Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

  I too was ‘unexpected’, my mother told me, eventually. We had one conversation on the topic; a brief one. After seven years of trying, she told me, she had almost given up hope. Adoption was something that she would have considered, but not my father. Childlessness began to seem to be her fate, and she was getting used to the idea when Anna Bramber, then a colleague at the clinic, gave her the news about her sister. The sister, Belinda, married happily to a ‘lovely man’, very successful, and with a good job herself and a ‘lovely house’, had a life that would have been perfect if only there were children in it. She and her husband were ‘desperate’ to have a child, but had conceived only three times in the decade of their marriage, and each of those pregnancies had failed. Tests were done, and no physiological explanation was found. Belinda was approaching forty; the odds were lengthening. A few months before Belinda’s fortieth, Anna moved in with her boyfriend; within weeks, a baby was on the way. Not knowing how she could tell Belinda, she postponed the announcement for two months, then three. Every week the sisters spoke on the phone, and the deception was making Anna miserable. When the pregnancy became unmistakeably visible, she could no longer keep it a secret. She rang Belinda. ‘Bel,’ she began, ‘I have some news.’ And Belinda answered: ‘So have I.’ Relaying the amazing story to my mother, the next day, Anna proposed that a greater power was at work. ‘I’ll pray for you,’ she said; Anna often prayed, sometimes to give a little bit of extra help to those who came to the clinic.

  For a while, a few years after my father went, a young couple lived at number 17. An attractive pair, as I recall. She had an old-fashioned grey-green gabardine coat, and I have an image of them walking arm in arm in the rain, with the man – Gareth? – holding the umbrella, like a stylish couple in an old film. They were often to be seen arm in arm; their happiness was remarked upon. Then the baby arrived, and every Saturday morning the glum husband could be seen, steering the pushchair around the streets; he had the face of a bolt-tightener on a production line, six hours into his shift. Some men do not like the idea of no longer being the sole beneficiary of a woman’s affection, my mother remarked, after we had passed him. This I took to be an allusion to my father, just as I had taken the husband of Belinda to be an envied paragon of love and patience and success.

  •

  ‘If it weren’t for Lucas, I wouldn’t last a month,’ Kathleen told me, in her room at Belmont Court, after what would be the last operation. ‘I read and I fall asleep, and when I wake up I’ve forgotten everything. I’m just pouring words down the plughole.’ Her laugh was a single small puff of air. Her left hand was no longer obedient; she looked at it as if it were a pet that she was obliged to look after. ‘I wait for Lucas,’ she said, ‘and for the light to go out.’ Every day, when Lucas was not on the road, he visited Kathleen. Every single day. This should be known. ‘How is she?’ I would ask him, and he would answer: ‘OK. She’s OK.’ His demeanour was more mournful in the weeks before her death than after. Fifteen weeks she survived in Belmont Court.

  One afternoon my mother, looking out of an upstairs window, saw Lucas standing in the garden, wincing into the sunlight. She knew what this meant. He looked like a prisoner who had been released that morning, refamiliarising himself with his home. She went outside, and Lucas called to her: ‘She has left us.’ That was all he said; he went back into the house. Later she saw him writing at the garden table. We were invited to the burial. No more than a dozen people were there. His speech was brief and simple, and touching. He spoke quietly, and as though the phrases in praise of her spirit, of her mastery, of the selflessness of Kathleen and of her art, were occurring to him as he spoke. ‘But words are superfluous,’ he concluded, touching an eyelid. ‘We shall miss her, always.’ I sat beside a woman who turned out to be the owner of a gallery through which many of Kathleen’s pieces had been sold. It was interesting, the way she listened to Lucas, and the way, later, she addressed him. His status, evidently, was unclear to her. He might have been a secretary whose influence she knew to have been rather greater than that of an employee.

  •

  I remember a Saturday afternoon, with my mother, in Dorchester; my father had been gone for five years or so. We entered a shop, a large shop. A sharp shower had started, and my mother pushed the door open with urgency. A woman in an emerald green coat was leaving; she had her head down, and was unclipping an umbrella. My mother, also head down, wiping rainwater from a sleeve, bumped into her. She looked up, to apologise, but the apology was cut short: my mother and the woman in the green coat stepped away from each other, and seemed to be embarrassed in a way that the small collision did not explain. The woman – younger than my mother, but not young – performed a sort of bow, then swerved around us, hurrying, and my mother watched her leave; her expression was a glare, as if the woman had said something rude. Following my mother’s lead, I too looked at the woman. With the umbrella held low, screening her face, the woman in the green coat trotted up the road.

  A comment was required. ‘She worked with your father,’ said my mother. And then: ‘A nasty piece of work.’ The woman had not looked at all like a nasty piece of work; and why would my mother talk about someone from my father’s workplace in that way, as though she knew her well? She had not known the people he worked with, I had thought. There was only one way, it seemed, to connect the woman we had just encountered, who was not nice, with my father, who had gone, and was always referred to as ‘your father’. My mother intended that I should make this connection; this is what I understood, though no further mention was made of the woman in the green coat. And the fact that this woman was not to be mentioned was proof that I was right to make the connection that I had made.

  A couple of years later, also in Dorchester, with a friend and his sister, I saw the green coat again. The hue was unmistakeable. There it was, on the opposite side of the road, but the woman wearing it was perhaps not the woman we had seen at the shop. She seemed heavier, but shorter; her hair was different, in cut and in colour. With my friend and his sister I crossed the road, and woman crossed too. Having only a few seconds to make sure, I looked at her bluntly; she was looking directly at me, but not, I saw, to ascertain if this might be somebody she had seen before – she knew who I was, and, under the influence of her certainty, I saw that the woman’s face, though changed, was the face that I had seen before. Passing me, observing that the recognition was mutual, she surprised me by smiling, slightly; what the smile said to me, I thought, or came to think, was that she would have liked to speak to me, and was sorry that this was not possible. I looked back, from the other side of the street; she did not look back. The green coat flashed once or twice within the crowd, then was lost. I never saw the woman again, or was never aware of having her in my sight.

  It required self-control to withhold a report of what had happened. My mother might even have been pleased, I thought, to hear that the woman had become plump. ‘Let herself go’ was a phrase my mother had used, of someone else of whom she did not approve. But silence could do no harm, so I said nothing. The woman in the green coat was, or had been, my father’s other woman, I believed; as perhaps she was.

  •

  On the bench of conversation, Lucas said of my father: ‘I liked him.’ As I recall it, the statement implied that, in saying this, Lucas was taking a position that was not unanimously held. I had not been aware that Lucas had ever spoken to my father; I doubt that the possibility had ever occurred to me. ‘I met him, a few times, when I was visiting Kathleen and Callum. In the street,’ Lucas explained, answering my thought. Kathleen and Callum had liked my father too, apparently. ‘You remember Callum? Mr Oliver?’ he asked; the suggestion was that I, though only a boy, must share his evident affection for Callum. For me, Mr Oliver was a figure rather than a person; he was the man who had lived with Kathleen. I replied that I remembered him well; a liking could be inferred from my voice. ‘A good man,’ Lucas pronounced, defini
tively.

  ‘What did Dad think of Lucas?’ I asked my mother, perhaps that evening. To which the reply was: ‘I don’t think he had a view.’ My father was not to be spoken about.

  •

  At 3am on a Wednesday night, in a hostel in north Wales, more than two hundred and fifty miles from home, young Lucas awoke from a dream in which his father, in the shadow of a huge church, on the moonlit central square of a town that did not seem to be in England, shook the hand of his son, firmly, but with tenderness, and some sadness, then turned his back and strode away, along a track of white stones that designated the central axis of the square, swinging his arms as though he were one of a marching company of whom he was the only visible man. Lucas woke himself up, having cried out, in reality, as his father – without once looking back – vanished under the arcades that bordered the square in front of the church. The air in the dormitory was colder than it should have been. A window had been left open, he thought, but it had not. He lay back, closing his eyes. His bunk seemed to have become unmoored from the floor; the air of the room was changing and then he saw his father, through the skin of his eyelids, with a clarity that was greater than that of any dream. Lucas was in the air, at ceiling height, gazing down on his father, who was lying on the floor of his bedroom, staring up at his son; his father’s face was motionless.

  At that moment, at home, his father was lying on the floor of his bedroom, with his eyes open, staring into the face of his wife, not seeing her.

  The anguish, Lucas told me, did not arrive immediately; it overwhelmed him only when he returned to his mother. Instead, what he felt, at first, as he lay in the hostel bed, in the hinterland of full wakefulness, was a ‘great surge of compassion’. Then, a sensation of ‘extraordinary well-being’ suffused his body, even though he knew – or ‘almost knew’ – that his father was dead. This is what he wanted me to believe. He had been ‘immersed in understanding’, he told me. What he had understood was that ‘all was well’, and no sooner had this understanding taken possession of him than he became aware that his father was with him: it was no longer a vision that he was experiencing but a presence, the presence of his father’s consciousness. They communicated with each other. It was not a conversation, however – it was an ‘exchange of feeling’. There was ‘a mingling’ of himself and his father. A metaphor came to mind: imagine two liquids flowing together, urged Lucas; one an oil, the other not; of different colours. They do not dissolve into each other or undergo dilution; each remains distinctly itself, in its essential self, but their forms, as they circulate around and through each other, are constantly changing. They modify each other, in ways that are immensely complex, and yet they stay the same substance. Thus it was with the spirit of his father and his own.

  The analogy was approximate, necessarily so, Lucas apologised. It was not possible to represent the phenomenon in a way that the rational mind could readily accommodate, just as it was impossible to reduce the world of quantum physics to simple images. We cannot visualise how something can be both a wave and a particle, or how that particle/wave can be in two places at once, or how the behaviour of a particle can depend on whether or not it is being observed, or how particles can become entangled in such a way that they continue to mirror each other, even when separated by huge distances, by light years. These things are real, nonetheless. The science seems to make no sense, but if it were not correct our computers would not function. The world in which we live our lives seems to obey certain rules. It is dependable. Tomorrow morning, our surroundings will look much the same as they do today. Houses will still be standing; trees will not have disappeared; our neighbours will not have vanished into another dimension. But on the smallest scale, nothing is stable. Within the atom, uncertainty reigns. This is a great mystery, said Lucas. How can our world of solid and law-abiding objects be constructed from particles that behave so unpredictably? We do not know how this can be. The two realities seem to be irreconcilable, and yet both are true. So it was with the experience of which Lucas was telling me. His consciousness and his father’s had become removed from the world of stable forms. They had achieved a communion of spirits. This was very hard to imagine, and yet it was true, Lucas assured me, as true as the unimaginable tumult of the particles of which our bodies are made, and every other thing.

  •

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, no less, once spoke of an immensely interesting spiritual experience, Lucas told me. Regaining consciousness after an operation, he had become aware of his soul as something quite separate from his body. It was a ‘black ghost in the corner of the room’. Slowly this ghost approached the body from which it had removed itself, and again ‘took possession of it’.

  •

  At the moment of death the deceased – or the spirit of the deceased, or the soul – embarks on a journey. As the body shuts down, the spirit-soul floats away. It is a process akin to evaporation. Or a sort of refining – the corrupted residue of the flesh is left behind. So far, so Christian. But whereas the Christian soul is transported immediately to heaven, or hell, or purgatory, according to which variety of the faith one espouses, the liberated soul in Lucas’s system, if we can call it that, ascends to the supra-physical dimension with less urgency. Having been evicted from the corpse, it lingers for a while, in a zone from which it can, should it feel so inclined, make contact with those whom it has been obliged to leave. Separation can be as difficult for the dead as it is for those who mourn, it would appear. It takes some time to loosen the multifarious threads of memory and sentiment that bind the soul to the world in which it had lived its embodied life.

  Think of the spirit as the occupant of a little boat on an ebbing tide. Before long, it will be lost to us. The sea will bear it away, to the vastness of the open ocean. As they drift off, the dead concern themselves less and less with what is happening back in the place where their bodily existence occurred. They are caught up in deeper and higher things. From time to time, before reaching the horizon, they might cast a reminiscent gaze upon the world; their mood is usually wistful, but rarely regretful. They have acquired the perspective of the wise, no matter how unwise they might have been while they lived among us. But for a while the boat remains in the shallower waters, and its passenger is close enough to communicate with us – or rather, with those of us who have ears to hear. For some reason, not many of us have been given the necessary apparatus. Lucas was one of the blessed. In the interval between the death of the body and the disappearance of the soul, Lucas could be of service. For several months after the departure of the departed, or longer, in some cases, Lucas was within range for them. The tides of the afterlife operate to a more generous and irregular schedule than those of the terrestrial seas.

  •

  Had I asked him the question that so often presented itself – ‘Is this what you actually believe?’ – I might have been banished from the house. Lucas was capable of bearing a grudge, as he said himself. I had witnessed his contempt for a journalist who had interviewed him two or three years before; she was a ‘sanctimonious idiot’ who had made up her mind long before meeting him; his anger was still strong. And there were people he had snubbed because of their less than friendly attitude towards Erin, which was taken by Lucas to be an insult to himself as well. I had seen the snub in action on the street – it was as though he were walking behind a private front of frigid air. The offenders might as well have been invisible to him. And I would not have asked the question anyway. His seniority was a consideration, as was his manner. The entire style of the man made such a question impossible. Having asked myself why this should be so, I answered that it would have been like asking an artist – an artist of established reputation – for a justification of his work, for a paraphrase of his ‘ideas’. The analogy is inexact.

  •

  There was no confrontation, but there were discussions that roamed around the periphery of the question. ‘Where do these spirits reside? Where are they going?’
Lucas wondered. ‘Why do they communicate through me? I don’t know.’ But it could not be denied that he heard them. Things that were true had often been revealed to him; items of information of which he could otherwise have had no knowledge. ‘So many things are incomprehensible to us,’ he pronounced. People of great intelligence – ‘much greater than mine’ – have struggled to understand the mysteries of the spiritual world. Many eminent men of a scientific cast of mind had come to concede the reality of spirit presences, without being able to explain what those presences were. The great Alfred Russel Wallace – biologist, naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, co-conceiver of the theory of evolution through natural selection – had stated that he knew (I can hear that knew, as spoken by Lucas – the word had colossal weight) that ‘there are minds disconnected from a physical brain – that there is, therefore, a spiritual world’, Lucas insisted, as if passing on an assertion that he had heard Wallace make. Other authorities were cited as required. The philosopher Henry Sidgwick, ‘no fool’, had been the first president of the Society for Psychical Research; even mightier figures – William James and Henri Bergson – had followed him, and nobody had ever accused William James and Henri Bergson of being gullible. Lucas invoked them as though the names were proof in themselves.