Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘But splashing around in the shallows can be a lot of fun,’ Lucas pronounced.

  ‘For a time,’ I answered. Erin was in the room too.

  Once in a while, at the very least, we should go where our instinct takes us, Lucas instructed. Instinct is spiritual, he said; it bypasses the overcomplications of our intelligence. Only through the plenitude of experience can we arrive at our true selves, he said, sounding like an overwritten Miriam.

  •

  I opened the newsagent’s door just as Erin was leaving. That morning, the wife was on duty; she would sometimes refer to Erin as ‘the assistant’, with leaden irony.

  This time she said to me, with a micro-dose of tartness: ‘Do you notice anything?’ She nodded in the direction of the doorway.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She’s pregnant,’ the woman stated. She released the words as if releasing a stone over the centre of a well.

  ‘Looks the same to me.’

  ‘Pregnant,’ she repeated. ‘She’s getting the morning sickness. You’ll see.’ I disliked this woman. ‘She seems like a nice girl,’ she once remarked, and even that was enough to put a stain, temporarily, on the image of Erin; it was akin to hearing slander.

  That night, I remember, Erin appeared in the kitchen, briefly. The dressing gown obscured her shape. For a few seconds she stood at the French windows, holding a tumbler of milk. She looked up; seeing me at the window of my room, she turned away.

  •

  This I remember now – the day that the situation became clear. Near the post office, I was on the inside of the pavement and Erin was on the outside, with Lucas’s huge umbrella to the fore, held at an angle of forty-five degrees. A gust smacked the umbrella aside, and it was then that she saw me. The first encounter for a week or so; the first sighting, for that matter. The rain had stopped, I pointed out; she presented an open palm to the sky, then brought down the umbrella. Her hair flew out from under the cashmere bonnet, and the wind plastered the coat across her midriff. Her waist was thicker, undeniably. She appeared tired, around the eyes, and the complexion lacked its usual finish. Her manner, definitely, was evasive; she had to be at home for a delivery, she said, no sooner had I spoken. But if what was happening was good news for her and Lucas, why not say? Now, the explanation is obvious – a rapprochement with Lucas had not yet been reached. When the news was announced, it was done with plausible delight all round. Though, again, I remember a strange gesture from Lucas: he put his arm around Erin’s shoulders and hugged her quickly, more as if she were his daughter, who had just excelled at something.

  •

  Almost as often as I think of the kiss, I recall this moment: walking by the harbour, in the middle of the day, I turned a corner and saw Lucas, sitting at a table outside the Anchor, alone. There was no one at any of the other tables; the day was cool and overcast. He was not reading a book or a newspaper; he was holding a pint glass, and gazing across the water, in the direction of the meadows and the holiday park beyond. It is a familiar and unenthralling landscape, and on the afternoon in question nothing was happening within it to make it any more interesting than usual, that I could see. Lucas did not appear to find anything of interest in what he was seeing. He took a mouthful of beer, and continued to gaze at the tedious view. I had never known Lucas to drink beer, but on this day that is what he was drinking. I had never even heard Lucas make mention of visiting a pub; I could not imagine him in a pub. Why was he there? From his house to the harbour is a distance of a mile and half. Perhaps someone would be joining him, I thought, so I waited. He would have had to turn right around to see me. Sip by sip he drank his beer, never looking away from the water and the meadow. He was an image of stupefied sadness. I watched until the drink was finished. Nobody joined him. For fully five minutes he held on to the empty glass, as if unable to move on. This was some time after the birth of Kit. Erin was away, with the baby, at the sister’s, supposedly.

  •

  Other explanations are of course possible. Though Lucas projected the unassailable confidence and authority of a professor, one should not think that he could not be wounded, as Erin once said. He was not thick-skinned, and some of the things that were said about him were hurtful. Melvin and Matthew Dodd had persisted in their abuse for years, and they were not the only implacable malcontents; some of the letters that Lucas received were disgusting, Erin told me.

  •

  It is not the case, Lucas believed, that the spirit is breathed into the flesh, as it were, by the all-mighty creator of everything, at the instant of conception; and neither did he believe, as many have believed, that the spirit has an existence that precedes the moment of conception, and that it merely spends an interlude, for whatever reason, in the temporary accommodation of the body. No. Eternity begins in the bedroom, with the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. That is when the spirit comes into being. This was not an outlandish idea, Lucas pointed out. Many Christians have believed that the individual soul is a hybrid, brought into being by the fusion of the mother’s soul and the father’s. The mechanics of the process did not concern him; or rather, he did not presume to understand it. Consciousness is likewise a mystery, as he pointed out. None of us – well, none but a few crackpots – has any doubt that we are conscious, yet there’s not a person on the planet who can explain how it comes to be that the body can have an awareness of itself. ‘How does mere meat come to think?’ he enquired, looking down on his hand with distaste, as if decomposition had already begun. No scientist can explain it, but its reality is undeniable, because we have proof of it everywhere, just as Lucas and his clients had experienced proof, many times, of the life of the disembodied spirit.

  •

  At first, I saw what everyone else seemed to see. Lucas was an attentive parent. He had never imagined that this would happen, he told me, and he was delighted that it had, though the necessary adjustments would not be easy, for a man of his age.

  Years before, I remember, not long after Kathleen had died, he said that Callum had not wanted to have children, that he had been positively averse to the idea, as averse as one might be to something that would severely endanger one’s health, and that Kathleen had managed to convince herself that her work and her husband would be enough for her, but she had never – Lucas thought – succeeded in entirely eradicating her regret. Callum’s childhood had been bleak, Lucas told me; in what way it had been bleak, he didn’t know, but Kathleen believed that the experiences of his early years had made it impossible for him to risk becoming a father. ‘Some men do not have what it takes,’ said Lucas, and I, detecting a tone of self-deprecation, understood him to mean that he was a man of that kind himself, as I did when he suggested to me that my father too might not have had the right stuff for fatherhood.

  Then Kit was born, and Lucas became paternal. Or we should say that Lucas, in my presence – and, we might assume, in the presence of others – was a convincing father of the baby. The greater part of the work was Erin’s. The greater part of the work is always the mother’s. Many men have little enthusiasm for the messier aspects of the early years of parenthood; his age was an additional excuse. He seemed to be speaking truthfully when he professed to wish that it were not necessary for him to spend so much time away from home. I often saw him playing with the baby, or diverting her. There was some awkwardness, at times, to this play; as if he had been reading books to teach himself how to do it. The intimacy was guarded rather than spontaneous; he seemed conscious always of the child’s fragility. He did not often kiss her, and when he did the kiss was extremely delicate, touchingly so. He seemed grateful for her, rather than delighted; he was deferential to Erin; the father was of secondary importance and must deny himself, he seemed to think. Again, I thought his age was much of the explanation. There was no reason to question what I was seeing.

  From the start, the baby resembled her mother, and the resemblance quickly became stronger. The form of
the chin was Erin’s; the brow, and the plane of the temples; the shape and colour of the eyes – even, at times, the glance. She had a watchfulness that was like her mother’s. There was little visible trace of Lucas, but this was not remarkable. I’ve known people whose features were like those of only one parent; I’ve known some who looked nothing like either. But the nose, one could say, had something of Lucas; the profile might remind you of him. One afternoon, when Lucas was away, coming upon Erin and Kit in the street, I paid my respects to the little one; crouching beside her, I stroked a cheek and, exaggerating, complimented her on the shape of the nose. ‘The nose of Lucas,’ I said, and at that moment Erin looked away. She smiled, but she could not look at me directly; and I knew then. There was in fact nothing of Lucas in the little girl’s face.

  It was a shock; it took me some time, I admit, to appreciate what should be appreciated here. How could one not admire the forgiveness that Lucas had immediately offered? He loved Erin and he loved her child, if not to the same degree. Such was his love, nobody could see the truth of the situation. Would any of the gossips and the critics have been capable of that generosity? Could I have done the same? Forgiveness, even now, does not come easily to me. Eventually people will come to understand what Lucas did. Some might think him a fool; an ‘old fool’, no doubt. But he was not. In this he was noble. That is the correct word. He loved her.

  •

  At around this time he said something that, as soon as he had said it, I knew I would always remember, because it was a remark that I could never have imagined Lucas making. It was especially strange, coming from the father of an infant. We had met on the street, near the bench of conversation; the afternoon was warm, and he suggested that we sit for a few minutes. He looked up into the sky, as he had done when he had first talked to me, there, and then, after perhaps ten seconds of silence, suddenly said, while tracking the flight of a pigeon: ‘For a mayfly, does a minute feel like a month does to us?’ Then: ‘Maybe a mayfly, in the course of its one day alive, has time to grow tired of life.’ It was said brightly, as though it were a witty proposition that he had encountered in his recent reading, but his eyes were not bright.

  •

  Steven Greenwood is the most obvious candidate. I see no resemblance, but that means nothing. I dislike him. Truthfulness requires that this be said. Some envy is in operation here. I admit that too. Though twenty years older than Erin, or thereabouts, he might be mistaken for a man only a decade older. In the gym three or four times a week, I should think. Always a white shirt, to enhance the impact of the five-day beard. Never more than a five-day growth, and never less. Visit the website of his new venture, in London, for monochrome shots of the man in action. The charisma radiates. See him stooping to examine the contents of a pan. Observe the concentration, the dedication, the sheer hard work. Read about his ‘passion for innovation’, his unceasing ‘research’. Customers – ‘guests’ – can witness the passion in action: the tiny kitchen, the crucible of his art, is visible from the best seats in the house. Amazing what can be conjured in so small a space. Truly, an alchemist of the edible.

  •

  The chronology fits – Greenwood’s departure for London; the period in which Erin was rarely seen; then her evident preoccupation, for which the loss of employment was taken to be the explanation. Connections are easily made.

  •

  I ate at Greenwood’s place once, with Miriam; she had heard good things about L’Écume. Her palate is more refined and educated than mine. She is more forthright too. Stirring her debris with a fork, she admitted to disappointment. ‘Controversial,’ she said, at conversational volume. Seaweed mayonnaise was involved; the rest I forget. Our beautiful waitress, concerned that Miriam’s plate had not been cleared, asked: ‘Was everything OK?’ Protocol required an affirmative or an evasive response. But Miriam replied: ‘To be honest, that was really quite nasty.’ Word would have been relayed to the kitchen, I’m sure, but the maestro did not come out to demand an explanation, as I feared he would. A few days later, an acerbic review appeared online. Adjectives such as ‘pretentious’ and ‘ill-conceived’ were used, and ‘overpriced’. This was not the first time a customer had protested at the expense. Miriam did not write this review, and neither did I, but I have reason to believe that the chef thought otherwise. ‘Incandescent, he was,’ Lucas reported, gratified.

  •

  The waitresses at L’Écume were never plain young women. Steven Greenwood employed no men, as far as I was aware. In addition to Erin, there was the Polish waitress – eerily pale; blazingly blonde hair; slender as a girl of ten, but six feet tall. Something was going on between her and the boss. This was widely known. They were seen together. Miriam and I were served by a remarkable Romanian, of more or less the same dimensions as the Polish sylph, of grave demeanour and catwalk posture. One night, passing by, I saw Erin outside L’Écume, waiting. Greenwood was inside, turning off the lights. After Greenwood moved the operation to London, Erin often seemed anxious; even, sometimes, unhappy. It was not an easy pregnancy, Lucas confided to me.

  •

  And Greenwood was in the house, once, when Lucas was away. Erin was no longer working for him. I cannot say I heard an altercation; I heard nothing. All I saw was Greenwood, in the afternoon, in the house, briefly. He appeared at the window, talking. I did not see Erin. Why would he have been there?

  •

  At the new L’Écume in London you could pay more, a lot more, for a single meal than a waitress gets paid for her whole evening’s work. The original L’Écume was barely cheaper. Lucas thought the prices were scandalous. He threatened to go down there and tell him to pay his staff a decent wage. Erin pleaded with him: it was not as if Greenwood himself was making a fortune out of the business, she argued. But Lucas would have done it, she knew. When Erin had been treated unfairly by the manager of the place where she had worked before joining the Greenwood operation, Lucas had gone to the shop the next morning and ‘let him have it with both barrels’, in front of the customers, Erin reported. It was embarrassing, but also exciting, in a way, she said, giving him a look that chastised a little and admired a lot.

  •

  ‘Try not to think badly of him,’ said Lucas, of my father, after I had made mention of the woman in the green coat. We should refrain from judgement because we can never see anyone in his or her entirety. ‘Nobody is transparent,’ he said – a strange pronouncement, I thought, from someone who purported to be able to see into the souls of both the living and the dead. Then he talked about his philosophy of forgiveness, a philosophy he had expounded for the benefit of several of his clients.

  I should understand that forgiveness was not the same thing as forgetting. People often say that they have at last forgiven a person who offended against then, when in fact all that has happened is that the offence has palled. Forgetting is a perfectly acceptable means of coming to terms with something that has caused pain or distress, but one cannot decide to forget. One cannot cancel a memory by an act of will. Therefore it would make no sense for Lucas to advise me to forget my father. That would be like advising me to be a different person.

  Forgiveness is not achieved by cancelling the offence, or writing it off, or ‘putting it down to experience’. Neither, Lucas would have me know, was it the same thing as reconciliation. It was not a question of coming to a comprehension of the offender’s reasons. If one were to learn the reasons, and offer one’s acceptance in return, this would be a kind of exchange, and forgiveness must not be an exchange, Lucas urged. Pure forgiveness, the only true forgiveness, is given without reasons. He had not chosen his words carefully enough, he said, in talking about forgiveness as something that may be achieved. Achievement requires time, and forgiveness is something that one commits, in a moment. Forgiving somebody is as sudden as falling in love, he said. ‘I can’t tell you how to do it,’ he said, ‘any more than I can tell you: “Look at that girl over there. Now fall
in love with her.” It’s not a rational decision. It’s gratuitous.’ The most important things in our lives are not rational, he said. The conversation was taking place in the garden; we looked towards the house; Erin stood at the sink, looking out, as if we were not visible to her.

  My mother, I responded, had never seemed to be interested in forgiving my father.

  ‘No,’ Lucas conceded. But forgiveness can be immensely difficult, he reminded me.

  •

  One evening, soon after his diagnosis, Lucas proposed that, just as only three points in a plane are needed to define a specific form, one’s essential self can be represented by means of just three episodes or moments. That is all that is necessary to summarise a life – a mere triad of details. ‘What would yours be?’ he asked me.

  I resisted: the idea of reducing a life to three bullet points put me in mind of the Last Judgement, I told him.

  Erin interrupted. It was easy to pick the first: it would be the day that Lucas came into her life. The second immediately followed: the Sunday afternoon on which the family sat down to eat lunch together, and her father put the carving knife into the chicken, and a dribble of watery blood leaked out; though she was only twelve years old, she decided there and then that she would never again eat meat. The third choice was just as obvious: it was ‘what any mother would choose’. The smile that Lucas gave her, it seemed to me, had something of approval about it, or even reassurance; not obviously the smile of her daughter’s father.

  ‘Now you,’ she said to me.

  And Lucas coaxed: ‘Come on, Joshua. Play the game.’

  So I came up with a moment of the expected sort: the proverbial teacher of life-changing influence, who, in a sign of special favour, loaned me a book from his own collection – The Cheese and the Worms, which I read in a single sitting (not quite true), because it was like nothing I had ever read before, and inspired me. Then a day with my mother, in an overheated café overlooking a Cornish harbour, on a day of heavy rain, gazing through the speckled glass at the roiling sea; still looking out, she put out a hand, which I took, and she said, with no preamble and no explanation afterwards, ‘Thank you’, as if I were her one true ally, and an adult. Touched by this scene, as I had hoped she would be, Erin clasped her hands. Finally: a game of tennis, at the end of summer, with a girl who would be moving to another town for the new term; her ‘glorious limbs’ were made even more glorious by the sunshine of a Caribbean holiday; the family’s money was an aspect of her allure, but not a major aspect. Exhausted, we lay under the leaves of a lime tree, for what would be the last conversation. She would miss me, she said; likewise, I said. And she cried, momentarily, barely. This was all too late. We lay in the lime-coloured light, on the hard warm earth; we held hands like lovers who might jump, but there was no kiss. A love gained and lost in the space of an afternoon, I told Erin and Lucas. Enchanted by my own invention, I semi-sang the first two lines of ‘Plaisirs d’amour’. Had it been possible to be honest, the third episode would not have been about the girl with the golden legs.