Nick’s father had observed this progression from medical-test frenzy to night-time enquiries after employment hopes with the calm attentiveness that he gave to bookplates and display cabinets. He’d been an unhappy banker for twenty-seven years until they’d got rid of him, an apparent humiliation that had set him free to study butterflies and beetles. He was a simple man who considered work a species of evil.
Avoid it,’ he said firmly.
Elizabeth had just gone to the Green Room. This was the day following the Primrose Hill proposal, and, as if on cue, Charles offered Nick the third reason why he should travel.
‘See things. Make notes. Be fascinated.’ He was leaning forward, whispering loudly ‘Look at that streak in your mother’s hair. That’s what work can do to you.’
It had appeared rapidly over two weeks when Nick was sixteen. In fact, as he subsequently learned, there was no medical explanation for the change. But Nick looked to legend if science was found wanting, and something similar had happened to Thomas More and Marie Antoinette before they were executed. He told his father.
‘Precisely,’ said Charles. ‘There’s no rush. Have you thought of Down Under?’
Nick hadn’t, but he liked the idea. It stirred his soul, for the phrase conjured up the ultimate voyage. He’d be able to wear a hat with corks dangling from strings. He could legitimately have a machete in his belt. A week or so later Charles phoned an old client in Brisbane who, it transpired, had a nephew with a surgery in Rockhampton.
‘Where?’ asked Nick.
‘Rocky’ Charles paused as if he were surveying millions of bleating sheep. ‘That’s what the locals call it.’
‘Oh dear, no …’ Elizabeth underlined a sentence in a brief She surfaced momentarily ‘Who?’
‘Not who,’ said Nick, with the relief that comes before a parting ‘It’s a place.’
‘Where?’
‘The land of Oz.’
She was stunned. She’d thought it was all talk. ‘Oz,’ she said, sinking.
Nick took off from Heathrow in the rain. The plane pushed through the cloud and it was just blue: a wonderful, clean, endless blue, as if he’d entered a sapphire. He caught a night coach out of Sydney, taking the front seat, and the headlights opened up the future. By morning they were cutting through oceans of high green sugar cane. For lunch he stood barefoot on the blistering tarmac drinking fresh pineapple juice. He could smell the sea. There wasn’t a sheep in sight.
The nephew was called Ivan and he laboured under the misapprehension that Nick’s father had bestowed all manner of financial blessings on his uncle’s business — which simply wasn’t possible — and so Nick received a sort of reward by proxy For a modest amount of work, he received immodest remuneration. The world was indeed a different place when things were upside down.
Nick did a weekly stint at a school in Yeppoon where there were fat cane toads in the swimming pool. A sub-aqua club shared the facility once a week. Nick joined them and duly signed up. He bought the gear. He took a course. And he discovered yet another world, but bigger and cleaner and deeper and more mysterious than any place he’d ever known. Out of sight, countless tiny polyps had built the biggest thing on earth: a reef, a barrier, a coral kingdom.
Then the letters from his mother had started to arrive, wistful things, not signed by his father. At first they looked back to his early school days — the time she’d missed. But then her tone became inquisitive. She wanted to know when he’d be returning. For some reason he couldn’t write back, so he lunged for the phone on the evening of his birthday He ‘let slip’ that he’d be staying another year — something he’d thought of anyway ‘What about Papua New Guinea?’ said his father. ‘The Bundi do a butterfly dance.’ His mother mumbled that Christmas was coming ‘The house is huge and empty without that awful music. Your trainers are still by the door, where you left them. I keep thinking of your feet.’
Then one day when he was diving off Green Island he understood. He was treading water. A queue of small brightly coloured fish was lined up before some sort of plant rising from the coral. It was like a car wash. The leaves, or whatever they were, opened up and a fish swam in. After a moment the leaves opened again, the fish left and the next one took his place. And there, at that depth, watching fish get themselves cleaned up, he realised that his mother wanted to tell him something; that she couldn’t write about it; and that she hadn’t mentioned it to her husband. Nick sorted out the flight.
A few days later his mother was dead in a parked car. She was sitting at the wheel, eyes closed, with a smile on her face. It was only when a pedestrian knocked on the window that anyone realised that anything was wrong. A paramedic found her mobile phone in the footwell. She must have dropped it as she tried to dial for help. Within reach, on the passenger seat, was a set of antique spoons, marked ‘£30’.
On the plane to Singapore Nick forced his head against the window. A most awful wave of emotion racked him. He cried desperately. The woman next to him asked for his yoghurt, and he couldn’t even face her to say ‘Yes’. His mother was out of reach. He’d travel now for twenty-two hours and he’d get no nearer. By the time he reached Manchester the impact of grief had been anaesthetised around a painful truth: his mother had wanted to tell him something, and he’d left it too late. In the churchyard during the burial, Nick recalled the childhood exchange that had often ended a day of revelations. She’d sit on his bed, stroking his hair:
‘No secrets?’ she’d whisper. ‘None.’
More quietly: ‘You can always tell me anything.’
He would study her in the dark with a child’s careful eyes, absorbing this insight: his mother received much, but she did not give.
Why did he recognise that only now? Nick slipped out of the pantry. On entering the hall a discreet cough made him turn:
‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t know what to say Dreadful business, if you ask me.’
3
Anselm kept his socks in a wig tin. It was large and dinted, a thing from his days at the Bar. His name was painted in gold upon the side. The wig itself rested upon a bust of Plato, part of the miscellany of oddments that he’d kept on becoming a monk (the remainder being his books and a jazz record collection, both of which accrued to the benefit of the community). The tin was still in service. Anselm used it daily as he’d done in that other life.
After lunch Anselm joined the community for recreation in the common room. It was a relatively important moment because he was wearing glasses for the first time in public. He’d chosen what he thought were modest horn-rimmed frames, but the view of Bruno was that he looked a cross between a futures trader and an owl. He’d been told to wear them all the time. Colouring slightly, he put them on and picked up a newspaper.
No one noticed, perhaps because the alignment of chairs cut him out of three conversations. On his right, Wilf timidly observed that as an entertainer Liszt could reasonably be compared to Richard Clayderman, given his penchant for transcribing other people’s good tunes; on his left Cyril expanded (loudly) on the double-entry ledger system; and straight ahead Bernard tried to find a word that rhymed with ‘murder’.
‘How about “merger”?’
‘We’re not a company,’ said someone.
“‘Herder”?’
‘We’re not a farm,’ observed another.
‘“Murmur”’.
‘Ah,’ said Wilf, crossing over, ‘that is expressly forbidden in The Rule.’
Murmuring. Grumbling from the heart. It could kill a community Anselm hid behind the raised paper, his mind on the funeral and his wig tin. Elizabeth, he thought, would be buried by now. The key lay in an envelope covered by socks. He’d looked at it every day, until he almost didn’t see it any more. Anselm had fished it out that morning knowing the funeral was underway A brief note recorded the address of a security firm where the safety deposit box was retained. Elizabeth had chosen Sudbury, a town near Larkwood. He’d thumbed the key, pondering her courtesy Then he’d put it back, firmly closing the lid.