The Convalescent Page 6

  “So you have a condition too?” Sheila asked, laying a hand on her stomach.

  “Yes; but as far from yours as I can imagine. Would you like some water?”

  “It’s all right. I look more uncomfortable than I feel.”

  George’s footsteps were heard outside – quick footsteps for so large a man.

  He passed the lounge window, head bowed, and, calling out to them, came in by the side door. Not speaking, flustered and perspiring, he lowered himself into the deckchair beside his wife, who, not speaking either, turned to him casually, and regarded him as from some remote but peaceable plain of pregnancy. He too a curiosity to her, with an unnamed condition? He made an impatient gesture, fretful almost, as in defence of himself (evidently, not for the first time) against his wife’s calmness, the dead-ends and irrelevancies it apparently enabled her to see. She was smiling, fanning herself again, using the artificiality of the movement not just to expose her husband’s distraction but to try and subdue it.

  “Well,” Sheila asked at last, “what have you got to report?”

  “One can never be too sure,” George said heatedly. “When they’re around, they’re everywhere. They’re more cunning now than ever. You think they’re gone and they’re behind you. William says they didn’t say a word. Not a word! Gone are the days when they shouted, came at you with spanners. You’d hardly know it was them.”

  “That’s right,” William agreed. “They could have been trainee mechanics, or unemployed mechanics.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Sheila said. “It might be the latest youth opportunity scheme. Summer therapy for our lost young.”

  “Good God!” George said.

  There was a silence. Slowly, George’s urgent manner subsided; but he didn’t relax. Bleached browns and yellows as far as the eye could see; the dykes diminished by the haze, mere lines now; the hedges ragged and skeletal; no birds in the sky: for a moment he appeared weary before all this. But then, a different kind of excitement to that with which he had searched the garden, he became heated again. This time, he was like someone searching for a point of reference but failing to find it. Finding nothing instead; nothing at all.

  “It’s not warfare, George,” Sheila said, taking his hand.

  “Their appearances are still very intermittent. Take it easy. Come on.”

  “You’re right, of course,” George answered. “It’s the heat: it always gets me.”

  “It’s cool in here,” Sheila said.

  William was struck by how easily she was able to calm George. She had calmed him, too. The scene in the steading of the first hamlet, at the time so ambiguous and unsettling, seemed merely odd now. Another curiosity.

  “Have you any family, William?” Sheila asked.

  Again he was aware of wanting to be as scrupulous in his reply as possible.

  “I have two children, a son and a daughter. But my wife and I are divorced. I don’t see any of the family. Haven’t done for years. I’ve not been in a state to see them, really, so it’s not as bitter as you might think. “

  “Parents still alive?” George asked.

  “No. Both dead, father for years.”

  He spoke then like one making a belated confession; challenging himself to see what his words really meant (wondering if he was succeeding); feeling his way into an abyss he had previously just skirted; taking more advantage of the forbearance of his audience than he thought he should (surprised that he had an audience at all); discovering himself to be on a kind of pilgrimage.

  “My mother … murdered earlier this year. The spring. Yes, I’m afraid so. They didn’t find who did it. Or why. No clues at all. There are more of these cases than one thinks. Utterly … The files are closed. Rarely reopened. Naturally we don’t hear about it – bad for police reputation! But why look for the invisible? Coming and going like that. Astonishing! Took nothing. Did nothing – except that. I was suspected, of course. Why not? She wasn’t a victim kind of person, though. Wouldn’t have set herself up for the chop. I’m sure of it. Sure too she didn’t know him. Or her. Are most killers male? I suppose so. Good God! Sorry! Enough said. Anyway, she’s dead. Mother and father dead.”

  He looked out of the window. No birds, no wind: one species of fact. His mother murdered: another. Had he grasped it? Taken it seriously enough? Instructed himself adequately in the meaning of such an end? On all counts he doubted himself. The line gave out where it should not have done – at the point of the knife. There he had denied her. Awed, he turned to the Weirs, whose kindly presence had enabled him to speak. They were staring at him.

  “How terrible, William,” Sheila said. “You mustn’t know what to think.”

  “Exactly so,” he replied with pain, sucking in his cheeks. “Exactly so. I’m sorry, in your condition …”

  “Not at all,” Sheila said. “Don’t think of it.”

  Still telling himself that he was holding back from drink, that when he got the half-bottle of whisky he would be as scrupulous with it as he was in his tours of inspection, he went that evening to the general store. It was a stifling evening and he walked slowly. He didn’t have a drink on the way back, holding the bottle as if it was for another, waiting until he was inside the farmhouse. In the kitchen, then, he poured himself a generous measure and drank it quickly. He poured himself another and went outside. Dogs barked in the distance (may even have been playing in the distance, for he was sure he could see quick dark shapes, coming and going, coming and going.) Purple clouds were banked in the west. He raised his glass to the flat land. But he could go no further. There had been too many savage mock toasts. Altogether too many. (Sandra Mclehose had drunk to the Pope, the Queen, Lord Byron, Henry VIII, those with too much money and those with no money at all.) He spilled the whisky on the ground and, coughing, embarrassed, went indoors. The rest of the half-bottle – as if it was a sick animal that had to be helped to relieve itself – he allowed to tip over in the sink.

  April 9th, 1973

  A man must have his hobbies. Without hobbies you shrink yearly. At least that is my opinion. Those who are claimed by their jobs or professions believe that they are rising when actually they are falling. Only their positions conceal the fact that, humanly, they are nonentities. For look at them in retirement: various kinds of nullity, of distemper. They are as powerless then as they were powerful when they worked. The captain of industry, left to himself at last, invariably falls to pieces. God save me from this. Walter Fairley, chairman of our firm, was dead after a year of retirement. Visiting him in hospital, I couldn’t believe he’d ever done anything. Such a spiritless death – not to mention such a premature one – it made me reconsider the life. Between the interstices of his achievements in educational publishing (several of them major, it has to be admitted) what did I glimpse – or believe I’d suspected at the time but not credited? (You don’t attend to the pupils contracting when the cigar is buoyant, the hands applauding.) A poorly fuelled soul hoping it wouldn’t be found out.

  My main hobby is birdwatching. Here I extend myself to the utmost. When the light is perfect, allowing me to do justice to the character of the bird, its movements, plumage (how the wind on this can disclose colours not seen otherwise!), I am inspired. The natural world can seen to me contained in this one small part of it. (Sentimental to believe so? Perhaps.

  Perhaps.) To appreciate one bird is to appreciate them all. To appreciate birds is, ironically, to appreciate their prey. And so on. I won’t say that I ever feel (this would be truly sentimental) that I end up by appreciating mankind – we are a special case – but at times I think I have glimpsed the possibility. On the shores of our afflicted world the waves of my sensibility have, perhaps, lapped tentatively.

  I sit down on a hilltop to a lunch of beer and ham sandwiches. (I have discovered that if you wrap cans of beer in newspapers they stay cold.) Usually I make my own lunch, but today Margo did it. During our courtship she sometimes accompanied me on these trips, but it was clear th
at she was bored. It was like listening to music with someone who is indifferent to it. She would get me to make love to her in the wildest spots. All right in romantic theory, I suppose, but these spots are good for birds. Once I missed an eagle because of her. I’m sure I did. I’m sure it was an eagle. I seemed to glimpse it over my left shoulder, soaring from a crag, angrily majestic, disturbed, who knows, by Margo’s cries. It cast an enormous shadow on us and I can’t think what else could have done that.

  So now I go birdwatching alone, no more required to explain to Margo what I hope to see, to give her the binoculars, to train them for her on the place where a kestrel or a dove or a raven briefly has its being, to hear her – oh God! – say that all she can see is a rock or a post or a piece of old clothing. The number of things she was able to see instead of birds was remarkable. In glades, for instance, she spotted refuse, on moorland the twisted remains of vehicles, in fields dead rabbits and dead sheep. And dead birds: these she was especially quick to see. She would not have the natural world pure for a moment. Her wish, it seemed, was to unsettle my reverence, to persuade me that the world soiled itself indiscriminately.

  There are larks above me. I eat my lunch. The peace I long for is assured for today. It is harder to find however than it used to be, I cannot understand why. The possibility that one day it will fail me, and then fail me again, and then clearly be gone forever, horrifies me. Wordsworth it was who lost the art of knowing it and became sterile. What will I do if that happens to me?

  A falcon hovers over the valley. I watch it through my binoculars, forgetting my lunch, forgetting everything, held entirely by this tawny idling in the mid air. Now it appears to be beginning its drop, now its rise, as if its plan is to persuade those below that it has no intentions, that its movements are all to do with wind currents. A capacity to deceive a part of its nature? I rather think so, having studied these birds for years. I read their minds well now. And so I can follow them with my binoculars, anticipating most of their feints and delays, switching suddenly to another part of the sky, there invariably to find the falcon arrived before me. There was a time when, mesmerised by their command of the air, by their monumental solitariness, I would lose them altogether. They would have dropped and I would be scanning an empty sky. Now I can sometimes follow them all the way down (we plunge together), exclaiming aloud in wonder, “Look at that!” or “There he goes!” To whom am I calling? Myself? Some ideal other? Is it not strange to cry out in the open spaces like this?

  Now and then, of course, I am disturbed, It is often at about this time, three-thirty, and often by a couple such as this that I see approaching: merry, garrulous, about fifty, holding hands. They are not bird lovers and nor, from the awkwardness of their movements, do they appear to be walkers. I can never make out whether they are exceptional in having been as intimate as this all their lives or whether it is the intimacy of those recently married for the second or even the third time. I know what they are going to say; they never surprise me. (I know what hawks are going to do, more or less, but they always surprise me.) They address me with what I can only describe as a kind of ostentatious peacefulness. This doesn’t seem to have been inspired by the countryside, but to have arisen elsewhere: it is as though they have brought it to the countryside for the finishing touches. It is the other way round with me. Comparatively speaking, I am a mess at home and in the city. Why? Because I have built my life too much on my wit, my capacity to be the life and soul of even the most soulless parties. The clown dependable because of his thirst for clowning. But what I really want is to lose my wit, or, if not to lose it (for what else might go also?), to address it to other ends. What ends? It alarms me that I cannot say. I still – when listing the virtues – have no impression of what I am naming. It is like an anachronistic role call: the past may shift a little, saints and martyrs stepping forward to take their bow, but the present is stuck fast, redeemers tripped before they can go anywhere.

  I stand with my binoculars half raised, but it doesn’t deter them: they chatter on about the heather and the fresh air. Eventually I excuse myself and move on. I find I am walking back to the car, tired suddenly, though not concerned to go home. I drive to an inn and sit at a table outside, drinking beer. I like the whiteness of this courtyard. It is strong, dominating even a party of cyclists. I will have a few beers and then go home. Margo has asked me not to be late because we are dining at the Macraes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  William always enjoyed breakfast-time; it was the simplest time of day. The day before might have been confusing, the day in front of him uncertain, but drinking his tea, approaching the moment when he swallowed his pills, he was at ease. It was when he planned his day. Since his meeting with the enemy (as, following George Weir, he now described them to himself), he had revised his idea of what he should be doing. He believed that he should be making it possible for himself to catch them, should they come again. The details of how he might do this escaped him, but the resolve was there. He worked at it daily – worked at it as if the only alternative was a boredom which would destroy him. He drew a map of the farmland (labouring until he got it right, convinced it would give him a decisive advantage) which showed the paths, the dykes, the fences, the hollows, the bushes, the trees and the outhouses. One copy he pinned up in the kitchen, studying it over the top of his teacup, one eye cocked, the other he took with him on his tours of inspection. He would stop quite often and consult it, as if he was inexplicably lost in his own domain, quite astray. It combined with his semi-military walk, which now came to him almost automatically (and from which he lapsed only when tired), to reassure him.

  One day he remembered that he had once been a birdwatcher. He had had binoculars. When had he given up birdwatching? What had become of the binoculars? He couldn’t remember. He would approach the edge of his former life and seem to see – before a well-kept house – a large pile of refuse, gravely smouldering. A vaulted pyre. However he approached it – this point where his life had ceased to make sense – he would be faced by the fire, slowly burning, absurdly slowly. He imagined that all his possessions were in it – his binoculars and his clothes and his watch and his books and his photographs – and that, though it might take a long time, they would eventually be consumed. But the pyre: that he saw smouldering without end.

  His sense of responsibility made him irritable. Why hadn’t he been given binoculars? Didn’t they want the job done properly? Didn’t they really care if the machinery was stolen or not? To protect machinery you needed machinery. Binoculars should have gone with the job: it was obvious. With binoculars, he would always have had the advantage. Lying on his stomach somewhere, he could have surveyed the horizon where the farmland dissolved in the haze, and, when he saw shapes emerging from it, danger approaching in one form or another, the chimerical becoming flesh, he could have taken immediate action.

  Then he feared that he was overreaching himself. He got the impression, looking round the bare farmhouse, with its crumbling plaster and its ugly oranges and yellows, that this was a job for a simpleton, a semi-invalid or an old man on the point of death. He had been warned not to be heroic; but what was the alternative? The alternative was how he had been when he had arrived: that was how the job was viewed apparently. His feebleness, his debility, which he had feared would count against him when he tried for the job, had actually been in his favour.

  His humiliation affected his walk. His stride got longer, his shoulders were hunched, his hands often in his pockets. He recognised that, unable to do the job as he wanted to – with binoculars, a walkie-talkie even (so he thought one morning) one of those small vehicles used by the obese or the elderly on golf courses – he was in danger of doing it badly. His tours of inspection became casual, occasional, as though he was mocking the job as he did it, or doing it in order to mock it. He knew that this would encourage those he had been hired to keep out; and he knew that this might be considered a form of collusion. (Was this how his predecessors, if there
were any, had changed colours?)

  One day, returning to the farmhouse in this mood, he found that Sheila Weir had called with some vegetables.

  “Can I use your loo?” she asked. “At this stage of pregnancy …”

  He let her into the farmhouse, half watching as, with little gasps of alarm and anticipation, she hurried to the lavatory. Standing in the hall, he heard her urinate (she hadn’t closed the door), moaning slightly as she did so. Then he heard her stand up and adjust her clothes. He stood very still (as still as he had stood for years), telling himself that this was the innocent arousal of the convalescent.

  “How are you?” she enquired, returning. “I thought you looked bored crossing the field.”

  “Bored?” he said, remembering how it was possible to be direct with her, scrupulous. “No, not bored. Frustrated. Angry even. I’ve been thinking that my job would be much easier with binoculars. I’ve a lot of ground to cover, you know.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course! I know that George has two pairs. I’ll get him to come over with one … later.”

  He wondered if she was making fun of him (“later” – she had emphasised the word, given it a flourish). He didn’t think so. She was lying back in the deckchair, a hand on her belly, breathing heavily.

  “I’m fed up myself, actually. I’m three days overdue and I can’t sleep. I’ve run out of books, but even if I hadn’t, I’d be too tired. Are you up to reading yet?”

  “Nearer. I might try. What do you suggest?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, William,” she said, as if it wasn’t in her nature to make such suggestions. “I’ll send some over with the binoculars.” She lost interest, then. Remote eyes, her hand still on her belly. Flies on the windowpane, loud in the heat. Once she waved one away, and once, compressing her lips, she blew upwards.

  “Can I get you a fan?” William asked.

  “Don’t worry, I can’t be bothered.”