What the Eye Doesn't See Page 16

  ‘Now be quiet,’ Freddy says. ‘Be quiet.’

  She’s fiddling with the record player, balanced on a pile of books. These cottages are built out of books. Anthropology under the windows, poetry up the walls, socialism stacked on the desk, French and German under the stairs and history toppling off the mantelpiece. Other people have crazes for golf, or flared trousers, or spinach but Nanda, Freddy and Theodora have crazes for philosophers, religions, languages and worthy campaigns. They devour ideas like vultures ripping flesh from the bone.

  There’s a scratch and a thump from the speakers as Freddy wobbles the needle. A single note hangs in the woodsmoke air. Debussy’s ‘Girl with the Flaxen Hair’, my favourite, they always play it when I come home. The music falls in a stream of glittering notes. For a moment they stand in reverent silence, listening, but Freddy can never be quiet for long. ‘Now what about this boyfriend that she’s got?’ That’s how they talk about me – as though I’m not here. Often I have the impression that I’ve walked in on a conversation that started several weeks ago.

  ‘Oh now really,’ Theodora says. ‘Maggie is going to have a brilliant career.’

  Freddy starts to make one of her disgusting cigarettes, as thick as my finger, with tobacco falling out of both ends. ‘Well, tell us then,’ she says.

  I try to imagine Adam visiting Thwaite Cottages but my mind won’t make the image. ‘Well, he’s nice,’ I say. ‘I really like him but I’m not completely sure. He may be a bit boring.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Theodora says. ‘You can’t have somebody boring.’

  ‘Yes she can,’ Freddy says. ‘You don’t need an exciting man. You need a kind man. Kindness is the criterion by which everyone must finally be judged.’

  Nanda and Theodora snort.

  ‘What does he do, this boyfriend?’ Nanda asks.

  ‘He’s a journalist.’

  ‘Oh, a journalist.’ With one word Nanda demolishes him.

  ‘It’s really no good having one boyfriend,’ Theodora says. ‘That’s bound to lead to trouble. Better to have two, at least.’ She would say that, having spent all her life playing Nanda and Freddy off against each other so she can get what she wants.

  ‘I’m going on holiday with him,’ I say.

  ‘Oh wonderful, where to?’ Freddy asks.

  ‘Seville.’

  ‘Ah, Seville.’

  Nanda and Theodora nod and that conversation lurches to a halt.

  ‘And what are his political opinions, this young man?’ Nanda asks.

  ‘I don’t think he has any, in particular.’

  ‘Well, he should be ashamed of himself.’

  ‘I don’t hold with journalists,’ Freddy says. ‘All those endless articles about the right shade of nail varnish and what the Queen has for breakfast. Who will protect the public’s right not to know? That’s what I ask myself.’

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘journalists are very important. People aren’t hurt by what they know, only by what they don’t know.’

  They shake their heads at me, appalled by the naiveté of this statement. I notice that behind a chair there’s a dried-up dog turd. I ask Theodora about her latest book and she talks about it in a disparaging way – and I can’t understand why because her books are wonderful. Everyone finds in them the person that they wanted to find. When I read the reviews I always wonder if the critics have all been reading the same book. ‘Is there an autobiography or diaries of Lou Andreas-Salomé?’ I ask.

  ‘A few bits and pieces, not much. And to be honest it would make little difference. One doesn’t take so much notice of these things. It’s all fiction – autobiography more than anything. One should never believe what anyone says about themselves.’

  Freddy passes me a box of Road Campaign leaflets and a stack of envelopes. ‘Could you stuff those for me?’ she says.

  They’re in their eighties now. I mean, why don’t they rest? Retirement is really wasted on the old. Freddy is agitating to be off down to Burrington to go and see some old biddy who’s in a bad state. They spend their whole lives worrying about old people, most of whom are years younger than they are. They fuss around getting tea and Freddy starts to cook the supper. Normally they just eat horrid things out of tins but it’s clear they now intend something more ambitious. A worrying prospect – riz flambé is a Thwaite Cottages speciality.

  I go to the kitchen door. They are cooking on Nanda’s wretched old stove.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like me to get you a microwave?’ I say this to annoy them.

  ‘No,’ Freddy says. ‘We like life to be about the process of living.’

  ‘Isn’t it strange,’ Nanda says, ‘the way that people in those countries with the most labour-saving devices invariably have the least leisure time.’

  ‘I don’t think she should be living on her own in Brussels,’ Freddy says. ‘It won’t do. No one should live on their own.’

  ‘You never know, perhaps she just couldn’t face communal living.’ Theodora raises her eyebrows and pokes at me with the end of her walking stick. ‘Now was Brussels a good idea?’ she asks. This is what they always do. They take a decision you’ve already made and start to unpick it. They make something certain into something uncertain. And it’s not just with me. They discuss what President Kennedy would have achieved if he hadn’t been shot. I mean really – what’s the point of that?

  ‘Brussels is a good idea,’ I say. ‘But I do feel bad about the other job. Even though I decided to leave, I still feel a bit of a failure.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Theodora says. ‘Rubbish. Failure? By whose standards would you be a failure? That’s just a judgement. You can agree with it or not agree with it. Anyway, failure opens up all sorts of possibilities.’

  ‘Being bad at things is a perfectly legitimate occupation,’ Freddy shouts from the kitchen. Then Theodora begins to ask me about Brussels. The power of the European Parliament? The prospects for the next German government? I don’t know what to say. I haven’t learnt anything like that in Brussels, I’ve just sorted out piles of paper and filled out forms. Fortunately, an argument soon breaks out between Theodora and Freddy about federalism and they forget about me. To me their conversation is like Salvador Dali doing words instead of images. Nothing leads where it should. I sit and stuff envelopes, drowsy with the heat from the fire. The music has finished but the record still turns, throbbing and crackling.

  When I was a child I didn’t really see anything odd about life here. When you’re ten years old everything is normal. You’re inside your own life so you can’t see it clearly. Then Dad’s torpedo-shaped red Jag slid over the fields, and he took me away because he was marrying Fiona, and it was time for me to have a proper mother. Nanda said I could go back and see her any time, and Freddy gave me a manicure set with tortoiseshell handles, when I never normally had any presents like that, but still Dad had to pull me out from under the sofa by my ankles, and in the car I screamed so much he had to pay me five pounds to shut up.

  But everyone is materialistic at ten, and when I arrived at Brickley Grange I was quickly persuaded by the deep-pile luxury Fiona creates – the heart-shaped soap in seashell dishes in the bathroom, the clown wallpaper in my bedroom. But for all that I never thought of Brickley Grange as home. This place is where I belong, although it drives me mad. Odd how love is expressed mainly in annoyance.

  I shouldn’t complain because they did their best for me. It’s just that they could never do anything in a straight-forward way. Like when I fell and cut my lip Nanda got the vet to take the stitches out, because it was too far to go to the hospital in Gloucester. And when we had to take a packed lunch to school I never had a Tupperware box with sandwiches in clingfilm, I just had a paper bag with some bread in it, and a knife and a pack of butter. And I was staying with Nanda when my periods started and all she did was sigh, as though periods should have been done away with in the march of progress. And, of course, they never really told me anything about my mother. They come from a generation
where people try to forget.

  As I go up to bed, I pass Theodora’s room and look in through the half-open door. Nanda is there, unfastening Theodora’s hair from its two buns. Theodora sits on a chair, wearing a trailing white nightgown. Her hair is long and twisted like seaweed, and it has a greasy sheen to it, but Nanda touches it as though it’s made of silk. I envy them, wrapped up together in their silent tenderness.

  They were at school together – Nanda, Theodora, Freddy – at a very advanced co-educational boarding school where there were no classrooms or dormitories, no detentions or organised sport. They decided very young that people should always live communally and they have never wavered in that commitment, even if they have never managed to build a commune as big as they would have liked.

  Nanda tells me that when she and Theodora were about fourteen they took to sharing a bed. Freddy was jealous – even then – and so she went to tell tales to one of the adults. But that did not work out as planned – all she received was a strict lecture about casting off narrow-minded notions of possession. Under the circumstances it’s not surprising that they’re all a bit odd.

  I go to the bedroom at the back, under the eaves. It’s the room where Dad slept as a child, and where I was meant to sleep as well, except it was usually occupied by a refugee, or a single mother with one leg, or someone else you had to pity, so I used to sleep in Nanda’s bed, or on a mattress in the kitchen. Now the room is still theoretically mine, but it’s full of boxes belonging to a friend of Theodora’s who’s been having a difficult house move for fifteen years.

  As I open the door, the musty air stirs. I flick the switch and a blackbird flaps close to the shadeless light bulb. It quivers like a plucked string, its claws scraping against the wall, and its blue-black wings flapping. For a moment it rests on the curtain rail, and its shiny eyes stare at me, its head turned to one side. Then it dashes itself against the skylight.

  Nanda comes up the stairs with a hot-water bottle for me. The bird is sitting on the top of the wardrobe. I show it to Nanda and we shut the door. There are two windows in this room – a skylight and a tiny diamond-paned window, low down and cut deep into the wall. The bird is sitting just below the skylight, looking out at the stars, unable to reach them. We can’t undo the latch to let it out, because the metal is rusted up. Nanda opens the other window, her lace-up shoes and woollen stockings shuffling between the boxes.

  I point at a broom standing behind the door. ‘Why don’t we use that?’

  The bird starts to throw itself against the skylight, its beak and claws scraping, shedding a feather. It flies close to the open window, but doesn’t see the way out. ‘No,’ Nanda says. ‘Just wait a moment. He will find his own way out.’

  I get into bed. The sheets smell of other people. Nanda passes me the hot-water bottle and sits down beside me. I put the hot-water bottle down the bed, feel the scalding rubber of it against my legs, then push it down further so that it’s under my socked feet. Outside the wind is blowing so that the beams of the cottage creak like the timbers of a ship.

  ‘It’ll never go,’ I say. ‘We’ll be waiting all night.’

  ‘I’ll put the light out,’ Nanda says. ‘The glass and the reflections confuse him.’

  The pale light of the moon is reflected from a mirror above the mantelpiece. The bird sits perched on the curtain rail. On the end of the bed there’s a patchwork blanket, which was Dad’s, then mine. Some of my old teddies are propped on a shelf under the window. A line of Nanda’s voluminous grey underwear is drying on a rack. On the dressing table there’s a wooden writing case Dad gave me as a present.

  He used to sit on the bed here when he came to stay for the weekend and we would listen to the radio together. Sometimes the reception was bad and we used to turn the radio this way and that, fiddling with the knob. Once there was no reception at all. Dad told me that people on nuclear submarines are told that if they can’t tune in to Radio Four then they should assume that Armageddon has arrived, that World War III has started, that the world has come to an end. The next morning, when I got up and went out in the garden, the world, so miraculously saved, seemed to glitter in silent celebration.

  The bird flaps again, throwing itself against the glass.

  ‘Why don’t we just steer it out?’ I say.

  ‘No, no, just wait.’

  Nanda irritates me, the way she sits there, so still and patient, watching the bird. The old-woman hunch of her shoulders, her hands folded in her lap, her knees pressed tight together, the fuzzy outline of her hair. All of that irritates me. A patter of rain falls on the roof tiles and the skylight. Nanda reaches for a tin bowl, white with a blue rim, and rust stains running down the side. She places it under the skylight, on top of one of the boxes. Then she sits beside me again.

  ‘It’ll kill itself before it gets out,’ I say.

  Nanda says nothing.

  ‘I don’t want to sit here all night.’

  I turn on the light and pick up the broom. The bird swirls above me, flapping against the ceiling. I steer the broom towards it but the bird is nowhere near the window and the broom is too long and unwieldy. I turn the broom, but the bird goes back to the skylight, battering its wings and shitting onto the boxes below. The broom catches against the light bulb and sends it swinging, so that the room tips in drunken lights and shadows. Again the bird flutters against the glass and I smash the broom across the wardrobe door. The bird is close. I feel the breath of its wings in my hair. I put my hand up to shield myself and drop the broom.

  Nanda reaches out to take the broom from me but I hang on. We face each other, both of us holding the broom. She will not wrestle it from me, although she wants to. The bird is silent. Suddenly I drop the broom and start to cry – loud, damp crying which has been shut up inside me for weeks. Nanda pulls me towards her. I feel her thin, strong hands. She pulls back the sheets and I get into bed, my head wrapped in my hands, and my knees pulled up to my chin. I hear her moving the patchwork blanket further up the bed. Her hand rests on mine.

  ‘Maggie,’ she says. ‘Maggie. You know, parents are only people. You can’t expect too much.’

  I wipe my nose on the sleeve of my pyjamas. The blackbird watches us out of a shiny black eye, its throat and wings trembling. ‘Can’t you talk to him?’ I say.

  Nanda shakes her head and sighs. ‘I don’t know, dear. You know, he and I know each other too well. Our worst fear is of seeing clearly … or being seen clearly.’

  ‘I think he won’t come and see you because he’s lied.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. All I can say is that your father may be foolish but he isn’t violent. Sadly, it’s usually harmless people who do the most harm in the end.’

  ‘Still I think he lied.’

  ‘Yes, dear, perhaps. But sometimes people lie in favour of the truth.’

  The rain ticks down into the tin bowl. Nanda switches out the light. The bird is against the window again – a dull scratching of beak and claws, the sound of delicate feathers breaking open against the walls. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You have no choice about what happened but you can choose your response.’

  ‘I just wish I could have at least one thing that is certain.’

  Nanda shakes her head. ‘You know, the odd thing is that a person who has got a map that is wrong gets far more lost than a person with no map at all.’

  I don’t understand what she means. For her this is just an intellectual argument. She doesn’t seem to understand that someone is dead. What should I say to her? Your son killed someone? I can’t say that to her.

  ‘Maggie. You know, your father needs you. You have more power over him than you know.’

  I look up at the bird. It is close to the open window. It hovers, uncertain, moving as though expecting to meet resistance. Its wings flap, its head turns, and then suddenly it flies through the open window, hesitates for a moment, then evaporates
into the darkness.

  Nanda releases my hand, gets up and goes to shut the window. Then she says good night and goes to the door. As she opens it, her spiky outline stands out black against the light from the landing. She turns away and then looks back at me. ‘All I can tell you is that salvation always comes from the most unexpected sources.’

  Max

  So the noose tightens.

  The worst is upon me. A trial.

  Geoffrey telephoned to let me know. It was like going downstairs in the dark, finding there’s one more step than you remembered. It was early this afternoon when he called yet still I don’t believe it. Somehow I thought that because of Lucía I would be spared this. They haven’t a shred of evidence against me, but they won’t give up. My hands sweat and my stomach churns.

  And now Geoffrey is coming round. The last thing I need. I blame this on him. He should have put a stop to it. Now he’s in Brussels for the evening. I only got back from England myself ten minutes ago. I wanted a bath and a shave. But he’s already here. I can see him in the square, lumbering out of a taxi. He said he’d got to have dinner with the camp followers at nine. I look at my watch. Eight thirty. Not long. Just keep the cabaret rolling on.

  At the door he shakes my hand. I mumble greetings, explain that I’ve just got back myself. Try to appear Hale and Hearty. Sweat pricks the back of my neck. Gus will be here soon, I tell him. Distractions and diversions, that’s what I need. I just hope Gus isn’t late.

  ‘Let’s have a drink.’ I pour Scotch for myself and for Geoffrey, feel it burn down my throat. Actually, I’m half cut already as I had a couple of whiskies on the plane. I find myself staring at my shoes.