This Must Be the Place (27 page)

Lucas passes through the doorways of the house. Green shoots are pushing up through gaps in the floorboards, curling their fingers through slits in the window frames, insinuating themselves into the plasterwork. Strips of wallpaper in what was once the dining room have given up their adhesion and slumped, defeated and ignored, to the floor. The place has a damp, vegetal scent. No one has lived here for a long time.

In the kitchen there is an old, blackened stove, still bearing a kettle, as if thirsty visitors might arrive at any moment. There are cobwebbed plates in the rack above the algae-stained sink, a tin of baking soda, sealed shut with rust, on the shelf, a curled shoe sole by the range. The lead of a long-departed dog hangs on a nail by the back door, its leather cracked and peeling, waiting for its canine familiar.

Lucas paces. He looks at the ceilings, at the walls, at the cart-ography of damp climbing the wainscot. He walks to the front of the house; he walks to the rear. He forces open the back door and stands there for a moment, the step worn alluvial-smooth beneath his feet; he considers the side of the mountain, the copse of aspens at the ramshackle fence. The rain has stopped, blown over, and the land is sodden, lush and green, illuminated with fallen water.

He climbs the stairs, keeping to the wall side. Safer that way, although there is no woodworm, no rot that he can see. On the landing, he turns his head one way, a big room with a bay window, overlooking the stream, and the other, a clawfooted bath overhung by a mildewed heater. He moves forward through a doorway into a space with low, slanted ceilings, two tall windows, vague shapes of things at the walls. He is treading across the floor, intending to look out at the view from here when it comes to him what the shapes around him are: beds, small beds, lots of them, pushed back to the walls, tarnished brass knobs on their tops, one with symmetrical curlicues on its side, one with a canopy, rotted now, of course, and curved wooden runners at its base. To rock a child, he supposes, to lull it, to soothe.

What is the word for that kind of bed? he wonders, looking at it as if he’s never seen such a thing before, so ornate it is, like a miniature marquee. The walls, he sees now, are decorated with depictions of toys. He can make out, through the dust and decay, a striped drum, a toy soldier, a teddy bear with a ribbon round its neck. So, a nursery. For a family with – how many? – six children. He counts the beds, turning in the middle of the room. Six. The number rolls around his head. Seven, if you count the baby.

As his mind admits the word ‘baby’, it supplies him with another: ‘cradle’. He looks again at the canopied bed with the rockers. Cradle. You would place the baby in there, under the canopy, which would once have been draped with fabric and lace – he’s seen such things in museums, in costume dramas – and then it goes to sleep, just like that.

Astonishing, he thinks, how small babies are. He looks from one end of the cradle to the other. How can an entire person fit in there? He’d caught a glimpse of Claudette’s baby, Ari, his nephew, before Claudette had strapped him into a kind of papoose thing on her front. Dark curls, a frown, pursed lips and, yes, eyes that reminded him strangely of his own. He and Maeve had looked, they’d made themselves look, they’d stood behind her as she lifted him from his car seat, they’d exclaimed things to the air about how beautiful he was, how sweet, how lovely. He could feel the steel in Maeve as they did so, the effort it took her. Claudette slotted Ari into the sling without turning round. Lucas saw a socked foot, a curled fist, a cheek creased by sleep. He wanted to take Maeve’s hand but didn’t dare. Then Claudette had turned and given them both a level look that told them they weren’t fooling anyone, one hand curved over the baby’s head. Right, she’d said, let’s go.

Maeve, he thinks. She mustn’t come into this room. It must not happen. He turns towards the door, as if to bar the way.

He can hear them downstairs, in the drawing room – a place with a high ceiling, a huge marble fireplace, the skeletal remains of a sofa, the floor strewn with disgorged horsehair. His sister’s voice is telling his wife that it was an old hunting lodge, built as a weekend retreat by the landowners of a big house near the village. The big house is gone, she is saying, lost in a fire years ago, during the Troubles. This is all that’s left, she says.

He can hear the murmur of his wife, their footfalls, and the high yips of another voice – Ari’s. He can hear Claudette speaking to the baby in quiet, soothing murmurs.

Lucas looks again about the room. A hunting lodge where seven children once slept, under pictures of drums and teddy bears.

‘Hi,’ a voice behind him says.

Lucas whirls round, as if caught doing something wrong. Claudette is standing in the doorway. The balaclava disguise is gone; her hair surrounds her, like a cloak. She is herself again, unmistakably so.

‘Maeve,’ he panics, gesturing around him, ‘she mustn’t—’

‘It’s OK,’ Claudette says. ‘She’s gone outside. She wanted to see what was growing in the back garden.’

Claudette comes into the room. She touches her finger to one of the beds, to the wall. The baby is a marsupial mound on her front. ‘If I buy this place,’ she says carefully, not looking at him, ‘is it OK to put the paperwork in your name?’

They stand together in the nursery, Claudette and Lucas and Ari.

‘Legally,’ she continues, ‘it would belong to you. Or appear to belong to you. I’d need your signature, nothing more.’

Lucas considers these words: the paperwork, his name, his signature. He realises that he has known all along what this trip was about, what it means, this house, this valley, this clearing.

He can hear Maeve in the garden below; she is digging or scraping at something. He can hear water running around the house, off the tiles, down the gutters, through the drains.

He clears his throat. He isn’t sure what to ask but knows there must be something. ‘But,’ he begins, ‘what about …’

She gives a tilt of the head, a minuscule movement, as if to recall something she has forgotten.

‘It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere, Claude,’ he whispers. ‘You couldn’t get anywhere more remote than this. You wouldn’t ever … I mean … you’re not actually going to … use this place. Are you?’

She lifts her head. Their eyes meet.

He tries to read her expression. ‘Claude? What’s going on? What about Timou? Does he—’

‘It’s just a house,’ she says, and breaks away from his gaze, walking towards the window. ‘In case I ever needed to … get away. It would be somewhere to come, somewhere to be. Just for a while.’

‘How long is a while?’

She shrugs, still with her back to him. ‘It’s just a house,’ she says again.

Lucas comes to stand next to her and together they look at the mountain, which is obscured by a girdle of cloud.

‘You have to promise me one thing.’ Each of his words appears as a swell of steam on the windowpane.

‘What?’

‘That you won’t do anything without telling me. You won’t disappear and leave me to wonder or—’

‘Of course I won’t. I couldn’t. I’d need your help. Just don’t …’ she hesitates ‘… don’t worry if … if you’re told that I …’ She shakes her head, marshalling her thoughts. ‘Don’t necessarily believe what you’re told. Hold steady and wait until I get in touch. Because I will. You know I will.’

‘Oh, God.’ Lucas puts both hands up to his face. He covers his eyes, as he used to do when she forced him to play her version of hide and seek, with her always the hider and he the permanent seeker. ‘I don’t even want to fully understand what you’re saying to me right now. The whole thing sounds like a ragingly terrible idea. I can’t begin to imagine what Mum will have to say about this when she—’

‘She’s not going to say anything because you’re not going to tell her,’ Claudette says, in a severe tone. ‘You know she’d go off at the deep end.’ She lays her hand on his arm. ‘I need an answer, Lucas. Preferably today. I need to know whether or not I can put it in your name.’

He sighs. He twists his head from side to side, as if to free himself from some invisible shackle. He sighs again, then says, ‘OK. Fine. Put it in my name.’

‘You agree?’

‘Yes. Against my better judgement, I agree.’

‘That’s lucky,’ she says, with a grin, ‘because I already transferred the money to your account. You’ve got a meeting at a solicitor’s this afternoon. I’ll drive you but I’m not going to come in. They have to believe that it’s yours.’

At that moment, Ari lifts his head from her breastbone and twists around in the sling. He raises his hand and seems to point at something beyond them, beyond the window, at something only he can see.

‘Ah dang-nang-nah, ah bleuf, ah blee,’ he says.

It is a long and complicated utterance. His fist opens and closes. Lucas looks at him, properly; his nephew looks back at him, fixing him with an intent, questioning gaze. What a child, he is about to say, but doesn’t because at that moment he feels, for the first time ever, not quite the presence but the possibility of another child, to the back and slightly to the side of him, a form, a being, standing at his leg. It isn’t so much a visitation or a haunting, just the idea of someone who might yet appear, might still exist.

Lucas puts his hand to the worn wood of the sill; he concentrates on this sensation, careful not to turn around, to scare it away. On the greenish glass in front of his face, his exhalations appear, then fade, appear, then fade, the unseen showing itself, over and over, the invisible making itself known.

The Tired Mind is a Stovetop

Daniel, Sussex, 2010

I
t is just after three p.m., Greenwich Mean Time, and I am standing in the car park of a secondary school in an unprepossessing town in the English commuter-belt.

This is not a sentence I’ve ever constructed before; I have never put that collection of words in that particular order.

I am lurking, in my crumpled clothes, in the shade of some trees, partially hidden by a car the exact shade of bile, my bag at my feet. My heart has taken it upon itself to perform a series of trips or tricks inside my ribcage: a type of cardiac pratfall. It has decided to miss or stumble over every tenth or eleventh beat. The effect is one of unremitting anxiety, interspersed with spikes of panic. I have to press my hand to my chest, as if to reassure my heart, to tell it to behave. Sweat prickles along my hair line, inside my collar. I’m fine, I tell myself, tell my heart, we’re fine. But what if I somehow miss Todd? What if I don’t find him? What if I drop dead of a heart attack right here? Would the police be able to track down Claudette, to reunite her with my lifeless body? Is there enough ID on me for them to locate her?

The clutter of brick buildings in front of me is silent. The doors are shut. The windows are still. But it’s almost the end of the school day and, any minute now, the place is going to erupt into activity and I will, I think, come face to face with my erstwhile friend Todd Denham for the first time in twenty-four years.

A short internet search at Newark airport revealed that the vinyl-loving, cardigan-wearing, Derrida-reading Todd of the late 1980s is now a high-school teacher in Sussex. It cannot be him, I told myself as I sat in a slightly too small airport chair, staring into my laptop screen. It must be another man with the same name.

But click on a ‘personnel’ tab for the school and there is his biography: born in Leeds, England, attended such and such a university, now teaching Media Studies. It had to be him.

Outside the school, I take a deep breath, I take two, I ignore another bungled heartbeat. I pick up my bag. I put it down again. I knock my temple, lightly at first, against the peeling bark of a eucalyptus tree. I have to stay on top of this situation, whatever this situation turns out to be. I have to keep my wits about me.

The automatic doors of the school sweep open and I stand straighter. A janitor-type person in overalls steps out into the searing sunshine, carrying a toolbox. He comes down the steps and disappears around the side of the building.

I watch as the automatic doors suck themselves shut.

Here I am, I think, loitering outside a school, lying in wait for someone in order to ask them whether or not I left a woman dead in a forest. Just an average day, then. Nothing to see here.

The doors trundle open, trundle back.

And something pushes its way into my thoughts. A rare appearance, this one, and I think it’s because there is something about the school entrance that reminds me of the linguistics department in that university in England. It’s not the ranks of cacti embedded in gravel or the woman behind a reception desk, who is wearing a thick layer of beige make-up (reminding me, unpleasantly and fleetingly, of my first wife), or the aquarium where neon-hued fish circle in their filtered environment, coshed by boredom. No, it’s those double electric doors, curved in shape, which open and shut with a hesitant glide, creating momentary parentheses around those who pass through. There is something about the noise of them, the whoosh-clunk as they open and shut, open and shut.

I have done an assiduous job, all these years, of keeping Nicola from my thoughts. I have staved off recollections, reassessments, memories of her. But here I am, waiting and waiting, and I’m thinking about Nicola, my first love, and also, in the simultaneous way you can, especially when jet-lagged, as if the tired mind is a stovetop that can keep several burners chugging away, keep more than one pan on the boil, I’m thinking how glad I am that Claudette, my current love, my hopefully permanent love, doesn’t go in for much make-up. She’s not a devotee of the caked slap that some women coat and obscure themselves with.

I’m also thinking – and this has just occurred to me – whether it is possible that I married my first wife as a reaction to Nicola (I dislike the word ‘rebound’: we homo sapiens are not rubber balls; we are surely more complex, sentient beings than that, our choices are surely more finely nuanced)? I’d always thought that marriage was in some ways a response to the death of my mother, me seeking stability, permanence, distraction, but now I wonder if it didn’t have something to do with my severance from Nicola.