Undercurrent (3 page)

'You need sleep, Henry. Loads of it. You can't talk now. Come along.'

He was bemused, unnaturally obedient. He could have been led upstairs to a masochistic brothel for all he cared, although such a thought did not enter his mind. Henry did not have that kind of imagination. There seemed to be a mountain of stairs. A swish of the cardinal's cloak, an attic room, reached only when he was out of breath. One of them was carrying his suitcase, the other his shoes and the leather jacket bought for the journey, both men chattering explanations like soft-voiced starlings.

'. . . Afraid the only bath is at the back of the kitchen.

. . we'll leave the lights on . . . Water hot again, soon.'

'. . . the loo's on the landing. . . your loo, that is . . . Peter, you forgot the bedside light ah, there it is . . .'

'Towels are here. . . you switch off the electric fire over there.

We'll make you a proper one tomorrow.'

The fire defied his own notion of antiquity. Two electric bars glowing like parallel fireflies, creating a patch of warmth extending creating a patch of warmth extending towards the bed but not quite reaching it. And such a bed. Not large, not even a queen size, but high off the ground; if he fell out of that in the night, he could break a leg. Henry's tired eyes noticed the series of bedspreads which were strewn over it, greens and blues with the shimmer of silk, giving the bare room its only opulence. His companions fussed a little more and then retreated. It was as if the whole of the world retreated with them and the silence they left behind was quite complete.

YOU can't talk now. The words held an echo. When would he ever be able to talk? He had been unable to talk freely for more years than he could remember, or not the kind of talking which was communicating. He never quite knew what to say, except to his father. All these years of saying little, as if he had some kind of impediment that made him incapable of expressing what his brain was telling him to say. A kind of scold's bridle, the curse of the shy man. He liked the easily opened window; he liked the bedspreads, stroked them, and despite the chill of the room, he was suddenly intensely grateful to be in it.

It occurred to him that he had been churlish to these two bizarre men; that he had failed to express or even to feel gratitude for the fact that they had so obviously responded in double quick time to a call from the flooded hotel, and that he ought to feel grateful also to the man who had made the call enabling his hosts to be so charmingly ready to receive him. And then, as he peeled off his clothes and tried to remember where on the way up the stairs was the bathroom, deciding everything could wait until daylight, everything, including judgement, he realized the man from the hotel would never have phoned, would have forgotten his existence as soon as he was out the door.

. . Nothing mattered.

Dressed in his underwear and his now dry socks, shivering, but only a little, he moved to the window. The moon shone on the water in a calm, silver pathway. The sea looked as if it was trying to efface itself, nibbling at the pebbles of the beach with discreet, foamy bites which teased the shore, eating at it with the quiet determination of the dog with her separate bowl of food. The whole of it had a poetic tranquillity, a normality he found reassuring and enough to suppress the conclusion that none of this was normal, or anything like.

He looked at the door of the room, suddenly and irrationally afraid that he had been locked in. He did not know why he should begin to imagine such a thing and experimenting with the quiet latch showed him he was wrong. An eccentric household was all. Nothing here to worry a stout heart.

He took off his socks, got into the bed, relishing cool linen sheets and heavyweight blankets.

He wanted to be pressed into sleep, ironed into unconsciousness, but just as he stretched to feel the parameters of the high bed, his feet touched warm fur, and he screamed. There was an animal in here.

Henry flung back the covers and roared towards the door.

There was silence from the landings below; he looked down the open stairwell and saw light. Foolish to scream at some cat. What was he, a child? He held the bedside lamp aloft like a weapon, and examined what it was his feet had found. 'Get outta here,' he ordered. The thing did not move. He touched it tentatively, then grabbed it angrily. He needed this bed. The fur was hot; a sick animal. Then he felt the contours of a brick, picked it up, turned it over. A brick in a pocket of fur. Ingenious. He got back into bed and twiddled his toes against it. Began to doze.

Woke with the moonlight in his eyes and his armpits sticky, convinced yet again that the fur at his feet was alive. Hearing her laugh at him and tell him there was nothing to be afraid of.

Wide awake now, with a sudden urge to take a shower, trying to remember what either the cardinal or the tweed suit and tattoos had said about showers. There wasn't one; there was a bath, next the kitchen. He was hot; his passion for hygiene had been subsumed by exhaustion and now he felt dirty. He put the socks back on, took a towel and set off to explore.

Down, down down. . . Looking towards the gaslight in the hall, he stopped on the third landing, arrested by sound. There was the lightest possible patter of feet, coming from a room he had not seen. The figure, tall but slight with a mass of pale hair, stood on the landing below, indecisive for a matter of seconds, paused as if the last flight was just too much, then slid down the final banisters in a flurry of white gown. There was an almost imperceptible thump in the landing.

The figure blew on both her hands, flexed her fingers briefly and disappeared.

Henry's warm feet had taken root in the spot. He seemed to have stood where he was for an hour, while the feet grew cold again, before he continued down the stairs, clutching his towel, rubbing his eyes with it, trying to dispel the illusion of what he had thought he had seen.

There was a fine Indian shawl draped over the newel post. It was incredibly soft to the touch, as soft as the fur in his bed. It could have been Francesca's shawl; the one he had given her. Or the one at the bottom of his suitcase he had bought as a gift. From the depths of the house, he could hear the sound of running water and singing. Feeling awkward, Henry Evans went back to bed.

The fur was still warm. He moved it level with his heart.

Don't talk now.

It is always warm in here. As warm as a hospital, or a baby's bedroom. I always loved children,
which seems a trite thing for a teacher to say. Before he died, my father discouraged teaching as a
choice of career because he said it would wreck my perception of childish innocence and stop me from
being able to play. I was preparing to follow his advice (I usually did and he was usually right) when
he died. I've been yearning for his advice ever since. It seems so short a step from being the one who
was given the wise advice to being the one who is relied upon to provide it.

I wonder what he would think of me now, and I think I know. We all hark back to childhood
here; it is consistently and often accurately blamed for everything. Not in my case, except insofar as it
gave me the burning ambition to provide for other children the same sort of security that was given to
me.

We would sit by the window, my cousin and I attempting to learn verse. There are things
worse than learning verse, my father said. Harry might not have been able to do that; he liked the sea
and he wanted to learn to fish. I tried to teach him nursery rhymes, the old-fashioned, meaningless
kind, because I love things which do not change, like the sea.

There was an old woman who swallowed a spider

That wriggled and wriggled and wriggled inside her;

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,

I don't know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps she'll die.

Nursery rhymes make me think of birthday teas and I must not. I've been warned that
anniversaries are dangerous; they loosen the tongue with grief. And this is supposed to be a record of
my thoughts, to prove that I can still think of other things. I must NOT venture into facts.

FMC

He first deceased; she for a little tried

To live without him, liked it not and died.

HENRY woke with these words being muttered to him from a far distance of memory. A very compact poem, but one which moved him unbearably. He tried to see if it would work the other way round; she first deceased, etc., but it did not. The sounds which confused him, along with the words he could have sworn he heard whispered in his ear, were those of a cacophony of seagulls and the irregular heartbeat of the sea, echoing through his room, dragging on the shingle in a series of sighs, drawing him towards the window.

The window stood out from the roof in a small bay made for one, angled against the slope of a turret, so that when he stood inside the frame of it, he felt part of the sky. The gulls wheeled round his head, quarrelling and screaming so close that he ducked automatically, convinced it was he who angered them. There was a streak of guano on the glass, blurring the sight of the watery sun.

It was paler than pale egg yolk, opaque, almost no colour at all. He lived with such artificial colours, the bright primaries of packaging and pills, colours made for noticing and remembering.

Not like this. Cloud moved across the egg yolk sun. The sea itself was too vast to contemplate; the horizon melted into mist. Henry looked down towards the ground. It was not nearly as far away as he felt it was. '

There was greater comfort in looking down than looking up. The vastness of sea and sky made him feel small, while the activity on the ground made him feel human. There was a jogger in a red fleece, varying the muscles deployed in his exercise by jogging backwards on the broad pavement opposite the House of Enchantment, flanking the sea.

The jogger stopped moving, breathed deeply, hands on hips for a second while he surveyed the sea before stretching his legs, placing them one at a time on the low wall of the parapet and bending his torso towards his thigh. Good boy, Henry applauded. A woman with a posse of chattering children and a baby in a pram passed by the jogger, oblivious to anything but her own amiable instructions. She slowed the pram to avoid a couple with two yapping dogs, one small and piebald, one large and tan, overexcited, pulling at the lead, dancing in tail thrashing frenzy. The jogger continued his stretches. Another runner appeared from stage right. A child sat, waiting for a bus, hugging herself into her coat. A black dog was at the edge of the water, recovering a brown, crumpled object and worrying at it. Henry had the fleeting thought that the object might actually be his hat and hoped he was wrong. He felt a brief and inexplicable moment of happiness. There were people here, after all. A backwards-running jogger, guys keeping fit, that was normal. The dog owners chided their animals.

The dogs made him sentimental. He should not have lied about owning a dog, just to ingratiate himself. The black dog, tail blurred in movement, yapped and growled at the water's edge, big, bold and secretly scared. Henry scratched his chest and smiled encouragement. When a big wave came in, the dog retreated, barking defiance. Know how you feel, buddy. We all have to bark, whether we mean it or not.

Then, from stage left, came a strange figure, walking so fast he could compete with the jogger. He was tall and thin and nothing seemed to fit, a suit and coat hanging from his frame like a series of scarves. Business attire, if you happened to be a funeral director, Henry thought; a rabbi on a bad day, some distraught unorthodox, orthodox Jew, smoking, talking to himself, looking at nothing but the inside of his own skull, forgetting in between furious drags on the cigarette that it was lit at all. How could anyone smoke in that breeze?

His hair stood on end, black, like his clothing, the skin of his hands alabaster white. He strode past Henry's line of vision, arms waving, cigarette unsteady, engaged in a debate with an invisible adversary, a client, a confessor, maybe mouthing words of admonition and advice, so earnest he was laughable. Henry smiled again, engrossed in the view; then sensed the presence of breath other than his own, misting the window. Someone standing level, closer than the seagulls.

'One tends to spend a lot of time staring out of the window,' Timothy was saying with a sigh, pointing at the figure below. 'He's barking mad, that man, but frightfully clever, you know. Where do you want me to put this?'

He was carrying a delicate tray of fragrant smells: coffee, sweet scented toast, a hint of silver pots under a large, stiff linen napkin. Henry had the irrelevant thought, hung over from a similar one of the night before, of how odd it was for a house to possess such fine crystal and silver, such elegant china cups and not have central heating. Speaking for himself, he might have sold it all and turned the proceeds into warmth.

Timothy was dressed in heavy cords, boots, shirt, sweater and cardigan, relatively normal and a comforting contrast to the outfit of the night before, despite the yellow cap which was squashed on his head at a rakish angle. Behind him strolled Senta the dog, carrying a newspaper in her mouth which she dropped at Henry's feet.

'Oh, I didn't expect breakfast. That's nice of you. Should have been up sooner, I guess.' He forced a laugh, suddenly full of the shyness from which exhaustion had preserved him the evening before.

'It isn't breakfast, it's simply toast. Breakfast is another matter altogether, has to be ordered.

Actually, it suits us quite well if the guest stays put until Peter's sorted us out downstairs and done the fires, at least. Such a mess.

We thought we might go shopping after that. Would you like to come with us? We could, you know, sort of help you get your bearings.'

'Is there a shower?' Henry asked.

'No, we told you, didn't we? Only the bathroom behind the kitchen. Free at the minute and plenty of hot water. Eat the toast while it's warm, won't you?'