The Convalescent Page 2

  He was taken to what had been his father’s study, now the inspector’s “enquiry room”. A notice to this effect had been put up on the door. Inside, typing in a corner at his father’s desk, was a secretary. His father had typed here too – articles on the countryside mainly – but never in a corner. His desk had faced the door in those days so that, entering, one was confounded, even humiliated by his aggressive industry. William had sometimes gone away without saying what he had come for, driven by the clatter of typing into the quiet hall with its soft carpets and consoling dimness. Once his father had flung the door open after him and shouted, “Yes!? Not nothing I hope!?”

  The secretary leant back holding a pad and pencil, the inspector sat to her left, arms folded. William remained standing, his awe and apprehension running over decades, from five to forty-two.

  “Please take a seat, Mr Templeton. I wouldn’t have you standing in your own house. For it is your own house now. You and your sister will have to dispose of it as you think best.”

  “My sister’s been told?” William asked, sitting down in a chair he didn’t recognise, grasping its arms.

  “Yes. We’re expecting her any time. But, now, some questions.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Your age?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Profession?”

  “None.”

  “Address?”

  “Ah … c/o Mclehose, 10 Archiblald St, Glasgow.”

  “When did you last see your mother?” The inspector, who had not been looking at William, looked at him now.

  “I’m afraid I can’t remember.”

  “Really? You can’t remember?” The inspector was grinning slightly.

  “I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.”

  “Months or years?”

  “I can’t … Both, probably,” William replied, smiling to admit his confusion.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean years and months. A manner of speaking. A long time.”

  “No recent visits?” This was asked quickly, as if the inspector had suddenly seen how he might proceed.

  “None.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Mightn’t you, a drunk,” the inspector said, looking away from William again, “have come and gone without knowing it?”

  “I see what you mean,” William answered, speaking carefully, “but I doubt it.”

  “You wouldn’t deny though that you’ve done things and not been able to remember them the next day?”

  “I wouldn’t deny it,” William said, nodding.

  “Quite a few times?”

  “Quite a few times.”

  “Why not this then – a visit out here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But it’s not inconceivable?”

  “It would have been a big thing, a visit out here.”

  “And so not to be forgotten? A visit to one’s mother too big to be forgotten?”

  “That’s my feeling. But your implication, inspector, is terrible,” William went on, leaning forwards. “You’re suggesting I might have come out here … have killed and buried my mother, but now have no memory of it!?”

  The inspector was silent.

  “I had no reason to want to kill my mother,” William said, trembling. “None at all. Never.”

  “Thank you, Mr Templeton,” the inspector said, as though suddenly tired or disgusted. “You are free to go, to resume your life, such as it is.”

  “Such as it is. Very good, inspector. Such as it is.”

  He rose weakly, nodding to the inspector and his secretary.

  His legs felt heavy and he had the impression that the light was strange: it seemed to be not of the day, not of the season, but to be left-over light – left-over light and left-over air. He went from the room in silence. Outside, a police car stood ready to take him back to Glasgow and Mrs Mclehose.

  July 22nd, 1959

  The occasion is my seventeenth birthday. I rise early (my impatience reminding me of my early childhood), not to greet my eighteenth year before the rest of the family, but because of the morning – a most beautiful one, as beautiful as I have seen.

  Outside (the dew as remarkable as the birdsong), I look up at my father’s bedroom window, the drawn curtains. He makes such a thing of sleeping alone (as he made such a thing of resolving to do so). His Saturdays start just before midday, but I am not around to witness his appearance, his descent in his dressing-gown to a breakfast laid hours before. Sometimes – though infrequently now – it has been laid by me. The grapefruit, the wide choice of cereals, the toaster placed so that he can work it without rising, the coffee percolator: it has the appearance of ritual, though I know (painful knowledge this) that there is more sloth than ritual.

  I am impatient with my breakfast too, eating it as I stand, looking out at the lawn, its quiet glistening (a kind of radiance, if I am not mistaken). There has been no talk of my birthday so I can be forgiven for thinking it has been forgotten and that I can go out for the day. I do this often at weekends. I don’t like companions on my hikes. The point is to be alone. Who can hear the countryside with a companion’s tread always beside one? (Not to mention with a companion’s talk?) The unsociable is an important part of personality, I think. My father would agree, but we don’t mean the same thing. Not at all. God preserve me from such ill temper.

  Going up to my bedroom for my camera, I meet my mother coming down. She has remembered, and her preparations have been as thoughtful as ever. She is descending with the present and the care that has gone into the wrapping makes me laugh. She has never known what to make of my amazement at her tact. Do I consider it irrelevant or beautiful? I hardly know. Actually, I hardly know what I think the virtues are. The vices I can list and understand, oh yes (who cannot?), but for some reason I don’t know what I’m saying when I list the virtues. I experience no sort of palpitation or quickening, for example, when I say “mercy”. What reality answers to this name? What but the hope that the word is not without meaning is touched? Arrange them how you like, I sometimes think, empty drums are empty drums.

  I will remember this present. I wouldn’t have thought I’d appreciate such a thing. A barometer. We have never had one, and apparently have never noticed the lack. But with my hikes and weekends away, what could be more helpful? I kiss my mother to banish her fear that she has chosen something absurd. My father often chooses something absurd, and can’t be moved from the conviction that it is deeply appropriate. His presents are didactic, one might say, implying a future to which we are either indifferent or actually have an aversion. Vain forecasts. The occasion when he gave my sister Marion jodhpurs and a riding crop comes to mind. A month before, he said, he had seen her talking to a horse, stroking it. But my sister is indifferent to horses and too concerned with her appearance to wear jodhpurs as a joke (it was I who wore them as a joke).

  We hang the barometer in the hall and tap it gently, expectantly, for it has to be admitted that it is wrong. It is not a stormy day but a perfect one and one cannot imagine that there are storms on the way, crossing the Channel or the Irish Sea. Then my mother reads in the instructions that barometers, if laid on their side, won’t work, but will eventually recover themselves if placed upright. We laugh in relief, for a broken present is a terrible thing, more terrible than no present at all (I have the feeling that there will be no present from my father this year).

  I walk then for most of the day. My sense is that I am walking away from my birthday – not from the unalterable fact of it (that is consoling), but from these undercharged or overcharged ceremonies. Or is it just that, when a walk is a good one, one is drawn in by it, nothing existing before or after? Today I am lucky. I study birds, I see foxes and deer (brief but beautiful in glades), I meet only one other person – an old lady studying fungi with the help of a magnifying glass, and I have lunch by a waterfall. The sound or sight of running or falling water:
what excites the capacity for reverie more deeply? Listen long enough and one’s aspirations are recalled, renewed, extended. I rise from the waterfall refreshed. Before and after, though, are heavy with claims and directions – the bedrock of normality – to which I know I will return, or be returned, one or the other.

  And so it is. Always such returns. I descend towards the house from the hills behind it. Plenty of evidence of before and after. I see my father rise from his deckchair, move to the house, return, readjust his deckchair, clean his spectacles, put them on, pick up a newspaper. From this height, and returning as I am from an inspiring walk, it has all the appearance of an exercise in idleness. Footling variations, the theme more apparent than real.

  I enter the house from the back. My mother and sister are out. The barometer still says stormy. I tap it again, suddenly moved. I contain myself though because my father is exceptionally alert to turns of sentiment. He can sniff them through walls, be home early from the office on account of them, to spy or remonstrate.

  But there is no avoiding him. It is one of the days when he is badly troubled by flatulence. The visits to the lavatory, once disguised, are now blatant. It is hard to see how they help, however, because they follow each other so rapidly. Indeed it is tempting to think that they give rise to one another somehow. It explains the number of books in our two lavatories, by the way. Some of the titles interest me, but I never read them because they are my father’s companions during his trials and they must surely smell of him.

  It is perhaps hard to wish someone happy birthday with a cistern hissing behind you and other evidence of your distress in the air. Let me be fair. That is maybe why my father doesn’t shake my hand when we meet (too proud, of course, to be seen suddenly realising he has forgotten). His present – so I think of it – is an invitation to me to come and discuss my plans. My career. The unfolding of my talents in inherited forms. He is always on about it. But the harder he presses the less I can imagine what I might ever do. Under the weight of his enquiries, in fact, I become disorientated. There is no before and after. Not as at the waterfall, however – not at all. It is a kind of vertigo, a moment squirming on its axis.

  My anger is purer than it has ever been. An exceptional outburst. I shout that on a day out of time one doesn’t bother with plans. He looks at me, looks past me. How he might have looked and what he might have said but for the need to go back into the lavatory (ours is a house of tired cisterns) I cannot say. He shuts the door gingerly, his eyes pained, remote.

  Outside, on his deckchair, a sudden breeze flicks over the pages of his book. I start up the hill again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Eleven days after her murder Mrs Templeton was buried. It was as she would have liked it, with her dread of cremations: a small country churchyard, a minister neither too casual nor too sympathetic, a small group of mourners. Even William, as he stood by the grave in this churchyard which seemed to be definitely tilted – tilted towards the sun and the delights of the valley below – recalled his mother’s horror of fires. It was the one fact about her he could recall in his distress. Otherwise her life and character were mysterious, the violence and strangeness of her end seeming to have thrown a long shadow backwards, obscuring the details by which she might otherwise have been remembered. (As if – William thought – it was a usurper’s corpse before them.) He swayed, liverish and fearful, noting the exceptional self-possession of his sister opposite him.

  Marion had arrived two days before, but he hadn’t seen her until today, for she had been staying with friends. He hadn’t even been sure, arriving at the church, if she would be there. And, seeing her, the aloofness with which she held herself, he wondered why she was. Questions occurred to him, the sort for which drunks – with their tactless insistence, desperate muddled perseverance (the drunk’s prerogative, if there is one) – are noted. Is it perhaps the violence of our mother’s end that has called you from New England? The murder or her death – which has summoned you? Would you have come had she died in bed? (It is not everyone whose mother is murdered, Marion.) Would either of us have come had she died in bed? Would you from the higher and I from the lower regions have budged at all? And what difference now, here, by the graveside, between you from on high and I from below? Sensational children. A sensational mother. His dear mother, her unforced prettiness: briefly recalled, it made his sister behind her half-veil seem merely glamorous. He faced her across the grave, careless of his tears, his unsteadiness, the impression he knew he was giving of mounting abandon. He wasn’t drunk – only weak from the habit of being so – but he could see that it was assumed that he was.

  Some of the mourners, old friends of his mother, had barely acknowledged him. He had dressed as well as he could, but it was not well – certainly not well enough to make them think they might have wronged him. A certain sense of style, though, had survived his ruin, but it didn’t show in his clothes – only in a capacity to make light of that ruin, to make a riddle of it. He had been quite theatrical, greeting the mourners, quite cavalier, coming up with appreciative phrases when he couldn’t remember the names. And mainly he couldn’t remember the names. Some, it appeared, barely recognised him, and some he could have sworn he had never met. Others clasped his hand with a kind of awed forbearance, as if the son’s disgrace and the mother’s murder were somehow connected.

  And one, whose name he immediately remembered, looked at him with more than simple disgust. It weakened him considerably, this look. Indeed, it may have been the main reason why he forgot most of the other names. Alice Fox. Alice Mary Fox. He remembered her role in his mother’s life well: the pert and inflexible confidante. In this woman, for some reason, his mother had confided, by her she had been advised, mocked, admired. It had been one of the mysteries of their family life.

  It was as his mother’s grave was being filled that William realised the meaning of the look. In Alice Mary Fox’s eyes, he, William, was the murderer. Cleared by the police (“too broken to want to kill anyone but himself”), he had not been cleared by Alice and would probably never be. Several times during the service she looked at him from her position behind Marion. Marion’s detachment, Alice’s accusation: their two heads came together, appearing to share the one pair of shoulders. He was used to these illusions of grotesque reassembly. In his time, he had seen men with the heads of giant crows, women with no heads at all, crowds with heads horribly swollen, as from a plague of hydrocephalus, dwarfs with wild grins and enormous bellies. There had been spells when these illusions had threatened to become more frequent than his times of normal vision. So it was with a grin almost of recognition that he saw Marion and Alice sprung from the one pair of shoulders. A legendary alliance. A kind of immemorial dovetailing in malicious agreement.

  By the end of the service, however, his eyes were closed against the possibility of further distortion. On the surface of his vivid inner darkness lights flickered, born from nothing, returning to it. He feared he was swaying disgracefully, but he didn’t care. It was the sun on his face, wasn’t it, rather than Mrs Mclehose’s gas fire? He should have known the difference, he had spent so much of his time by that fire, on the floor. With Mrs Mclehose on the floor, with her sour breath and sour underwear, her words alternately romantic and vicious.

  Marion and he, hardly having spoken, took up their positions by the churchyard gate. The path between the gravestones was narrow and uneven and the mourners mainly over seventy, so the line moved very slowly – a sort of stricken shuffle. Now couples passed them, marriages of forty years or so (dressed, it almost seemed, not just to show respect, but to try and appease death itself), now individuals, the unmarried, the once married. William became aware that Marion was as uneasy as he was himself. Her words were few and made slightly ridiculous by what struck him as a false American accent. His own voice, he knew, was thick, made so by lips still cracked and swollen from the winter. But he was able to vary his expressions of appreciation; he was nimbler than his sister, and after sev
en or eight people had passed he realised she was using some of his phrases. “It may have been a long time but it’s nonetheless a pleasure.” “How good to see you, under such terrible circumstances.” “Thank you, I’m sure we’re equally appalled.” “An unusual awe unites us today.” “It is shocking – doubly shocking.” “Of course I know you – why should I have forgotten?”

  Then they were alone with the minister on the quiet hillside. The sound of the cars going down into the valley in low gear grew distant, was gone. William stood smiling, glad of the silence, the sound of larks, the sun. Marion was smiling too, but uneasily, and she was holding on to her hat; though there was a wind, there wasn’t even a breeze. William saw that it was her way of managing herself. She didn’t seem aloof now at all. Merely ordinary. Ordinary grief; ordinary mortality. It was the same with himself. An ordinary embarrassment. He didn’t know this minister and it was so long since he had seen Marion that it was as if he had never met her. Alone with two strangers, his drunk’s impudence asserted itself.

  “Who were all these people? Are you sure they had the right funeral?”

  “They can be difficult occasions, William,” the minister said. “One is confused.”

  “One is indeed,” William went on. “You’d think some of them had climbed from their graves to help mother into hers!”

  “William!” Marion said, but it was clear that she was relieved.

  “Alice Fox, for instance. I could have sworn she’d died before mother.”

  “I’d forgotten you were a joker, William,” Marion said gravely. “Alice Fox. Yes. I couldn’t remember that name at all.”

  Sometimes a house seems like Noah’s Ark, everything of worth stored inside, to be enjoyed under a new dispensation. Old objects become charged with significance and there is a feeling that those who live there have been entrusted with the elements of exceptional change. It is particularly so if the sky is torn and livid, the trees and bushes bent against a gale, and if the residents themselves have recently been afflicted. Then the windows suggest that such storms are the last rages of the old creation. The intimacy of those indoors is as perfect as their confidence and they part with no suspicion that either will be undone. Little in the poses they strike is justified by experience, but the poses are deeply suggestive nonetheless and, like signs or oracles, are never forgotten.