Griefwork Read online

  ‘So it’s something I keep to myself. Sooner or later I’ll probably confide in Monodora. One more of love’s curses is that it will out: it makes one as reckless as if it were an achievement one yearned to brag about instead of an incubus beneath which one crouches, even though it did descend like manna. I can never tell her, of course, it’s unthinkable. Worse than the shame of hearing one’s own trite and stumbling words would be her expression of naive puzzlement. After that there would be nothing for me but the axe and the flame. No, there is such a thing as dignity and besides I love her far too much to wish to cause her the least upset. I can’t believe I’m the only case of frustrated affection in this House, anyway. In fact I know I’m not. Now and then one hears things said in sleep, confessions, laments and suchlike. It’s probably the common lot, again with notable exceptions. The palms, of course, are above all that sort of thing, being too busy fancying themselves as the philosopher kings of the plant world. Don’t raise your expectations too high, is my advice. I’ve never heard any of them express a single worthwhile thought. The lotuses are a quite different case. I’d wager there’s not a plant in the House who hasn’t at some point or another been kept awake by their carryings-on. You never heard such screaming and bitching. That being said, one has to admit their outrageous remarks are often very funny. There’s something inherently comic about their situation, too. Talk about a divided community. Half of them are trying to be religious and the other half sordid, and we can all hear which half has the more success.

  ‘Oh! It’s so beautiful when the gardener blows the candles out. When the last light is extinguished a sigh goes through as a billion cells relax at once. I talk too much. I know it; and I only do so because I lack the freedom and courage to whisper to my little hemlock those few words I want to say, and then for all I care the roof can fall in and we perish in the snow which tonight is stealthily patting the panes.’

  Two

  Picture a boy beside a grey northern sea, a distant figure whose neutral tones blend easily into the landscape. His faded dungarees, stuck with dried and curling fish scales, are the silvery blue-green of the sea holly scattered in clumps among the dunes. His hair is the melancholy yellow of rock samphire shaken by wind in cups and hollows. The landscape in which he moves is pared down to three elements: land, sea, sky. Each of these has a superficial scurrying quality beneath which it is as static as a grim metal poured long ago and set. To one horizon stretches rumpled water raising an infinity of failed castles. To the other, a terrain of low tufted dunes and saltings trembling stiffly in a flat wind and reaching inland past the invisible estuary. No trees, no vertical objects break the tyranny of the horizontal save only three wind pumps, vastly distant from each other and appearing bigger and closer than they really are, like oil drums in a desert. Although these are the late 1920s the sky remains as innocent of the aeroplane as it was when it frowned upon Europe’s last retreating ice sheets.

  The boy smells strongly of fish oil, and is quite unaware of it. From before dawn he was helping his uncle empty the smokers and pack the boxes: bloaters sweating amber droplets, the twisted batons of eels. They were still nailing the lids when the lorry called, though in this land its arrival could hardly be said to have caught them by surprise. Its insect crawl had been visible for ten minutes, its rattle over sluices and the bridges made of loose railway sleepers audible even above the sea’s beating pulse. He had helped with the loading, drunk a pint of milky coffee, walked off along the shore to a point where the house he had left, with its line of huts, looked no more than the cluttered superstructure of a wrecked ship stranded far away on tidal flats. Now in the distance beyond it are Flinn’s palish gleams: roofs greasy beneath stray sunlight, the steely flare of greenhouses. Most prominent of all is the menacing white stump of a lighthouse which dominates the town and at night intermittently blanches his bedroom curtains with its beam.

  Ten years earlier the lighthouse had set the course of his life, and so cardinally that it was only of late he had managed to make a story from what had been an inarticulate wound. A space had at last opened up in that ever-receding landscape to accommodate a remembered figure and the images which clustered around her like birds about a distant statue, immobile in sunlight. Immobile, for there is no movement in memory; there are only instants which paint the fluent living with the rigidity of death, even when they are most in motion. Yet this boy would have said how vividly as a five-year-old he remembered his mother’s bicycle spokes, sprrixx, as she pedalled away up the track across the polder to Flinn, the sun sparkling off the twirling wires, merry as mills. So he had stood as he always did when she went shopping in the village, watching her out of sight. It took a long, long time. The pedalling figure shrank to a gliding blob, now disappearing behind a stretch of stiff bushes, now sinking into invisible declivities, reappearing heraldically proud, crossing a bridge over one of the cuts. That creeping dot was his mother. At the same time he thought of anybody else in the distant village who might happen to be gazing inland rather than seaward: how they would notice movement out there among the kale fields, a creeping dot with a speck of colour to it which slowly grew and resolved itself into Christina in her orange headscarf escaping from that foul-tempered brother of hers and her poor little boy for a quick round of cards, some purchases and a good few glasses of schnapps (which Leon could smell when she returned). And so he watched everyone and everything out of sight: boats putting out, a heron flying, the lorries coming to fetch smoked fish, a white steamer crossing the horizon and leaving its long thinning smudge. They all trailed behind them a hollow never quite filled by their return, carrying away part of him with them so he could look back and watch himself watching, just as he was sure his mother never once glanced over her shoulder to glimpse her melancholy child dwindle behind her. Sprrixx.

  One day in Flinn marketplace there had been a stir of interest as a lorry arrived bearing a huge lump tethered beneath green canvas. The driver asked the way to the lighthouse, possibly out of self-importance since it was clearly visible from all points in Flinn and, indeed, from many a mile outside. It stood on a low sandy cliff not a quarter of a mile away and had been blind in its eye for nearly a year since the heavy steel trolley on which the half-ton lens revolved seized up one night. The year was 1918, and even at the end of the world’s first mechanised war the arrival of a lorry in Flinn was an occasion and a large group followed it along the sandy track. It would be a three-day task to instal a jib on top of the building, haul the new mechanism up, swing it in and seat it in its bed. A crew of trained engineers was sitting in the cab with the driver, and the keeper of the only inn for some miles began cheerfully throwing open windows and airing beds. The weather was propitious: a high blue summer sky with a few mare’s tails languidly unravelling their tresses across Europe. Scattered lark song ascended flutteringly on weak thermals from among the dunes. The sea rocked and glittered to the horizon. The work began.

  On the second morning Christina pedalled into town with her string bag, took a couple of glasses of refreshment and asked where everyone had got to. Told, she hopped back on her bicycle and soon joined the crowd of onlookers. It was at one of the more interesting moments. The men were getting ready to haul up the revolving mechanism, a task almost as delicate as remounting the lenses in it since it was as finely engineered as a watch. It lay in a cradle of mattresses on the back of the lorry, steel and brass glistening beneath a film of light oil. Before the order to haul was given the keeper waved everyone back and the spectators drew off to one side, just far enough so that if the rope broke (as many of the adults and all of the children were hoping it would) they were sure of a ringside seat without being in danger. The men hauled, the rope creaked, the pulley high up on the lighthouse squealed, the mechanism rose slowly into the air. As it did so the upturned heads tilted ever further back until they looked to the foreman up by the jib like a patch of daisies in a meadow. When the load neared the top there occurred one of those brisk claps of w
ind which come from nowhere and pass into nowhere, a stray lump of summer air perhaps detached from a stiff breeze a week previously and loitering lazily in its wake. It did no harm whatever to the precious mechanism now at the lamp room’s sill. All it did was catch and throw back one of the curved lattice windows. Being heavy, it moved quite slowly and jarred to rest with a thud against a wooden stop bolted to the stonework. The foreman, intent on his job, scarcely glanced up but called out ‘Latch that, Jon,’ his gloved hand on the quivering rope. As the window struck the stop a single diamond pane flew from its mounting and twirled languidly down in a bending trajectory. Hardly any of the onlookers even saw it. This fluttering glass blade took Christina at the base of the neck and killed her where she stood.

  Her child being five as well as living in isolation made it easier for the unplanned conspiracy to emerge and bear him the news that his mother had been taken seriously ill all of a sudden and wouldn’t be coming back for a while. He accepted this as any child must an adult account of disaster, at face value. At the same time his speechless part must have wondered at the incongruity, at the perfectly everyday fashion in which, only a few hours before, she had pedalled away expressing at the last moment a fake exasperation at his demand to be brought the peppermints he knew she would bring anyway. These delicious mother-and-boy games were snapped off short, at once and for ever, at midday when a motor car drove inexpertly into the yard, temporised by reversing too close to the smoke house door and cuffing it off its hinges, and reluctantly disgorged some pale village women who at once closeted his uncle. After only a few minutes they came out again and got back into the car. One of them reached out of a window with a wild smile and dropped half a bag of liquorice (which he didn’t like) towards Leon’s chest. His hands came up an instant too late, the bag fell and bounced off the running-board and there was a fossil moment. For ever afterwards the image would recur of a crumpled white bag lying on sandy ground in the sunlight, hazed about by an engine’s sound and the sweet pungency of a black tailpipe. Then the exhaust receded, the motor car departed, and everything was over.

  His uncle, bereaved brother turned cantankerous guardian, remained an unknown quantity. ‘He’s got his own problems,’ as the teenaged Leon was later to learn in the village, though he never found out what they were and by that time cared less. It was no good trying to impute to the man either a particular cruelty or emotional incompetence, especially not in a time and place which did its best to deny subtleties of feeling unless they were put into the shorthand of convention. It was easy for his uncle to offend no code but also to give no clue to his own motives when with malign scruples, as weeks lengthened to months, he met his little nephew’s tearful demands to know when his mother was coming home with vague news of her progress from one special sanatorium to another. It soon became impossible for the child to ask while looking directly at his uncle. The stoniness was unbearable. Anguish masked as stoicism? Rage at being badgered to come up with fresh fictions? He gave up asking. One sunny morning she had gone away, sprrixx, twinkling off as she always did twice a week, but she had never come twinkling back again and now she never would. That much her bereft child knew. His conviction remained that somewhere beyond the limitless polder, somewhere out in the wide world his mother lay in bed or tottered about in a dressing gown smelling frowsty and looking grey as she did when she had one of her colds. And since he could see her thus, he thought she could surely see him too. How, then, could she bear not to come home and take him in her arms?

  In those days Leon howled a lot for his mother. But neither the culture nor the landscape encouraged self-indulgence, and bit by bit the impulse was translated into more appropriate forms. In this way the habit began which marked the rest of his childhood and adolescence of endlessly wandering that desolate littoral in search of driftwood, birds’ eggs, coloured stones, the sounds of water and wind, bobbles of black tar – for any, in fact, but the one thing. And after a time these treasures and their long searches engendered a life, as an oak gall’s tiny grub becomes surrounded by accretions ever denser, larger, more rugose, in final shape and substance utterly unlike their begetter and yet faithfully its home. When he was ten he was allowed to go to the village school if there were no fish to be cleaned and spitted, and sooner or later the insouciant brutality of childhood dragged him to the churchyard and confronted him with a small plain stone bearing his mother’s name.

  ‘There,’ they panted in a circle around him. ‘Now will you believe us? Anyway,’ (said their leader) ‘it’s spooky here. I vote we go down to the lighthouse. Or no,’ he added with unexpected kindness, ‘not there. Wim’s trapped some sparrows in his greenhouse. Let’s make his cats get them. Come on, Leon.’

  The balder a fact, the more equivocal. This one had immediately split into unrelated parts. Thereafter his mother existed in two tenses simultaneously, past and present; or, like an element, in two allotropes, the one dark and supine in a grave and the other still whitely refusing to come home. Either way it added up to abandonment. At about this time he had begun to avoid looking at the lighthouse and to hate its beam: the long empty finger sweeping over land and sea as if levelling them, ordaining or demarcating an area of blight. As he lay in bed its insistent pulse on the flimsy curtains seemed like surveillance. There were two flashes every twenty seconds. As dusk fell these blips hardened into spokes of light whose inexorable quality added severeness to evening’s melancholy. As if that were not enough the foghorn mounted on a low concrete hut at the lighthouse’s foot sent forth its bellow into the frequent sea mists. These hootings into nowhere sounded, muffled by fog and the remoteness of his house from the village, less strident and more like the regular groans of mortal illness. A territory was defined with Flinn lighthouse at its centre, the circumference of its horizon constantly retraced by the ends of light beams and sound waves. To Leon, glancing up suddenly from where he might be crouched over a drowned gull or the filmy mantle on a peat pool, everything seemed to rush soundlessly outwards into illimitable distance.

  The child became the boy, ignorant of all that lay outside Flinn except as fragments of schoolroom learning. Tucked into shrubs against the wind, himself to himself in small unknown places, he watched the sea and thought of it stretching back from its nearby line of constant collapse to behind the horizon, on and on until it returned somehow, wrapping the world in a wrinkled sleeve. His mind fled away over its surface to far-off nowheres and diluted his grief by smearing it ever thinner across dreamed deserts or forests whose canopies sagged beneath carpets of celestial butterflies. By such lonely acts the faintest heartening echo sometimes came back to him as from temple gongs struck by his thoughts or as scents jarred from distant blossoms.

  The boy became the yellow-haired dungareed youth who at every opportunity walked off alone until his uncle’s house was a distant wreck. As he walked he talked in a lively conversational tone to the one who accompanied him. Maybe once, when he was small, he had had the invisible companion whom so many children befriend until one day he or she vanishes, unmissed. This boy talked to his self as it grew, and it spoke back in his own voice or in the speech of waves and wind. Of what did this language consist? Of absolute purity, for one thing, unmuddied by any notions other than his own. His stark and orphaned life contained no music. No impassioned dominie had ever read him poetry with a traitorous glint of tears. Had he had a musical upbringing the sea’s voice might have come to him in the accents of dead composers: the compulsive sequencing which floods the lonely and impressionable child by the shore who constantly hums and whistles his self. Instead the water, the breeze, the birds, shingle and plants were for him an endless syllabary. In correctly hearing and learning to pronounce each sound he talked back to the world which surrounded him, and in talking back intensified the one who spoke.

  The principal sounds of his life included these, made without the larynx and in a fervent whisper: Shuuuff was the voice of the onshore wind which comes in summer puffs and beats against the
first dune-crest, curling up its face and striking the exposed roots of eroded tussocks on its lip. Ssiiih was the steady breeze of grey April or October days through samphire and grasses. Grockle was medium-sized abraded stones tumbled by a retreating wave, a sound peculiar to winter and which had always pleased him because at a time when the sea appeared uniformly thick with cold this unexpected hollowness at its roots suggested aeration down below, a valiant lightness permeating upwards. There was a whole vocabulary to describe the noises made by different waves depending on mood, the direction of the wind, the colour of the sky. The sounds he attributed to birds were legion. None of them, had he known it, much resembled any of the standard transliterations used to identify them in books. At some point, after an age of lonely repetition, the words he had assigned these noises had hived off and now stood on their own, names for things which had become the things, had become his companionable whole. Long after he reached the city as a young man he would repeat them when alone, quite consciously, or maybe no more unconsciously than a prayer: something affirmatory and consoling; something heaved, iterated, meant.