The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Stay if you like,’ said Clem. She smiled and shook her head. She would see them both later, she said. She went out; Clem stared at the back of the door and then, with a surge of hopelessness, at the crown of his sister’s head. He took the chair from beside the window and sat opposite her, knee to knee.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve come back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She reached up with her left hand. Her fingertips brushed his lips, his cheek. He shut his eyes and she touched his eyelids. ‘I have to know it’s you,’ she said.

  ‘You can see it’s me.’

  ‘And seeing is believing?’

  ‘Who could it be but me?’

  ‘I don’t like riddles,’ she said.

  ‘Clare. Please listen to me. Do you want to come away? Do you feel strong enough to leave here today? I’ve spoken to Aunt Laura. You remember the little place she had in the lane? Frankie lived there for a while. Remember? Laura says it’s empty and if we want it we can use it for the rest of the summer. It’s not in great condition, but there’s electricity and water, a little garden. I thought it was a good idea. Better than London. Better than Dundee. I thought we could try it for a while and see how we do.’

  ‘In Colcombe,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can trust you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘Would you rather stay here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s your choice, Clare.’

  ‘What if I don’t get better?’

  ‘You already are. Pauline says so. Boswell says so. I say so.’

  ‘Really? And how would you know? How would you know?’

  From under the plastic rim of the glasses came tears. Her shoulders shook. He sat next to her on the bedcovers. After a moment he put an arm round her. She tugged a piece of tissue from the sleeve of her dress and blew her nose. ‘Can I sleep in the car?’ she asked.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And I don’t have to see Daddy?’

  ‘Not until you want to.’

  ‘I have to be careful.’

  ‘He worries about you.’

  ‘He worries about his immortal soul.’

  ‘About you too.’ He looked round the room. ‘Have you packed?’ There was a suitcase open on the floor behind the bed, though she seemed to have given up the job half-way through. ‘Shall I finish it?’ he asked.

  He checked the wardrobe, found her slippers beneath the bed, a scarf on a hook by the door. The Géricault picture, The Raft, was pinned to a cork board. He unpinned it, rolled it, then packed her washbag, zipped it up, put it into the case and strapped the case shut. He helped her into her coat, a smart fawn raincoat—the same he thought she had worn the night he walked her to her friend’s house in Tite Street.

  ‘Did I tell you,’ he said, ‘that Frankie’s getting married? Some character called Ray. I don’t think Laura’s that impressed with him.’

  ‘Frankie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will they have children?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He waited at the open door. She came slowly and took hold of his elbow. He guided her down the stairs to the office. Pauline stood up when she saw them. On the desk was a sealed bag with a pair of grey-blue canisters inside. ‘Medication,’ she said, handing the bag to Clem. ‘Clare knows the drill. As soon as you’ve registered we’ll send the records down. It’s very important the dosages are checked regularly. And this is my card. You can call me any time. OK?’

  There were some papers to sign: waivers, disclaimers. When it was done they all went out to the front. The laundry lorry had gone; the rain had stopped. A few weak beams of sunlight fell across the dripping trees and the slates of the clinic roof. Pauline hugged Clare and rubbed her back, saying something to her that Clem couldn’t hear and didn’t try to. He lifted her suitcase into the boot beside his own, then opened the passenger door for her and helped her to buckle her seatbelt. He had cleared away the cassettes and the whisky bottle but the car still had a semi-derelict look to it.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Pauline, shaking his hand.

  ‘Has Clare had her eyes examined?’ he asked, a quiet voice.

  ‘Clare’s eyes are fine.’

  ‘The glasses...’

  ‘Her eyes are fine.’

  ‘Our mother...’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  He got into the car and let the window down. Three of the residents came out to see what was happening, three hunched young women in woollen cardigans who seemed suffused with cold, as though icy springs were bubbling beneath their breasts. As Clem drove past them they lifted their bony arms and waved goodbye. Clare glanced back, then ignored them.

  ‘Who were they?’ asked Clem, turning onto the road.

  ‘Clotho, Lachesis, Atropus.’ She shrugged into her seat. Clem accelerated up the hill. They did not speak again until they came to the city.

  They stopped for an hour at her flat. Clare asked who had taken the tape from the windows and was briefly irritated when he told her. He sat in the kitchen while she collected what she wanted from her bedroom. Again, he was braced for the sudden intrusion of Finola Fiacc, but there was no sign of her, no acid note left on the table. He felt a twinge of guilt. He had been ready to bargain with her, to explain that he was trying, finally, to behave like a brother; that he was repaying old debts of kindness. And he had been ready for her come-backs: the charge that he was using Clare to distract himself from his own difficulties (she would know all about such strategies). That Clare, as usual, was helping him, not the other way about. But this non-appearance, a sadly lame quitting of the field, suggested she was more hurt than angry. What if it pushed her to drink again? He did not want that on his conscience as well.

  They locked the flat. A neighbour coming up the stairs as they went down greeted them, cautiously. ‘It’s nice now, isn’t it?’ responded Clare, as though reciting a line from some phrasebook of normalities.

  ‘Ay,’ agreed the neighbour, glancing at Clem. ‘Nice enough.’

  They lunched in Edinburgh at a place on the edge of the New Town. She ate little. When they returned to the car she wanted to lie on the back seat. She spread her mac over herself as a blanket. Clem put on the Veloso tape. He didn’t know if she was sleeping, if she was happy to be out of Ithaca, pleased to be going to Colcombe. On the motorways he several times glimpsed a phantom Volkswagen three or four cars behind them, but once they had passed Gloucester (their grandfather, Nora’s father, had been a printer in the city, an alderman too) he felt they were back in their own kingdom, and safe.

  The last hour he wound the car through country roads past banks in shadow, fields of blue corn, pubs called the Waggonwheel, the Plough, the Wheatsheaf. Since the petrol stop south of Birmingham Clare had travelled in the passenger seat again. She still wore the glasses. She sipped from a bottle of mineral water, nearly a litre of it since the garage. On the far side of Radstock he pulled over to check the map. The road he remembered was not quite the road in front of him, but coming to the brow of the next hill he saw below them the abbey, its buildings freckled with light. He turned off to the left. Now, half shyly, everything showed itself faithful to memory. The hump-back bridge, the old brick bam, each blind bend where, during the day, you had to sound your horn. Left again by the post office, then the branches of the trees closed over their heads. The cottage they would share was somewhere to the right, set back a little behind scrub. He slowed, peered, thought he saw it, then bumped the car another thousand yards to Aunt Laura’s house. The gates were open. His headlights cut through trees, scooped the lawn and, for a moment, held the figure of a child, a concrete boy with an urn on his shoulder, his face to the valley, one stone foot behind the other, spellbound, lost in a dream, waiting, so it seemed, for the sharp clap of hands to send him running home again.

  16

  Laura explained it to
him.

  For two years the cottage in the lane had stood empty. Before then she had let it through an agency in Frome, a small but useful income until the agency surveyor wrote to inform her that the house was sinking. He showed her the crack, fine still but unignorable, that ran up the side of the house from ground to guttering. She had not been surprised. There were tunnels in black webs under most of the fields and local villages. Sometimes a garden shed would disappear, sometimes a cow or a parked car. Two hundred years of burrowing, branching off, blocking off old shafts and starting again. Who knew what exactly was down there? Only the later work had been mapped.

  No one had suggested repairing the house: cheaper to bulldoze it and build again on firmer ground. The surveyor’s opinion was that it would stand another twenty years, perhaps fifty. It was not, however, suitable for renting, so the doors were locked and the house removed from the agency’s list of properties.

  The last tenants—gone three months by the time of the surveyor’s letter—had been a family from Bristol looking for a start somewhere they were not known. A man, a thin older woman, a boy Laura thought was slightly hydrocephalic. The husband—Alan—had had a taste for country ways, striding through the village with a piece of cloth round his neck, a stick in his hand, a little black and white dog running at his heels. Over Laura’s gate he told her he had not been happy in Bristol, hinting at a history of family feuds. He found work at one of the local quarries and spent his evenings digging in the garden behind the cottage, sowing vegetables, dahlias, sweet peas. He built a cold frame, a wooden bin for compost, hung new wallpaper in the bedrooms. A model tenant, really.

  ‘And then?’

  Then his back was broken in a blast at the quarry. Accidents were not uncommon there. In the post office someone said he had run the wrong way when the klaxon sounded. Laura had helped the wife pack up. Later she learned they had gone back to Bristol, to the wife’s mother’s place.

  ‘So the man survived?’ asked Clem.

  ‘Oh, he lived,’ said Laura. ‘Yes. But not with them any more. It’s rather sad, isn’t it?’

  Clem said that it was.

  On the first day, Clem and Kenneth arrived at the cottage with mops and buckets, a bag of detergents, old newspapers for the windows. Other than a patch upstairs outside the bathroom the place was dry, and with all the doors and windows open there was soon a through-breeze scented with grass and a whiff of the honeysuckle that grew round a pole by the back door. Laura had had the electricity reconnected. Clem vacuumed dust and two summers of dead flies from the carpets. He put Kenneth to work in the kitchen, scouring the sink, scouring surfaces. They filled black bags with rubbish, sweated as the sun hit the back of the house. Under the bed-frame in the boy’s little room Clem found a toy car, a red Ferrari the length of his finger. He polished it on the leg of his jeans, carried it downstairs and put it on the mantelpiece.

  They worked until two o’clock, the hour ringing from the village church, and then, a moment later, from a belfry in the abbey twenty fields to the west. Lunch was wrapped in sheets of greaseproof paper. Ham in slices of white bread, two wedges of cheese, two apples. They had a packet each of salt and vinegar crisps and two small tins of pale ale, Laura having the old-fashioned notion that men working together liked nothing better than beer for their thirst.

  They ate outside, brushed the crumbs from their laps, pulled the rings on their beer. Clem tossed his apple core into a patch of wild com. He saw the cold-frame Laura had mentioned; the glass was broken; a few blackened tomato stalks poked from the waterlogged peat bags. He liked the idea that he would never have to do anything with the garden, that it could go its own way, a haven for hedgehogs, grass snakes, countless thousands of insects. For a few weeks—if all went well—the house would be disturbed once more by the sounds of the living. Then the latch on the front door would click shut for the last time (the last of the last times?) and the rooms would grow quiet again. The house was a coaster, a little tramp ship, sinking so slowly there was no need for anyone to go down with her.

  A middle-of-the-day somnolence settled on him. If he had been alone he would have lain in the long grass and slept. He grinned at Kenneth, leaned over and tapped tins with him. His cousin had grown rounder and balder in the years since Clem had last seen him, more stately and deliberate, more silent. Kenneth as a boy—a maker of rudimentary bird tables, a sweeper of leaves, Ron’s tame shadow, then Laura’s—had struggled to make himself understood in words, his voice a mash of noise in his throat, an effort that must have hurt him and never communicated much beyond his own frustration. Now, in his forties, he had settled on an ABC of gestures—the wave, the nod, the pointed finger. It occurred to Clem he would fit in well at Theophilus House. They should like his silence there, those connoisseurs, and could surely use such a biddable, good-natured character. He would have to go somewhere when Laura died. Why not there? There he might thrive.

  At the sky’s zenith a prop plane flew in circuits; in the woods someone started a chainsaw. Clem went back into the house, found the cleaner for the windows, and got to work again, spraying the glass, buffing it with crumpled pages from the Western Daily Press. Now and then, growing warm, he paused to read about a Bring and Buy sale, a school production of My Fair Lady, a man fined for badger-baiting. He gave Kenneth the job of washing the orange tiles around the fireplace. Later they moved upstairs and set about the bathroom. Clem tried the hot tap over the bath. Yards of old piping juddered, there was a burst of musty air, then the sudden slap of water on the worn enamel. He let it run a few minutes; it began to steam, and when he put his hand under the tap the water almost burned him. The walls were hung with green paper that curled back at the joins. A green light fell from a small square frosted window above the bath. Clem pulled the toilet chain. The flush worked, but the noise of it, the chum of water followed by a final mournful groan from the water tank in the attic, would make it unusable at night. It would wake half the village; it would certainly wake whoever was not in the bathroom. For himself—the primary carer—he would go into the garden and piss on black grass under the stars. Clare could make her own arrangements (somewhere in Aunt Laura’s attic there was surely a chamber-pot). They were fastidious people. He did not think they would want to see the unflushed reminder of each other first thing in the morning.

  On the landing, two plain doors led into two plain bedrooms. Light came from a window at the top of the stairs, its frame filled with the heads of the trees that arched over the lane. Clem swept a moth’s wing from the sill, then leaned there just as Laura and Clare were turning from the lane on to the path that led to the front door. He tapped on the glass but they were not quite close enough to hear him. How awkwardly they came! Laura leaning on her aluminium stick; Clare in her dark glasses (the glasses were starting to exasperate him), gripping the older woman’s free hand as though she were being led along the edge of an abyss.

  He met them at the open door.

  ‘Would the workers like some tea?’ asked Laura. There was a Thermos and some cups in the string bag over her shoulder.

  Clem led them through the house. He fetched the chairs from the dining area and arranged them into a half-circle beside the honeysuckle. Laura was sweating from the walk. She fanned herself with her hand and plucked at the yellow cotton of her dress to peel it from her skin. She wore woven leather sandals, the kind boys used to wear in picture books. Her ankles were puffy, dimpled. For an instant, Clem imagined the labouring of her old heart, then took the Thermos from the bag and poured the tea. There were biscuits too, a packet of chocolate bourbons, a packet of Garibaldis. Clare sipped at her tea, holding the cup as though they were huddled on some out-ofseason beach in Norfolk. She had washed her hair and it had half dried on the walk down. It needed brushing through; it needed treating with something—a conditioner, a cream, some nourishing oil. Would she go to a salon if he suggested it? How could she be well when every time she looked in a mirror she saw this haggard woman with her bad ha
ir and bad skin? Better to have her hair cropped short than leave it like that. Laura would know somewhere, a local place run by friendly women. They could do her nails too, what was left of them. It worried him that away from Ithaca, away from the institutional backdrop, the company of people equally broken down, she looked more ill rather than less.

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Laura, adjusting the hefty strap of a salmon-coloured bra, ‘when all of you children camped in the garden? Ron brought you lemon tea and bananas in the morning.’

  ‘We camped?’

  ‘All four of you, on the lawn beside the court. Clare was in charge, of course. None of the rest of you was very sensible. You would have set the tent on fire.’

  ‘I vaguely remember,’ said Clem. He tried to picture Uncle Ron crossing the grass with a tray of bananas, a pot of tea—surely he should remember something like that?—but the lawn in his mind was deserted.

  ‘You smoked one of Uncle Ron’s cigarettes,’ whispered Clare. ‘You and Frankie.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Laura. ‘I hope you put a stop to it, dear.’

  ‘Does Frankie still smoke? asked Clem.

  ‘You know,’ said Laura, ‘I think cigarettes are why she gets up in the morning.’

  ‘A grand addiction, then.’

  ‘The one thing she’s really stuck at.’

  ‘But now there’s Ray.’

  ‘I’m trying to have charitable thoughts about Ray,’ said Laura. ‘You’ll see them both on Sunday.’

  ‘And the wedding?’

  ‘September the twenty-fourth. Though as the invitations still have to be sent out I don’t see how it can happen at all. The church will be empty.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll be there,’ said Clem, glancing at Clare.

  Laura nodded. ‘And your father, I hope. Why don’t you call him this evening?’

  ‘Yes, I could.’