Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  He is thinking about nothing, almost dozing, when suddenly Stephanie asks, ‘How much did he tell you? My father.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About us. Me and him. Our history.’

  ‘Not a lot. No more than I’ve told you.’

  ‘You mean he didn’t give you his side of the story? He must have done.’

  ‘I don’t think he gave me any side, no. Only the outline.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That you haven’t seen each other for a long time. That he’d lost contact with you when you went abroad,’ he says, at which she makes a sound that seems to signify disagreement. ‘Is that not right?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say “lost” is exactly the right word.’

  ‘What would be the right word?’

  ‘Don’t know. “Discontinued”? It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I think it does.’

  ‘No,’ she says airily. ‘I was just wondering what he’d said, that’s all. But it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Are you disappointed?’

  ‘With him?’

  ‘With the way it went.’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ she says. ‘Possibly. A bit.’

  ‘Not what you expected?’

  ‘I don’t know what I expected. Nothing in particular. I’d almost forgotten him, to tell you the truth.’ She pauses as the train rattles and lurches, crossing a set of points. ‘So what was I thinking of?’ she goes on. ‘Why did I write to him? That’s the next question, isn’t it? He told you that I wrote to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I did. Don’t know why, but I did,’ she says, a heaviness coming into her voice in the last phrase.

  ‘Perhaps you had a score to settle?’

  ‘Possibly,’ she replies. ‘Possibly. I don’t know. I don’t know,’ she sighs, histrionically, self-mocking, and he can sense that she is looking out of the window now. For a minute or more she does not speak. One day soon, he thinks, she will call at his flat and they will talk about this again, but then she says, abruptly, as if compelled to utter the words: ‘I don’t like my mother. He told you that? He must have told you that?’

  ‘No,’ he lies.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘He didn’t say you didn’t like her.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. I suppose that’s got something to do with it. But that’s enough. Let’s not talk about my mother or you’ll never shut me up.’

  ‘Who said I want to shut you up?’

  ‘I want to shut me up.’

  ‘OK,’ he agrees. ‘But you know, when I was your age I found it hard to get on with my parents. Very hard.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I did,’ he says, then laughs. ‘I still do.’

  Stephanie laughs with him, and it crosses his mind to tell her about her father’s generosity to him, but he stops himself, because she might take it badly, as something like a bribe. ‘But I like your father,’ he concludes. Stephanie says nothing and he feels a resurgence of guilt at not inviting his parents to the Oak, a notion to which he barely gave a thought, just as he barely gave a thought to visiting them again, and from this tepid guilt flows a thought of Leopardi’s letter to his father, the letter in which the poet accused his father of condemning him to the tedium of Recanati, a town in which no remedy for his troubles was to be found. He begged his father’s forgiveness for this trouble, the last he would ever cause him, but the letter was not delivered and he did not leave Recanati, not on that occasion. And he thinks of Count Monaldo’s last glimpse of his son, the night before Giacomo left Recanati for ever. Too distraught to say goodbye, in the morning Count Monaldo remained in his room when the carriage arrived.

  Behind him a phone starts up, ringing with the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, and a man says: ‘Yeah? What? where the fuck do you think I am? Course the fucking train, you prat.’

  ‘You look like you could kill,’ whispers Stephanie.

  ‘I hate those things.’

  ‘Nah. Nah. No way. No fucking way,’ bawls the man on the phone.

  ‘Pestilential gadgets.’

  ‘They have their uses.’

  ‘Does he think he has a right to inflict this on us?’

  ‘Well out of it, he was. Well out. Fucking wasted.’

  ‘Today’s paper?’ Stephanie proposes.

  ‘Please,’ he replies. ‘As loud as possible.’

  The metal box above Eloni’s head begins to whirr and she watches the names spinning round, like the figures in a gambling machine. They settle, forming a list of places which is the same as the list she saw a while ago. She sees the word ‘London’ there and it doesn’t affect her at all. Under the canopy, people are getting up from their seats, hefting rucksacks onto their backs, taking hold of suitcases, wheeling bicycles forward. Two children, brother and sister, are doing a jig near the edge of the platform, excited at the idea of their holiday. Their mother pulls them back, telling them to be careful. Grumbling, they sit on top of the two big metallic cases. The girl winds her hair round her fingers while the boy keeps watch, willing the train to arrive, and now he jumps up, pointing. The train is approaching, swaying over the junction at the bend, screeching as it slows down. It stops. In front of her the doors open of their own accord. She looks inside the carriage, at the empty seats, but she cannot move. The doors are beeping at her. They slam shut, then straight away they open again, as though someone has noticed that she has been left behind. Nobody steps off and nobody else gets on. The boy’s father, handing a book to his son, gives her an unseeing glance. Again the doors are beeping, closing. The wheels start to grind on the rails and she watches the train disappear behind the trees. A minute later the names whirr again. When they stop only blank black panels are showing.

  A blackbird bounces across the rails and into the undergrowth below the red light. She looks up and down the platform. There is nobody here. The red light until it goes out and the green light comes on. Names are flickering in the box above the other platform. From the opposite direction a train arrives, its windows covered in huge spray-paint writing that is hard to read. ‘Madda’ she thinks one word says, and ‘Fetcht’, beside a figure of a spaceman with smoke coming out of a hole in his belly. Another chorus of doors, and the train groans out of the station, revealing a girl of Stephanie’s age standing on the platform, squinting into the sunlight. She is pretty, and now she is walking away. In the sky there is a cloud that is shaped like a turban.

  She looks into her bag, at the packet of money she has saved and the envelope that Mr Caldecott gave her, at the notepad with the oak tree on it, the spare pair of shoes, the rumpled blouse. A faint smell of cooking fat comes off the fabric. She sits on the bench, as if waiting for a train. Twice, three times, four times she counts the money, but the numbers are just numbers. On one of the benches under the canopy, she notices, a man is sitting now, reading a magazine. A chill of alarm touches her, a chill that has Francesc in it, but the man does not look up from his magazine, not even as the names whirr again. She reads the names of the towns on the metal panels. One by one she reads them, the names of places she will never see, then she stands up. The man reads his magazine, unaware of her. She walks through the gate, across the car park, up Station Road. None of the shops in the High Street is open. She looks through windows, at racks of clothes and shelves of magazines, at shelves of food and wine, at the counters of the empty bank. She looks up at the sky, at the English sky. Bright white clouds, huge clouds, are moving in a slow herd across the town. The clock on the wall of the church is in shadow. It is 2.28 p.m. on Sunday, August 18th, she tells herself. She waits for the bigger hand to fall over the number 6, and then she turns to walk to the police station, where she will tell them the story she thought about last night, a story that doesn’t mention Francesc, and doesn’t mention Mr Caldecott either.

  Alone in the hotel, Malcolm sits at his desk, gazing at the prints that cover the walls, skimming through the registers an
d putting faces to the names, reading the old advertisements for the Oak, the first hotel in the county to fit electric lights, to have steam-heated rooms, to install an Otis lift. The sunlight has gone from the lawn, he notices, and he looks at his watch. It is eight o’clock. He takes one last tour of the hotel, walking the tracks of paler colour that have been worn into the carpets of the corridors. The tracks seem even paler now that everyone has gone, and in almost every bedroom he observes a mark, a fraying, an agedness that has never before been so distinct. He stands where Adelina Patti once stood to sing to the guests, and when he looks up at the skylight he sees rashes of rust that previously he had not noticed. He goes down to the pool. The surface is slowly falling, uncovering tiles that appear less purely white in the air than they did below the water. In the lounge he takes his leave of Walter Davenport Croombe; he closes the doors of the Randall Room, where dusk is settling on Lily Corbin and William Randall and all their company. He collects his briefcase from his office and closes the door. There is nothing more to do. He sits on the stairs, waiting, absorbing the stillness of the hall, watching it fill up with shadow, then he hears a car on the drive, bringing the security guards who will be here tonight.

  At home there is no message from Stephanie, though she must be home by now. He makes himself a meal and takes it into the living room. The only TV programme of any interest is a murder story. It’s the final episode and he missed the one before, but he watches it anyway.

  The police are searching the flat where the Russian girl’s body was found, then the phone rings and she knows who it’s going to be before she picks it up.

  ‘It’s me,’ says Malcolm, irritatingly timid, but at the same time managing to sound as if he’s about to start complaining. ‘Did Stephanie get back all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course she did.’

  ‘Good. I just wanted to check.’

  ‘She made it. Back in one piece.’

  ‘I’ve been trying for a while. The phone’s been engaged for more than an hour.’

  ‘Yes. She’s been on the Internet.’

  ‘I thought that might have been it.’

  ‘And you were right.’

  ‘You’ll be needing a second line.’

  ‘Thank you for the tip.’

  ‘Or broadband.’

  ‘Yes, we are aware of the options.’

  ‘There are some good deals around at the moment.’

  She’ll be hearing this voice more often now, it occurs to her, and as if in protest at the idea she does not speak.

  ‘Is she in?’ he asks, reeking of self-pity.

  ‘Went out five minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, and pauses, as if expecting her to account for her daughter’s movements. ‘Did she have a good time down here, do you think?’ he goes on.

  ‘She hasn’t said.’

  ‘But nothing to indicate that she didn’t?’

  ‘No. Seems quite jolly, by Stephanie’s standards.’

  ‘Good,’ he says, and there’s another pause, longer than the last. ‘I think she enjoyed herself,’ he adds.

  Perhaps for another minute she can maintain her self-control. ‘Look, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m in the middle of something, and –’

  ‘Fine. OK. That’s all I wanted. See you again soon?’

  ‘I’d have thought so.’

  ‘OK. Sorry to interrupt your evening.’

  ‘OK. Take care.’

  ‘’Bye.’

  ‘’Bye.’

  Robert, sipping his wine, raises a quizzical eyebrow at something one of the policemen has just said. ‘Malcolm, was that?’ he asks, still looking at the TV.

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Making a fuss?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Unperturbed, Robert takes another sip. ‘Ah well,’ he smiles. ‘We’d better get used to it.’

  ‘Christ,’ she murmurs. Doctor Hunt is holding a small plastic bag that has a scrap of material in it and Inspector McConnachie is frowning at her, while Sergeant Dunwoody glares at him. Why Inspector McConnachie is frowning, and why Doctor Hunt seems so pleased, and why Sergeant Dunwoody is angry, she has no idea. The life she has made is unravelling, she thinks, and then Robert’s hand touches hers. She looks at him, but he pretends not to notice.

  ‘All comes flooding back, does it?’

  ‘I can’t imagine what I ever saw in him.’

  ‘Search me,’ he says.

  She watches the programme, but the people on the screen are not people now, they are only actors, mouthing words they’ve been paid to speak. She has no notion what’s going on. Everything is unravelling.

  ‘So what’s the bit of cloth all about?’ she asks, and Robert explains.

  At the end of the road, by the post office, a taxi’s diesel engine clatters; he hears the bang of a door, followed by the steps of high-heeled shoes, not Claudia’s. A bottle clinks on the pavement and falls into the gutter; the taxi moves away with a groan, and the woman’s steps cannot be heard any more. A dog, a small dog, barks indoors, somewhere on the opposite side of the street, towards the junction. Then there is only the swish of the traffic on the main road and the hum of the nearest street lamp. A warm breeze, too weak to rouse any sound from the tree outside the house, stirs the hairs on the back of his hands as they rest on the keyboard. Suddenly the music starts again in the house next door. He waits for the shout, and it comes, three or four voices yawping in unison. He closes the window and listens again to the e-mail that has been waiting for him since Thursday:

  Surprised, yes? We have come into the town and I have seen this café with Internet so here I am. We agreed not to talk, I know this. But this is not talking, is it? E-mail is not really talking and definitely it is not talking if you do not reply, so you must not reply. Besides, I am home in three days, so what is the point of writing a reply? But what is the point of me writing to you, you will ask. I want to. That is all the point. I hope you are successful in your thinking. I am not thinking much and am reading almost nothing. I have some papers I should read, but it is too hot for the Chemistry of Social Recognition in Cuttlefish. It is too hot for any mind work. Even you could not do thinking here. All the roads are sweating and when you walk across the street it is like walking on sticky tape. Every day I drink three litres of water, minimum, but I never need the bathroom. It sinks into me like into a desert. And I am tired because I have not slept well – not because you are not with me, oh no, but because of the frogs in the stream beside the villa. They are very noisy and they do not stop for hours. It is worse than traffic in London.

  How are our days? Every one is the same. In the morning we have a long breakfast in the garden, then mother waters the flowers and cuts some for our rooms, and then we go down to the beach. Mother gets onto the sunbed right away, but father would not lie on a sunbed even if you gave him money to do it: he has to take his film director’s chair, so he will not lose a minute for his reading. He puts the chair under the parasol and there he sits until lunchtime in his big straw hat and long-sleeved shirt and long trousers. But mother is out in the sun all of the day, with her magazine and her six bottles of tanning lotion (really, six!) and her two pairs of Dolce e Gabbana sunglasses, bought in the airport – we almost missed the flight because she could not choose which pair to buy, so she bought both of them before her husband would murder her. I tell her about melanoma but she doesn’t care – she lies in the sun all day, and my father sits in his chair, studying his book, very very serious. You would see him and think he is an unhappy person, an unfriendly person, but it is my father not my mother who talks to the people on the beach and finds out they are from Belluno and ten minutes later we have been invited to stay with them if we would like to go skiing sometime. And he is the one who talks to the young loveliness from Pistoia, with the bikini that would fit a girl who is ten years old and does not eat properly, my mother said, but that is another story. In fact Miss Pistoia spoke to him first, but he was not shy. He is really
Mr Hello once people start talking to him, especially with the pretty girls, but he looks so terrible – like San Girolamo on holiday, sitting on the beach instead of in his cave, always with his face in his big book, which has a picture of a skull on the front, like Girolamo’s skull, though he doesn’t beat his chest with a big rock, not yet. (And mother sleeping beside him – she is Girolamo’s lion. Ha ha.) Perhaps the girl was a little fascinated by him, or not pleased because he did not look at her enough, when she was jumping around in her weeny bikini.

  The book with the skull on the cover – it is his Melancholy book, you guessed. Where my father travels, his Melancholy travels too. Yesterday he put the book down and stared at the sea, having a big thought, an important thought. He stared at the sea for a very long time, then he went back to his reading. When I asked what he was thinking, later, he says he was thinking it is a scandal that it is not translated into Italian. Incredible. An outrage. There is so much wisdom here, he says, putting a hand on the big fat book, proud of it. But I ask him: does Italy need a thousand pages of melancholy? We are a modern country. We go forward all the time. Money and beauty and success, please. We want happiness. A thousand pages of Happiness. A hundred pages, that would be better – we do not have the time for a thousand pages of anything, not even a thousand pages of Happiness. But my father does not agree: we will have melancholy for ever, he says. Melancholy and foolishness and wickedness, there is never any end to them, he says. And it does not matter that we do not have time for a thousand pages: you visit ten pages on one visit and another ten on the next and another ten on the next, like looking at the pictures in the Uffizi, which is a book of a million pages. This I think is the project he has in mind for you and him: to do the thousand pages of melancholy into Italian. How can you say no to this? It is right in your street.

  My mother shouted at him yesterday. She threw her magazine in the sand and told him he is crazy. Look, look, she says, waving at the beautiful sky, the beautiful sea, the beautiful beach. You sit there, all wrapped up, reading about misery, she shouts. (She really did shout – the Pistoia girl had made her very annoyed. Beauty is only as deep as the skin, she told him. Skin deep is deep enough, he said, to laugh, but again he makes things worse.) Anyway, I am having a good time, he tells her, smiling. She does not hear this. Why not stay at home? she demands. What is the point of coming here? Why can’t you enjoy this place? I am enjoying this place, he says, then he goes back to his big fat book of misery and mother turns over on the sunbed, like in bed at home. But in the afternoon, like every afternoon, they went for a walk together, to the end of the beach and over the rocks. I saw them far away, paddling in the shallow water, walking very close together, almost like they are young again.