Memory and Straw

by Memory

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Change and decay,’ said Rick. ‘The decline of the Roman Empire.’

  ‘Or the start of the brave new world,’ said Sue. ‘The mob always execute or impeach their dear leaders in the end. History outlasts its fools and tyrants as well as its heroes.’

  They were getting drunk, began touching and kissing each other. It was obvious they wanted me to leave.

  ‘You can afford to have a conscience,’ Rick said to me as I left. ‘You’re lucky. You have land and money. Make good use of it. Cattle and horses would be a good investment. You should also buy yourself a bolt-hole in California. Great weather, as you know, even though it might be a bit too close to Silcon Valley for comfort. Or New Zealand. Where all the millenials are heading.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

  He gave me a pencil from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  ‘You do that,’ he said. ‘It’s a Staedtler Lumograph. Writes beautifully.’

  The next day the estate agents phoned to confirm that the tenants had vacated Granma and Grampa’s farm and had left the keys under the white stone by the orchard gate. I remembered the day Aoife and I painted the stone.

  ‘It will then always shine like a light in the darkness,’ Grampa had said. It would be the first thing I’d do when I got back. I knew he always kept a good supply of sealed paint tins in the garden shed, and the years would not have damaged them. He’d have sealed them with angelic care.

  I caught the last train north to Oxford. A few stragglers in fancy-dress costume were still making their way home. It was a clear starry night as we travelled through the Chilterns. A crescent moon was visible to the west. The one on which Calum had hung his jacket. I hadn’t rejected Rick and Sue at all. I was in exactly the same business as them, of making masks. When the moon was full, Neil Armstrong jumped on to it. Otherwise, he’d have fallen off the edge of it.

  ‘Aye, but they’ll never land on the sun,’ Mary had said.

  ‘Of course they will, darling,’ John replied. ‘During the night, when the light’s out.’

  Whether in words and images or in plastic and bots didn’t matter. All of us were in the business of bringing things to life. Rick and Sue would do it through a screen or console, just as I might with a pencil, as Calum had done with a spade, and Elizabeth with a mirror.

  I started by making a drawing of Calum, for the picture always comes first. He would have been a small man. Dark haired, with grey-blue eyes and a stubbly beard. Large but delicate hands. Intelligent, and looking out at the world as if at a mystery. I gave him a spade and hoe for digging the earth. He’d get up before dawn and go outside to urinate and defecate, and as he crouched there would look up at the moon and talk to the man who walked there with a scythe over his shoulder. For the most distant planets have the best inhabitants. Then they spoke, for speech always comes after vision.

  ‘How’s the weather up there?’ Calum asked as he crouched by the river, and the man in the moon replied, ‘Och – the usual. Sun when you need rain, and a downpour when you’re drying the corn.’

  ‘And how was the crop this year?’

  ‘Excellent. I rotated the patches better. Planted the turnips over by the lake and the tatties over there at the foot of the hill. At the dark spot there, see?’

  And Calum could. The dark spot on the moon down to the bottom right next to the clouds. By the big star whose name he couldn’t remember. Betelgeuse. That was it. And as he strained he promised to himself that he’d also do that next year. Plant the turnips over by the loch and the tatties in that small patch next to the trees at the bottom of the ravine.

  And what a decent woman Elizabeth was. Gallus. I came to know her with increasing awe. Feeding and clothing and washing and educating all the children while that wayward husband of hers talked to the moon and had his fabulous affair with his fairy lover. Though she too had her conversations, and I sat humbled when I heard her groans and prayers. If there was no other proof for the existence of God, she was proof enough. The streams whispered Amen and the mountains shouted Hallelujah as she breathed.

  Then there was Angus. Big brave Angus who single-handedly killed twelve Turks in one day at Sevastopol. You should have seen him, decades later, on his homestead near Calgary, sitting on the veranda in his panama hat, like a man who’d spent his entire life sowing and hoeing and ploughing and reaping. Like a man who had never done anything except watch the corn grow, which is enough in itself. He pretended to folk he was Irish and called himself Óengus.

  There were no ghosts but Grampa and Granma’s empty house was full of voices when I got back there at one o’clock in the morning.

  18

  WORDS WERE NEVER her forte. She preferred silence to noise, and as a young girl learned that silence was also a powerful note. You could often get your way with it. As the family quarrelled endlessly about what to have for dinner or where to go on holiday, Emma would stay quiet, knowing she wouldn’t be noticed in the storm. And then when things settled down she would make a suggestion, and her sudden quiet voice sounded so angelic that her advice was taken. She would have her way.

  She realised that words were both insignificant and dangerous. They could not only mean anything, but – more importantly – be made to mean something completely different than intended. She remembered her father saying to her mother each morning as he left for work, ‘See you at five thirty, darling,’ and once he’d gone, her mother would say to her, ‘That’ll be seven o’clock, then, Emma.’

  There were bigger examples. Once, at college, she praised one of the lecturer’s talks, and he immediately interpreted it as a come-on, asking her if she’d come to the pub with him that evening. He was ugly and middle-aged and she said to him, ‘No. I admire how donkeys bray, but I don’t go out with them.’

  Music was always a comfort and a strength. The best way she could express herself really. She remembered the first time she heard the CD of Jacqueline du Pré playing the Elgar Cello Concerto. Every nerve end in her body stirred, and it was as if the whole universe had stopped, waiting to hear what the next note promised.

  Like every other teenager, Emma also went through the phase where song lyrics spoke for her. She listened to anything and everything, from medieval madrigals to Beyoncé. The things that she couldn’t say they said. ‘Did you ever stop to notice the crying earth, the weeping shores?’ Michael Jackson sang for her.

  She always knew, however, that music was superior to words, because it articulated silence as well as speech. The trick was to create the void. The listener would then inhabit and nurture that space. Notes themselves were not just signals, but symbols. For things she’d felt and desired. She knew this: that she’d always wanted to sing. All the time, like a child, before the world tells that child that singing is inappropriate.

  ‘Sush! Your father is speaking now.’

  ‘Hush! I’m watching this programme just now.’

  ‘Be quiet, so that I can hear myself thinking.’

  ‘You don’t need to make a song and dance about it, Emma!’

  What else should you do except make a song and dance about it? Like a baby, rocking backwards and forwards. Like a child singing to her cat. Emma remembered asking her mother one day,

  ‘Mum. Why do we not sing instead of speak?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ her mum had said. ‘Singing is only for special times. At concerts or in church. Places like that.’

  Emma knew she was wrong. Singing and dancing had come first. And all speech and music had come from that. Singing was for all places at all times. She sang to the trees as she walked to school. The trees sang back, as they moved in the wind.

  While I discovered my past, she explored the future. She spent those months on a work called ‘The Moving of a Pencil.’ It was a piece speaking of the joy of stillness and of movement, and of how the movement of anything, from the tip of a pencil to tribes crossing continents become constantly shifting spacetime.

/>   Her father was from Belfast and her mother from Cork. Love had bridged the religious divide, though that hadn’t stopped endless arguments about nationalism and independence. The fieriest times were when they disagreed about the so-called ‘border songs’. Once he’d taken a few drinks her father would begin singing some Orange songs, which her mother claimed were traditional Gaeilge tunes.

  ‘These are just Protestant unionist words laid on top of old Catholic tunes,’ she’d say.

  ‘Sure enough, the best thing to do with Catholic tunes is to bury them,’ her father said, smiling.

  It was lovely to receive a letter. I’d forgotten the pleasure of seeing the postman delivering an airmail envelope. I hadn’t seen one since my mother sent me one decades ago, before electronics made them obsolete. I may have imagined there was an extra spring in the postman’s step that morning as he walked up to the house with the letter. Certainly he was whistling.

  I recognised Emma’s handwriting. I made myself a coffee and went out into the conservatory to read the letter. It was a page of music. On the back she’d written,

  I bet you looked at the notes and said to yourself ‘Music’! But you’d be wrong. That’s not music on the other side of this page – just lines and dots and signals and symbols. The music doesn’t happen until you sing through and round and between the marks.

  All my love,

  Emma x.

  I looked at the staves, the treble and bass clefs, the key and time signatures, all the dots, the quavers and semiquavers. This strange language which most folk couldn’t read, but could hear if played. Just like my Grandfather’s Gaelic. Everything meant something. I sang the tune, and even now, after all that has happened, the music means everything to me.

  19

  IT WAS SPRINGTIME. The time of year when the ground needed to be prepared. Fortunately old Bill Ashby still ran the neighbouring farm and offered all the advice and help he could give. He tried to persuade me to buy a tractor and a harvester, but I refused.

  ‘I want to do it the old-fashioned way,’ I said. ‘Everything by hand.’

  ‘It’ll kill you,’ he said, but was gracious enough to add, ‘Mind you, so will everything else.’

  So he took me in hand and showed me how the old potato drills worked, and where I should plant the turnips and cabbages and carrots, and which varieties I should plant, and we spent February and March getting the ground prepared as best we could. He was a hoarder too and though his children – and by now his grandchildren – had taken over his farm and mechanised everything, he had hardly thrown any of his own traditional implements away.

  ‘Better to see them used than gathering dust and rust in my barns,’ he said as he gave me a whole pile of old things, from hoes to hand-held ploughs.

  ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘it’s all a lifetime’s work. Plant nothing this year. Just prepare. You’ve plenty time. Nature can’t be hurried.’

  Which was just as well, for I was waiting an Easter call from Emma, and I knew full well – or at least hoped – that would take up take up the whole of the planting and growing season. We’d made an agreement some nine months beforehand not to contact each other except in an emergency.

  ‘I need time and space,’ she’d said. ‘To work. Six months at least. No texts. No emails. Nothing. I’ll phone you on Easter Sunday. Promise.’

  A few weeks before Easter old Bill called in.

  ‘The Fair’s next week,’ he said. ‘At Aikley. Still the best horse fair in England. We should go there.’

  I wasn’t sure I was ready.

  ‘You need to start sometime,’ he said. ‘And I won’t be around forever. So if you’d like me to help we’ll go down there on Monday. Monday’s always the best day. If you leave it till later in the week you’ll only get the dregs.’

  He spotted the horse for me almost the moment we got there.

  ‘There. What a beauty. Look at her, Gav.’

  A sturdy looking dappled grey horse.

  ‘A Percheron,’ Bill told me. ‘Of course, in time, you’ll need a whole team of them, but best to start small and learn, eh?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s the only way.’

  The seller delivered the horse at the end of the week and Bill then spent the next few days with me teaching me how to feed and care for the horse and how to harness it ready for work. I was a slow learner, but as Bill kept saying, ‘Keep at it. Practice makes perfect. And for goodness sake, give the horse a name so that you can talk to her! And make sure you listen when she talks back to you!’

  I called her Maggie. By Easter Saturday we were like old friends.

  I woke early on the Sunday morning. At six. I made coffee and sat out in the porch to watch the sun rise. Magnus always claimed that the sun danced on Easter day in celebration of the Resurrection. It was shimmering somewhere to the east, rising over Europe. The phone rang. I let it ring seven times, as agreed.

  ‘Gav! How are you?’

  Her voice was warm, friendly.

  ‘Emma! I’m good. You? Goodness, it must be early – I mean late – over there.’

  ‘It is. One o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, just fine. Guess what?’

  ‘You’ve finished the symphony?’

  ‘No, not quite. It didn’t work out. The first two movements are okay, but then I found myself in a cul-de-sac. A theme, but no music. And you?’

  ‘The other way round. Music but no theme. And guess what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve bought a horse. And I’m not going back to the office.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I presume the two are related?’

  ‘Indeed. I’ve traded in Albert for Maggie, as it were.’

  ‘I like the gender balance, Gav. Listen, I’ve also got some news.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ve been given a commission to write the score for a film. In Rome. They’re giving me an apartment there for a year.’

  ‘Must be a big budget.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘So what’s the film?’

  ‘Chaplin in Europe.’

  ‘Hasn’t that been done?’

  ‘Not this century.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m flying in via Dublin next Monday. I plan to spend a week to ten days in each European country – sort of researching, getting the feel of places – before settling down to write in Rome. Maybe you could join me for the latter part of the journey, once I get to Amsterdam?

  I hesitated. There was the horse and the farm to think about. No – it would be fine. I was sure Bill would look after things for me till I got back. After all, he did say to do things nice and slow. That this year was just preparation. Next year was planting.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘With pleasure.’

  ‘I’m keeping an electronic log of the trip. I could message you.’

  ‘That would be good. A kind of last technological hurrah. I’m going completely off-grid next year.’

  ‘Like Saint Augustine? “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet”?’

  I still miss her sense of humour.

  I’d check Facebook every few days. Most of the messages were cryptic, but embossed now and again with a photograph or a video link. Emma, descending the aircraft stairs at Dublin. Hair cropped short and dyed blonde. She looked tanned and relaxed. Wearing a light raincoat, like Bardot in the late 1950s.

  ‘Chic,’ I messaged.

  ‘Not the rage,’ she messaged back. ‘Bouffants and trouser suits are terribly in just now, wouldn’t you know?’

  ‘You sound Irish.’

  ‘Remember, my mother was from here. A corker from Cork, my father used to say.’

  Emma was extra communicative over Facebook, as if writing things in absentia gave her freedom. She stayed in a small hotel off St Stephen’s Green. She sent me a photo of the ivy-covered door with a bell ringer in the image of the Virgin Mary.

  ‘Emma�
�s not my proper name,’ she told me one day.

  ‘I was christened Natasha. After the heroine in War and Peace. It was also my grandmother’s name on my father’s side. She was Natasha Semyonovna Petrovich. She married an Armenian Jew called Moses Garegin Geusugeutchugian. When they emigrated to New York nobody could say their names right, that’s why we became Getz. Then I read Jane Austen, and since our name had been changed over the centuries, I figured I’d call myself Emma.’

  She was physically elegant. Every morning she’d alternate between yoga and ballet exercises and meditated for an hour every evening, saying ‘Ohm’ when she breathed out, and ‘Yid’ when she breathed in. The breaths were as regular as clockwork: a great stillness for five minutes, then an ‘Ohm’ as she breathed out. Then another great stillness for five minutes and a ‘Yid’ as she breathed in.

  ‘Six Ohms and Six Yids’ she called the whole thing.

  Her yoga and ballet had the same kind of artistic discipline. When she made those movements which stretched her body to extremes she did it in slow motion as it were, as if placing your heel on top of your head whilst sitting straight-backed and motionless and upright was the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘Which it is,’ she’d say afterwards, ‘once you understand it’s all about muscle memory. Teaching your body to conform to your will. Just look at you, Gavin, hunched there as if you were born to crouch in a cave.’

  And I would sit up straight for a while before slouching back down again.

  She travelled for three months. Took the train south from Dublin to Cork and then on to Kerry where she spent a sunny week walking and cycling, before travelling north to Derry and to Belfast. The next message was from Paris. A selfie standing at the Atelier Brancusi.

  ‘Have you seen Hemingway?’ I texted.

  ‘They say he passed this way a hundred years ago,’ she texted back.

  I was already beginning to regret my decision to go offgrid. All this would go too. This easy communication that was not spoilt by the physical presence of each other. By the look in the eyes which betrayed the words spoken, by the body language which contradicted what was being said. Here in this electronic world, everything was much safer. Emma chose when to speak and when not to speak. I chose when to hear and when not to hear. Nothing except the words themselves could contradict the brief messages we sent to one another. And when it came to the crunch, a lol always covered a multitude of sins.