He stood at the living-room window looking at the scruffy garden, the stray blooms, the unmown grass decorated with lozenges of sunlight. Forgetting what had happened last time, choosing to forget it, he thought of calling Zara again. Would she take a day off work? The spontaneity of it might charm her—a pair of schoolkids tiptoeing past the headmaster’s study. Buy wine, chocolate, smoked salmon, cigarettes. Flowers! Then back to her flat behind Oxford Street. Lock the doors, pull down the blinds (were there blinds? He couldn’t remember). Go at it like dogs. He might even ask Rose to sell him some junk. He had not taken it before—Nora’s ghost would be aghast—but now the idea appealed to him powerfully. What was he saving himself for? Wasn’t hedonism as good a way as any? He could live in a kind of stumbling dance, show his bare arse to all solemn thinkers, act the fool. He no longer understood why he was going up north. Family obligation? Bad conscience? And what if he didn’t go? Who would think about it for more than ten minutes? Surely, like almost everyone else, he suffered from an exaggerated sense of the importance of his own actions. Better to be a clown or a drunk. Better to somehow get past caring and stay there.
Rose returned with a tray, a brass teapot, two little cups. They drank the sugary tea and smoked, meditatively. Rose had been working in the Balkans and was going back at the end of the week. He asked where Clem had been.
‘Canada,’ said Clem.
‘Canada? Shit. What’s happening in Canada?’
‘Nothing,’ said Clem.
‘Right,’ said Rose.
‘The car still works?’ asked Clem, quickly. He wanted no descent into the details of his trip.
‘The car’s all right,’ said Rose. They had bought it together from the auction house the other side of Wandsworth Bridge: five hundred pounds each. Out of the country half the year neither had need of a car of his own. Sharing was a sensible plan, though it was Rose who got the greater use of it.
‘Going somewhere nice?’
‘Dundee.’
‘Dundee!’ Rose shook his head. ‘Another of the world’s great trouble-spots. What about the old dark continent? You’re not going back?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘If you’re looking for fresh mayhem you can come with me.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Not?’
‘Looking for fresh mayhem.’
‘Well, please don’t tell me you’re going to start doing abstracts like that poor cunt Singer.’
‘There are other things.’
‘What? Weddings?’
‘Other things besides photography.’
‘If you’re giving up, sell me the Leica.’
‘You can’t afford it.’
‘I could if you gave me a good price.’
Clem nodded. ‘I’m going to need the car for a while. I’m not sure how long. A few weeks perhaps. Is that OK?’
‘Wenn du willst,’ said Rose, turning in his chair to watch the girl from the bed entering the room on bare feet. Not a nymph any more, but an ordinary broadhipped girl in a frayed towelling bathrobe, her hair tangled from the pillow. She looked about fifteen. ‘Clem Nina, Nina Clem.’
Clem wished her a good morning.
‘Clem’s off to Dundee,’ said Rose.
‘Nice one,’ said Nina, without a trace of Rose’s irony. ‘That’s the cake place, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Nice one.’ She showed off her little pearly teeth in a smile, found her pouch of tobacco under a cushion and started to roll a cigarette.
Clem said it was time he made tracks; Rose went to find the car keys. At the door they slapped hands and wished each other luck. ‘And think about the Leica,’ called Rose down the stairwell. ‘No sense in it gathering dust. I could do something with it.’
***
The car, a white Ford, unwashed in weeks or months, was parked beside the common. There was a penalty notice under one of the windscreen wipers. Clem put his case in the boot, put the notice in the glove compartment (at least two more in there) and wound down the windows to let out some of the cooked, rubbery air. The inside of the car was a scale model of Rose’s living room. Clem rooted through the cassettes scattered on the passenger-seat footmat, found one that he knew by the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, and put it on. For a minute it was tempting to stay there, secure in the public privacy of the car, listening to the caress of Veloso’s voice. He let his eyes shut, then opened them again and rubbed vigorously at his temples. He should be listening to some of Silverman’s ‘angry boys’, not this crooner. He looked again among the cassettes on the mat. No rap there; a good deal of glum British rock; some club stuff that might have been Nina’s. He settled for a tape called Essential Soundtracks 2, manoeuvring into the noonday traffic to the beat of ‘Caught in the Middle with You’, glad to be on his way at last, relieved, as though he had survived some subtle trap, the perilous down-suck of hesitation, inaction.
As soon as he had cleared London he filled the tank with petrol, paid with a cheque, then drove hard, a middle-lane driver, pushing the little car to keep up a steady eighty. Near Knaresborough he stopped for coffee. Fifty miles further north the traffic slowed to a crawl, half an hour in first gear until, for no observable reason, no blue lights or fuel spill, they were freed again. He crossed the Tweed at Coldstream—Berwick was only twenty miles down-river. He smiled a greeting to his father, and had a strange brief fantasy of all the old men from the house gathered around an enormous camera obscura in which they could see him, the white car, climbing into barren latitudes on a road that ran past dry stone walls and the shadows of hills. At Edinburgh, arriving at that point of the dusk when nothing is clean-edged, he lost his concentration and found himself on the M8 to Glasgow. He changed carriageways at the next junction and drove back, crossing the Forth Bridge in darkness, the lights of the shore-front below him, a sense of flying now, of no longer going north but upwards.
On the far bank, bored by symmetries, he turned off the motorway and took the minor roads, driving through villages and black countryside until a string of bulbs on a roadside inn made him realise how hungry he was. He went in and ate, gratefully, a heaped plate of badly cooked food. Immediately he longed for sleep. He asked behind the bar if they had rooms but there were none. The landlady gave directions to a place that might; Clem nodded but did not listen to her. He bought a bottle of Scotch and went back to the car. The roads were quiet, almost empty. He drove towards the sea (a sign said Tayport), then slowed and turned into a lane, wooded on one side, utterly unlit. Skeins of mist hung over the hedge-tops. His headlights picked out moths and, low beside a barred gate, a flash of yellow eyes. A second turning, narrower, led into the woods. He drove cautiously over trackway, pulled on to a small clearing beneath the trees, turned off the lights and switched off the engine. Quietness, like the hissing in a shell, seeped through the skin of the car. He drummed his fingers on the wheel and peered out at nothing. Did he want to stay here? Or should he press on for Dundee, find a B-and-B there, a cheap hotel? If he had kept the keys to Clare’s flat... but staying there would have brought the risk of a confrontation with Finola Fiacc. Would she not have tipped off the neighbours, warned them about an errant brother, a troublemaker? God help the pair of them if it came to a showdown in the small hours. What were they not equal to?
He climbed from the car and stretched his back. Above him he could see sprays of tiny stars but their light did not penetrate. The forest floor was black as a cellar, the car itself a bare grey shadow. He fetched the whisky and leaned against the ticking bonnet. Now that he was here he was determined to be at ease, to feel that this space apart from human voice or light was not hostile. Why should it be? If he climbed a tree he would see the glow of some village or other. Did he suppose Ruzindana would suddenly appear, megaphone in hand, as Odette said he had appeared outside the church compound, taunting them, calling them cockroaches, snakes, then urging his men to leave no grave half filled? No. This forest was neutral gro
und: it did not know him and had not been expecting him. It harboured only itself. If there was fear in this place then he had carried it with him from London.
He broke the seal on the bottle and warmed his mouth. He had the sudden urge to whistle, and he was grinning at himself, the absurdity of it, when he heard a movement, twenty, perhaps thirty yards to his right, a shifting or a falling that startled him so badly he gasped, theatrically, like the heroine in an old film. He crouched by the radiator grille, the bottle in his fist. For a minute he heard nothing; then it came again, a soft crashing ten yards nearer, ceasing as abruptly as it had begun. He bent towards it, listening with his spine, probing the tight, invisible corridors between the trees. The next sequence was longer—four or five seconds, leaf and fern and twig pressed underfoot directly behind the veil of the first trees. Whatever it was, whoever, it had a clear view of him now, his childish hiding by the car. Should he shout a challenge? Throw something? He could run, of course, as he had run away from the Spanish girl, as he had run from Clare too—or thought he had. He pushed himself to his feet and walked to the first trees. Now, if he stretched out his fingers, what would he touch? He went on. After twenty paces he stopped. No hand had clutched at him, no hot breath had blown against his neck. Another ten steps. A clatter of wing beats made him stumble, but he did not fall. Through the boughs he saw a scrap of moon, the moon in its first quarter, the rubbed edge of a coin. He went back to the clearing and smoked, lighting one cigarette from the embers of the last. There was no comfort for him in the knowledge that he had been stalked only by his own mind. He sat inside the car. A sense of aloneness descended, so vast he nearly laughed out loud. The dashboard clock said 10:10. He had been at the clearing for less than forty minutes. He locked the car doors and climbed on to the back seat. He could smell the smoke on his fingers, and something of the woods, clammy and fungal. He thought of Nina; of Toby Rose asking him if he was giving up. When he closed his eyes his head played monotonous views of roads, miles of Tarmac unspooling in real time. He muttered a short prayer, scoffed at himself, and aimed at sleep.
15
He did not know the routine at Ithaca—what time did bi-polars and alcoholics get up in the morning?—nor had he remembered to ask for such information when he had called from London, but he assumed there would be no five a.m. starts. He ate breakfast at a café in Dundee, then idled an hour, leaning on a wall watching gulls patrol the banks of the estuary. At eleven, in light rain, he drove out on the Arbroath road, missed his turning, doubled back, and parked outside the clinic just before midday, relieved to find no green Volkswagen van there. He checked himself in the rear-view mirror. He looked, as he had thought he must look, like a man who had spent the night on the rear seat of his car in the woods (and how benign the woods had been in the morning—birdsong and emerald bracken; a pair of rabbits nibbling at shoots of grass). It was still raining as he crossed the gravel, a persistent summer drizzle, half warm, like being in the basement of a cloud. A small lorry was picking up or delivering laundry, and the clinic’s blue door was propped wide open. There was no one in the day-room. Clem knocked on Boswell’s door.
‘The doctor’s away,’ said a voice from behind him. He turned: an enormously fat woman with ginger eyebrows was wiping her hands on a piece of damp cloth.
‘Away?’
‘For the golf at St Andrews. Have you come to see someone? They don’t like visitors at lunchtime.’
‘Is Pauline here?’
‘I’m Sheila, the cook.’
‘Clem Glass. My sister’s been staying here.’
‘That’s Clare.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she expecting you?’
‘I called a couple of days ago. If I could see Pauline.’
‘She has a sweet tooth, your sister.’
‘Really?’
‘Did you not know that?’
‘I suppose I’d forgotten.’
The cook made a face as though they had been debating something of substance and she had scored an important point ‘I’ll walk you round,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you go on your own. They’d scalp me.’
She led him past some stairs and out through a fire door at the back of the building.
‘Hydrotherapy suite,’ she said, waving the cloth at a newly built brick block directly ahead of them. ‘You can live like a fush in there.’
They veered left and crossed the garden, the cook with the awkward chafing gait of the obese, Clem all gristle and long bones, a stride he could have walked many hours with, untroubled. ‘And this wee hoose they call the gazebo,’ she said, pronouncing ‘gazebo’ as though she found the word comically affected. It was a wooden cabin raised off the ground on short stilts, a pair of larches at one end, a veranda at the other. Inside, in soft light, eight or ten residents sat in armchairs or occupied themselves at the table. There was a tape playing, a winding, soporific flow of pan pipes and little bells, a music Clem associated with wholefood stores or the waiting rooms of progressive dentists. He recognised the man he had smoked with on his last visit, though the Paisley gown had been replaced by crumpled cricket whites and a mustard-coloured cravat. He was staring with great avidity at the puzzle on the table in front of him, a big jigsaw of what looked like the mid-Atlantic photographed from the air. He had the edge pieces in place and was moving down from the upper-left quarter, building waves and troughs, searching among the pieces that remained (at least a thousand of them) for a fleck of spume or a particular green wrinkle. To Clem it looked a puzzle to take a month over, though the man had the air of someone determined to finish it in a day, as if, should he succeed—and it would require heroic concentration—somebody would put him into a car and drive him to the nearest distillery.
Pauline came down the room, greeted Clem and smiled her dismissal to the cook. She led Clem on to the veranda. Drops of rain, fine as pins, fell from the edge of the veranda roof and broke on the wooden railing. They sat in a pair of canvas chairs. Clem lit a cigarette. Pauline asked if the weather was better down south. Clem said it was.
‘Do you know what Clare’s decided?’ he asked.
‘I think she intends to go with you.’
‘She understood, then?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘And she’s able to leave?’
‘She always was. There’s no one here on a section. Certainly not your sister.’
‘I mean, you think she’s well enough to leave?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Boswell seemed optimistic about her.’
‘We’re optimistic about everyone at Ithaca. There’s no point in being anything else.’ She pushed a grey-blonde curl behind her ear, glanced at her watch. ‘You’re going to be in Somerset?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll want to find a good family doctor there. That should be a priority. Ideally someone with some mental-health experience.’ She paused. ‘Have you ever been a primary carer before?’
Clem shook his head.
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘What about the dark?’
‘What about it?’
‘Is she still frightened?’
‘She likes to keep a light on. More than that she just wants to be reassured.’
‘You know what it is she’s afraid of?’
‘Not specifically.’
‘But she feels threatened?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose she’ll tell me when she’s ready.’
‘We recognise a patient’s anxieties, Clem, but we’re careful not to be drawn into colluding. Clare’s fears are largely irrational.’
‘Fantasies?’
‘Powerful fantasies that are not, by Clare, always experienced as fantasies.’
‘Fantasies she believes in.’
‘Yes, if you like.’
‘So her illness is to believe in things that are not real. Not the case.’
‘That’s a symptom of the illness. The illness itself, ‘I’m afraid,
is very real. The depression is real. The physical effects are real. The suffering is real.’
‘I understand.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said again.
‘We’ll manage.’
‘What about work?’
‘Mine? I’m taking some time off.’
‘Clare tells us you’re a photojournalist.’
‘Yes.’
‘She said you were out at—what was the place called?’ He reminded her.
‘That’s stressful work,’ she said.
‘This too,’ said Clem, tilting his thumb towards the door of the cabin.
‘I’ve spoken to Finola,’ she said. ‘About your coming for Clare.’
‘How was she?’
‘Not pleased.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t think she’ll give up easily.’
‘Clare can call her when she’s ready. We’re not going to be in hiding.’
He put out his cigarette in the sand-tray next to his chair. There were already a dozen butts poking from it, most with the same bright red lipstick print.
‘Well,’ said Pauline, ‘should we go and see her now?’
Their feet leaving silvery tracks in the damp grass, they walked to the main house, went in through french windows to the dining room, then up the stairs to Clare’s landing. There was a smell of floral disinfectant, a slightly stronger smell of the meat being roasted for lunch. Clare was sitting on her bed, her hair held back by a band of black or purple velvet. She was wearing dark glasses, the type skiers wore, the shades curling around the sides of her face and hiding her eyes completely. This was new. Pauline said she would wait downstairs in the office.
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