Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  A fortnight after I’d hired him, Mr Innes and I discussed the situation. We now knew beyond doubt that Sarah had given birth to a boy she’d named Sam, that this child had eventually been adopted by the Hendys, and that this Sam had grown up to be the man who was claiming to be my son. ‘If we’re to move things along, we need to talk to Mr Williams,’ Mr Innes concluded. He was confident of finding him quickly. I thought I was satisfied with what had been verified; as for the missing portion of Sam’s story, I had strong evidence, even if it were negative evidence – he had refused a test, and thus he was not mine. I was even beginning to believe that it might, in time, be possible to get Sam out of my mind. I thanked Mr Innes and his team for their efforts and told him that I’d be in touch, convinced that I never would.

  While this was going on, Aileen was trying to persuade me that we should take a break together. It had been almost two years since we’d last been away for more than a weekend. She reminded me of a holiday we’d taken in Perugia, a few years after we’d married. It had been a wonderful week, she said, and we’d sworn that one day we’d go back. We decided to go to Perugia; within a day Aileen had located and rented an apartment close to the centre of the town.

  17

  We flew to Pisa, picked up a car at the airport, and by mid-afternoon we were at the apartment, which was perfect, as I’d expected it to be. Aileen has always been the holiday planner, and she’s unerringly successful in her choices. If an advertiser says his property is ten minutes’ walk from the centre of town, she doesn’t believe it until she’s checked a map; if it’s in a spot that’s rural but easily accessible, she’ll suspect that a motorway runs right past it; if there’s a pool, she has to know precisely how large it is. Our apartment in Perugia occupied most of the upper storey of a modern villa, and it had a pool, a small saltwater pool, which the half-dozen photographs on the villa’s website had in no way misrepresented. The rooms, too, were as they’d been shown: spacious and bright, with large windows in the living room that gave a fine view of the city walls and an assortment of churches and towers. The walls, as Aileen had verified, were a kilometre away. The gradient of the road we had to walk up to reach them, however, was a little steeper than anticipated.

  Within an hour of unpacking we were labouring up the hill towards one of the old city gates. We had a map that our host had given us, but Aileen barely glanced at it – having been here two decades previously, she knew exactly where she was. From the gate a road descended to a crossroads and another ancient wall. ‘If we turn right here we’ll come to the university; straight on for the cathedral,’ she said, and of course she was right. Passing the cathedral, she reminded me that we’d seen a concert in the piazza one night – a folk group had been playing, with an accordionist who had long grey hair but couldn’t have been older than thirty, and a young woman who danced like a whirling dervish through every song. I vaguely recalled musicians leaping about on a stage late at night. At the end of the main street we crossed another piazza and stopped at a terrace which gave a view of a valley that ran away to the horizon; I recognised Assisi, but Aileen could put a name to every town we could see. She pointed out a museum to the side of a street below us – we’d been there and found it boring, apparently. The botanical gardens were beyond it – ‘Remember?’ she asked me. I remembered that there were botanical gardens, but as to whether they were north, south, east or west of us, I couldn’t have said.

  All week, wherever we went, Aileen knew precisely what she was about to see: go into this church and a painting of Saint Such-and-such is on the left; up this side-street there’s a nice café; this alley is a short cut. ‘I envy you,’ she joked, ‘seeing everything for the first time all over again.’ But she didn’t envy me – having so precise a mental image of the city didn’t dull her enjoyment of it in the slightest. And, as she knew, it wasn’t quite the case that I was seeing everything afresh: much of the city had an aura of familiarity, at least, and parts of it – random parts, it seemed – caused moments of recollection, of varying degrees of acuteness.

  Aileen observed that I seemed to be enjoying myself. ‘I haven’t seen you this perky for ages,’ she remarked, showing me the picture she’d just taken, in which I was smiling at some statue as if it had just been unveiled solely for my appreciation. I was enjoying myself, very much. Wherever I looked, things struck me strongly – more strongly, it seemed to me, than they had done twenty years earlier. Had I been as impressed by this place then as I was being impressed now, I reasoned to myself, I could not possibly have forgotten so much. I felt that the quality of my experience of the place was more intense now. The sight of things seemed strangely rich: one afternoon I found myself watching the pattern of cloud-shadows moving across the hills – not just looking, but watching, as if a story were unfolding and I wanted to know how it would end. Another day, a portion of pitted stone wall in sunlight was as engrossing as the grain of a piece of wood had been to me when I was younger. Complicated reflections on shop windows; a tattered flag against a perfect blue sky; a huge flagon of dark green olive oil – I was stopped by them all, like a photographer on the lookout for good images.

  But it wasn’t only what I saw that seemed to have a renewed urgency – every sense seemed enhanced. When Aileen returned to the city’s art gallery (the only feature of the place that had changed greatly in the intervening years, she informed me), I sat on the flight of stone steps that faced the cathedral, and sat in the sunlight with my eyes closed, listening, and the mixture of sounds that I heard – voices near and far-off, loud and quiet, male and female; the whine of a scooter; the clatter of metal shutters; the clapping of pigeons’ wings – had such an intricacy, it was like a piece of music. It was invigorating to walk into the coolness of a café, to step into the aroma of it and the noise of a dozen conversations clashing. As I stood on the terrace near the end of the main street, looking over the valley, my hand stroked the stone of the balustrade – the once-rough stone that had been made waxy by the contact of hundreds of thousands of hands over hundreds of years – as if testing the finish of something that I had made. As we get older, we become detached from our own experience. It’s as if we’re always observing ourselves, as if we’re adding a commentary to what’s going on – ‘This is pleasurable’, the mind tells itself, or ‘This reminds me of …’, instead of having that pleasure purely, without a frame around it, as it were. But during these seven days in Italy, there were several moments, sustained moments, in which there was no frame around what I was experiencing. And of course the chief reason for this must have been Sam – or rather, the removal of Sam from my life. He was done with me and I was done with him. With great speed he was receding from me, which is why I was seeing things as they must appear to a man who has just come out of prison.

  On our first night we’d intended to go back to the restaurant that Aileen said had been our favourite before. Certain of the address, she took us down a flight of steps and a steep side-road, only to find the premises occupied by a clothes shop. We crossed town to see if another restaurant that we’d liked was still in operation. It was, and we ate there several times in the course of the week: the food was good, the waiters did their jobs politely and without fuss, and the location was perfect – in a tiny courtyard, entered under a skewed stone arch that had no wall above it, enclosed by rugged old buildings. On our last night we ate there again, and sat at our usual table, close to the foot of some heavily worn steps that rose to a thick nail-studded door.

  At the next table sat a German family: grandparents, parents, and three kids, all under ten, who spent much of the evening jumping off the steps. They were ebulliently happy children, if too noisy for Aileen’s comfort. We chatted, after a fashion, with the parents, who were both taking language courses at the university. The eldest of the children was called Rainer, and his speaking voice was a semi-shout in the soprano range, which elicited from Aileen the smile of a woman with an incipient migraine. Rainer wanted to tell us, in English, wha
t they’d been doing that day. They’d been to Gubbio, and gone up the mountain in a sort of basket that you had to stand in. ‘I was flying in the air,’ said Rainer, putting his arms out like wings. We had been there too, I told him. ‘It is great. Exciting,’ he screeched at Aileen. His siblings verified loudly that it had been very exciting. All three children were nice-looking, with large grey eyes and long lashes and a fetching dash of tan across the cheeks, and the parents were affectionate with them, as were the grandparents – there was a lot of hair-ruffling going on, and much encouragement as each of the kids tried to draw, on napkins, a sketch of the funivia at Gubbio. As his family was leaving, Rainer’s sister presented me with her napkin, showing three stick-children with heads like Halloween pumpkins, ascending a rock in tiny baskets hung from a wire.

  Aileen and I resumed a conversation that had been impossible to continue with the children in close attendance. ‘We must do this more often,’ she had said. With many people such a remark would be merely another way of saying: ‘This is nice.’ Coming from Aileen, however, it was the opening of a definite proposal. Aileen’s mother had died at the age of sixty-four; her mother’s mother had died at the age of sixty-four; her great-grandmother had died at the age of sixty-four. The nearest Aileen ever came to being superstitious was in her notion that she wasn’t going to live longer than they had. She’d make a joke of it: ‘Five years to the deadline,’ she’d say, as if she’d signed a contract for that duration, but at times she really did seem to think that she was destined to enjoy less than the average allocation of time. ‘We’re getting on,’ she said, pouring a full glass for each of us, as if to signal that we were about to commence a weighty discussion. ‘We should think about what we’re going to do,’ she said. She thought that in the next year or two I should consider scaling back my involvement in the business. There were things we both wanted to do: she wanted to take piano lessons; I was always complaining that I didn’t have enough time for the books I wanted to read; we should see some more places. With our savings and investments, we’d be secure even if we both lived to be ninety, Aileen said; she even scribbled figures on a napkin to show that she wasn’t being over-optimistic. By the time we left the restaurant we’d agreed that, at the very least, we’d go to Petra some time soon.

  It was a warm night and I wasn’t sleepy, so I went for a swim in the pool. Over the city hung a long thin reef of cloud, as bright as milk underneath the half-moon, fading to deep blue-grey where it slanted behind the roofs. Hundreds of stars spattered the sky and the small yellow lights of dozens of windows glittered on the hills. Every few minutes a car would traverse the slopes, raking the olive trees with its headlights, making them flare up and sink quickly back into shadow. Bats were darting around the water, once or twice passing within a yard of my head. I felt that our life might be changing, for the better. There would be many more weeks as enjoyable as the one that was now coming to an end. In the morning, having woken before six, I took one last dip. Standing in the cool water, I watched the sunlight trickling down the slopes, edging towards the lumps of gunmetal-coloured mist that lay in the hollows of the fields. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, intermittently, for minutes on end. In the mood I was in, its yapping was not an irritant, but instead was like the clanging of a church bell: it was the sound of the awakening day; it measured the expanse of mild, still air that the hills enclosed; it underscored the silence of the morning. I could not have been more content.

  A little over a week after we’d returned to England, I came home to find Aileen sitting in the living room, reading a magazine. I fell into the armchair opposite hers. I was tired, having been in a meeting most of the afternoon, talking about the idea of opening another branch, in Bath. ‘How did it go?’ she asked. There was no sign that anything unusual had occurred, but as I was giving her a summary of what had been discussed she lifted an envelope from the arm of the chair and handed it to me.

  There was no stamp on the envelope; our address and Aileen’s name were written in capitals, with a cheap ballpoint. ‘Read it,’ she said, as if it were something that might amuse me. Inside was a single piece of paper, ruled; the message too was written in capitals, with DEAR MRS PATTISON underlined. I AM THE SON OF A WOMAN CALLE D SARAH WILL IAMS WHO TRAGICLY DIED LAST YE AR, it began. FOR MANY REASONS THAT I WONT GO INTO I WAS NOT BROUGHT UP BY HER AND SADLY I DIDNT GET TO KNOW HER UNTILL THE LAST YEARS OF HER LIFE. I WAS BORN IN 1981 AND BEFORE THAT MR PATTISON HAD A REL ATIONSHIP WITH MY MOTHER. I HAVE MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE WHICH SAYS THAT MY FATHER IS YOUR HUSBAND. I TOLD HIM THIS IS A FACT BUT HE DOES NOT ACCEPT THAT THE SITUATION IS WHAT IT IS. I AM NOT AFTER MONEY OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT MRS PATTISON. I JUST WANT THE TRUTH TO BE KNOWN. THIS IS NOT GOOD NEWS FOR YOU I KNOW. YOUR GOING TO BE UPSET BY IT BUT IN THE LONG RUN IT IS ALWAYS BEST IF PEOPLE ARE HONEST I THINK. There was no signature.

  ‘Do you know who this is from?’ asked Aileen, squinting as though looking into the sun, which is what she does when she’s keeping herself on a tight rein.

  ‘I do,’ I answered.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Someone who’s been pestering me,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘A fantasist.’

  ‘A fantasist equipped with a birth certificate that has your name on it?’ she asked, placing the magazine on the table beside her chair, as though to indicate that the conversation was now becoming extremely interesting and required her complete attention.

  ‘He doesn’t have a birth certificate with my name on it,’ I said.

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  ‘He has a certificate on which he’s written my name. It’s a fake.’

  ‘You’ve seen it? This certificate – you’ve actually seen it?’

  ‘Yes. He’s written my name on it with a ball-point.’

  ‘Therefore: you’ve met this individual?’

  ‘I have,’ I replied.

  ‘Where?’ she asked, rubbing the skin between her eyebrows as if to tamp down her incredulity.

  ‘Tottenham Court Road.’

  ‘This man just appeared at the shop, out of the blue, clutching a birth certificate with your name on it?’

  ‘With my name added to it, that’s right.’

  ‘And when was this?’

  ‘A few weeks ago. May.’

  ‘This man appears, claiming to be your son, and you don’t think to tell me?’

  ‘I thought about it, and I decided not to.’

  ‘And why did you decide that?’

  ‘What would have been the point? Why trouble you with it?’

  ‘Because I’m your wife?’ she suggested. With an upright forefinger she drummed lightly on her lips, frowning. She put out a hand to receive the note, and I gave it to her. ‘So, what did you do? Apart from not tell me, that is.’

  ‘I told him it was total nonsense.’

  ‘And his response was what?’

  ‘That he’s my son. Nothing I said made any difference. It was like arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness.’

  After an unamused small smile, she said: ‘So he’s mad, is he?’

  ‘Certainly not thinking straight.’

  ‘So what happened next? You told him that you couldn’t agree with his point of view, and then he went away?’

  ‘Well, no – obviously not,’ I said, gesturing at the note.

  ‘And why do you think he’s done this?’ she asked.

  ‘To make trouble. He didn’t get what he wanted from me. As he saw it, I’d let him down. So he decided to get his own back.’

  Aileen has this gesture that I’ve seen her employ in meetings, when people have spent too long on irrelevancies or shown themselves to be under-prepared for the discussion. First she puts the fingertips of both hands to her brow, and massages the furrows for a few seconds; then she slowly drags her fingers over her lowered eyelids, all the way down to her chin, and when she opens her eyes again her face has become the embodiment of serene attentiveness. She did this now, and
then she looked straight at me, and at that moment I knew I was doomed. ‘But if it’s total nonsense, what trouble could there be?’ she said. ‘If you’re just some random man he’s decided should be his father, how could this note cause trouble? Surely there’s no point in doing this if there’s absolutely no chance that he might be right, if you can just say: “I’ve never heard of this woman.” You see what I’m getting at? And more to the point, if he’s simply a lunatic with a story that makes no sense, why wouldn’t you tell me?’

  ‘His story doesn’t make any sense. It’s not possible,’ I persisted, as if merely by reiterating my innocence I might somehow prevail. ‘I’m not his father.’

  ‘Not possible because you never knew this woman? Or do you mean “It’s not possible” as in someone coming home and finding a bus has crashed into the front of the house and the only thing he can think of saying is “It’s not possible”? Is it the first one or the second one?’ she asked, jabbing a finger onto the left arm of the chair and then onto the right. Her eyes hadn’t left mine since she’d wiped her face with her hands, and the look in them had remained steady; now, however, she blinked, trying to quell her dismay. ‘It’s number two, isn’t it? It’s the bus crash. Of course it is. You were involved with this woman. That has to be the case.’