One morning (for it is morning in my time-zone) you sip from your glass of ice-cold Aspall and describe how Mallarmé is nudging up the side of the tank to within a foot of your face. From the patina of ocellation you have learnt to distinguish easily between the rays and, picturing these differences, I have memorised them so that I can follow. Of course the single male is the most immediately identifiable, having claspers.
— It’s a completely different world, you say.
I assume you’re referring to the pool. But you go on:
— The totter has gone.
I have to cast my mind back.
— The beautiful lionish man: vanished! He hasn’t been there since we saw him there together, just before the funeral. I meant to tell you. It’s a completely different world.
— At the tip?
— Everything is being stripped away. I can’t express it. I’m experiencing new, incredible possibilities. It’s a kind of magical sharpness, as if shadows have light, and the totter’s disappearance belongs to a time that is coming back but for the first time. It has to do with that mimosa thing I told you about. It’s a kind of upside-down space of coincidence, a portal. I can’t stay…
Your voice is strained and I’m having real difficulty following what you are saying.
— What is happening there? Are you missing me?
— I can’t wait to see you again. But the weirdest thing has just happened. I wonder if I’m not going completely off my head.
A long pause ensues. An expanse of hundreds of miles of deep cold sea dangling the frailty of a telephone is not a reassuring medium for a long-term relationship.
— What do you mean?
— I’ll write. I love you.
Then you hang up. I call back but there’s no answer.
There is no internet at the house, but you must have gone, as you sometimes do, to the café in town to write: the Tea Party, as it’s quaintly called. For a couple of hours later an email arrives, in which you explain that yesterday afternoon, having just overseen the day’s final fire of ripped-up nettles, clipped brambles, hedge trimmings and scythed grasses, eyes a-blur stinging and watery from acrid smoke, a slight breeze at the fireside an almost pleasurable twisting of a knife swirling smoke one way then another, walking up the steep back lawn towards the house bulking up with almost manorial proportions above you, it occurs to you, a decision precisely contrary to all your desires and hopes. You’re going to sell the house. You phone the estate agent and a meeting is arranged. And so this morning the gentleman duly appears and enthuses and proposes an asking price and takes photos, starting with the gardens from this and that boundary or angle, standing on a woodworm-eaten ladder (a big man, perspiring in a suit and tie, trying to get the best photogenic perspective) which snaps clean through under his weight and he tumbles vaudeville roly-poly down the slope of yellowing grass. And inside he clicks and slicks away at this and that room, deterred only here or there. Naturally, unphotographably, your father’s study remains the last stronghold of chaos. The biggest obstacle, of course, is the first thing inside the front door (but Shakespeare, you want to say, is working on it). The agent’s lack of surprise suggests he has been tipped off (down in the town things get about). Encountering what was once a dining room now a major aquatic display he blandly enquires what you plan to do with it.
— Not, he queries chuckling, presumably to be part of the fixtures and fittings?
— I’d be taking that with me, you say, struck momentarily by the enormity of doing so.
— What are they in there anyway? asks the man, stooping a little and peering in.
And then one of them, Taylor, flaps into vision, and it occurs to you that you haven’t in fact shared the secret of the rays with anyone since the funeral.
— Curious, exclaims the visitor. Like an underwater kite.
There is now a delayed version, you suggest, a shadow-replay of his falling through the ladder five minutes earlier and almost breaking his legs when, his curiosity getting the better of him, the agent goes to put his hand near the surface of the water as Taylor edges up close and you, rallying to the defence of both parties, pull the arm back, exclaiming at the danger of the spine lashing his hand. Stung at any rate mentally, the estate agent remarks that it is not going to be easy transporting a contraption of dangerous creatures that size and you have to agree. Surveying the upstairs rooms he more than once poses the question of the fate of other furnishings and items obviously capturing his business eye.
— Some nice furniture, he remarks. Will you be instructing the auctioneers in town?
A query too far for you at this moment, you merely note you have not yet decided what to do with it, and the agent with newfound gusto and boldness avers that while the condition of the house, so obviously in need of modernisation, is not going to put off a prospective purchaser, given that the price would be tailored to that fact, and while such a person would be attracted as much as anything else by the size of the plot of land coming with the property, nonetheless a bit of tidying up and clearing space in the bedrooms and the drawing room downstairs might be advantageous for the purpose of viewings.
— Your father’s study in particular, he sighs with but a thin veneer of professional decency.
He leaves you with the promise of papers to sign, coming with luck in the post next day, and an unnecessarily impactive handshake.
Five minutes later you too drive out, seeking replenishments of your favourite bottled cider.
It happens, or has already begun, on your return. There is a sound coming from the kitchen. You can hear it above the noise made by the water-pump in the pool as you come through the front door. There is, you write, a resting place in every mental archive, a discrete space of effects walled up without a listener’s awareness. Most remain unnoticed in the dull daily roar. Then there are the others, those isolated, unmistakable sounds which, once heard again, transport more directly and more frighteningly than any odoriferous power of reminiscence or snapshot visual recall. Of course there is a kind of common stock, shared files of archetypal distinction, the sound of rock falling, a footstep where none is expected, the thrown vocable of a diabolical chuckle, the autumnal rustling of trees, a snatch of distant seas shrugged off in the dozy instant. But there are also sounds peculiarly your own, received and buried, as it were, in your heart of heart. It is what you mean, you remind me, when you tell me I am your pristine.
The sound you hear on coming back through the front door, carrying over the peaceful bubbling of the pumps in the ray pool, is a screech. You recognise it immediately: it is the shriek, initially a scrawny cry but rising, made by your mother locked in the bathroom upstairs one night twenty years ago, shortly after the local GP downstairs administers a final dose of morphine, on the occasion of the first death, the deciding death. And now coming into the house the hallucination, for you tell yourself it could only be such, is that unmistakable but faint cry, started up from you can’t think where. It is a savage gutturality, a fugal scree. After a moment of absolute disorientation you think of the upstairs bathroom, where you recall she would not respond to your murmured entreaty but kept up this speechless screech intolerably, forcing you in due course to let her be and return downstairs. Climbing the stairs again now the sound, you note, has outstripped you. The upstairs landing is silent and still. Coming face to face with a bathroom door that is closed, however, re-establishes your disquiet with a sharp, unpleasant flutter. Always in the time of your parents the door of the bathroom, if unoccupied, would be ajar. With trepidation you open it. There is nothing: a once pleasing up-to-date emerald-green bathroom now unequivocally in need of what the estate agent called modernisation, the chrome covers to the taps long since broken off, the cracked cover to the cistern leaning against the wall below the window, the bath and bidet stained bone-gray and cobwebbed. Then you realise it must have been the estate agent, closing the door behind him as he was making his tour of the house.