The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  Another line missing.

  Beside me the shup! shup! of the photographer’s flashgun. When I turned to look, I saw him crouched over what was left of a woman, a matronly figure, the type a well-bred Frenchman might describe as ‘une femme d’un certain age’. Her dress had been hauled above her hips, and something—a stick or truncheon—thrust into her vagina...

  And so it went on—a little more, a little further: horror as a list—but Clem had had his fill. He turned over the page. On the back of it were a half-dozen lines in hurried pencil strokes:

  And there is another thing he has in mind

  Like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

  Would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,

  With open eyes, he attends, blind.

  All the bells say: too late.

  From the Berryman poems? One of the Dream Songs? He did not recognise it. He gathered the pages together, tapped their edges on the table-top and returned them to the envelope. From Clare’s desk he fetched a marker-pen, a red-ink fibre-tip, and wrote on the front of the envelope FRANK SILVERMAN’S WORK. Then he licked the unused strip of adhesive on the flap of the envelope and sealed it, pressing down hard with the side of his fist.

  Outside, the garden air was cool and slightly sweet. He lit a cigarette, found the Plough, the Pole Star, the square of Pegasus over the Mendip Hills. Then he saw the firefly light of an airliner moving east to west, Heathrow to the States perhaps, or Amsterdam to Rio, Paris to Toronto. There would not be much for them to look down upon a little patch of darkness between the orange glittering of the cities—but Clem gazed up at them with interest and, snared by some perversity of hope, some blind fellowfeeling that disregarded every high black thought that Silverman’s unfinishable article had reawoken in him, he raised an arm and waved, as his father, under the old lighthouse on the island, waved to ships too far out at sea to see him.

  18

  ‘What are you doing?’ she called.

  Clem looked up to the window. ‘Don’t lean out too far,’ he said.

  ‘Are you gardening?’

  He held up the sickle. ‘Thought I’d try to clear some ground.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We have to go to Laura’s.’

  ‘Not for another couple of hours.’

  She drew her head inside. He wondered if she was anxious about seeing Frankie. He imagined she must be: all such meetings had to be a hardship for her. But he was pleased with what amounted to a conversation between them, a simple to-and-fro of question and answer. Each occasion when she took her gaze from her troubles and glanced into the world again he counted as a small victory. There had not been many during the last four days.

  The sickle was from Laura’s garage—Ron’s garage. Several times he had come close to gashing his leg with it. The required posture, a lopsided stooping, made his back throb, but he went on with it, swinging, chopping, adjusting the angle of the blade, looking for a rhythm. It was work he had not intended to do at all—what could be more dreamily senseless than tending the garden of a collapsing house?—but sleeping in the quarryman’s room, looking at the same ceiling cracks he must have looked at, it had been impossible not to enter the man’s head a little, and feel some admiration, envy even, for the determined and practical way he had set about changing his life. He had come to the village with a project in mind, a new idea of himself that was surely something more than just running away from whatever dogged him in the city, those feuds he had mentioned to Laura. Under the briars, the bowed grass, the waist-high nettles, the print of his labour was visible everywhere. In the flowerbeds there were pegs hand-labelled with the names of the plants, and at the bottom of the garden, laid out beside the wall that divided the garden from the field where sheep grazed under the watchful green eyes of a billy-goat, there were the remains of fruit and vegetable plots—strawberry leaves under tom netting, a half-devoured marrow, a pile of grey potatoes like slingshot. There was even a vine, its tendrils wrapped round a collapsed wooden frame, the grapes themselves hanging in shrivelled green strings. An arbour? The quarryman had aimed to sit there with his wife perhaps, a shade and silence tantamount to love, while the sun went down and sixty square miles of Somerset were folded into night.

  At noon, Clem went inside, sucking at a blister on his thumb. Always, on entering the cottage, he listened for Clare, locating her, monitoring her. It wasn’t difficult: the walls were thin and every board complained the moment it was pressed upon. As he filled the wash-basin in the bathroom he heard her leave her bedroom and cross the landing, then a soft diminuendo of creaks as she went down the stairs. In a moment he would hear the door into the living room, then perhaps the faint click of the back door if she wanted to smell the rain that had begun its pattering on the tiles over his head.

  He shaved, washed beneath his arms, changed his shirt. In the living room they stood in silence by the window waiting for the rain to stop. She wore no makeup. Her hair (the night before last he had found a sticky whorl of it in the plug-hole of the bath) was fixed with an elastic band. No earrings, no rings or bracelets or brooch. The only colour, other than the patch of eczema or psoriasis below her ear, and the fawn of her raincoat, was a sea-green shawl she must have packed in Dundee.

  The rain lengthened, grew briefly fierce, then eased to drizzle. With her hand on his arm they set off under the dripping trees, picking their way round shallow puddles where the water was already draining into the earth. In a field hidden from them by the bank and the trees, they could hear the tractor of a Sabbath-breaking farmer. The harvest was coming in; not a village enterprise any more but the private industry of a few dozen professionals. Going into Radstock to collect his eye-drops and buy a radio, Clem had seen the combines in the larger open fields moving like dredgers on a brass sea. They worked after nightfall too, their arc lights criss-crossing the darkness, then sweeping like the beams of a lighthouse as the machine turned at the end of the field. No reason to regret any of it, but neither did you need to be an anthropologist or village archivist to know that something had gone out of the life of the country for good, and that a Saturday night disco was not the old ‘Harvest Home’ Laura and Nora, as little girls, must have heard hallooed in the lanes around Gloucester.

  Frankie’s Alfa Romeo Spider—Clem was astonished she still had it—was parked in Laura’s drive under the dining-room windows, a classic sports car reduced to something chaotic by London street-life and years of botched parking. A Harwood car, and left in typical Harwood manner, the driver’s door, despite the rain, wide open, as though shutting it were something too tedious to bother with, something for others to do.

  In the kitchen Laura was crouched like a sumo in front of the Aga, pushing a tray of roast potatoes into the oven.

  ‘They’re in the drawing room,’ she said, her head in a scarf of steam. Clem said they’d go through but Clare immediately sat at the kitchen table and started to pick at her nails.

  ‘Clare can help me in here if she wants,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve no idea where Kenneth’s gone. I’m afraid he’s been caught in the rain.’

  ‘He’ll be under a tree somewhere,’ said Clem.

  ‘Colds always settle on his chest,’ she said, gripping the steel rail on the front of the Aga and using it to heave herself upright. ‘But I can’t make him wear vests in the summer, can I?’

  Clem poured her a glass of Soave from the open bottle in the fridge, then went along the passage to find Frankie. He had not seen her since Ron’s funeral, when he had arrived at the crematorium in a taxi two hours off a flight from Colombo, coming into the back of the chapel with his suitcase and camera bag just as the coffin was beginning its descent to the furnace. In those days Frankie was still calling herself an actress, though she had not worked for many months and had never worked much. A play called Header Garbled at the Edinburgh Fringe, a stint as the
weather-girl on the HTV lunchtime news, a season or two of pantomime. At various times—her life to him, as his to her, no doubt, was a spilt file: no clear order to anything—there were periods of English teaching, modelling, Buddhism, the dole. The men he had heard about were mostly older and mostly married. At Ron’s wake she had mentioned a recent abortion and somehow given the impression it was one of a series. Her newest venture—explained to Clem by Laura in that half-anxious, half-amused tone that coloured most of her comments about her daughter—was an interior-design consultancy operated out of a friend’s basement in Finsbury Park, though it was hard to know what exactly could have qualified her for such work.

  She was standing by the drinks tray in the drawing room slopping gin into a pair of tumblers. She had her coat on still, a shiny mock-snakeskin mac that fell to shiny black boots. Her auburn hair was piled under a large tortoiseshell grip decorated with an orchid of red and white silk. Clem kissed her cheek.

  ‘I wish these clouds would fuck off,’ she said.

  ‘We need the rain,’ said Clem, grinning.

  ‘Balls!’ She smiled at him over the rim of her glass. ‘How very peculiar that you’re living at the cottage.’

  ‘Just for a while.’

  ‘Oh God, yes.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you again, Frankie.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you too. Isn’t Clare with you?’

  ‘She’s with Laura in the kitchen.’

  ‘How is she?’

  He made a see-saw movement with his hand.

  ‘I remember the first time,’ said Frankie, lowering her voice. ‘Some heartbreaker in Paris, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That was part of it, I think.’

  ‘Poverina.’ She swilled the ice around the sides of her tumbler and looked for a moment vexed by memories of her own heartbreakers. Then she smiled and pointed to the sofa. ‘Meet Ray,’ she said. Clem looked over the back of the sofa and found a small man with a brown moustache lying there. He was not asleep. His clear blue eyes were wide open. He reached up a hand and Clem shook it.

  ‘Gemini?’ asked Ray.

  ‘Capricorn,’ said Clem.

  For a while Ray seemed to ponder this, then, with a little moan, he swung his feet off the sofa. Frankie patted his hair into place and gave him his gin. Clem poured one for himself.

  ‘You’re coming to the do?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘Of course. And Dad will come down.’

  ‘It’s going to be a terrible bore,’ she said, a light of excitement dancing in her eyes. She started to tell him about the preparations, the woman from her boarding-school days who was doing the catering, the flowers they would have, the dresses she had tried.

  ‘You have to help Ray choose a new suit,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have a boys’ day out or something. You could bond.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ She leaned towards him as though she would sniff his breath.

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘That’s why you look a bit musty,’ she said.

  ‘Well, you look good.’

  ‘She looks great,’ said Ray to the fireplace.

  ‘A triumph of cream over experience,’ said Frankie, touching her very white face with pleasure.

  ‘I like experienced women,’ said Ray, chuckling to himself. His neck and spine seemed fused in a way that made it hard for him to turn round. Frankie leaned and kissed his temple. In the doorway, Kenneth, his grey hair bright with rain, waved a tea-towel at them.

  ‘An attempt at lunch,’ drawled Frankie, draining her glass. ‘Tell her we’re coming, Kenny.’ She put a hand on Clem’s arm. ‘And don’t worry about Clare,’ she said. ‘We know tons of people like her. These days it’s practically an epidemic.’

  Lunch was ribs of beef. Clem was given the carving knife and Ron’s old steel to sharpen it on. The heavy cutlery from the dining room had been brought out, and the tall glasses. Bottles of wine stood along the table, and in a vase at its centre, the yellow roses Clem had brought dropped their petals as the meal wore on. Clare was next to Ray. Clem, at the other end of the table, heard snatches of what Ray said to her, something about little frogs that lived under the sand in the deserts of California, waiting for rain. He talked to Clare as if there was nothing wrong with her at all and Clem was grateful to him, though could not yet tell if it was good style or plain ignorance. He asked Frankie what Ray did for a living. ‘Oh, everything!’ she said immediately, tapping ash on to the side of her plate as though ash were a condiment. On Clem’s right Laura huffed through her nose, and he remembered the answer she had given him to the same question, her equally emphatic ‘Nothing! He does nothing whatsoever.’

  By the time they had finished eating and the dishes were piled in the sink, it was late afternoon. They went back to the drawing room. The television was switched on. Laura sat on the sofa, her arm round Clare’s shoulders. Ray fell asleep in the armchair. Kenneth went walking again, though this time was made to wear his father’s Barbour. Frankie and Clem sat on the window-seat at the back of the room. Frankie tipped her head to her lap to show off a tattoo on the nape of her neck, a blue heart the size of a baby’s fingernail. She hinted at other designs, more intimately sited, that Ray had asked her to have done. She seemed keen for Clem to understand that, despite some appearances to the contrary, the relationship was not just healthy but athletic. On the television a horse race entered its excitable last furlong. Clem asked Frankie if she knew a good local hairdresser. He nodded towards the sofa.

  ‘There’s Donatello’s in Frome,’ said Frankie. ‘Mummy’s been going there for about a thousand years.’

  ‘Can we get an appointment?’

  ‘It’s Frome. Of course we can get an appointment. If it can wait a couple of weeks I’ll take her myself.’

  ‘You’re coming down again?’

  ‘Blah blah with the vicar,’ she said. ‘What does he want to know?’

  ‘I could take Ray into Bath and look for that suit.’

  ‘Something nice,’ she said. ‘But not too expensive.’ She peeled the Cellophane off a fresh packet of cigarettes. ‘I don’t suppose you want to do the pictures of the wedding, do you?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Clem.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think so. It wouldn’t be the same with no one shooting at you.’

  ‘I’d be afraid of screwing up,’ he said.

  ‘Liar,’ she said. ‘Bare-faced liar.’ She offered him a cigarette.

  When Ray woke up they had tea. Once tea was out of the way Frankie poured the early-evening drinks. They watched, without the slightest interest, a programme of hymn singing, then the start of a soap opera about chirrupy and resourceful people whose lives were issue-based and comically disastrous. Through the drawingroom windows the light suddenly flooded as the sun rolled below the level of the clouds.

  ‘We have to go,’ said Clare, standing up.

  ‘Do you?’ asked Laura, looking at Clem.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clem, ‘we probably do.’ He fetched his jacket from the back of a chair in the kitchen. The others came out to the hall to say their goodbyes.

  Laura gave Clem a carrier-bag with the remains of the beef in it. ‘It makes the best sandwiches,’ she said.

  Clem squeezed her hand. ‘Remember that appointment with Crawley,’ he said.

  She promised him she would.

  At the cottage that night, Clem, searching for his lighter in the side-pockets of his jacket, found a white postcard written over with the type of gold ink people used for writing names on birthday presents. He read the card, then took it through to where Clare was drinking a mug of sweetened milk by the heater. He read it again, out loud: ‘Near Picota southern Portugal 6-year-old Luna Vargas missing from home for 9 days has been found alive at the bottom of a dry well 12km from her village. Dr Pires 43 who treated Lima for cuts and bruises described her survival as “a miracle”!’

  ‘I know,’
said Clare. ‘I’ve got one too.’ She went to her raincoat, pulled out another of the cards, and passed it to Clem.

  A 16-hour operation in Osaka Japan to sew a woman’s arm back on after it was severed in a freak bicycling accident has been declared ‘entirely successful’! 20-year-old literature student Izumi Kuzuu hopes to be in the saddle again before her 21st birthday’

  ‘Where do they come from?’ asked Clem, turning the cards over to see if there was some clue.

  ‘It’s Ray,’ said Clare. ‘I saw him put yours in your jacket when you went to the loo.’

  ‘Ray?’

  ‘Frankie’s marrying Don Quixote,’ she said.

  19

  On Monday morning, so early it was barely light, the chimney sweeps arrived: an aged man with his chest full of coal-dust, followed by a bland, incurious boy who carried the equipment, an outsize vacuum cleaner like a Max Ernst elephant. Though the nights were mostly mild and would be perhaps for weeks to come, Clare wore her jumpers and cardigans in the evening and was not much helped by the threads of warm air from the electric heater. Another source of heat and light would be welcome (and had fires not kept off the human fear of darkness for two hundred thousand years?). The old man called Clare ‘Mrs Glass’. Clem made him a cup of tea that he drank scalding hot, sucking the liquid noisily through pursed lips, then coughing and spitting into a handkerchief. He had never, he said, in response to an unasked, an unimagined question, found any riches in a chimney. ‘Just soot and dead birds. The rest is all mad talk.’

  There was a coal merchant’s in the lane, a place that had continued from the days when there were working mines around the village. Later in the morning Clem bought a twenty-kilo sack, carrying it back in his arms like a sleeping child. At twilight, his first attempts to set a fire choked the room with wraiths of kerosene-scented smoke, but after fifty minutes of blowing and fanning, the use of many more matches and several chunks of firelighter, the little flames finally adhered and the coals began to give up their heat. Clare drew her chair close and held out her palms. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and stayed up late watching the coals bum down to a bowl of bright embers, sometimes naming the colours she saw there. Copper, violet, viridian. Deep red, chrome yellow. Magenta.