Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  In the last year of his life my father spent a lot of time in the garden. (Charlie was certain he wasn’t going to last the year. ‘Twelve percent of widowers die within twelve months of the death of the wife,’ he told me, as dispassionate as an actuary, and our father, he just knew, was going to be one of that twelve percent.) He tried to maintain it in the condition in which his wife had left it, and did so, approximately. Sometimes I gave him a hand, but usually he preferred to attend to the garden alone. He preferred to be alone most of the time. For hours at a stretch he would sit on the bench, holding her old gardening gloves, which had stiffened to become crude casts of her hands. He could never bring himself to discard anything that had belonged to her – it seemed disrespectful even to be alive now that she’d gone. Remembering days from their life together was sometimes a consolation, but far more often it was not. When she’d been here and they had recalled things that they’d done together many years ago, the experiences that they recalled had become a part of their present life and so had come alive again, but now that these memories existed only in his head it was as if the past had suddenly withered away from him. Friends reminiscing about Sylvia might cheer him up for a while, but more often what he felt was that he had entered a state between being alive and being dead, and that soon these friends would be talking about him as they were talking about his wife. (There weren’t many friends, it must be said. The social circle had always been narrow (neither parent could be described as gregarious; having the mutant son in residence also imposed certain constraints on the entertainment of guests, I’d say), and death had winnowed it to the brink of extinction.) I would sit with him and read; sometimes he read his paper or half-finished the crossword, but mostly he watched the birds in the trees or the traffic of the clouds or whatever other distraction might be available, and from time to time he’d speak. His utterances were brief and gloomy. ‘It’s meant to get better with time,’ he said, ‘but every morning she’s gone again. It’s the same day, over and over and over.’ She’d died on a Tuesday. On the Wednesday they had been going to spend the day at Kew. They’d been talking about it, just before she went out to the post office. Some mornings, on waking up, for a second or two he’d think that they would be going to Kew that day.

  Twice a week Janina would come round and cook a meal for him, and sometimes she’d stay all afternoon, talking to him as if he was on suicide watch. He didn’t want to talk that much. The entirety of most days were spent inside the house. Then came the week of his birthday. Celia came over to see him, and stayed for five days, and each afternoon she went for a walk with him. This became a new routine for him, after she’d gone: every afternoon, regardless of the weather, he’d take half a dozen circuits of the park. These walks brought a slight lightening of the gloom. ‘Grey,’ he’d answer, when I asked how he was feeling; very occasionally ‘light grey’. This new candour, by the way, did not betoken a new intimacy between us – had there been a lodger in the house I think he might have said the same to him. In bereavement he could no longer be bothered with the effort of keeping his thoughts to himself.

  One lukewarm August evening my father said to me: ‘I’m feeling very grey. I’m going to bed. See you at breakfast.’ It was still not perfectly dark. In the morning I waited until eight-thirty before knocking on his door. There was no answer, and I knew what I was about to see. There was no sign of distress on his face. It was if he’d finally wound down and stopped. So my father, at least, had what used to be known as a good death, or so it appeared. From his mouth might have issued a scroll inscribed: In manus tuas, Domine, commendu spiritum meum. I held his hand and sat with him for an hour, then I rang Celia.

  In his Physiologie du goût the epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin records that General Baptiste-Pierre-François Bisson drank eight bottles of wine every day. The general was immensely corpulent, he writes. Nevertheless – eight bottles?

  ‘Be in the world, but not of it’ – or, for some of us, vice very much versa.

  Freddie rings: he’s deluged with work, so he’s going to have to be in the office on Saturday. Charlie takes the call, but Janina goes out into the hall and grabs the phone. ‘This is not acceptable,’ we hear her hiss, like a boss to a useless underling who has finally gone too far. And: ‘No, no, no – that’s simply not good enough.’ Charlie comes back into the living room to report that Freddie will not be coming. ‘This has been on the cards for a while,’ he whispers. Livid Janina goes upstairs immediately, without so much as a Goodnight.

  I step out of bed and pain impales me, vertically, as if a two-foot spike has shot up through the pelvis. The after-shocks last for hours.

  It has been discovered that Petru has a magnificent voice: his employer, lured by a sweet high tenor to the vicinity of the swimming pool, found Petru skimming debris off the water and singing to himself while he worked. This is moderately interesting, I tell her, but what I want to know is whether or not she’s back with Mauro. A pause supplies the answer. ‘Now don’t you go all Charlie on me,’ she orders. She knows exactly what can and cannot be expected of Mauro. ‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ she says, and she can’t be too choosy now she’s at an age where everything depends on high-grade lingerie and low-level lighting.

  Celia and Mauro went to Bologna last weekend. It was enjoyable: the hotel (refurbished this year, which was a principal reason for the trip – Mauro visits hotels the way other people drop into new bars or shops) was as excellent as Mauro had expected it to be, and they took a slow stroll up to the basilica on Colle della Guardia, which used to be one of her favourite spots in the city. The weather was perfect, with a gorgeous Bolognese dusk to round off the day, suffusing the old brick walls with the roseate flush that she always loved so much. In the evening they went to a restaurant that was a favourite with herself and Maria. The moment she opened the door she recognised the boss. His name then occurred to her as well, and it was as if the force of the sudden recollection of his name obliged her to utter it: ‘Ciao Tino.’ She had to explain why she knew him, and Tino did a good job of pretending to remember her.

  It was a really wonderful evening, says Celia, but the cadence of her voice implies that the weekend with Mauro in Bologna was not as much fun as she’d expected it to be. ‘But?’ I prompt. ‘No “but”. It was terrific,’ she says. The restaurant, the whole weekend – she had a great time. ‘But? But? But?’ The meal was exceptional, she insists, and Mauro was on top form. He’s taken delivery of a new Aston Martin, and when he called for her on Friday evening she found on the passenger seat a Pucci shirt he’d bought for her. And yet – now we come to it – perhaps it had been a mistake to go back to one of her old haunts. As they were walking back to the hotel from the restaurant, a wave of sadness broke over her – that’s really what it was like, the impact of a wave. The restaurant had hardly changed since she had last been there, and neither, it now seemed to Celia, had she: she was still doing the same sort of work as she had been doing when she lived in Bologna all those years ago, for the same sort of money; she was living more or less the same life, albeit – temporarily – with a man of considerably more substantial means than his predecessors; and now she was two decades older – that was the only difference. She counted the years, and was horrified.

  The next day, walking up to the basilica, she was caught in the backwash of her wave of gloom. Sitting on the parapet on which she had so often sat with Maria, she tried to recall days that they had spent together in Bologna, and it was terrible that so few came to mind. She had lived in this city for a long time; she had been happy here; she had met Maria; yet all those hours – hundreds and hundreds of them, replete with good experiences – seemed to have left almost no residue. ‘It’s as if they never happened,’ she says. And she knows that, ten years from now, almost every minute of what’s happening now will have evaporated too. She has a great time with Mauro. Their brains aren’t in perfect harmony, but you can’t have everything, can you? The sex is as good as she’s ever had
; he makes her laugh, and vice versa. And yet, and yet … At times, when she’s not with Mauro, she wonders if she hasn’t permanently lost something. She seems to need Mauro to give her life some zest, and that’s what’s wrong – something’s gone seriously awry if she’s enjoying herself most acutely with a man she doesn’t love. Perhaps this dulling is inevitable, as one grows older, but she can’t bear to think that it is.

  At Sunday lunchtime Mauro had to meet someone for a business conversation, so Celia took herself off to Fidenza, a town she had never visited before. As the train pulled out of Bologna station she could feel the mood of ennui beginning to dissipate. An expectation of pleasure arose. Until recently, the first stages of engaging with a new locality have been one of life’s dependable satisfactions for Celia. The gratification of walking though unknown streets is of such richness that, to ensure maximum piquancy, she has often promised herself, while still in the thick of those hours of discovery, that she will never again return to this place – a promise that in many cases she has kept. And Celia’s afternoon in unfamiliar Fidenza did indeed prove to be pleasurable. The unique townscape of Fidenza composed itself around her as she walked from the station. The duomo presented itself in powerful sunlight, against a sky of crystalline blue. It was beautiful, really beautiful, she could see that – and yet it was as though the church were some sort of gigantic exhibit with a label that read A Beautiful Church, and she could see that the label was accurate, in the way a label bearing the text A Large Building Made of Stone and Brick would have been true. She went inside: her eyes received the light from a variety of things that should have pleased, and she felt almost nothing. Her thoughts, if they could be called thoughts, were as drab as postcards. Novelty had failed to have its customary revivifying effect – it felt, instead, like yet another repetition of the experience of being somewhere new. And the failure of Fidenza had an air of high crisis. The problem may be Italy – or rather, Celia in Italy. She has become dangerously jaded, she concludes, and the only way to refresh her faculties is to make a drastic change.

  The solution, she would have me believe, is England, the country that once bored her. She’s been in exile so long, so the argument goes, that the motherland has become a semi-foreign country. Her career (she actually uses the word) is going nowhere, she says. Back in London she could get a far better job than any she’s going to get in Italy. Back in London, I point out, she couldn’t afford any accommodation much larger than a kennel, unless she were to live in the limbo of deep suburbia. The riposte to this is a story about the travails of getting something done about the state of the road outside her flat. If she were a pal of a local politico, she tells me, it would have been repaired six months ago. ‘I think I’ve had enough, Dan,’ she says. ‘In the end it wears you down.’ By this time next year, she insists, she’ll be back in London. But I’m not to say a word to Charlie – it’s one thing to concede defeat on the school, but she doesn’t want him thinking that he’s been right about everything.

  Newly posted at Tat2.co.uk: pictures of a young woman who calls herself Ainj. A vermilion and turquoise shark swerves around her navel; a red starfish lies on the front of a shoulder; her left arm is sheathed in variously blue-green whorls and torcs of Celtic derivation, intertwined with seaweedish tendrils. Trix did a genius job, yeah? Ainj writes. Next we do the other arm, and then a chest plate to tie it all in. Gonna hurt like fuck but you gotta suffer for your art, right?

  A most splendid day: sunlight flowing up and down the hills; magnificent accretions of cloud, in multifarious tones of white; lengthy solos from a blackbird on a nearby TV aerial. Ellen enters, with a face I’ve seen on so many hospital visitors: fearful and humble, as if they are walking through an ogre’s palace but might get out alive if they watch their behaviour. All those doors, and death behind every one. The air moaning in the lift-shaft like the ogre’s sigh. Ellen puts a hand on mine. ‘How are you?’ she asks. ‘In despair,’ I answer. And he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain. Not sure if I said this. ‘But a hospice would have been worse.’ I did say this. Janina and Charlie, says Ellen, would never have contemplated a hospice – they would never have let me die alone. ‘Everyone dies alone,’ I almost say. I feel a compulsion to be wise. Ellen commends my bravery. It’s in the job description, I tell her. Ever heard of anyone losing a cowardly fight with cancer?

  Introduced to Ellen, Peter doesn’t know at first whether to shake her hand or hug her like one of the family, but he picks up a cue from her and does a little jump forward to give her a kiss on the cheek. They both go the same way and almost crack foreheads; he blushes brightly. As soon as his jacket is off, his mother takes him out into the garden for a talk. It’s obvious that Freddie is the subject. Much shrugging from Peter, as if to say that his brother is a hopeless case. He’s looking podgy and quite pale – insufficient exercise and sunlight. And the hair is already thinning too. After an hour, he comes up to my room.

  Freddie’s weakness for the white stuff, it appears, is putting his relationship with Valerie in jeopardy – indeed, Peter thinks they may have passed the point of no return. Screaming arguments have become frequent, and Valerie has delivered more than one ultimatum. Valerie has a volcanic temper, Peter says, but Freddie’s behaviour has been so erratic of late that even a vicar would be tempted to take a knife to him. Off his face in a Piccadilly bar, he came within a syllable of starting a fight with a similarly disoriented individual who – as any sober idiot could have seen – would have been capable of removing half of his teeth for him with a single blow. Even more severely scrambled one night last month, he permitted his hands to skim a curvaceous and unfamiliar posterior that presented itself to him in the crush around the bar. Valerie decanted a quantity of iced water onto his groin, and swore that a repetition of this misdemeanour would be the last offence he ever committed against her. Last night Peter and Freddie went out for a drink. Much of the talk was about Valerie: she’s the best thing that ever happened to him, says Freddie. He’s besotted with her. There’s not a sexier girl in London, and he doesn’t know what he’d do if she weren’t around. But she needs to understand that these are the best years of their lives and it’s just too soon to get all domestic. This would appear to mean, says Peter, that Valerie simply thinks it’s healthy to get to bed before 2 a.m. at least three times a week, and has doubts about the long-term sustainability of a cocaine-based diet. After the pub Freddie announced that he was going on somewhere – ‘Not your kind of place,’ he told Peter, chucking him a key to his flat. Peter had half a mind to tag along, mainly to prove that he wasn’t quite the slipper-guy his brother took him to be, partly to keep an eye on him (Valerie wouldn’t be there), but questioning revealed that the bar in question really wasn’t Peter’s kind of place, and they had more or less run out of things to talk about anyway. (Not that talking would have been feasible where Freddie was going – the music was loud, he warned, which meant it would be the sort of din that impairs your hearing into the following week.)

  When Peter got up this morning his brother had still not returned, so he rang him on the mobile, which put him onto voicemail, as it did again ten minutes later. On the third attempt Freddie answered: he said he was at the office, but the background noise didn’t sound right – Peter heard footsteps on a wooden floor, and there are no wooden floors where Freddie works. He was immediately tempted to ring the office landline to check if Freddie really was there, but then was dismayed that he should be reduced to trying to prove his brother a liar. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Peter, defeatedly. ‘He should be here. He has to stop messing people about,’ he says, in a tone that could be his father’s.

  An object known as the Exceptional Lie Group E8 has given Peter great excitement recently. Exceptional Lie Group E8 is a 248-dimensional structure, and the mapping of it took four years of work, he explains. The final computation – more than three days’ processing time for a supercomputer – churned out in excess of two hundred billion entries, and by ‘
entries’ we mean not mere digits but complex equations. ‘That’s so much data,’ he enthuses, ‘that if all the numbers were typed out they’d cover an area the size of Manhattan.’

  ‘Four dimensions has always been my limit,’ I tell him. Undeterred, he endeavours to explicate in the language of the laity the meaning of this inconceivably symmetrical creation and what its discovery might mean for supergravity and string theory and the work that Peter does. In this context, I don’t even understand what ‘discovery’ means, but I endeavour to simulate a partial comprehension. Peter knows that I’m putting on a show, just as he is, to an extent, in compensation for the absence of the feckless brother. But his 248-dimensional entity does delight him. ‘This is as complicated as symmetry gets,’ he tells me, with the hazy smile of a boy who has tasted ambrosia.