Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  More virtues could be listed; many more. The gentleness, of course; the innocence – an innocence that was implicated, however, in her enthralment to Lucas. The list would not account for the reality of Erin. Her aura would not be explained or depicted. What I loved was Erin, not the qualities of Erin. One does not love a person’s qualities.

  •

  After the funeral, more than one woman came up to me and said: ‘So you are Joshua.’ This was unexpected; the meaning was never entirely clear, but some second-hand affection seemed to be involved. A delicate and pretty widow – perhaps sixty-five, with an elegant grey chignon and eyes in which desperation lurked – was one of them; there was a preponderance of widows. This one had been widowed for a year when she called for Lucas, but it was the loss of her mother rather than of the husband that had prompted the call. Clearing out her mother’s house, she had experienced some eerie moments, which had made her wonder, and Lucas had been able to set her mind at rest, in ways that were not specified. She told me her name and where she lived, and seemed pleased – but not wholly pleased – to learn that her name, an unusual one, was unfamiliar to me. ‘Lucas respected the confidentiality of his clients,’ I assured her. The conclusion was unavoidable: this had been another liaison. From what she told me, I worked out that she would have known Lucas at around the time that Erin moved in.

  •

  Lucas was consulted by a man whose jealousy, he confessed, had almost destroyed his marriage. His wife, who had died abruptly the previous year, aged only sixty, had been an extremely attractive woman, the widower, seventy-two, told Lucas. Photographs were produced as evidence. Though the client did not say so, it had to be assumed that photos did not do justice to his wife. Even in the wedding photographs, taken in her twenties, this was not a face to make a man look twice, Lucas reported. The figure was likewise in no way remarkable. ‘Something of the cylinder about her,’ said Lucas. Yet men had found her powerfully attractive, the man insisted, and her attractiveness had been a torment to him. She worked in a library, and thus was on constant display to the public; her husband imagined a procession of admirers. Sometimes, if she happened to be working on a day when he was not, he would find an excuse to drop by. She accused him of spying on her. On holiday one year, he had awoken to find that his wife was not in the room; he found a note, telling him that she had gone for a swim and would see him at nine, in the breakfast room. He had imagined the worst, and accused her. The following year, she left him. Three years later, she returned. Then he wanted to know everything about the affairs he was convinced had occurred in the interim. There had been only one relationship of even the slightest significance, she insisted. She told him about it as soon as he asked. He interrogated her: he needed to know everything, so she told him everything, and it was too much for him. He had learned, however, that he would lose her if he did not change his ways, and so, finally accepting that there was nothing else to be confessed, he kept quiet. When she took a new job, he refrained from surveillance. He could not say, however, that the torment had ceased; neither could it be said that he had ever entirely believed that his wife had told him absolutely everything about what had happened in the three years of separation. He had never learned to trust her, he told Lucas, and now it was too late. The man wept. Now this man needed to know if his wife was thinking of him, and had forgiven him.

  ‘Your wife loves you,’ Lucas could tell him. What the man wanted to ask, but could not, Lucas knew, was: ‘And only me?’

  Jealousy was unbecoming in an adult, said Lucas, but it was a purgatory through which every young person had to pass. It would be absurd, he said, for him to feel jealousy because there were many young men – and not so young men – who liked the look of Erin. On what grounds could he object to their seeing and admiring in Erin qualities that he himself saw and admired? Love and jealousy are mutually exclusive, he said. I think I took this as a dismissal; I was not considered to be a rival.

  But once, having left an unsatisfactory job, Erin went away for two weeks, to Greece, with the sister. They were ‘doing a bit of island-hopping’, Lucas told me. He would have liked to accompany her, but his schedule was full for the next couple of months, so Erin had gone with Chloe. ‘She needs a break,’ said Lucas, in the manner of a benign employer. A few days before her return, visiting Lucas for a game, I noticed a postcard on the kitchen table: small whitewashed domes, violently blue sea, et cetera. Left alone for a minute – I admit this – I turned the card over, quickly. The word ‘wonderful’ stood out, and this: ‘still dancing when the sun came up’. The handwriting was regular and effortful, like the writing of someone rather younger than Erin; it lacked character; it lacked maturity – this is what I tried to think, to negate the jealousy. When Lucas came back, his gaze turned immediately to the card, as if it were an item that had appeared in his absence. He picked it up and put it on the mantelpiece, upright, with the picture outward. For a second or two, in his eyes, there was a suggestion of suffering.

  •

  ‘Oh, the old girls all love him,’ said Erin. ‘And why would they not?’ she said, giving Lucas a sidelong look, and smiling slightly, with something like indulgence.

  •

  Four or five weeks after my mother’s death, Erin visited me, alone, but as the emissary of the household. She brought Lucas’s sympathy, and an invitation. As yet, no reference had been made to my mother’s coolness towards her; there was no need to remark on the fact that the climate of the house had changed. A different air now encompassed us.

  I was invited to eat with them when Lucas came back. He was leaving that afternoon, on a tour that would take him to clients in Nottingham, Rotherham, Halifax and Ripon. At the last name, I made a sound signifying familiarity and amusement, and soon I was talking about Lia Seidel, my tutor for a term, who had led a visit to Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx. Rievaulx, I told Erin, had been ‘one of the great days of my life’. More: I had been ‘hopelessly in love’ with Lia Seidel. This was not true.

  I talked at length about the brilliant Lia Seidel, her eloquence in three languages, the ‘seductive creak’ in her voice, the sense she gave of having a brain that ‘never idled’, and the severity of her beauty, a beauty that, as I was speaking, seemed to have had something in common with Erin’s – aspects of the profile, perhaps; certainly the colouring of hair and complexion; and the posture, a little. Lia, at the time I knew her, would have been not much older than Erin now. What I had liked most about her, I seemed to realise, in the moment of telling Erin, was that she took no prisoners; she had the appearance of a princess’s handmaiden in a kitschy nineteenth-century painting, but her temperament was combative and relentless. So this contrast was a factor too, I decided. The incident by which Lia Seidel had smitten me was a lecture given by a modish young professor, American by birth and residence, but French by intellectual inclination. His appearance at our second-tier university was something of an event for us, he evidently believed. In a low drawl, I imitated the suavely provocative style of the glamorous young professor. ‘History does not describe reality,’ he informed his audience. ‘No. Our discourse creates the objects which it purports to study.’ At the end of the lecture, I had asked a question, and been crushed. He repeated the simple lesson that I had failed to comprehend: ‘A fact has only a linguistic existence.’

  Sitting in the row in front of me, Lia Seidel raised a hand and gave it a flourish, as if summoning a waiter. She wanted to be absolutely sure that she had not misconstrued. Was it the case that he was maintaining that the historical record in itself gives us no reason to prefer any one version of its meaning? Was that correct? With evangelical finality, the self-infatuated young professor said it again: ‘There is no reason.’ Lia nodded, apparently satisfied with this answer. Then, with exquisite timing, as the man was about to take a question from an apparently starstruck undergrad, Lia sighed: ‘But that is nonsense.’ A thousand survivors of a battle will have a thousand different acc
ounts of what took place; there will be a multiplicity of versions; the relationship between those versions and the realities of the event will be problematical; but each survivor is a fact, as each dead man is a fact. The real might be elusive, but it exists, and it was merely an affectation to maintain otherwise, Lia told our guest. He smirked at her simplicity. Then the argument became heated.

  At Rievaulx I had sheltered from a downpour beside Lia Seidel. She had written her PhD thesis on the abbey, on the place of the community of monks within the society of twelfth-century Yorkshire. I could – and still can – picture her face as she gazed over the ruins, as though seeing the whole place reconstituted and inhabited again. For fifteen minutes I had been blessed with the entire attention of Lia Seidel. I could remember some of the things she had said – that we should think of the great medieval cathedrals and churches as ‘mass factories’, rather than as Bibles in stone. If you look closely, said Lia, you’ll find some decidedly un-Biblical things lurking in the stonework. Somewhere – I forgot where – she had seen a carving that was a parody of the Virgin birth, with a dog in place of the baby Jesus. A pregnant woman, seeing something monstrous, or even merely thinking of it, might give birth to a monster, it had been believed, I told Erin.

  On and on I talked. The garrulousness was an effect of bereavement, it would have seemed, I hoped.

  •

  Some time shortly before the kiss, with Lucas away on a week-long peregrination, I worked at my desk for at least an hour against the distraction of Erin in the garden. She had been reading, then dozing, in the full blare of the sunlight, and now she had returned to her book. She turned a single page, then went back to where she had been; she closed it, keeping her place with a finger, and frowned, and read the page again. She went into the house, and emerged a few minutes later, holding a jug of some deep red drink. At no point, since coming out with the deckchair, had she so much as glanced at my window. Now she looked up, straight at me, and held up the jug in a mime of invitation.

  The book had been assigned by Lucas; a project to keep her occupied in her leisure hours while he was away. Poetry with a ‘spiritual dimension’. Lucas had thought she might ‘get something out of it’, she told me; she was not finding it easy, she admitted; then again, ‘perhaps that’s the point’. She lifted the book and recited: ‘. . . where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / Of waters, – with a sound but half its own’. She presented the book to me, open, indicating the lines in question. ‘Do you know what that means?’ she asked. ‘Why “half”? If it’s only half its own, who has the other half?’

  I gave the poem some scrutiny, while Erin poured the drinks – an experimental fruit-juice mix. To make sense of the lines, I would have to read the rest, I answered.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Erin, and so I settled on the lawn to read. She sat back in the deckchair; the exquisite feet were exhibited within touching distance. With eyes closed, she smiled into the sunlight. Concentrating less than was required, I proceeded through the lines. ‘Well?’ she enquired; her voice had the intimacy of a voice on the brink of sleep.

  I made some remarks, none of any incisiveness.

  ‘Yes,’ said Erin. ‘That’s what I thought. More or less.’ Then she opened her eyes and swivelled in the deckchair, to face me; she took back the book, and there was a touch of fingers, a touch like a spike. We talked about the poem and others in the book, which Lucas had encouraged her to read. She couldn’t say that she had enjoyed everything. Some of it had bored her, and she’d often not known exactly what was being said, but she’d enjoyed the confusion, some of the time. Confusion was not necessarily a bad thing, Lucas had impressed upon her; one can understand a poem in a way that is more than rational; putting the words of poetry into other words is a futile endeavour, he had instructed.

  We exchanged words that had something to do with this notion. Erin had an image that was hers rather than Lucas’s: when reading this book, she had often felt like a woman wandering around an unfamiliar town at night – nothing was perfectly clear, but she soon came to have a sense of where things were, and of the atmosphere of the place, an atmosphere that was like nowhere else.

  I joined her in the image of the town, and as we were refining it a disturbance in the tree of the neighbour’s house made us look up. A collared dove was flustering there. The pink-brown of its plumage was the loveliest of all colours, Erin said. It was like a cloud in a perfect sunset.

  I knew some things about this bird, having worked on a naturalist’s memoir the previous year. In just twenty years the range of the collared dove had expanded more than a thousand miles westward from Turkey and the Balkans; no other European species had ever spread with such speed; not until the mid-1950s had it bred in Britain, and now it was common. During the Second World War it had followed the path of the German tank battalions – this is what I was telling her when her phone rang. The interruption was from Steven Greenwood: suddenly short-staffed, he needed Erin to work that evening. Talking to him, annoyed, or apparently annoyed, she raked her hair with her fingers. The boss had other things to discuss, it seemed.

  ‘Back to work,’ I mouthed to Erin, and she rolled her eyes and smiled; the smile had a tone that seemed new.

  •

  Erin could be seen sometimes in the garden, paused, kneeling at a flowerbed, gazing without focus. More than once I saw her at the window, in the kitchen, looking out at nothing, with the expression of a woman whose convalescence seemed to have become perpetual.

  On a Sunday afternoon, after a game, Lucas held forth on the subject of boredom. We sat in the living room; Erin was busy about the house. There had been some evidence of tension on my arrival.

  The beneficial effects of boredom were underestimated, Lucas informed me. Boredom was a powerful solvent: even in moderation, it could be effective in dissolving the ‘detritus of thought’ with which the mind is often clogged; in a stronger dose, it could dissolve much more – the self itself can be reduced to almost nothing by boredom, for a while, and the mind, thereby unobstructed, can become receptive to impressions and ideas to which it has previously been resistant.

  Lucas had no appointments, for once. Most of his clients wanted to see him on a Sunday, he told me. This was to be expected: they had more time on a Sunday, and the Sabbath was ‘conducive to thoughts of the eternal’. He thought it a shame that the Sabbath was now so widely disregarded. A day of compulsory abstention from work, a day of inactivity and thought, was necessary for the health of the individual and of the community. ‘There is not enough boredom in the world,’ he said.

  Boredom sometimes was nothing but boredom, I countered; it was not always a balm. I was often overcome by a boredom that was only deadening. This was why, I revealed, I had considered removing myself to a town in the depths of France or Spain or Italy, a town with which I had no connection. It would not be picturesque; it would be a place of no immediate charm; only with effort would any attachment be formed, and the attachment could never be strong. Every day I would be learning; I would have to pay attention to everything; I would be freed from habit. I said something about Kathleen’s experience of Japan – the exhilarating strangeness of it.

  ‘But Kathleen lasted barely a year in Japan,’ said Lucas. ‘She was not happy there.’

  Now that Kathleen was dead, Lucas was the custodian of her life; if Lucas said that Kathleen had been unhappy, she must have been unhappy. But I could hear her, talking about her time in Japan; I could see her – and still can. ‘It was wonderful – I was such a foreigner,’ she had said to me, holding out her hands, cupped around an invisible object that made her arms tremble with its energy. Loneliness had been the source of Kathleen’s unhappiness, he told me. ‘She had uprooted herself,’ he said. Yes, she had learned a great deal there; for her art, that year had been of inestimable value; but for herself, it had been difficult. ‘She found that she belonged precisely here,’ s
aid Lucas. Living in this ordinary little town suited her very well. Life made few demands on her. Its dullness, as some would call it, was nourishing. It allowed her to be free. ‘Boredom is the dream-bird that hatches the egg of experience,’ he proclaimed, at volume, perhaps for Erin to overhear.

  •

  Two months before the kiss, another visit from Erin, authorised by Lucas. We went from room to room, discussing what might be done with the decor. In the doorway of the room that had been my mother’s, Erin peered in, as if there were a rope across the threshold. ‘You’re not going to keep it like this?’ she asked; it seemed she thought that I might. She would give me a hand whenever I decided to brighten it up, she told me. A few months earlier, she had helped her sister to give her flat an overhaul.

  In my room she scanned the bookshelves, pausing once or twice to look more closely at a title, as one would pause at a family photograph. She picked up the postcard of the smiling head in the York chapter house. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked. I talked too much, again. For centuries only devils were shown laughing or smiling in Western art, I told her; then, around 1200, smiles had appeared on the faces of angels and the blessed. Christ had never smiled or laughed, the church fathers had taught; laughter was indicative of a ‘false conscience’. Erin laughed, and looked out at the garden of the house in which she lived with Lucas.