This tiny sound was an aspect of the pleasure of go, Kathleen told me, as were the fragrance of the wood, its grain, its weight and density, the colour of it, the colours of the stones. With chess there was no such satisfaction in the materials of the game. Chess was hand-to-hand combat, whereas go was an engagement of much greater subtlety. I accepted readily the implicit compliment.
Instruction now began. In a game of chess, you begin with the two armies facing each other; here, however, you begin with emptiness, and the potential for any number of games, Kathleen explained. ‘The possibilities are infinite,’ she said, gazing into the board, as if through a window, onto a landscape of thrilling wildness and extent.
‘You play not so much to win as to learn, to become a better player,’ said Kathleen. ‘You endeavour to create an interesting thing, with your opponent. The game is more important than the players.’ Whereas each piece in chess has a specific role to play, a particular way of behaving, in go every stone is equal. There are no hierarchies of kings and queens and foot soldiers. At one point in a game, a stone might be strong; later, the same stone might be weak. ‘Every stone is vulnerable, and every stone can cause damage,’ she explained.
‘It’s all very metaphorical,’ Lucas heckled from the armchair, from behind a newspaper; he could have been a long-married and affectionate husband.
‘Well, it is,’ answered Kathleen. The rebuke was mock-headmistressy. She went on: in chess the focus is upon the enemy’s king, and three or four pieces might gang up to trap him, but in go there’s no focal point – the whole board is alive. ‘Everywhere, the situation is constantly changing.’
‘As I said,’ Lucas intervened.
‘Lucas is useless at it,’ said Kathleen.
‘I am,’ he said happily. Then he warned me: ‘It’s like bleeding to death. Very, very slowly.’
‘I’ll show you how to play,’ said Kathleen. ‘The rules are simple.’
‘The rules aren’t the problem,’ said Lucas.
Regarding him over the rim of her glasses, she enquired: ‘Lucas, wasn’t there something you were going to do?’
He lowered the newspaper and gazed at the facing wall, slack-mouthed, failing to remember. He turned his clueless eyes to Kathleen. A mimed word gave him help. ‘Ah yes,’ he recalled, and bowed in apology. It was a routine for my amusement.
Lucas left us, to run his errand for Kathleen, to the chemist, and she instructed me in the rules of go. We began to play. There was a fluctuating wind that afternoon, and an upstairs window clattered in a gust. Kathleen looked up. ‘It’s the one on the landing,’ she said. ‘Would you mind?’
I went up the stairs, into a part of the house that I had not seen before, a part that belonged to Kathleen and Lucas, in a way that the rooms downstairs, where I was often a visitor, did not. Something might be revealed, I thought. The arrangement of this household was strange. Usually she spoke to Lucas like a mother to her son (sometimes a son of fifteen, rather than a man of middle age), but on occasion there was a deference in Lucas’s manner, as if he were the live-in assistant of a famous person, and sometimes – even before her frailty – I observed a dependency, as though Lucas were more a nurse than an assistant. And once in a while I would notice a glance that seemed to expose a sentiment that was of quite a different order. That made me uneasy, as when Lucas came back and Kathleen said ‘Thank you, dear,’ with the inflection of a private joke, as if they were allowing me a glimpse. The creak of the stairs augmented an atmosphere of secrecy and intrusion. Nothing that I saw bore any trace of Lucas; the glassy dark wood of the floorboards, the threadbare rug, the sun-bleached burgundy curtains – it all signified Kathleen. On a wicker chair at the top of the stairs stood a huge glass bowl of dried petals, from which a weak and dusty scent arose. All four doors along the landing were shut. There seemed to be some meaning to this. In any other house, I thought, one door would have been ajar, at least. They had made a point of closing every one. On two other occasions, while Kathleen and Lucas were living in the house, I went upstairs: once to fetch a book from the shelves on the landing; once again for the window. All the doors were shut.
‘Let the game take you in,’ Kathleen encouraged me, and I did. She handicapped herself, yet always won. But I learned, and improved, and was happy to lose. Kathleen considered placidly the terrain of the board; she placed the stones quickly, as if intrigued to see what the consequence would be. Often Lucas watched for a while, admiring, and perplexed, both by what was happening in the game and, it seemed at times, by the invincible Kathleen.
•
The evening of the swim clarified nothing. About to turn back, having walked east for some time, along the beach, I saw a man sitting on the sand, reading amid bags and towels, and recognised him as Lucas. A late September evening; the sun had just gone – so, about 7pm. It was cool, but not chilly. In the moment that I realised that the reading man was Lucas, Lucas saw that the walker was me. He beckoned me to approach. This was some time after the episode of the bowl; I was one of the chosen few. Kathleen’s clothes were strewn about. Lucas pointed to where she was, neck-deep in the placid water; wading rather than swimming, it appeared. With Lucas I would have talked about school, I imagine. We admired the sky: clouds of charcoal ash, as I recall, with a lower stratum of pomegranate. The tide was low. The distance from us to Kathleen would have been thirty yards or so. Seeing us marvelling at the horizon, she turned to do the same; and then she returned. I can see her, pushing through the water, striding out. Her pallid shoulders emerged; she emerged to the waist, entirely naked. The birth of Venus did not come to mind. The flesh was chicken flesh, blotched with violet from the coldness of the sea. Not knowing who it was, one might have mistaken the stocky body for a man’s – an unfit man, and elderly. Half-revealed, she turned away, not abashed at seeing me there, but to look back over the water. It occurred to me that this was an act of remembrance; that this was the time of day at which Callum had died, in these waters. Another thought: that with Callum gone, Kathleen, never conventional, no longer cared what anyone thought. For perhaps a minute she stood in the shallows, then turned back towards us and walked out, in no hurry. This is when Lucas stood up, lifting the towel. He went down to the water’s edge, arriving as she reached the sand. There was no urgency; no need to protect her modesty. Like the attendant of a grand eccentric, he held out the huge white towel at full stretch, at shoulder height, and Kathleen turned into it, with a smile of gracious thanks. It was not a sexual scene; but she had decided to be naked in Lucas’s presence; she must have undressed in front of him. I did not know what to think of it. She sat down, swathed in her towel, to the side of her clothes, and we talked as she watched the light disappear. What we talked about, I can’t remember. It was a weightless little conversation, such as we might have had upon meeting in the street. Her nudity had been of no account. While she dressed, I looked away, but not at her request or suggestion. This must be the strangest widow in England, I decided.
•
Kathleen talked to me about life without Callum, once, in the year that was to be her last. I had returned from university; our conversation had a new frankness, warranted by the elevation of my status – I was now semi-independent, a young adult, a proto-scholar. After the death of her husband she had fallen into ‘an abyss of grief’, she told me. Too weak, too badly injured to climb out, she had seen everything as if from the floor of this abyss; people were all at a distance from her; she could barely see them or hear them; the light was far away. It was Lucas who had guided her back to the upper surface. And yet, the climate of her life was no longer what it had been with Callum; it never could be. ‘It’s colder now,’ she said. A posthumous reunion of the spirit, such as Lucas envisaged and promised, could not be a perfect reunion, she seemed to be telling me. I thought, without speaking, of Achilles in the underworld, telling Odysseus that he would rather be the living slave of a dirt-poor farmer than a king among
the dead.
•
Some people seem to believe that there was a disagreement about the scattering of Lucas’s ashes. There may well have been, but there was no disagreement in which I was involved. The brother and sister, I know, would have preferred a burial and a stone. They told me so; or the brother told me that his sister found cremations too squalid, and he sympathised with her point of view. ‘At least the waste disposal element is a bit less obvious with the church option,’ he said to me, after the funeral. Erin noticed that I was talking to the brother, and did not care for the way he seemed to be taking the day. The smirk was objectionable, she said to me afterwards; and I was implicated in it. But a cremation is what Lucas had wanted, Erin said, and there is no reason not to think that this was true. And whatever my relationship with Lucas might have been, it was for Erin to decide what should be done with the ashes. She chose not to make a ceremony of it; exactly what was done, only she and her sister know. Golden Cap was a place of particular significance to Lucas, Erin told me, and I can only make a guess as to the nature of that significance, as he never made any reference to it, and neither did she. I did not ask. Obviously it must have played some part in the story of Erin and Lucas. My view is that what was done was entirely fitting: the body reduced to dust in the shortest possible time, and cast into the air, the spiritual element. But had an equivalent of Callum been on hand, Lucas once told me, he might have considered commissioning a stone: a quiet monument, in the style of Wittgenstein’s gravestone; name and years, and nothing else. ‘Something gloriously humble,’ he sighed, in a parody of self-importance.
•
A Saturday afternoon; I was alone in the house, and Lucas called to me over the wall, inviting me to join them; Kathleen had made a rhubarb and apple pie – a speciality. This would have been some time after I had seen them on the beach.
The three of us ate in the garden, before Kathleen took a nap. ‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ she said, leaving us, and I heard the implication that Lucas had something significant to say to me – something, perhaps, about his life with Kathleen, which was still opaque to me.
And Lucas was indeed in expatiating mood, but his subject, after some preliminaries that are now forgotten, was not his current life; it was his family – in particular, his mother. I should count myself fortunate in being the son of my mother, he told me, and for a moment I wondered if I had given him some reason to suspect that I lacked gratitude. What he meant, however, was that he had not been so fortunate.
With the death of his father, Lucas had been left alone with his mother; the brother and sister – of whose existence I was only now made aware, I think – were somewhat older than Lucas, and were living elsewhere. ‘I was an addendum,’ he told me. As a child he had often felt, he told me, that his mother had been ‘less than wholly delighted’ by his conception. The hardest years of motherhood were behind her, she had thought, but then Lucas arrived, surprisingly, and the drudgery recommenced. His mother was never ‘the warmest of women’. She was ‘an efficient mother, but not a cuddler,’ he said. Young Lucas had come to feel that his mother regarded him as something of a project, a test of her child-rearing skills and stamina. His father contributed to the work of raising the boy no more and no less than was customary for fathers of that period. Of course, there had been episodes of tension between the parents, but no arguments within Lucas’s hearing. Sometimes, however, and with increasing frequency in later years, he had sensed that a disagreement might have recently occurred, or been in the offing. When his father died, his mother’s demonstrations of grief were soon over. She was unhappy, as went without saying, but it seemed to Lucas not so much that his mother was bereft at the loss of her husband, but that she was burdened by all the work that she now had to do on her own. ‘The household was understaffed,’ as Lucas put it.
He admitted that he had thought that his mother should have observed a lengthier period of full-blown widowhood. To his way of thinking, she had been a little too hasty to fill the vacancy. She was a good-looking woman and not yet fifty when widowed; in time there would be another man, in all likelihood, but a two-year pause was not long enough for Lucas. He might have found it easier to accept that his mother had found a new object for her affections so soon after her husband’s decease had she accepted a replacement other than the one she chose. Malcolm ran a company that offered ‘Logistical Solutions’ – Lucas relished the absurdity of the slogan. ‘Translation: he owned some lorries.’ There were signs that the business was doing well. He was also few years younger than Lucas’s mother, and played a lot of squash – as she told Lucas one evening, by way of presenting her admirer’s qualifications, prior to introducing him to her son. It was impossible to understand the attraction: the man had no apparent interests other than his business and, now, Lucas’s mother. He wore a watch that had half a dozen pointless dials within the main one; it might have been permissible if worn by an astronaut. The watch, one felt, told the world what Malcolm felt it needed to know about him. It was not inconceivable that he had never opened a book since leaving school. Yet Malcolm’s imperceptible magic did its work. One night, a conversation was convened in order to clear the air. It ended with his mother telling him, with rather fetching and youthful vehemence, as if defying the wishes of a parent: ‘You will have to get used to it, because we’re getting married.’ At least she had delayed the announcement until Lucas had left home.
The newly-weds moved to a large house, with extensive grounds, several miles removed from the old neighbourhood. A room was set aside for Lucas’s use during the university vacations; Malcolm had no offspring to accommodate, which, as Lucas put it, ‘might or might not have been an aspect of his allure’. The room was three times the size of his boyhood bedroom and had a fitted wardrobe that could have held the uniforms of an entire platoon. After graduation, for a few years, he occupied this room half a dozen times a year, at most, for weekend visits. He was the most welcome guest. ‘It wouldn’t have been a surprise to find complementary chocolates on the pillow when I arrived,’ he said. At best, his relationship with Malcolm was one of reciprocal indifference. Lucas acknowledged that his mother’s new husband had occasionally made an attempt to reduce the distance between them. He recalled, with embarrassment, an evening during which Malcolm solicited the aesthete stepson’s appreciation of a recently acquired artwork – the head of a racehorse, life-size, in solid glass. Lucas feigned admiration impeccably, he thought, but – ‘for once’ – he felt ashamed of himself, he told me – ashamed of the pretence, and ashamed of his snobbery, because Malcolm was doing his best, after all. An antique table was bought for the display of the horse’s head; it was the first thing one saw on entering the house. A staircase curved around it, a wide staircase that Lucas’s mother would descend, ‘as if appearing in the film of her own life,’ said Lucas.
Yet he admired his mother, he insisted. Above all, he admired her honesty. ‘I like this life,’ she stated, as though asserting a philosophical principle. She liked not having to worry about money, she told him. Lucas was unaware that there ever had been any reason to worry about money before. She liked the house and the enormous garden and the holidays, and she liked no longer having to work full-time. ‘And she did seem happy,’ Lucas conceded. ‘She seemed to love Malcolm, perhaps more than she had loved my father,’ he said, appearing to find some sweetness in the mystery of it, and he sighed, as if exhaling the smoke of an invisible cigarette.
If I were to see Lucas with his mother, he told me, I would not think that they were related. ‘Which, in a way,’ he added, ‘we no longer are.’ There was little affection between them, but no rancour, either; and no physical resemblance that he could see. Under the influence of Malcolm she had perhaps become the woman she had always wanted to be; unencumbered. ‘Perhaps I could have been a better son,’ he said, and for a few seconds seemed to give the proposition some thought. ‘You’re a very good son,’ he told me, as if conferring upon m
e a certificate of quality. They were not close, but he wished his mother well. ‘I do,’ he assured me. ‘People should not be alone,’ he said, looking me in the eye, with too intense a kindness, to ensure that this most important of lessons should be remembered. From time to time he visited his mother. She was nearing eighty, and no longer in good health.
•
Three years after this conversation, his mother died. It was some time after her death that we became aware of it, when Kathleen, talking to my mother, made reference to the funeral. It had happened a fortnight before. We wondered: leaving aside the fact that, according to Lucas, he and his mother had become to some extent estranged, was it appropriate, given what Lucas believed, to pass on our commiserations? Had any real loss occurred? It would be strange to call on him in order to express our sympathies for a misfortune of which he had chosen not to inform us, and which might not, to his way of thinking, have been a misfortune at all. His mother was now an occupant of the higher realm. Nonetheless, next time she saw him, my mother offered her condolences, and he accepted them, with thanks, as one might accept an unexpected but very small gift. He said nothing about his mother, then or ever again, to either of us.
In fact, I later learned, she had not seen her younger son for several years. ‘Estrangement’ was not the right word, his brother informed me – rather, there had been a ‘cessation’. Money was the immediate cause; Lucas had been in need, the brother believed, and their mother had not been as generous as she might have been, possibly because Malcolm would not allow it. Malcolm had little respect for Lucas’s line of work, and his wife’s point of view was more or less the same, said the brother, whose sympathies did not need to be made more explicit. Malcolm was not at the funeral of Lucas. Having nursed their mother in her dwindling years, he had declined abruptly once she had gone, and was no longer occupying the house. When I asked if Malcolm knew that Lucas had died, the answer was: ‘I doubt if the name means much to him any more.’
Live; live; live Page 4
