— Don’t look at me, boss, he said. I have an alibi.
Some sort of gas had exploded in one of the tunnels. Two men had been killed, a dozen were maimed. The story was in all the papers. They misspelled Mr Kasperl’s name. Felix was not mentioned, which provoked one of his rare bouts of rancour. For days he would speak to no one, but kept a sullen, injured silence.
11
SPRING CAME EARLY that year — no, I’m wrong, it came late. But when it came it was glorious. I recall the jonquils blowing on the lawn at Ashburn. All work at the mine had stopped. The roof supports rotted. People said the place was haunted, ghostly rumblings were heard underground, and sometimes at night a bluish radiance was seen flickering above the pit-head. Each morning at nine Uncle Ambrose arrived in his car and sat outside the house for an hour, and then drove slowly, sadly away again. Mr Kasperl kept indoors, creaking up and down the stairs and through the empty rooms. I would come across him in old corners, standing motionless, like a stalled automaton, glazed, absent. A sort of paralysis had settled on him. He would sit in his room with the black notebook open on his kness, staring blankly at the pages. He looked strange, not like the rest of us. He might have come from a country where no one else lived.
One morning early I arrived in the attic and found Felix crouched in the corridor outside Sophie’s room. He put a finger to his lips and pointed. Her door was ajar. She was still in bed, lying on her side, with a hand under her cheek and her eyes closed. A luminous white mist pressed in the circular window above her, lit by a pale sun. Her clothes were draped untidily on a chair beside the bed. Mr Kasperl stood a little way from her, as if sunk in thought, palping his fat lower lip with a finger and thumb. Outside, under the eaves, a pigeon sounded its soft, lewd note.
— Watch! Felix hissed gleefully, gripping my wrist. Watch now!
Mr Kasperl took a step forward to the side of the bed and paused, watching Sophie’s face. Then, laboriously, his boots groaning, he knelt down by the chair and gathered her clothes in his arms and buried his face in them, snorting softly. Felix let slip a little moan of laughter, and clapped a hand to his mouth. Mr Kasperl was oblivious, nosing deep in the bundle of silks, devouring their secret fragrances, his fat old shoulders trembling. Sophie had opened her eyes, and lay unmoving, watching him. Now she looked towards the door and saw us there, our faces pressed to the crack. She smiled.
— Oh, look at him, look! Felix whispered in ecstasy. Oh, the dirty old brute!
Felix too was lying low. There had been a row at Black’s, when relatives of one of the men who had died tried to attack him, and he had to escape out the back way. He was indignant. Why were they after him? It wasn’t his fault. Probably one of those dolts — maybe that very Paddy or Mick himself, or whatever he was called — had lit up a fag down there. But feelings were high in the town. My mother listened to the talk, and decided the time had come to act. I arrived home one evening to find her ironing her best dress, her white cotton gloves, banging the iron down on the board with angry strokes. Uncle Ambrose was there, flushed and frowning, staring at the floor and trying to control the jitters in his knees. My father cocked a wary eyebrow.
Next morning Uncle Ambrose called for them in his car. My mother was already waiting, sitting by the window in the parlour, with her handbag and her hat and her white gloves. It was a Sunday in May, I remember the sun in the window, the heavy reek of her face powder. My father, shaved and brushed, limped down the stairs, muttering. Uncle Ambrose wrung his hands unhappily. He cast a furtive glance at me, his adam’s apple working. We had both been seduced by Ashburn, after all. He seemed strapped into his tight suit. The three of them stood on the pavement in the sunshine for a moment, confused a little by the light, the gay breeze, the trees delicately coming into flower. Then Uncle Ambrose led the way to the car, and settled himself in the driving seat with his accustomed care. He held the steering wheel at arm’s length, as if he were afraid of it, and pumped the pedals and fiddled with the choke while the others got in. My father sat beside him, my mother took the back seat. She was saying something to me, but the window was shut, she could not work the winder, then the car shrieked as Uncle Ambrose trod on its underparts, and the last thing I saw, behind the reflected stage-set sliding on the glass, was her blurred face speaking without sound as she was borne away.
It was Aunt Philomena who came for me. At first I thought she was drunk. Her mouth was askew, and a strand of hair hung across her cheek. When I opened the door she was already speaking. Her voice was thick with what I took for manic laughter.
— I don’t know a thing! she warbled. They phoned me up, they wouldn’t tell me a thing!
We hurried through the town. The Sunday streets were deserted. A blinding disc of sunlight bowled along beside us in the shop windows. Aunt Philomena tottered on her high heels, sweating and muttering.
— Are you a relative? she kept saying. Are you a relative? that’s what they asked me. A relative, indeed! The cheek!
The hospital was a big white building on a hill, impressive in the spring sunshine, like a grand hotel in some southern clime, its windows awash with the sky’s festive blue. Another species existed here, different altogether from Aunt Philomena and me, fragile, etiolated beings, ennobled by their secret wounds. Even the visitors coming down the steps had a special air — thoughtful, solemn, a little dazed — as if they had gone in tipsy, but were sober now. The entrance hall smelled of tea and floor polish. At the reception desk a nun in an elaborate, winged head-dress was writing in a ledger. Aunt Philomena and I waited, standing on the gleaming parquet in the midst of a huge silence. Presently a nurse arrived, a tiny person with red hair and pretty, pink-rimmed eyes, and a watch on a strap pinned to her breast. I noticed her neat white shoes. She told us her name, which I forgot immediately, and shook hands with us tenderly. Her hand was warm and dry, she pressed it into mine like a little present, looking at me in silence, with a kind of gentle fervour. She led us down a corridor and up a curving flight of stairs. A wide window looked out over the town to a distant strip of dark-blue sea. A life-sized statue of the Saviour stood in a niche on the landing, glumly displaying a ruby-red heart in flames. The face was that of a bearded lady, creamy, smooth and sad.
We entered an enormous ward filled with light and noise, like a gymnasium. My father and Uncle Ambrose lay on their backs in adjoining beds, still and pale as a pair of marble knights. Each had his right hand resting on his heart, and his left arm extended at his side and connected by a tube to a bottle on a stand. Their skulls were wrapped in bandages. They breathed lightly in unison. Uncle Ambrose’s nose jutted up out of his face like a stone axe-head, I had never noticed it was so large. He opened his eyes and looked at Aunt Philomena and me with a mild air of surprise.
— Mr Swan! the nurse shouted with startling force. You have visitors, Mr Swan, look!