Reading by Lightning (24 page)

After the burial there was a tea served in the parish hall for the neighbours in Salford, and then we came back to Oldham and poured tea again, for Aunt Lucy's neighbours. Gradually they left, and Lois and Madeleine curled up on the sofa, silent and tired. They'd known Nan all their lives, but my own particular burden was of a sort not easily shared. I walked restlessly through the house. It was dawning on me why this had happened, that God was using this means to bring me back to him. Drastic, yes (I felt a wave of vertigo at the thought, a lick of the old despair), but it was always like that with God, things never were proportionate.

A lantern burned in the potting shed window, and George's head was bent over his workbench. I knocked, just twice, leaving off the last knock so he could ignore me if he wanted to. Without a word he reached over and opened the door from where he was sitting, as though he'd sent for me. I stepped across the sill into the yellow light of a kerosene lantern and smelled earth, rust, turpentine, bird nests.

The workbench of the potting shed was high, for standing, and sitting in front of it, George looked like a gnome at work. He seemed to be making something of a lump of brown clay. Had enough of Anglo-Christian burial rituals, then? he said. The lamplight darkened the shadows under his eyes.

Are you making another skull? I asked.

Well, well, so cynical and so young, he said. He stood up and pulled an oilcloth over the clay before I could see what it was. My sisters' influence, no doubt.

I smiled awkwardly at him. How long are you staying home?

I'm going back on the train tomorrow. I've got exams next week. I should be studying now, I suppose, but attention must be paid. In death if not in life.

You don't think we paid enough attention to Nan?

Me, I meant, he said. Not you or the girls or Mother.

Well, you're not home very much, I said. Why don't you go to university in Manchester?

I didn't get a scholarship to Manchester.

You're studying history?

In a way. I'm hoping to go into paleontology.

I lifted my chin, the way Lois always did. I wouldn't ask. He offered me his stool, his shadow, broken against the shelves, gesturing hugely.

No, that's all right, I said. I stood hugging my arms. Do you care if I look at your things?

Go ahead, he said. He held the lamp up for me.

This was still a potting shed, with clay pots nested under the workbench, and trowels hanging from pegs on the centre beam. But new rough shelves had been put up with aluminum brackets, and they were crammed with the paraphernalia I'd seen when Lois unlocked the shed. Hanging right in front of me was a chart of the heavens with the familiar constellations. Beside it was a diagram made up of circles, one inside the other. The planets were embedded in these discs like gems in a ring.

They're
spheres,
said George eagerly, following my eyes. Crystal spheres. As they revolve they put out music. Only the pure of heart can hear it. You must have studied Kepler?

I don't think so, I said. George pulled another chart out of
a heap of books on the workbench. In this one the orbits of the planets had geometrical shapes traced between them.

Kepler calculated the ratio of the distance between planets, said George. The ratios parallel harmonic keys, which is kind of amazing.

Was there actual music?

How would anyone know? But mathematically there could have been. That was the point. He pushed his glasses back on his nose with his middle finger.

Where would heaven be? I asked, looking closely at this map of the cosmos.

Heaven?
he said, amused. You're asking on behalf of all medieval souls?

Then he saw my tears start up, and there was a moment of acute surprise between us. He looked tactfully away and began to rifle through a stack of papers. I wonder what I have here, he said, kindly. For images of heaven you have to go back a lot earlier. I don't know if I have anything. A lot of my copies of etchings are in Durham.

He took a long time looking through his papers while I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve, and then he pulled out a large sheet of manila.

Well, there's this.

It was a picture of the Garden of Eden drawn in a circle. The heavens made a border around it, like the rim on an ornate tea plate. And God leaned over the plate, and the sun rose behind him.

I like this, said George, pointing to an orb in the heavens. It's the moon. Look how it has God's face. It's a little duplicate image of God keeping watch over the world. It's sort of interesting that they'd portray God like that, because the moon waxes and wanes.

Where did this drawing come from? I asked.

It was the frontispiece to the first Lutheran Bible. I copied it by hand.

I stared at this testy old man with tousled hair peering down over the garden where Adam and Eve walked with their naked front sides turned decorously away.

It was drawn in the early sixteenth century, said George. See, it says here.

He pointed to a legend at the bottom of the page, but my eye was drawn to the signature beneath the legend:
George Oldham.
Their family name was Sheffield.

That, he said, catching my questioning look. That's in the tradition of foundlings.

We stood close together, looking at the drawing. I felt my grief and guilt lapping inside me — I felt swollen with emotion, the way you feel full of sickness when you have the flu. And I felt something new, astonishment: I was almost off-balance with amazement. I'd never longed to know a boy like George because I'd never dreamt that such boys existed.

The door opened and Madeleine poked her head into the shed. Mother says to stop mucking about and come inside. George, Mr. Shillingford wants to see you before he leaves. Go upstairs and wash up first. She spoke as though he were a child. He held my eyes for a minute and then he tucked the oilcloth more closely over whatever he had been moulding and held the door open for me, and we followed Madeleine back to the house. As we crossed the garden under the gaslit Manchester sky, I understood why I'd come all the way across the ocean, the other reason, besides saving Nan: I'd come to take George seriously.

The day after George left for Durham, the rest of us drove to Salford to get my trunk and to clean Nan's house.

Nana said she didn't want her things sold, I said in the kitchen after breakfast. She told me almost every day. She couldn't stand the thought of the women on the street pawing through her things.

Well, we'll bring it all to the Tommyfield here in town, said Aunt Lucy. No one knows her here. What else can we do? I'm not burning the lot.

It was strange to go back into the silent house on Stott Street, to smell its old, mixed smell of fry-ups, ashes-of-roses dusting powder, mouldy boxes, stale pipe. I was cautious, looking into Nana's room. Someone, Mrs. Baxter probably, had made the bed up neatly and tucked Nan's grey felt slippers with the backs trodden down just under the fringe of the yellow bedspread.

I gathered up my things and packed up my trunk and stood in my dad's room for the last time, looking through the flawed glass at the view it afforded of the back garden wall, and then I went to help Aunt Lucy in Nan's room. We had to sort through all the junk I'd never attempted to clean up while I lived there: jars of face cream dried into cracks, boiled sweets all gone solid in their bag. Tangles of worn cotton stockings with stiff, dirty feet. An open tin of bright pink Gibb's toothpaste with a film of dust on the surface. Hairpins in crumpled brown paper. Granddad's bicycle lamp that we carried when we went out to the loo in the night. In a box of jars and bottles I discovered the recruiting pamphlet — the paper that sent my father to Canada — still wrinkled from the puddle where my granddad found it.

Garbage would go straight to the tip. Uncle Stanley rolled two barrels in for it and we filled them both. A man came in a van, and his boys began to carry out the furniture and all the boxes. Mrs. Crisp watched from her doorway. Mrs. Grimshaw stood on the curb arm in arm with Aunt Lucy, holding the cat. I buried me three sisters and me three brother-in-laws and me
own husband, she said, but I never thought I'd bury your mam. I never dreamt your mam would go before me. Never in all the world.

On the ride back to Oldham Aunt Lucy's tears stopped dripping by Failsworth and she set herself the job of cheering us up. She turned around and patted my leg. All right, then, love?

I'm fine, Aunt Lucy.

My own girls wouldn't of done
half
as well with their nana as you did. Would you, girls? Lois and Madeleine gave her thin smiles. Well, it's true, I'm afraid, said Aunt Lucy. You would of been a dead loss, both of you, whingeing about missing your friends, and wanting to take the coach home every second day to see them. Lily was a real brick, not a word of a complaint. Although when you first come, love, I have to say I wondered. What a silent little thing you was when you first come.
Heavens,
I said,
what have we got ourselves into!
Didn't I, Stanley?
What have we got ourselves into?
I said.

What
had
they got themselves into? There I was with my trunk in their spare room, a big, healthy girl with an appetite for pork roast, apples, and bread and butter with brown sugar, bereft of any ambition she could openly admit to, scandalously ignorant of social niceties, as well as of Kepler, Ferdinand and Isabella, and the wave of Fascism creeping darkly across Europe. (War? I'd said to Madeleine after the New Year's party. Between who?) An eager, self-conscious young woman with a savage battle between God and his enemy ready to flare up at any moment in her heart, less than a shilling to her name, holes in her stockings and chilblains on her toes, dreading the moment someone would say,
When will you be going back to Canada, then, Lily?

For the time being we had the task of getting Nan's things
sorted out and sold, and as Madeleine was still in school for almost a month and Lois had her exams, Aunt Lucy and I did it. On dry days we carried boxes out to the flagstones in the garden and set about cleaning.
Set not your affection on things of this earth, where moths and rust do corrupt and where thieves break through and steal,
that's what I'd always been taught, but really it was the
things
that lasted, Nan's smiling china terrier with its clumps of china hair outlined by a glaze of dirt, the silk pansies they gave her at the factory the day before her wedding, turned brown with age. The biscuit tin full of hair curlers with her hairnet stuffed on top, strands of pale hair tangled through it. It was all still here, but she was gone.

Everyone must take a memento, Aunt Lucy said, standing in the midst of it all with a scarf tied over her hair. For herself she took the photographs. For George she picked up a blanket, because it was almost new and his dormitory at the university was so cold. Madeleine wrinkled up her nose and took the china terrier. I took the Barr Colony pamphlet, of course, and things I thought my father might remember: the biscuit tin from the kitchen and the milk pitcher that Nan'd said was a wedding present. All the time I worked I thought of George, thought there must be something that would please him more than a cheap new blanket. Then in one of the boxes I came across our granddad's hook with its aluminum stump and leather strap, lying among his folded clothes like part of a pirate costume. I knew better than to ask. With my heart racing at my own daring, I rolled it in a towel and smuggled it up to my trunk.