On a Monday morning in January, we walked to Vivien’s as usual and, as usual, Cathy picked up the work she was given and took it outside. I chose an armchair by the fireplace and wrapped myself in one of the soft quilts. I rested my feet on a small leather pouf the colour of leaf litter. Vivien crouched by the hearth. The fire was unlit. She took old newspapers from the pile and scrunched them into tight balls then packed them into the grate. I watched her place coals on the newspapers then lay strips of wood around the top like the spokes of a wheel. She lit four matches and placed them by corners of the paper such that the body of the structure was slowly overtaken by rippling flames: bright in parts like ice, dull in others like scorched tarmac.
Back at school, I had learnt to read and write and count and add up but when I remembered the lessons it was not the development of these skills but the series of profound revelations that held their clarity. People used to live in caves with woolly mammoths. There were tiny forgotten creatures buried deep inside rocks. There was once a precious little baby named Jesus. Salt and sugar dissolved in water, and this meant they were soluble. Pipistrelles were the smallest bats and they could see with their ears. Rivers cut deep paths through mountains. The moon had no light of its own. Joseph wore a technicoloured dream-coat.
The lessons with Vivien were different. Today I was supposed to be reading a book about aeroplane mechanics. It contained illustrations of the components and diagrams of how they fitted together. It set out American planes alongside their Soviet counterparts and made comparisons between them. A few weeks ago Vivien had told me that she was concerned that she was not teaching us enough about science. Science and technology, she had said. And the natural world. So she had started giving us the books she had about vintage cars, the flora and fauna of the Brecon Beacons, mushrooms and fungi of the British Isles, geology of the Grand Canyon, and the manuals from cameras that had been taken to junk shops years before, with instructions about shutter speeds and aperture settings. And with all these she supplied a dictionary. She wanted to teach us the words in the books, the definitions of the objects and organisms and how to identify them by name. I did not learn much about how anything worked, or why, or how all the birds and beetles stayed alive. I just learnt their taxonomy.
Vivien remained by the fire to watch it take hold. She stretched out her hands to warm them. Her palms turned a light tawny, slowly, from the heat and glow they reflected. I wondered about her taxonomy. I wondered how Vivien could be described.
‘What do you do, Vivien?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
She stopped speaking and I did not want to prompt her further, but she soon started again. ‘Nothing at the moment, but I’ve done various things over the years. I’m older than you might think.’
I really had no idea how old she might be. My only real comparison for adult age was Daddy, who was so worn yet so vital that it was impossible for strangers to discern his years.
‘I’ve been a painter,’ she went on, ‘and a poet. And I’ve worked in offices for money. And I spent four months becoming a lawyer but gave it up. And I even nearly became a naval officer, once, but that was actually completely ridiculous because I’m not very active and I don’t know anything about boats and I’ve never spent much time near the sea. I mean, I rented a cottage overlooking the Norfolk coast once, but I found I hardly ever looked out of the window, and when I went out for walks I went inland. Strange that, isn’t it?’
‘When Cathy and I lived with our Granny Morley, we walked by sea all time.’
Vivien smiled without teeth. ‘Most people would. But I don’t have any real interest in anything, you know. I don’t really care about anything. Not about the sea or the outdoors or nature or anything. I don’t really have any hobbies. My mother and grandmother used to sew things.’ She picked up one of the embroidered cushions. ‘But it doesn’t interest me. I do things for a bit and then get bored. Like painting or writing. It interested me for a while but I gave up.’
Some sparks flew from the fire and she swept them up and moved away from the hearth. Her knees cracked as they were flexed.
‘I think about swimming but I don’t swim,’ she said. ‘I imagine what it would be like to be in the water, especially the sea. I imagine what it would be like to dip my body into the freezing salt water and how it would feel to be fully submerged and then come up for air but I never do it. I don’t go to the beach and I don’t get into the water. Sometimes I think I could have been an actor. It’s the one profession I’ve never tried. In one way or another, I have spent my whole life impersonating other people. Acting out fantasies with personalities that I’ve made up in my head. Brave people that go about the world and do things. But it’s not like it’s the achievements that matter to me, it’s the interest. The interest the people I play take in the world around them. I suppose they love it in a way that I don’t. They’re fanatics.’
She sat down on the sofa but remained erect rather than sinking back into its curves. ‘What are you, Daniel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What are your father and sister?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well if you don’t, then how can I? But I do know they’re fanatics. When they care about something, whatever it is, they care about it to the full. They care about it as much as anyone can. They don’t pretend, like an actor would. They’re not concerned with being seen to be doing something. They just do it.’
‘Daddy likes to fight,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Vivien. ‘I know all about that.’ She looked as if she did. She looked as if she knew more than I did. I wondered again how she and Daddy knew each other. Daddy the brute and this well-dressed, mild-mannered lady who liked to sit inside her stylish house with her stylish possessions.
‘It’s his job,’ I said. ‘He says it’s just something he does to get paid.’
‘Do you believe it’s just a job?’
I looked up at Vivien for a moment. Then into the fire.
‘A lot of men feel like they should be violent,’ said Vivien. ‘They grow up seeing a violent life as something to aspire to. They don’t have any real sense of what it means and they hate every minute of it. Your father is not like that. There is a tension about him when he approaches a violent act and a calm about him when it is finished. The times at which he is on edge are those just before he strikes. He is most frustrated when a fight is a couple of months behind him and a couple of months ahead of him. That’s when you’ll see him shake. Your Daddy needs it. The violence. I wouldn’t say he enjoys it, even, but he needs it. It quenches him.’ She sat and looked at me. Minutes passed, possibly, but I did not respond and she did not speak again until she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a whale, Daniel?’
I told her that I had not in real life, only on the television.
‘On the television have you seen a whale breach?’ she asked. ‘That’s when it jumps clean out of the water only to smack down onto the surface of the sea. Have you seen that? The almighty splash it makes?’
I told her that I had.
‘We don’t fully understand why whales do that but there have been many suggestions. Some people say that it’s to see the world and especially the sea from a different perspective, to catch a glimpse of what it is they spend their lives swimming around in. It’s like us humans sending rockets up to the moon only to spend the next fifty years gazing at the pictures of our own earth. The whales want an experience like that. A different view. Some people have suggested that it’s not a visual experience they’re after but a sensual one. When they breach the water they feel the full size and heaviness of their own bodies in the air. They feel gravity and dry cold and when they smack the hard brine with their full airborne weight they quake to their blubber. People say that they’re trying to brush off dead skin, barnacles, lichen, and that breaching is like a horse scratching its rump against rough tree bark. But it meets at the same point, doesn’t it? The need for a physical sensation that they can’t get any other way. That sensation becomes a fixation and each time after they feel it the pressure slowly builds until they can feel it again. I think it’s something like that for the whales. They swim around for days, weeks even, feeding and sleeping and breathing and they start to think about that last time they jumped clean out of the water and how it felt when their head, then their body and fins, and then their tail, all emerged from the sea, and how it felt to momentarily hover in a substance that fills their lungs but dries their eyes, and then they remember especially about how it felt to return to the water after their moment in the air. That thump. That splash. The whale continues to think about the breach, more and more, until the urge to repeat becomes irresistible and it erupts out of the ocean only to fall again into it. And so it’s sated for a while. Your Daddy’s like that, I think. Like one of the great whales. And when he fights it’s like one of their breaches. But bloodier, much bloodier. And it isn’t a lone act. It’s not just an animal and the elements. There’s another animal too. Another human. But it’s the same. It quenches him.’