At the funeral my mother could not cry. She watched with melancholy interest as the coffin was lowered into the hole. My father stood to one side fingering his tie. The violet shadow of a cloud swept a far-off meadow. At the edge of the small circle of mourners a figure had appeared, half hidden among a cluster of headstones, his hands in his pockets, a lick of foxy hair plastered on his narrow brow. He smiled at me and winked, and made a little sign, raising three fingers and sketching a sort of rapid blessing. Behind him a stained seraph towered on widespread marble wings.
9
QUEER THE LANDSCAPES that memory, that old master, chooses for its backgrounds, the twilit distances with meandering rivers and mossy brown crags, and tiny figures in costume doing something inexplicable a long way off. When I think now of that autumn, in a flash I see the malt store, I don’t know why. It was a grey stone fortress with a slate roof, and a row of small, barred windows high up under the eaves. Through an opening over the arched entranceway a block and tackle stuck out, like the arm of a complicated gibbet. The malt was dried there before being sent to the breweries. Insinuations of steam escaped at the windows day and night, and the sour, beery stink of the simmering grain pervaded the air. My father’s job must have taken him there often, though I never saw him — indeed, now that I think of it, I never saw anyone at all there. Where it stood was known as the Folly, a windswept angle between the backs of two mean streets. The place wore an air of dejection, and a sort of weary knowing. It seems always an overcast and cold October there. Dry leaves like the hands of dead pianists skitter along the pavements with a scraping noise. The wind soughs in the trees, and panels of pale, lumpy cloud pour in silence down a tilted rectangle of sky. A dog is barking in the distance, something is monotonously creaking, and I halt and stand expectantly, as if everything might be about to gather itself together and address me.
School was grotesque now, an absurd and shameful predicament. I had outgrown all this, the noise, the smells, the tedium. Every afternoon when the bell went I set off at once for Ashburn. At Coolmine the gate had been mended, and a warning sign had been put up, with a skull-and-crossbones stencilled on it. From the road I could see the workmen over at the pit-head, toiling like ants. Sometimes I spotted Mr Kasperl too, pacing up and down, or with Felix poring over charts spread out on the bonnet of the lorry. The old women were no longer let in to hunt for coal, I would meet them, with their blurred faces, and their stumpy legs wrapped in rags, wandering dazedly along the road, by the new barbed-wire fence.
As the year darkened so the house grew sombre, standing stark against a knife-coloured sky, a ragged flock of rooks wheeling above the chimney-pots. The first gales of the season stripped half the trees in the park, opening unexpected vistas. Indoors it was like being on a great ship at sea, the windows in their warped frames banged and boomed, and a grey, oceanic glow suffused the ceilings. Beneath the creaks, the rattlings, there was a deep, undersea silence. This was Sophie’s medium. It was as if something had been left switched off, like the lights in a blind man’s house. She was so quiet it was hard to find her. I would steal upstairs and along the corridors, my heart unaccountably pounding, and come upon her in one of the empty rooms, standing motionless at the window, her arms folded and her forehead pressed to the glass, so still, it seemed she must have been there for hours, without moving. Sensing me behind her, she would turn slowly, and slowly smile, blinking her dark, doll’s eyes.
Often too I would find her with Mr Kasperl, sitting quietly in his room in an old deckchair, with her legs folded under her and her hands resting in her lap like a pair of pale birds, while he lay on the bed reading, or working at his charts. The room was dim and hot, like the lair of a large indolent carnivore. He would be in his waistcoat, collarless, his bootlaces untied. He took scant notice of me. His silence was profound, a far place where no one else could follow. Sometimes he worked in his notebook. He would frown over a page for a long time without stirring, then lean forward suddenly with a snort and inscribe a line or two, driving the pen heavily, with grim exactness. He let me see things, certain insoluble niceties, but in such elaborately casual, roundabout ways that it might all have happened by accident. He would leave the notebook open near me and wander off, padding here and there about the room, while I squinted avidly at the place where he had been working. It was always some paradox, some tautology. He was fascinated by things to which there could be at best only an inconclusive result. Strange geometries amused him, their curved worlds where no parallels are possible, where there is no infinity, where all perpendiculars to a line will meet in one mad point. He would come and stand beside me and consider these queer axioms, panting softly, and softly flexing his stubby fingers, and I would seem to hear, deep down within him, a faint, dark laughter.
I came away from these occasions in a sort of fever, my head humming, as if from a debauch. Things shook and shimmered minutely, in a phosphorescent glow. Details would detach themselves from their blurred backgrounds, as if a lens had been focused on them suddenly, and press forward eagerly, with mute insistence, urging on me some large, mysterious significance. A wash of sunlight on a high white wall, rank weeds spilling out of the windows of a tumbledown house, a dog in the gutter nosing delicately at a soiled scrap of newspaper, such things would strike me with strange force. They were like memories, but of things that had not happened yet. Walking home through the town on those smoky autumn evenings, past lighted pubs, and factory workers on bikes, and the somehow sinister bonhomie of fat shopkeepers standing in their doorways, I would feel a shiver of anticipation, not for what would be there now, the cosy hopelessness of home, but for that vast, perilous sea that lay all before me, agleam and vaguely shifting, in the dim distance.
One afternoon in November I spied Uncle Ambrose’s car coming down the drive at Ashburn. I hid behind a tree while he went past. When I got home he was there, sitting bolt upright at the tea-table, looking about him with a stunned smile, his small shiny head swivelling slowly and his adam’s apple bouncing.
— A what? my father was saying, with what in him passed for a laugh. A chauffeur?
Uncle Ambrose nodded, still dazedly smiling, amazed at his own audacity. He said:
— From Ashburn to Black’s, just, and then out to the mine.
My mother had stopped behind him, and was staring at the back of his head.
— What? she said sharply. What? When is this?
Uncle Ambrose jerked his chin forward, working a finger in under the collar of his shirt.
— Oh, every day, he said. Monday to Friday. And bring him home again in the evening.
— Home, my mother said. Ha!
He took up duty straight away. He drove out to Ashburn each morning prompt at nine, and pulled up at the front door with a discreet toot on the horn. He would not venture into the house, but waited patiently in the car, sitting motionless behind the wheel and gazing off impassively through the windscreen, with an air of disinterested rectitude which he wore like a uniform. Often an hour or more would pass before Mr Kasperl appeared. Uncle Ambrose did not mind. He was nowhere more at ease than in his car. It was a huge, black, old-fashioned sedan with a long sloped bonnet and a humped back, like a hearse. On a few evenings, returning early from the mine, he stopped — it must have been at Mr Kasperl’s bidding — and picked me up on my way out to the house after school. I sat in the back seat with the fat man, my satchel pressed on my knees. No one spoke. Mr Kasperl looked out his window, his arms folded and his stout legs crossed, puffing on a cigar. Now and then I would catch Uncle Ambrose’s eye in the rearview mirror, and immediately we would both look away, with a guilty start. He drove very slowly, turning the wheel with judicious attention, like a safe-cracker. Each time he changed gear he would hold in the clutch for a moment, and the car would billow forward in a sleek, brief bound, rolling a little, and Mr Kasperl and I would be lifted up an inch and then dropped back gently on the high, soft seat. As soon as we had drawn to a stop at the house, Uncle Ambrose would slide out smartly and turn, in one continuous movement, twirling on his heel in the gravel, and snatch open Mr Kasperl’s door, while I scrambled out the other side and hared off up the steps. Sometimes Felix made him drive me home as well. Those trips were the worst. I sat in the front seat, sweating, while Uncle Ambrose clung to the wheel in an excruciated silence, like a stammerer stuck in the middle of a word.