wait.
Had no one taught Ms. Fiorella Seabourne about appropriate register when addressing your elders, or does no one care about such niceties anymore?
But then I thought, it isn’t her fault. Why do adults complain when young people do or say things badly, inappropriately, lacking manners, when it’s adults who are meant to teach them how to do things properly?
So I relented.
Hi, Fiorella. I am beyond hope of updating.
Am sorry but I don’t know what Karl is doing.
As for whether you should try and get together with him again, I’m afraid I am no use as an agony uncle. And I have no idea what he wants. My own general approach to such matters is: The nose knows.
Saluté.
One more note before I finish this chapter. I mentioned earlier another reason why I wanted to know what Karl was up to.
As I’ve explained, I hadn’t been able to write a book since Jane died. Her death seemed to kill the writer in me.
But all along, since my first meeting with Karl, in the unconscious back of my mind—the womb where all the best creative ideas have their conception and their gestation—something had been growing. And now, that Saturday, as Mrs. Williamson appealed to me, a finger reached out from my unconscious and I knew with sudden clarity the following:
The recording of Karl’s encounters with me and mine with him, our shared experiences, was a story I could write.
This story would not be fiction. It would be a true-life story. I didn’t have to invent anything. As yet, at that time, the end was unknown. The plot was revealing itself as we lived it.
I realised only then that it was not writing that had died when my wife died, but invention. I had had enough of invention. The facts of life, life as it is actually lived, was all that now mattered to me, all I wanted to think about, all I wanted to write about. What I had to do was set down a record of what I knew about Karl and had experienced with him. It would be his story, not my story. And that also pleased me. I had had enough of myself.
Later that day, I settled at my desk for the first time in more than a year to do what I feel I was made to do. I began making the notes, writing down all I remembered of Karl’s story so far, ready to begin writing it when I knew the end.
It was, it is, in every sense, a labour of love.
YOU REMEMBER THAT EXPERIMENT WITH IRON FILINGS AND A magnet the science teacher did at school when you were of an age still easy to amaze? You remember the way the iron filings, which were scattered like a mess of dust on a sheet of paper, suddenly formed into clean strong patterns when the magnet was placed in the middle of the mess, revealing the magnet’s magnetic field? Oo-arr, from the kids who’d never seen this magic before. (Do they still do that in schools?)
I was reminded of this when I arrived at the Williamsons on Saturday and saw Karl preparing lunch. Since the crisis, he had been like the mess of iron filings. Disarranged. Now he was magnetised, his filings composed into the pattern of his self. It isn’t an exaggeration to say he was glowing with energy. The change was palpable. Before, he had been uneasy with himself. Now he was comfortable in his skin.
Some words from my religious past came to mind. He once was lost, and now is found.
Good spirits are infectious.
Mrs. Williamson was jocular, which I had not seen before. I caught a glimpse of what she must have been like when she was young and happily married, with infant Karl to coddle and tend.
She did a good line in joshing.
“Come and meet the master chef,” she said with a wink when she let me in. And teased Karl now and then during the meal, a tickling he enjoyed while pretending pokerfaced toleration of his mother’s jokes.
Another pretence—that I was there as a thank-you—was kept up throughout the meal. And because nothing could be said about why I was really there, and any talk of recent unhappy events would have dampened the jollity, Mrs. Williamson plumped for the safe strategy of asking me the usual questions people ask a writer. How I got started and why, how many books I’d written and what kind. Which led by association to where I was born, and what my parents did, and what kind of boy I’d been. But no questions about my wife, for which I was grateful.
Karl listened but said nothing. He played the part of cook and waiter with the easy care I’d come to know was natural to him, whatever he did. But at the same time I sensed he’d rather I hadn’t been asked about myself, and I wondered why. The clue came later.
By the time we were eating the ice cream I’d brought as my contribution, I was puzzling how to introduce the topic of Karl’s activity in the shed without spooking him. I knew he’d baulk, shy away and clam up if I got it wrong. We’d finished the meal before I’d made up my mind. But need not have worried. Mrs. Williamson knew her son, and was blessed with more savvy than I’d so far guessed at.
“Have you noticed,” she said to me, still in her joshing tone, “how craftsmen never clear up after themselves? They need labourers to skivvy for them. His father was like that. And like father, like son. So you two go and do whatever men do after feeding their faces, while I clear the table and wash the dishes.”
She got up and began stacking the plates, and as she did so, bent over her son, kissed him on the head, and said in her genuine voice, “That was a delicious meal, my love. Thanks for making it.”
“Hear, hear!” I said.
Karl affected a suitable modesty, but a blush and lowered eyes betrayed his pleasure.
“We’ll help you,” I said, out of politeness, but without making a move, aware of what she was up to.
“No, you won’t, thank you all the same,” Mrs. Williamson said. “You’re a guest, and in this house guests don’t do chores.”
She went off into the kitchen.
I looked at Karl, smiled, and shrugged.
He got up, nodded “Follow me,” and without a word led the way through the kitchen, out the back door, down a path at the side of the lawn to a substantial shed at the bottom of the garden.
I don’t mean to boast when I say I had an inkling of what I would be shown.
The shed was generously kitted out. A multitude of tools and gear neatly arranged, everything in its place. And filled with that workshop smell of sawdust and oil mixed with the tang of electricity given off by power tools. A handyman’s paradise.
This was a quick impression, because my eye was caught at once by a number of objects—eight or nine—carefully placed on the workbench, like a little exhibition. They were made of thick black
wire bent into a variety of shapes. Some were very simple, no more than two or three separate lengths, bent into shapes and placed together in what was clearly meant to be an intended, not an accidental, arrangement. Others were more complicated, made of one length of wire bent into elaborate, almost knotted interwindings.
I could see the inspiration for some of them was William Tucker’s sculpture, which is what I’d guessed I’d find. Others were quite different.
Words are the worst tools for describing objects. I don’t know whether teachers still do it, but when I was a kid, they used to give us an exercise that began with the instruction, “Imagine that a man from outer space has come to Earth. Describe a screwdriver to him as clearly as you can.”
The spaceman, poor guy, has presumably wandered up and somehow indicated—because of course he can’t speak any Earth language—that his UFO has conked out and can you help him, please. In a flash, without a moment wasted on intelligent astonishment, you give him a detailed description of a screwdriver, regardless of the fact that he cannot understand a word you’re saying and assuming without further investigation that this is the implement the stranded spaceman needs.
Ah, the pleasures of school, where, we’re told, we spend the happiest days of our lives!
Hard enough to describe objects with an everyday practical purpose, it’s impossible to describe objects that aren’t meant to be used, that don’t look like anything you have seen before, and are made out of material like paint, and metal pipes, and pieces of wood and stone and clay. Sculptures. Objects made into shapes that represent nothing except the shape itself. And even if they are objects that represent things we know—landscapes, buildings, people, plants, animals, the sea, whatever—they aren’t meant to be described, or presumably their makers would have used words rather than made the objects. They are objects intended for you to look at and work out what they mean from the feelings and thoughts they excite in you.
In other words, works of art.
The fact is, art objects aren’t meant to be described. If there’s anything to be said about them it’s what you want to say because of what they have done to you.
As I looked at Karl’s miniature sculptures I rather dreaded he’d ask me what I thought of them and whether I liked them. I’m not good at instant reactions to anything. I need time to take in what I’ve experienced before I can say anything intelligent.
I’m sure most people would have asked what I thought. But Karl didn’t. Another example of his difference from most people and of his sensitivity. He waited long enough for me to have a good look from various angles before he spoke.
“I know they are bad copies of the one we saw at the hotel.”
I said, “Some. Not all. But I wouldn’t say bad. And what does it matter if they are? Copies, I mean.”
“I wanted them to be a bit different. A bit more … my own.”
We weren’t looking at each other, but at the sculptures.
I said, “When you started as a plumber, didn’t your boss show you what to do and how to do it and then you did it the way he showed you?”
“Yes.”
“And when your dad taught you to fish, did he show you how and then you did what he did?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that copying?”
“I suppose.”
“Isn’t that how we learn everything? By copying people who know how to do it and show us?”
“Hadn’t thought of it like that.”
There was a high stool in a corner. I sat on it. Karl hitched himself onto the workbench.
I said, “When I was fifteen, I wasn’t regarded as clever, and I wasn’t much of a reader. But one day I came across a book I started reading just because I had nothing else to do. I don’t know why I picked it rather than another. Anyway, I started reading. It didn’t hook me straightaway. It didn’t have the kind of catchy opening that grabs your attention. I was well into it before this strange thing happened that had never happened before. I just couldn’t stop reading it. And as I read the last page, all I wanted to do was write a book like that. I wanted it so much, I started straightaway. I still have the story. It’s about eighty pages long. Eighty-one to be exact. It took me six months. When I read it now, it makes me laugh, because it’s so obviously a bad copy of the book I’d read. But it got me going. It showed me what I wanted to do with my life. It showed me what I am.”
That put a silence on both of us.
When the emotion had drained away, Karl said, “What you’re saying is something like that has happened to me.”
I kept my eyes, as I felt his eyes were, too, on his sculptings.
And replied, “Hasn’t it?”
How hard it is to admit to someone else who has recognised it before you have yourself, that something has happened to you, which will reshape your life. Perhaps because you resent that they have noticed before you have. Perhaps because such an admission reveals your deepest and most vulnerable self. The self we all fear someone will injure or hurt or destroy.
And it’s hard because you know at that very moment of recognition that your future is decided. That whatever happens, come what may and whether you want to or not, you will have to live your life in a way determined by your discovery of what you are and what you are meant to be.
At one and the same moment, you suddenly feel free—free to be who you are—and at the same time restricted, bound, unfree, because you can be nothing else. In gaining your freedom to be you have lost your choice of being anything else.
I sensed Karl was struggling with that very dilemma before he answered in a voice forced through a jammed mouth.
“Yes.”
After such moments of a truth declared and accepted, discomfort sets in.
What should you do? Break the ice by telling a joke? Change the subject?
I thought of suggesting we leave it there for today, but that felt like dodging the questions still hanging in the air.
All I could do was take the advice I’d given Fiorella: follow my nose.
“I’m guessing these are models,” I said. “D’you plan to make them the right size?”
“One or two,” Karl said. “The ones I’m pleased with.”
“Which are?”
He pointed to two. One very like William Tucker’s, the other a more complicated arrangement of entangled and almost knotted wires.
“And making them out of pipes?”
“The Tucker one. But the other one I’d like to make out of stainless steel rods.”
“And then what will you do with them?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t thought that far.”
“You made them on the spur of the moment because you couldn’t resist it?”
“I suppose … Yes.”
Pause for thought.
“Maybe,” I said, “the thing to do is make those two the size you want and then decide what to do with them?”
“Maybe … But is it worth it?”
So that was the question he really wanted me to answer?
I said, “Do you mean, is it worth you making them, or are they worth making?”
“Both, I guess,” he said.
Pause.
“Well … in my opinion, yes. It’s worth you making them and they are worth making.”
“Why?”
Oh, please, I thought, just do it! Don’t question so much!
And I was beginning to feel down. I’d forgotten the aftereffects of the ’flu during our happy meal and finding out what Karl was doing. But now started to feel queasy again.
I don’t know how I’d have answered his question because before I could try there was a knock on the door.
This injected a supercharge of energy into Karl, who shot off the workbench and grabbed the door handle, while shouting, “Don’t come in! Go away! Don’t come in.”
And Mrs. Williamson’s shocked voice replying, “I won’t. I’ve brought you some coffee.”
“All right!” Karl shouted. �
�Put it down. I’ll get it. Don’t come in. Go away.”
And Mrs. Williamson saying, “Yes, all right. I’m going. I’m going.”
Karl waited, then opened the door enough to check his mother had gone.
Now, I’m slow to anger, which is just as well, because I’m unreasonable when roused.
And Karl’s behaviour roused me.
“Just a minute!” I said, or rather heard myself explode, for anger splits you in two, or at least it does me. The angry me being angry and the normal me observing the angry me being angry.
I was beside Karl and pushing him away before I could stop myself.
“What!” Karl said.
But I paid no heed, opened the door and called after Mrs. Williamson’s retreating figure, “Wait, Mrs. Williamson. Please wait!”
But she went on into the house.
I closed the door and confronted Karl and in a stern voice new to him and rare to myself said, “That was disgraceful!”
“What!”
“You should be ashamed of yourself!”
And then in a voice that matched mine, he said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“That was your mother, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t want her in here.”
“You don’t talk to your mother like that. Never! Not for any reason.”
We were enraged bull to bull, close up.
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” he said.
“I won’t stand by and say nothing when you behave so badly to your mother.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Have I ever interfered in your business before?”
No reply.
“Have I ever criticised you in any way?”
No reply.
“Have I ever told you you were wrong?”
No reply.
Karl turned away and leaned against the workbench.
I waited. Nothing.
“Have the decency to give me a reply.”
“All right!” Karl said with a wave of the hand that would have pushed me away had I been in range. “All right. No.”
Dying to Know You Page 12
