The second impulse to travel came from an unexpected quarter: his dealings with his mother. As he’d grown an indefinable tension had crept between them, evident not so much through confrontation as a loss of assonance: that pliability, the willingness of children to rhyme with the lives of their parents.
As a boy Nick had rarely seen Elizabeth before nine in the evening, but she’d sit on the edge of his bed and they’d talk way past a sensible hour. They had no secrets. He would give his verdict on his teachers and she’d pass sentence – like consigning Mr Openshaw, the headmaster to a week at Butlins with a clothes peg on his nose. This was a time of alliance against Sensible and Prudent, and the Grown-Ups. Unusually the separation didn’t begin with a conflict of ideas – although that was to come – but with his size. It started when he began lumbering round the house and spilling things at the table because of the glut of adrenalin. As he filled out and rose above her head, she turned brittle. It was as if becoming a man had not been a foreseeable consequence of his infancy Nick couldn’t recall when it first came to pass, but she stopped coming to his room at night, and no comparable ritual took its place. It was what they both wanted, without saying so; perhaps without even knowing it. He’d lie in the dark simply aware that she was still in the Green Room, still between the papers of a brief. During breakfast he could see the courtroom looming in her face. At the weekends, she was forever tuning into conversations halfway through, getting the wrong end of the stick. As he moved towards manhood, her work expanded to meet the space created by his diminishing childhood. It was part of a symmetry that he didn’t altogether like. For while he wanted to build his own life elsewhere, he didn’t altogether appreciate her concurrence. The night before he went to Edinburgh, she cried: out of loss but with relief, he thought. Most of the friends he made told the same old story.
Comradeship, hangovers and exams were the landmarks of his growing independence. And from that new vantage point he began to see his mother’s awkwardness as an achievement, a mighty thing, purchased by little acts of selflessness. She’d managed to let go of her son, knowing that she would drift towards the waterfall. She, too, was an adventurer, he thought. She’d made the heroic sacrifice.
Just when this adult gratitude had shaped his outlook, Nick observed with surprise that his mother was hovering over the terrain she’d abandoned. At one point, he thought she’d lost her sanity. Just after Nick had qualified, she slammed the front door and practically ran into the sitting room. ‘You’ve never had a full medical,’ she said, as if he’d been reckless since childhood.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I don’t care.
They had argued a great deal recently, so Nick seized the opportunity for accord. ‘All right… send in the doctor.’
Nick had thought of blood pressure and tummy pressing from a buxom nurse. But his mother had other ideas. She wanted every organ screened. They argued some more; they bargained; and she paid. Nick had X-rays, ultrasound scanning and an ECG. Kidneys, liver and heart. When the results came back showing him to be without fault or defect, she burst into tears.
‘What else did you want?’ asked Nick.
‘Nothing,’ she sobbed, flushed and radiant. ‘I only wanted this.’ And they went to a restaurant as if she’d won a nasty case.
After that outburst she began to come at night and sit on the edge of his bed, but it didn’t quite work. She once asked about his intentions.
‘What will you do, Nick?’
‘Dish out prescriptions, hold the odd trembling hand.’
‘Whereabouts? I imagine London would be an attractive prospect.’
Without having said anything to his parents, Nick had already approached Medecins Sans Frontieres, and various other agencies, all of which had suggested he obtain some practical experience. So Nick was thinking of a couple of years in a surgery, but not one so near to home.
‘How about approaching Doctor Ferguson in Primrose Hill?’ continued Elizabeth.
Primrose Hill was on the other side of the road from St John’s Wood. She wanted him back home. His mother had worked out how to swim upstream, away from the waterfall, and she was determined to survive. At that moment more than any other, Nick recognised that he had to put some distance between her need and his identity.
Nick’s father had observed this progression from medical-test frenzy to night-time enquiries after employment hopes with the calm attentiveness that he gave to bookplates and display cabinets. He’d been an unhappy banker for twenty-seven years until they’d got rid of him, an apparent humiliation that had set him free to study butterflies and beetles. He was a simple man who considered work a species of evil.
Avoid it,’ he said firmly.
Elizabeth had just gone to the Green Room. This was the day following the Primrose Hill proposal, and, as if on cue, Charles offered Nick the third reason why he should travel.
‘See things. Make notes. Be fascinated.’ He was leaning forward, whispering loudly ‘Look at that streak in your mother’s hair. That’s what work can do to you.’
It had appeared rapidly over two weeks when Nick was sixteen. In fact, as he subsequently learned, there was no medical explanation for the change. But Nick looked to legend if science was found wanting, and something similar had happened to Thomas More and Marie Antoinette before they were executed. He told his father.
‘Precisely,’ said Charles. ‘There’s no rush. Have you thought of Down Under?’
Nick hadn’t, but he liked the idea. It stirred his soul, for the phrase conjured up the ultimate voyage. He’d be able to wear a hat with corks dangling from strings. He could legitimately have a machete in his belt. A week or so later Charles phoned an old client in Brisbane who, it transpired, had a nephew with a surgery in Rockhampton.
‘Where?’ asked Nick.
‘Rocky’ Charles paused as if he were surveying millions of bleating sheep. ‘That’s what the locals call it.’
‘Oh dear, no…’ Elizabeth underlined a sentence in a brief She surfaced momentarily ‘Who?’
‘Not who,’ said Nick, with the relief that comes before a parting ‘It’s a place.’
‘Where?’
‘The land of Oz.’
She was stunned. She’d thought it was all talk. ‘Oz,’ she said, sinking.
Nick took off from Heathrow in the rain. The plane pushed through the cloud and it was just blue: a wonderful, clean, endless blue, as if he’d entered a sapphire. He caught a night coach out of Sydney, taking the front seat, and the headlights opened up the future. By morning they were cutting through oceans of high green sugar cane. For lunch he stood barefoot on the blistering tarmac drinking fresh pineapple juice. He could smell the sea. There wasn’t a sheep in sight.
The nephew was called Ivan and he laboured under the misapprehension that Nick’s father had bestowed all manner of financial blessings on his uncle’s business – which simply wasn’t possible – and so Nick received a sort of reward by proxy For a modest amount of work, he received immodest remuneration. The world was indeed a different place when things were upside down.
Nick did a weekly stint at a school in Yeppoon where there were fat cane toads in the swimming pool. A sub-aqua club shared the facility once a week. Nick joined them and duly signed up. He bought the gear. He took a course. And he discovered yet another world, but bigger and cleaner and deeper and more mysterious than any place he’d ever known. Out of sight, countless tiny polyps had built the biggest thing on earth: a reef, a barrier, a coral kingdom.
Then the letters from his mother had started to arrive, wistful things, not signed by his father. At first they looked back to his early school days – the time she’d missed. But then her tone became inquisitive. She wanted to know when he’d be returning. For some reason he couldn’t write back, so he lunged for the phone on the evening of his birthday He ‘let slip’ that he’d be staying another year – something he’d thought of anyway ‘What about Papua New Guinea?’ said his father. ‘The B
undi do a butterfly dance.’ His mother mumbled that Christmas was coming ‘The house is huge and empty without that awful music. Your trainers are still by the door, where you left them. I keep thinking of your feet.’
Then one day when he was diving off Green Island he understood. He was treading water. A queue of small brightly coloured fish was lined up before some sort of plant rising from the coral. It was like a car wash. The leaves, or whatever they were, opened up and a fish swam in. After a moment the leaves opened again, the fish left and the next one took his place. And there, at that depth, watching fish get themselves cleaned up, he realised that his mother wanted to tell him something; that she couldn’t write about it; and that she hadn’t mentioned it to her husband. Nick sorted out the flight.
A few days later his mother was dead in a parked car. She was sitting at the wheel, eyes closed, with a smile on her face. It was only when a pedestrian knocked on the window that anyone realised that anything was wrong. A paramedic found her mobile phone in the footwell. She must have dropped it as she tried to dial for help. Within reach, on the passenger seat, was a set of antique spoons, marked ‘?30’.
On the plane to Singapore Nick forced his head against the window. A most awful wave of emotion racked him. He cried desperately. The woman next to him asked for his yoghurt, and he couldn’t even face her to say ‘Yes’. His mother was out of reach. He’d travel now for twenty-two hours and he’d get no nearer. By the time he reached Manchester the impact of grief had been anaesthetised around a painful truth: his mother had wanted to tell him something, and he’d left it too late. In the churchyard during the burial, Nick recalled the childhood exchange that had often ended a day of revelations. She’d sit on his bed, stroking his hair:
‘No secrets?’ she’d whisper. ‘None.’
More quietly: ‘You can always tell me anything.’
He would study her in the dark with a child’s careful eyes, absorbing this insight: his mother received much, but she did not give.
Why did he recognise that only now? Nick slipped out of the pantry. On entering the hall a discreet cough made him turn:
‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t know what to say Dreadful business, if you ask me.’
3
Anselm kept his socks in a wig tin. It was large and dinted, a thing from his days at the Bar. His name was painted in gold upon the side. The wig itself rested upon a bust of Plato, part of the miscellany of oddments that he’d kept on becoming a monk (the remainder being his books and a jazz record collection, both of which accrued to the benefit of the community). The tin was still in service. Anselm used it daily as he’d done in that other life.
After lunch Anselm joined the community for recreation in the common room. It was a relatively important moment because he was wearing glasses for the first time in public. He’d chosen what he thought were modest horn-rimmed frames, but the view of Bruno was that he looked a cross between a futures trader and an owl. He’d been told to wear them all the time. Colouring slightly, he put them on and picked up a newspaper.
No one noticed, perhaps because the alignment of chairs cut him out of three conversations. On his right, Wilf timidly observed that as an entertainer Liszt could reasonably be compared to Richard Clayderman, given his penchant for transcribing other people’s good tunes; on his left Cyril expanded (loudly) on the double-entry ledger system; and straight ahead Bernard tried to find a word that rhymed with ‘murder’.
‘How about “merger”?’
‘We’re not a company,’ said someone.
“‘Herder”?’
‘We’re not a farm,’ observed another.
‘“Murmur”’.
‘Ah,’ said Wilf, crossing over, ‘that is expressly forbidden in The Rule.’
Murmuring. Grumbling from the heart. It could kill a community Anselm hid behind the raised paper, his mind on the funeral and his wig tin. Elizabeth, he thought, would be buried by now. The key lay in an envelope covered by socks. He’d looked at it every day, until he almost didn’t see it any more. Anselm had fished it out that morning knowing the funeral was underway A brief note recorded the address of a security firm where the safety deposit box was retained. Elizabeth had chosen Sudbury, a town near Larkwood. He’d thumbed the key, pondering her courtesy Then he’d put it back, firmly closing the lid.
4
‘Dreadful business.’
Nick turned towards the voice. A short, oval man bulging out of a dreary suit scooped a fistful of cashews from a bowl and began popping them into his mouth as though they were sedatives. A grey tangled beard crept up his cheeks to narrow, moist eyes, suggesting a sociable mole on hind legs.
‘I’m Frank Wyecliffe, a lowly solicitor.’
‘Very nice to meet you.
‘I instructed your mother year in, year out. Family carnage mainly’ He rummaged for a business card. It was dog-eared.
‘Thank you.
‘I never knew she had a weak heart, though. Never.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘Really? You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
The mole popped some nuts, chomping quickly ‘Well, if I had known, I’d have thought twice about some of the stuff I sent her.’ He paused. ‘First and foremost she was a prosecutor, although she defended on some memorable occasions.’ The small eyes brushed over Nick. ‘I suppose you knew that?’
‘No.’
Ah.’ He sniffed. ‘It doesn’t seem right somehow If asked, I’d have said your mother would have died – if you’ll forgive the bluntness of the term – on her feet, bringing down the wrongdoer.’
‘That would have been more fitting.’
‘The East End, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Got family over there?’
‘No.’ Nick shifted uncomfortably ‘Why?’
‘Sorry. Silly question. That’s why I keep out of court.’
Nick backed away ‘If you’ll excuse me.’ The little man’s intense manner seemed to have filled the hall. Nick ran upstairs as if on an errand of practical importance. At the open door to the Green Room he paused. With one hand on the jamb he surveyed the familiar chaos.
This was her study Piles of paper lay scattered on the floor, held down by various paperweights – curious stones or chunks of wood picked up from the Island of Skomer. He saw her in outsized wellingtons, a torch in one hand… she cut the beam and called, ‘Hurry up.’ They’d stood and stared. He could still see the glow-worms and her eyes, wide with astonishment.
Downstairs a glass smashed. Nick stepped into the room, treading between heaps of transcripts and reports. As a child he’d always been picking things off her desk. Now he wanted to hold the fountain pen that had written those letters. By her chair, he stepped over a cardboard box and slipped; a hand flew out and he struck a line of small antique books on the desk – the kind you don’t read, but look good. He steadied himself and swore. By his foot was a dark glossy photograph, a shot of a smashed cranium, part of an autopsy report. He knelt down to gather the books. One lay open, its pages fanned against the floor. When he picked it up, a key fell out. Engraved upon it was ‘BJM Securities’ and a telephone number.
For something like ten minutes Nick sat at her desk, his mind blank. He flicked through the pages of The Following of Christ -a tiny volume by Thomas a Kempis, printed by Keating and Brown in 1829. Nick had written all over it when he was five.
She’d never said anything, as far as he could recall; but she must have noticed, even if it was years afterwards, because a hole had been cut into the text. He put the key in his pocket and left the room slowly like a man crossing a field.
Nick braved out the remaining hour or so, shaking hands and talking of Australian wildlife. When they’d all gone he tapped open the kitchen door and saw Roderick Kemble assaulting the cooker while crunching a mint. Good old Roddy in his red apron. He was swishing onions in a skillet. The cad had prepared for the moment no one had thought about. Ni
ck leaned on the counter observing his father at the table: the jacket discarded, the rolled-up sleeves. Thin, silvery hair, usually combed back, had been ruffled. The red patches on his cheeks – a harmless liver malfunction – glowed as if he’d been slapped across the face.
He began to speak, and Nick listened, thumbing the key in his pocket. For some reason he felt like an intruder.
‘During the reception I nipped upstairs to the Butterfly Room. After a minute there was a knock at the door. Someone called Cartwright.’
Roddy banged the skillet with one hand and threw in something pink with the other. ‘She’s a police inspector.’ He tipped a bottle and threw in a match. The thing almost exploded, as in a pantomime when the genie turns up.
‘What did she want?’ asked Nick casually.
Charles searched the table, as if for crumbs. ‘She asked whether Elizabeth had been troubled by anything.’ He was ruffled and red. ‘Just kindness, you know Surprised that she’s gone the distance too soon.
Roddy banged the skillet on the cooker, as if it were a gong.
‘Plates, glasses and the amenities of joy if you please,’ he said solemnly ‘Even now, at this painful time, we cannot waver.
Nick woke in the middle of the night. He went to the bathroom for a glass of water. The mirror was too low because he was too big… that’s what his mother had said… so he stooped to look. Despite the sun, he hadn’t gone especially brown. But his skin was speckled and his eyebrows had turned to straw As if that bewildered face ought to know, he asked himself why a solicitor had quizzed him about the East End, rather than dingos; why an inspector had gone after a widower; and why a key his mother’s secret, had been kept not only from her husband, but also from him.
5
Father Andrew was fond of a saying from a Desert Father:
‘Don’t use wise words falsely’ Perhaps that explained why he was always cautious when he spoke. And why it was disconcerting when you sensed he was preparing to speak.
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