And I would carry on watching the black window because I knew he would be standing there, looking out. Few sounds reached into the shed from outside, so I would hear my chair creak as I pulled a blanket around myself, and settled. Arthur would be listening, too, I was certain, to his own breathing. His house would be quietly alive with the noises all houses make, and maybe the place seemed to him bigger and emptier, and those distant, lapping sounds from walls and pipes and floors louder, because she was no longer there. Perhaps he talked to her while he stood at the window. I wondered if he sensed her still in the house, or beyond it, somewhere out in the darkness. It was possible, of course, that he considered that the burial of her body really was the end of it. But if she was simply perished, and nowhere at all, would that mean she was now free, or somehow exiled? I would have liked to know if he pictured her still as she used to be, or if he imagined a changed appearance for her in some new existence as a spirit; there’s all the difference in the world.
Why is it easier to imagine that the dead might be waiting for us in darkness rather than in the light? For a while after my great-uncle died I cried every bedtime, terrified to go to sleep in case he was now a ghost and came visiting to take me to task for my part in his death. My grandmother told me that all you had to do to get rid of a ghost was to make a loud noise. She would make me cry “Away with you!” and clap my hands until I laughed. She had never been frightened of ghosts, she said, and I knew from the way she could smile in an empty room that that was true. But I also knew something she didn’t: that the dead never are quite away, never absolutely gone. They’re still there, caught in the very act of parting from us, betrayed by a swaying curtain of falling snow, by a movement behind a white sheet, by some trickery of sunlight and shadow. And imperfectly though their leave-taking may be enacted, yet it is quiet and quick and you could miss it in the taking of a breath, and then you wouldn’t know the road they took for they leave no clue where they are going; you would be left staring, hoping for a single last trace. But I clapped my hands and laughed just the same, and watched my grandmother smile.
Soon enough, anyway, I was burdened by other knowledge, on top of the shoplifting and the ghosts, that I couldn’t let my grandmother share. She knitted every afternoon for the Society for the Relief of Blind Orphans Overseas. I didn’t understand why the blind orphans overseas should find relief in socks and scarves and mittens particularly, though I worked out for myself that it must be for reasons to do with blindness or orphanhood that were more compelling than the overseas-ness; overseas meant a hot climate, surely too hot for hand-knitted woollies. I also wondered how she knew their sizes, and her telling me the things were sent off to Sales of Work never quite explained it.
One day she finished another baby matinée set-jacket, bonnet, and bootees-in a rather upsetting brown flecked with green, a colour difficult to imagine on any baby but since the blind orphan one overseas couldn’t mind I supposed the people looking after him wouldn’t, either. On my way upstairs a day or two later, I passed my mother’s bedroom. The door was ajar; I glanced in and saw, facedown on the bed, a human head. I let out a shriek, but I couldn’t drag my eyes away. It couldn’t be a head! I stared, and after a moment I could see that it wasn’t. It was a wig, an ugly, dark, curly wig. But before I’d begun to ask myself why my mother would have such a thing, I took a step nearer and saw what it really was: a heap of brown wool flecked with green. A single strand snaked out of it and wiggled across the bed into what was left of a forlorn and tiny sleeve.
Why hadn’t I noticed? I’d seen the colour before; the wool had been socks to begin with, at least twice. My mother was unravelling the orphans’ knitting and giving my grandmother the same yarn back to knit up again. I didn’t know why, and in the rush of sadness I felt for the orphans (and not for my grandmother, who seemed to blame, somehow) I didn’t really wonder. How long had they been going without? was all I could think. What would become of them now, orphaned, blind, overseas, and suddenly without their woollies?
After that I would come home from school to find my grandmother knitting the same thing she had made the week before and the week before that. I said nothing. Not knowing the point of my mother’s trickery deprived me of a good reason for exposing it, and as time went on and my curiosity grew, so did my fear of asking for an explanation. At some point I must have concluded that my mother was simply saving herself the cost of new yarn, but by then it was too late. Her deception had become mine also, and I sustained it with fervent and egotistical guilt.
When my grandmother’s memory for complicated stitchwork abandoned her and she grew impatient with the intricacies of sleeves and heels and collars, she turned to knitting scarves. My mother would give her the “new” wool in two or three bags, telling her it was red and green and yellow or blue and yellow and pink. Good, everyone likes stripes, my grandmother would say. She would work twenty rows from each bag in turn, smiling as a monotone grey or brown scarf grew from her waggling needles. She would let me choose the colour for the fringe, and in a loud, formal voice I would pretend to consider the green, the yellow, or the pink, my heart lopsided with tenderness and shame.
By the time I was nine I was concealing so much that keeping even direr truths from her was routine. I covered my mother’s increasingly prolonged absences by mentioning in passing that she was very tired again, just resting in bed. When she sobered up enough to put in bilious and remorseful appearances at mealtimes I unleashed irritating streams of talk to hide the fact that she was too hung-over to speak. Sitting between them, I looked from my mother’s pouchy, stupefied face to my grandmother’s, beaming sightlessly upon her golden girl, and I’d prattle on about nothing. When I came across empty bottles I got them past my grandmother and out to the bin quietly, without one ticking against another. Whatever the weather, every morning I opened windows all over the house hoping that enough new air would freeze out the pall of drink.
After a time the reasons for trying to keep my mother’s condition secret didn’t cross my mind. Concealment of one kind or another was to me by then a form of good manners, a necessary protective kindness; it progressed from being second nature to becoming my very nature. Because of it, I never could have grown up to be anything other than watchful and cautious. I never could have done otherwise than keep the distance from other people that enabled me to see dangers that they, more engaged in events, might not, and to prevent scenes that would upset them. This was the person I was, or believed myself to be, until that day in April.
Eventually, as I watched, poor Arthur would leave the bedroom window and wander downstairs, through the kitchen and into the conservatory. Once or twice early on he watered the plants there, stroking their leaves and inclining his head to them as if he were petting small living creatures. For a while after that he took to just sitting on a wicker chair, staring, and soon he was bringing papers in with him and would sit reading for hours at a time. I had the impression he read the same things over and over again. Sometimes he wrote.
He ate and drank, although very little. He would swallow milk straight from the carton, and then leave it half-full on the conservatory ledge where the sun would beat down on it all the following day. The next night or two nights later he might stir from his reading, wander across, and down whatever was left. I saw him bring in food and stand there eating with both hands. He seldom used a plate, but if he did he’d leave it behind. If he was forking something into his mouth out of a can, he would drop both can and fork on the floor when he had finished, as if he’d forgotten he was holding them. It mattered to me to know if he was eating canned food cold that should have been heated up, such as baked beans or soup, or if he was not neglecting himself quite so badly and was gorging on something like tuna or sweet corn. Once I saw him, in silhouette, digging with his fingers into something very small and oblong; it must have been a can of sardines. When he’d sucked each finger one by one he lifted the can to his lips and tipped his head back. My stomach heaved at the thought of his tongue questing into the corners. Those edges are lethal. I started to my feet and moaned, feeling the metal slice into his tongue, seeing bright red marbling appear across its coating of thick yellow oil, and run down and stain his lips. I could taste the tinny little plumes of blood mixing with his mouth juices all cloudy with fish scales and crumbs of bone as soft as pumice. I waited to hear him cry out. But all he did was drop the can and calmly wipe his mouth on his sleeve.