by Patrick Gale
Thirty-One
‘It’s no good if you look,’ Iras told him.
‘How can you tell I’m looking?’ asked Robin, amazed because he had been.
‘Because of the delay. I can tell you’re trying to count the bumps with your eyes. Eyes always make people slower. It’s bad enough that you vocalise when you read printed text.’
‘How can you tell I do that?’
‘Same way. Speed. You turn the pages so slowly I can tell you’re reading aloud in your brain.’
‘I might just be enjoying it, or not concentrating hard. Reading doesn’t have to be a race.’
‘No. But it’s much more exciting if you can read nearer the speed you think.’
‘Impossible.’
She tapped the page between them. She nearly smiled. Iras often nearly smiled when talking to him now; he began to see that, in the depressed currency of her physical communications, a near-smile was valuable.
‘Next word,’ she said. ‘And don’t look.’
‘I’m not. I’m staring at you.’
‘Try shutting your eyes. There are fewer distractions that way.’
Robin shut his eyes. He had been trying so long that his fingertip was beginning to itch. Iras had said he must use that sensitivity, push through it and soon he could tell what letter he was reading without having to slide his finger back and forth. Or cheat.
‘C’, he said ‘and one dot is A so it’s Ca. Cat sat on the mat?’
‘No. Much easier.’
‘Two dots vertically.’
‘Think.’
‘I’m thinking. Got it. Cab!’
‘Finally.’
‘Iras, this is too hard.’
‘It’s the simplest primer there is. It’s uncontracted.’
‘What?’
‘Uncontracted. Grade one. Grade one and a half is simply contracted.’
‘What happens then?’
‘It speeds up. You leave out letters, as many as you can before the meaning gets muddled. So B on its own is but. M on its own is more but with dot five before it becomes mother and if you add dots four five and six it turns into many.’
‘How do you ever learn it?’
‘You have to. You would soon enough if you lost your sight. People need books. Proper people.’
‘That’s monstrous. You can’t judge people on their literacy. It’s too external.’
‘Yes, you can. Anyway, as I was saying, after simple contraction it gets harder still.’
‘More grades?’
‘Quite. Grade two is moderately contracted and grade three is highly contracted.’
‘What does that involve?’
‘Getting quicker still. Immediate becomes imm, blind becomes bl, beyond becomes bey.’
‘What’s deceive?’
‘Dcv.’
‘But that takes away all the beauty of it!’
‘What’s beauty? If it’s the look of the thing you can hardly blame the sightless for not having much time for it.’
‘I mean the sound.’
‘You can still read aloud or vocalise in your head. It just means that you can skip out all the unnecessary letters. Think how many letters in English are unpronounced or unnecessary. Most of them are just historical.’
‘But that’s nice. People like historical.’
‘It’s hard work if you do all your reading by hand. Braille still has poetry. There’s a special sign to show when you’re leaving prose and moving into verse.’
‘Like a gear change.’
‘Exactly. Like when Andrea puts on her poetry voice. Punctuation comes alive too. From what I can gather, most sighted people don’t really understand punctuation and they certainly don’t see much beauty in it, but when you read it with your fingers a punctuation sign has an equal importance to the letters on either side of it. It gets dramatic.’
They were sitting on either side of Faber’s old dining-table. Faber was away at his father’s funeral but had asked Robin to stay at home with Iras. Iras had been keen to go too, never having been to a funeral. When Robin explained what happened at one, however, she lost interest, saying that it sounded remarkably like a christening without a party.
‘All that clumsy poetry and primitive symbolism,’ she scoffed.
‘Some people find it helps,’ Robin assured her. ‘People in pain especially. Faber’s in quite a lot of pain at the moment.’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t need poetry. He’s got us. And his painting. He’s been painting a lot. Is it any good?’
‘Which?’
‘His latest?’
‘It’s of us.’
‘That makes a change.’
‘Come round and we’ll have a look.’
‘You mean you’ll have a look.’
Iras left her seat and followed him to the far end of the table where Faber’s easel stood in the sunlight.
‘Sorry. I’m learning.’
‘Gradually. So?’
Robin had stopped in front of the canvas and took her shoulders to guide her in front of him.
‘Give me your reading finger,’ he said. She held up a hand with forefinger extended. Gently he grasped the finger and drew it around the rough edge of the square before them. ‘This is the canvas he’s been painting it on,’ he told her.
‘Big, isn’t it? He’s always moaning about the price of paint.’
‘But the bigger the painting, the more money he can ask for it.’
‘Strange,’ she murmured. ‘Like paying more for Great Expectations just because it’s longer than Lolita.’
‘Have you read Lolita already?’
‘Last year. I wouldn’t let Faber watch it on television unless he promised to buy me a copy. I’d heard all the fuss.’
‘Which did you prefer?’
‘Well, Great Expectations is far more subversive.’
‘Iras Washington. You’ll go far.’
‘Yes, but show me the rest of the painting.’
Robin took her finger again. ‘This is the table we’re sitting at.’ He drew her finger through the air, tracing Faber’s design just above the glistening surface of the thickly laid paint. It was a beautiful painting, with the deep slate blue of Iras’s dungarees and the red of Robin’s shirt. There was no direct source of light in the scene, but the sunshine from elsewhere was bouncing up from the pages of braille onto their faces. ‘And that’s the book on your side and this,’ he continued to trace with her finger, ‘is you teaching me to read braille and this, over here, is me trying to learn and failing dismally.’
‘You weren’t that bad,’ she conceded. ‘Not for your first day. You’ve such a lot to unlearn before you can get much further.’
‘Do you honestly think so? Shall I persevere?’
‘We could pass notes behind Faber’s back.’
‘I think he understands more of it than you think.’
‘Not much.’
‘Well, he tries. He knows a lot about blind history.’
‘But any fool can learn that, it’s so short. Here, I’ll show you.’
He followed her to her room. She felt along a very full bookcase.
‘It’s here somewhere,’ she said. ‘Ah. Here we are. My first exercise book from my “special school”. They try very hard at making us proud of blind culture. Our first homework was to learn this list.’ She ran her finger down a brailled sheet pinned inside the front cover. ‘Homer,’ she said, ‘Tiresias (well, he hardly counts), Phineus, (who?), Didymus of Alexandria 4 AD, theologian and teacher, Nicholas Saunderson 1682 to 1739, Yorkshireman, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, John Metcalfe 1717 to 1810, English road engineer and bridge builder, Thomas Blacklock 1721 to 1791, Scotch poet and minister, (ha!), François Huber, Swiss naturalist and bee specialist and last, but not least … Oh. Sorry. The paper’s all squashed here. Yes. Maria Theresia von Paradis 1759 to 1824, Viennese singer and pianist and Marianne Kirchgessner, the glass harmonica virtuoso who inspired works from Mozart an
d Haydn.’
‘What about Monsieur Braille and Helen Keller?’
‘Oh, they’re not culture. They’re God.’
‘Ah. Is this your novel?’ She had left the word processor switched on, its screen full of a dense paragraph.
‘Yes. But you don’t want to see that.’ She reached to clear the screen.
‘Can’t I?’
‘It’s not very good.’
‘Well, it’s better than anything I could do. You don’t seem to realise that I’m washed up compared to you. I have no degree, eight years missing where my career should be and no outstanding abilities. I couldn’t write a novel if I tried.’
‘You can read them,’ she suggested.
‘Yes, but alas one doesn’t get paid to do that.’
‘Critics do.’
‘Not much. Change the subject, there’s a dear. Tell me how this machine works for you. I can see the braille keys but how can you read what you’ve written?’
It was treachery but, as they chattered, he started reading her novel. He found himself plunged into a weird scene in which the heroine flew somewhere on someone’s back (an alien of some kind) and had to keep them afloat in a dangerous mist by improvising poetry. The language was not advanced, but not childish either. Iras age only showed in the strong influences of her recent reading, chiefly Dickens, which emerged as an occasional archness of clumsy formality. Carried away, he started tapping keys in an effort to see another page.
‘Hey! Stop!’ she shouted, seizing his arms. ‘What did you just do?’
‘Sorry. I was trying to see another page.’
‘Did you type anything new in?’
‘Er. Yes. A few letters. Nothing much.’
She reached round him to find the delete key.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Tap this once or twice until all the new letters have gone.’
He did so.
‘Right,’ he said.
‘Now,’ she felt the keyboard again, ‘This is the relay key. Press this once to tidy it all up.’
He touched the key and a kind of ripple ran through the paragraph, tucking in stray letters and filling unwanted gaps.
‘Done.’
‘What did you think of what you read?’ she asked.
‘Iras, you’ve probably heard this already, but it’s very, very good. You have to finish it.’
‘Oh, I already have.’
‘When?’
‘Days ago.’
‘But why didn’t you say? We must celebrate. Faber will be so pleased.’
‘I didn’t think it was a good time to tell him.’
‘No. Honestly. It would give him something else to think about.’
‘Well. Perhaps. Hang on.’ She pushed him gently to make him move from the seat so that she could sit at the keyboard. Expertly she tapped a few times. The screen cleared, offered her a list from which she chose a chapter simply by counting the number of times she tapped a key then a new chapter appeared. ‘Now,’ she muttered to herself, ‘it was at the end.’ She pressed a key and the pages rushed by to stop at the end of the chapter. ‘Since I’ve taught you braille you can teach me something.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t ask Faber because he gets so embarrassed but, well, you’re less grown-up than he is so I think you won’t mind.’
‘What?’ Robin laughed.
‘This is the only bit I haven’t done because I haven’t got the right information and I want to get my facts right. You’ll have to fill me in.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Well, I need to know what you two get up to in bed.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’re not going to get all coy?’
‘Of course not. Er. We touch.’
‘Where?’
‘Everywhere.’
‘I need scientific names. This is a scene between two Minervans, you see – that’s the planet the girl gets taken to – and they’re all the same sex, you see, rather like worms, only much more attractive but they only bother to make love in a physical way when one of them knows they’re going to die soon and I need to know what they’d do.’
When Faber returned, drained, from Marcus’s funeral he would find Iras thrilled at having finished her novel, with a little help, and Robin thrilled at having finally decided what it was he wanted to do with his life.
Thirty-Two
In the days when Marcus used to take summer afternoons off to sketch the view of Chelsea from its riverside graveyard, Saint Mary’s, Battersea had nestled in a long line of great flour warehouses, gin distilleries, mysterious factories, and unloading places alive with cats and smells of exotic rot. Then the church had been a lone eighteenth century feature amid a mass of looming red brick, watched over by the council estate tower blocks. Today it still looked as though it had been shipped over from some quaint New England parish but only the riverside brown bread factory held out against a tide of dubiously prettifying alteration. Dozens of toytown houses had taken the place of the wharves and warehouses. Each had its spotless, new Georgian fanlight, Victorian streetlamp, patch of expensive grass and set of Dutch gables. They seemed to press as close to the church and riverside as was seemly or possible and their proximity had infected the older building with their counterfeit elegance.
‘Good lord!’ Andrea exclaimed as they left the car, less at the houses, whose style was common enough across the city to have become the unremarkable signature of a decade, than at the crowds. A line of taxis and cars stretched almost to where they had left the Volkswagen. People were being set down at the graveyard gate or were spilling out earlier and making for the already crowded pavement. ‘I thought you said he didn’t have any friends.’
‘He was so precisely spoken,’ Peter said. ‘I expect he would have called this lot acquaintance.’
‘Where did Faber place announcements?’
‘I told him to put them in all the big papers. He put one in the Herald Tribune too.’
They walked on, bemused. Around them old friends greeted one another in German, Italian, French and unfamiliar, Eastern-sounding tongues. The average age looked like sixty-five and everyone was in black. Andrea was wearing grey, ‘Because it suits me and after all I never met the man.’
Peter had donned an old City suit, rather loose in the waist after eight years without boardroom lunches.
When finally they were on pillowy grass and in sight of the river, they saw Faber standing in the portico. He waved and came towards them smiling.
‘At last some familiar faces!’ he said.
‘Who are all these people?’ Peter asked him.
‘Perhaps we double-booked?’ suggested Andrea.
‘I’ve no idea,’ sighed Faber, kissing her then shaking Peter’s hand. ‘I’ve been standing there for nearly half an hour saying hello to people but none of them have the faintest idea who I am so it’s fairly pointless. Besides, they’re all having such a fabulous time. Listen!’ It was true. The air was full of gaiety and release, as though the service were already over. ‘I was convinced it was going to be just we three and maybe Candida’s godfather.’
‘Which is he?’
‘There he is. Uncle Heini!’
‘My dear boy!’ A dapper old man in a well-cut suit black as night turned from another conversation and came towards them, beaming. He shook Faber’s hand and patted his shoulder. ‘I’m so very sorry,’ he said, still smiling but saddening his voice a little.
‘Heini, these are dear friends. Andrea Maitland, Heinrich Liebermann.’
‘How do you do?’
‘Enchanté.’
Uncle Heini all but kissed Andrea’s hand.
‘And this is Andrea’s husband, Peter.’
‘Ja, so it was you who visited dear Marcus all this time. We all owe you so much.’ His pronunciation turned Marcus into something rich and rare, something from Ancient Rome. Embarrassed, Peter shrugged.
‘He left me the richer,’ he told him and yet again Andrea wondered
what he and the dying man had talked about all this time. Whenever she had asked him, Peter told her, ‘Nothing, really.’
‘Heini, you must tell me,’ Faber urged. ‘Who are all these people?’
‘Oh,’ Heini dismissed them with a scornful raising of eyebrows and a wave of a hand, ‘Acquaintance. Marcus had very few friends left alive, but he had an enormous acquaintance.’
‘But this is so embarrassing,’ Faber said. ‘Shouldn’t I be providing them all with food and drink or something? Some of them seem to have come miles.’
‘St Johns Wood,’ Heini snorted. ‘Have they said hello to you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then you needn’t worry.’
The four of them had reached the church’s elegant West end.
‘Shall we see you inside?’ asked Andrea.
‘Oh no. I think I might as well come in with you now,’ Faber said.
‘But what about Marcus?’ asked Heini. ‘Shouldn’t you be walking in with him?’
‘He’s already in his place,’ Faber said with a smile. ‘I’d have felt such an idiot walking up the aisle all on my own behind a load of bearers so I got them to come early and put him up at the front before anyone else got here. You can hardly find him for flowers. Come and see.’
He turned inside and they followed him, Andrea taking Peter’s arm and Heini bringing up the rear. Peter saw with relief that the musicians were already in place and playing. Marcus had left him a letter in Miss Birch’s care. It gave him strict instructions concerning the paying of musicians and some nurse together with advice concerning the handling of meddlesome priests.
The coffin was quite buried in flowers as were the trestles that supported it. Flowers dangled from the pulpit and someone, an anonymous donor, Faber muttered, had paid for green garlands to be draped around the length of the horseshoe gallery. The smell was delicious – rosemary, bay and late honeysuckle. The pews were already filled to bursting and the gallery creaked under an unaccustomed burden but the front pew had been left respectfully empty. It was clear to Andrea as they walked up the aisle, that no one there was quite sure exactly who the chief mourners would turn out to be. Not being in mourning herself, she felt no harm in enjoying the sense of attention on her as the one woman in the quartet that now took the principal places. She saw Peter bow to a tidy-looking creature on the other side. In answer to Andrea’s questioning glance he whispered, ‘Miss Birch,’ which left her none the wiser. She reached into her bag for the piece of paper on which she had typed out her Donne poem. It was all so exciting, like being in a school play or local pageant. Peter had told her that he really had very little idea what was going to happen. All he knew was that the form of the service would probably be ‘free’ and that she was to go into the pulpit and read the poem ‘after the song’. Faber sat on her right, beside the aisle, as seemed proper, although he was to play no active part in the proceedings. She reached across to pat his arm. He smiled slightly but continued to stare at the heap of flowers on the coffin.
