Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  I dreaded Sam’s return. When the phone rang, it would often occur to me that it might be Sam, and the idea was like a claw to the chest. But in effect he was always with us. Several times I walked into a room and found Aileen standing there, looking around like a detective revisiting the scene of a crime, picturing in her mind the exact disposition of what she’d found. From time to time I’d catch her looking at me in a way that reminded me of the way I had sometimes looked at Sam: she seemed to be trying to find points of similarity between the man in front of her and the man she had known as her husband. Sometimes, she said, she could see Sam sitting at the table, or she could hear him talking to her, or it was as though he’d left the room only a minute earlier. The house had been sullied by him, and by what he represented. It was no great surprise when she said to me one night: ‘I’m not sure if I can stay here.’ By this, it turned out, she meant that she no longer felt at home not only with the house but also with me. She had forgiven me, she insisted, but forgiveness was not enough. ‘I can never trust you completely,’ she said, ‘and if you can’t trust someone completely, you don’t trust them at all.’ She knew that she would always live with the memory of what I’d done; some days, she could think of little else. It was like water getting into the tiny crevices of a rock and freezing there, and melting and freezing over and over again, until the rock falls apart.

  We moved to a house that has a separate flat at garden level, and that’s where I live. Eleanor was told that neither of us had felt right in the other house, and we’d decided that we should give each other a bit more space. There was some surprise at this, but not too much – no more than Eleanor’s surprise that Aileen had married me in the first place.

  Three or four evenings a week we eat together, most weeks. I stay to watch TV. We go out together, to the cinema or for walks. We’re still on good terms, having shared a long past – even if, for Aileen, it wasn’t shared quite as fully as she had thought for many years. She’s not spoken Sam’s name since we moved; as far as I can tell, she’s obliterated him.

  Business has been slack lately, and the opening of the new branch in Bath has been suspended indefinitely. The situation in London isn’t too bad, though. I’m working as many hours as before; I need to be in the office; I enjoy it. Aileen has cut down her work to one or two days a week. She has been travelling: she’s been to Prague, alone, and a couple of months ago she was in Peru with a gang of intrepid seniors. She has plans to travel to Costa Rica, Madagascar and New Mexico, and Eleanor is giving some thought to joining her, if she goes to Madagascar. So far, Aileen has not told her what happened with Sam; her view is nothing would be gained by telling her. I disagree. The secrecy must be very difficult for her to maintain: never before has she had to keep a significant occurrence in her life hidden from her sister, and perhaps nothing in all the years of our marriage was more significant than this. There’s a chance that Aileen, fatigued after a day’s hiking through the Madagascan jungle, might one evening tell her sister the full story. After that, I’m sure Eleanor and Gerry would want to keep me at arm’s length. For me, that would be no great loss. But Cerys too might consequently decide to keep her distance, and that would be a different matter. Cerys stayed with Aileen last week. The current boyfriend, Derek, is a lighting technician, whose eye she caught when she was doing Sunday in the Park with George. She was very good in it, but she tells us she has given up the idea of being an actress, and has decided to become a primary school teacher. She seems very happy.

  Aileen too is happy, or much happier than she was a year ago. She has taken up the piano as well: she has a lesson twice a week, and practises for an hour or more in the evening. She has discovered something of an aptitude. Already she’s playing Mozart and Bach – simple pieces, but Mozart and Bach nonetheless. She regrets having delayed for so long. The piano is in a room over my bathroom, but I can hear her clearly wherever I am in the flat. Occasionally I go upstairs to listen to her play, but she plays better, she says, when she doesn’t have an audience. It’s saddening, often, to hear her playing when I’m downstairs. The sadness of it almost smothers me, and I have to go for a walk or a drive.

  In my mind I see Sam Williams every day. Usually he appears to me as an aggressive young man, swearing ceaselessly, leering at girls in the park, brandishing a cigarette like a blade, but I’ve also recalled him at his best, talking about the Baikal Teal at Minsmere, or showing me the work he had done. And I have imagined, frequently, how it might have been to have had a son. The ground has been cleared for him, so to speak. A place has been made available – not for Sam, but for a son. After seeing Cerys, I have sometimes entertained this daydream: a young man makes contact and proves to me that he is who Sam claimed to be, and everything works out well. This is ridiculous too – as ridiculous as envying Cerys her youth, which is something else I’ve taken to doing. My hypothetical son is an absurdity, but nevertheless I have imagined him almost as precisely as I imagined having a child during the years when being a father was something that might have happened. In fact, once or twice I have even envisaged a life with Sam himself in it – but fleetingly, as an idea that’s beyond the realms of reality. I remind myself of how terrible he could be, and the fantasy explodes.

  One day, not long after I’d moved into the flat, I encountered him again, not far from North Street. I had dropped in to see how things were going with the new manager. Geoff had recently left for a job in London, taking Agnieszka with him, which was an unexpected development. I stayed for a couple of hours, then went for a coffee. While I was in the café the sky darkened; I decided to get back to the car quickly. Head down against the drizzle, I hurried along the street, turned left, in the direction of the car park, and saw a couple sauntering towards me, under a huge red umbrella. The woman caught my attention first: she was slim and tall, with thick shoulder-length hair that was a fifty-fifty mix of black and grey; her clothes – loose black slacks, soft grey roll-neck top, charcoal overcoat that reached almost to the ground – looked expensive. The man was wearing smart jeans with a white shirt and well-cut navy blue jacket; his face was at first obscured by the umbrella, but when they were about twenty yards from me the woman tilted the umbrella back to check the state of the sky, and I saw that her companion was Sam Williams. He was talking to her, looking into her face, laughing; then, sensing that someone was in their way, he glanced up and saw me and recognised me immediately.

  His initial intention, I think, was to walk straight by, but he saw something in me that showed him that I wasn’t going to let him pass – although I’m sure I wouldn’t have stopped him had he not seen me. ‘Mr Pattison!’ he called out, as though no surprise could possibly have pleased him more. A matching facial expression was displayed; it would have fooled anybody. His friend was smiling at me: she was a rather good-looking woman, with a strikingly straight nose and a full-lipped mouth; her face suggested a warm and outgoing character, but there was something about her eyes that seemed indicative of nervousness, or a tendency to anxiety; the make-up was extensive, I could tell, but very discreet; she was, I’d say, at least fifteen years older than Sam.

  He put out a hand and I shook it. His grip – firm and brief – was that of a man who is confident of his dominance of the situation. ‘How are you?’ he asked, but before I could answer he moved on to the introductions. ‘This is Mr Pattison,’ he told his companion. ‘I did some work for him last year. And this is Marianne.’ In his voice there was no trace of its former coarseness. It might have been Sam’s more prosperous and better-educated twin.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Marianne, giving me a hand that was nearly weightless; a huge acrylic bracelet, translucent red and flecked with gold flakes, slipped out of her coat sleeve onto her wrist.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, before turning to Sam. ‘So, Sam, how are you?’ I asked, thinking that he might have given Marianne another name, and consequently be embarrassed. He was not embarrassed.

  ‘I’m fine. Very well indee
d. How about yourself? You’re looking dapper. Aileen well?’

  ‘Very, thank you.’

  ‘Been away?’ he asked. ‘You look tanned.’

  ‘Not recently,’ I answered. I told him we’d been to Petra.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go there,’ said Marianne, with a glance to Sam which seemed to mean that he might give some consideration to the idea.

  ‘How’s work?’ I asked him. ‘Busy?’

  ‘Busy enough,’ he said. ‘Roofing. That’s what I’m doing now. Just roofing.’

  ‘He does a good roof,’ I said to Marianne.

  ‘I know,’ she said, cocking an eyebrow at Sam. The rain was becoming heavier by the minute. Marianne angled the umbrella to give me some of its shelter.

  ‘We’re going to Ireland. To live,’ said Sam. ‘Always raining in Ireland, so they need good roofers. I’ve got family there.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I said, as if this were news to me, and interesting news. I was doing all I could to betray no sign of my delight at hearing that he would soon be gone.

  ‘Yes,’ he stated, gazing steadily and calmly into my eyes. ‘On the west coast, in Donegal.’

  Marianne, sensing in this exchange a hint that something was being said that lay beneath the literal meaning of the words, looked at Sam with a faint puzzlement in her eyes, and Sam gave her a tender smile, as if they were alone. Then he put out his hand again, a paragon of good manners. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was nice to see you again. Take care of yourself. Give my regards to your wife.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Marianne, moving off. For a moment she was between myself and Sam. He took her arm; in a few moments he would be gone, and I would never see him again. I could hear myself yelling at him: ‘You’ve ruined my life.’ I imagined Marianne’s reaction when I told her what her boyfriend had done to me and my wife. But I kept my mouth shut. Sam hadn’t ruined my life – that was just a phrase that came to mind. It was the sort of thing a man in this sort of situation might say in a television drama, but it wasn’t true. There was a crack in my life, a wide and permanent crack, and Sam had been a cause of it. But my life hadn’t been ruined – the latter part of it had been damaged, but I’d had a good sixty years before that. And what would have been gained, if I had told this woman the truth? Sam would have told his version of the story and he’d have been the one she would have believed. He, unruffled, would have listened to what I had to say and then told her the facts of the case, his facts, and I would have lost my temper and looked like a fool.

  I’m not certain, however, that these reasons for saying nothing had formed in my mind until some time after Sam and Marianne had left me. It was a glance from Sam that silenced me. In the instant that Marianne stepped forward he looked at me over her shoulder, and the look that he gave me, though it filled such a tiny splice of time, had as much meaning in it, it felt to me, as any conversation we had ever had. There was some amusement in it, and contempt as well. But, prevailing over those, there was also a pain – a pain that I saw as a pain of rejection – and a resolute farewell. His eyes said to me: ‘You were wrong. I was your son. I no longer am.’ I did not tell Aileen that I’d seen him.

  My father lay in bed for the last week of his life, too weak to even turn his head. Delirious for much of the time, he muttered words that were mostly indistinguishable. During those last seven days, though, he would mumble a phrase that sounded like ‘but Mark will know’. Sometimes we heard the last word as ‘willow’; sometimes we thought he’d said ‘pillow’; but nearly always we heard ‘Mark’. Again and again we asked him what he was saying, but he couldn’t hear us. Neither I nor my mother knew who Mark might have been. Perhaps my father wasn’t saying anything. Perhaps his brain, short-circuited by illness, had merely formed a sequence of sounds that pleased it, and had kept the sequence playing. That, in the end, is what my mother and I had come to believe, most of the time. The alternative – that there had been a last message that we had failed to take from him – was too hard to live with. In all likelihood, there was no last message. And yet, whenever I remember my father, I always have to push past the memory of that last week, and that phrase being murmured over and over again. Likewise, I think that for the rest of my life the first thing that I will see whenever I recall Sam Williams will be that final glance, telling me that I had been wrong.

  Once in a while I come close to feeling that I can no longer endure not knowing, that I’ll have to track him down again. Then I get past the image of his face in that last instant, and I remember him more fully, and I know I don’t want to see him again. I did once try to send him a text, but it wouldn’t transmit.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN BUCKLEY

  The Biography of Thomas Lang

  Xerxes

  Ghost MacIndoe

  Invisible

  So He Takes the Dog

  Copyright

  Published in 2010 – and as an ebook in 2011 – by

  Sort Of Books

  PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL

  www.sortof.co.uk

  Copyright © Jonathan Buckley, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  Typeset in Melior to a design by Henry Iles

  264pp.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Print ISBN 978 095600 386 7

  eBook ISBN 978–1–908745–01–9