The Convalescent Read online

  William and Marion had arranged to meet in order to sort out their parents’ possessions. William joked immediately that he was beyond possessions: he had come to nothing and so he needed nothing; he had no place for anything. All he wanted were knick-knacks, a few souvenirs; and maybe he would find that he didn’t even want these. But he wasn’t unhappy; it meant that they wouldn’t have the problem of how to divide their inheritance. It also made him feel generous, and since he hadn’t had the means to be generous for some time this was a great pleasure. What failed to happen when he had entered the house with the inspector happened now. He moved about the rooms with simple curiosity, often touching things, occasionally being enthralled – rediscoveries so intense they recalled the discoveries of children. (There were moments indeed when, dizzy, staggering slightly, he might have been leaving the darkness of infancy for the first time.) Some rooms he barely recognised at first: he had to take up several positions before he remembered. Had their mother rearranged the house after their father’s death? Sold some of the furniture? His gaze and questions were innocent, interrupting Marion’s attempts to work out what she wanted. She didn’t mind. Her brother appealed to her strongly today, and if there was a selfish reason for this – he had not been favoured in the will and he wanted nothing anyway – there was also an unselfish one. His very absence of status or position was arresting. It was a touchingly bare disinterestedness. It was not an achievement, she knew, but a few times, hearing him say – “D’you remember this?” or “There it is!” or “I’d take that, if I were you” – she was close to feeling that it was. Her smile was of wonder, and wonder at her wonder: her brother was ruined and the house was hers, but as he accompanied her from room to room, opening doors for her, sometimes taking her arm, he didn’t seem ruined and the house didn’t seem important.

  “What about Margo and the children?” Marion asked.

  “Haven’t seen them for years. They may have joined you in the New World for all I know.”

  “I mean, wouldn’t they like some of the furniture?”

  “No need. Margo is well provided for. With my demise her father stepped in. Huge cash injections. He threw a castle round her.”

  “Would it help if I saw her?”

  “It wouldn’t help me,” William said quietly, realising that Marion hadn’t quite grasped how far he had fallen. When had he last seen her? Had he seen her off to America or had he just heard that she had gone, imagining so many farewell scenes that he had come to believe that one of them must have happened?

  “When did we last meet, Marion?” He asked it very directly, almost as if he believed that unless he were told he wouldn’t know how to go on.

  “Oh, William, you don’t recall?”

  “No. Most of the lines between my past and I are down.”

  “Margo rang me because you’d passed out at breakfast.”

  “So you saw me but I didn’t see you? No wonder I don’t remember! There would have been too much toast. Always was. Yes. But which year?”

  “Let me see,” Marion said, looking carefully at her brother. “It would have been nine years ago. You still had a few years to go with Margo.”

  “So nine years ago I was asleep on a bed of toast,” William said, standing up from the window seat on which they had been talking. “I see.”

  He was rueful, not from some affectionate feeling for the details of that time, but from the realisation that he had no such feeling. Except for the children, there were no images, and even his images of them, he suspected, were sentimental. They were always grave and always together: in the bath, for example, or waiting to be read to at night, or coming into their parents’ bed in the morning. Saving images, images which allowed him to pretend that his children hadn’t grown. But they wouldn’t always be summoned, and then the children, tall and thin now, would seem to be in a wood of some kind, crows’ heads on the ground, the air thick with hawks. Thick too with sanctimonious babble. On their way to a lake of pitch, spellbound by their mother’s plans. Margo in a lake of pitch, pointing, commanding. It was unfair, he knew, and it was uninteresting, but they were the images which assailed him when the other ones – the cameos of innocence and vulnerability – failed.

  “William?”

  “Sorry. Unnecessary reflections. Easily banished. There!” he said, clicking his fingers as for the amusement of a child. “There!”

  “I’ve brought some dinner. I thought we’d be hungry.”

  “A carry-out?”

  “Oh no. I’ll cook it.”

  “That’s kind of you,” William said, going with her to the kitchen. “But I should say – please don’t be offended – that my appetite is poor. It happens, you know.”

  She paid no attention to him, as if she was confident that when he saw the meal he would eat it! She might have been back in New England, it seemed to him, preparing dinner for a dozen guests. His admiration turned her into a performer. She moved stylishly, like one giving a cookery demonstration – cooker to table, table to cooker – now and then smiling at him as he sat. She was wearing their mother’s apron, but her kitchen manner was very different from Mrs Templeton’s. Even for the simplest snack, William recalled, their mother’s preparations had been halting. Marion’s were soft, silent.

  But his admiration wasn’t confined to her kitchen manner. He noted that she had become heavier but also more graceful, with a way of throwing her head back and smoothing her hips. If she hadn’t been his sister: but that was the trouble – it didn’t feel that she was (ostracism so barbarous apparently it destroyed even the sense of blood ties). Changed by America, by marriage there – her face, at least, was fuller, kinder – she struck him as the sort of woman (suggestive of many types without herself being one) one might talk to on a train and find it difficult to forget. Wasn’t that exactly it? This was a heightened interval, and Marion, more appreciative than he, was marking it with a meal. He stood up abruptly, but there was nothing for him to do, and so he sat down again, smiling at the preparations, approving them, not wanting them to end.

  They ate in the old dining room. The evening sky was livid and stormy. Rain drove against the window in gusts, the background in wavering sunlight, or scoured the hills, the young forests there, the foreground or middle ground in uncertain light. Then there were intervals when there was neither rain nor sun, only gloom and a wind unsure of its strength and direction.

  Marion hadn’t allowed William to do anything. Now he sat above his prawn cocktail, a perfectly folded napkin on his left, a glass of white wine on his right, his hands clasped in his lap and his eyes fixed on the salt-cellar. Marion spread her napkin and then, as if it was her custom, her brother’s deftly for him. They clinked glasses, the sound pure and high, but fading quickly, and Marion led the way with the prawn cocktail, eating with a slow relish she clearly hoped would be encouraging. William followed as best he could, but he could taste neither the prawns nor the wine. Still like one hoping to encourage by example (the optimism of her chewing and swallowing was exemplary), Marion went through the three courses – prawn cocktail, steak, fruit salad – finishing the third as William, apologising for his extraordinary slowness, was beginning the second. Was she, William wondered, simple enough to believe that she could persuade him of the importance of diet and the necessity of health by eating in this way? With this slow theatrical relish? He saw that she wasn’t. It was all she could do, under the circumstances. Another mightn’t have been as generous – mightn’t have cooked at all, or might have swept the bravely prepared meal onto the floor in a paroxysm of confusion and grief.

  “You’d never think,” William said, as if to test the rituals of cooking and eating to the utmost, “that mother was murdered out there. And buried.”

  Marion looked as if she thought he might have got his information wrong.

  “You’d never think it,” he said again.

  Marion was blinking, her tongue half out.

  “To picture someone doing that: is it pos
sible?”

  “For me,” William said, starting to push his plate away with his fingertips, “it’s not who but why. Why.”

  “Oh really?” Marion said. “For me the need is… a face. To supply a face.”

  “She had no enemies,” William offered.

  “Only friends,” Marion murmured.

  But then, as if dismayed that the conversation was necessary at all, she banged her fist on the table.

  William attempted to rise, to comfort her, but he couldn’t. Then he tried to say something appreciative about the meal; but he couldn’t do this either.

  The meal remained with him however. In the squalor of Mrs Mclehose’s lounge – the air hot and stale and smelling of whisky – he thought of it. In her bedroom, which had somehow also become his, he thought of it. His sister’s nice and encouraging sense of ceremony. She had returned to America, promising to write, promising (he was to go over for a visit when he was ready) to send him his airfare. But when he was ready, he knew, it wouldn’t be for that sort of journey. Not that he could picture his path (if there was one), only the first steps (into the wind and the dark if necessary). He started to look at the “situations vacant” page in the evening paper, the last part of the column for those without professions: the meretricious, the migrant, the half-hearted, the discredited, the damned, the dull. And one day he saw an advertisement for a caretaker on a disused farm. Trembling (unclear whether it was fear of rejection, fear of commitment or fear of abandoned farms), he applied, keeping his intentions from Mrs Mclehose, for thoughts of desertion drove her wild. Suffering himself to be embraced nightly, on the couch or in the narrow bed, he dreamt of the farm, its limitless acres, its silences, the room he would have there were he hired.

  September 10th, 1966

  I am doing well at this job. I seem to be well liked, and, what is more, I like everyone here. I’m not aware of the grudges, the misunderstandings I sometimes hear about in the pub, at the end of the day. Indeed, young though I am (twenty-six next month), I’ve been asked to intervene on a number of occasions. I’ve not thought of myself as a peacemaker, not at all, but it’s a change from the uneasy opinions my seniors usually have of me. Between Mr Fraser and his secretary I arranged a reconciliation, and between Mr Fraser and Mr Arthur a handshake and a drink. The latter two came to see me in the pub, where I was sitting in my usual corner. It was clear that something was wrong, but it was also clear that they were hoping to be rescued from their disagreement. I seem to have that knack – particularly after a drink or two. Laughter: create the conditions for that and you create the conditions for ease and forbearance. If I believe anything, I believe that; I make no apologies. (For how many faiths have we seen crumble, burdened by their own complexity, thousands perishing as a consequence?)

  It’s taken me some time however to find a job that suits me. What a relief to find it! This is partly the explanation perhaps for my popularity. My relief is mistaken for the happiness of a mature man, for informed good nature. It’s thought that I have wisdom, higher advice to dispense. I wish I had. I feel peculiarly ignorant, and if I have any virtues they are these: I make no claims to knowledge of an improving kind, and I live from day to day. This second, I sometimes suspect, borders on a vice, for the moment can seem to me all that there is. I try to arrest it by means of impromptu ceremonies, but I always end up (sometimes inside a circle of broken glass) by chasing my tail.

  Jobs. It is as if they are embedded in the very substance of our world. One can break oneself against them. Just as there are more rock formations than people realise, there are more jobs. There are the professions, of course – we all know about these – but it is the world below them and around them that I am speaking of. I am at ease where I am, but there are many who are not – who are bent double or actually twisted in ill-lit caves. I was frequently so myself. The little firm of Robertson’s which sold diaries and calendars, for instance: I didn’t prosper there. From the start (after a characteristically impressive interview – at once attentive and cavalier) I was considered to lack a concern for detail. Fatal, this, in the world of diaries and calendars. My Housewives’ Calendar for 1984 featured a March with only thirty days. Now I know that March has thirty-one days, so what went wrong? Mr Robertson himself took charge of the matter. He was deeply aggrieved, and sat, as he interrogated me, with his hands on his two most popular calendars: the Dog Lover’s Calendar and the Calendar of Favourite Cats. It is no wonder my facetiousness surpassed itself. Arguing from the stars, quoting Newton and Einstein, I said that every one hundred and sixty-two years there was what some of us in the trade knew as a double leap year – twenty-nine days in February, thirty in March. I told Mr Robertson that if he were to check the records he would find that 1802 had been just such a year. (A year of memorable frosts, I added, three assassinations and twenty-six wars.) He was shaken and obviously wondering how to reward me if I was right. He did check and I was sacked instead.

  From here, my disregard for the clock intensified by my experience of diaries and calendars, I went into the flour industry. There have been no appreciable gaps between my jobs, firstly because I am good at interviews and secondly because I have always been able to convert my despair over a job into the conviction that the next one will be almost ideal. In the flour industry, however, I couldn’t even bring myself to despair. A mild exasperation was mainly what I felt. The only thing I enjoyed was the sensation of the flour itself, running through my fingers. On my last day, I recall, it was what anchored me while I was being berated for my poor sales figures. I ran it through my fingers and onto my desk – ran it almost continuously. It was like exploring the substance of the time-glass. In the exquisitely fine grains which for centuries measured time I imagined I was taking up my position. Paradoxically, though, the effect was to destroy my sense of time’s great categories. Century, Decade, Year, Month, Week, Day – all dissolved as the flour ran. On and on, just the flour and my idle graceful fingers. Beyond, the terms of my resignation (or, failing that, of my sacking) were monotonously spelled out to me by what seemed like the entire board of directors. First one voice, then another, then another, each with its own part of the official script, but each losing conviction, I thought, as I sat silent, the flour running, the typewriters going next door, in the secretarial pool. The only words I remember are Charlie Hutton’s, himself a casualty of the next reshuffle. “You should be a fortune-teller, William, you have the hands of one.”

  After Robertson’s diaries and calendars and Clapperton’s flour I had a spell with a distillery. It wasn’t the whisky which got me, but the drunkenness of so many of my colleagues. It disgusted me; at times it enraged me. The firm seemed to run itself, unless there were, hidden even from my exasperated gaze, sober, intelligent people who ran it while the official employees, my colleagues, played at being businessmen. No job has so deeply distressed me. There was no equivalent to running flour through my fingers (unless you want to count drinking from ten in the morning until six at night as an equivalent), and so I bought some of the very 1lb and 2lb packets I had been unsuccessful at selling. I got a reputation, running the flour through my fingers, for modelling in clay. (I was even asked to model a four-foot bottle of whisky – someone’ retirement present.) All that I got out of my stay was the chance to speak in public. I did it well, though it wouldn’t have taken much to impress these people (anyone who didn’t get lost in his sentences impressed them). I pitched my speeches higher and higher, at an imaginary audience (who might they have been?), one quite other than that actually before me, in all its florid messiness. They were lonely speeches to make. And, after six months, loneliness and disgust made me resign.

  From my corner in the pub I review my day. We are an Educational Publishers. It is a small firm, but expanding. I am one of two salesmen. I travel alternate weeks, which makes my weeks in and about the office special. My popularity is intensified, I think, by these arrivals and departures. People store up anecdotes for me, as well as problems.
I am missed. Who would have thought that I would be considered a peacemaker, and that, day by day, life should appear easy to me, running by as surely as the lovely flour?

  At ease, therefore, I wait for Janet Macpherson. She is pregnant, I fear, but by whom I don’t know. What can I say?

  CHAPTER THREE

  William held back on his drinks the night before he left Mrs Mclehose for the farm, for it was important that he should get up at six, undetected, and follow his plan faithfully. He had been holding back on his drinks for two weeks, in fact, planning. The edginess and reserve in his manner he accounted for by pointing to his grief, his mourning for his mother. Funeral matters also. It was convenient, for there was much to explain: the interview, the letters, the greater concern with his appearance, with tidiness generally. His determination was to repossess his will. And his grief, far from hindering him in this, strengthened him: the more he mourned, the more he uncovered energies (they were energies, he was sure, rather than just whims or impulses because they did not desert him) which allowed him to aim at the farm. The farm which was his future. The farm whose boundaries were as far as he could see for himself.

  His plan for the evening before his departure worked well. He got Mrs Mclehose so drunk that she passed out on the couch in the lounge. He covered her carefully with a rug, gave her what he realised was a farewell kiss (on the forehead, for her mouth was open) and spent the night in her bedroom. Under the pillow he placed his farewell letter, written some days before. He had had trouble with it, not being able to write it until he had overcome the feeling that he should apologise. In its final form it was a simple statement of his intentions. It had a certain elegance, though, and this he knew would defeat her, for in eight months he hadn’t once been elegant with her. He had been as responsible for the grossness in their relationship as she. Indeed it had been her coarseness, her utter disregard for niceties of any kind, that had attracted him. He had been undone in her shadow; and she in his. At pains to reduce himself to vanishing point, his wit only apparent the instant before he had a drink – and then mainly used to curse his past – he had become Mrs Mclehose’s idea of a man of culture. His past. She was the audience for his dramatisation of such of it as he could remember. He lied, he vilified, he stumbled across the truth without knowing it and cast it aside, he approached the same event from different angles without reaching it, lurching into extraordinary irrelevancies, and he wept.