I told him I would be having a cookout before I left. It would have been Patrick’s sixty-fourth birthday in a week. I wanted to mark that and my own imminent departure.
I liked Winks. I wished I could show him the stories: I would have welcomed his thoughts. He might even have been able to ease my worries by pointing out some trivial discrepancy between the fiction and reality. He would have been an ideal reader, but if any part of the story turned out to be true, it would have put him in a difficult position.
Did I think Patrick had killed Mr Fernshaw? It was a literal-minded explanation of the story, I told myself. Equally, that didn’t prevent its being true. But what was truth in this case? I didn’t think that Patrick had ever had a boxing lesson; I was sure Mrs Fernshaw didn’t cook curry and had never been near the Indian subcontinent. I doubted Mr Fernshaw had ever had ‘oakum’ on his boots. Whatever that was.
But what was true was that my uncle was an isolated old man who was troubled by memories of the past. His neighbours were a deaf family, minus one father, who it seemed had been abusive to his wife and children. And these were all spelled out in the story.
It did violence to my memory of my uncle to think that he was capable of such an act, of course. I had never seen him so much as lose his temper, though I knew he was capable of it. I know that when his relationship with my father was at its nadir, my father was physically afraid of him. But this, I thought, was my dad being neurotic. It wasn’t based on a rational assessment of Patrick’s character.
To accept that my uncle would attack someone, hurt someone in a premeditated way, was to accept that I didn’t know him at all. I hadn’t accepted this, but just thinking about it, entertaining the possibility, made Patrick seem stranger and more remote. I wanted to exonerate him, if only so that I could have my image of him restored to its former innocence. Looking back, I suppose I was guilty of a kind of sentimentality.
When Patrick talked about writing, which he didn’t often, because he was superstitious, he sometimes said that a story was a way of asking a question so loosely that the writer wouldn’t even be aware of its real meaning. I think he was afraid of those questions, the ones he couldn’t control, and which couldn’t be answered with any of the vast array of facts that he had stored up in his cranium. I think that’s why he had virtually stopped writing. Better to make lists, better to crack jokes, better to dazzle without any risk of self-exposure. It wasn’t surprising that the stories had stayed on his desk. Mycroft was a dangerous character. He was capable of getting all of us into trouble.
*
It was another overcast day. The summer was already entering island mythology as one of the worst in fifteen or twenty years. I felt now that the Ionians were taking a grim pleasure in each fresh spell of rain and would be disappointed if the weather took a turn for the better.
Nathan stood at the aft rail of the ferry watching Ionia recede into the distance as the engines churned the sea into froth right under him. Judging by the look on his face, he didn’t get off the island very much. I told him so. ‘It looks small, doesn’t it?’ he said. I told him it was small, then felt bad for saying it.
‘Which is bigger,’ Patrick had asked once, ‘Little England or Great Britain.’ And then: ‘Great Britain or the United States?’ I got the answer wrong in both cases. The gross disparity in size between Britain and the United States had come as something of a shock to me. Since then, America has always struck me as some kind of bigger and more glamorous younger brother. I think the Portuguese must feel the same away about Brazil. The younger brother who went away and made his fortune, while the older one stayed home and looked after the family farm. One night, there’s a knock at the door and it’s young Brazil, or Yankee Doodle Dandy, in a sharp new suit, flashing his money around and full of advice about how to modernise the cowshed.
I often had the feeling, though I tried to deny it, that England was tired and second-rate, and that it was precisely its tiredness and second-rateness that fated it to be a significant part of my life. I could not identify with the superiority that Americans — even Patrick — took for granted. English people took pride in failure. ‘Good losers’, people said of the English — but that was because they had so much practice. Primacy was the American obsession. ‘We’re number one!’ And its sportsmen had developed a repertoire of gesture — high fives, clenched fists, chest bumps — as complex as Ionian sign for signalling their superiority. In England, low self-esteem was part of the national character, although it was partly concealed by our grandiose insistence on our glorious past.
I bought Nathan his boat from a shop in the Cape Cod Mall, a better-stocked version of the one on Ionia. I tried to persuade him to buy one that was more nautical, with little rowlocks and oars, but he wasn’t having any of it. I had to keep my own authoritarian tendency in check. I had a prejudice against the turtle boat. It was slightly effete. It was too young and gimmicky. It was a toy. I was being like my father, who refused to buy me the Wendy house I wanted for my eighth birthday and got me a pup tent instead. I realised that part of me wouldn’t be happy until I had cajoled Nathan into a mapping expedition in the sand dunes.
We had two hours before the next ferry crossing, so I suggested we go to the flea market in Barnstable. I don’t think Nathan even knew what it was, but he must have liked the sound of it.
It was bigger than I remembered. A faint drizzle lay heavily on the gathering; the air was thick and warm, like damp wool. The stalls were laid out in neat rows over several acres of wet grass. Nathan skipped off to examine a stall of rusty toy boats. Before he went I asked him to find out where we could buy some fleas. He gave me a pained look and rolled his eyes, and I watched him disappear into the crowd.
The vendors, who were retirees for the most part, sat in deck chairs behind their trestle tables, selling things that were not really antiques at all. A velvet reproduction armchair was sprouting springs through the ripped fabric of its seat. It wasn’t antique furniture, it was senile furniture. There were little tins of gramophone needles, glass bottles, unloved LPs. If you were lucky, you might find a copper washbasin or a pair of snowshoes, but it would take a lot of searching.
This had been one of Patrick’s favourite places. The flea market was guaranteed to get him on to the mainland. He’d sometimes show up at the house in Truro before seven in the morning to take us along with him. Or he’d appear afterwards, the boot of his car stuffed with treasures which he’d show my dad in the driveway.
I rarely saw him happier than he was then, or at the flea market itself, his eyes bright with the prospect of imminent acquisitions.
Occasionally, when we were with him, we saw a book we wanted and he’d urge us to haggle. ‘Offer him five dollars for two.’ ‘See if she’ll take fifty cents for it.’ I had seen him walk away a hundred times from things he desperately wanted for the sake of a dollar or two, or because he found the vendor churlish. It wasn’t exactly meanness. The arbitrary budgets acted as a brake on his desires. If he’d been a millionaire, there would have been something else he would have forbidden himself, as though a thousand small acquisitions could take the place of a single, inadmissible desire.
I had lost sight of Nathan. Big fat raindrops had started to wash away the remaining charm of the flea market. Eventually, I spotted him far off, wandering among the stalls. Small and serious, he moved with the peculiar invisibility of a well-behaved child.