Dying to Know You (16 page)

“From one extreme to the other.”

“Exactly.”

“At least he’s not mooning about.”

“True. Before, he was dying of breath, now he’s fit to burst.”

We couldn’t help smiling at each other.

“Could you have a word with him?” Mrs. Williamson said. “Find out what’s going on. I don’t think you understand how fond he is of you and how much he listens to you.”

“I don’t know about that. Can’t think I’ve said anything to him that’s worth much.”

“Well, I know it sounds like sucking up, saying nice things to persuade you, but it’s true, whether you know it or not. Actually, I rather like it that you don’t know. It’s a good quality. But, anyway, would you have a try?”

I waited a moment, to be sure, before saying, “To be frank, any use or not, I’m intrigued. What on earth can he be up to?”

“So you’ll have a word with him?”

Apart from being intrigued, which was a reason I was sure Mrs. Williamson would understand, I have to admit that I’d grown fond of Karl. I was concerned about him. Perhaps there was something of the paternal stirring in me after all. But there was something else as well, which I’ll mention in a minute.

I said, “Phoning him won’t do. He’ll clam up. I’ll have to see him.”

Mrs. Williamson sighed with relief, but instantly looked anxious again.

“But you’re not well enough,” she said. “You must take care of yourself.”

I was pleased she didn’t add “at your age,” though I suspected that’s what she meant.

I was also learning she was a woman who lived on her nerves, sensitive to the smallest changes in the psychic weather. I could only imagine how much she had suffered these last months as her only child was battered and bruised, and what devastation she must have endured after the loss of her husband.

I said, “I’m feeling better already, thanks to you. I’ll get up and see how I manage. If I’m OK, how about we fix for me to come to your place tomorrow? That’s Saturday. Karl will be home, won’t he? But we need a good excuse.”

A silence for thought.

Then Mrs. Williamson perked up and said, “How about I invite you to lunch, as a thank-you for helping when Karl … had his episode? I think he’d like that, though he’ll not admit it.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“All right. What about lunch tomorrow, so long as you feel up to it?”

“Thank you kindly.”

“As you’ve been very naughty this week and not eaten
properly, it’ll be best to give you something light. What about some sea bass gently poached, a few new potatoes and a salad? It’s a favourite of Karl’s, who’ll probably do the cooking.”

“Spot on! Looking forward to it already. But let me bring some ice cream for after.”

“I get the impression you’re an ice cream junky.”

“I have to confess a slight addiction.”

We both laughed, more heartily than the joke deserved, and the deal was done.

Mrs. Williamson wasn’t my only visitor that day. There was another, virtual this time, not visceral. Fiorella in my inbox.

Hi, Mr. Author. I do wish you’d update yourself. Email is so yesterday. Thought I’d let you know I saw Karl today. He was with his boss doing stuff in my gran’s flat. I don’t know what you’ve all been going on about. He didn’t look one bit ill. In fact, he looked in pretty good shape to me. Really, to be honest, I quite fell for him all over again. But please keep this to yourself or I’ll never forgive you. I went so far as to invite him for a game of chess tomorrow but he said he was too busy. DOING WHAT? I ask you, because he wouldn’t tell me. And I am consumed with curiosity. Please tell me. I’m sure you’ll know. I asked him about you.
He said you’d been out for a day together. I was somewhat jealous but suppressed this unworthy reaction. Please please PLEASE tell me what he’s doing. I promise not to let on to ANYONE, least of all Karl. I mean, I’ve just trusted you with a secret. You can trust me. I’m really really agog to know. And what do you think? Should I try and get together with him again? Do you think he wants that as well? Do you think what happened when we were away was an aberration? A one-off? Has he said anything about it? He’s so lovely. I’d welcome your advice. With love from Fiorella desperado.

It was an email that switched off my reply button. Let it wait.

Had no one taught Ms. Fiorella Seabourne about appropriate register when addressing your elders, or does no one care about such niceties anymore?

But then I thought, it isn’t her fault. Why do adults complain when young people do or say things badly, inappropriately, lacking manners, when it’s adults who are meant to teach them how to do things properly?

So I relented.

Hi, Fiorella. I am beyond hope of updating.

Am sorry but I don’t know what Karl is doing.

As for whether you should try and get together with him again, I’m afraid I am no use as an agony
uncle. And I have no idea what he wants. My own general approach to such matters is: The nose knows.

Saluté.

One more note before I finish this chapter. I mentioned earlier another reason why I wanted to know what Karl was up to.

As I’ve explained, I hadn’t been able to write a book since Jane died. Her death seemed to kill the writer in me.

But all along, since my first meeting with Karl, in the unconscious back of my mind—the womb where all the best creative ideas have their conception and their gestation—something had been growing. And now, that Saturday, as Mrs. Williamson appealed to me, a finger reached out from my unconscious and I knew with sudden clarity the following:

The recording of Karl’s encounters with me and mine with him, our shared experiences, was a story I could write.

This story would not be fiction. It would be a true-life story. I didn’t have to invent anything. As yet, at that time, the end was unknown. The plot was revealing itself as we lived it.

I realised only then that it was not writing that had died when my wife died, but invention. I had had enough of invention. The facts of life, life as it is actually lived, was all that now mattered to me, all I wanted to think about, all I wanted to write about. What I had to do was set down
a record of what I knew about Karl and had experienced with him. It would be his story, not my story. And that also pleased me. I had had enough of myself.

Later that day, I settled at my desk for the first time in more than a year to do what I feel I was made to do. I began making the notes, writing down all I remembered of Karl’s story so far, ready to begin writing it when I knew the end.

It was, it is, in every sense, a labour of love.

YOU REMEMBER THAT EXPERIMENT WITH IRON FILINGS AND A
magnet the science teacher did at school when you were of an age still easy to amaze? You remember the way the iron filings, which were scattered like a mess of dust on a sheet of paper, suddenly formed into clean strong patterns when the magnet was placed in the middle of the mess, revealing the magnet’s magnetic field? Oo-arr, from the kids who’d never seen this magic before. (Do they still do that in schools?)

I was reminded of this when I arrived at the Williamsons on Saturday and saw Karl preparing lunch. Since the crisis, he had been like the mess of iron filings. Disarranged. Now he was magnetised, his filings composed into the pattern of his self. It isn’t an exaggeration to say he was glowing with energy. The change was palpable. Before, he had been uneasy with himself. Now he was comfortable in his skin.

Some words from my religious past came to mind. He once was lost, and now is found.

Good spirits are infectious.

Mrs. Williamson was jocular, which I had not seen before. I caught a glimpse of what she must have been like when she was young and happily married, with infant Karl to coddle and tend.

She did a good line in joshing.

“Come and meet the master chef,” she said with a wink when she let me in. And teased Karl now and then during the meal, a tickling he enjoyed while pretending pokerfaced toleration of his mother’s jokes.

Another pretence—that I was there as a thank-you—was kept up throughout the meal. And because nothing could be said about why I was really there, and any talk of recent unhappy events would have dampened the jollity, Mrs. Williamson plumped for the safe strategy of asking me the usual questions people ask a writer. How I got started and why, how many books I’d written and what kind. Which led by association to where I was born, and what my parents did, and what kind of boy I’d been. But no questions about my wife, for which I was grateful.

Karl listened but said nothing. He played the part of cook and waiter with the easy care I’d come to know was natural to him, whatever he did. But at the same time I sensed he’d rather I hadn’t been asked about myself, and I wondered why. The clue came later.

By the time we were eating the ice cream I’d brought as my contribution, I was puzzling how to introduce the topic of Karl’s activity in the shed without spooking him. I knew he’d baulk, shy away and clam up if I got it wrong. We’d finished the meal before I’d made up my mind. But need not have worried. Mrs. Williamson knew her son, and was blessed with more savvy than I’d so far guessed at.

“Have you noticed,” she said to me, still in her joshing tone, “how craftsmen never clear up after themselves? They need labourers to skivvy for them. His father was like that. And like father, like son. So you two go and do whatever men do after feeding their faces, while I clear the table and wash the dishes.”

She got up and began stacking the plates, and as she did so, bent over her son, kissed him on the head, and said in her genuine voice, “That was a delicious meal, my love. Thanks for making it.”

“Hear, hear!” I said.

Karl affected a suitable modesty, but a blush and lowered eyes betrayed his pleasure.

“We’ll help you,” I said, out of politeness, but without making a move, aware of what she was up to.

“No, you won’t, thank you all the same,” Mrs. Williamson said. “You’re a guest, and in this house guests don’t do chores.”

She went off into the kitchen.

I looked at Karl, smiled, and shrugged.

He got up, nodded “Follow me,” and without a word
led the way through the kitchen, out the back door, down a path at the side of the lawn to a substantial shed at the bottom of the garden.

I don’t mean to boast when I say I had an inkling of what I would be shown.

The shed was generously kitted out. A multitude of tools and gear neatly arranged, everything in its place. And filled with that workshop smell of sawdust and oil mixed with the tang of electricity given off by power tools. A handyman’s paradise.

This was a quick impression, because my eye was caught at once by a number of objects—eight or nine—carefully placed on the workbench, like a little exhibition. They were made of thick black wire bent into a variety of shapes. Some were very simple, no more than two or three separate lengths, bent into shapes and placed together in what was clearly meant to be an intended, not an accidental, arrangement. Others were more complicated, made of one length of wire bent into elaborate, almost knotted interwindings.

I could see the inspiration for some of them was William Tucker’s sculpture, which is what I’d guessed I’d find. Others were quite different.

Words are the worst tools for describing objects. I don’t know whether teachers still do it, but when I was a kid, they used to give us an exercise that began with the instruction,
“Imagine that a man from outer space has come to Earth. Describe a screwdriver to him as clearly as you can.”

The spaceman, poor guy, has presumably wandered up and somehow indicated—because of course he can’t speak any Earth language—that his UFO has conked out and can you help him, please. In a flash, without a moment wasted on intelligent astonishment, you give him a detailed description of a screwdriver, regardless of the fact that he cannot understand a word you’re saying and assuming without further investigation that this is the implement the stranded spaceman needs.

Ah, the pleasures of school, where, we’re told, we spend the happiest days of our lives!

Hard enough to describe objects with an everyday practical purpose, it’s impossible to describe objects that aren’t meant to be used, that don’t look like anything you have seen before, and are made out of material like paint, and metal pipes, and pieces of wood and stone and clay. Sculptures. Objects made into shapes that represent nothing except the shape itself. And even if they are objects that represent things we know—landscapes, buildings, people, plants, animals, the sea, whatever—they aren’t meant to be described, or presumably their makers would have used words rather than made the objects. They are objects intended for you to look at and work out what they mean from the feelings and thoughts they excite in you.

In other words, works of art.

The fact is, art objects aren’t meant to be described. If
there’s anything to be said about them it’s what you want to say because of what they have done to you.

As I looked at Karl’s miniature sculptures I rather dreaded he’d ask me what I thought of them and whether I liked them. I’m not good at instant reactions to anything. I need time to take in what I’ve experienced before I can say anything intelligent.