Out of Mind

'To take Robert for a little walk. You say where.'

Robert is standing beside me on the swept porch, wagging his tail. Behind us a young girl closes the door. I gingerly walk down the steps, stamp about with my black shoes on the snow-covered gravel path. I see the sharp footprints of a squirrel. At every hop, his tail has put an exclamation mark behind them. The girl puts her arm through mine. She does it naturally, as if she were my daughter.

'It's slippery here and there,' she says. 'Where are we going?'

'To the stone man.'

'The stone man?'

'Follow me.'

She has put up the hood of her anorak. Her blonde hair is hidden under the hood. You can smell the sea quite well from here. Seagulls stay at a sensible height when they see Robert running ahead of us. I wonder where we are going.

There is something adventurous about it. On this side the coast is rocky and here and there steep. The paths to the beach are narrow but this blonde girl is holding me firmly.

'Vera is a wonderful person,' she says all of a sudden, bluntly amid the bare pine trees.

'Oh, do you know her? Yes, she means everything to me. Everything. That's the only thing you sometimes worry about when you get older. That she might go before me. I don't think I could survive a winter like this on my own. Who would I have to talk to? We have done everything together, been through everything together. I was standing in the back yard one day, it was high summer, I remember there were birds singing all around me, and I saw her through the window, standing by the sink. She was cutting a loaf. I watched her. Slice after slice. A brown loaf, it was. That was all. That's the sort of thing I mean. Another person would see only a house, but everything is there: all the gestures, all the smells, all the words of my life. But now it's gone wrong. Every day something disappears, every day there's something gone. It leaks everywhere.'

'Come, you forget a few things from time to time but for the rest you're perfectly healthy, aren't you?'

'Who's to say? Let's leave the subject alone, shall we?'

Robert dashes across the wet-gleaming rocks behind which the sea-water swirls and runs into gulleys between the carelessly heaped stones. Here and there, in a hollow, a stagnant puddle has formed which will presently evaporate when the sun comes out. The water along the shore looks dark from the algae and seaweed that grow against the underside of the rocks. I look across the flat slabs of stone; in places they are covered with greyish-white furry seaweed. I turn my back to the sea. This makes me feel better at once, more stable.

'Is the stone man somewhere near here? You seem to be looking for something.'

'Did Vera tell you about him?'

'No, you did.'

'Did I. .?'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Here,' I say, 'you can see him from here. If you look to the right, to that rock jutting out into the sea. It's like a man lying on top of it, embedded in the stone, with his face turned towards the open sea. You see?'

A girl. Look at her. Peering. Screwing up her eyes a bit, like someone who is slightly short-sighted. She puts her hands into the pockets of her blue anorak and you can tell from her face that she sees nothing but stone and water.

'Everybody sees something different,' I say in order to console her. I can see him very clearly, but this may be because other people have pointed him out to me. The legend has it that he was shipwrecked long ago. He gazes out to sea, trying to lure ships towards the shore where they will founder on the rocks and he will have company at last. A typical sailor's yarn. All sailors are afraid of the shore, after all.

'I don't like the sea,' says the girl. She looks across the bay, which is at its widest here. 'I almost got drowned in it once.'

'So did a colleague of mine,' I say. 'Only he didn't need the sea for it. A bath tub was enough for him. Maybe I could have saved him.'

'Saved him? Were you there, then. . when it happened?

'No. I left, and then it happened.'

'Someone saved me,' she says. 'Someone. I'd gone too far out. Back on the beach I lost consciousness. When I came to, the man had disappeared. No one knew who he was. No one knew him.'

'Poor Karl.'

'Karl?'

'Do you know him? Karl Simic. That's how you pronounce it, Simmitch.'

'Shall we go back?' she says.

'All we need to do is follow Robert,' I say. 'Do you have to be home before dark?'

'I'm coming with you.'

'Are you staying for supper? Does Vera know?'

She nods. Vera might have told me. Too many things happen behind my back these days. It was the same at work towards the end. You were no longer taken altogether seriously. Just because you'd grown a day older. All respect and interest go by the board. I disengage my arm from hers.

'I want to walk on my own for a bit.'

She remains close behind me. I quicken my pace in order to get back to Vera sooner. Only with her can I 'still have what can be called a 'conversation'. (The others merely interrogate you or try to confuse you, lead you up the garden path.)

Can't understand this. Vera lives here, doesn't she? And now she has suddenly vanished, nowhere to be found, while a young girl is frying meat in the kitchen. Someone ought to explain this to me. I have looked everywhere but she is nowhere. It's the right house, I'm sure. Anyway, Robert would be the first to notice that mistake. He is fast asleep in his old familiar spot, tired from the open air. So am I, actually, but I can't afford to take a nap now. Must stay awake. This question has to be answered first.

Dusk is already falling. Vera never stays at the library as late as this. And since when have we had a girl to help in the house? I've said it before, more and more things are being schemed behind my back. I don't like it a bit.

Three, five, six, one, the number of the library. I still know it by heart. No one answers. So they're already closed.

I walk into the kitchen and ask whoever she is whether she knows where Vera has gone.

'She's with Ellen Robbins,' she says.

'That alters the situation.'

I must admit it smells delicious in here. The girl goes with me to the living room. Asks if she may play the piano.

She plays from memory. And then, because of the music, everything suddenly becomes clear and lucid. Of course I knew all along who she was but I couldn't place her in this environment. That can happen, that you initially fail to recognize a person out of their usual context.

I pull a chair up and look at the strong ringless fingers as they seek their way effortlessly over the black and white keys. How beautifully she plays! And then I do what I have always wanted to do but have never dared. She briefly goes on playing, but then she lifts my head from her lap and pushes me upright. In her fright she starts talking to me in English.

'You mustn't do that again. Otherwise I shall have to leave.'

All in rapid English. The lesson is clearly at an end, although I haven't played a single note to her yet. She leads me to the settee and then goes to the kitchen.

I sit straight up on the settee. For a moment it is as silent in the house as in a diving bell. Or does this silence well up inside me? I get up, go to the television set standing on a low oak table, and switch it on.

I watch a game with a lot of laughing people in a hall and constantly changing numbers at the bottom of the screen. Although I don't understand the game very well, I am clearly so engrossed in it that I haven't heard Vera come in. Maybe she walked on tiptoe because she thought I had fallen asleep in front of the television. She sits down beside me on the settee and asks if I had a good walk with Phil. So she knows more about this.

'How do you know her?'

'Through Dr Eardly. She's come to stay with us for a while.'

'I thought she was a friend of Kitty's. She's so young still.'