It went on. Friday, while she was up at the health centre, he found an envelope on the dining-table addressed to the Principal of Dundee University. He held it to the window, squinted, but could make out nothing of its contents. Just an update perhaps, a progress report. He hoped she had not said something foolish about going back in October, or if she had, he hoped they would have the sense to stall her. ‘Slow down,’ he said to her that night, as she collected the dishes after supper. ‘Don’t overdo things.’ Politely, she asked him not to fuss. He said he wasn’t fussing; she said he was. ‘Let me breathe,’ she said. But was this the request of a competent person? What if he dropped his guard and found her in the garden one night tearing out her hair, howling at the moon? He was the primary carer, not Boswell or Fiacc, or Laura even. He would be the one who picked up the pieces.
On Sunday, as though to confirm the working of a spell, she insisted they went back to the quarry together. This time they wore costumes—Clare in a tiger-striped one-piece of Frankie’s, Clem in a pair of Ron’s old trunks that sagged at the crotch. The day was cool and the quarry was quiet. A pair of skinny boys dived from a rock; a tattooed girl in a bikini necked with her boyfriend. Clem and Clare swam slow curves in contrary directions. As they passed each other for the second time, Clare said she had a plan.
Clem turned and trod the water a yard in front of her.
‘Ray,’ she said, ‘his mother, Frankie. They’re all coming on Friday.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to cook.’
‘Cook?’
‘Lunch. Saturday. We can eat outside.’
‘At the cottage?’
‘Going to cook a salmon,’ she said. ‘Keep dreaming of them.’
‘Won’t Laura have organised something?’
‘Laura’s done enough.’
‘Sounds like a lot of work,’ he said.
‘You won’t be doing it. So it doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘Let’s talk about it at home.’
‘No need,’ she said, leaning back from him and starting to swim again. ‘Already decided.’
But the new week brought rain. The cottage’s broken guttering spilled water down the walls; the patch outside the bathroom darkened and spread. On Tuesday, Clare stayed all day in her bedroom, coming down in the evening, sullen, distracted, something of the old fear in her eyes. Clem braced himself (was it not all as he had predicted?), but on Wednesday her mood brightened, and on Thursday morning she appeared at the kitchen door in her coat while Clem was brewing coffee. She told him that she needed to go into Bath. Bath was where she would buy the salmon. They would need other things too, of course. Some good wine for a start. Sancerre, some white Bordeaux. Clem pointed to the rain on the window.
‘It’s you or the bus,’ she said.
‘The bus will take two hours. Probably three.’
She shrugged.
‘Do I have time for my coffee?’ he asked.
This was unmysteriously the Clare he had grown up with. The more he attempted to balk her the more determined she would become. And why balk her at all? He drank his coffee while she watched him, then went upstairs to collect the car keys and his jacket.
In Bath they bought an umbrella and then a fish, a whole salmon, farmed but organic, that they found curled on the chipped ice of the fish counter at the supermarket. It was expensive. Clem offered the last of his Scottish twenties from the cashpoint in Dundee, but Clare paid with a card, for the wine too and the icecream and half a dozen boxes and bottles of toiletries. In Waterstone’s on Milsom Street, a light of physical appetite in her eyes, she bought books—nineteenth-century French history, a George Sand novel, a new edition of Coleridge’s Table Talk, as expensive and heavy as the salmon.
The car was in the car park under the supermarket. They were almost back there—Clare holding the umbrella, Clem carrying the bags—when she stopped him outside a barber’s on the high street.
He, too, she said, needed some attention. He was getting ragged, wild-looking. Didn’t he know? He thought she was teasing him but she bustled him inside. The barbers in their blue aprons were sitting on the adjustable chairs, reading newspapers. There was no business on a wet mid-week afternoon; they did Clem straight away.
‘Day off?’ asked the barber.
‘That’s right,’ said Clem. He waited to be asked what he was taking a day off from but the question didn’t come. He shut his eyes and let the barber tilt his head with fingers smelling of nicotine and the various oils and balms of his trade. When it was done, Clem looked like all the others there—in a blue apron he would have been indistinguishable—but the event amused him, and as they went out into the rain with their bags and new hair he decided that Boswell had been right. Why not accept the evidence of his eyes? Let what seemed to be be in fact. Where did it get him to assume the worst, to wait on disasters? He saw them together reflected in a store window, two ghostly shoppers, tall, half elegant in the splashed street.
‘What about calling Dad tonight?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say to him.’
‘I don’t think that matters.’
‘Of course it matters.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I hate the thought of his being kind to me. Forgiving me.’
‘He has nothing to forgive you for.’
‘He’ll find something.’
‘He’s not angry with you.’
‘Are you?’
‘Angry?’
‘Having to be your big sister’s keeper.’
‘No one’s angry with you, Clare.’
‘It might be easier,’ she said, as they took the concrete steps down to the car park. ‘People’s goodness rather terrifies me.’
At seven they went up to eat with Laura and Kenneth. Clem’s hair was admired; Clare’s admired again. Tidying peas on to his fork, Clem said that Clare had a plan for Saturday. Laura looked at Clare. Clare faltered a moment.
‘Lunch,’ prompted Clem.
‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘I’m going to cook lunch. For everyone.’
‘Lunch, dear?’
‘At the cottage on Saturday.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Outside.’
‘Outside?’
‘I need a fish-kettle.’
‘Goodness,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve had a fish kettle for forty years or more but I don’t think I’ve ever cooked anything in it. It might even have been a wedding present. People give you so many silly things.’
After supper they found the kettle’s lid at the back of the cupboard beside the Aga. The copper base was on the kitchen window sill filled with earth and planted with hyacinth bulbs. They repotted the bulbs in an ice bucket. The kettle was scrubbed and put into a bag. It was nine thirty. Clem went along the passage to ring the island.
‘I think she might want to talk to you tonight,’ he said, when his father had been fetched to the phone.
‘Oh, Clem! That’s marvellous news. Marvellous!’
‘It would be good to keep things fairly light.’
‘Yes. Very. Don’t worry on that score. What do you suggest?’
‘If you have any recipes for salmon you could pass them on. She’s cooking on Saturday.’
‘Cooking! Gracious. Is she there now?’
‘She’s with Laura. Give me a moment.’
In the kitchen Clare had put on her coat. She was smoking one of Clem’s cigarettes. He took the cigarette from her. She hesitated, then went out to the passage. Clem waited with Laura and Kenneth. They could hear Clare’s voice but not what she said. She was gone for two or three minutes. When she came back she nodded to him, then pressed her face against Laura’s bosom and cried noisily. The dog woke from its slumbers and growled. Kenneth shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. Laura stroked her niece’s hair. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There now. That’s another fence jumped.’
The fish was cooked on Friday afternoon, poached in a court
-bouillon of white wine and onion, bay leaves and fennel, the kettle slanted across two of the electric coils. At four o’clock Clare left for her appointment with Crawley. She didn’t suggest that Clem accompany her (she hadn’t suggested it last time). When she returned, ninety minutes later, her pockets were filled with Sicilian lemons from the village shop.
‘A good session?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Great.’ He was not even sure she had gone.
Towards sunset he walked down the garden to the vine arbour. The weather was on the move, the clouds breaking up in the west. Streams of light, as in a child’s drawing, picked out certain favoured fields. ‘Could go either way,’ he said, scraping his shoes on the doorstep.
‘Oh, Mr Gloom,’ called Clare from the kitchen. ‘Mr Caution.’ The fish was cool now. She said she was going to peel off its skin. Clem sat down at the desk. The books, pens and pencils had all been tidied together. Next to them was her print of the Géricault painting, The Raft of the Medusa, which she had never, for whatever reason, bothered to put up. He switched on the lamp. He could remember some of what he had read in her essay in Dundee—the body parts in the studio, the scandal when the painting was exhibited (one of the critics running home to write it up as a painting for vultures, the delight of vultures). He adjusted the articulated stem of the lamp to bring its light closer. The storm that had wrecked the Medusa was over, though the sea was still rough and the raft was wallowing in a deep swell. They had a mast of sorts, an improvised affair with rope stays and a sail, blood-brown, bellied out by the wind. In the foreground, a man with grey curls and the beard of a philosopher, his head protected from the sun by a cloth, was sitting with the naked corpse of a youth across his lap, the dead boy’s feet trailing in the foam behind the raft. More corpses, face up or face down, lay over the timbers like fallen statuary. Among the survivors only the older man was turned towards the audience (those ladies and gentlemen of the salon). The others—Clem counted twelve of them—were meshed into a frantic pyramid at the right-hand side of the painting, backs and arms and necks straining upwards to where a muscular black sailor, stripped to the waist and held high on his comrade’s shoulders, signalled with his shirt to a vessel they had spied on the remote horizon.
How thoroughly the moment’s terrible urgency had been caught, though on Clare’s print—a colour photocopy, very imperfect—the other ship, if it was there at all, was nothing but a scratch of black paint above the wave tips. Were they keeping good watch out there? Only the sharpest eyes could hope to see something as small as the raft at such a distance. Certainly no voice would carry. And if someone had seen, through a telescope perhaps, the pyramid of men balanced like a circus act, would the captain change course for a raft full of strangers, people who would need attending to, who might bring disease with them? Distress at such a range would look almost ridiculous; it could arouse as much contempt as pity. How difficult then, separated by those leagues of heaving sea, to snap shut the telescope, thank God it wasn’t them, and sail by?
‘Clare,’ said Clem, going to the arch and looking through to where she worked in the kitchen, ‘were the people on the raft picked up in the end?’
She lifted a length of silk-thin skin from the salmon’s side, then turned to him with the knife in her hand. ‘The original,’ she said, ‘is huge. Almost five metres high. When I was staying in Paris I used to see it at the Louvre two or three times a week. If you look at it long enough the sea begins to move. It’s a masterpiece.’
‘The dead don’t look quite dead enough,’ he said. ‘Oh, it’s not one of your photographs,’ she answered. ‘In Géricault’s day the dead were still sacred.’ She smiled and turned back to her work (the fish shone now, moist and coral). ‘Someone saw them,’ she said, speaking over her shoulder. ‘Two of them wrote a book about it. Naufrage de la Frégate la Méduse’.
Early on Saturday morning she came into his room. She shook his feet to wake him and told him to look out of the window. A few white clouds, but the southern sky was mostly blue. On the wall of his bedroom was a block of early orange sunlight.
‘In all the rushing today,’ he said, passing a hand over his face, ‘make sure you take your stuff.’
‘You can watch if you like,’ she said, a giddy voice, flirtatious.
Downstairs she handed him an envelope (it was addressed to ‘The Occupiers’, unopened). The list on the back was headed ‘Things We Need’. He drank a mug of tea and drove to Laura’s. The front door was locked; he had to tap on the kitchen window. Kenneth let him in, then helped him carry stuff to the car. He was choosing cloths from the drawer under the kitchen table when Laura came down in her dressing-gown, her hair held in a net of the type he had had no idea people wore any more. ‘Still looting, I’m afraid,’ he said.
‘I wish you’d take it all,’ she said. ‘I wish you were going to stay.’
‘We are,’ he said. ‘For a while.’
‘How is she today?’
‘A little high.’
‘And how are you?’
‘Nervous.’ He asked her how she was getting on with Ray’s mother.
‘It’s like a house on fire,’ she said, taking a crumpet from the bread bin and dropping it into the toaster.
Clem took Kenneth with him to the cottage. On a fifth attempt they manoeuvred the dining-table through the back door and into the garden. The ground was rain-softened but there was a good warmth in the sunlight and it would be firm enough by the time the guests arrived. He set the table, then picked a dozen vine leaves and scattered them on to the cloth as decoration. In the kitchen the salads and the dressings were ready, the lemons quartered, the salmon snug beneath its sheet of foil in the fridge.
‘They won’t be here for another hour at least,’ said Clem, catching Clare again at the front door looking down the path to the lane. ‘There’s plenty of time to relax.’
‘Mmm,’ she said. She walked away to the bottom of the stairs, paused. ‘Clem...’
‘It’ll go beautifully,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’
He took a bottle of white wine from the fridge door, pulled its cork, poured himself a large glass, and went outside for a last inspection of the table and the garden. There was something finely unEnglish about the heavily laid table on the grass—or not unEnglish at all, just unGlass-like. Would the quarryman have approved? The work Clem had done in the garden did not now, as he looked at it, amount to much, less even than he had thought. Some ground cleared, some of the beds dug over. The place was irreclaimable perhaps, or needed skills beyond any he would have time to learn there. He would not give up on it just yet, but this lunch in the open air should, he decided, be the ‘project’s’ official end (its true end, he knew well enough, was in the tunnels underground). ‘To Alan,’ he said, and raised his wine, seeing, as he did so, Clare at the window of her room looking down at him. They smiled at each other, but did not wave.
Ray’s mother was called Jean. Her small round face was like the button of an inconspicuous flower. She shied from things as though quite ordinary objects, her cutlery, Clem’s lighter, a slice of salmon on a plate, might strike at her without any warning. To cover her discomfort she began to drink. By the time the first course was cleared she had become hopelessly free, describing herself to Clem as ‘a decayed housekeeper’. Ray seemed hardly to notice her. On arriving at the cottage from Laura’s he had hugged Clem, a bony clinging that lasted many seconds. Frankie had been cooler with him, remembering his anger. She was dressed in a polka-dot frock of the sort worn by flamenco dancers in tourist nightclubs. Jean regarded her with undisguised awe. Clem kept Jean’s glass topped up. She told him he looked like a man she had once known called Alfie. Later, she started calling him Alfie. Clare talked to Frankie. Ray talked to Laura. Kenneth attended solemnly to his food. Toasts were drunk: to the cook, to Jean, to absent friends, to family. A van passed in the lane. The ice cream was a Viennetta, described on the box as extra-dolce. Clem cut it into seven po
rtions, then brought more wine from the kitchen. He told Jean about Silverman’s work in Toronto. There were people, he said, hiding out in little rooms in the railway station. Jean said she hoped he wouldn’t be offended but it was her opinion that a lot of down-and-outs needed a swift kick up the backside. Clare went into the house. Laura and Clem swapped places. The sun was sliding towards the abbey. The table’s complicated shadow grew over the grass. Clem smoked with Frankie. He reminded her of their moment in the attic. She blew smoke between her teeth, laughing. ‘Be honest,’ she said, holding open the little sateen jacket she had put on. ‘Do I still have great tits?’ Clem assured her she did. He noticed that Clare had shut the back door. He thought she’d been away perhaps ten minutes. He lit another cigarette, rubbed his eyes. Ray dragged his chair over. Clem asked him if Jean knew about the good-news cards and what she thought of them. Ray said the cards frightened her, he didn’t know why. Clem threw his cigarette away, excused himself, and walked to the cottage.
In the living room Clare was standing beside the empty fireplace. Next to her, her hand on Clare’s shoulder, was Finola Fiacc. She looked much as she had the last time Clem had seen her—the plimsolls, the scarlet lipstick, the vulcanised coat—though instead of the tracksuit she wore a black woollen dress that hung to the middle of her long bright shins.
‘Well, well,’ said Clem. He glanced at Clare. ‘A surprise?’
The Optimists Page 18
