Live; live; live Read online

  *

  ‘She’s going to live forever,’ my mother remarked, on seeing Mrs Oliver in front of us, on South Street, walking alongside Lucas, arm in arm. Mrs Oliver, though the older of the pair, was still robust, whereas Lucas limped slightly, and used a stick. He might have been a man recovering from an operation or injury, and Mrs Oliver his mother, giving support.

  It was the summer before I went to university. The memory of the moment is clear, and I know what I heard and saw when my mother said that. ‘She’s going to live forever.’ I remember the tone and the smile. There was admiration for Kathleen Oliver, and something else, which was not quite malice – more a mild but surprising unkindness, which is perhaps why I have not forgotten it. It implied amusement at the failure of a plan, and could only have meant that my mother suspected, or was affecting to suspect, that Lucas’s friendship with Mrs Oliver – if that is what it should be termed – was to some extent strategic.

  Kathleen Oliver was not many years short of seventy when Lucas moved in; he might have thought that he should not have long to wait. Instead, he had now waited for seven years, and would wait for another three. Then again, those years would have enabled him to make certain of his claim. Yet, although I never understood what was going on with Mrs Oliver, it was evident that a true affection existed, at least, and was reciprocated.

  •

  At work in the house of Kathleen and Callum Oliver, Lucas had remarked on a bowl that had caught his attention; it was the first day of the job. The bowl occupied a ledge by the front door, and the manner of its display betokened value. The texture of the clay was rough; the colour was that of a drought-reduced puddle in mud. It was evident that the clumsiness and dullness were purposeful. Asked about it, Kathleen informed him that she was its maker. A conversation followed.

  Lucas had questions about how the colours and the texture of the bowl had been achieved. He knew something of the tea ceremony. His intelligence was obvious, as Kathleen would tell me, one day around Christmas, after my first term at university; we were in the kitchen, and Lucas came in a couple of times, briefly, while we were talking; she spoke about him as if he were a favourite nephew, and she wanted him to overhear what she was saying. This intelligence, however, was not what had created the ‘connection’ that Kathleen had immediately felt; it was more an ‘affinity of temperament’, she said to me. Lucas too, another time, spoke of the ‘connection’ that was established by the conversation about the mud-coloured bowl. He was ‘greatly moved’, for some reason, by the way she handled the object, tilting it from hand to hand, as if it had life, as if it were a delicate animal. When she passed it into his hands, a certain trust was confirmed.

  Callum came home before Lucas had finished for the afternoon. When her husband shook hands with the young man, something very strange happened, Kathleen told me. Callum was an imposing man; some found him intimidating, at first. And she saw Lucas glance away from Callum, downward, at the floor. But Lucas was not shy; he was not intimidated. Rather, it seemed, in facing Callum some thought had occurred to him that made it impossible to sustain Callum’s gaze; it seemed to be a kind of embarrassment, she said. They talked for a few minutes, the three of them, and the conversation was easy. Then Callum abruptly excused himself. He had liked Lucas, it appeared, but he needed to remove himself from his presence.

  Her husband suffered from migraines, she explained to Lucas; he’d had one that morning, and the after-effects were still with him. Only one third of that statement was true, and she knew – though Lucas gave every appearance of believing what she was telling him – that he had not been deceived. Then he surprised her, saying: ‘He has lost somebody, very recently.’ It was said as if he were the one giving the reason for Callum’s departure. ‘His sister,’ he added. For the first remark, there was a simple explanation: the bereaved have an aura; we all can sense it. For the second: intuiting bereavement, one would have a reasonable chance of being correct by guessing that a sibling had gone. A parent would be most likely, but a sibling would be next. Another possibility: that Lucas knew who Callum was, and had heard what had happened, perhaps through somebody at the studios. But Kathleen knew that this would not be the case, as indeed it was not.

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  In answer he shook his head, puzzled and apologetic.

  They went out into the garden. The consternation deepened, because Lucas had understood more: the circumstances of the sister’s death; the turbulence of her relationship with her brother; other things. His insight was appalling, said Kathleen, yet she was under a spell. And Callum, when this was reported to him, was unnerved – or further unnerved, as the first contact with this strangely intense young man had unsettled him immediately. The gaze of Lucas, though it had lasted but a second or two, had been acute and compassionate, he said. One encounter would have been enough for Callum, but Kathleen was caught, and Lucas had shown an interest in seeing more of her work. So Lucas paid a call to Kathleen’s studio, and to Callum’s, and it began. He became a visitor to the house.

  When did it happen? In what year did those visits commence? This is a pertinent question. Erin would not know the answer. The only reliable sources are dead.

  •

  I think I have an image of Lucas as he first appeared to me, but the image is as insubstantial as a figure remembered from a dream of many nights ago: a man high above me, standing on a stepladder, his face amid leaves. He has scissors or secateurs in his hand, I think. He speaks to me – this is certain. He says something, and smiles, and passes down a flower. Perhaps what he says is: ‘For your mother.’ This might not be Lucas; it could be a gardener. Whichever it is, the scene must be after the death of Mr Oliver; had Mr Oliver been alive, he would surely have done the job himself. The man on the stepladder is not Callum Oliver, I know that much. I think it is Lucas.

  •

  Another scene: I am sitting on the floor of the living room of Mrs Oliver’s house, on a red rug, in sunlight; there is a beautiful slope of sunlight coming from a window; Lucas is drinking from a heavy tumbler; the glass is cut into patterns like a crocodile’s back; the adults are laughing; Mrs Oliver is known as Kathleen now; she has given me a book to browse through, in which there are photographs of a white wooden castle – a fantastical building, with roofs like wings. My father is no longer with us.

  •

  I remember the first conversation of any length with Lucas alone; I think I do. It was perhaps a year and a half after he had moved into Kathleen’s house; I would have been twelve years old, perhaps thirteen, just. Our paths had crossed in South Street; a fresh and bright afternoon. I had been to the bookshop, and I showed him what I had bought; he suggested that we should sit for a while, on one of the benches on the other side of the street.

  Clamping the walking stick between his knees, he rested his hands on the handle, one over the other, and smiled at me in a way that suggested that this was to be the occasion for a proper talk. The stick, with its band of bright copper near the top, had intrigued me. From the way he walked, the stick often did not appear to be entirely necessary; its contact with the ground seemed light. It was sometimes more like an elegant prop; with the dark suits that Lucas favoured, and the prematurely silvered beard, the stick augmented the appearance of distinction.

  Noticing the direction of my glance, he said: ‘I could get along without it, some days. But it helps. I like to have it with me.’ He let the stick topple into my hand.

  The design on the copper collar, I could now see, was the image of a ship, embossed, with dates and some words below.

  Putting a fingertip to the image, he told me about HMS Foudroyant, a story that involved Admiral Nelson. The stick was made from a piece of oak that had been salvaged from the Foudroyant. I read the ship’s name on the copper band, as if it were a password that I had to remember. The stick was a gift from a client, he explained; it had belonged to her husband. I unde
rstood that the walking stick was a form of commendation, of thanks. And I understood that Lucas knew that I understood what was meant, though he had not told me about what he did for a living.

  At the end, he considered the sky for some time. Easing back on the bench, he directed his gaze into the trees, resting his interwoven fingers on the handle of the stick; he might have been presenting his profile to a photographer. At the conclusion of his thinking, he rapped the pavement decisively with the tip of the stick. ‘Let us be on our way,’ he announced.

  •

  At around that time, I remember, he asked me, in the street: ‘And how is your mother?’ It was asked strangely, as if she had recently been ill.

  •

  The medium Hunter Selkirk seems to have specialised in making posthumous contact with members of the armed forces, and conveying to those who were in mourning for them the news of the deceased’s survival in spirit form. An RAF officer, speaking through Hunter Selkirk, complained of the difficulties that the dead often experienced in finding a conduit for their messages: ‘There are so many of us and so few mediums,’ he said.

  •

  Some weeks after the conversation about the Foudroyant and the walking stick, I met Lucas again, by chance, at more or less the same place. ‘Shall we sit?’ Lucas suggested, and we went to the bench – our ‘bench of conversation’, as he came to call it. The day was warm. The weather would have been remarked upon, I suppose; my progress at school; he would have enquired after my mother.

  With the tip of the stick he stroked the shin of his outstretched leg. ‘You want to know about the limp,’ Lucas surmised, correctly. Then he told me about the crash. It had happened when he was just a few weeks past his thirteenth birthday – ‘so your age,’ he said, with meaning. It appeared that I should understand that some sort of affinity had been confirmed. He had spent the day at a friend’s house, out in the countryside, and the friend’s father had given him a lift home. It was late, and very dark. The father, it was evident, wished to be admired for his skill behind the wheel; his son encouraged him to go faster, and the father obliged – the roads were quiet, after all. An unlit car suddenly appeared in front of them, in the middle of the road. Foreseeing the collision, the friend’s father turned the steering wheel sharply, so that his side would take the brunt of the impact – that was the intention, anyway. ‘I am not going to wake up from this,’ Lucas had thought, as trees whirled around the sliding car; though calamity was imminent, he was oddly calm, he told me. But he did wake up, some time later, as did the friend, who lost an eye, and the father, whose legs were broken, but not as badly as Lucas’s. A year later, the friend’s mother left her husband, taking their son with her. She had held her husband to be responsible, in large part, for the injuries that the boys had suffered; he had not been wholly sober, it turned out; and he had been driving too fast. ‘No seat-belts in those days,’ Lucas explained, whacking his shin with the stick. At first the doctors had thought they would have to amputate at the knee. ‘So mustn’t complain,’ he said, with another whack.

  Gazing up at the sky, he smiled – remembering something, it seemed. The recollection was a private thing, so I did not speak. He glanced at me, and returned to considering the sky; he nodded slightly, and smiled again, as if I had said something wise.

  I thought of a question: ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Only when I hit it,’ he answered, straight-faced; he whacked the shin again.

  I laughed, and he grinned at me. But a few seconds later his expression changed, and he directed a different kind of look into my face – an attentive and complex look. ‘I know it can be difficult, with just the two of you,’ he said. His eyes doused me with sympathetic sorrow.

  The crash was not, however, the low point of his early years, he told me. His father had died when he was only fifteen. Lucas was on a school trip that day, and he would never forget the face of the teacher who came to fetch him from the dormitory. ‘Mr Courtney,’ he said, and he tilted his head a little, half-smiling, as though now seeing the grim-faced ghost. ‘A terrible day,’ he said, looking skyward again, with an intensified gaze. Lucas had been immeasurably fond of his father. This was the phrase he used: ‘immeasurably fond’. The words were spoken softly, as if great care were governing their selection; they indicated a precise measurement of affection. ‘So I understand how hard it can be,’ he said.

  •

  It was peculiar, that Lucas should confide in me; he seemed oblivious of the difference between his age and mine. I did not know what to make of it, as I told my mother. She answered: ‘He’s an unusual man.’ To the best of my recollection, little more was said. Several times, over the years, she said the same thing: ‘He is an unusual man’, not with any suggestion of affection or admiration, but as if the adjective signified an objective category, akin to his height or nationality.

  •

  Another moment on the bench of conversation: adopting what had become the customary pose (hands on the stick; eyes aimed cloudward), Lucas told me that his father had died of a subarachnoid haemorrhage. ‘A stroke. A rare kind of stroke,’ he explained, as though – it seemed to me – the rarity reflected well on his father. And the precise and difficult words were, I sensed, offered to me by way of flattery of my intelligence.

  •

  Anecdote: from the Greek anekdota, meaning ‘unpublished’ / ‘not given out’. Neuter plural of anekdotos, from an- (‘not’) + ekdotos (‘published’) – in turn from ek- (‘out’) + didonai (‘to give’). Walking with me, Lucas once said: ‘That would make a good anecdote.’ The words, as I hear them now, suggest an anticipation of the current situation. ‘I’m in good hands,’ he said, perhaps on the same afternoon; the implication was that I might be his anecdotalist. But what the anecdote in question might have been, I do not remember.

  •

  The death of Callum Oliver is central to the story of Lucas; perhaps more central than the life.

  Callum swam in the sea throughout the year, before or after the working day. For an hour or more he would stay in the water. My mother once came across Kathleen on the beach, looking out, shielding her eyes from the sun with a magazine; though guided by the direction of Kathleen’s gaze, my mother had to search for some time before she could distinguish the dark dot of Callum’s hair in the midst of the water. ‘He goes out too far,’ my mother remarked. To which Kathleen replied: ‘He won’t listen.’ As a boy, Callum had won trophies for swimming and been encouraged to compete at a higher level. He had not been prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. As a recreational swimmer, however, he was dedicated. When Kathleen had met him, he was going to the pool two or three times a week, doing fifty lengths per session, without a break. At sixty-two he was fitter than the average forty-year-old British male. Nonetheless, in conditions that were not difficult, he had drowned. While his wife waited on the beach, Callum drowned.

  The sea was quite placid. There was a light wind, so the surface was slightly ruffled; no more than that. He was a long way out, at usual. Among the uncountable little cusps of water it was not easy to spot him; when Kathleen looked up from her book, it would take a few seconds to find him. Once or twice it took more than a few seconds; then she could not be sure that she could see him. He might have raised a hand to wave to her; it might have been a piece of flotsam. She put down her book and scanned the water. What she took at first to be his arm was in fact a floating bird. Movements of the water deceived her. As if it would make a difference, she ran down to the water’s edge; standing knee-deep, she called his name, over and over. It took ten hours to find the body.

  His heart must have failed, Kathleen thought; a cardiac arrest can kill even an apparently healthy person. It was established that his heart had not failed; neither had he suffered a stroke. Perhaps cramp had disabled him, or a sting. It was possible. And it was possible that he had intended to die.

  Lucas could remember, ‘as if it were yest
erday’, the shock that he had felt when Kathleen said those words: ‘It’s possible that he intended to die.’ She was sitting in the damson-coloured armchair. Beside the chair, on a low table, stood a small stone head, of a young man, which Callum had carved. The fingers of her right hand, as her arm hung over the arm of the chair, stroked the stone hair. Looking at her fingers as they caressed the head, she told Lucas that she had come to think that it was probable that Callum had let himself drown. There was something that Lucas did not know, she told him; it was something that only she had known. From time to time, from nowhere, with no discernible cause, a ‘massive darkness’ would descend on her husband. ‘Here we go,’ he would say to her when he felt that it was beginning, as if he were about to be lowered into a cavern, and was both fearful and intrigued. It was a sensual experience, he said; he could feel the black bile, the melaina khole, flowing over his brain.

  For Lucas, this disclosure required some readjustment of his thinking, he confessed to me. ‘I had no idea,’ he told Kathleen.

  ‘Why would you?’ she said.

  (An obvious response: might a man of Lucas’s abnormal sensitivity not have been expected to read accurately the character of a living acquaintance?)

  Callum could often work through it, said Kathleen. He could not talk and he could not think, but he could work. The stone ‘told him what to do’. The contentment that Lucas had seen in Callum was not a pretence. It was just that his contentment would sometimes be unavailable to him; he would be temporarily unavailable to himself. And Kathleen could protect him; she could ensure that he was left alone with his work.

  But what had happened on that day? Had he been felled by something much worse than the usual influx of black bile? Had he, in an instant, been wholly engulfed by it? In a moment, could he no longer make the effort required to keep going? Perhaps, unable to think, he had suddenly decided – or it had suddenly been decided for him – that it would be best to die, or that there was no difference in being dead. She replayed in her mind what Callum had said to her before going into the water. They had barely spoken, but it had been a light silence. He had undressed, and kissed her, and walked down to the water. She loved him; he knew this, and he loved her. He could not have set out with the intention of never coming back to her. She had seen, she thought, a slight shadowing in his eyes – one of his lighter clouds, which the water, or work, or music, or her company had in the past been able to disperse. It had not been the onset of the black bile; the black bile was something quite different. It had not been that; she would have seen; he would have said; he had always told her when it was starting – the announcement was an aspect of his love for her. But perhaps, when she was out of sight, his mind had ceased to be his own; unable to think, he had not known that they loved each other. An avalanche of despair. It was all improbable, but possible. Even after thirty years, there could have been some part of his mind that her husband had withheld from her. There might have been a secret.