As it grew lighter it began to rain. He walked down Portobello Road, but not wishing to pass in front of the kebab and chicken shop (might not one of the men already be there, setting up? Might not the dog be there?) he turned off and walked up the Grove. He was nearly home when he paused outside St Michael’s to pick up the flowers that had fallen from the war-memorial crucifix: hot-house lilies dripping with London rain that he threaded again between the cross and the figure’s bowed wooden neck. There were often flowers here, though he had never seen who brought them. One of the local Spanish or Portuguese, someone used to the dressing of images; or the old priest perhaps, a High Church relict who drank most nights in the pub across the road wearing a boot-length coat of ecclesiastical black.
There had been a Christ above the door of the church in N—, Christ the shepherd in white marble, ten, fifteen feet high, the arms outstretched above the murdered congregation. An object of such utter inutility, dumb, wicked in its deceiving, it had begun in Clem an irrational rage (for what did he, Nora’s son, expect of stone?), an anger he was no longer properly tracking, and that moved through his blood like a virus. Yet towards this small wooden figure, half grey from years of soot-fall, he felt an ill-defined affection. He could not have cared less what it stood for, was intended to stand for. What he liked was the way it looked, the limbs slender and well carved, the buoyancy of it, the way, between the brick wall of the church and the traffic, it possessed some quality of weakness endured, of suffering endured, that was purely human and subtly instructive.
At the flat he showered the scum of baby oil from his skin, dressed in clean clothes, made coffee, and sat at his desk, smoking. The LED on the phone blinked in sequences of three. When he finished the cigarette he pressed the playback button. The first call was from Shelley-Anne. ‘Silverman’s taken off for a while,’ she said (a voice with a sleepless night inside it). ‘I think he may have gone up to Toronto. Do you have his cellphone?’ She read out the number and asked him to remind Silverman to call home. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked pointedly.
The second caller, who he guessed was Zara, had left no message, just a brief, quizzical silence, abruptly ended.
The last call was from the island. ‘Hello again, son. Sorry to keep missing you. The thing is we need to talk about Clare. There’s some urgency in fact or I wouldn’t keep bothering you like this. I know how busy you are. Anyway, that’s all, really. It’s just that I’m very worried. Right-oh. I’ll go now. It’s the old trouble, Clem...’
6
As they moved northwards, the carriages, half empty in London, began to fill up. The country flew past them. Hills, hay fields, a motorway, a caravan park; a spire topped with a knot of light where the sun flashed off a weathervane. Then the long deceleration into cities he had passed through a score of times without ever knowing more of them than the view from a train window.
Across the aisle from Clem, four soldiers on leave, their names stencilled on kitbags, drank lager out of cans and played cards (game after stoic game). Clem’s bag was on the floor by his feet, a shoulder-bag with a pair of tattered airline tags tied to the strap. He had packed lightly: a clean shirt, a summer sweater, his wash-things, a fold-up waterproof. He did not intend to be away for more than a few days. He would see his father, then, presumably, his sister. A night on the island, a night in Dundee. It was Saturday. By Monday evening, Tuesday at the latest, he would be back in London.
He walked down the train looking for the smoking compartment, finding it a few carriages further back, a helix of blue smoke under the roof. Where he sat someone had left their newspaper behind, a broadsheet, and he scanned the foreign pages, noting a photograph (cars on fire) by Toby Rose, a young photographer he knew in London, a true student of the extreme who, had he been at the Bellville that night as the rumours began, the first talk of a fresh outrage somewhere beyond the limits of the blacked-out capital, would gladly have taken Clem’s place beside Silverman in the Land Rover.
He folded the paper and thrust it under the seat. The train was running a little easterly now, towards Newcastle and the coast. The ticket inspector came through, then two Japanese girls with packaged cakes and cups of coffee from the buffet. He lit a cigarette and, as he smoked, distracted himself by trying to work out his father’s age. It was years since either had remembered the other’s birthday, but after a few minutes of calculation he decided his father must be seventy-seven or seventy-eight. If he had retired at sixty-five then he had lived at the house on the island for more than ten years, during which time Clem reckoned he had visited slightly less than once a year, perhaps eight times in total. To these visits there was a particular routine. Clem would arrive at Berwick on the early train from King’s Cross; his father would meet him at the station; they would shake hands and walk together down the hill into the town, going into one of the hotels for lunch. Two hours later, after a conversation consisting mainly of Clem giving polite answers to polite enquiries about his work, they would walk back to the station, shake hands again and say goodbye. Clem had never stayed at the house on the island, though he knew it had guest rooms for the use of male relatives (females had to make their own arrangements). He had never asked to stay, and after the second trip his father had stopped suggesting it, knowing, perhaps, that to raise it a third time would have brought into plain language his son’s continuing exasperation at his ‘withdrawal’ from the world, a retreat that Clem had always considered extravagant, baffling, perverse even. Clare, though capable of heroic intolerances of her own, had argued the other line, reminding Clem (on those occasions when they still bothered to discuss it) that their father, after his own discreet fashion, had been a churchgoer all his life; that when Nora died it was his faith that had kept him strong; that without his work—most of his career had been spent at the British Aerospace plant in Filton as an engineer, a specialist in turbines—there was nothing substantial to keep him in Bristol. A few friends and neighbours, the house itself. It was not enough.
‘But a monastery!’
‘It’s not a monastery. It’s a community.’
‘They’re lay monks, Clare.’
‘A group of like-minded men, that’s all. A brotherhood.’
The brotherhood had a brochure. William Glass sent copies of it to his son and daughter in the week after he moved to the island, a folded photocopied sheet with a sketch of the house on the front, Theophilus House, named, so the text explained, after the Roman lawyer who taunted St Dorothy on her way to martyrdom, asking her to send him the fruits of the garden of heaven. Twenty elderly men there given over to God, widowers mostly, retired men of all backgrounds. A former publican, an ex-policeman, a schoolmaster, a naval officer. They rose at five, a scene Clem had sometimes imagined to himself, the old men like wraiths, rising in the dark and dispersing to chores, devotions. He supposed that he too would have to get up at five, though he had no intention of sharing in the life of the community, even for a morning. He had agreed to stay because of how his father had sounded on the phone on Friday: the sighs, the repetitions, the frank admission of helplessness.
He had, he told Clem, received a letter from Clare, a frightening letter, and completely out of the blue. He had had it for weeks and must have read it fifty times without being any nearer to knowing what to do about it. He would, of course, let Clem see it as soon as he came up. He very much wanted Clem’s opinion on it.
‘So you haven’t seen her?’ asked Clem. ‘You haven’t spoken to her?’
But he had not been able to! He had been expressly forbidden! The only contact he had had was with a colleague of hers, Finola Fiacc, Irish, something at the university, an administrator, he thought, supposed to be helping, supposed to be a kind of go-between, but apparently intent on obstructing him.
‘I have been trying to remember,’ he said, at the end of the call, ‘everything that happened the last time. Did we let her down in some way? Did I let her down?’
‘That was a long time ago, Dad.’
‘Yes, I know. But still, I’m trying to remember.’
Some lapse? Some failure of care? What use would it be to remember it now? What could be done about it? Clem that winter—the winter of the ‘last time’—had been twenty years old, a student in the humanities department at Sheffield, but already restless, already disenchanted with French philosopher-kings, English Marxists, American feminists (Wuthering Heights as a study in menstruation). It was the winter he met Professor Lamb, whose office walls were hung with large board-mounted black-and-white photographs of the Biafran war and Vietnam, the first Don McCullins Clem had seen, certainly the first he had ever looked at. Lamb had had a line Clem liked about profundity lying in surfaces and, alert to his student’s interest, had introduced Clem to Dorothy Lange’s portraits of Depression-era USA, Bill Brandt’s work for Picture Post, Capa’s civil war Spain, Weegee’s streets of New York. There, in the big-format books on a table in the library, in the exhausted back of the Jarrow coal-searcher, the flung-out arms of the loyalist soldier dying on a hill outside Córdoba, were truth and beauty, life in the raw, and all that poetry of the actual Clem had not even known himself to possess an appetite for. Almost at once he had been moved to emulation, buying, with money inherited from Nora, a second-hand Nikon—the weighty and indestructible F2. He learned to develop and print in the university darkrooms, grew used to the stink of chemicals, began to talk, breezily and much too often, about Reality, believing then—and how happy it had made him!—that taking photographs was an honest and straightforward way of engaging with it.
Clare was in France doing a postgraduate year at the Louvre. The first Clem knew of her illness (that time as this, a phone-call from his father) she was already in hospital in Paris, though it was another two weeks before he understood that she had not gone down with some infection, some unpleasant but common enough mishap of the organism she was young and strong enough to shake off quickly. She was brought home to Bristol and spent a month at the psychiatric hospital in Barrow Gurney, a second month as an outpatient. Among family and friends the idea took hold that something must have happened in Paris to ‘trigger’ the illness, and because it was Paris the assumption was made that the trigger was a romantic difficulty. What better cause than love? What more excusable one? But Clare had offered nothing to support this theory. To Clem, six or eight months later, she said she had been ‘run down’, that Paris had ‘overwhelmed’ her. The vagueness was defensive perhaps, but he had been left with the impression that she herself had no special insight into what had occurred or, if she did, was not prepared to share it with him. As she grew stronger it was easier to forget. Soon, it was hardly spoken of, and never in front of her. She had gone to Paris, she had come back. Even the diagnosis, a language not at all about the flush of young love, was allowed to sink to the bottom of the collective memory. She returned to her studies and thrived, a slightly different Clare, but one whose alteration was visible only to those few who had known her intimately from the beginning. Clare Glass became Dr Glass, an attender of conferences, a giver of papers, a recipient of grants and awards. Every third or fourth year she had a book published by an academic press. Clem had them all in London, though other than the first, Delacroix and the Economics of Excitement, and half of the second, The Fallacies of Hope: J. M. W. Turner in Italy, he had not read them; nor, he thought, did she particularly expect him to. They were given as a courtesy and he was glad to have them, with their painterly covers, their sober commentaries. Under, he supposed, their mother’s influence—though Nora had been impatient of ‘ivory towers’ and might have preferred Clare to be an ordinary schoolteacher—her writing, what he had seen of it, was strung on a frame of sophisticated left-leaning politics. But beneath the scholarship, the picking over of the bones, the civilised dryness, was an abiding passion for a certain kind of sensual visual luxury. Her public style—her clothes, hair, appetites—had to them all an obvious austerity, yet the paintings she wrote about were soaked in moonlight, drama, in chaos even, a tension Clem had always thought to be a way into her, though he had taken the thought no further.
The last time he had seen her, the previous autumn, she had been guest curator for an exhibition at the Cour-tauld. They had met at the gallery and gone to dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club. At forty-four, she still drew her share of admiring glances from the men at the other tables, drew them more than before perhaps, an allure that had as much to do with her gravitas, her mid-life swagger, as with the length of her legs, her good skin. After dinner he had walked her to the house of a monied girlfriend of hers in Tite Street, someone she had been at St Anne’s with. He had kissed her cheek, then waited at the bottom of the house steps until she was welcomed into the yellow light of the hall and had turned to wave to him.
And now this! ‘The old trouble’, back after twenty years. Out of the blue? What would people blame this time? What did Dundee suggest?
On a hill to the right he saw the rigid wings of Gormley’s giant seraph. They would be in Newcastle soon. Berwick was less than an hour away. What now? He needed a view on all this, a plan of action, but had neither. Reason wasn’t helping much. Reason merely told him he was in no condition to help others. It was his heart he needed now and his heart had locked fast the night he had straddled the dead with his lenses. To whom, then, should he explain his unfitness? To his father? To Clare? He could leave the train in Newcastle, of course, make up some story about work, a job he couldn’t turn down, but he knew he wouldn’t. He watched the city suburbs pass, the track curving towards the river. Then two minutes in the broken shadows of the station, the blast of a whistle, and he was off again, racing north like some foolish doctor with nothing in his bag and not even the will to find kind words.
7
His taxi driver knew Theophilus House, though if he had any opinions on it he kept them to himself. They drove out of the town, travelling back along the coast, then crossed the causeway, a narrow road, pale with salt, which ran between shining mud-flats and banks of marsh grass. On the island they passed by groups of tourists ambling from the coach park, many of them in brightly coloured windproof jackets, for though the sun was on their backs there was a gusting easterly wind that blew the hair around their faces and made them walk with their hands in their pockets. In winter—and winter here would be eight, nine months of the year—the weather would whittle any softness from you. A place for those who were bom to it, or for those who could warm themselves with their own thoughts.
Theophilus House was the first big house in the village. It stood at the side of the crossroads, grey, four-square, weathered and undistinguished, a row of low brick outbuildings at the back where a flagstone passage led to an entrance. A man in overalls and welder’s goggles leaned his head from one of the sheds. Clem gave his name but the man already seemed to know who he was. Father, he said, examining Clem through the green glass of his goggles, was away in the van collecting feed for the hens. He would not be long now. At this time of the afternoon most of the community were busy. Clem should look for the guest master. He was about in the house somewhere, upstairs perhaps. Tea was at five thirty sharp. ‘Egg salad,’ said the man, drawing his head back into the shed. ‘Listen for the gong!’
Clem went into the house, moving from room to room but finding no one. For a place inhabited by twenty souls there was little to evidence the daily round. No unwashed teacup, no book left casually at the side of a chair. No boots by the door, no whiff of pipe-smoke. It was neat as a barracks.
The walls were whitewashed and mostly unadorned, though beside the half-open door of the office was a painting of an astonished man receiving a basket of apples and roses from a tall quattrocento angel. (What was this childish obsession with angels? Did they believe in fairies too? Hobgoblins?) Opposite the painting was a long-case clock with a slow, self-important tick, and next to the clock, a flight of stairs turning at a frosted window and rising to a broad, bare landing. Here, there were four shut doors to choose between. Clem tried the
one directly ahead of him, opened it cautiously, and stepped into a small room of butter-coloured light where two men knelt before a simple altar. Candles flickered on the altar cloth. The men’s white heads were bowed, their hands clasped beneath their chins. If they had heard Clem they gave no sign of it. There was no discordant modernity. What he saw—the candles, the men’s postures, the way they leaned slightly forwards as though pressing into the infinite—he might have seen in identical terms five hundred years ago. On his tongue he tasted the incense they used, a savour of ashes and aromatic wood. The candle flames shivered in a draught from the stairs. One of the men straightened his neck, a dreamer rising to the surface of his sleep. Clem stepped back on to the landing and gently drew the door shut.
The next room he entered was a dormitory, and so like the one he had envisaged he wondered if his father had ever described it to him. Two rows of sternly made-up beds, the old mattresses grooved from the weight of their nightly occupants, each bed with its woollen blanket, its wooden locker. A man was kneeling there too, though he was scrubbing rather than praying. ‘Timothy,’ he said, looking up at Clem and crinkling his face. ‘And you must be William’s son.’ He was not the guest master: ‘Nothing so grand, I’m afraid.’ He suggested that Clem look in the gardens or perhaps the laundry, and then, as Clem turned to go, added, ‘That’s where Father sleeps,’ pointing with his brush to one of the middle beds along the left-hand wall, a bed exactly like the others.
Downstairs, the office door was now wide open. Inside, stooping over the desk, William Glass was counting money into a petty-cash tin. There was a moment, three or four unguarded seconds, during which he remained oblivious to Clem, a remote and elderly man in a corduroy suit, his back humped above the shoulder-blades, his long white fingers not quite steady. When he saw Clem he hurried round the desk to greet him. He squeezed his son’s arm, appeared briefly at a loss for what to say to him, then asked about the taxi ride—‘How much did he charge you, by the way?’—and when Clem told him, stroked his little grey beard and said it was a high-season fare though not outrageous.
The Optimists Page 3
