Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  Erin brought the plates to the table professionally. At the first mouthful, Lucas led the praise. Closing his eyes, he frowned, like a restaurant reviewer submitting the dish to analysis. ‘Stupendous,’ he pronounced. ‘Very nice,’ agreed my mother. But no talent was involved, Erin insisted. It was simply a question of doing things in the right order. Her modesty seemed entirely genuine. Lucas smiled at her, as one might smile at someone who was on probation. It was possible to believe that she had been hired.

  Nothing was clarified. All we learned of Erin was that she could cook, and that her mother could not, which was why Erin had taken it upon herself to learn. Just once, in the course of that evening, I glanced at Erin and received a glance in return, a glance that seemed to acknowledge that she and Lucas were objects of speculation, and to dismiss anything that might be thought about them.

  She did not speak much; Lucas would have accounted for eighty per cent of the talking. Ten per cent would have been mine – tales from the classroom, mostly. Lucas was over-entertained by my stories. Only one can now be remembered: the boy who had thought that the Beatles and Queen Victoria had belonged to the same period. ‘He has a point,’ said Lucas. Erin’s face at that moment was that of a student in the seminar of an oracular professor. A little nod seemed to signify that something had been understood and put in its place, in the system of Lucas’s thinking.

  At the end of the meal, Erin cleared the table; it was notable that Lucas made no attempt at assistance; an offer of help from the guests was declined crisply, with thanks; this work was an aspect of her role, it appeared. Before the clearing, Lucas expressed gratitude on behalf of us all. Erin bowed, with a hand placed demurely over her heart. The way Lucas looked at her was interesting: I saw admiration and appreciation; the beauty of the face and form was incontestable, of course, but I saw nothing libidinous in his gaze, and nothing proprietorial; it was not a lover’s or a husband’s gaze. His pleasure seemed to arise from the good fortune of having found someone of such competence, or so I told myself. The pleasure of patronage was also perhaps involved.

  For fully twenty minutes the three of us remained at the table; there was a bottle of wine to be finished. It was a peculiar situation, with Erin at work in the kitchen while we talked, but Lucas made no reference to what she was doing; indeed, as I recall, she was not a subject of the conversation. And when at last she returned, it was only to say that she had enjoyed meeting us, and to wish us goodnight. There was no kiss for her from Lucas, not even a touch of hands. At no point in the course of the whole evening did he touch her. She was going to her own room, I was sure. ‘Sleep well,’ said Lucas, as though saying goodnight to a colleague at a conference hotel. We stayed for another fifteen minutes or so, and nothing more was said about Erin. I wondered if the purpose of the evening, for Lucas, might have been – in part, at least – to generate perplexity.

  Back home, my mother said, right away: ‘Well then, what did you make of that?’

  ‘No idea,’ I answered.

  Erin, my mother proposed, was a ‘bit of a cold fish’. Decorative, undeniably, but perhaps with nothing of any substance behind the façade.

  ‘Early days,’ I said. And: ‘Cool rather than cold, I’d say.’

  ‘Too placid,’ she said. She was aware, however, that some men – most men – liked that quality in a woman. She seemed disappointed that Lucas should have turned out to be one of those men.

  But I had been captivated. The laugh – a low two-note chuckle, heard twice during this first evening – would always charm me, as would the slight hesitation before speaking, sometimes, as if a moment of self-doubt had to be overcome. The evenness and light timbre of the voice beguiled me, as did the fact that she made no attempt to beguile. I could not imagine her angry, and was never to see her angry, until recently. Her face was fascinating. Again and again I had glanced at her, when she was turned towards Lucas: in profile her eyes and the downward curve of the upper lip – slightly more prominent than the lower – gave a suggestion of sadness and obduracy, whereas her face when fully seen was mild, open, almost ingenuous. The smile too was an element of her attractiveness: the unsudden smile, which seemed to be produced by a rising force of goodwill or contentment or amusement. But to enumerate the visible qualities is to miss the essence; the essence is outside the words, always.

  •

  A scene occurs to me. I was at the sink, washing up; my mother alongside, drying. I had become aware that she had been at work on a single plate for longer than could be necessary; staring out of the window, she was rubbing slow circles with the tea towel. A cue was required. ‘Something worrying you?’ I enquired.

  After a pause, as though the question required thought, she answered, in a tone of worry: ‘Not worrying, no.’

  ‘Let me try again: I sense that something is on your mind.’

  Another plate was taken up, for a protracted bout of wiping. She made a quick soft grimace.

  ‘The suspense, Mother, is killing me.’

  She emitted a sigh and disburdened herself: ‘I saw Erin this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did Erin have to say?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘This is exciting news.’

  After a pause, and a smaller sigh: ‘I wish I liked her more.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ I said, as though perfectly unconcerned.

  ‘But I just don’t trust her.’

  To which I answered: ‘I have absolutely no idea why you say that.’

  ‘There’s something sly about her.’ Peering up at the sky, as if something of interest were flying by, she added: ‘Nice figure. Nice face. But other than that, I don’t know what you see in her.’

  ‘Who, me?’

  ‘Both of you,’ she said, like the mother of two sons.

  •

  On another day, my mother said of Erin: ‘The thing is, I can’t imagine her ever saying anything very interesting.’ She had decided that ‘fey’ was the word that summed her up. In a more generous mood, some time later, she decided that ‘fey’ was not quite the right word after all, and ventured instead that ‘dreamy’ might be better. ‘The dreamy pretty housewife,’ she once called her. Having talked to her that morning, in town, she had begun to wonder if Erin might be taking some sort of medication. Lucas was on tour; recently he’d been spending a great deal of time away from home. ‘It’s not fair on the girl,’ she said, but she never invited her to eat with us.

  •

  And I remember an encounter, at the top of South Street, one afternoon in summer, before the arrival of Erin. We saw Lucas in conversation with Mrs Dealey, who was always amenable to having Lucas’s charm vented on her, and vice versa; a remarkably pert woman, for someone on the downslope of her fifties. As we neared them, Lucas, overcharged with bonhomie, turned to greet us. Pleasantries were bestowed with some gusto. He remarked on how well my mother was looking, but the flattery, as I recall, received no response, pointedly. It did not occur to me that jealousy might have been a factor. In the time between Kathleen and Erin, Lucas was flirtatious with a number of women of Mrs Dealey’s age. Some of them returned the compliment; I saw this, several times. With some of them, I wondered, was something more than flirtation happening? With my mother, it was something less: it was a meaningless gallantry. Or rather, that was all I saw.

  •

  The first time I called at the house alone, after Erin had moved in, it was she who answered the door. Lucas would be down in a minute or two, she told me; he was upstairs, in the archive. She pronounced ‘archive’ as though Lucas’s filing cabinets constituted a scholarly resource of high repute. Lucas and I had arranged to play a game of go that afternoon.

  While I waited, she made me a cup of coffee. There was an exchange, very brief, about the meal. ‘It came out well, didn’t it?’ she responded to my praise, as if the meal
that she had prepared for us had assembled and cooked itself. She took me into the living room – ‘escorted’ might be a better word. I received the impression that she had other things to which to attend.

  ‘I’ll get out of your way,’ she said, when Lucas came into the room, and I did not see her again until the game was over. I did not hear her either, yet no sooner had the game been concluded than she reappeared. It was uncanny. Lucas, defeated, shook my hand, made a remark, and the door immediately opened.

  Lucas had a call to make, so Erin led me out. On the doorstep she said: ‘Lucas likes you very much.’ It was as though she had been deputed to pass on this piece of information, like a personal assistant with a client.

  •

  Walking past The Ropemakers one evening in summer, Erin was unambiguously propositioned. The propositioner, more or less her age, was drunk, and it was not the first time this individual had made it clear that he liked the look of her. A week or so earlier, stopping his van to let her cross, he had complimented her on her dress. This time, the aggression was more blatant; she should lose a few inches from the hemline, he suggested. Erin’s response was sharp, and the rebuff was taken as an insult. He called after her: ‘Say hello to your dad for me.’ His companions found the joke hilarious.

  It was Lucas, not Erin, who told me about the incident. People were generally more subtle in their disapproval or resentment, he said. When he walked through the town with Erin, questioning glances were sometimes dispatched in their direction; glances of mockery and distaste.

  ‘People are so quick to judge,’ said Lucas, without rancour. ‘One rarely knows enough to judge correctly.’

  •

  References to Erin’s youth were infrequent, but Lucas once said to me that he had sometimes wished he were a famous artist, or any kind of famously creative person – not for the fame, of course, but for the immunity that came with eminence. Talent exempts certain men from criticism that an ordinary individual, in a comparable situation, would attract. He had a list of examples, memorised like the details of an alibi. Picasso, of course. Marie-Thérèse Walter was seventeen years old when she became Picasso’s lover; he was forty-five. Françoise Gilot, the mother of his two youngest children, was twenty-one when she met him; he was sixty-one. Goethe, sixty-five, fell in love with Marianne von Willemer, thirty. In 1914 Thomas Hardy, born 1840, married Florence Dugdale, thirty-nine years his junior. Lucas knew all of the dates. Alberto Giacometti, born 1901, married Annette Arm, born 1923. (Annette was an ‘ingenuous and adoring girl’, I later discovered.) Let’s not forget Charlie Chaplin: born 1889, eloped with Oona O’Neill in June 1943 (Lucas even knew it was June), just a month after her eighteenth birthday. ‘And does anyone care – or even know – about the behaviour of Erwin Schrödinger?’ Lucas enquired. In the first six months of 1926 Schrödinger published four papers that constitute an episode that has been described as being ‘without parallel in the history of science’. In the previous year, Schrödinger had begun tutoring Roswitha and Itha Junger, twins, aged fourteen. Schrödinger was in his late thirties, and married. When she reached the age of seventeen, Itha Junger became Schrödinger’s lover. After an abortion had left her sterile, Schrödinger moved on to other lovers. ‘Isn’t that disgusting?’ said Lucas. ‘Despicable. Appalling. And yet, it’s ignored, or erased.’

  But I was to understand that there were no comparisons to be made. ‘I am not in any respect like Erwin Schrödinger,’ said Lucas. ‘I am not a genius and I am not a creep. I am nothing like Chaplin. I am not like any of them.’ The situation was entirely different, and yet people in the town, knowing nothing, thought that they had the right to disapprove. ‘Envy, however, I can understand. And forgive,’ he said, with a look that might have been forgiving.

  •

  Erin reclining, book in hand, then glancing at me, across the room, put me in mind of the wonderful portrait of Madame Récamier. The accomplished and beautiful Juliette Bernard was only fifteen years old when she married the banker Jacques-Rose Récamier, who was some twenty-six years her senior. Announcing his engagement, Récamier wrote to a friend: ‘She possesses germs of virtue and principle such as are seldom seen so highly developed at so early an age; she is tender-hearted, affectionate, charitable and kind, beloved in her home-circle and by all who know her.’ He also wrote: ‘I am not in love with her, but I feel for her a genuine and tender attachment.’ It appears that the marriage was not consummated. When David painted his magnificent portrait of her, Madame Récamier was still a virgin. On the afternoon that the similarity occurred to me, I might still have believed it to be possible that the relationship between Erin and Lucas was of this kind.

  •

  In his sixties, Guillaume de Machaut composed Le Livre dou Voir Dit; its subject is a romance with a beautiful lady, forty years the poet’s junior, whose love for him has been ignited by his literary reputation. There may or may not be a factual basis to this Book of the True Tale.

  •

  ‘The soul has no age,’ Lucas said to me, on another day; but in what context this was said, I cannot remember.

  •

  ‘She will not be here forever,’ Lucas once said to me, watching Erin as she went out of the room. He said it as though, at that moment, she were leaving not just the room but his life. What I was to understand was that he knew that day would come; eventually, he would be abandoned. In that minute I could only admire him.

  •

  It had not been ‘a condition of Erin’s residency’ that she should take command of the kitchen, Lucas told me. ‘The paperwork is the thing,’ he said, and I could not tell if this was a joke. ‘I generate an immense quantity of paperwork,’ he said, ‘and she takes care of most of it. I needed a secretary.’ Erin had come into the room, briefly, while we were talking, but she did not react to the remark. A few minutes later she came back. ‘Any filing for me to do, boss?’ she asked, chidingly, from behind his chair, and Lucas reached back to take her hand. She had been living in the house for nine or ten months by then, and this was the very first time I saw him touch her; I cannot recall ever seeing Erin reach out to touch Lucas.

  •

  ‘You know about my brother?’ Erin asked, at the dinner table. They had invited us to eat with them again; now it was late, and my mother had gone home. I knew nothing of any brother.

  Erin looked across the table, at Lucas; for her to continue, his permission was required, it seemed. ‘His name was Tom. He died,’ she said. ‘That’s how I met Lucas.’

  The story was told. When Tom was twenty, and Erin fifteen, he had departed for London, having, in the space of a couple of weeks, quit his job and left – or been left by – his girlfriend, who had been in effect his fiancée. It was not clear what was cause and what was effect, said Erin. Peterborough, the home town (another disclosure; a minor one), quickly palled for him; a place with more life was what he needed. At twenty-four hours’ notice, Tom announced that he was going to London ‘for a while’. A friend had a friend who had a room to rent in a flat at the end of the District line. This was where Tom would be living while he looked for work. He had no idea what kind of work it might be, but whatever was right for him, he would find it there, because London had everything, said Erin, with a shake of the head for her brother’s foolishness. Tom left the next day. He worked in pubs, then hotels, then better hotels. He moved to a more comfortable room, in a less remote zone. There was a girlfriend; she was a singer, Tom said. For three years he stayed in touch; a weekly call or message. He had half a dozen addresses in that time. Then a letter arrived, addressed to the parents. What was in it, Erin never found out, but it upset her mother very much, and angered her father. He phoned his son; the number was defunct. Thus began the silence. Two years later, the visit from the police, telling them that Tom was dead; he had drowned; he had been drinking.

  ‘My mother was mad with grief,’ said Erin. ‘There was so much she needed to know.’
>
  Having heard from somewhere that families in similar situations had been helped by Lucas, her mother made an appointment. Lucas arrived punctually at midday; his manner was ‘completely businesslike’, said Erin. ‘You’d have thought he was a doctor.’

  Here a small laugh from Lucas. All the time Erin was speaking, Lucas looked down at his hands, attending to the story; once or twice he raised an eyebrow, slightly, as if he had forgotten some part of it, or was taking pleasure in a particular phrase. But there was no sense that he was listening to a tale of which he was the subject; no sense that he was being praised.

  Erin’s father, who had agreed to co-operate only after a campaign of persuasion from his daughters, had insisted that Lucas should not be told the circumstances of Tom’s death, nor the place. It would be a test.

  And of course Lucas did not need to be told. He saw and heard things that he could not possibly have known beforehand, Erin told me.

  At Lucas’s request, her mother brought him some items that had belonged to Tom – a book, clothes, a wallet of photos. Closing his eyes, he held a photo sandwiched between his palms, as if his hands were cold and the picture were a source of warmth. It was a picture of a dozen small boys, playing football. Lucas was silent for some time, until, suddenly, he said: ‘Vinnie’. Vinnie had been Tom’s best friend at primary school; he was one of the children in the photograph. The boy’s sister, a very cute girl, was called Amy, and Lucas named her as well. Another photograph prompted him to make reference to ‘the lifeboat road’. This gave Erin a shock, because ‘the lifeboat road’ was the name that Tom, aged eleven, and Erin, six, had used for a particular road in a town where they had once stayed on holiday; Erin had been fascinated by the gleaming lifeboat that perched at the summit of the slipway, and had needed to see it every evening, before going back to the cottage. The photo that made Lucas utter that phrase had been taken during that holiday, but did not show the lifeboat, Erin reported.