The professionals judged that Brendan was suffering from senile dementia, an irreversible process which would finally make him impossible for Cal to nurse. It might be best for all concerned, they advised, if a place were found in a Nursing Home, where Brendan could be cared for twenty-four hours a day.
Cal rejected the suggestion. He was certain that Brendan's cleaving to a room he knew - one he'd shared with Eileen for so many years - was all that was keeping him from total breakdown.
He was not alone in his attempts to nurse his father. Two days after he'd failed to set the pigeons flying, Geraldine had appeared at the house. There was ten minutes of hesitant apologies and explanations, then Brendan's condition entered the exchange and Geraldine's good sense came triumphantly to the fore. Forget our differences, she said, I want to help.
Cal was not about to refuse the offer. Brendan responded to Geraldine's presence as a child to a long-lost teat. He was cosseted and indulged, and with Geraldine in the house in Eileen's place, Cal found himself falling back into the old domestic routines. The affection he felt for Geraldine was painless, which was surely the most certain sign of how slight it was. When she was there he was happy to be with her. But he seldom, if ever, missed her.
As to the Fugue, he did his best to keep his memories of it sharp, but it was by no means easy. The Kingdom had ways to induce forgetfulness so subtle and so numerous he was scarcely aware of how they dulled him.
It was only when, in the middle of a dreary day, something reminded him - a scent, a shout - that he had once been in another place, and breathed its air and met its creatures, it was only then that he realized how tentative his recall was. And the more he went in pursuit of what he was forgetting the more it eluded him.
The glories of the Fugue were becoming mere words, the reality of which he could no longer conjure. When he thought of an orchard it was less and less that extraordinary place he'd slept in (slept, and dreamt that this life he was now living was the dream) and more a commonplace stand of apple trees.
The miracles were drifting from him, and he seemed to be unable to hold onto them.
Surely dying was like this, he thought; losing things dear and unable to prevent their passing. Yes; this was a kind of dying.
2
Brendan, for his part, continued to continue. As the weeks passed, Geraldine managed to talk him into joining them downstairs, but he was interested in little but tea and television, and his conversation was now scarcely more than grunts. Sometimes Cal would watch Brendan's face as he sat slumped in front of the television - his expression unchanging whether the screen offered pundits or comedians - and wondered what had happened to the man he'd known. Was the old Brendan still in hiding somewhere, behind those addled eyes?, or had he been an illusion all along, a son's dream of his father's permanence which, like the letter from Eileen, had simply evaporated? Perhaps it was for the best, he thought, that Brendan was shielded from his pain, then drew himself up short at such a thought. Wasn't that what they said as the coffin was marched past: it was all for the best? Brendan wasn't dead yet.
As time went by, Geraldine's presence began to prove as comforting to Cal as to the old man. Her smiles were the brightest thing those dismal months could boast. She came and went, more indispensable by the day, until, in the first week of December, she suggested it might be more convenient all round if she slept at the house. It was a perfectly natural progression.
‘I don't want to marry you,' she told him quite plainly. The sorry spectacle of Theresa's marriage - five months old and already rocky - had confirmed her worst suspicions of matrimony. ‘I did want to marry you once,' she said. ‘But now I'm happy just to be with you.'
She proved easy company; down-to-earth, unsentimentaclass="underline" as much companion as lover. She it was who made certain the bills were paid on time, and saw that there was tea in the caddy. She it was too who suggested that Cal sell the pigeons.
‘Your father doesn't show any interest in them any longer,' she said on more than one occasion. ‘He wouldn't even notice if they were gone.'
That was certainly true. But Cal refused to contemplate the sale. Come spring and the fine weather his father might well show fresh interest in the birds.
‘You know that's not true,' she'd tell him when he put this point. ‘Why do you want to keep them so much? They're just a burden.' Then she'd let the subject drop for a few days, only to raise it again when a cue was presented.
History was repeating itself. Often in the course of these exchanges, which gradually became more heated, Cal could
hear echoes of his mother and father: the same routes were being trodden afresh. And, like his father, Cal - though malleable on almost every other issue - was immovable on this. He would not sell the birds.
The real reason for his bullishness was not, of course, hope of Brendan's rehabilitation, but the fact that the birds were his last concrete link with the events of the previous summer. In the weeks after Suzanna's disappearance he'd bought a dozen newspapers a day, scanning each page for some report of her, or the carpet, or Shadwell. But there was nothing, and eventually - unable to bear the daily disappointment - he'd stopped looking. Nor was there any further visit from Hobart or his men - which was in its way bad news. He, Cal, had become an irrelevancy. The story, if it was still being written, was running on without him.
He became so frightened he'd forget the Fugue that he took the risk of writing down all that he could remember of the night there, which, when he set himself to the task, was depressingly little. He wrote the names down too: Lemuel Lo; Apolline Dubois; Frederick Cammell...; set them all down at the back of his diary, in the section reserved for telephone numbers, except that there were no numbers for these people; nor addresses either. Just uncommon names to which he was less and less able to attach faces.
3
On some nights he had dreams, from which he would wake with tears on his face.
Geraldine consoled him as best she could, given that he claimed not to recall these dreams when he woke. That was in a sense true. He brought nothing into consciousness that words could encapsulate: only an aching sadness. She would lie beside him then, and stroke his hair, and tell him that though these were difficult times things could be much worse. She was right, of course. And by and by the dreams dwindled, until they finally ceased altogether.
4
In the last week of January, with Christmas bills still outstanding and too little money to pay them with, he sold the pigeons, with the exception of 33 and his mate. This pair he kept, though the reason why was harder and harder to remember; and by the end of the following month had been forgotten entirely.
IV
THE NOMADS
1
The passage of winter was certainly weary for Cal, but for Suzanna it held perils far worse than boredom and bad dreams.
Those perils had begun the day after the night of the Fugue, when she and the Pever-elli brothers had so narrowly escaped capture by Shadwell. Her life, and Jerichau's, with whom she'd been re-united in the street beyond Shearman's estate, had scarcely been out of danger since.
She had been warned of this at Capra's House, and a good deal else beside. But of all she'd learned, the subject that had left the deepest impression was the Scourge. The Councillors had grown pale talking of how close to extinction the Families had come. And though the enemies now snapping at her heels - Shadwell and Hobart - were of a different order entirely, she could not help but believe they and the Scourge sprang from the same poisonous earth. They were all, in their way, enemies of life.