by Peter Walker
But nothing was said, and Morgan then turned and began climbing again and Race began to climb as well and followed him up through the highest branches to the top of the tree and even there Morgan did not stop – he just went on out into the air, and Race reached the top of the trunk which was as slender as a whip – he felt his handhold waver – and he too went on up into the air, after Morgan, who without looking back turned and flew out over the sea. They went a long way out, flying a little higher all the time it seemed – Race saw the breakers below, and the sea beyond the breakers, and then the deep blue of the ocean ahead, and they flew on, Morgan never looking back, and then Race saw a series of towers or windmills standing on the horizon. At first these were small and faint but as they grew larger he began to feel afraid. Morgan was flying on, but Race knew if he went beyond the line of towers in the sea there would be no chance of return. He looked back: he could still see the land, though it would soon be out of sight. He looked ahead. Morgan was still flying on, and he never looked back, and then Race turned and headed for the land, saw the green back-wash of the breakers below him, and then came in to land, the sun and wind beating on his face, and then he woke.
He lay staring at the ceiling. At first he felt only wonder, and then some alarm. It was the most vivid dream he had ever had, and it had left a kind of fearful livingness in the room. A sound of clanking came up from the rail-yards and a blueish light from the yards went tracking across the ceiling. Race began to feel sad and sorry for himself as well. The cottage was old; the air was musty; the bed-springs sagged. Even the old wardrobe at the end of the bed had a gloomy forbidding appearance. And he was quite alone. There had been no sign from Panos that he would ever show up. Race had a feeling that the dream had come because he was alone. It had come for that reason and then it had gone, but it had woken him first, to ensure that he remembered it. He lay there for a long time and his heart stopped pounding and he went back to sleep.
In the morning the sun was shining. He got up, dressed, ate some breakfast, then packed his bags and stepped out onto the veranda. He remembered the key and stood there for a minute wondering what to do with it. It was an old-fashioned iron key, long and thin, dank, with the faintest bloom of rust. For three days Race had carried this with him, out to his lectures in the morning and back to the cottage in the early evening. The air that met him when he came into the house in the evening was musty, heated, sad – no one had spoken in it or had thought a thought in it since he had left in the morning. He had come to dislike the weight of the key in his pocket during the day. It was a proof of the solitude waiting for him at home. Race had never spent any time alone before. He was lonely, and irritated with Panos, and embarrassed at his situation. And now an element of fear had arrived. That was one drawback to living alone, he thought: it was unsafe. Dreams, far too vivid, could come and get you, and then wake you in order to record them. He had the key in his hand and he looked at it again. Then he brought his stuff out on the veranda, locked the door, dropped the key through the letter slot and, hoisting one bag on his shoulder, walked up the street in the sunshine, and never went back there again.
Part II
2001
1
‘A visitor for you.’
‘For me?’
‘A visitor for you,’ said Candy, ‘in the form of – ta dah!’
‘Granddad!’ said another voice. ‘How are you?’
A tall young man strode into the room. A very old man was sitting alone at the end of a gleaming wooden dining table. A knife, a fork, a spoon, a soup plate on a linen mat, salt and pepper shakers and a glass of red wine were in front of him. At his neck he wore a napkin rather spotted with soup. He looked at the young man with strained blue eyes.
‘How am I?’ he said. ‘I’m old.’
‘But lookin’ good, Grandpa. Lookin’ pretty snappy.’
‘I am in my ninety-third year,’ said Bernard. ‘And I may say I feel every minute of it.’
‘You’re going to do the ton for me, I know it,’ said the young man. ‘One hundred years old! I’m relying on you now.’
‘What a horrible prospect,’ said the old man, looking pleased.
‘Come on. I bet you’re having a good time.’
‘A good time?’ said Bernard. ‘Let me show you how I spend my time.’
Bernard laid down his spoon, stood up and, exaggerating his totter, went across the room to the sofa where he sat down, then flung out his arms to represent every emptiness.
Candy sighed.
‘He had Merle in to get him up,’ she said to her son. ‘Then the chiropodist came. Then I spent an hour with him and he told me all about the 1947 snow storm. Didn’t you, darling?’ she cried, bending down to her father-in-law. ‘The 1947 snow storm!’
‘What about it?’ he said curtly, looking up at her. Bernard had been one of the leading ophthalmologists in the United States. His sharp blue eyes had gazed into the orbs of tens of thousands, including Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and Marlene Dietrich.
‘Where’s Dad?’ said Toby to his mother.
‘Race?’ said Candy. ‘Oh, he’ll turn up like a bad penny. Sorry. I shouldn’t say that. Your father will be here for Thanksgiving.’
‘Toby has come home for Thanksgiving,’ she called to Bernard.
‘As to that,’ said Bernard, ‘in all my years here, no one has made it absolutely clear to me who is thanking whom for what.’
Toby laughed. He looked lovingly at the old man, who was not in fact his real grandfather but the father of Candy’s second husband, Chip. When Race and Candy had divorced, Toby was six. Race, so it seemed to him, suddenly vanished off the face of the earth. But he and the old man had formed a bond. Bernard bought him a bicycle and took him cycling, at ruthless adult speeds, on the Rock Creek trails. He taught him sailing, and even, in his eighties, took up wind-surfing with him on Chesapeake Bay. Chip, by contrast, had no aptitude with children. He looked through them, though without malice. He was a journalist; he had a column on the Washington Post, and he could not identify any child as one of his significant readers. ‘I write for eight significant people inside the Beltway,’ he once said. ‘The million and half others are a pleasing superfluity.’ Race, in the meantime, had not really disappeared, but he no longer lived under the same roof, and for a few years after splitting up with Candy he did travel more often than before. Toby, in boyhood, lived under a windfall of postcards, mostly ultramarine in hue, underwater scenes from obscure tropic shores, Sulawesi, Socotra, various Gulfs. Race was a marine biologist. Toby developed a dislike of the underwater blue. What was the hold it had, the mermaid draw, over his father? He connected it somehow with his mother’s love for Chip; in childhood he developed a distaste for the formidable ardours of the adult world.
‘If it’s the Indians we’re thinking of,’ said Bernard, ‘perhaps an orgy of remorse rather than gluttony might be in order.’
Toby beamed at him.
‘Toby’s just come from England,’ Candy called. ‘He’s at school in England now.’
‘England!’ said the old man, startled. ‘I was born in England.’
‘Yes I know, Granddad,’ said Toby. It was an elementary piece of family lore. It was probably one of the reasons that he, Toby, had gone to live there himself. He had left London ten hours earlier. London had been dark, damp, gloomy, lit by a dim silver lamp nearly hidden by clouds. Here, everything was hard, cold, bright, dry. The lawns in northwest Washington looked as though they’d had military haircuts. No rain had fallen in the DC area for forty days. Several strangers, Slavic, black – a cab driver, a porter at Union station – had informed Toby of this fact since he’d arrived. He had almost forgotten the easy address between fellow Americans. The idea of a porter at a London station – were there any? – engaging in un-ironic chat even about the weather seemed remote. The English, he thought, lived at another depth of the atmosphere, like fish in another zone of the ocean. Before leaving for Heathrow that morning, he had r
un along two long, damp, brown-carpeted avenues to return Jojo’s overdue books.
Jojo had called from Honolulu to remind him about them, before she flew east and he flew west to meet in Washington.
Inside the library, a young male librarian – obese, gay, besprinkled with dandruff – was reading a story to twenty pre-schoolers camped on the carpet.
‘Now, who knows what a skeleton is?’
‘Oooh. Arrgh.’
‘It’s bones,’ said one, in gloom.
‘That’s right,’ said the librarian. ‘All of you – hold up your arms. Feel that? That’s bone. We’re all made of bone. If we got rid of all . . . this . . . we’d be skeletons too. This is a story about a man called Mr Skeleton. Say “Hello, Mr Skeleton.” ’
‘Hello, Mr Skeleton,’ said many sepulchral voices.
Toby, rightly or wrongly, could not imagine this scene in American accents.
From the sofa, Bernard looked around his sitting-room with a patrician air.
‘It’s not a bad sort of place, I suppose,’ he said. ‘They generally serve a drink about now.’
‘Would you like a drink?’ said Toby.
‘Yes,’ said Bernard. ‘I would.’
‘What would you like?’
‘What would you like?’ said Bernard cagily.
‘I’d like a vodka,’ said Toby.
‘It’s three in the afternoon,’ said Candy. Her hair was in two wings, thinner than it used to be, and silvered and elegant.
‘I’m on holiday,’ said Toby. ‘I’ve just flown the Atlantic.’
‘I will have a vodka as well,’ said Bernard.
‘Oh, let me do it,’ said Candy and she went away to fix the drinks.
‘I don’t know who she is,’ said Bernard, as his daughter-in-law left the room, ‘but she seems a good sort of woman. Are you married?’
‘No,’ said Toby.
‘Like your father,’ said Bernard. ‘Running off after every bit of skirt.’
Toby listened calmly to this remark which was in fact baseless. Bernard mused on the sofa, his eyes bleak.
‘My own father took agin me, I never knew why.’
Candy came back in with vodka, glasses and ice on a tray.
‘Toby’s girlfriend’s arriving tonight,’ she called. ‘Jojo. She’s Australian. She’ll be here for Thanksgiving as well.’
Bernard sipped the vodka with an elaborate pucker, and shuddered.
‘This is rather good,’ he said.
‘She and Toby live in London,’ called Candy.
‘My brother Reuben, of course,’ said Bernard, ‘married a girl from London. A pretty girl, without a single, solitary thought in her head.’
‘Toby’s studying there,’ said Candy. ‘He’s studying popular culture.’
‘Haw!’ said Bernard, in the tone he reserved for the latest example of human folly that came to his notice, but he looked kindly at the young man.
‘I suppose you live in digs,’ he said.
‘I suppose so,’ said Toby who never used the term.
‘I lived in digs,’ said Bernard, ‘once upon a time.’
He paused for a long time, looking at the carpet.
‘He sent me shitty letters,’ he said.
‘Who?’ said Toby. He was amazed. In all his days, he had never heard Bernard use foul language.
‘Father,’ said Bernard. ‘The old man.’
Candy sighed again. ‘He’s obsessing,’ she said. She spoke at a conversational level, confident that Bernard could not hear. ‘At the moment it’s his father,’ she said. ‘He goes on and on about him. Last summer it was Eisenhower. Nothing but Eisenhower. And there’s the snow storm in 1947. We still have a lot of that. He’s polishing it all up for eternity.’
‘ “Good riddance”,’ said Bernard. ‘Imagine writing that to your own son! I was seventeen. I’d gone to university in Manchester. “I’ll be as glad to see the back of you as you will be of me.” That’s what he wrote to me. Of course he didn’t write it himself. He was quite blind by then. He dictated his letter to Reuben. And Reuben wrote on the bottom: “Take no notice of the old bugger.” Ha!’
Toby looked out the window. Bernard had bought the house on Barleycorn Street in 1958. A white pick-up truck went fast down Barleycorn and at the corner sounded its horn – a sort of fanfare of trumpets. A tall black woman was walking up the street. She suddenly stopped, as if seized by dread, and searched through her leather shoulder bag. Then she went on up the hill at a leisurely pace. Another fanfare sounded much more closely. Toby looked nonplussed, then he grabbed at his phone in his inside jacket pocket.
‘Hello, Plum,’ he said. ‘Where are you? What? Can you? Really? Will I pick you up? Of course I’ll pick you up. OK. OK. OK. Yes. I’ll come and get you. I know. I know. I know. OK.’
He hung up, pressing a key, frowning down at the little phone.
‘That was Jojo,’ he said. ‘She just left Honolulu. She’s on the plane. She can see the sea.’
But Bernard’s eyes were closed. His drink, forgotten, was on the square arm of the sofa. Candy chose not to be impressed that Toby had just spoken to Jojo who was looking down 30,000 feet at the ocean.
‘I never use that phone thing on the plane,’ she said. ‘I’m just terrified of what it might cost.’
She collected Bernard’s drink from the sofa arm and put it on a coaster on the table, and picked up his soup bowl, spoon, knife, fork and the linen table mat. Toby followed her out to the kitchen and stood there. He turned on his heels one way, then another. He opened the fridge and looked in. Every centimetre, every last millimetre was jammed with pickles, sauces, chutneys. Chip liked condiments. Toby sighed. Nothing, he thought vaguely, had changed in the whole of his life. On the fridge door was a litter of magnet-held data – photos, crayon drawings, scraps of paper with addresses on them.
‘What time does she get in?’ said Candy.
‘Uhhhh . . . late,’ said Toby absently.
‘Do you want the car?’ said Candy.
‘Nope,’ said Toby. ‘I’ll take Caspar’s truck.’
‘Caspar!’ said his mother.
Toby didn’t answer. He was reading an essay in a childish hand on the fridge door:
Robert Ripley
of Ripley’s believe it or not started his collection of amazing facts as a caratoonist for the New York Globe. Then he went to find every unusual thing of life: such as an sub machine gun with a curved barrel for shotting round corners and over obstercals. He searched 747000 miles for more material and found a snake trying to eat itself and a tooth pick mermaid.
‘Who wrote this?’ said Toby.
‘Romulus,’ said Candy.
Romulus was Merle’s younger son. Merle had been coming to the house every day for six years to get Bernard up and dressed in the morning. Merle was from Jamaica. Her mouth was deeply downturned; in winter she wore a man’s pork-pie hat. She was a clever and thoughtful woman; over the course of the years she and Candy had become friends. Romulus was eleven. Candy, who taught remedial reading, took an interest in his education. She did not approve of Merle’s elder son, Caspar, who treated his mother, she believed, with young black male indifference. As teenagers, however, Caspar and Toby had formed an alliance which appeared to be in place despite the Atlantic. They must have been in touch already, she thought. Who knew how 21-year-olds communicated across space and time?
‘A tooth-pick mermaid?’ said Toby.
‘I don’t know,’ said Candy.
‘Then we’re going out to Middleburg,’ said Toby.
‘Middleburg!’ said Candy. ‘What time does she get in?’
‘Midnight,’ said Toby.
‘Why on earth are you taking Jojo to Middleburg at midnight?’ said Candy.
‘We’re going to see the meteors,’ said Toby. ‘It’s the Leonids tonight. It’ll be dark out there. We’re going to see a meteor shower.’
Candy shrugged but she was impressed all the same. She felt a little lonely
as well. Who would ever ask her to see a meteor shower in dark Virginia? She looked at her son from behind – tall, brown-haired, narrow-headed: she liked looking at the back of his head and the cusp of hair in the nape of his neck. But still he was just a child! Just as he used to as a boy, for instance, he now put the coffee grounds in the sink and turned on the waste-disposal switch and peered in, watching. There was a rich grinding of metal jaws, then they whirred freely again.
‘In-sink-erator,’ said Toby, just as she remembered.
2
‘Chantilly lace and a pretty face,’ sang Jojo, ‘she walks with a wiggle and she talks with a giggle . . .’
They came to an intersection and turned west on Route 66 towards Middleburg.
‘Route 66!’ said Jojo. ‘Get Your Kicks on—’.
‘Darling,’ said Toby.
‘Yes?’
‘Are you going to sing your way right across the US road map?’
‘Yes,’ said Jojo. ‘Yes. I think I will.’
‘OK,’ said Toby. ‘Just so’s we know.’
‘We,’ said Jojo.
‘Caspar and me,’ said Toby.
‘This is not the real Route 66,’ said Caspar. ‘That goes from Chicago to, God – someplace.’
‘They changed it,’ said Toby. ‘Can you believe that? The most famous route in America and some jerk, some board, changes the number.’
‘They did?’ said Caspar. ‘Why did they do that?’
‘You wonder,’ said Toby. ‘You have to ask yourself.’
He glanced at Jojo out of the corner of his eye. She’s angry, he thought. Jojo had thick, short blonde hair and mid-brown eyes. She looked as if she was internally heated, with no need for a naked flame in order to catch fire. Her colouring was the same as his mother’s – Toby was aware of that, and saw no need to examine the fact further. He guessed there was some psychological weight in it and he didn’t care. Jojo’s eyes, side on, sweetly protuberant in the passing night lights – streetlights, headlamps – were transparent. He put his arm around her, his hand was resting on her shoulder. She was in the middle of the cab between Caspar who was at the wheel and Toby on the door. Toby moved his thumb left and right, a gentle arc, on her skin just below her collar bone. Jojo shrugged at this caress, as if at an insect touch.
