Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  He paused again, grimacing, as the helicopter came back over the cottage.

  “Then a most unfortunate thing happened. We’d arranged to meet in town, but before going there I was to collect some extra money from their caravan. She didn’t like carrying a lot on her. It wasn’t where she said it would be, however, in an inside pocket of a brown jacket she sometimes wore, so I looked for it elsewhere. That was in John’s clothes as well as hers. What else was I to do? But I was caught in the act: the caravan door opened and John came in. I hadn’t heard him coming. In fact, I was under the impression that he was working late. He accused me of theft. I denied it and tried to explain myself, but he laughed in my face. I punched him. We had a fight then, all over the caravan. Later, when I asked Janet to confirm my story, she wouldn’t. She said it looked like theft to her too. That made me wonder … wonder if I had been set up. I’m pretty sure I was.”

  When he spoke again it was more painfully than before.

  “It brought them together again. Can you believe it? The caravan didn’t shake any more – at least, not from their rows. And I … I was fired. Any protests and I’d have been charged with theft. That was made clear. So here I am.”

  As if he didn’t believe that after such a confession either of his parents could possibly have much to say to him, Larry got up, suddenly and quietly, and left the room. They saw him in the garden then – as though to avoid seeming pathetic, looking up at the helicopter.

  Douglas went out into the garden after him. They watched the helicopter together.

  “There are times when I take their noise and presence almost personally,” Douglas said.

  “I’ve heard that they sometimes use isolated cottages as reference points in their manoeuvres.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised; it often seems so.”

  “A terrible noise. I could hardly hear myself speak in there.”

  “You spoke very well, very well indeed.” The wretchedness of what Larry had said had affected him less, Douglas found, than the honesty of the telling. “I appreciated it, and so did your mother. It can’t have been easy.”

  Larry shrugged his shoulders.

  “Would you mind if I stayed a while? A month, maybe more?”

  “As long as you like.”

  Because Larry wouldn’t look at him, Douglas laid a hand on his shoulder. Inside, Edith had put on some lights; they seemed to beckon to her family to come back in. This they did when, as though suddenly summoned, the helicopter banked off towards the north.

  Edith’s Journal – II

  Larry is home again. The thought never quite leaves me that one day he’ll be home for good. Is this the time? He seems more hurt and lost than ever. A few times I’ve caught myself whispering “my boy”. A bad sign. Larry is twenty-five. After an opening confession which moved us both very much, he’s been very silent. I try to let him be. So does Douglas, but he’s better at it than I. I have a tendency to probe, to make pointed enquiries. The way he looks up when I make them, his big head turning slowly and wearily, I’m instantly ashamed. But I don’t want him to think that we’re not concerned.

  I don’t want him to get the idea that his crises over the years have wearied us. There are punch drunk parents, I know, parents who can’t take any more, but that’s not us. Douglas says it’s a matter of faith, of having faith in his faith in us. Yes, faith in his faith. What if life is finally a network of such faiths? The ultimate bedrock? That or nothing at all?

  My health has been bad again. The pain came back not long after Larry’s return (there’s no connection, of course). Always the return of bad pain is like a renewal of hostilities. Always, to start with, it’s as if there’s someone behind it, directing it. For a few days I personify it, only knowing my attitude is right when I stop doing this, when I understand again that pain is impersonal, mindless, random.

  I’ve stepped up my painkillers, three three times a day instead of just two. My days are rather drugged, as a result; I find it hard to get going. Sometimes I can’t see the end of my sentences; I tail off. Douglas is very patient with me though. He adjusts his pace to mine, speaking more slowly, pausing when I need a rest, never letting me feel he’s got something better to do (though I’m sure he has). What I hate most is the feeling of passivity. I can’t be bothered asserting myself. I’m content just to be nursed. I barely talk, and Douglas’ and Larry’s conversations, such as they are, I follow from a tired distance, if I follow at all. And this journal: I think it would be beyond me if it wasn’t that the chance to keep it … well, let me just say that though the pain makes it hard to keep, keeping it gives me strength.

  Would more pain make for more initiative? Maybe. So hard to strike a balance. Too drugged or too much in pain. Is there a state in between – alertness threatened by pain but not eclipsed? Doctor Macfarlane is coming tomorrow so I’ll ask him. I’ll ask about Larry too, for he’s not eating or sleeping well. Sometimes I see him belching into the back of his hand, then drawing in his cheeks strangely, as if he’s in pain as well.

  I’ve not let on that the pain is worse, of course. From the way he looks at me, though, I can see that Douglas suspects. I’m quite devious really, only taking two pills if he’s around, swallowing the third later. What’s to be gained by frankness in these matters, if you come to think of it? What’s wrong with courageous deception? I know this is an age for confidences, sharing, counselling, but I think that there are times when sharing is neither possible nor desirable. Funnily enough, I think Douglas is also holding back, not telling me things, worries about his heart especially. And Larry certainly is: I can see it in his eyes, the set of his shoulders, I can hear it in his whistling. If there’s love in the family at all – and I think there is – it’s what’s making it possible for us to behave like this. It’s as if we all know it, and as if knowing it enables us to continue with the tender masquerade. I mean, if Douglas and Larry were ignorant of the pain I have to endure, would I be so concerned to keep it to myself?

  Should it not be possible, anyway, to use our pain in some way? Were the endeavours of the saints not fuelled by suffering and mortification? I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. What my particular endeavour will be, I don’t know, but I have faith that it’ll be revealed to me, as I have faith that my pain will drive me forth and inspire me when the time comes.

  I’m as secretive about this, however, as I am about the fact that my pain has come back and that I don’t think it will go away again this time.

  V

  In spite of his troubled state, Larry quickly took his place in the family again. His parents allowed him to come and go as he pleased. Afraid that questions would drive him away again or cause him to crack up altogether, they respected his whims and silences, Douglas in particular at pains to act as if his behaviour was quite normal really. He believed that it would relax him, help him to come round in time.

  But it wasn’t always easy to see him as normal. Sometimes he would come in late and watch television in his room until six in the morning; sometimes pace up and down in the garden, a glass of vodka in his hand, talking to himself; sometimes get up at noon, have breakfast, then go back to bed; sometimes, for half an hour or so, play his music extraordinarily loudly. Edith’s inclination was to discuss such behaviour and gently discourage it, but Douglas persuaded her not to. So there were days when little was said, their three lives, intensely separate, giving rise to three different kinds or qualities of silence in the cottage.

  Occasionally Larry would take the car when he went out, but if he thought he was going to be drinking – and usually he thought this – he would walk down the hill and catch a bus. There was no pattern to his outings, so far as Douglas could see; they appeared wholly random. Once or twice he hinted that he’d like to come along too, for a change of scene, lunch in the Eagle Inn, maybe, or in The Haven, further along the coast, but Larry didn’t respond. And whenever Edith and he were going for a run, they would ask Larry if he wanted to join them. He
always declined, as appreciative of the empty cottage, apparently, as he was of leaving it when his parents were there.

  Once he asked Douglas if he could come with him to the town. He had business there, he said. Douglas dropped him at the drinking fountain in the town square, doing so casually, as though it was a regular occurrence, as though his son’s ways were transparently simple and worthy, not obscure and unexplained. In the rear-view mirror he saw him fold his arms and wait by the fountain nonchalantly.

  He would always see him off, asking if he had enough money, would be back late, might need to be picked up from somewhere. Because Edith couldn’t easily get to the front door, he felt that the rituals of departure and return were his to sustain. He was very particular about them, hating casualness. But Larry was indifferent to such rituals. Douglas persisted nonetheless, having faith that in time and probably without Larry ever knowing it they would bear fruit.

  On the little hill which rose behind the back garden Douglas built a hut for his telescope. At chest level there was a bench on which the telescope stood, and from the bench to the roof for three hundred and sixty degrees the hut was open to the skies. It didn’t matter that there was barely enough room to stand up in because, when he got excited, Douglas tended to crouch at the telescope. He called it his “observatory”, though he suspected Larry was right when he said it looked more like an outside lavatory. It was surrounded by gorse bushes, and quickly became a haunt for birds, even big ones, like crows and seagulls. It gave Douglas pleasure to think that when he wasn’t using it, the birds were. He covered the floor with cardboard and newspapers, replacing them every week or so.

  Sometimes in the winter darkness he stayed in the hut for as long as three hours, coming down at midnight or later. He wore an overcoat, gloves and a scarf, and on especially cold nights took up a flask of tea as well. Outside the cottage there were trees, some tall ones, but here his view was uninterrupted. It was the best observatory he had ever had; he was determined to make full use of it in the time remaining. Some nights, leaving Edith in front of the television, or in bed, he would climb the hill slowly, feeling, for some reason, that this time might be short. His heart seemed all right again, he wasn’t breathless, even felt quite vital, but he had the feeling nonetheless. After using the telescope for an hour or so, however, the feeling would be gone. The heavens restored him. It was close to what he sometimes felt with Helen: their passion seemed able to defeat time, carry some kind of guarantee of indefinite survival.

  One night in late January, having helped Edith to bed after dinner (had the worst of the pain come back, that she should be so tired?), and having seen Larry off to town (he had “friends” to see), Douglas climbed to his observatory through a keen wind. The spread of stars exhilarated him. So much remained mysterious in each quarter of the heavens. The naked eye saw a fraction of what existed, and what it saw was not as it was but as it had been millennia ago. He would always start with such simple truths, lingering outside the hut to ponder them. To renew his amazement was essential: otherwise he couldn’t enter the hut at all, put his eye to the telescope, look upwards.

  It was a good time of the year for Gemini. It was high in the sky and due south, with Orion the hunter lower and south west. Lower still was Canis Minor with the star Procyon, lower again Canis Major with Sirius, amongst the brightest of all the stars. Then, from south south east to north north west, there was the Milky Way, its arch embracing Gemini and Orion, its highest point Capella in Auriga.

  To trace the course of the Milky Way was to risk a kind of vertigo, he knew. Nothing on earth affected him comparably. To skim over star clusters, vast areas of space, was dangerous. To avoid feeling as though he was being drawn upwards, spinning through an ever opening funnel, he had to know which part of the sky he was going to study. Space had to be approached with a plan and in a spirit of earnest enquiry if it wasn’t to overwhelm you. Yet if he put his eye to the telescope just to confirm what he already knew, he would quickly feel the weight of what he didn’t know. The course was a challenging one, between caution and abandon, the penalties for failing quite severe. He recalled a time when for hours after leaving the telescope he had felt that the earth was tilting beneath him, clear and familiar objects sliding out of reach; a time when he had had to sit in a chair, fearful that if he were to rise and open the front door he would be swept away by interstellar gales. (You could hear these sometimes, he fancied, dark sounds, weird sounds, constant background to astonishing splendour.)

  In the months before his heart attack, when he had felt low and tired most of the time, he had been particularly aware of his relationship with the stars. Three good nights at the telescope and he would be refreshed and in equilibrium, three bad ones and he would feel done for. One of the strangest thoughts he had now was that the heart attack could have been prevented altogether had he immersed himself in the stars more ardently and imaginatively, not allowed his relationship with them to be coloured by his condition, the unsteadiness of his heart.

  For some time after his illness he didn’t touch the telescope. He would dream of the stars, though, he would imagine what he would see and feel when he returned to them. When it happened, the return was remarkable. One night, impulsively, with the beginnings of joy, he set up the telescope in the attic of his old house and drew open the skylight. The diffuse yellowness of the city night was almost eclipsed by a fierce overarching darkness. He found himself in a part of the sky he didn’t recognise at first, a cluster of extraordinarily bright stars. Only slowly did he realise that it was a constellation in the Crab Nebula long familiar to him. It glittered like a necklace on dark velvet, stars in radiant colloquy, inviting, he believed, a kind of adoring contemplation. It had never appeared so before, and it made him think that his illness might have changed him, that he was coming at the world differently. (How differently, he believed the heavens themselves would show him.)

  The conditions tonight were perfect. There was no distorting urban glow, only the deep darkness of the countryside. Had they gone to live by the shore, he would have been troubled by the noise and glare of the American base, but, up here, in the intense cold darkness, the approach to the stars was direct, pure. He would stay at the telescope until his hands were numb and his eyes watered. Then, back in the cottage, he would probably think again of ways of heating the observatory, for in his later years, he believed, he would be spending more and more time there. How strange the sense that critical passions awaited him, times of reckoning. It made him grasp the telescope boldly, almost as if – the observer observed – it was to be trained inwards as well as outwards.

  He was cold, but he couldn’t break off from Gemini. He might have observed it for much longer, he thought, flirted with the illusion that Sirius was bright enough to command his attention until dawn, but on some far periphery of consciousness he heard a car door slam and his son laugh in the darkness. Trying to keep pace with a female laugh apparently. Competitive but yearning to be close. Douglas stood up, head spinning, and began to take down the telescope. It was what a friend called the period of re-entry. You were never quite sure you’d make it. All these galactic wastes might have done for you. Between heaven and earth confounded. He stepped outside the hut and banged his gloved hands together, swung his arms and stamped his feet. In the moonlight he could see his breath and his watch. Two a.m. Now that Larry and his friend or friends had gone indoors, there was silence again. Looking at the stars, you ceased to be aware of earthly silence. It was something else you sensed, a kind of cosmic lull in which all matter was involved. Now again Douglas knew the silence of the night, relished it as if it contained antidotes for instability. He breathed very deliberately for a few moments, before, cautiously, as if the path was treacherous, starting down to the cottage. Lights were on now, and he thought he heard laughter again.

  He was pleased that Larry had found some companions, but he didn’t want to risk his mood of calm with the young. Especially with new acquaintances, Larry had a
way of playing the cynic, the leveller, that could antagonise. He went in by the back door and tiptoed towards the bedroom in which, he hoped, Edith had been asleep for hours. The lounge door opened abruptly, however, and Larry stepped out, standing in a shaft of light and beckoning. Head lowered, Douglas went down the corridor towards him, aware that his son was swaying slightly, but less troubled by this than he was by the atmosphere of forced gaiety in the room behind.

  “Come and meet Ruth and Robert,” Larry said, putting a hand on his father’s shoulder. “I’ve been telling them about you.”

  “Just for a moment then. It’s very late.”

  “The night is young,” Larry said, not so much to his father as to his companions.

  To cover himself as he adjusted to the light and the visitors, Douglas started to speak, his voice excited, as if he had a tale to tell and this was the moment to tell it. He didn’t bother to sit down, but stood in the middle of the lounge, hands clasped by his chest.

  “How d’you do? This is the clearest night we’ve had in months, since my wife and I came here, in fact. For some of my fellow astronomers, you know, it’s a matter of life and death to have such skies. Without them, they’re not just shut off from the stars, they’re shut off from themselves. They pine. I’ve not quite reached that stage, but I can imagine it. So long live clear skies! Yes, Larry, a cup of tea would be very welcome; I’ve been up there for hours and I’m pretty cold.”

  Larry and his companions stood smiling and swaying during this speech. Ruth’s face, beneath a mass of brown curls, was neat but pretty, and her hand, when at last she was able to offer it to Douglas, was neat too and jingling with bracelets. Robert was tall, with short hair, very clear eyes and an earnest face. Even before he spoke, saying “Pleased to meet you, sir”, Douglas knew he was American. He held himself in a disciplined way, shook hands very correctly, as if entering a contract of some kind, and then would not sit down until Douglas had done so. Ruth was not so formal, drawing her legs under her after she sat and, as if to massage her scalp, burrowing her fingers into her hair.