Breaking Light

by Karin Altenberg

  The minister’s large ears were sunlit from behind now and, as he bent to make the sign of the cross, Gabriel could see in them the veins where the minister’s lifeblood was running through him in its own circuit, which made him quite separate from anyone else and so much more alive than Mr Bradley, who had been committed to the ground and was already beginning to fade under the earth which was being thrown on top of his coffin.

  There was a gust of wind, honeyed air bringing the sweet scents of autumn’s gentle decay. Or were they the scents of death? Gabriel looked at Michael, who was staring mutely, intently into the filling grave. Suddenly, he looked up and his eyes met Gabriel’s. Grief flowed across Michael’s transparent face, but his gaze was dark and bottomless. And just then, for the first time, Gabriel felt that this loss was also a terrible and strange thing in his own life. He felt a sudden great emptiness inside him, which was not quite hollow because it was beginning to fill with a pain that was mirrored in Michael’s dark eyes, looking away now. Michael, who was a year younger than himself and yet seemed to understand so much more, as if he had already lived a life to the end of its course and started all over again.

  Once Gabriel had awakened to the pain inside, he could see it in other people too. It was in the straight backs of the men in uniform, it was in the bloodless, tensed face of Mrs Bradley, the softness all gone, and, more surprisingly, it was in Mother, who was weeping soundlessly, tears seeping down her cheeks and falling from her jaw on to the collar of her best dress. How could it be that he had not seen it before?

  Several times during the afternoon, as the mourners gathered in the drawing room at Oakstone, where tea was poured and cucumber sandwiches served by well-meaning ladies of the parish who had come to help, Gabriel’s face reddened as perfect strangers – whose faces wouldn’t open – came up to him and offered their condolences. Some of these strangers even put a damp hand on his head or on his shoulder, as if to steady him or paste him to the cold shadows next to the empty fireplace where he was skulking. The dense air was full of displeasure and it took a while for the room to fit; the atmosphere was too close, the company too strange – like waiting for a thunderstorm. But after a while, once sufficient tea and brandy had been poured, it all settled and the afternoon began to warm some of the guests through the French windows. Portraits of ancestors – government officials and imperial minor officers – seemed to straighten in their gilded frames. Somebody, perhaps one of the aproned ladies of the parish, had brought a bouquet of red and purple dahlias and put them in a crystal vase on a rickety console by a window. The light, which sieved through the petals, cast a shadow the colour of forbidden fruits on to a crocheted tablecloth.

  Above the starched collar of an otherwise undistinguished suit, Uncle Gerry flamed. Gabriel could see that he was drinking gin, as clear and innocent as a child’s face. With the new insight that the unexpected pain had brought, Gabriel also noticed that subterranean rivers of despair flowed under Uncle Gerry’s grey stubble. The uncle looked at the silent nephew who had sidled up to him.

  ‘If one can’t have a drink at somebody’s funeral …’ he said, as if to explain why he seemed to be only half there.

  But the boy did not answer.

  ‘I’ll just pour a little one for the dead,’ he slurred apologetically and inclined his head.

  And still Gabriel remained silent.

  ‘Ah, don’t look at me like that, Gabe. It’s late – late in my life – and things haven’t exactly gone according to plan.’

  And Gabriel watched Uncle Gerry’s shaking hand as it steadied itself around the re-filled glass.

  ‘There,’ said the man, ‘that’s better.’

  They stood in silence for a moment. People around them had turned their backs, and their shoulders seemed to be slowly solidifying into a black screen.

  ‘Why are all these strangers telling me that they’re sorry for my loss?’ Gabriel asked, at last.

  The room seemed to have gone quiet around them as Uncle Gerry turned slowly to face him. The man rocked a bit on his heels, trying to focus his gaze into the open eyes of his nephew, which were of warm, brown soil with small black seeds for pupils.

  For a brief moment, Gabriel detected a spark of clarity and intelligence in Uncle Gerry’s eyes. I shall know now, he thought. At last, they will tell me. And then his uncle blinked and looked away, smiling vaguely at the guests.

  ‘All this contemptuous flesh.’ he raved, and flicked his arm, spilling gin on to the parquet floor.

  ‘Tell me, please. I need to know.’ He had gripped his uncle’s arm, his nails digging into the sleeve of the black jacket.

  ‘Look, Gabe, I would never do anything to hurt you. Do you understand me?’

  ‘No, I don’t. You’re never straight with me.’

  ‘You’d better speak to your mother about this. I have sworn to her …’

  ‘Sworn what?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘But why, Uncle G? Why did you swear about something that’s to do with me? Why would you do that?’

  ‘Oh, well, one does sometimes, eh?’

  He realised this was true. Hadn’t Michael sworn to do anything at all? But still he insisted: ‘What, though, Uncle G? What did you swear?’

  ‘Oh, forget about it,’ the uncle said over his shoulder, already pushing his way through the crowd towards the door.

  Alone again by the marble fireplace, Gabriel could not determine the exact reason for his sudden sadness that was quite separate from the pain inside. He longed to be outside. His arms felt too long, his polished shoes too narrow. Slithering past the thick black bodies, he made his way towards the refuge of the kitchen, where Mrs Bradley had once served him pancakes.

  The door to the kitchen was ajar and a rectangle of light, slightly askew, leaked from it on to the floorboards of the dark corridor like spilt milk. Gabriel stopped abruptly as he heard his mother’s voice from inside.

  ‘I don’t believe in your compassion,’ she said, her voice thin and hard.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that …’

  Gabriel gasped as he recognised Mrs Bradley’s voice shaping the soft words out of her round mouth. Holding his breath, he pressed his back against the wall and edged a bit closer to the door, crabwise. From his new position he could glimpse Mrs Bradley’s back and, facing her, his mother, clasping her elbows across her chest, her shoulders narrow and sharp. Her face was red and puffy and it suddenly struck Gabriel that he had never seen his mother laugh; her unhappiness was like tinnitus in the walls of their house. But what was she doing now, crying in Mrs Bradley’s kitchen? A wave of shame on her behalf reddened his face.

  ‘Here we go again,’ his mother snarled, ‘but it’s a bit late for you to say sorry, don’t you think?’

  Mrs Bradley sighed and turned slightly towards the window so that Gabriel saw now that she was smoking a cigarette. He couldn’t remember having seen her smoke before and he looked in fascination at her white hand with its elegant fingers as she put the cigarette to her red lips. Her other hand was supporting the smoking arm so that she too seemed to be protecting her chest. The arm, Gabriel noticed, pushed up her breasts ever so slightly and he could make out their bulging round shapes through the thin fabric of her black dress. He had a sudden, dark, exciting urge to run up to her and put his head against her cleavage and smell her woman’s smell. His head was hot and his temples were pounding, his heart beating faster and faster. He struggled to keep his breathing in check.

  ‘I have been wanting to speak to you for a long time – ever since I realised that the two of you were still in Mortford – but George told me that you wouldn’t let me anywhere near you or the boy.’

  Gabriel’s mother snorted in reply and followed Mrs Bradley’s gaze out of the window. The sunlight fell through the leaded windowpanes from the left and illuminated their faces, as if they had been painted by Vermeer.

  ‘Can we at least try to be reasonable for the sake of the boys?’ Mrs Bradley’s voice s
ounded tired and sad.

  ‘Reasonable. Who are you to tell me to be reasonable? You’re not the one who has had to raise a boy on your own. You haven’t had to do a menial job to keep a shitty little household afloat at a time when rationing has made it almost impossible to find decent food anyway. You’re not the one with a mental cripple of a brother.’

  ‘I understand it must have been hard, horrific … but we did offer you money – George did.’

  ‘As if I would accept his filthy money.’

  ‘You’re upset; can I get you a drink to calm your nerves?’

  ‘Why, of course I’m upset! What do you expect?’

  Mrs Bradley vanished from Gabriel’s view for a moment, only to return with a bottle of brandy and a single glass in one hand, the cigarette still in the other. She poured the drink and handed it to Mother before she cleared her throat and spoke again. ‘Believe me, we were both devastated at the hurt we caused you, but the war changed everything. You cannot imagine what it was like on the continent.’

  ‘Oh, so now it’s my own stupid fault for hiding comfortably in Britain whilst the war raged in Europe, is that it?’

  Mrs Bradley sighed again. ‘No, that’s not what I mean at all. All I wanted to say is that everything becomes black and white in a war – in some ways, life seems suddenly so simple – things are either good or bad – good or evil. And love … love in such circumstances is … it’s hard to explain, but it’s all-consuming. It offers itself as the only possible salvation … George was my life, my destiny. It was as simple as that. And now he’s gone.’

  This was followed by a silence and Gabriel stretched his neck in order to get a better view. His mother was crying soundlessly, but her stiff shoulders were shaking now. Her face looked different, thawed, as if a layer of skin had been dissolved by the tears and drained away. It gave her features a tenderness. Years later – however much he tried – he would never be able to remember what she looked like at that moment, his own mother. And yet, even at the age of thirteen, hiding in the dark corridor, he realised that he was seeing his mother as she once was, as she might have been.

  ‘I used to love this house,’ he heard her sob. ‘I think we might have been happy here, if it hadn’t been for …’

  Mrs Bradley, too, was crying now, softly, but with a quiet passion which made her even more desirable in Gabriel’s eyes. He was confused. Confused by his conflicting emotions and by the two women’s strange conversation that still did not make sense to him. He was torn between the loyalty towards Mrs Bradley, with whom he realised he was in love, and the loyalty towards Mother, whom he clearly ought to love. And then suddenly he felt a great lump growing in his throat and silent, hot tears started streaming down his face. For the second time that day he was overcome by a great sadness. In hindsight, this moment – this hot, breathless hiding in a dark corridor – was his coming of age. This moment, so full of longing and lust for clarity and unity. As he eavesdropped into his own past, into his own beginning, and the meaning of their words slowly started to dawn on him, he realised too that every event in his life so far had brought him to this knowledge.

  And, for a brief moment, he saw them all clearly in front of him: the two women crying in the kitchen; Mr Bradley, who was suddenly so much more to him and yet already cold in his grave; Uncle Gerry, slurring and stumbling through his drink; and Michael and himself, separated now by an unfathomable distance.

  *

  He closed his eyes and relived once again that fateful day of Mr Bradley’s funeral. And then there was that other occasion, not as upsetting, perhaps, but still disturbing enough for him to have pushed it to the back of his mind for all these years: the reading of the will.

  He saw, quite clearly, the lawyer, Mr Turnpike, who was sitting behind an enormous desk. He had never seen such a desk in Mortford before, not even at Oakstone. He, Gabriel, had been at one end of the desk and Michael at the other, his head bowed. He too had glanced down at his shoes, the shiny black ones he had worn for the funeral. They had been hurting in all the wrong places. Mrs Bradley had been sitting behind Michael, and he remembered now how he could feel, rather than see, Mother sitting behind him, her back straight and her lips stiff and stretched like the mouth of a fish.

  *

  ‘All right,’ he heard her say impatiently, ‘let’s get this over with, shall we?’

  Mr Turnpike frowned. He was dressed in an expensive-looking dark suit with a thick, stripy tie and a yellow silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. ‘I understand,’ Mr Turnpike began, without looking up from the desk, ‘that you have not yet been told of the full extent of your … ahem …’ At this point he cleared his throat and pushed his half-rimmed specs further up his thin nose. ‘Of your … connection. Your blood connection, that is.’

  Gabriel noticed a tuft of coarse grey hair sprouting out of Mr Turnpike’s ear, and wondered why the lawyer’s hair was growing from his ears rather than on his head, like most people. He looked at Michael again, to see what he was thinking, but his side-on face gave nothing away. Was Mr Turnpike’s hair growing out of the ear on Michael’s side too? he wondered.

  ‘Well?’ Mother’s hardest voice sliced through the room.

  Mr Turnpike was beginning to look decidedly unhappy. He kept fidgeting with some papers in a file, which lay open on the desk.

  ‘Well,’ he repeated, without looking at Mother or Mrs Bradley, ‘I’m afraid I am obliged to read the content of the will with all three benefactors – that’s the wife and the two sons and their …’ He hesitated again, stroking the wood of the desk now, as if it was a giant pet, offering reassurance. ‘Yes, with their guardians present.’ There were beads of sweat on his brow. Behind Gabriel’s back Mother made a noise as if blowing her nose, and Mr Turnpike looked up from the desk, his eyes falling instead on Mrs Bradley’s chest.

  ‘You boys,’ he soldiered on, ‘won’t fully appreciate the details …’ He brought out a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket and, leaning over the desk, offered one to Mother, who sneered, and to Mrs Bradley, who accepted but had to stand up and lean forward to reach the case. Mr Turnpike’s hand trembled a little as Mrs Bradley’s blouse billowed. Gabriel, too, couldn’t take his eyes off her as Mr Turnpike lit her cigarette. He sensed Mother tightening in the chair behind him. Then Mrs Bradley and Mr Turnpike both sat down and order was restored in the stuffy room, where the air was suddenly as heavy as the desk. But it was an order threatened by the crimson marks that Mrs Bradley’s lipstick left on the filter – delicious little cherries where her lips had kissed.

  Mr Turnpike cleared his throat again and began reading out the will. Gabriel could feel the lump in his own throat growing and swallowed to push it down. For this reason he wasn’t listening, at least not consciously. There was a small allowance from the age of twenty-one and then, later on, there was Oakstone, shared by the two sons, although Mrs Bradley would have the right of residence for as long as she lived.

  Gabriel looked across at Michael again – at his brother. How had this happened? He felt strange and wondered if Michael felt the same now that they were not just Gabe and Michael anymore, but brothers. Michael’s thin hands were fidgeting, playing back and forth on the edge of the desk, as if it were a piano. His healed fingers were beautiful – slender, like a girl’s. Thud, thud.

  ‘Are you boys listening?’ Mr Turnpike took an ordinary handkerchief from his pocket, not the silk one, which stayed immaculately where it was, and dabbed at his brow. ‘I understand this must be hard for you …’

  Gabriel said nothing and Michael murmured something and shrugged, because this was just the kind of thing, without any point or direction, which adults said to children.

  ‘Stop picking, Gabriel,’ Mother’s voice wheezed from close behind, which made Michael stretch his neck to get a better look at the scab on Gabriel’s knee, where a drop of blood was now visible under the crust. The attention made Gabriel want to pull it all off, just to show Michael. But, wh
en he reached for the scab again, Mother’s hand came suddenly forward and grabbed his wrist hard – so hard it brought tears to his eyes, which made the whole thing – a comforting, good thing – turn just awful and embarrassing.

  Michael gloomed again and refused to look up. Mr Turnpike stared rather hard at his manicured hands, as if the buffed nails might be about to convey a coded message. ‘There’s something so sad about this … this business when children are involved …’ he suggested.

  ‘You don’t say,’ Mother replied dismissively, so that the hair at the back of Gabriel’s neck stood out. But then Mrs Bradley looked over at him and smiled. Her eyelids were pink, he saw, and her face a bit blotchy, but he reddened all the same.

  ‘There’s just one more thing, then … You need to supply me with details, bank accounts …’ Mr Turnpike said, vaguely.

  Just then, Michael looked up at Gabriel. They were looking at each other. Without knowing why, Gabriel made a face – pulling out his ears and squinting his eyes. Michael’s eyes were darker than ever, made darker by the smoky, brownish gloom in the room, but a light turned on somewhere deep inside and flickered once. Michael’s lips were very red and slightly pouted, like Mrs Bradley’s, and he looked very thin inside his best suit, as if his ribs might show through the fabric. Gabriel, on the other hand, was jam-packed in his own suit – he could feel the fabric in his armpits and his crotch, and the shorts were hitching up his thighs. Too much going on at once. He was ready to burst – must let it all out somehow. The air in the room was unbreathable. He might have been swimming underwater. Michael might have had the same thought because he suddenly blew up his cheeks like a puffer fish and let the air out in one long, perfect raspberry fart.

  That was it; they burst, snorted, shrieked with dammed-up laughter, grunting like sea lions in the closed room. It was awful, horrible and wonderful at the same time.