Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

  At the séances conducted by Marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto, in his ancestral castle, the spirit voices addressed the gathering in several different languages: Latin, Spanish and German, plus five dialects that were said to have been unknown to the Marquis – Piedmontese, Romagnolo, Neapolitan, Venetian and Sicilian. It is widely agreed, however, that the medium’s most impressive achievement occurred on the night of July 18, 1929, when he vanished supernaturally from the chamber in which the séance was being conducted. The following year, the journal of the Society for Psychical Research published Theodore Besterman’s review of Modern Psychic Mysteries, an English translation of reports on the paranormal activities of Marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto, written by an investigator named Ernesto Bozzano. Besterman had some doubts about the phenomena that Bozzano had supposedly observed. In protest at Besterman’s unwarranted scepticism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle resigned from the Society for Psychical Research.

  •

  In order to achieve the most accurate ‘tuning’ possible, it was sometimes necessary for Lucas to spend some time in the home of the deceased before attempting to achieve contact. In the case of the Binfield client, it was evident immediately that tuning would be difficult. Anger, as we all know, is commonly an aspect of grief, but this woman’s anger was not of the common variety. The husband had died, of heart failure, at the side of the local swimming pool, aged sixty-two, five months before Lucas received the call; in each of those five months, the widow had made distressing discoveries of a financial nature. Her husband’s bank account, she found, contained less than she had expected to find – considerably less. The almost-new car, bought a year ago, for cash, much of which had come from a bonus paid by his employers, had not in fact been bought for cash; there had been no bonus. The credit card statement was a shock. He had spent an absurd amount of money on a pair of shoes. There was a payment to someone who turned out to be a dealer in sports memorabilia; the husband had paid hundreds of pounds for a box of Arsenal match-day programmes, which she had found under a blanket in the loft. In another box she found autographed shirts and photographs. Substantial amounts of cash had been withdrawn from his account, inexplicably. And he had been betting on horses, two or three times a week; he knew nothing about horses, as far the wife was aware. ‘I’d have preferred an addiction to pornography,’ the wife told Lucas. ‘At least I could have understood it.’ Every time there was knock on the door, the widow had an attack of dread – this time, would it be the bailiffs?

  She wanted explanations and apologies, and she needed to know what other revelations might be in store. Lucas, she believed, would be the means of obtaining justice. Of the reality of an existence beyond the one we call life, she had no doubt. Her mother, who had known someone who had been cured by Harry Edwards, had been a ‘deeply spiritual woman’, and had raised her daughter with constant guidance from the girl’s father, who had remained at her side long after his too-early death. ‘She spoke to him every day,’ said the Binfield widow, ‘and he told her what she should do.’ Lucas was shown some of the books that had sustained his client’s faith. She had read every word that Raymond Moody had written, though her husband had not found it possible to believe.

  Despite the woman’s commitment, Lucas could find no signal. The room in which they tried to make contact was not conducive to the procedure, he told me. It was as neat and clean and inert as a museum installation showing a suburban domestic interior of two decades ago. He came out of his receptive state in order to talk to the woman again. Anger, he explained, could be a barrier.

  The preparatory conversation with Lucas had rekindled and redoubled her grievances. They should pause, he advised. The woman went for a walk, leaving Lucas to extract what he could from the air of the house; it was ‘spiritually refrigerated’, he told me. At the resumption, he again received nothing. ‘All I heard,’ he said, ‘was the silence of indifference.’ The dead do not often apologise, Lucas told the widow, endeavouring to console. ‘Their eyes are turned to higher things.’ But he had a suggestion: could others who had known the husband be brought into the circle? He likened the hypothetical gathering to a radio telescope – the larger the dish, the more sensitive the instrument. Calls were made, firstly to a cousin who was more like a sister. Resistant at first, the cousin was persuaded into compliance by Lucas. She lived thirty miles away, and consented to give up an hour of the following evening. Two friends – husband and wife; former neighbours – were also recruited, along with a current neighbour whose cats the client would feed whenever their owner was visiting her son. The social network was not extensive.

  That night, Lucas slept in the dead man’s room. The couple had not shared a bedroom for ‘a long time’, he had been told; the marriage had produced no children. It was, said Lucas, ‘the deadest room in Britain’. On opening the wardrobe, he saw a row of suits under plastic, and above them a row of shirts, all of them white or blue. The shoes, on the floor of the wardrobe, were aligned with such precision that a ruler might have been used to position them. Lying in the bed, looking around the room, Lucas saw nothing that signified a person of flesh and blood. He could have been in a two-star hotel.

  The next day, at 8pm, the group convened. As soon as they were seated, the environment was changed. It was, as Lucas put it, as if a single cloud had formed above a landscape of absolute desert. And now there was a signal. Information was coming in, but the information had nothing to do with money. By the time the session was concluded, Lucas knew no more about the husband’s illicit expenditure than he had already understood. Neither was anything like remorse directed towards the wife. The signal encompassed the wife, as Lucas told me, but it struck her as the beam of a car’s headlight strikes whatever lies ten feet to the side of the verge. At the centre of the beam was the cousin who was more like a sister, whose lack of enthusiasm for the undertaking now took on a different meaning.

  In the circumstances, it was best to offer some palliative. As far as he could tell, there were no further financial irregularities to be unearthed, he told the wife. There was something, however, that he would have to discuss with her in private. As the guests made ready to depart, Lucas discreetly took aside the cousin who was more like a sister and asked if she could stay for a little longer. ‘One rarely sees a woman of that age blush,’ he said to me. When he left, an hour later, the widow gave him a sum much larger than he could have expected; but she shoved the envelope into his hand ‘as if paying off a blackmailer’.

  •

  One afternoon, Lucas came to the door. I was home from university, and alone in the house. Holding his arms wide, in a gesture of submission, he said: ‘I am taking a walk, and was wondering if I might have your company for an hour.’ This was in the interval between the loss of Kathleen and the arrival of Erin; just before or after Easter.

  He wanted to hear about the essay I was writing; we talked about Jeanne d’Arc; the horror of her death, he told me, had given him nightmares as a boy.

  After a morning of heavy rain, the streets now had the shine of fresh steel, and there was a glitter of droplets in every tree. Overhead the sky was lucid; in front of us, over the hills, there were floes of mussel-coloured cloud, against a backdrop of Uranian blue. Sunlight ebbed then struck again, spreading a white-gold varnish quickly onto the fields, and we stopped at the sight of it. ‘Glorious,’ said Lucas, raising his stick in salute. For two or three minutes we admired the scene, not speaking, until the grass had darkened again. Lucas turned back towards the town; a smile informed me that the spectacle had given rise to a thought. A glance from me was sufficient to extract it. ‘We are sentimentalists,’ he said, in a tone of rueful conclusion. ‘Not just you and I. Everyone,’ he clarified, again making use of the stick, swirling it in the direction of the town, as though to include a whole classroom in his accusation. ‘We are sentimental because it is not possible to be naïve.’ Naïvety – ‘true naïveness’ – has long been impossib
le for almost all of us, he told me.

  Callum, however, had perhaps achieved something like it – but only something like it, Lucas mused. An approximation was the best we could hope for. To watch Callum at work was to be in the presence of something exemplary, said Lucas, looking down at the pavement, as if humbled by the remembered example. Work for Callum was a spiritual exercise, said Lucas. And then he said, not looking at me: ‘That is what’s wrong with the way I live. There’s no work in it.’ The words seemed to constitute the revelation of a secret discontent, yet the tone was light, almost blasé. This tone was maintained in a meandering improvisation on the theme of his deficiency, spoken as though he were speaking of something about which he had already often spoken. He talked about the vita activa and the vita contemplativa; the terminology – never used by Lucas before – was intended, it seemed, to signify some affinity with me and my studies. Centuries ago, the working day had begun and ended with prayer, and that was how it should be, he said. The vita activa was imbued with the vita contemplativa and vice versa. He returned to the spiritual labour of Callum, and now Kathleen was included. ‘But there’s not enough activa to my vita,’ he joked.

  He halted, and turned back to look again at the sky above the hills. The fields had become drab; the composition of the clouds was weaker. Lucas smiled – he saw a metaphor here, I was perhaps being prompted to think. ‘Nothing to be done now,’ he said, and sighed parodically. We walked on. ‘I am such a sentimentalist,’ he murmured, with a shake of the head.

  •

  On an evening of heavy rain and thunder, I shared a bottle of wine with Lucas after a game. The room was at its most homely: warm, with a fragrance compounded of old fabrics and burning wood, and the subtle scent of the go board. Beside me, two of Kathleen’s bowls, in the firelight, gave off a murky green glow. Other than the fire, the old standard lamp was the only source of light. Encircled by shadows, we listened to the seething of the rain in the garden.

  Observing the drowsily appreciative look I had cast about the room, Lucas remarked, answering the thought that he had intuited, that he was thinking of selling the house. He was attached to the place, he admitted, but he was not rooted in it. He was attached to it in the sense that it embodied his attachment to Kathleen – and to Callum too, of course. But that attachment would endure wherever he might be, and he was beginning to think that life might be more straightforward if he were based somewhere more central than the south coast. Business was brisk, he implied; nonetheless, it would make sense to minimise his travelling time and expenses, and he didn’t really need as much space as he currently had at his disposal.

  He was a latter-day mendicant, wandering the length and breadth of the land, dependent upon donations from those to whom he ministered, he proposed, albeit not in quite those terms. His home was akin to the order’s mother house – he resided here, temporarily, because one had to live somewhere, and naturally a bond of some sort arises when one resides in a particular place. But he was only passing through, as Callum and Kathleen had passed through, as we all were passing through, though we allow ourselves to think that the relationship with our home is one of ownership. ‘We own nothing,’ said Lucas, gesturing widely, as if the room were the embodiment of nothing. What matters in life is the relationships we construct among ourselves, he felt obliged to instruct me – ‘Those are our real roots.’ Every week he encountered people who had not taken enough care with their relationships. ‘There is so much loneliness,’ he sighed, then he said something that seemed to suggest that loneliness might persist into the afterlife, that there were solitary spirits among the numberless throngs of the dead. Surely, I thought, it should be possible to form new friendships beyond the grave, with so many souls to choose from; this was an objection that I left unexpressed. ‘Sometimes it’s hard,’ Lucas confessed, in a melancholy moment. He was not absolutely sober.

  But there were, he conceded, good reasons to stay where he was. ‘For one, I would miss you,’ he said, sternly, replenishing my glass. Then he talked about the case of Katie Burtenshaw.

  Within the year, Erin was installed; there was no more talk of relocation.

  •

  After the death of Kathleen, Lucas lived alone for two years, give or take a month or two. Then, on a Saturday afternoon, no sooner had I arrived than my mother announced: ‘Interesting development. Lucas has company.’ Thus Erin arrived. ‘A pretty girl,’ said my mother; there was some mischievous pleasure in the enigma. The pretty girl had first been spotted five days ago, and was still at the house; she had been seen in the garden that morning. On Thursday she had been observed in the kitchen, carrying an armful of laundry. She might be a relative of whom we hadn’t heard, my mother had thought at first. That was before she had seen Lucas talking to the girl, again in the garden. The conversation had been brief, but interesting. The girl, working at a bush with secateurs, had not stopped what she was doing; there was almost no eye contact, and no touching at all. There was nothing in their interaction to suggest a family connection; it was more like an exchange between a hired gardener and the householder. ‘Do housekeepers still exist?’ my mother wondered. Having a housekeeper might suit the image that Lucas liked to project, we agreed. ‘But she is rather good-looking, and very young,’ my mother repeated; the youth and prettiness were complicating factors, as the seniority of Kathleen had been before. I stayed that night, but there was no further sighting of the intriguing guest or housekeeper or whatever she was, and no sighting the next morning either.

  Three or four weeks later, I was back. In the interim, my mother, in South Street, had passed the pretty girl – she was carrying a heavy bag of shopping in each hand, and had the air of an overworked domestic help. Later that day, she was seen pegging clothes on the line. And then, she had been introduced. At the end of the road my mother had seen Lucas and the girl walking twenty yards ahead, an arm’s length apart; the girl was talking with barely a pause, and Lucas, turned towards her, seemed to be listening closely. Hearing footsteps behind them, Lucas looked round, saw my mother, and stopped. ‘My neighbour, Monica,’ Lucas informed his companion, then: ‘This is Erin,’ with no further information. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Erin. She was courteous, my mother reported, but not, she thought, particularly friendly; not so much shy as self-enclosed; not a light-hearted person, my mother suspected – it was something to do with the eyes. Erin said nothing else, until she excused herself, politely – she had a packet that had to be posted. She left Lucas with my mother; he made not a single reference to his guest. ‘It’s all a bit odd,’ my mother said to me. Now she was inclined to think that Erin might be a relative after all.

  ‘There she is,’ she called to me, that evening, and at last I saw Erin. It was the last half-hour of dusk, so the face could not make its full effect; the long bright hair was what made the impression. She was holding a cat; Lucas had no cat; therefore Erin was in residence.

  ‘Told you,’ said my mother, observing my reaction, as if in encouragement.

  ‘You didn’t tell me about the hair,’ I said. The hair was like something from a shampoo advert, we agreed. There were so many tones in that hair – oak and honey and brass and hay.

  •

  My second sighting of Erin, the crucial one, occurred in town. Crossing the street, I noticed first the hair, then that Erin was talking to a fragile little woman, about a foot shorter, and at least fifty years older. Erin was primarily the listener, it appeared; her attention was focused purely on what was being said to her, which seemed to have an element of complaint. The sincerity of this attention was obvious to me, as was the sincerity of her sympathy. This was attractive, but it was a gesture, or a sequence of gestures, that transformed the attraction. The elderly woman, reaching a place to pause, moved closer to rest a hand on Erin’s forearm; Erin then put a hand on the woman’s hand and smiled, and spoke, very briefly; and at this the woman said something to her – evidently a compliment – that ma
de Erin raise her other hand and cup her neck with it, below the ear. And more than anything else it was the movement of that hand – the grace of it; the modesty it seemed to signify; the vulnerability – that germinated my love of Erin, before I had ever spoken to her. The vignette might be thought mawkish, but there was a truth in it. Struck by the tenderness of Erin, I was overcome by a tenderness of my own; not desire, but an insatiable tenderness.

  Only then, as I passed behind the woman and glanced at Erin’s face, did her beauty do its work; and here, of course, desire was involved. The eyes, deep-set and dark, transmitted a frankness that was pleasantly unnerving. The perfect symmetry of the arcs above them, and of the angles of the cheeks and jaw, and the pallid complexion – all this was alluring. Small and slightly flattened at the bridge, her nose – and the planes of her cheekbones – gave her the face of an exquisitely pretty boxer; the physique was that of a dancer – or a young woman who had been a dancer, and had softened slightly since relinquishing the discipline, yet retained the posture and the slimness and the strength. And the glorious hair, again. The appearance was wholly admirable; there was, I think, more admiration than desire. I wanted to look rather than hold. I was entranced. It was important to this moment that she did not notice me.

  •

  Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

  •

  A few months after Erin’s arrival, we were invited for a meal. The invitation was not only an opportunity to meet the new companion – it was an opportunity to enjoy her cooking. ‘She really knows how to use a kitchen,’ Lucas marvelled to my mother. It was as if an employee had revealed an unexpected and delightful talent, my mother reported.

  Lucas welcomed us to the house. The kitchen door was ajar; through the gap, we saw Erin raise an implement in greeting. We went into the living room, where nothing gave any sign that a new person was living there. Watching Erin at work, said Lucas, was like watching a one-woman air-traffic control room. Half a dozen pots and pans might be in action simultaneously, while she chopped and shredded the ingredients for another element of the creation, and all this was done in an atmosphere of perfect calm, he told us. When living alone, he had subsisted on the plainest of diets. He’d had a repertoire of four or five meals. ‘I don’t care what I eat, as long as it’s nothing new’ – this had been his position, until now. It was not merely a matter of delighting the taste buds in ways he had not known were possible: considerations of health and of ethics had been impressed upon him. Erin had made him think again about what he ate, and in consequence meat was off the menu, permanently. This was news to my mother; she raised an eyebrow.