“But, young man, you wish to know. On the day before the girl walked out with her child, the Greenwood boys saw a fire on the point, around Reid’s house. This was in the late afternoon. Not, they said, a common sort of fire, for this one rolled slowly with a cap like a mushroom’s. It was yellow and high—higher than the roof. Its smoke was dark and it smelled bitter.
“Well, being curious. And possibly drunk—I would not put it past the Greenwoods to be drunk—they tacked around the point to a place where they could see more clearly.”
“The Greenwoods didn’t think to shout fire?”
“Well, I do think Reid made himself clear regarding interference—after the incident with Mrs. Sweeney—when was that? Five years ago now? Well, the Greenwood boys sailed around the point until they saw that the fire was indeed moving, and from their deck they could just make out the figures about this mechanical flame, though they seemed… well, shrunk was what Matthew said, but I will say stunted, and they did not move as men move. They seemed a mass, a knot of people and above them, this device—this engine with its flames spreading over the house itself.”
“It being dark, and them being drunk, I can’t think what conclusion Mr. Manley is to draw.”
“No conclusions, though he might nod and say, “How strange.” Well, a whole wing of the house is burnt. That’s been confirmed.”
“Hideous building. Bogus Tudor!”
“It is the thing itself that makes me wonder—the engine. What do you suppose it did, Mr. Manley?”
“I don’t. I don’t know.”
“Well then, how strange,” and the Bishop turned away to fill his pipe.
Liam stood.
“Not going I hope, Mr. Manley,” said the card dealer. “I hope you will stay, have a drink before dinner.” The invitation was so perfectly phrased, so perfectly meaningless. “And perhaps after dinner you will give us a song?”
“Yes, a song.” This time Archie said it. “I understand you have a series of concerts here and in some of the other Kilgour villages. I seem to remember some of your work, with Mrs. Kilgour, poor lady.”
“Perhaps it will tire his voice,” said the Bishop.
He had endeavoured to remain calm, but finally he found himself blushing. “Thank you,” Liam said to the card dealer, “but I must go to the hall first.”
He left the room. He badly wanted a cigarette. He passed the sleeping man without stopping, walked out the door and to the street and did not care which direction he took, because wherever he looked, he saw the girl, walking, and the engine creeping sideways toward the house. The man had gone and done something horrible and destroyed it all, ruined the manor, the garden that was only just laid out, the cottages—which would be comfortable now, nearly fifteen years on, with real gardens and grass growing. The man had gone and wrecked it all and while, really, Liam didn’t care, there was something shameful in it, in the smashed windows and the whole wing burnt down and the barefoot girl limping along the roads. Shame shame, he thought, and said aloud as he walked and swung his arms sharply. Shame.
He knotted his hands behind his back so they would not shake. As he imagined the girl and her child, she was like other girls he had seen in high summer, the long road heat-smeared so he could not see her feet, but could just make out the silhouette of a girl with a bundle in her arms. Around him the buzz of flies, the glittering blue air, and somewhere, far away, the hay lying in swaths across the fields.
That evening he walked from the inn to the train station, down the wooden sidewalks to the block they called “China Town,” to the inn and back to the train station, and down the wooden sidewalks toward the river, and then back to the inn and on to the train station, and then north along the tracks, and then back along the street that ran parallel to the tracks until he reached the river, and then back along a dirt road until he reached a wooden sidewalk. When he was too tired to walk, he lay smoking in bed until he slept, with that vision playing through his sleep. The engine itself was shadowy, but he could guess its size. He saw black enamel dials marked with white degrees of declination, then the crosshairs and the click-k-k-k-k of calculated trajectories and angles set, and all around it the believers keening, fallen to their knees and raising their hands to worship it, until they bruised on the black metal, their eyes rolling in the ecstasy of comprehension. It would fall on them and crush them, he thought, it would fall soon. It would detonate, and the detonation would ripple outward through their bodies, the house, the village, the water and land all around them. Passing through them, it would break bones and rupture organs and toss them high into the air, then drop them down, and something wet spreading over the earth beneath their bodies. What was the range of an engine like that? How far would it reach?
When he closed his eyes he saw fallen men in the street by the Temple Theatre, the bare skin of their faces turning red. The man he liked, the man who had asked him to sing, held one hand up at his forehead, and when he pulled it away there was red on the fingertips, a red trickle down the side of his face, then another and another. When Liam looked at his own skin, there was no blood, no pain. All around him there was shouting, and men running under the still-falling glass, and sound reduced to smog, oppressive and indecipherable. It would not do to remember the explosion itself, and how the windows had blown outward like soap bubbles from a wire loop, and think that if he had stood a foot farther from the wall, he would have been in the path of all that glass and shrapnel, the disrupted material world inside the theatre. He would have lain on the pavement before the advancing engine, his blood staining the fabric of his coat, spilled from some unseen wound onto the splinters and glass-dust that covered the street.
The next morning he slept late. He avoided the hotel’s restaurant and went instead to the lunch counter in a five and dime, and drank coffee and read the local sheet. There wasn’t any mention of refugees in the paper, no neurasthenic stragglers with pushcarts, no exhausted mother with child slung over her shoulder, walking barefoot out of the model village behind the gates of Reid’s estate. Outside his window, he saw no obvious emigrants from Reid’s kingdom, nothing but the cenotaph with the pale granite cross and the black names, the wooded hills rising around the town and the tidy, bloomless geraniums of the station flowerbeds.
He would leave soon. He would go south. He would go to Mexico where the air was better for him, far from the damp that shortened his days. He would be well away from the northern raincoast. In Mexico it would be hot and dry and still, and he would drink tequila beside the beach, just a few steps from a warm blue ocean, or in the mountains.
But don’t think about the girl. Think of the dry inland, and tequila. Think about the annuity. He would be able to make plans, and think what he would do next, and he would do it as he sat somewhere in the black afternoon shade, watching women walk through the ruthless light outside his café.
PART THREE
THE
CITY OF
THE END OF
THINGS
PART THREE
NO PLACE FOR SISSIES
Anthea’s grandfather Max died when she was eighteen. Shortly after that, Hazel began telling her about the injustice. “You get old,” she said, “and everyone leaves you. And you can’t do all the things you thought you’d do, because you put them off to look after people. And it’s not fair.” Her voice was emphatic but quiet. Hazel didn’t like raising her voice. Instead, she throttled a sob in her breast, and Anthea glanced away, pretending not to notice because Hazel didn’t like to be seen in a state.
“Old age is no place for sissies,” she said. “It’s not for sissies. You have to be tough, but even if you’re tough—don’t we deserve dignity?”
“Of course. Yeah, totally,” Anthea said—always said. “Dignity.”
“You don’t understand.” That was what Hazel said when anyone tried to agree with her.
Even before she was properly old, Hazel had hated the habit of some elderly women who took cups of hot water in the ev
ening. She hated them, because if one couldn’t taste the difference between hot water and tea, it seemed like one should take a hard look at one’s life. Anthea wanted to remind Hazel that there was more to her than her faculties, and that probably hot water was nice when you were ninety; she didn’t dare, though, because once she’d said something like that, and it had ended badly. She didn’t like it when Hazel yelled at her. Besides, the hot water ladies—deaf, drifting in time and the wheelchair-friendly corridors of some old folks’ home—were no longer alive by Hazel’s definition. They were no longer themselves; they weren’t anyone anymore. Hazel wouldn’t be like that, she insisted when she still showed her characteristic defiance of circumstance. She wouldn’t be one of the others. She wouldn’t be a burden—mean and suspicious, turning on their children like ugly toddlers who pull books from the shelves, driving even after they failed their eye exams, buying high-tech stocks over the phone.
Hazel glared a hot glare, as though to defy Anthea, with her four limbs and her appetite and her faculties.
Their visits were regular and frequent, whenever Hazel expressed a desire to see her granddaughter, and made her wishes known through Colm. Though Anthea complied, she dreaded these meetings after her grandfather’s death. After each one, she thought that next time she might arrange to be busy. She never did, because Colm was the one who told her what Hazel wanted, and he always did it in such an understanding way, she knew it wasn’t really his fault. Anthea would submit to an afternoon spent discussing the last novel she had borrowed and read dutifully, though with little pleasure: Doris Lessing or D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf. After Max died, Hazel began offering Anthea grown-up cocktails, usually gin and tonic with a fat wedge of lime, served in real crystal, not the red plastic glasses kept for kids’ pink lemonade.
The first time she offered, Anthea said, “But. Can I have ginger ale?” though she was afraid it would be wrong. Hazel filled a red plastic glass with warm, flat ginger ale from a can that stood open on the kitchen table. No ice.
After that little ceremony, Hazel led the way outside, and sat in close on the porch swing and held Anthea’s hand. They’d talk about Briefing for a Descent into Hell or To the Lighthouse as Hazel sipped her first and second G&T. By the third, she was finished with books; she grew sharp and bright and talked about atheism and the existential absence that was death, and how you’d have to be a deluded sentimentalist to think there was anything beyond the material world. Anthea, quieter and more agreeable as Hazel poured her fourth, tried to remember the earlier woman, the one from olden days who took photographs with an undoubting eye and no wasted film. She’d given up the camera after her husband died, as silently and conspicuously as she had abandoned writing local history or gardening.
In her last years she did little, though her energy did not seem to abate. As her friends declined and died, she began a stack of obituaries in her birthday book, hoarding her dead and accounting for each with an “x” over their name in the original entry. Sometimes when Hazel was outside on the beach at family parties and Anthea had a minute alone in the house, she picked up the little book and shuffled through the pages, reading bits of newsprint that reminded her of invitations for a party, or a girl’s scrapbook from an earlier generation, recording the adventures of the local social pages. Hazel didn’t mention the collection, just kept it on top of her desk beside the phone.
Having read and clipped all those obituaries, Hazel declared that she would not emulate the conventional dead, recounting her decline in the assembled thankyous to doctors and nurses and critical care wards and hospice units. Hazel particularly disliked the obituaries that read like yearbook entries, listing names, in-jokes and helpless clichés. No. Hazel read obituaries aloud the way Jas read personal ads, seeking out and stressing the flabbiest platitudes: “Look, darling!” Hazel said, “this one was a toastmaster, well known for his rousing songs on long bus trips, those who knew him knew him well, dear. And he’s got an unattached grandson!”
Anthea laughed. She laughed every single time Hazel made that joke, though it grew steadily grimmer. She stopped laughing a moment later when Hazel grew serious and reminded her—as she had done many times—about her own preferences: no obituary, no funeral, no stone. Sometimes she asked for Auden’s “Lullaby” in a tasteful corner of the weekend edition, and her name, no dates. Sometimes she wanted her initials and the years. She discussed that often with Anthea, repeating the arguments pro and con the inclusion of dates, whether the whole poem, or select lines from the last stanza, and the lineage “Hazel Brooke, née Lyon.”
O SUPERMAN
It was Liam’s shame that when he first encountered the places whose names had formed his earliest litany of arrival—Covent Garden, Thames, Piccadilly, Oxford Street and Pall Mall—he felt no joy in their radiant Englishness, but found himself inexplicably homesick. Until then, he had only known those places in cheaply tinted postcards he kept in a cigar box under his bed, sealed with a tiny padlock so Ella couldn’t get at them. He bought them penny-by-penny, pored over them as he read the English news that filtered down through the local paper, thought about how it would be to stand on that bridge, stare across that river, be among those crowds.
When he finally arrived at that moment, he wasn’t awed by the real width of the river with all its boats and barges, but thought instead of the narrow, root-choked trickle of another Thames, another Oxford and Piccadilly and Pall Mall. He had thought of a little cigar box, and a tiny, ugly bedroom in the attic. He was ashamed of this unaccountable nostalgia as he looked on the wet grey pavement outside his boarding house, which was so English and should be so completely satisfying. He did not like to find himself thinking instead of dull yellow brick houses on wide streets. That was not the London to be sentimental about, and with this arrival he should feel not homesickness but homecoming.
Because he hated Other London as much as he hated the farm he grew up on and the village. As much as he hated the summer air like a sweaty blanket, and the evenings after dinner when his father—stinking though he was so careful about washing the dust from his neck and hands before they sat down in the tiny, close dining room—his father played dominoes on the front porch with Ella. Across the wide road, another family sat on another front porch, in front of an equally respectable yellow brick house and waved over their lemonade. Liam hated them, too.
He hated his own London, and knew himself to be only temporarily exiled, and soon returned to the English city, where there were no yellow brick houses, no fathers who stunk, no mothers who suppressed their summer odour with Florida water and talcum powder. There were no expectations that he would walk nice girls home, nor that he would get a job in a bank—his mother admitted her unlimited ambition for him the day she said she thought he’d do very nicely in a bank! Once he was in London—the real one—they would see that there was only one possible trajectory, and it concluded with leading tenor at Covent Garden, La Scala or the Paris Opera House, places he had seen in postcards and loved.
Shortly after his arrival in Proper London, Liam saw O’Mario sing. For years afterwards, he counted the man as his true, his spiritual father. Often in the confidential darkness, late at night with men or women, he described the theatre, the illuminated figure on the stage below, the voice. It was like evening sunlight in summer, he said, or like amber water in a creek, or whitecaps. Once he had explained elaborately to a woman (she seemed enraptured at the time) that Mara O’Mario’s voice had just the quality of the icicles that form near a stream on hanging roots or blades of grass, the smooth, round kind that seem to hold drops of light.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon. It was June at Covent Garden. It was Le Cid. He had begun the tedious round of private recitals that paid his room and board but was (he knew he knew) only the beginning. Liam, half an hour early, read and reread his program (he would do without coffee the next two weeks to make up the money for a real program, with pictures), and when he dropped it to his lap, he saw that his dam
p fingers had buckled the paper. His knees pressed up against the seat in front of him, so he sat twisted, his wrists spindly and white out of his cuffs, his hands at rest in his lap. He had intended to wear gloves, but none of his were nice enough. No one in his row had them, which made him feel even more ashamed: he knew better, after all, and did not like to be mistaken for the sort who didn’t. The men down below in the dress circle or across, in the boxes, would wear gloves. They would arrive late, after the overture. He would not be so shallow as that, arriving late, even if he did have white gloves and a satin-lined opera cloak.
He had been there when it was empty—the very moment they opened the doors, he had found his seat and looked down into the stage below and imagined what he was about to hear: rings of fire and vigil lights, sounds like sunbursts, and others as dangerous and enticing as black water running under ice. He had the score behind his eyelids, the love triangle, and the Moorish threat, and the gleam of Rodrigo’s sword. His initial devotion to Saint James and his third act celebration of the veiled father and judge.
The seats filled, the chocolate-eaters up top with him, down below the girls in dancing frocks trailing after their mothers, getting settled early, the young couples engrossed in conversation in the boxes below him, the ladies-of-an-age sharp-eyed as crows. And when the lights went down, finally, his heart wound up tight inside his breast, so it might break or burst, that only from the pleasure of waiting for the orchestra and then for the light to leap up from the stage. He imagined himself fifty years on, long retired and telling the story of his first vision of Mara O’Mario. How would he tell it? He would tell about breathing with Rodrigo’s first aria, and how he felt a deep tremor in his belly as though it were his voice, his throat, the reverberations his own as they travelled through his lungs, trachea, larynx, pharynx, palate, nasal cavity, skull. It could have been him channelling O’Mario’s voice, that voice rolling like an echo through his own body.
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