What the Eye Doesn't See Read online

  It was just after he left Cambridge that he came to work for me, just for a couple of months, to get some experience. He was meant to be helping Deadly Dull Browning, my then assistant. First morning he arrived, I remember the shock of his appearance. Oh dear, oh dear, I thought, there’s been some genetic mishap there and left Browning to deal with him.

  After that I never gave him a second thought, until one morning Browning and I were talking about an inquiry which was causing a real stink – something to do with food poisoning. We were in my office at the Commons and it was stiflingly hot. There hadn’t been a breeze for days. Everywhere the air had been in and out of several pairs of lungs, and several exhaust pipes. Gus was sweating away at another desk, head down, with too many clothes on. Suddenly he cleared his throat loudly. ‘I’ve got a copy of the draft report if you want. It’s a week out of date, but it might be useful.’ Then he reached into his desk drawer and, with both his raw, shaking hands, he held out a sheaf of papers to me.

  I was stunned. Any of my colleagues would’ve given their right arm to see that document and there was this misshapen lump passing it to me across the desk. ‘I had lunch with someone,’ Gus said. ‘There was a draft lying around …’ I hesitated, looked over at Browning. Then I put my hands in my pockets and chuckled, uncertain what to say. Gus watched me, his left eye clicking open and shut. Open and shut. Time passed, footsteps came and went along the corridor. A photocopier whirred. I cleared my throat. The ends of my fingers itched. Browning pursed his lips and I shrugged. Even the wallpaper was sweating. Gus’s opaque eyes did not move from my face. As I took the document, his fingers touched mine. A Faustian pact, if ever there was one.

  After that I intended to give Gus his marching orders. But somehow it was Browning I got rid of instead. Then within six months Gus got me into every newspaper, and into the right meetings, and onto the right committees. Operation Brown Nose, that’s what Gus and I called it. Those were good times. I was a rising star and Gus was my stage manager. Photo calls, radio interviews, high-profile scraps. This place seemed like the heart of a secret operation. I always thought we should have a huge map spread out on the table, and little red flags to move across it. Often we worked all day and all night. Gus stayed here sometimes, because he lives in some Godforsaken place out in the sticks – Peckham Rye, or Balham, or somewhere. Ghastly.

  Two years after Operation Brown Nose started, I got the call from on high, and became a Junior Minister. Not that it is so very difficult, mind you. When the competition is all men with Sellotape around their glasses and clumps of wax in their ears. In politics you can go a long way just by being personable. Then the leadership crisis. Gus had already made sure that I was not on the sinking ship. After that, plain sailing. Minister for the Arts. I was en route for the Cabinet, poised on the brink. Then there was the fire. Tiffany was dead. And my constituency organisation deselected me, just a couple of months before the election. And there I was, suddenly no seat in the House, nothing. Only a few months ago, but it seems like another century.

  Whenever I’m in this flat, I think of the morning after the fire. After Tiffany’s death. The whole world was upside down and back to front. I sat on a chair in the kitchen with my head between my knees. I was in such a state I couldn’t move. Everything was black. My mind was elsewhere. Far back in the past. They say that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Believe me, it can.

  Eventually I realised Gus was still with me. I could hear the sound of his voice, but I couldn’t understand the sense of his words. He was cleaning his glasses again and again, hands shaking. He was asking me questions but the words were all jumbled up. Then slowly I began to understand. Gus was plotting and calculating, finding an angle. My jacket? The packet of photographs? Maggie? He knew what had happened because I’d called him from Brickley. And he knew because he had telephoned me the night before. The rest he didn’t ask. Of course, I’d been in some scrapes before but this was different. Small boys really shouldn’t play with matches. Jokes, jokes. None of them worked.

  Gus made me take off all my clothes and lie down in the back bedroom, the one he always uses when he stays here. The bed smelt of him. I lay there, shaking. In my head the future was like a smashed-up car, broken and bent. Gus went out to the laundrette. He was gone a long time. I lay and listened to the silence. Was it unusually silent that morning? Or was it just that I noticed the silence? It was an autumn day but the sky was bright. I lay and watched clouds moving across the skylight above the bed. After a while I stretched myself out and tried to think. I knew I’d have to go back and explain.

  But when Gus came back he had another plan. He sat on the side of the bed, rubbing his hands together. He had it all pieced together in his head, told me what I’d have to say. I was shaky and ready for surrender, but he didn’t want me to throw it all away, all that we had worked for together.

  It won’t work, I said. It would be better for me to come clean now. He turned away from me, walked back and forth up and down the small bedroom. The tic in his left eye made the flesh of his face flutter. His eyelid clicked open and shut over his small, pale eye. It’s already too late for that, he said. Your decision was made last night. If you didn’t explain it immediately then you can’t begin now. No one will believe you.

  Gus is more than twenty years younger than me but that morning he was older. He made it into a neat package. He talked about it as though what had happened was Tiffany’s fault. And, in truth, it was. He put his hand on the sheet. I could feel his fingers through it. It’ll hold, he said, it’ll hold. So I put on the clothes from the laundrette, bristling with static, warm and smelling of soap powder. He stood at the door, watched me go. To Geoffrey.

  Problem now is that Gus doesn’t accept that my career is over, at least for the moment. Strange, really. You’d think he’d be glad to move on, work for someone else. What good is it to him, watching me piss my life away, when men with half my brain are climbing the greasy pole?

  ‘Listen, Gus,’ I say. ‘Have you accepted that job yet?’

  ‘No, I thought I’d wait.’

  He’s been offered a job with the Party. Some research on pension and social security. They’re always short of people who can do sums.

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

  He shrugs. ‘I’d rather keep working for you, that’s all.’

  ‘Gus, I’ve no money to pay you and no work for you to do.’

  ‘Yes, but Geoffrey is going to get you that Inquiry job, isn’t he? So I might hang on and see what comes of that.’

  ‘That job’s a very long shot. And even if I get it I doubt I’ll have any budget to employ anyone else. Anyway, it’s not the kind of work you want to do.’

  I watch him trying to close up a cardboard box. It’s too full, he can’t get the lid down. His parsnip fingers are struggling, his lips flapping in frustration. He gives up, looks up at me, the light from the candle glinting on his thick glasses

  ‘It’s a good chance, that job,’ I tell him.

  ‘Maybe.’

  He runs his tongue over his lips, the only bit of him which look really human. Red and round, in the pasty skin of his face, they’re like lips painted on a rag doll. He’s always biting bits of dry skin from them, or licking at them nervously. The room is getting warm now. There’s a smell of gas and candle wax. The fire clicks. A police siren wails in the street below. Gus picks up the whisky I poured for him, cups it in his hands. ‘So you’re going back to Brickley Grange, are you?’ he asks.

  ‘What else can I do?’ I push a box out of the way, sit down in an armchair by the fire. The springs squeak. Gus is still watching me, scratching at one of the scabs on his hands. ‘I mean, if I need somewhere to stay in London, I can always go to Geoffrey’s, but I can’t put up with that for long. So it’s back to Gloucestershire, Fiona and the Doghouse. Life in the country, doing the gardening. The sunset years. I may even take to writing whingeing letters to my MP.’

  For th
e first time Gus looks as though he might smile. He finds the proposition ridiculous, as I do.

  ‘Look, what I’m telling you, Gus, is that you shouldn’t wait around on me. You’ve got to think of yourself.’

  I stand up and start shuffling boxes around aimlessly to avoid Gus’s glum and stubborn look. I wish to God he wouldn’t make this so difficult. The problem is that he’s sharp, and he knows me well. This isn’t really about jobs.

  ‘Remember Mrs Mimbers and the wardrobe?’ he says, with a smile of reminiscence which annoys me.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and turn away to pour myself another drink. I hope he’s not going to get sentimental. I can’t put up with that. The last thing I need is a Trip Down Memory Lane. But I do remember, of course. One afternoon Mrs Mimbers turned up when Rosa and I were having a bit of a fiddle. Usually we made clear Mrs Mimbers should never come here. Anyway, Rosa hid in a wardrobe. I went to deal with Mrs Mimbers, doing up my trousers as best I could. Unfortunately the wardrobe was one of those home-assembly jobs and it decided to disassemble itself noisily, while I was trying to have a reasonable conversation with Mrs Mimbers in the sitting room.

  Gus picks up something from the desk and holds it close to the light of the candle. It’s a stamp and an ink pad. The stamp says Blah! Blah! Blah! Gus bought it for me as a birthday present ages ago. Stamping Blah! Blah! Blah! in red ink across turgid documents was always a good way of cheering up a rainy afternoon. We used it so much that the knob broke, and the ink pad dried up. Anyway, no point in thinking about that now. We pack. The silence between us fidgets.

  The phone rings. I give Gus a look and he answers it, says I’m not available. Then he changes tack and hands the receiver to me. ‘It’s Rosa.’

  I snatch the receiver. Rosa. Rosa. At last. ‘Hello.’ Silence, then a brief rustle. ‘Hello,’ I say again.

  ‘Are the swallows flying south?’ Her voice is soft, uncertain. I imagine her lips close to the phone.

  ‘Yes, certainly. How about the Flag? Eight o’clock.’

  ‘See you there.’ She’s gone. I stand holding the telephone. Draw in a deep breath, as though I might be able to catch a scent of her, twisting along the phone wire.

  ‘So are the swallows flying south?’ Gus asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  It annoys me that Gus should use our code. Probably I should ask him if he wants to come for a drink as well, but there’s no point in drawing this out. He picks up the Blah! Blah! Blah! stamp and it moves back and forwards between his fat fingers. In the half-light I can see him chewing at his thick bottom lip.

  ‘Look, don’t worry. If you want to go I’ll pack the rest up and you can just come and get it later,’ he says.

  ‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘No. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Thanks, that would certainly help.’

  I shouldn’t let him, but all the same. I look at my watch and pick up my coat. His hands are pushed down beside him, fists clenched. But he smiles, picks up the stamp from the desk, throws it towards me. I reach for it in the dark, but miss, then bend down to pick it up from the floor. ‘You better put that in,’ he says. ‘You might be needing it.’

  God, I wish he wouldn’t do this. I toss the stamp into the bin. ‘I don’t think so. It’s broken.’ I pick up the ink pad from the desk, throw that in as well. I turn to go, Gus follows me onto the landing. Under the bright hall light, he’s standing with his hands clasped, looking at the floor.

  ‘Well, give us a call then,’ I say.

  It’s like that day when he gave me the document. Except now he has nothing to give me and I’ve nothing for him.

  Nanda

  One can only bear so much of the truth and this, now, is enough.

  I look around me at this new doctor’s surgery which has red-brick walls, both inside and out, and white light, reflected from snow, shines through a high window, bright enough to blind me, and Dr Dervitt sits opposite me, his lips snapping open and shut, like a cine film being played too fast. He talks of options, and treatments, and his hands expand and contract as he explains the operation of the stomach. He is a young man. The sound of his voice goes on, although the morning has stopped.

  I knew, of course, deep within, I knew. Three weeks ago – perhaps four – I went to the hospital in Gloucester for some tests, but even before that I knew. I watch Dr Dervitt’s arm, below his short-sleeved shirt, and it is white and smooth, exactly the same as the plastic top of his desk, yet there is life in that arm and not in the desk. He watches me from under heavy lids. ‘Miss Priestley? Are you all right?’

  On the wall behind him there’s a painted children’s jungle and a chattering monkey is stationary on a swinging vine, his mouth jabbering, as he raises a paw to wave, and an elephant’s trunk is frozen, curled upwards, squirting a grey splatter of water through the palm trees. Dr Dervitt clicks the top of his pen.

  ‘Yes, of course I’m quite all right.’

  I must not snap at him because really he’s managing admirably. Even the professionals are shaky in the face of oblivion. Death is the one fact of which we can be quite certain and the one fact we can never accept. I don’t want to continue this conversation and neither does he. Somewhere in the distance a door slams and children shout and I can’t seem to remember the words one says to doctors, it is so very long since I have encountered one. The winter of 1972, it would have been, six months before Lucía’s death, and they took me to the cottage hospital – now, of course, defunct – and they said it was pleurisy, but I only stayed one night before Freddy and Theodora came to take me home.

  ‘I think perhaps I’ll leave it for the moment, if you don’t mind.’ My vision becomes cloudy at the edges and when I start to stand the blood has gone from my feet, and the floor is no longer beneath me, and a rush of cold floods me, and a throbbing starts in the side of my neck … I see a vision of myself stumbling, grasping at the desk, and the walls, then my body lifted onto a trolley, with me trapped inside, shouting silent words. My bloodless fingers fumble with the clasp of my bag. So finally it has come to this.

  ‘Yes, why don’t you think it over and make another appointment?’ Dr Dervitt’s hands smooth over papers on the desk, his head nods back and forwards, and his eyes are turned away.

  I find a handkerchief in my bag. ‘Thank you so much for your help.’ I must make this easy for him, even though his defeat is so much less absolute than my own. My blood has started to flow again, and the floor is solid beneath my feet, and with my hand on the side of his desk, I can stand. He opens the door and I walk out into the caustic corridor.

  ‘Now book another appointment as soon as you’ve had some time to think.’ My feet pick a careful path over the carpet, and Dr Dervitt raises a hand in farewell, knowing I will not return.

  I find my way out of the low red corridors, and into the winter sun, and the warmth of it gives me strength, and I blink as the weight of it lies heavy on my eyelids. I let sensations wash over me, while my mind rests, preparing to search for a strategy to outwit despair. My breath rises in frozen clouds in front of my face and my eyes are full, but the tears are only the sting of shock, and I keep walking, feeling my way through their fractured light …

  It is early still, but despite the snow, the market is opening up in the square and wheels crunch through the ice, horns beep, children cry and dropped tomatoes are crushed in the gutter. I pass the school, where I taught for twenty years, time gone in the twitch of a cat’s tail, the years carrying out their deadly work, and I see Max, seven – perhaps eight – years old, standing beneath this very tree, looking down at a baby bird, fallen from a nest. On the pavement, in the rain, the baby bird was little more than a smear of blue mucus, one half-formed leg spread out from its first fluff of feathers, but, oh, how he wept over that dead bird, his face twisted with anger, his arms flapping up and down as though he might fly away, in place of the bird that never would.

  There are cobwebs stretched across the black branches of the tree
s, they glitter with frozen dew and one branch hangs low, and I stop to look at a cobweb which links one frozen twig to another. I stretch up a stiff arm to touch it, tenderly at first, feeling its trembling resistance, then pressing my hand against it, so that it yields under my hand and disintegrates into nothing. The past, so close, so very close, yet I cannot cross the divide.

  Colonel Bampton passes me carrying bags of meat from the butcher’s. ‘Good morning to you, and how are the Miss Priestleys?’ That’s the way people in Burrington refer to Freddy, Theodora and me, having tactfully decided years ago that we must be sisters. He touches his hat and walks on, then Young Mrs Briston calls a greeting from one of the stalls, and their smiles shock me. Time should freeze and there should be silence, people should stand aside and let me pass, but instead they turn away, smoking cigarettes, chatting, swinging plastic bags from their hands. I stand on the kerb and Shirley Biggs stretches out a black leather arm to me. ‘Shall I help you, Miss Priestley?’

  I shake my head, and pull back my arm. ‘No, no. Thank you. I don’t want to cross the road.’ I turn back across the square. I must get away, there is too much life, too many people, they can do nothing for me. As one nears the end, the road narrows, until it is single file only, and one goes on alone …

  It is a long, long walk home, two miles and all uphill, and when I reach Frampton Edge I stop to rest, and below me is the Medlocks’ farm and the stream. And how the land rises and falls, thick with snow, white against white, dissolving into the distant morning sun, and further down still, the crooked roofs of the town of Burrington are hidden in the bottom of the valley. Doubtless somewhere there Dr Dervitt still clicks the top of his pen, while behind him the frozen monkeys chatter.

  I walk on and around me the air is so still that I can hear the distant sound of a hammer on metal, ricocheting across the valley, travelling upwards, before it is released into the still air. My flesh hangs heavy but inside I’m floating and floating, as though my soul is already detached from my body, and the thought comes to me that today has been strangely similar to the day when I found out I was pregnant with Max. There is that same knowledge of something growing inside me, that same sense of being driven back inside myself.