The Book Of Evidence Page 5

  Gin first, then some sort of awful sherry, then successive jorums of my late father's fine Bordeaux, the last, alas, of the bin. I was already half-soused when I went down to the cellar to fetch the claret. I sat on a crate amid the must and gloom, breathing gin fumes out of flared nostrils. A streaming lance of sunlight, seething with dust, pierced the low, cobwebbed window above my head. Things thronged around me in the shadows – a battered rocking-horse, an old high bicycle, a bundle of antique tennis racquets – their outlines blurred, greyish, fading, as if this place were a way-station where the past paused on its way down into oblivion. I laughed. Old bastard, I said aloud, and the silence rang like a rapped glass. He was always down here in those last months before he died. He had become a potterer, he who all his life had been driven by fierce, obsessive energies. My mother would send me down to look for him, in case something might have happened to him, as she delicately put it. I would find him poking about in corners, fiddling with things, or just standing, canted at an odd angle, staring at nothing. When I spoke he would give a great start and turn on me angrily, huffing, as if he had been caught at something shameful. But these spurts of animation did not last long, after a moment he would drift off again into vagueness. It was as if he were not dying of an illness, but of a sort of general distraction: as if one day in the midst of his vehement doings something had caught his attention, had beckoned to him out of the darkness, and, struck, he had turned aside and walked towards it, with a sleepwalker's pained, puzzled concentration. I was, what, twenty-two, twenty-three. The long process of his dying wearied and exasperated me in equal measure. Of course I pitied him, too, but I think pity is always, for me, only the permissible version of an urge to give weak things a good hard shake.

  He began to shrink. Suddenly his shirt collars were too big for that wobbly tortoise-neck with its two slack harp-strings. Everything was too big for him, his clothes had more substance than he did, he seemed to rattle about inside them. His eyes were huge and haunted, already clouding. It was summer then, too. Light was not his medium any more, he preferred it down here, in the mossy half-dark, among the deepening shades.

  I hauled myself to my feet and gathered an armful of dusty bottles and staggered with them up the damp stone steps.

  Yet he died upstairs, in the big front bedroom, the airiest room in the house. It was so hot all that week. They opened wide the window, and he made them move his bed forward until the foot of it was right out on the balcony. He lay with the covers thrown back, his meagre chest bared, giving himself up to the sun, the vast sky, dying into the blue and gold glare of summer. His hands. The rapid beat of his breathing. His -

  Enough. I was speaking of my mother.

  I had set the bottles on the table, and was clawing the dust and cobwebs off them, when she informed me that she did not drink now. This was a surprise – in the old days she could knock it back with the best of them. I stared at her, and she shrugged and looked away. Doctor's orders, she said. I examined her with renewed attention. There was something wrong with her left eye, and her mouth drooped a little on that side. I recalled the odd way she had clutched the cigarette box and matches in her left hand when she was conducting me around the house. She shrugged again. A slight stroke, she said, last year. I thought what an odd term that is: a slight stroke. As if a benevolent but clumsy power had dealt her a fond, playful blow and accidentally damaged her. She glanced at me sidelong now with a tentative, almost girlish, melancholy little smile. She might have been confessing to something, some peccadillo, trivial but embarrassing. Sorry to hear it, old thing, I said, and urged her to go on, take a drop of wine, the doctors be damned. She seemed not to hear me. And then a really surprising thing happened. The girl, Joan or Jean – I'll compromise, and call her Jane – got up suddenly from her place, with a gulp of distress, and put her arm awkwardly around my mother's head, clutching her in a sort of wrestling hold, and laying a hand along her brow. I expected my mother to give her a good push and tell her to get off, but no, she sat there, suffering calmly the girl's embrace and looking at me still with that small smile. I stared back at her in startlement, holding the wine bottle suspended above my glass. It was the strangest thing. The girl's great hip was beside my mother's shoulder, and I thought irresistibly of the pony pressing against me on the lawn with that stubborn, brute regard. There was a silence. Then the girl, I mean Jane, caught my eye, and blenched, and withdrew her arm and sat down again hurriedly. Here is a question: if man is a sick animal, an insane animal, as I have reason to believe, then how account for these small, unbidden gestures of kindness and of care? Does it occur to you, my lord, that people of our kind – if I may be permitted to scramble up and join you on the bench for a moment – that we have missed out on something, I mean something in general, a universal principle, which is so simple, so obvious, that no one has ever thought to tell us about it? They all know what it is, my learned friend, this knowledge is the badge of their fellowship. And they are everywhere, the vast, sad, initiated crowd. They look up at us from the well of the court and say nothing, only smile a little, with that mixture of compassion and sympathetic irony, as my mother was smiling at me now. She reached across and patted the girl's hand and told her not to mind me. I stared. What had I done? The child sat with eyes fixed on her plate, groping blindly for her knife and fork. Her cheeks were aflame, I could almost hear them hum. Had a look from me done all that? I sighed, poor ogre, and ate a potato. It was raw and waxen at the heart. More drink.

  You're not getting into one of your moods, are you, Freddie? my mother said.

  Have I mentioned my bad moods, I wonder. Very black, very black. As if the world had grown suddenly dim, as if something had dirtied the air. Even when I was a child my depressions frightened people. In them again, is he? they would say, and they would chuckle, but uneasily, and edge away from me. In school I was a terror – but no, no, I'll spare you the schooldays. I noticed my mother was no longer much impressed by my gloom. Her smile, with that slight droop at the side, was turning positively sardonic. I said I had seen Charlie French in town. Oh, Charlie, she said, and shook her head and laughed. I nodded. Poor Charlie, he is the kind of person about whom people say, Oh, like that, and laugh. Another, listless silence. Why on earth had I come back here. I picked up the bottle, and was surprised to find it empty. I opened another, clamping it between my knees and swaying and grunting as I yanked at the cork. Ah! and out it came with a jolly pop. Outside on the lawn the last of the day's sunlight thickened briefly, then faded. My mother was asking after Daphne and the child. At the thought of them something like a great sob, lugubrious, faintly comical, ballooned under my breastbone. Jane – no, I can't call her that, it doesn't fit – Joan cleared the table, and my mother produced, of all things, a decanter of port and pushed it across the table to me. You won't want us to withdraw, will you? she said, with that grin. You can think of me as a man, anyway, I'm ancient enough. I began earnestly to tell her about my financial troubles, but got into a muddle and had to stop. Besides, I suspected she was not really listening. She sat with her face half-turned to the nickel light of evening from the window, rheum-eyed and old, showing the broad brow and high cheekbones of her Dutch forebears, King Billy's henchmen. You should have a ruff, ma, I said, and a lace cap. I laughed loudly, then frowned. My face was going numb. Jean carefully offered me a cup of coffee. No, thank you, my dear, I said gravely, in my grandee's voice, indicating my port-glass, which, I noticed, was unaccountably empty. I refilled it, admiring the steadiness of the hand that held the decanter. Time passed. Birds were calling through the blue-grey dusk. I sat bemused, bolt-upright, in happy misery, listening to them. Then with a snort and a heave I roused myself and looked about me, smacking my lips and blinking. My mother and the girl were gone.

  He died at evening. The room was still heavy with the long day's heat. I sat on a chair beside his bed in the open window and held his hand. His hand. The waxen feel of. How bright the air above the trees, bright and blue, l
ike the limitless skies of childhood. I put my arm around him, laid a hand on his forehead. He said to me: don't mind her. He said to me -

  Stop this, stop it. I was not there. I have not been present at anyone's death. He died alone, slipped away while no one was looking, leaving us to our own devices. By the time I arrived from the city they had trussed him up, ready for the coffin. He lay on the bed with his hands folded on his breast and his eyes shut tight, like a child being good. His hair was brushed in a neat lick across his forehead. His ears, I remember, were very white.

  Extraordinary: all that anger and resentment, that furious, unfocused energy: gone.

  I took what remained of the port and staggered away upstairs. My knees quaked, I felt as if I were lugging a body on my back. The light-switches seemed to have been moved, in the half-darkness I kept banging into things, swearing and laughing. Then I found my way by mistake into Joanne's room. (Joanne: that's it!) She must have been awake, listening to me barging about, I hardly got the door open before she switched on her lamp. I stood teetering on the threshold, goggling at her. She lay in a vast, sagging bed with the sheet pulled to her chin, and for some reason I was convinced that she was still wearing her jodhpurs and her baggy pullover, and even her riding boots. She said nothing, only smiled at me in fright, and for a wild moment I considered climbing in beside her, shoes and all, so that now she might cradle my poor whirling head in her plump young accommodating arm. I had not really noticed before her extraordinary flame-red hair, the sight of it spread out on the pillow in the lamplight almost made me cry. Then the moment was gone, and with a grave nod I withdrew silently, like an old sad grey fading ghost, and marched at a careful, dignified pace across the landing to the room where a bed had been made up for me. There I discovered that somewhere along the way I had mislaid the port.

  I sat on the side of the bed, arms dangling between my knees, and was suddenly exhausted. My head fizzed, my eyes burned, but yet I could not make myself lie down to sleep. I might have been a child come home after a day of wild excursions. I had travelled far. Slowly, with underwater movements, I untied my shoelaces. One shoe dropped, and then – I woke with a dreadful start, my ears ringing, as if there had been an explosion in my head. A dream: something about meat. It was light, but whether it was dawn or still dusk I was not sure. Grey. Nor did I know where I was. Even when I realised it was Coolgrange I did not recognise the room at first. Very high and long, with lofty windows that came down to the floor. Shabby, too, in a peculiar, offended way, as if it were conscious of once having been an important place. I got up carefully from the bed and went and looked down at the lawn. The grass was grey, and there were pigeon-coloured shadows under the trees. My brain thudded. It must be dawn: in the oak wood, under an iron sky, a solitary bird was testing out the lightening air with a single repeated flute-note. I pressed my forehead against the window-pane, and shivered at the clammy, cold touch of the glass. I had been travelling for the best part of a week, with scant food and too much alcohol, and now it was all catching up with me. I felt sick, sodden, reamed. My eyelids were scalding, my spit tasted of ash. It seemed to me the garden was watching me, in its stealthy, tightlipped way, or that it was at least somehow aware of me, framed here in the window, wringing my hands, a stricken starer-out – how many other such there must have been, down the years! – with the room's weightless dark pressing at my back. I had slept in my clothes.

  The dream. (The court will need to hear about my dreams.) It came back to me suddenly. Nothing very much happened in it. My dreams are not the riotous tumble of events that others claim to enjoy, but states of feeling, rather, moods, particular humours, gusts of emotion, accompanied often by extreme physical effects: I weep, or thrash my limbs, grind my teeth, laugh, cry out. On this occasion it had been a dry retching, the ache in my throat when I woke was what brought it back to me. I had dreamed I was gnawing the ripped-out sternum of some creature, possibly human. It seemed to have been parboiled, for the meat on it was soft and white. Barely warm now, it crumbled in my mouth like suet, making me gag. Believe me, your lordship, I do not enjoy relating these things any more than the court enjoys hearing them. And there is worse to come, as you know. Anyway, there I was, mumbling these frightful gobs of flesh, my stomach heaving even as I slept. That is all there was, really, except for an underlying sensation of enforced yet horribly pleasurable transgression. Wait a moment. I want to get this right, it is important, I'm not sure why. Some nameless authority was making me do this terrible thing, was standing over me implacably with folded arms as I sucked and slobbered, yet despite this – or perhaps, even, because of it – despite the horror, too, and the nausea -deep inside me something exulted.

  By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of the language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself – badness – does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps the words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. What was I talking about? My dreams, yes. There was the recurring one, the one in which – but no, no, leave that to another time.

  I am standing by the window, in my parents' bedroom. Yes, I had realised that it was, used to be, theirs. The grey of dawn was giving way to a pale wash of sunlight. My lips were tacky from last night's port. The room, the house, the garden and the fields, all was strange to me, I did not recognise it today – strange, and yet known, too, like a place in – yes – in a dream. I stood there in my wrinkled suit, with my aching head and soiled mouth, wide-eyed but not quite awake, staring fixedly into that patch of sunlit garden with an amnesiac's numbed amazement. But then, am I not always like that, more or less? When I think about it, I seem to have lived most of my life that way, stalled between sleep and waking, unable to distinguish between dream and the daylight world. In my mind there are places, moments, events, which are so still, so isolated, that I am not sure they can be real, but which if I had recalled them that morning would have struck me with more vividness and force than the real things surrounding me. For instance, there is the hallway of a farmhouse where I went once as a child to buy apples. I see the polished stone floor, cardinal red. I can smell the polish. There is a gnarled geranium in a pot, and a big pendulum clock with the minute-hand missing. I can hear the farmer's wife speaking in the dim depths of the house, asking something of someone. I can sense the fields all around, the light above the fields, the vast, slow, late-summer day. I am there. In such remembered moments I am there as I never was at Coolgrange, as I seem never to have been, or to be, anywhere, at any time, as I, or some essential part of me, was not there even on that day I am remembering, the day I went to buy apples from the farmer's wife, at that farm in the midst of the fields. Never wholly anywhere, never with anyone, either, that was me, always. Even as a child I seemed to myself a traveller who had been delayed in the middle of an urgent journey. Life was an unconscionable wait, walking up and down the platform, watching for the train. People got in the way and blocked my view, I had to crane to see past them. Yes, that was me, all right.

  I picked my way down through the silent house to the kitchen. In the morning light the room had a scrubbed, eager aspect. I moved about warily, unwilling to disturb the atmosphere of hushed expectancy, feeling like an uninitiate at some grand, rapt ceremony of light and weather. The dog lay on a dirty old rug beside the stove, its muzzle between its paws, watching me, a cres
cent of white showing in each eye. I made a pot of tea, and was sitting at the table, waiting for it to draw, when Joanne came in. She was wearing a mouse-grey dressing-gown belted tightly about her midriff. Her hair was tied up at the back in a thick, appropriately equine plume. It really was remarkable in colour, a vernal russet blaze. Immediately, and not for the first time, I found myself picturing how she must be flossed elsewhere, and then was ashamed, as if I had misused the poor child. Seeing me, she halted, of course, ready to bolt. I lifted the teapot in a friendly gesture, and invited her to join me. She shut the door and edged around me with a panic-stricken smile, keeping the table between us, and took down a cup and saucer from the dresser. She had red heels and very white, thick calves. I thought she must be about seventeen. Through the fog of my hangover it occurred to me that she would be bound to know something about the state of my mother's finances – whether, for instance, those ponies were making money. I gave her what was intended to be a boyish, encouraging smile, though I suspect it came out a broken leer, and told her to sit down, that we must have a chat. The tea, however, was not for her, but for my mother – for Dolly, she said. Well! I thought, Dolly, no less! She made off at once, with the saucer grasped in both hands and her agitated smile fixed on the trembling liquid in the cup.

  When she was gone I poked about morosely for a while, looking for the papers that had been on the table yesterday, the bills and ledgers and chequebook stubs, but found nothing. A drawer of the little bureau from my father's study was locked. I considered forcing it open, but restrained myself: in my hungover mood I might have smashed the whole thing to bits.

  I wandered off through the house, carrying my teacup with me. In the drawing-room the carpet had been taken up, and a pane of glass in one of the windows was broken, and there was glass on the floor. I noticed I had no shoes on. I opened the garden door and stepped outside in my socks. There was a smell of sun-warmed grass and a faint tang of dung in the rinsed, silky air. The black shadow of the house lay across the lawn like a fallen stage-flat. I ventured a step or two on the yielding turf, the dew seeping up between my toes. I felt like an old man, going along shakily with my cup and saucer rattling and my trouser-cuffs wet and crumpled around my ankles. The rosebeds under the window had not been tended for years, and a tangle of briars rioted at the sills. The faded roses hung in clusters, heavy as cloth. Their particular wan shade of pink, and the chiaroscuro of the scene in general, put me in mind of something. I halted, frowning. The pictures – of course. I went back into the drawing-room. Yes, the walls were empty, with here and there a square patch where the wallpaper was not as faded as elsewhere. Surely she hadn't -? I put my cup down carefully on the mantelpiece, taking slow, deep breaths. The bitch! I said aloud, I bet she has! My feet had left wet, webbed prints behind me on the floorboards.