Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  That he had no idea what this was all for, for what purpose it was designed, struck him as the height of abandon: in all our human designs, he reflected, we know why we are doing such and such, for whom or for what we labour, but in the grander scheme of things we are lost, ignorant, fired only by some obscure desire to stay alive and generate copies of ourselves. Nature seemed suddenly to offer him a vision of complete luxury, just as he saw its workings as mere ruthless striving to reproduce and be. Seeing this fusion made him smile, and as if in response his body quivered and burnt almost deliciously, like a pressed tooth. The others heard him grunt and looked up from their newspapers, games, meditations, some of them plugged by their ears into transistor radios brought by their relatives; he engineered his face back into a smile and nodded, beaming at each of them in turn.

  ‘Is he daft?’ he heard one of them ask, a deaf old man whose shout must sound like a whisper in his universe. ‘Is he daft?’

  It occurred to him during these last weeks that the medicaments may well be intoxicating. At night – when vague shadows flitted beyond the door of his room, its upper half put to glass and discreetly blurred with lace – he wondered whether this gift of happiness and wonder wasn’t, therefore, a simple matter of drugs, of chemicals awash in his twilit brain. So he asked the doctor if the drugs might have this effect, in the way morphine did. Dr Godley chuckled in the patronising way of his profession and said that it was a bit late for Jack to become a hippy, he would have to grow his hair a lot longer before he was eligible for LSD. (Jack had, in fact, almost no hair at all.)

  ‘I can always bring you one of my son’s Beatles records, Jack,’ Dr Godley grinned. ‘Awfully groovy, you know.’

  So Jack was not much the wiser – although, as an afterthought, Dr Godley told him (in a serious voice) that at least one of the ingredients of the medicinal cocktail was, in certain cases, a ‘depressant’. Jack did not like this information and vowed not to ask any more questions of a technical nature. He heard the faint roar of Culdean Water and remembered how in Africa he’d had to cross many a rope bridge over a raging torrent, and how it was only when an old timer told him tales of folk plunging to their deaths when a rope, rotted by the humid air, declared itself done that he had been assailed, each time, by a choking fear.

  It was really quite extraordinary, this almost visionary sense he had been given, and he wondered whether he should record it in some fashion, if only for his children. But as soon as he tried to scribble something down, his hands scarcely able to hold the pen level, he felt the wonder shrivel up and die; he felt the inadequacy of his terms, the paltriness of words when faced with the multiple universe and his own particular multiplicity of wonder, like a many-petalled rose that was unfolding ceaselessly in his heart. He thought of his heart when he wrote ‘heart’, a flapping, dilatory organ swathed in blood, and saw how the part of him that reduced the world to its merely physical particulars was stirred by the act of setting his feelings down, as if blundering about in a magic glade.

  And yet how particularly physical the glade seemed, as he stared day after day into the garden and the grounds beyond, his view finishing on the clough’s steep wall of trees where Culdean Water, its pour always the colour of tea from the peat on the moors, was raising shreds of mist. He remembered passing this place at fifteen, on a midnight hike in 1906, well before the trenches claimed him for their own. The air was hazy with smoke, then, and smelt sulphurous. Now, some sixty years later, he knew how to understand.

  Even the first trembling fly on the glass, its waxy wings tested on the cool air, jolted his sense of amazement yet further down some long and private walk.

  4

  That Richard Godley was rumoured to ‘help’ some of his patients to their final sleep was well known even to her, and if the nurses watched him carefully it was not with the intention of catching him at this nefarious activity, but to confirm its reality. There were lacklustre discussions in the tea-room over the merits or otherwise of such final easing – some taking the view that the dying were like infants and they the midwives of death (these tended to be of a religious bent), while others professed themselves appalled at an activity tantamount to murder, seeing all sorts of possible ramifications (greedy or vengeful relatives backhanding doctors, and so forth) that, to those of a more didactic or philosophical mind, belonged inside the world of the cheap novel.

  In her dreams that night these discussions became the cawing or crying of birds, and Godley (with his crisp beard and salt-and-pepper suit) a kind of gamekeeper, prancing among them with a large shotgun. His war had, apparently, been a good one – that is, he had emerged from Tobruk with a decoration. When she saw him, one afternoon about a week after the lecture, walking towards her over the lawn with exactly the same gun in his hands, she heard again the growl of the liberated beasts her sleep’s iron bars had somehow let out.

  ‘Just culling, my lovely,’ he said. ‘Too many pigeons.’

  His eyes wandered over her face as if seeking a target. She had not heard any shots from inside the house, but the grounds were large and partly wooded. Looking up, wondering what to say, a large bedsheet folded over her arm, she saw how very red the sun was, as if full of blood, through the bare tops of the furthermost trees.

  ‘Are they really such a nuisance?’

  ‘You want me to spare them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would you care for a stroll? We could discuss books. I hear you like books. I hear you write. Don’t you go to the poetry club? I have spies.’

  ‘I have sheets to put out.’

  She eyed his gun briefly. Yes, it was the same as in her dream the week before, down to the polished wooden stock.

  ‘I promise I will keep it cocked, my lovely,’ he said, following this up with a guttural chuckle that made her blush. The dying folk no one loved (except the younger children, who tugged at their relatives’ hands thinking they might lie in this amusing way for ever) were as much at his mercy as she was, she thought.

  5

  There was nothing amiss with physicality – even the kind of brutish sort you had to face each day, each night . . . and here his nose wrinkled at the slight odour of fetor and decay that lingered in the lounge, emanating as from some general miasma, some bog into which, like those ancient sacrificial victims in prehistoric Denmark, they were each of them sinking, their bodies already half peat, their blood dark with its waters, until the surface rose over them and all that was left was a black pool under clouds. It is not physicality that is wrong, that leads one astray (here he imagined Bruno in glory, shedding the taint of existence in some heavenly wash that whitened the earth-blotched soul to something altogether unnatural), but the fight one has with it. He watched as a gardener heaped dung from the next-door stables into a barrow, the load steaming in the chilly air. All morning the dung was scattered over the flower-beds, its dark ochreous matter lovely in the sunlight, shot through with gleams where the unmashed straw still showed.

  His daughter had brought from home his old trench binoculars, which allowed this sort of detail to leap into sight, as well as giving him the power to roam without moving. When he was allowed outside for the first time – muffled from the cold, which to him had seemed a fresh, joyous sensation in its teasing bite – he had found himself overwhelmed as on a great sea, and requested that he forego his planned daily ‘walk’, terrified that this engulfing would sweep away his wonder. A small battle had ensued, in which the advantages of fresh air had prevailed over his own ‘agoraphobia’ (Dr Godley’s term), and he now ventured out with his eyes half closed, like a painter, greatly amusing whichever nurse was pushing him.

  The lidded blur of the landscape was sufficient, and allowed him to appreciate – and with as much joy as the view from the lounge – the touch of the air, the smell of the earth, the sensation of rough movement over paths as the wheels of the chair grappled with the vagaries of gravel and stones. It was not his eyes that were needed out here; the lack of a
n edge, a frame, made them too free, the landscape encroaching on him from every side, swivelling into view from every angle, the utter terror of its spaces grounded not in prolixity but in anarchy. Anarchy is not abandon, he reflected; abandon is beautiful, anarchy is ugly. Abandon is surrender, as I am soon to surrender to death, surrendering also all my memories. Anarchy is wilful and destructive, egotistical and raw, making a sound like those rooks there, battened to the treetops.

  ‘Would you like me to tuck your blanket in for you, Jack? You look a bit shivery.’

  ‘No, thank you very much, Carol. I’m quite alright. I’m really quite alright.’

  6

  As they walked over the vast lawn, chatting about books, she found herself drowning mentally in the fug of Dr Godley’s personality, as strongly repugnant to her as the wafts of pipe tobacco his breath gave off every time he turned his head towards her, yet unable or even unwilling to wrestle herself out of it. He was all of a piece – his bristly suit, his beard, his polished brogues, his voice, his opinions on current affairs, his bright-red, brand-new Triumph Spitfire that gouged the gravel or spat it at your knees. His waxy face was neither youthful nor too old, but poised somewhere in an eternal middle age that suggested he had never passed through any other stage of life. Against this certainty she felt herself flake into pieces as easily as the bark of the large birch that stood sentinel over the benches in the courtyard, not even the starch of her uniform helping her there.

  When he took her – seized would be too strong a word – around the waist, too far off from the house to be properly visible, and sought to press his mouth upon hers, his other hand burrowing under her uniform, fingers scrabbling at the elastic of her underwear, a thumb making a stab at entering the muff of her privates, the scream she gave off broke into the hundreds of rooks it frightened into flight from the tops of the great elms beyond, and with this sound went the last vestige of control. She flung the sheet over his head, pulling him down by its edges into a crouched position, her arms strong enough after a year of nursing to take avantage of his surprise.

  She ran, and he ran after her, tangling himself in the sheet like an awkward ghost, turning the sheet into a toga that hugged his body and felled him with one wrong footing while she fled to the nurses’ quarters.

  He lay there on the grass, his fury and surprise exaggerated, if anything, by the cotton that gripped his features and made his face resemble the plaster moulds of the dead at Pompeii, screaming in their agony – though Richard Godley’s agony was that of shame, and came out rather muffled.

  7

  Positioned again by the glass doors, the binoculars in his lap, he saw how without memory life is anarchic and spiteful, how life today wrought terrible destruction on memory, filling the space it left with stuff and nonsense. The television blithered in a corner, turned up too loud, and for the first time it bothered him even after he had removed his hearing-aid. It was the afternoon news, and the word ‘guerilla’ kept repeating itself, and he imagined gorillas in khaki in the jungles around Saigon. The television had been broken when he first arrived and a man had come about a week ago and mended it as one might mend the broken statue of a deity, and now as it flickered like a shadowy, poisonous thing in the corner of his joy he considered whether he might break it purposefully, whether he had the strength to sabotage it in some way – passing through his knowledge of such things culled from a lifetime in advanced electronics, then sinking into scenes from his past, his work, the laying of the lines in Africa, the research project in Newfoundland, the dull routine of the Manchester years in which he had, nevertheless, formed the technical basis for all hybrid computer systems (increasingly in use on assembly lines, according to the reports he had read right up to the day he came to the hospice). He was wearied even by the thought of it. His life had been almost too long.

  What, he reflected, had this sick, tired old man granted to the world – what new horrors, what dreams turning into nightmares, what little gifts? Their minutiae snaked into a thousand branches, themselves branching out into further possibilities as a twig snakes through the seasons and hardens into its life, leafing its growth. Why, he thought, training his binoculars on a nearby tree, do leaves look like lungs? Why do those new leaves on the ash appear to be coaxing the air into them as they quiver or lie still?

  With the binoculars he could shut out the shadows of the crazed, flickering eye the other old men were clustered round, and he roamed over the garden in peace, catching birds pulling worms on the lawn, looking forward to the nightingales said to nest close enough in the shrubbery to be heard mid-summer from everywhere in the house. He did not like considering his working life; already it seemed to him a shrivelled thing, like the shell of a caddis fly, imitating exactly his form, his being, but not of that being, that life he was now discovering. As for his children’s visits, they were almost a distraction, though he loved to touch their hands and kiss their cheeks, stroke the flesh that was part of his long-dead wife, the blood blended with his but her eyes in them both, their warmth and suffering, their unhappinesses; feeling the blood beat at their wrists with the tips of his fingers, listening to them without complaint or even bitterness.

  His old trench-observer’s binoculars swayed onto the high, far-off treetops of the clough, where rooks were swirling suddenly as if disturbed by a great wind, and then crept down to focus on a nearby winter rose. Behind the rose, at the furthest distance of the lawn, lay the edge of the woods where something moving caught his eye. He fumbled with the focus, and saw that someone was running, pursued by a white phantom. It was as if he himself had coaxed this scene into being, the figures so blurred and distant as to be almost imaginary; the pursued figure and the wriggling, white horror were like mythic figures providing, despite their tiny size, the disturbing subject of a vast painting. Greenery hid them before he could adjust the focus precisely enough to bring it out of dream. He waited, though there was nothing but the shadow of the woods, brushed here and there with the first blossom of spring.

  He lowered his binoculars and closed his eyes, disturbed in some way he could not describe, even to himself.

  From that moment on (and it was as if he was watching it happen from the outside, helpless), his feeling of joy and abandon withered. Remarked on by his visitors in the last week of his life, right up to the very last minutes of consciousness, his sinking into the blues was regarded by no one on the staff as the least bit abnormal, but the inevitable result of the fading of his essential powers.

  8

  ‘Did you kick him in the you-know-whats, Carol?’ asked Pooma, whose sense of propriety was only equalled by her lust for titillating facts.

  Her roommate shook her head.

  The sun had been discoloured and the rooks had taken away her screams. She was poised on the edge of a great discovery: death was neither sleep nor awakening but the total defeat of both. She had studied the moment the last breath was not repeated – they all had – but the stiffening yielded no more than the carrying on. There was no actual instant, in fact. Life was, she thought, rather like the great marquee they had put up for the annual fête on the lawn and which she had watched being taken down on the Sunday, its slow collapse like that of an airship’s she had seen in a documentary a year or two before. Life’s collapse begins at some indefinable point and continues until the last peg is packed away and the lorry driven off out of the gates, or possibly until the trampled grass springs up again. The point is, one could not know where life ends and death begins, only that death spares nothing, not one morsel.

  She ran these thoughts through her head over and over again, cutting deeper grooves in her consciousness and feeling her body under the nightgown with her hands as if to reassure herself of her own physical presence, straying long enough over her soft muff to drown herself frequently in a torrent of intense pleasure which encouraged sleep (of a deeper kind) rather than shame. The dead strode through her dreams with enormous confidence, trailing their soiled raiments and foul
ed sheets, stinking of discarded parts, babbling like excited children about to receive a treat.

  Soon these too strode out of the cage of her dreams and into her waking days.

  Dr Godley died in his Triumph Spitfire on a dark lane one late night in July. He reappeared in the corridor as she was carrying a chilled glass of milk to a patient some three weeks after the death notice had been printed in The Times. His face was gaunt but otherwise unharmed, though he trailed his fingers as if something had stamped on them.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ he whispered, as she stood quite calmly with the tray steady in her hands, waiting for him to depart, ‘let me tell you, it is awfully cold in here, awfully cold.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Godley, I can’t help you there,’ she said, keeping her back very straight. ‘It is high summer, the nightingales are singing and all the windows are open.’

  They stood together and listened; even in the corridor they could be heard, the nightingales, by the dead as well as by the living.

  THE ORCHARD

  He was never quite sure of Lucy. She would sometimes approach him like a bear wanting a hug, ready to crush him. At other times she would manifest herself as a harridan, yet a gentle one, all smiles behind the torrent of vituperation. They would make love easily, at least twice a week when he was not working late, and the twins came with no undue difficulty. After their birth she developed complications and there were no more children: he had hoped for a daughter. There were no other women, though he had considered several, and her affairs were only in his mind. Their holidays were desultory but relaxing, filling the car with shells and sand and the fragrance of sun oil, filling his mind with memories that had as much to do with his own childhood as the immediate past. One day they decided the house was not quite big enough and they moved after five weeks, ‘like lightning’ as she put it. They moved into a house near Henley with Jacobean panelling and an orchard next to a crumbling garden thick with bracken, nettles, liverwort in the damp corners, a muddy pond with a concrete frog on its bank green with algae. She was happy, he was not. There were woods around it which in fifteen years’ time, soon after they were gone under something of a cloud, would be cut down and replaced by a large commuter estate of forty well-appointed residences, thus depriving the house of its cosy isolation. During the time they were there they knew nothing of this, as one does not know what might happen in an hour’s time, let alone the far future. They believed the old battered house with its leaking roof and crumbling garden and ill-tended orchard would be slumped in its verdant solitude for good, and that their life would go on there for ever. He cleared the garden of weeds and cleaned out the pond, but all this took longer than anticipated and he was tired of the luxuriance, the greenness that crept back in lolloping stems and broad, unnameable leaves. It was like a story-book picture, one of the complicated illustrations in the children’s glossy book of fairy tales from which he would read to the boys on his free nights, emphasising the voices. Out of the greenery glared these pink and red eyes, denizens of the woods beyond. They walked these woods each Sunday and Lucy would thank God the trees were here, despite the mud underfoot and the miasma of rotting leaves between the mossed trunks. He imagined himself somewhere dryer, more exotic than Buckinghamshire, and wondered if he should have accepted that post in Dubai. He would dream at night of hills of sand, hills rolling on and on under a burning sun and their damp house in the middle of these hills, surrounded by a grey cloud of mist in and out of which the boys played, the garden and the orchard still rampant somehow.