Coincidence: A Novel (10 page)

did rise anew

where spanned aloft a small stone bridge

where sprang a salmon up the ridge

among the stones and the pale cascade

where dragonflies and stoneflies played

where naked as a boy i laid

with all the canvas of a world displayed

 

and when the gunshot sounded plain

as a whistle from a distant train

and i half turned and turned again

i saw the bridge

i saw the salmon leap upstream

i felt the splash of spray

as one might dream

of sunlight and shadow

of presence and place

where naked as a man i laid

with blood upon my face

 

there are no guns on red pike crag

no missiles on scafell

there is no sound of cannon fire

no tolling of the bell

there are no cries from wounded men

no one to weep for solace when

the blood upon your face runs thin

and darkness takes away your pen

where naked as an ancient now

i beckon back and turn my brow

and think of her who lay with me

beside the stream

beneath the tree

 

Thomas closed the book. ‘Is it good?' he asked.

‘You tell me.'

‘I don't know. What do I know about poetry?'

‘No, it isn't especially good,' she said. ‘The metaphors are superficial, the language is very plain, the passion is pretty muted. He isn't always faithful to the metre, and the rhymes are simple – thin/pen, brow/now, stream/dream; but he has a following of a sort, and I wanted to explore that. I wanted to understand what draws people to his poetry.'

‘So what drew you to him?'

‘His blindness.'

‘You wanted to know what it might be like . . . to be blind?'

Azalea nodded. She held back her head as if decanting a tear.

‘Do you have blindness in your family?'

‘I once met a man who said he was my father. He was blind.'

‘You met a man who said . . . he was your
father
?'

‘Long story.'

‘And he was blind?'

‘Yes.'

‘And that drew you to this poet. This Loak?'

‘Yes.'

‘So where's the coincidence?' Thomas asked.

She gave a gentle groan as if recalling this story would be painful. ‘A little while ago I resolved to meet p. j. loak,' she began. ‘It was while I was writing my thesis on his poetry. So I wrote to him, via his publisher of course, and I asked if we could meet. He wrote back – eventually. He doesn't do email, you see. But it wasn't a very helpful reply. All he said was, “Do drop in if ever you're passing.” No phone number. No way of contacting him. But I did, at least, have an address, and of course it was way up in Cumbria. Anyway, a day came when I really didn't have a lot to do, and I found myself deciding to do exactly as he had suggested. Only it wasn't quite so simple. I packed a little overnight case, and I took a train up to Oxenholme and a bus to Cockermouth and then a taxi to his cottage in the hills. I don't really know what I expected. It was November. I should have thought about miserable hail and wind, but somehow I'd read so many Lakeland odes that in my mind I'd imagined this land of perpetual springtime and daffodils and babbling brooks.'

‘Wordsworth,' said Thomas.

‘Indeed. Anyway, by the time I reached Loak's driveway it was almost dark and it was raining hard. The taxi dropped me at the gate, but the cottage itself was up a long steep driveway and there I was, in a ridiculous city coat, no umbrella, heels, with a silly little suitcase on wheels. I paid the taxi and then I sheltered under a tree for a long while, asking myself what the hell I was doing there. I tried to look down into the valley but everywhere was steamy and misty and all I could really see were a few drystone walls and some sad-looking sheep.'

‘Should I be writing any of this down?' Thomas asked.

Azalea shook her head. ‘So here's the first strange thing. I was standing there in the rain, trying to shelter under a tree with no leaves, when suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling of déjà vu. I thought perhaps I'd read so much Lakeland poetry that now I felt as if I'd already visited this place. It was unsettling. I thought, “If I follow that little path, I know where it'll lead – it will climb slowly up to the left, and it will curl around the hill to the right, and then it will cross a beck over some stepping stones, and there will be an ancient tree with roots like a giant's fingers bursting out of a buried glove.” That's what I thought.'

‘That's poetic.'

Azalea smiled. ‘I didn't mean to come over all purple. But you see, it was such a strange feeling. How could I possibly know a strange pathway in a county I had never visited? Even if I'd read the most lucid poems, even if I'd studied the maps, even if I'd seen photographs – well, even then I wouldn't have felt the way I did right then. It was something eerie – something other-worldly.'

Thomas gave a gentle cough. ‘I think perhaps it's a feeling we all get from time to time.'

Azalea shook her head. ‘But you need to let me finish,' she said. ‘You see, there are some things you don't know about me, Dr Post.'

‘Thomas.'

‘Well, one thing you don't know about me is that I never knew my mother. My real mother. She abandoned me when I was three.'

‘Abandoned you?'

‘Well, no. Not exactly. But we used to
think
she had abandoned me. That was the story I grew up believing. It was the story my parents – my adopted parents – believed right up to their deaths, and I believed it too until that day, the day that I went to visit p. j. loak. That was the day I learned the truth. My mother didn't abandon me. She just took me to a fair, and then she was abducted. And murdered.'

‘Oh my God!'

‘But what matters is that I have no memories of her. No real memories. I have some memories that I may have made up, but there is no picture of her in my mind.'

‘That's a shame.'

‘Yes, it is. But here's the funny thing. As I stood there, I could somehow feel my mother with me. My real mother.'

‘Are you claiming to be psychic?'

‘No, not at all. I don't even believe in that sort of thing. This was more like a deep memory. I could see myself clambering over the stile and running up the pathway and in my mind the sun was shining, the daffodils really were blooming and with me there was a woman and I could feel her next to me and there was this enormous sense of warmth between us.'

‘I'm starting to see where this is leading,' Thomas said, tugging again on his earlobe.

‘So anyway. I waited for a lull in the rain, but none ever came. Finally I just thought, to hell with it, and I made a dash for it up the driveway, and all the time I was cursing myself for not bringing an umbrella, or even a coat with a hood. And then, when I got to the front door there was no porch. I stood there for about five minutes, in the downpour, ringing the doorbell. I almost gave up. I thought I was going to have to walk all the way back down to the valley. Then finally he came to the door. p. j. loak. Not an old man, particularly. He was twenty-two when he lost his sight, so he was only forty-something when I met him. You'd think from that poem that he was decrepit, but I suspect that's just how he thinks of himself. He looked fairly trim. He wasn't wearing dark glasses or anything, but his eyes looked glazed. We sat in his front room. He had a little electric fire. He didn't make me tea, or offer to let me dry myself. He's blind, so he couldn't see how wet I was. So we just sat, and I realised that I hadn't really prepared much for this meeting – hadn't really thought what I should say. I didn't want to come over like some crazed groupie. I told him I was the woman who had written to him, and he said that he used to get quite a lot of letters, but not so many now.

‘The funny thing was, all this time, coming in through his little hallway, sitting in the front room – I had this eerie sense that I knew this house. I knew the hallway, I knew this room; I knew there was another room that I hadn't yet seen, and in that room there would be a piano and somehow, in a parallel universe, I could hear it playing, something soft, dreamy, a lullaby perhaps. I could see a door that led to another room, and I wanted to get up and snatch the handle to prove that I was wrong. Maybe it was just a broom cupboard. Or maybe behind that door there would be a room in which the sunlight flooded through the windows, where a man would sit at the piano and his fingers would become musical notes; and maybe there would be a woman in the shadows and maybe she would sing, with a voice as pure as an organ pipe, and the words she would sing would speak of love.

‘But of course I didn't. I didn't get up and open the door. I was scared. Something was making my heart race. Then I told Loak my name was Azalea Lewis. It was an uncomfortable moment. My head was still swimming from the turmoil of images I'd experienced. Loak paused for a very long time. “Tell me how old you are, Azalea,” he said. So I told him my age – I was twenty-nine. He seemed to think very hard about this. Then he asked me my birthday. I told him it was the first of November. “That's good,” he said, and he seemed to be off in a dream somewhere. Then he said, “I knew an Azalea once – a long time ago; a very long time ago. She would be twenty-nine now, too. But I have no idea where she is, or how to find her. Her birthday would be in August.” '

Azalea paused, as if the effort of telling the story was too great to bear.

‘Go on,' Thomas coaxed.

‘The thing you need to know, Thomas, is that I'd heard these words before; almost these exact same words. Do you know what it's like when somebody quotes something back to you that should be familiar, but just for a moment you can't place it? Well, that was what his words were like to me. It was as if he was playing me a recording of a conversation that had taken place at another time in my life. I was . . . unbalanced by it. Like when you cross a beck on stepping stones and one of them suddenly wobbles.'

‘I‘m beginning to understand why you teach poetry,' Thomas said.

‘The thing is, Thomas. Well, the thing is . . . my real birthday
is
in August. I've never bothered to change my birth certificate. After all, you get used to your birthday, don't you?'

‘I suppose you do.'

‘Anyway – now I was spooked. I said, “If . . . just
if
. . . I was born in August . . . and
if
I was the same Azalea you knew a long time ago – well, then you would be able to tell me what part of England I was born in.”

‘He just sat there and shook his head very slowly, in some kind of reverie. Finally he said, “If . . . just
if
. . . you were the same Azalea I knew a very long time ago – well then, I would be able to tell you that you weren't born in England at all.”

‘Now I was almost shaking. He said, “If I tell you the name of the place, can you tell me the name of the village?” I said I could. Then he said, “
If
. . . you were the same Azalea I knew, you would have been born not far away . . . not far away at all as the seagull flies . . . but far enough for it to be a different place and a different country way across the Irish Sea. You would have been born in the Isle of Man.”

‘And I could barely say it, Thomas. I could hardly speak. My mouth and tongue just locked and I couldn't get the words out. I was crying. It was so sudden. Down by the gate I'd seen a shadow of my mother, the first I'd seen since I was a toddler, and now he'd pulled away the floor, and I was just floating . . . not even floating, I was sinking. So at last I just choked out, “Port St Menfre,” because that was the name. The name of the place.'

‘And then what?'

‘There was a long moment when he didn't speak at all. I just looked at him with my mouth wide open. I was trying to find my voice again. Finally I said, “How do you know all this?” and he just started to laugh. And then as he laughed it wasn't a laugh any more. He was sobbing. He was crying into his hands. When he looked up, I could see that even if his eyes no longer worked, his tears still ran.

‘ “The Azaliah I knew would have had . . .” and I took his hand, because I knew what he was about to say. His hand felt big and cold. I put his fingers here.' Azalea brushed her hair away from her face to reveal the faint trace of a scar.

‘I knew then what he was going to say, and I was almost willing him not to say it. “The reason I know all that, Azaliah . . . the reason I know that . . . is because I'm your father.” That was what he said.'

Thomas held Azalea's gaze. ‘I see. So this . . . Loak . . . he
was
the blind man – the blind man who said he was your father?'

‘Not exactly, Thomas,' she said. ‘No.'

‘But I thought you said . . .'

‘I did.'

‘So this chap Loak . . .' Thomas was floundering.

‘This is my coincidence, you see,' said Azalea. ‘This is why I'm the person who won the lottery twice. You see, Peter Loak wasn't the first blind man that I've met quite out of the blue who told me he was my father.' She shook her head slowly. ‘Oh, no.' She looked directly into Thomas's eyes. ‘He was the second one.'

 

They walked from Thomas's office through the green park in Bedford Square, past the British Museum, and found a small café – one where Azalea could savour the rich smell of roasting coffee and find herself on a different continent half a lifetime away. Azalea drank her coffee rich and black, the way Luke Folley had once done. Thomas drank tea.

They sat in a corner on two inadequate stools. Thomas ordered a ciabatta, Azalea a salad. She was muffled in a stylish overcoat and matching scarf. He was unsuitably dressed in a plain blue shirt and a loose brown cardigan – all the better, he had thought in the morning, to protect his plastered arm, but now he looked like an invalid at large.