Past the Prince William. Past the Council buildings where once the baths had been where Dorry swam. He placed his left hand on his chest as he drew up again for the lights, and blew the blue cigar smoke, painfully pleasant, out of his mouth. Common on the left, criss-crossed with paths.
What was the name of that thesis you were writing, Dorry? ‘Romantic Poetry and the Sense of History’? And now you are living with a historian. What do you learn from history, Dorry? Was it history that made you come and plunder your father’s house? Or the opposite? Did you want to escape history, to put it all behind you — me, her, those twenty-odd years in that house? To have your moment, your victory at last, with one wild gesture? But — don’t you see? — it’s the moment (framed in the doorway with your heavy box of loot) that captures you.
And have you escaped history, down there in Bristol? Found new life? Encumbered with all those things of hers, encumbered with the money I sent you (that money, which was only converted history). Don’t you see, you’re no freer than before, no freer than I am? And the only thing that can dissolve history now is if, by a miracle, you come.
39
He turned into Leigh Drive. He had put on the car radio. The weather man was saying, in apologetic tones, that rain was expected for the morning. But along the curving pavements, the sycamores and rowan trees were stirring blithely in the deepening sun. Earlier homecomers were already out, in shaded front gardens, watering flowers and trimming edges. Mr Norris, in number twenty-eight, knobbly-kneed in long khaki shorts, like a dauntless colonial. Mr Dixon, in number thirty, with a pair of shears.
He drove onto the crazy paving of the garage drive and stopped. The neighbours, with their clippers and hoses, would look up, seeing the cream coloured Hillman, and think, ‘He’s early’; and then continue their tasks. ‘Don’t blame him, on an evening like this.’ They would see his usual stout figure stepping from the car; but they wouldn’t see the pain swelling inside his ribs. Mr Dixon waved. He got out, the engine running, to unlock the garage. The metal handles were hot to touch and as he pulled open the heavy doors he had to gauge the effort carefully. Not now. He returned to the car, drove it into the garage, emerged again with his briefcase, and shut, laboriously, the two doors. Then he walked along the path by the bay window and the hydrangeas to the front door.
Outside, all was clear, obvious. Inside he seemed to enter a submerged, aqueous world in which the past was embedded like sunken treasure. He’d drawn all the curtains in the morning to keep the house cool; and he moved now, slowly, like a diver with heavy boots, through a shady, flickering world, shot with eddies and swirls of light, where the sun found its way through chinks or penetrated dimly, as into the hollows of a wreck, through the rippled curtains. He hung his jacket over the post at the foot of the stairs and put his briefcase in the usual place beside the umbrella stand. The ticking barometer-clock, the photographs on the wall loomed through the ooze, and as he opened the door into the living-room, the polished cabinets, one for china, one for glass, the green baize on the oval table, the spiralling stem of the standard lamp swam into view, as if he were really discovering, let down in his diving suit, a world left long ago, miraculously preserved. ‘See, things remain.’
He crossed to the french windows and drew back the beige curtains, so that the murky relics inside were suddenly raised once more into the fresh, familiar light of the present. Should he redraw them? Was it more fitting to return to the veiled museum-world? But he kept them open. The lilac was half within the shadow of the house, but its upper leaves, where the mauve cones had already bloomed and died, fluttered in the sunshine. He opened the quarter lights of the window so that the sound of lawn-mowers, clippers, a smell of cut grass trickled in on the breeze.
She could never get enough air. Or was it that air assailed her?
He turned round again to face the room. The clock on the mantelpiece showed half-past six. Its hands might have stopped for ever at that position, like a clock rescued from some catastrophe, recording the exact moment of disaster. But not yet, not yet.
Normally, when he returned from the shop he would change his clothes, eat the meal that Mrs Pritchard left, prepared but uncooked, in the kitchen, wash up, sit at the table and make up his books — or, on an evening like this, potter gently in the garden. But there was no need of those things now. He had been lifted clear, it seemed, of that frame of routine that had been built around him, able to see it at last like some visitor from outside. So that his feet led him to wander now, with the immunity of a ghost, round this deserted monument of a house.
He climbed the stairs. Each step cost an effort. Yet he could almost encourage the pain now. He passed into the bedroom, gloomy behind the drawn curtains; into Dorry’s room — lingering several minutes; into the spare bedroom with its long, quilt-covered trunk. He ran his eyes diligently over objects, like a curator making a final tour before the gallery is locked.
It is all here, Dorry. Locked in little mementos, fixed in little tokens of the past. As if its only purpose were to be saved for this final glance.
He opened the heavy lid of the trunk. This required concentration. His hands reached down to a red tin box, hidden beneath other boxes full of objects wrapped in tissue-paper and old newspaper.
You never delved this far when you came. Did I prevent you? These are the letters she wrote to me when I was a quartermaster’s clerk in Hampshire and she worked at the Food Office. How good we always were at minding the store. How well we’ve kept everything. Up till now.
His eyes studied the worn envelopes, with the addresses crossed out, several times, for re-use, and the red stamps with the head of George VI. But he didn’t open the folded notepaper.
Sometimes, in museums, Dorry, you think what you see isn’t real. And these (he took another batch of envelopes from the tin box), these are all your letters from college — when you would write just to me and not to her.
The china shepherd and shepherdess on the dressing-table still anticipated their embrace. He wasn’t aware how many times he slipped from one room to another, inspecting their silent contents. Was it to make sure all was complete, secure? To summon life from those unmoving objects? To laugh at their fraudulence? Perhaps he was already sitting, motionless himself, in the armchair where he’d decided he would sit, and it was only some shadow of himself, touching but not touching these frozen items of stock, who drifted now — out of his daughter’s room — onto the landing at the top of the stairs.
I don’t believe in ghosts, Dorry. But sometimes, alone in this house, I’ve thought she’s watching me, her moist eyes stalking me still, ensuring that I keep all just as it was. Perhaps she’s watching me now. Is her face set, Dorry, in that old tenacity? Or smiling? Or torn with remorse? And what does she want now, watching over me? Is she saying: Forget her, Willy? Or is she hoping, too — you will come?
He grasped the bannister to descend. His head swam, looking down. Don’t fall. He came down, gingerly at first, then more rapidly. No more precautions. He picked up his jacket from the stair-post. He moved across the hall, not looking at the photographs on the wall. The needle in the barometer pointed to ‘Change’.
In the living-room he eyed the clock as if there were some deadline.
Twenty-past seven. You wouldn’t come till after my normal time for getting in.
The shadow had crept further up the lilac tree. Bryant would have closed, an hour ago, at Pond Street. Miss Fox would be on her way to Broadstairs. Sandra would be home — trying on again that new dress? Mrs Cooper would have opened her pay-packet at last, and discovered, beside her normal wage, the five hundred pounds.