I let them form, the thoughts that are born of the middle hours of the night, I let them grow firm and real in my mind and become the plan for what I realized was now the only possible course of action against our circumstances. Everything had been leading to this, though nothing had prepared us for it, but no matter; it was as if we were making our way into an obscuring white mist that would disperse before us and show the way ahead. I could see that our path had been there all the time, merely hidden.
Before it was light I got up. First I climbed the ladder to the attic. Apart from the nest of dusty curtains where I had been sleeping, there was hardly a space not strewn with rubbish: papers, books, journals baled and tied with hemp string, plastic binders of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, but mainly notebooks and photographs and loose typed sheets, covered with crossings-out and annotations. I was pleased that Arthur, in all his rummaging and ransacking up here, had not had the strength to dislodge the heavy things. There was furniture: a kidney-shaped coffee table set upside down, its spindly gold legs splayed like antennae, a chair half re-caned, two dismantled beds whose slats, poles, and headboards lay sloping in against the roof beams. Everything was threaded together by wispy brown loops of cobwebs. I also found, stashed behind a bundle of tied tent poles, more than I had hoped for: a mattress with rusty-edged stains, and shaded with what looked like charcoal or soot. I cleared the books and papers off the floor with the edge of my foot and shoved them into heaps against the walls, then I hauled the mattress onto the floor. It fell with a whump, raising a cloud of its own sticky dust that smelled of dead grass and feathers and dried blood.
I went back to the spare room and collected bedding, which I pushed up the ladder ahead of me. I returned to the kitchen and made sandwiches and two flasks of tea. I found a jar for milk, and filled a large plastic jug with water. All these I carried up the ladder and set neatly next to the mattress. I got cups and plates and paper napkins, biscuits and fruit to go up, too. We could have nothing hot to eat, I had decided, in case the smell carried. I liked to give Arthur a hot meal every night, but he would miss it only this once. As soon as it was dark again we’d be on our way.
There was one other practical consideration that could not be ignored. I brought out the largest bucket from under the sink, emptied half a bottle of disinfectant into it, and added some water. I got the bucket up the ladder and set it in a corner behind as discreet a screen as I could devise from stacked boxes and an upended decorating table.
It was now after five o’clock and the sky was yellow. Birds were already screeching. The new day was burning the condensation off the skylight and soon would be reaching in and pasting the mattress with a rectangle of buttery sunshine. I pulled one of the old curtains from the pile of carpet scraps and burlap and underlays, and rigged it up against the glass, wedging it in tight. It was patterned in red and yellow and green; light shone through and cast glowing jewels across our bed. Suddenly I feared that Arthur might wake and find me gone, so I hurried back down.
He was asleep on his back. My entering the room roused him. At once his eyes were upon me, searching and finding, and they closed again.
Ruth? he said, though he seemed still asleep. Ruth, Ruth. I whispered to him that it was time to wake up. His eyes opened, and closed again. His mouth wriggled and settled into a thin pout.
Come on, I said. Wake up. It’s time. I pushed the bedclothes back. He turned over, gathering what was left of sleep tight into himself. I stroked his arm and gave his earlobe a little pinch.
Wake up, Arthur, I said. It’s time.
I pulled his feet to the floor and drew him upright but he kept his eyes closed, and when I let go he sank back into the pillows. To the east on the other side of the house the sun was almost risen; through this eclipsed window the light had begun to gleam sullenly.
Arthur, wake up! Come on, it’s time to go.
He didn’t say anything or even open his eyes, but he allowed me to help him up again until he was sitting on the bed. I found his slippers and fitted them over his feet, as stiff and grey as dead flounders. There was a delta of purple veins reaching across both of his ankles. I pulled him up by the hands and he stood swaying and unquestioning as if he’d given up all resistance and all sensation in his desire to stay asleep. When I led him along the landing and indicated the attic ladder, he went on ahead of me without haste or curiosity. By the time I had drawn the ladder up after us and dropped the trapdoor in place he had crawled onto the mattress and was lying curled and still.
I expected Tony to be a man of eager habits and that we would not have long to wait. It was still early when I heard the doorbell. I waited for some other sound, fearing something rushing and cataclysmic, some rapacious incursion, but at first there was nothing, not even the key in the lock. Then came the sounds of Tony and his mother talking and moving, it seemed casually and at random, through the house: feet on the stairs, opening doors, calling from one room to another. By degrees, voices were raised and grew urgent.
Have you checked the bathroom? See if he’s got stuck.
Wait. Look in there.
Arthur! Oh, God, where’s he got to?
I’ll try the garden.
Maybe he’s had a fall.
Go and check the bedrooms again. Check the sides, in case he’s fallen out.
The sounds receded for a while but I knew the two of them were still there. They would be thorough. Even after they had finished searching, they would not leave. They might check the hospitals to see if somehow Arthur had been transported away in the night. They would probably call the police. We had hours still to wait.
I did not dare move for fear of the floor creaking. I watched Arthur, praying he would go on sleeping, but he shifted and turned, groaned and woke up. For a wild second or two after his eyes focused, he didn’t know where he was. I leaned across, smoothed the side of his face with my hand and quieted him with a finger to my lips. I pointed downward and pressed the finger to my lips again, and then placed it gently on his lips.
He nodded. Nosey parkers, he whispered.
They can’t stay forever, I said. They’ll go soon.
Then it’ll be just us, he said, smiling.
I reached for his hand. It felt dry and loose as if his finger bones were afloat in a paper glove.
Around us the attic air grew grey and silky, and the sounds of voices and movement resumed in a dreamy way and swam like warm dust in the ether. Later, there were new voices and more footsteps, and the searching began again. All this was progressing at a time when we were used to sleeping and so we listened only half awake, half dreaming, to these warnings we didn’t need, that below us, another day had got people in its crass and ruthless grip and was propelling them through the hours, using them up with things that didn’t matter. We listened, and waited, and rested together untouchable, answerable only to each other.
All is quiet. Arthur is turned away from me, on his side. Now and again his hand flutters on his hip and a soft whistle or scraping noise emerges from his throat. I lie awake in the stained glow through the curtained glass and think of the shimmering sky and the surface of life beyond the strange warm altar of our mattress. Around me the air ripens with heat, and atoms of dust spin and glitter in it, and I sense a thousand secret quickenings in our attic universe of abandoned things and all their gummy folds and crannies and crumbling fibres, all the microscopic barbs of disintegrating matter on which the tiniest living things will catch and cling. Below me the house sighs with solitary, daylong weariness.
So we sleep, or wake and lie looking at the slopes of the roof, and turn to each other sometimes, and twice we stir ourselves as if by agreement and sit up and eat together, shyly at first and then with the silent, slight formality of people accustomed to sharing food but a little reticent and tongue-tied about the sharing of pleasure.