What the Eye Doesn't See Read online

  ‘So what is worrying you?’ Freddy says to me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something is worrying you. What?’

  ‘Oh Freddy, don’t bother her,’ Nanda says.

  ‘I’m not bothering her. It’s important to ask these questions otherwise she’ll think we just don’t care.’ Freddy fixes me with a watery-eyed stare. I look up at the night sky, suddenly clear above us, now that the mist has gone. The stars are thickly spread across the blackness.

  ‘Something is on your mind,’ Freddy says.

  I turn to her and try to think what to say. ‘I just don’t know what to do.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About everything.’

  ‘You do know what to do,’ Freddy says. ‘Deep down you know. And you just have to trust your feelings.’

  ‘Oh Freddy, how can you talk such rubbish,’ Nanda says.

  ‘Is it rubbish?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, of course it is. Just because you’re sincere doesn’t mean you’ll be right. The world is full of people who are sincere – and sincerely wrong.’

  ‘But if I can’t trust my feelings what can I trust?’

  My question is carried away by a rush of wind into the star-bristled night.

  Nanda

  Her footprint is all that remains … marked into the concrete of the path outside Theodora’s front door, a wide footprint, with each toe marked clearly, the ball of the foot imprinted deep, but the heel only a shadow, so that the bounce of that step is sealed in the concrete. It’s been there so very long, since that day when she stepped across the path, holding Maggie on her hip, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the evening sun, laughing as she felt the wet concrete underfoot, her brown legs under a trailing summer dress, her hair knotted up in a scarf and smelling of sun. A moment gone in a flash, the significance of it not understood. How little we know, how we stumble through the dark.

  The time we had of her was too short. When Max wrote from Spain to say he was getting married, I was surprised but not displeased, as I felt a Spanish daughter-in-law must be infinitely preferable to some tiresome girl from the Home Counties, with an obsessive interest in hygiene. Then Lucía came here to stay, and the moment I saw her I recognised her – of course, it’s you, I thought, arrived at last, and it was as though I had always been keeping a space open for her.

  Her eyes were extraordinary. Maggie has inherited them, dark brown and sometimes midnight blue, still and serene, but with a raw edge, a hidden energy – both of them women with no sense of themselves, no knowledge of their power. It is a type of beauty one sees in Degas’ bathing women, a lack of self, and the same quality exists in the photographs Rosa takes, which I saw once in a London exhibition …

  Lucía’s English was rather random but she and I had no need of it. Max spoke to her in Spanish, arguing with her about nothing all the time, except for the evenings when he played his guitar for her, sitting outside on the steps, and he seemed quite changed when he was with her, but I did not know that change for what it was. All that I had put aside in my own life, and so I did not know it when I saw it in him … So many mothers are jealous of their daughters-in-law and that I cannot understand. For me Lucía was the natural inheritor of my love for Max. More than that, she was the interpreter of that love, for always between Max and me there had been a distance, an intensity of feeling, and yet a distance. Love, and the denial of love, the fear of what it might do …

  As a boy Max was fascinated by Le Morte d’Arthur, and all those other tales of knights and their ladies and of courtly love, played out at a distance, the desire of the eye. I read him those stories and took him to see medieval castles and houses, with secret gardens, enclosed within walls, and, as those were the images of his childhood, so they became the way in which I thought of him – my knight, playing in the garden with a wooden sword, his hair pale and shining so that every ray of the sun seemed to be focused in on him – and it was a feeling so intense and yet never expressed, until he met Lucía and then I felt that she was the one who would consummate my love for him, and I supplied her in my place, but, oh, it was not to be.

  Today Freddy is busy with the wind turbine, our latest project. She has ordered a kit and she intends to use the wind to create our own power system which the manufacturers tell us should create enough for the three cottages, although first we must dig a hole to stand it up, and put a battery, I think, in the shed, but no doubt we will manage that. Freddy gets so upset about it all the time, every setback reduces her to tears for she doesn’t seem to understand that at our age there are really no tragedies other than death. In the distance, across the fields, Mr Medlock’s men are mending a fence and at four o’clock they’ll come over for a cup of tea.

  Here, sitting on a bench in the warmth of the sun, I am happy. All my life I have always tended to recognise happiness largely by its absence, but now I am happy, consciously happy. I have arrived at the summit of my own life and, dizzy and breathless, I look down at the tortuous route by which I ascended. The proximity of death has removed a filter from my mind so that I am no longer shielded from the dazzling beauty of the ordinary and so the sight of a flower, a butterfly, a blade of grass, is painful in its intensity. I am living inside a poem. I take deep breaths, sucking in every moment. The future and the past are no longer important. I have been forced into the present and am intent on squeezing every last drop of sensation from it. This is Keats’ ideal of a life of sensations rather than thoughts. I focus on each tree, each cloud, and I want to watch each leaf, each bud, each drop of dew. I look up and stretch my eyes from one side to the other of the vast blueness above.

  When I see the farm van coming along the track, I go inside to make the tea. The men come up the path, brushing their hands across their overalls and taking their caps or woollen hats from their heads. ‘Good morning to you, Miss Priestley.’ They nod to each of us in turn, and there are three of them today and one of them is Young Bob Briston, the grandson of Arthur, dead so many years ago now, and he has the look of his grandfather, as his father had before him, all of them tall, with beautiful silver hair and very blue eyes. Also there is Young Mr Medlock, the son of the Medlock who carried me in from the fields when Max was born. They stand with mugs gripped in their hands. The weather’s better, we all agree, there’s less of a chill in the air.

  The men from the farm start to talk among themselves, in muffled voices, and I feel too tired to stand and so I move back to the bench by the wall and Freddy starts to talk about Maggie. ‘She is really most unsettled at the moment. Not that I’d want her to be settled, God forbid.’

  Three months now since Maggie went to Brussels – or perhaps even four – and she’s not home as often as she was when she lived in London, although she’s coming quite soon and I must get her letter out to know if it’s next weekend or the weekend after … and now Max is in Brussels as well, and she won’t like that. He sent me a postcard about a month ago, only three or four lines, and anyway I already knew of his move from other sources. The postcard showed Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, and there were teeth marks stuck through it, where Bullseye had tried to eat it, one of his final acts of sabotage, and Max’s illegible handwriting crawled across the back of it. Since then I have heard no more.

  Freddy continues to talk but Theodora interrupts. ‘Maggie is not in her prime, youth does not suit her. She will come into her own at forty or fifty. Anyway I do not set too much store by youth … it is merely a stage of underdevelopment. After all, no one harbours sentimental notions about the wonders of the mentally handicapped, do they?’

  I suggest that perhaps on that question Theodora might not be entirely objective and she nods her head towards me in recognition that I might be right on that point, although not necessarily on any other.

  ‘What I’m wondering,’ Freddy says, ‘is whether we should think about going to Brussels as part of our trip, although I can’t quite think what we will see there that we can’t see here.
Nowadays there are so many reductions on the trains, and Maggie’s letter sounds as though she is inviting us – all that patronising information she provides about how airline companies are perfectly willing to wheel the elderly and infirm through foreign airports, at no extra cost.’

  Freddy’s butterfly mind goes off on that conversation, and Theodora looks across at me and pokes at my leg with the end of her walking stick – for we’ve been intending to make a trip now for a long time, and before the war we travelled all over continental Europe and we saw there all that we wanted to see, and much that we didn’t … and we’ve always talked of going back and now Freddy presses the point and even I start to talk of it as though I may indeed travel again but really it is Maggie I am thinking about. What can I do to help her? Really I have no wisdom to offer, for as soon as one finds an answer the question changes – and she so much wants me to join in judging him, but judgement is really for the young.

  The men from the farm finish their tea, and I watch them go down the path, and how strange it is that these men know nothing of how their forefathers helped us when we first arrived here all those years ago … and all they know is that it’s a tradition, when working the stubborn land up here, to come and have tea at four o’clock with the Miss Priestleys, but they do not understand why that is, and they are simple men and do not recognise our gratitude.

  For it was Arthur Briston and Old Mr Medlock and others long since gone who helped us through our first winter here, and it’s doubtful if we would have survived if it hadn’t been for them. ‘Them daft lasses from London.’ That’s what they called us, as they rodded the drains for us, fixed the roof, changed the flat car tyres, and explained that even carrots will not grow if you plant them in sodden ground.

  We’d come here to escape from the war, from the pain and disillusion of all those new worlds we had wanted to create breaking up around us in violence … the thirties, an era of grand plans, the struggle between communism and fascism, all brought to nothing in the horror of war. Evil was ever present. How different is the world today, preoccupied as it is with more personal struggles. Theodora was ill, and Freddy and I were worn out, and we had lived too much, and travelled too far, although, I suppose, we were only in our late twenties then …

  And so we came to Burrington, just for the day, trying to find out about an early communist community which was founded here in the last century, and then, on an impulse, we bought Thwaite Cottages, empty and partly derelict, for fifty pounds, for we had an idea that we would try simplicity, life on a small scale, and we had some vague and ridiculous notion that it was perhaps our duty to bring liberal and egalitarian ideas to the ignorant natives of Burrington.

  However, we had failed to take account of the fact that it was summer when we bought the cottages, and very picturesque they were in the mellow sunshine and dry weather, but when winter came we had no running water, and the wind was so bad that it picked up half the roof of Freddy’s cottage and deposited it in a nearby field, and there seemed to be nothing but mud all around us, and the fires smoked and went out, and the very air seized up with the cold, and the car would not start, and we had no idea how to grow vegetables, or paint window frames, or even drive a car, having always had people to do everything for us. Freddy survived better than Theodora and I, for she would not give up and she shouted at us, as we lay in bed under piles of blankets, reading William Morris, and wondering why it did not seem to have turned out quite that way …

  So long ago now, all of that. The sun has gone in and the air is colder.

  I go inside to the kitchen, and Bullseye’s basket is still on the floor for I did not get rid of it, as I should have done, and now the harsh solidity of it shocks me. I sit down on the bench to look at it, and his bowl is there as well, the red plastic of it dull and cracked – and the wicker sides of the basket are twisted and chewed, and his blanket is moulded into the circular shape he made by burying his muzzle in it, and walking round and round before lying down … After a death the loss is finally measured in the bits and pieces left behind – one is left with a chewed wicker basket and a red plastic bowl, when one wants a dog.

  Bullseye at least died as a result of a lethal injection – a kindness that is permitted to animals but not to human beings. Of course, I have made some enquiries myself but I have to take care because if a woman in her eighties claims that she is interested in voluntary euthanasia as a matter of general interest, then eyebrows are raised – one should not have to bargain for death.

  All my life, when anything bad has happened, I’ve always tried not to make a drama out of it – worse things happen, I’ve always said to myself, but now I find myself at a loss to consider what worse things do happen. Pain grips my side and I press my hand against it, and images run through my head – a hand slammed in a car door, a baby’s head crashing down on a tiled floor … I must be outside, I want to die outside, I will not let them take me from here. So I sit myself down again, in the cold evening air, next to the place where that footprint lies, half-covered by grass, on the concrete path.

  When faced with a disaster the mind fixes on what it can manage, on a small and irrelevant detail, and so finally it is always the wheelbarrow that I remember … The rest of it I know only as a dividing point, as a before and after, a moment of savagery which I still fight in my mind, still trying to forgive the world for having allowed it, for it was so much more than one should have to bear – and even now I wake in the night, and brace myself against the thought that it might happen, and then realise that it has already passed, and find that, at least, a relief.

  It came with a phone call, slicing through a summer afternoon, with washing blowing on the line, and buttercups scattered across the fields, and a bowl of plums – delicious Pershore plums with golden flesh and pink skins – lying on the table with one half-eaten, when I went to the telephone. I was at home because it was towards the end of the school holidays and I was preparing for the new term and listening to the radio, and Theodora had taken the cats to the vet, and at that time Freddy still worked at the Ministry in London and was only back at weekends.

  To this day I don’t know who it was who telephoned, or what they said – an accident, a fatal accident, I understood that, and the person mentioned Lucía and he mentioned Max, and I was sure he’d made a mistake, and then he mentioned Wales, and that was where they had gone for a long weekend … Then my mind was filled with towers and turrets and flags waving in the wind, because Max had taken Lucía to see castles, for she’d seen pictures of Welsh castles in a book as a child, and she’d always wanted to visit them, so they’d left Maggie with friends and taken a night train.

  I looked out of the window and the washing was flapping and snapping on the line. Then this person asked me if I was on my own, and I said no, and then I had to put down the receiver to get hold of the table, which was moving away from me, and I stumbled around the cottages, bent double, taking hold of pieces of furniture, until I knelt in the kitchen with my hand pressed against my mouth and the side of my head against the fridge and the noise of the radio still babbling on.

  After that what I remember is the ship – a toy galleon, which Max had had as a child, carved in wood with cotton sails, from some expensive shop, bought by one of Theodora’s London men, and it was his favourite toy, although he ruined it by drawing on the wood in ballpoint pen, and letting the rigging get twisted up. It had always been on the shelf in his room, except that I had given it away a few days before to a child whose family lived in a caravan, because it seemed stupid for it not to be used, and this child’s father was going to mend the rigging … Except that wasn’t the only reason why I had given it away, it was also because of some anger against Max, a stupid argument we had had …

  Then when I received that phone call I knew I must get the ship back and I knew if I could do that then he’d still be alive, but the family in the caravan had no telephone, and I had no car, and when Theodora came back from the vet, she wouldn’t go
straight to get the ship, and I shouted at her while she was trying to telephone the police but of course they couldn’t tell us anything as we had no idea what had happened, and Theodora couldn’t believe that I hadn’t written down a telephone number and when I screamed at her it was really myself I was screaming at for having been so stupid. We didn’t know, we just didn’t know, and we were waiting and waiting for so long and Theodora wouldn’t go and get the ship. ‘What good will the ship do him if he’s dead?’ Then she said that I knew he wasn’t dead, because I could feel him alive inside me, as clearly as I’d felt him when I’d been waiting for his birth, walking back and forwards across the Edge.

  When Theodora finally went down to Burrington to find the ship the family with the caravan had gone, and no one knew where, as they were wandering people and there was no way of knowing where to find them, and I felt I’d killed him with my meanness and Theodora said not to be so stupid. In Max’s bedroom I stood by the shelf and there was a clean white square in the dust, where the base of the ship had been, and I stood by the telephone waiting and waiting, but then Theodora made me clean the cottage – and so we scrubbed the kitchen floor, and then I stood by the telephone. She made me do the washing, and then I stood by the telephone. Then we weeded the garden, although neither of us ever normally do such things, and after I had washed and swept and weeded everything, we sat on the front wall and I felt the sun burning over me, as it fell lower and lower in the sky …