by Barbara Vine
Tina opened it and said, ‘Hallo, Ma.’ Then she said, ‘This is Daniel. He's come to pick up his stuff.’
This was perfectly true, not a ploy to make Cecilia believe things were other than they were. Tina did not tell lies, though she acted them. Daniel Korn had left his CD player, some of his clothes, an electric toaster and a barbecue tripod at Tina's when he moved out. Now that he had acquired a flat instead of a room, he had come in a borrowed van to collect his property and he and Tina were having an amicable cup of coffee in the kitchen.
Daniel Korn said, ‘Hi.’
Cecilia said, ‘How do you do?’ and lifted her eyes and looked at him.
The face imprinted on her inner eye reproduced itself somewhat enlarged before her. It was as if she were looking at Jasper once more. Or as if this was Jasper grown up, a shortish, stocky, neatly made man with a smooth oval face, what when she was a girl they called on girls a lovely complexion, hair as black as Chinese hair and looking as if painted on, bright black eyes, black crescent eyebrows.
Tina said, ‘Ma?’
When she got no answer she said, ‘Are you OK, Ma? You're looking a bit pale.’
Cecilia said she was quite all right. She said it twice. ‘I'm quite all right.’
She went through the motions. What would Tina like her to fetch from Selfridges? Would Tina be in when she came back at, say, five? She spoke slowly and abstractedly. A thought came between the words and their utterance, a simple negative reassurance: it can't be. It did not reassure. She fell silent. She thought, I must be alone, I must think about this alone.
The shock – it was like a blow, enfeebling her legs – had made her sit down. She got up, still holding on to the table.
‘Aren't you going to have your coffee?’
‘I don't want to be late for Daphne,’ Cecilia said.
The glance that passed between Tina and Daniel Korn, or which Tina gave and he received, a smiling, knowing look, though not without kindness, was not lost on Cecilia. But it did not touch her, either with anger or shame or embarrassment. She was beyond all that. She could hear a sound in her head now, a dull booming that did not lessen when she was out in the street, and because of what she had recently been reading and watching, she thought of Mrs Moore hearing the boom in the Marabar Caves. That had been a real sound and what she could hear was her own blood pumping, but her reaction to it was the same. There had come to her a dull but perfectly clear awareness that life had no meaning, that there was no morality, ethics did not exist, values had departed if indeed they had ever been.
Daniel Korn was Jasper's father. She knew that beyond a doubt. All these years Tina had been taking money from Brian who believed, who had been led to believe, Jasper was his son. He had been deceived, and she had been and the children had been, for now she had no doubt Brian was not Bienvida's father either, and Tina did not care. Tina, if confronted with this, would smile and shrug and ask what did it matter.
Nothing mattered, then. And Cecilia, making her way towards the station, crossing the railway bridge, walking mechanically and without looking where she was going, but knowing the way because she had done it ten thousand times before, thought of her youth and her past and what had mattered. So it all meant nothing? When she was a girl Tina would have been ostracized; when her own mother was a girl, Tina would have been an outcast. But now everyone knew her, everyone smiled. It was not that they forgave, for there was nothing for them to forgive. Nothing.
Three bicycles were dropped on to the line from a bridge between Leytonstone and Snaresbrook on the Central Line on an April evening in 1951. The consequent short circuit delayed trains by only half an hour.
More than half a century before this a passenger fell from a train on the City and South London Railway, as the Northern Line was then called. The train was passing through a tunnel at the time and he was killed.
In November 1927 a porter tried to close the gate of a moving train at Piccadilly. He was carried to the tunnel portal and killed. Twenty years later a guard was killed when he fell from a westbound train travelling between Liverpool Street and the Bank, and in the same year a man died when his arm was trapped in the doors of a train at Lancaster Gate after he had tried to force them open. He was dragged to the tunnel portal and killed when it struck him.
On the bridge, on the slippery lichened boards, she paused to look, almost unseeing, down upon the unravelled skeins of dull lines and silver lines stretching out between here and Finchley Road. What would become of the children when Brian found out? Who would keep them? Tina was her only heir. The house would pass naturally to Tina. She thought that she would protect Jasper and Bienvida by making a will and leaving the house to them, not to punish Tina, but to keep the children from want. She would find a solicitor on Monday and make a new will.
Cecilia walked on and down the steps on the other side. She presented her Senior Citizens' Travel Card. She walked on to the platform. A new and terrible thought had come to her. If that morality which in her own youth had been hard and fast and inescapable, so that people said it had always been like that, throughout the ages, and always would be, what rules prevailed today that in the time to come, in twenty years' time, would amount to nothing too?
Almost the worst thing a woman could do in her youth was what Tina had done and constantly did. But it was all right now. The stigma then of illegitimacy, though admitted not to be the poor child's fault, was an ineradicable one. Who cared about it now? What Peter did was all right now, though her father had called it a sin so bad that it must not be mentioned, not even touched upon by euphemism or innuendo, in their house. So, this child abuse and this child pornography, which were the crimes of now, would these one day be all right too? In the years to come when she was dead, would they look back to smile indulgently on these horrors which to Cecilia had been the worst of sins?
Had been. She no longer knew. Tina, using a popular word, would have said she was confused. But Cecilia was not confused, she was not puzzled or in doubt. The division between right and wrong had been bridged, had melded, had fused, until there was no separation. She had never believed in God, only in rules that had seemed to serve her very well instead, but one by one those rules had been broken and the world had not ended, only grown empty, become a nothingness. The boom in her head repeated itself. She listened to it. She felt the vibration, heard the singing sound, of the train approaching.
She felt divorced from herself. That was the way she put it, the only explanatory way there was. There was her body, which performed actions, stepped into the train, moved towards a seat, sat in it, and that part she called her mind, which seemed to watch her body from a distance, to tread the air on wings outside it, as if she were already dead. A huge desolation rolled upon her.
Other people were in the train. The days when she could have entered an empty car at this station were long past. But the faces might have been goats' and monkeys' heads on human bodies, they were as devoid of reason, of civilization, of humanity. The car began to fill up at Swiss Cottage and people were standing. She closed her eyes, retreating into that dark chamber which was her own Marabar Cave, empty, desolate, the booming dull now and distant.
It was the first time she had been in this train, descending the steep gradient, without thinking of the dead boy, without thinking of the boy and his terror, with compassion and with pity for his parents. That death was meaningless now, not worth a thought, of no account in a world where nothing mattered. Cecilia thought of chaos and the blood boomed in her head.
Only the partial emptying of the train, the displacement of people, brought her back and made her open her eyes. There had been the usual Baker Street exodus. The kind of sickness that comes when one is actually empty, when one has not eaten for a long time, was afflicting her. Her mouth filled with saliva. She felt for her handbag and could not find it. Her handbag was gone.
It sometimes happened, when they had arranged to meet like this, that Daphne and Cecilia got into the same train
. That is, Daphne got into a train at Willesden Green, and two stops down the line Cecilia got into it at West Hampstead. This had happened now, though neither of them knew it. And Cecilia, for once, had not thought that this was something she must tell Daphne, had not longed as she had always longed in the past for Daphne to be there and to listen. After the first shock of discovery when all her feelings had been involved with personalities and their interaction, she had not thought of individual people at all. Those in the tube car with her had been so many beast-headed lay figures, incapable of good or evil, incapable of doing her a mercy or doing her harm.
But one of them had stolen her handbag.
The sensation common to all of us when we realize we have lost something important or valuable was what Cecilia felt, as of her inside turning and of a heaviness rolling down through her body, a monstrous child expelling itself without pain. Her head seemed to be released from her shoulders and to float above the rest of her with a spatial lightness, and there the common feeling ended. For an instant she was not there at all, she was not in the car, a second's blackness drew her into itself, a second of death, and then she was back in her seat, half-keeled over.
The seat was the one nearest to the door, with the steel pole to which standing passengers clung. Cecilia clung to it with her right hand, her right hand was all right, and dragged herself to her feet. Or to her foot, her right foot; the left leg was as dead as the left arm. No one took any notice of her. They said no one did in cases like this and with her new knowledge of the world, she was not surprised. I have always been very strong physically, she thought. She was upright, or almost so, and she was hanging on. The train came into Bond Street, someone outside pressed the button, and the doors opened.
Cecilia got out of the train. She limped out and fell. People took notice then. Hands came to help her up, to lift her, and suddenly Daphne was there. Daphne was holding her. Cecilia's face felt as it did after the dentist had given her an injection of anaesthetic in the gum. There was no feeling on the left side. Daphne was holding her right hand, sitting beside her on the bucket seats on the platform, and she wanted to put up her left hand to touch her frozen mouth but she could not move her hand, it felt as it sometimes had when she had lain on it in sleep. But this was not sleep. You woke from sleep and feeling returned to the numb hand.
She said, ‘I have had a stroke. It was on the right side of the brain, thankfully, for the left side you know is dominant and damage there would be much more serious.’
She spoke as clearly as she could but to Daphne her speech was as incomprehensible as a mumble in a foreign language.
The appointment Jed had made with the vet was for Monday morning. He had wondered if this vet, a kind of general practitioner, would be competent to give Abelard a painless death but the vet said, sure, that was OK and would Jed like him to come to the house. Jed said, no, he would bring him.
Abelard was in the shed in the garden. Jed continued to weigh him and to feed him according to his weight. His weight increased because now he had no exercise, so his food had to be cut and out there, alone, he began to scream again. Tina told him that in the house with the windows closed she could not hear the screaming, but Jed could hear it. He was like the princess in the princess and the pea story who could feel the pea through twenty mattresses, only with him it was his hearing and not feeling that was sensitive. Twenty closed windows between him and the hawk could not have cut off that sound.
It was Saturday afternoon before it occurred to him that it was pointless what he was doing. The hawk was going to die on Monday morning and here was he still worrying about its weight, about restricting its feeding. At least he could make Abelard's last days of life happy. As he crossed the hall the phone was ringing, so he answered it. The caller was someone wanting Tina to tell her that her mother had been taken ill. Jed knocked on the front door of the Headmaster's Flat and Tina came running out to the phone, the smile wiped from her face and her cheeks suddenly pale.
It made Jed think of love, what it is and the strange forms it takes. He had loved others, his wife once, his daughter. He sometimes told himself, though suspecting hypocrisy, that he worked with the Safeguards from a love of humanity. But he had loved nothing and no one more than this bird whose screams for sustenance and for care now reached him with a dreadful, penetrating, bitter shrillness as he went out by the garden door.
Abelard became silent as soon as he was in his jesses and on Jed's wrist. Jed stroked his head. The great well of love inside him rose and overflowed. He was crying. He took Abelard upstairs and into his room. There when the hawk was on his perch he fed him all the meat that was to have been slowly rationed out. Abelard gobbled the food. His eyes flashed. Jed had no day-old chicks because, since Abelard no longer flew, these were not needed as rewards for prowess.
I'll get some on Monday, he thought, and then he remembered that on Monday Abelard would be gone. Abelard would be dead. The tears rolled down his face. The hawk's eyes were closed. Jed pushed his hand across his eyes and rubbed at the tears. He watched the hawk and the heavily hooded eyes, the poise of him and his balance. Abelard was so beautiful, he had so much dignity, such grace.
Presently Jed went downstairs again and phoned the vet's surgery to cancel that appointment.
It was clear what he had to do, it was simple. He need do nothing but keep Abelard with him. This was of all things open to him the one thing he most wished to do. It always had been and had always been denied him. But now – and he realized all these things by a gradual process rather like the inward flowing of a tide – now he could keep Abelard in his room and feed him unrestrictedly. He could make the hawk happy. He could make the thing he loved endlessly happy. And it would be nearly endless, there was no reason why Abelard should not live twenty, thirty years. Close, side by side, day and night, they would live together in this room or some other like it somewhere, in companionable silence. The hawk would never cry again.
In a happiness that seemed to have come in the simplest and clearest possible way, Jed sat watching the bird on its perch. He sat relishing his decision. After a long time, when Abelard opened an eye, Jed went to the cupboard and took out the meat he had intended for his own supper.
The school at Aldeburgh did not want Alice. They told her so when the audition was over, or rather before the time she thought the audition was over. They were kind and polite and rather distant.
She wondered what she had meant by thinking being in love made her a better performer. It now seemed a curious fallacy to which she had subscribed in a moment of madness. When she played with the aim of being chosen as one of the few post-graduates at the Britten–Pears School to be taught by an eminent violinist, she had forgotten all she had ever known of technique. One horrible discord she drew from the violin brought the hot blood up into her face.
She was ashamed, for she had indulged in daydreams of the kind Tom would have. She had seen herself as the pupil in Max Rostal's master class to which the public could come, playing before an audience in the Recital Room at Snape. Axel would have been there, watching her. She imagined his mocking expression displaced by one of pride.
She thought she would not have minded the great violinist's reproaches in public but would have borne them smiling, for a chance of playing and pleasing Axel.
20
‘They're going to let me know.’
Tom was used to hearing those words from her. She came back from auditions and said that. Or she admitted flatly that they would not offer her a place on their course or subsidize her at the conservatoire or finance further lessons.
It was wrong to exult, but he could not help himself. She would join him now and become a musician in his street band. She could leave her job as soon as her failure at this most recent audition had been confirmed. The experts were cruel only to be kind and it was best to know before wasting more time and money. Everyone who knew anything about it said that if you wanted to be at the top, a star, you had to start as a ch
ild. You had to go to Chetham's or the Yehudi Menuhin School and have a hothouse training.
In this world you had to be a realist. Not everyone could get to the top, most could not. Second-class was an unattractive way of putting it and he thought of his - and her - position as the middle ground. That was what gave the most pleasure, after all, and provided the best entertainment. To look as stricken as Alice did and make such a drama of things exasperated Tom but had no effect on his love for her. He put his arms round her and held her, whispering kind, meaningless words and stroking her hair. She clung to him like a child and he thought, ambition took her away but she is coming back to me.
Later, when he told her he was going to the pub with Axel, she shook her head fiercely before he could make the various excuses he had prepared for getting her to stay at home. Talking about her to Axel was something he could hardly ever do because she was always there. He wanted to talk about her more now she was more his.
‘You see, I think when the first disappointment's past she'll see this as all for the best.’
‘Why so?’
‘A lot of people would think themselves enormously lucky to get into an orchestra like mine. Alice would never have made it as a soloist. It's crazy, you know, people leave music school in this country knowing how to play the solo part in a Mozart concerto but without the faintest idea of the discipline you need for an orchestra. She isn't going to have to learn that now, or rather we'll all be learning together. It's the best chance she could have.’
Tom noticed Axel's abstracted expression.
‘Sorry, I'm boring you.’
‘Not at all. What are you going to have?’
