Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  She hurries back inside and Mr Morton switches off the recorder, as if expecting to resume their conversation. She asks him if he would like something, thinking that she would leave him here, but he says that he would and before she can offer to bring a breakfast to him he gets up from his chair, inviting her to lead him. Side by side they walk to the breakfast room, to the table at which he usually sits. Through the window in the kitchen door she watches him as she prepares his coffee and toast. She sees him opening his computer and turning it on. He listens to the recorder, types something, turns his face towards the window, his brow buckled in thought. When she comes out of the kitchen he seems still to be thinking of some problem, with one hand resting on the computer’s keyboard, but as she puts the tray on the table he gives her a grateful smile and asks if she would join him for a while, and she cannot think of an excuse in time. She fetches her cup of coffee and sits opposite Mr Morton. ‘What will you do when the hotel closes?’ he asks her. She has a job, in a restaurant, she tells him, lightly, as if it doesn’t matter, so as not to have to say any more. ‘Good, good,’ he says, and adds, lifting his cup: ‘This is very welcome.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she replies, stirring her coffee for no reason.

  ‘Going to be another splendid day,’ he remarks, and she agrees that it will be. ‘Let’s hope it stays like this for the last day,’ he says; she says that she thinks it will.

  They are like two strangers in a compartment of a train, but with the blind man it is not possible to say nothing, to exchange the glances and half-smiles of strangers who have nothing to say, and so, feeling that it is her turn to speak, she asks: ‘Did she like the kite? Your sister’s girl?’

  ‘Yes. It was a big hit,’ he says.

  ‘That is good.’

  ‘A great success. Thank you.’

  And then, as if speaking words that have been written for her to say, she says, ‘Thank you for posting the letter for me. For doing that. It helped me.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he says, with a solemn expression, by which he tells her he will not intrude any further. Eating his toast, he touches the wilted flowers in the vase at the edge of the table. He puts his nose to them and sniffs softly. ‘I really like this perfume. Do you?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies.

  ‘I’ve always liked it,’ he tells her. He puts his nose close to the flowers again and as he breathes the perfume his face becomes wistful, as if at a tender memory. ‘What’s this flower called, in Greek? Do you know?’ he suddenly asks.

  For an instant, but only for an instant, it seems possible that Mr Caldecott has told him about her. ‘We do not have this flower,’ she tells him. ‘I do not know the word for it. I am sorry.’ Before he can ask another question she gets up from the table. ‘There are things I have to do,’ she apologises.

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Morton replies, pushing his plate towards her. He slides the computer back to the centre of the table, and by the time she reaches the kitchen door he is at work again. There he stays, typing a sentence, listening to his tape, typing a sentence, until the first of the other guests come in, and five minutes later she glimpses him in the garden, hugging his machines to his chest as he crosses the sunlit grass.

  The origin of the yellow door eludes him, nor can he make sense of the wall of miniature windows, but the curving staircase must be the cathedral at Wells, the steps to the chapter house, which he visited with his parents and Charlotte, he knows, though no particular day comes to mind. And Claudia talking while a young woman talks, and the brick windowsill – that was Recanati. The children’s voices in the deep stairwell, the carpet, the tinny bell: they all belong to Recanati too. The window by which he stood, listening to Claudia’s translation of what the guide was saying, is in the library of Palazzo Leopardi, and it seems that the atmosphere of contentment in which his dream ended, the atmosphere in which he awoke and which has returned like a trace of vapour, rises from that day in Recanati.

  He remembers the interconnected rooms of the library and the larger room, near the end, in which the window was closed. Following the guide, he and Claudia walked through the rooms where young Giacomo, passing day after day with no company other than his family and the thousands of books that his father had collected, had taught himself ancient Greek with such speed that within one month – one month, the guide emphasised in a whisper of astonishment – he could write a letter in Greek to his uncle. On the table there was an ink-stand, a white china inkstand, Claudia explained, and the dust inside it was all that remained of a carnation that the poet Carducci had left here in tribute. He put his hand on the cool sill. A faint fume of hot brick reached him. Claudia described the view across the small piazza. While he worked at his books Giacomo could hear the coachman’s daughter singing at her loom. Often he would get up from his desk to listen more closely to her singing. Sometimes he could see her in the little window of her father’s house, a window like the frame of a portrait. Her name was Teresa Fattorini, Claudia told him, as if it were the name of someone she had known. She was very young when she died, and Giacomo wrote a famous poem in her memory, a poem in which Teresa became a girl called Silvia. Claudia’s hand touched his. Softly, in the voice of someone reading an epitaph on a tombstone, she began: ‘Silvia, rimembri ancora | Quel tempo della tua vita mortale’. On the way out of the Leopardi house Claudia met someone she knew. He left them to talk and walked into sunlight. On the side of the piazza there is a church and there, sitting on a hot step, he waited. Above his head a bell began to clang the hour, and when he raised his face he could feel the heat of the light increase on his eyelids. Somewhere near this step stood the home of Teresa Fattorini, whom Leopardi had loved in a poem, if not in life. He thought of the ailing girl, of her parents, who began their mourning before she was dead, and in time became so well reconciled to their loss that it was as though they no longer noticed that she was with them still. ‘They cared not about her,’ Claudia protested, ‘but only about consolating themselves.’ He heard her saying goodbye to her friend and then she asked him what he was thinking. He’d been thinking about Teresa and her parents, he replied. So why was he smiling? He had been thinking about her telling him about Teresa and her parents. The bag slipped from Claudia’s shoulder and settled on the ground. She sat beside him on the step. ‘Edward,’ she said, and he felt her breath on his brow. When she kissed him, a lock of her hair fell onto his cheek. Her lips left his, slowly, and this gentleness of separation was the aspect of her kiss that was like no other woman’s kiss. A tiny engine, a van with a tiny engine, whined across the square. He sensed that she had turned to watch the van pass, then she took his hands and raised them to hold her face. He felt the delicate taper of her jaw, the loose curls behind her ears. She had dyed her hair, she told him. It was meant to be bronze, but it had turned a nasty brown. A horrible colour, she said. Once more she kissed him. Holding his hands, she stood up and opened his arms and stepped into them.

  A breeze sets the leaves in the garden fidgeting. The sound is like the crackle of cigarette paper as it burns, and as he listens to it he imagines himself with Claudia, walking in Recanati, up the short rough path that leads to the hill of ‘L’infinito’, where the air smells of pine sap and jasmine, and at the start of the path there’s a monument against the wall, with water gurgling in it. It was better that he couldn’t see it, Claudia said, as they climbed up the path, amid three or four distinct birdsongs, an incessant chorus of chirrups and two-second melodies he had never heard before. They walked between a hedge and a high brick wall that radiated heat, and sat on a bench so that Claudia could read ‘L’infinito’ to him. A strong wind was blowing. They sat for a while, waiting to hear the breeze in the leaves, like the speech of the wind in the poem, the only voice in the infinite silence, but there was always a car on the road that ran down to Loreto. He hears her voice – ‘Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle’ – reciting a poem he understood imperfectly, and which sounded like a love poem when she read it. ‘What
can you see?’ he asked. The fields looked like velvet in the sun, she said. There were seven horizons, one above the other, and on the farthest there were streaks of snow, on the peak of the Gran Sasso. She named the villages around the town, like a teacher calling a register. And that evening, his first evening in Recanati, she whispered ‘ti amo’ in his ear, as she put two glasses of wine on the table in her father’s study, where her father was talking about his years in London and the English writers he had come to cherish. Speaking of his favourite poets, he pronounced their names with the reverent familiarity of a man invoking his patron saints, exactly as Claudia spoke of her scientists, just as his quiet ardour, his gentle seriousness, were qualities of his daughter too. When Claudia’s mother called them from the kitchen her father linked arms with him. What poem they were discussing he cannot recall, but ‘Tell me what you think’ her father urged him, with a deference that seemed above all to signify his love for his daughter. And ‘basta, basta’ Claudia’s mother implored, as her husband wouldn’t stop talking about his poets. They sat down for their meal, which began with ciauscolo, he remembers, because while Renzo waited for him to come to the study she had told him that the professor could wait a little longer and gave him a taste of each dish, giving him the names as she put the food to his lips: ciauscolo, formaggio di fossa –

  Sitting on a shadeless bench, with the laptop closed beside him and the recorder placed on top of it, Mr Morton faces the sun, apparently giving himself wholly to the enjoyment of its warmth. Behind him, very close, a haze of gnats is swirling in the shadow of a bush. She walks towards him, stamping her feet on the path to make herself heard, and when he turns in her direction his expression, not changing, seems drowsy with the pleasure of the sun. ‘Mr Morton?’ she says.

  ‘Stephanie,’ he answers quietly, as if they had made an appointment to meet.

  ‘There’s no getting away from me.’

  ‘A glorious morning,’ he says, turning his face into the light again. ‘Come and join me.’ His hand falls onto the laptap and drags it closer to him.

  ‘Plenty of room,’ she tells him, sitting down. ‘You’re not working? I’ll go away if –’

  ‘Skiving,’ he interrupts. ‘I’ll get back to it soon.’

  ‘My father told me you were here. I mean not here, on this bench, but at the hotel.’

  ‘The drillers drove me out,’ he explains. ‘And the neighbour’s non-stop karaoke party. To say nothing of the attractions of the Oak,’ he adds, flourishing a hand at the garden.

  ‘And the charming company.’

  ‘That too, of course,’ he agrees, beaming at the sun. ‘Things well with you?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Oh yes. Mr Even Keel, steady as he goes,’ she jokes, realising as she says it that the joke isn’t hers. ‘He’s got another job lined up. In London.’

  ‘He got it, did he?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Good, good,’ says Mr Morton, genuinely gratified, it seems. He blows a little puff of breath onto his cheek and whisks a finger across his temple, dislodging a gnat from near his eye. ‘Gone?’ he asks, leaning towards her, presenting the side of his face. A faintly jaundiced patch of skin is all that is left of the bruising.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Do you have today’s paper?’ he enquires.

  ‘I don’t. Shall I fetch one? There’s a stack in the hall.’

  ‘Better not. Might end up spending half the morning here. Which would be nice,’ he adds, ‘but I am not on holiday, appearances notwithstanding. My forester awaits, in the Brazilian jungle, with his nut-brown maid. He has fallen in love,’ he tells her, with a grin which suggests to her, for the few seconds it takes to assure herself of the impossibility of it, that he might somehow know about David.

  ‘And the poems?’

  ‘Making progress. Nearly there. Fourteen down, two to go,’ he says with a trudging motion of his head.

  ‘Solved the festa problem?’

  ‘Wouldn’t say solved. Reached an acceptable compromise.’

  ‘So “Saturday” is finished?’

  ‘In a sense. I’ve finished with it, yes. There comes a point at which it’s like trying to rid a house of mice: you just chase them from room to room. Solve one problem, another pops up over there. Make one phrase more pleasing, you find you’ve damaged its relationship with a later line. I’ve reached that point with “Saturday”. I could keep on changing it for ever, but I’m not improving it any longer,’ he says, placing a hand on the laptop. ‘Time to move on.’

  ‘Is it on the computer?’

  ‘It is. Do you want to read it?’ he offers readily, as if the poem were not his work, but merely an item he happens to have in his possession.

  ‘Is it in your head as well?’

  ‘God, yes,’ he grimaces. ‘Morning, noon and night it’s there. The mice never rest.’

  ‘I’d rather hear it than read it,’ she says, and at this he smiles to himself, evidently finding her request in some way amusing and pleasing.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’m not a good performer. It’ll sound like the offshore weather forecast.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘OK. Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘OK. Here we go. Sitting comfortably?’

  She puts her feet on the bench and draws her knees up in the loop of her arms, looking at Mr Morton. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Right. “Il sabato del villaggio”. “The Village Saturday”,’ he begins and he recites the poem in a voice that is slow and intimate and melancholic, with his eyes fixed straight ahead in concentration, as if he were listening as intently as she is:

  The girl strolls homeward from the fields

  At the closing of the day,

  With a sheaf of grass and, in her hand,

  A posy of roses and violets

  With which, tomorrow,

  As every Sunday, she will adorn

  Her bodice and her hair.

  Sitting with her neighbours

  On her steps, the grandmother

  Looks towards the dying sun,

  And revives the best days of her life,

  The holidays when she would make herself lovely

  And – so lithe, so quick – dance the whole evening away

  With those who were her friends in that happier time.

  All around the air is darkening,

  The sky turns azure, and the shadows lengthen

  From the hills and from the roofs

  In the pallid light of the rising moon.

  And now the bells announce

  That Sunday is coming,

  And at that sound you’d say

  That your heart took comfort.

  The children are yelling

  In the little square

  And dashing here and there

  In a joyous din;

  Meanwhile, walking home to his meagre supper,

  The farmhand whistles to himself,

  Looking forward to his day of rest.

  Then, when every other light is out

  And everywhere else is silent,

  You hear the hammer’s tapping, you hear the saw

  Of the carpenter, who labours on

  By lamplight in his shuttered shop,

  And sweats and strains

  To finish his task before the sun comes up.

  This, of the seven days, is the favourite,

  Full of hope, and of joy.

  Tomorrow, discontent and tedium

  Will flood the hours, and the drudgery of work

  Will occupy again the thoughts of everyone.

  Little madcap lad,

  This springtime of yours

  Is like a day of perfect delight,

  A day of lucid blue

  That comes before the Sunday of your life.

  Enjoy it, my little one – it is sweet,

  This unsullied season.


  I’ll say no more; but if your Sunday

  Seems slow to arrive, don’t be downhearted.

  Slowly Mr Morton turns towards her. Nothing in his face betrays the unhappiness he has just revealed to her, through the words of the poem. He has just confessed his unhappiness to her, yet his face is a mask of composure as he gives her a questioning shrug. Moved and embarrassed, she cannot at first reply. ‘Far from perfect,’ he says. ‘There’s a mouse in the first line, the very first noun. Donzelletta. “La donzelletta vien dalla campagna”. It means “girl”, but it’s a diminutive, a diminutive with an archaic flavour. There’s a hint of Arcadia in it. But what’s better than “girl”? I don’t know. It’ll do, I think.’

  ‘It was lovely,’ she says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I assumed you did.’

  ‘It was lovely,’ she says again, ‘and sad.’

  ‘It is,’ he says. ‘But not purely sad. Upliftingly sad, don’t you think?’