She tore the prescription from the pad and handed it to him.
‘I’m a photographer,’ he said, surprising himself and wondering if it could be true any more.
‘I know,’ she said. She smiled at him, gravely, as if she knew far more than that. ‘And tell your aunt it’s time she came in again.’ The smile lightened. ‘We’re missing her.’
Outside the health centre Clare put on her glasses again. Clem said nothing; nothing even when she reached for his elbow and let him lead her as though she could see barely a yard in front of her. He had no doubt that her interview with Crawley had had a good effect, that they had found, as Pauline Diamond said they must, the right person to oversee her care, but this thing, a malignancy that ran as deep as thought, was intractable, and perhaps permanently so. Fiacc had not wanted to tell him why the windows at the flat in Dundee were taped, but now he believed he understood. All of it was about trying to stay alive. A tremendous undertow was drawing Clare out, like Mary Randall, into a cold sea. Amazing, then, that in the midst of such a struggle she should concern herself with his sight! She must have caught him rubbing at his eye, something he might have been doing far more often than he was fully conscious of. And if there really was a problem? The idea unnerved him, though he seemed to have been thinking about it for a long time, as long, in fact, as he could remember. Long before Africa, before the night at N—. Do the children of blind parents spend a lifetime preparing for a blindness of their own? Do they store the world away for a time when they will have to navigate by touch and memory? As they drew level with the village hall (a poster in the window announcing the harvest disco in September), the road curving gently downwards towards the Pump and the lane, he slowed his pace and closed his eyes. Now, he thought, let’s see who guides whom.
At eight o’clock, the lights on, the lamps on, the curtains drawn, Clem set the table for supper. In the kitchen he opened a tin of baked beans, a tin of sweetcorn, a tin of mackerel fillets. He broke the leaves from a lettuce and sprinkled them with oil and salt (a benediction). He buttered the bread and cut the slices into halves, shredded the white bulbs of two spring onions. He uncorked a bottle of white wine, poured unequal measures into two glasses, and carried the smaller through to Clare. A mouthful of wine would, he believed, do her more good than harm, and to drink wine together would be a little marker of a normal life, something to set against the sheer strangeness of their situation. For the first night or two they would need to defend themselves against any stark accounting of the facts. Whatever was ordinary—and the ordinary could always be found because it was rooted in the routines and appetites of the body—they needed to make use of it.
She was sitting next to the electric heater on the other side of the archway. While there was still daylight she had gone to her bedroom and brought things down: a few books, an academic journal, the Géricault print, some pens and paper. He had hoped she might do something with them—read a line, write a line, a single line—but having tidied them on to the desk she had apparently lost all interest.
He held out the wine to her. When she didn’t take it from him he put the glass on the mantelpiece between the light bulbs and the toy Ferrari. ‘Supper when you’re ready,’ he said.
He served up in the kitchen. A spoonful of beans, a spoonful of corn, two fillets of mackerel each. He carried the plates through, brought in the bread and the lettuce, the wine bottle. Clare sat at her place as though she hadn’t the strength to pick up her fork.
‘Try something,’ he said. ‘If you won’t eat, what’s the point?’
She ate some of her beans and afterwards the cherry yoghurt he gave her. He asked if she approved of the painting he had put up. He said how much he had liked Crawley. ‘Have you ever been to Toronto?’ he asked. She didn’t say a word. He decided he would take her back to Ithaca the next day. How ugly she had become! Skin the colour of uncooked potato. Her hair, her ridiculous glasses. What was he making such an effort for? If Fiacc wanted her, let Fiacc have her.
He gathered the plates and hurried through to the kitchen to keep himself from shouting at her. By doing everything at the speed Kenneth might have done it, he made the clearing up last for a full hour. When he went through the archway again, Clare was sitting at the desk with a book in her hand. He slipped on to the chair by the heater. Some of the newspapers he had brought down for the window-cleaning, all local papers, were still in the room. He reached for them; they were months old. One had a front-page photograph of cars abandoned in the snow. More weather pictures appeared on pages two and three—children tobogganing, a snowman with a carrot nose, a cheery postman trudging up a snowy front path.
Over the top of the paper he watched Clare ‘reading’. She held the book as though, should she relax her grip, it would fly violently into her face. The veins stood proud on the backs of her hands. She moaned. The skin twitched at the corners of her mouth. Clem waited. When he gauged that she could no longer bear it, that something was about to break out, to shatter the evening, he said, ‘Postmaster Christopher Dee has made a personal pledge to readers of the Somerset Standard.’
She looked at him.
‘Collections and deliveries will go on as normal, though he asks people to be patient.’
‘What?’
He read it again.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. She put down the book. Clem saw that it was one of her own, The Death of Polite Nature: Poussin to the Fauves. ‘If deliveries go on as normal why do people need to be patient?’
‘There may be more snow.’
‘Then he should say that. He should say what he means.’
‘Are you feeling tired yet?’
She nodded.
‘You want to go up?’
She shrugged.
Clem folded the paper. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Check that everything’s working.’
They climbed the stairs in single file, Clem first, Clare just behind him. Clem thought of the children pursued by the evil preacher in the Laughton film, The Night of the Hunter. He remembered a scene of them sleeping in the hayloft of a bam, the boy waking at first light to see on a theatrical horizon the silhouette of the preacher on horseback, a man who apparently needed no sleep, who was relentless. Clem had liked that boy, the slight stiffness of his character, the way he stood up to the adult world. He had a less clear memory of how things had ended. The children overcame, of course. Weren’t they taken in somewhere? Some stern old lady with a heart of gold who taught them to be children again?
While Clare was in the bathroom he waited on the landing inspecting the red-brown moth-wing stain in the corner where the damp had come through. In the bathroom the pipes banged; the flush released its weight of frantic water. When Clare came out she had the red robe on and paused at the bathroom door as if for effect, though with the glasses she looked what she was: a woman in trouble made freakish by things that had recently made her attractive.
‘You go first,’ she said.
He went into her bedroom. The overhead light and the bedside lamp were already on (what kind of electricity bill would they have?). Clare took off the robe. She had on a white knee-length nightdress. There was nowhere to hang the robe. Clem took it from her and draped it over the end of the bed. She got into the bed and pulled up the sheets. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘Do? I don’t know. Is there something you want me to fetch you?’
‘You could read to me,’ she said.
There were no books in the room. He asked if she wanted one of the books from her desk. She shook her head, rolling it on the pillow, forty-five reduced to ten. He went to the other bedroom, the one the quarryman and his thin wife must have slept in. From his case he took the book he had borrowed from Frankie’s room, a guide to Italy that he imagined she had bought or been given to prepare for one of those Harwood holidays in the south (certain pages had the corners turned down; on others there were tanning-oil fingerprints in the margins). He did no
t know Italy. He had been at Rome airport a few times, napping on a bench in the transit lounge. He knew Pakistan better, Brazil, Northern Ireland. He had taken the book because flicking through it had proved an effective way to edge himself towards sleep, a sort of harmless romance, the traveller as unnamed hero, his place set at a recommended table, his room aired, a famous view of the lake and the mountains awaiting his gaze.
He carried it through. There was no chair. He folded the robe and sat on the end of the bed. He showed her the cover of the book; then, as he had done the previous night, he opened it at random and started to read. ‘Montalcino, with its full circuit of walls and fairy-tale castle, has long been a place of pilgrimage for lovers of Tuscan Hill towns...’ The Hotel dei Capitani was apparently the place to stay. In August there was a festival with dressing-up and archery competitions. He listed the restaurants, the Madonnas on view at the Museo Civico, described the neighbouring vineyards, the bus schedule from Sienna. Was she sleeping? He thought she had soporifics among her medicines, temazepam or some such. He moved on to the sulphur cures at Bagnio Vignoni, the Renaissance façade of the cathedral at Pienza with its three-tiered veneer of Istrian marble. He whispered her name, whispered it again. When she didn’t answer he eased himself from the mattress, tiptoed to the door and switched off the overhead light. The bulb in the turquoise shade flickered, then burned steadily.
In the kitchen he drank the last of the white wine, then went upstairs and tugged from the front pocket of his suitcase the brown envelope Frank Silverman had passed to him with such sleight-of-hand at the airport in Toronto. He opened it at the dining-table. There were sixteen sheets of paper inside. He fanned them out over the tabletop. ‘Maybe you can do something with it,’ Silverman had said. But do what? Finish it? Find the conclusion he had been unable, or unwilling, to find? He started to sort through. None of the pages was numbered; all of them were heavily corrected; corrections to corrections in some places, each modification a degree more impenetrable than the last. He looked for a way in and found a page, two pages, that dealt in précis with the colonial backdrop, the divisions of power, the parties, the factions, the secret committees, the growth of extremism.
Even the president’s wife was talking about it: the need to hunt down the enemies within and show no mercy. Weapons were collected. Bands of men were trained, quite openly, to go to war against their neighbors...
A third page gave glimpses of the physical country. The tightly terraced hills, the jagged shoulders of old volcanoes, the abandoned plantations, the starburst green of banana trees, the marshes, the rusted iron roofs of the houses, the churned red earth of the roads, the fast rivers brown with upland silt. There was a description of the Bellville Hotel,
abandoned by its foreign masters, left to its fate. Penile, though several stories less tumescent than Mobuto’s Intercontinental. The hotel bar was called the Shangri-La and boasted a pianola that every night some over-refreshed member of the press corp would pretend to play... In some of the rooms on the top floor, wanted men and women, people with their names on death-lists drawn up months earlier, hid out with their families...
Then the beginning of a narrative:
For the westerner, a citizen of the so-called developed world, used to taking his night walks under a flow of silver and orange neon, an unlit city has a special menace. The road behind the hotel where we waited for Major Nemo and our escort had not a single source of light, the whole quarter sunk into almost palpable darkness, a shuttered maze where the sense of someone being very close to you but unseen and unseeable becomes, in short time, a source of real and escalating disquiet.
The next six lines were inked out. The last paragraph began with a sketch of Major Nemo.
I do not know if Nemo liked being a soldier. To me he lacked that appearance of animated iron most of his caste aspires to. But he was a man whom you sensed would keep his authority however a situation turned out. On several occasions in the Shangri-La he had shared information with us and given advice. We had come to think of him as a friend...
Another line erased, then:
...the first roadblock was a barrier rigged from a sapling balanced across a pair of oil drums. Nemo lowered his window and spoke in French, his tone so pitched as to suggest the respect between fellow professionals, though the men at the roadblock were militia, and no more or less than an armed gang, the local sansculottes, full of banana beer and ready for any criminal enterprise, though not, that night, quite drunk or brave enough to take on a body of disciplined soldiers. They spat into the dust at their feet, drew back the pole, and let us pass...
It took Clem a minute of shuffling and scanning to find the page that followed this. Here, too, much had been defaced, only becoming readable again a third of the way down the page, and half-way through a sentence:
...of shacks and lean-tos and at last into the country. For ten miles or so we traveled on tar roads and made good progress but the road gave way to track and we had to cling to what we could while the driver wrestled the steering-wheel to keep us from tipping into a ditch. I was thrown repeatedly against the thigh and shoulder of the soldier beside me. Each time we hit a larger stone or deeper rut we grunted like boxers. The track narrowed. Elephant grass scratched at the windows. Nemo picked out our route on a square of crumpled map, though it was hard to have much confidence in those lines, or to believe they bore any close relation to the forested vastness we drove through. I tried to read my watch but could not hold my arm steadily enough. After forty minutes of this, longer perhaps, Nemo spoke to the driver and we braked hard. I was afraid he had seen something—shadows flitting over the track ahead of us—but he was looking for the turning that would take us up to the church at N—. We went on more slowly, stopped, went on again, then found on our right a sanded incline like an old riverbed, ascending steeply. We drove now at walking pace, the headlights swinging over the forest walls. The sensation was of having entered a long tunnel into the side of the hill. The soldiers gripped their weapons more tightly; we all peered forward, straining our sight. Then the trees were gone and we were on the crown of a hill, a spacious grassy clearing beneath an expanse of stars. Ahead of us I could make out a cluster of low buildings gathered under the bulking shadow of a much larger one. As we came closer I saw that the larger building was the church, and that above its main door was a statue of Jesus Christ, ghostly white, his arms thrown back in the universal gesture of welcome...
The cars deployed in a line. Little clouds of golden insects danced in our lights. We sat a while in stillness. Through the vehicle’s air vents there came the smell I had become almost accustomed to during the worst days in the Lebanon and El Salvador, though, of course, no one can become entirely used to the smell of death. Something deep in us rebels, quails, aches to flee from it, but once you have it in your mouth and nose it clings to the soft lining, the little hairs, lingering there for days or weeks. It becomes part of the taste of the food you eat, part of the odor of your own living body. More troublingly, it penetrates the imagination, and there it stays much longer.
Nemo’s soldiers were skittish. He issued commands in a low voice, positioning two of his men by the rear of one of the Land Rovers, their weapons trained on the tree-line behind us. The photographer and I tied cloths around our faces. Someone threw up, unrestrainedly. Nemo, pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other, led us along a gravelled path until we reached the first of the corpses, a boy of seven or eight years of age, lying on his back in khaki shorts and what had once been a white T-shirt. There was a deep wound to the side of his head, and half of his left arm was missing, severed just below the elbow. His right eye was destroyed, but the other was open in a fixed and unmeetable gaze that traveled over our heads to some infinite mid-point of the sky. We paused, then passed by without a word, following the beam of Nemo’s flashlight. Two more corpses lay across the path, then five together like a family group, then suddenly hundreds of them in crazy ranks, face up, face down, twisted and swollen
, their limbs tangled like wire. Many had been decapitated, apparently with machete blows or axe blows, or the sawing of a knife. One child I saw—there were very many children at N——had been sliced almost in two, skull to hip, by the force of a blade.
The buildings around the church—most of them constructed with brick and stone, for religion here, as in most places, has a certain call on people’s money—had served a variety of purposes. Offices, meeting rooms, a small clinic. Some had been used as classrooms, and in one of these, among the kicked-over desks, we found fifteen teenagers, their hands bound behind them, puncture wounds to the backs of their legs where the tendons had been cut to keep them from running while their killers rested.
More lines erased. Then:
Rats squeezing between the bodies. They go for the viscera first, burrow into the abdomens... Maggots move under the skin making it ripple. A soldier fired a round at a dog that ran from us carrying something in its jaws...
A line missing.
So much blood! Did the killers leave their bloody footprints behind? Could they be trailed?
The Optimists Page 14
