The Bellwether Revivals (35 page)

She came in from the bathroom with a white towel wrapped around her, and the skin of her shoulders mottled, beaded with water. For a moment, she sat at her dresser, brushing her hair, and he watched her, trying to imagine her fifty years from now, wondering if he would still feel the same exhilaration at the sight of her. And he realised how easy it was to picture her that way, still tidying her hair with the same little gestures of her brush, half-naked in the shade of some future bedroom.

‘Will you play for me?’ he asked.

She kept on brushing her hair. ‘Now? I’m not even dressed.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just want to hear you.’

And so she went to get her cello from the corner. She took off her towel and sat at the foot of the bed with her back towards him. She played something he’d never heard before—a plaintive, drawling tune with notes so low they rattled the perfume bottles on her dresser. He watched the slow flight of her shoulder blades as she bowed. It was all he needed to make that dry ache inside him disappear.

Herbert Crest emerged from Dr Paulsen’s room like a man defeated. It was a muggy Thursday afternoon in late March and the underarms of his cotton shirt were dark with sweat, his upper lip glistening. The peak of his baseball cap had been a perfect horseshoe shape when he’d knocked on the old man’s door, but now it was creased along the middle, forming a gable above the solemn features of his face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I tried.’

Oscar had been waiting outside the door for a while, hoping that the sight of Herbert Crest might jog the old man’s memory. There had been some improvement in Paulsen’s physical state (he’d regained some of the strength in his left side) but the wires of his brain were still tangled up. All week, the old man had been staring back at Oscar with a misty panic, a terrifying blankness, calling him ‘Herb’ and ‘Hebb’ and ‘Herbie’. One morning, down by the parlour window after breakfast, Paulsen had pushed a pair of used ticket stubs into his hand.
LARKIN’S BALLOON TOURS: REDEEMABLE FOR ONE RIDE ONLY
. It had near enough broken his heart.

‘I think I made things worse,’ Crest said, standing in the
corridor, trying to hide the sadness in his voice by laughing meekly. ‘He didn’t really recognise me, I don’t think. I tried to get him talking but he just sat there. Didn’t say much.’

‘What
did
he say?’

‘Yes, no, mm-hm, okay—not much more. Oh, and “What time is it?” He asked me what time it was. I couldn’t even tell him
that
.’ Crest raised his left arm to show his bare wrist.

‘He didn’t use your name?’

‘Nope.’

‘Sometimes he mumbles. Maybe you missed it.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I would’ve heard it.’

Oscar didn’t know what else to do. ‘He must’ve been happy you came, at least.’

‘Hard to tell,’ Crest said. ‘He was pleased to see the carpet, I know
that
. Barely even looked at me … Listen, this is kinda difficult for me to take right now. I could use a little air. Take a walk with me?’

They went out into the back garden, where the tended lawns were freshly striped and flowers bloomed in hanging baskets and window boxes. Residents sat out on the patio in wheelchairs, noses white with sun cream. Crest walked along the path with confident strides. There was definitely a new range of motion in those stout legs of his. Though his chest was heaving slightly when they reached the far end of the garden and sat down on the stone wall beside the fishpond, Crest didn’t take too long to steady himself. He removed his cap to let the sunshine fall upon his face. ‘Y’know, of all the nursing homes I’ve seen, this is definitely the nicest. I never thought Bram would end up in a place like this, but I’m glad it
is
a place like this. Does that make sense?’

‘I think so.’

‘Look at this garden. It’s impeccable.’

Oscar was so used to the Cedarbrook grounds he hardly noticed them any more. Looking now in the fervid spring sunshine, he could see what Crest was talking about. Everywhere
was its own shade of purple: there were azaleas in the lawn borders, and clutches of hyacinths in the rockery, and that perfect covering of wisteria on the walls of the building like a fine velvet jacket.

‘I’m sorry about—you know,’ Crest said. ‘I had to get out. It’s not easy, seeing him like that.’

Oscar realised he hadn’t even thought about how Crest would feel. It would be tough for anyone who knew the old man to watch him silently dribbling in his chair, absent from the world, but Crest was the person who’d known him in the best years of his life, when he was Abraham Paulsen, a young academic with things to say and places to go.

‘I’ll bet you think you know that old man better than anyone, huh?’ Crest said. The question caught Oscar a little off guard. He opened his mouth to speak, not really knowing what was going to come out, but Crest went on: ‘I mean, you probably think you’ve got him all figured out—am I right? That’s how I used to feel too. But you can be sure there’s plenty he hasn’t told you. Like I’ll bet you don’t know about his ex-wife.’

‘No,’ Oscar admitted. The shock, the intrigue was clear in his voice, and he felt ashamed of himself for sounding like some gossiping neighbour. ‘God, I had no idea.’

‘Oh, yeah, she’s out there somewhere. Doubt she’d ever come to visit. They’re a long time divorced. But she’s still out there alright.’

‘He never even mentioned her.’

‘That’s Bram. You’ve got to pry things out of him. Let’s face it, most of the time he’s pretty hard to like. That temper of his. Boy!’ Crest went about straightening out the peak of his baseball cap, pressing at it with his thumbs. ‘I’m amazed that
anyone
still gives a damn about that guy, truth be told. He’s pushed a lot of people away in his time, myself included.’

A melancholy came over Crest’s face. ‘All I could think about on my way over here was the first time I saw him, up there teaching
my freshman Lit class. I’m talking way back now, long before you were born …’ Crest gave a little smile of recognition, puffing air from his nostrils. ‘I hated that class—
everybody
hated that class. He was always in such a bad mood. Tyrannosaurus Paulsen, we called him. One guy, Teddy Pugh—I remember this clear as day—he was reading out a passage from a Donne poem in a seminar one time and I guess he must’ve misread a line. The thing about Teddy was, he kind of stumbled over his words when he got nervous. I think he said, “as
sun-burned
souls from graves will creep” instead of “
sin-burdened
souls”, and Bram, well, he just went crazy, started pacing around like he’d been personally insulted. He made Teddy write the whole poem on the board and recite it to him at the start of every class. That was Bram for you. Tyrannosaurus Paulsen. Ha.’

Crest shook his head wistfully, eyeing the upstairs windows of the building, as if trying to see through the walls, into the old man’s room. ‘I guess that’s what I must’ve liked so much about him back then—he seemed a little dangerous—but I guess it’s also what held me back in the beginning. I was a grad student by the time we got together. Maybe if I hadn’t made my move on him, things would’ve worked out differently; maybe the two of us wouldn’t be all alone. Two lonely old men with only our nurses who really give a shit.’

‘That’s not true, Herbert. I know he doesn’t think that way. He told me you were the love of his life.’

‘Really? He told you that, huh.’

‘Yeah. I’ve never seen him happier than when you came to The Orchard.’

Crest mused on this, the shape of the garden reflecting in his eyes. ‘That’s good to know. Maybe the time we spent together was worth something after all.’ Then, in a spasm of his shoulders, he turned to Oscar and said: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been talking way too much. That’s how I seem to be lately. Got more energy than I know what to do with.’

Oscar was almost afraid to ask Crest how he was feeling. It was only because he saw something in his expression—an openness, a willingness to be questioned—that he even voiced it. It came out more tentatively than he’d intended: ‘So you’ve been feeling better, you know, since—since last week?’ He couldn’t bring himself to use the phrase he’d originally thought of: ‘since your treatment’.

‘I don’t know if
better
is the right word for it, but I definitely feel
different
. More productive lately, that’s for sure. It’s all placebic, of course. Nothing to get worked up about.’

‘What about the seizures?’

‘Haven’t had one since last week.’

‘That’ll be the medication.’

Crest shook his head. ‘No, that’s what’s strange—I’ve stayed off the pills. I mean, I still get the headaches, but they don’t seem to last as long, and they aren’t—I don’t know—they don’t seem so intense. All I can tell you is, at the rate I’ve been going these past few days, my book’ll be done in no time.’

‘That’s great, Herbert.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t get too excited. I’m meeting my consultant next week. We’ll find out the real picture then.’ Crest edged forward on the stone wall and idly fingered the scar on his skull; then, with a quick, easy motion, he tugged the cap down onto his head. The peak was now straight as an airstrip. ‘Look, I can’t believe I’m even suggesting this, but did you think about maybe asking Eden if—’ He stopped himself, laughing. ‘No, forget it, forget I said anything. Seriously. Wow. That was almost a moment of true dumbness. Let’s go back inside.’

‘I know what you were going to ask,’ Oscar said.

‘You do, huh?’ Crest shook his head at the ground.

‘The thought’s crossed my mind. Every time I look at Dr Paulsen now, I think about it. I hate seeing him this way.’

‘But you can’t bring yourself to do it.’

‘No.’

‘Good. Don’t. Once you surrender to hope, it’s a long road back to reason.’ There was a certain tone of self-loathing in the way Crest said it. He got up. ‘Walk me back to the car? I should try to beat the traffic.’

Iris said that revising medicine was like digging a well: you had to get your head down and keep on working through it, and trust that every spade-load of dirt you were lifting out was actually bringing you one step nearer to striking water. This was the philosophy she’d been sticking to all evening. The Easter term was still a few weeks away, but she’d been studying since they came back from dinner—by Oscar’s count, that was three straight hours—and she’d only just allowed herself a bathroom break.

It was dark out. A gallery of her textbooks lay open on his bed: pages of dense, blocky paragraphs; precise anatomical drawings of the brain and diagrams of cranial nerves; minuscule footnotes in italics, referencing other books containing even more paragraphs, diagrams, footnotes and references (‘Ibid., pp. 291, 482, 886’). Each book was thick with a luminous rainbow of page-markers onto which Iris had scrawled letters and numbers. Each colour corresponded to a topic, and each letter and number corresponded to something else. She’d tried to explain the nuances of her system to him over dinner and he’d nodded his head, pretending to follow everything she was telling him. (‘So when I need to remember, let’s say, that the trachea is level with the
sixth
cervical vertebra, to the upper border of the
fifth
thoracic vertebra, where it divides into the two bronchi, I just think Pink B-8, Yellow K-4. It’s simple …’) But it had been very hard to hear her voice above the Algerian music bleating through the restaurant speakers and the sound of the sizzling grill. Now all he wanted to do was gather up those textbooks and throw them out of the window.

She left the bathroom wearing one of his old T-shirts, the lace of her underwear showing and the light glistening upon her bare
legs. She lay frontways on the bed, feet upon the pillows, and took to reading again, chewing on the cap of her highlighter pen.

‘How much more have you got to read?’ he asked.

‘I’ve already read these chapters, sweetheart, I
told
you. I’m annotating now.’

‘Oh.’

‘Five more chapters, then I’m done.’ She lay her pen down on the page and looked at him. ‘Why don’t you put some music on or something? It’ll help me concentrate.’

‘Okay.’ He needed to concentrate, too—on something other than the smooth pale skin of her calves, and the slow enticing way she was bending her heels towards her thighs. She was raking her fingers through her hair now, pulling it over to one side of her face, and he could see the polite little nape of her back above the waistband of her underwear.

He chose a CD at random, hit play on the stereo, and went over to sit beside her on the bed. His hand reached out for her shoulder, and she tilted her face against it, until he could feel the gentle pressure of her cheek. There was a jangle of acoustic guitars now, and Tim Buckley’s voice was breaking over them; he was singing about searching for dolphins in the sea.

She wriggled forwards. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I have to read this.’ But he moved his hands to the small of her back, running one fingertip along her skin, under the cover of her T-shirt, from the base of her neck to the bottom of her spine. She quivered, ticklish. ‘Don’t,’ she said, giggling. He bent to kiss the backs of her legs—that gentle flesh where the skin was silken, scented with sweat—and she hummed along with the music and gave out quiet little moans. ‘You’re going to make me fail. Do you really want that hanging over you?’ He just kept on kissing, stroking her legs. And then, in one motion, her whole body spun around, and he was staring down at the cute recess of her belly button. ‘Alright,
stop
,’ she said, and took off her glasses. ‘If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly.’

She pulled him forwards and kissed him, and soon she’d manoeuvred herself into the groove of his body, twining her legs around his. He lay on top of her, feeling her breath on his neck, her fingers against the buttons of his shirt. She stole the shirt from his shoulders, her palms cold against his stomach, and looked up at him alert, ready, clutching for his belt buckle. He lifted off her T-shirt and kissed her; she became a fragile body in his hands, light as paper. The music in the room seemed distant and formless now, like some argument playing out many storeys above them. His breath fogged upon her shoulder. As he pushed himself inside her, the textbooks dug into his knees. She gasped. Her legs wrapped him up and turned him around, so he was on his back, gazing up at her. Cars passed by outside the window, brightening the room with slow, pale flashes; her shadow swiped across the ceiling, angular and gaunt. She rocked herself upon him, eyes closed lightly. Then, like some old piece of furniture giving way under too much weight, she collapsed. There was a sudden jolt from her body, and a low judder of the mattress beneath them, and the strangest sound like a tiny object dropped from a great height. He knew something was wrong, badly wrong. She fell down onto him, winded and screaming. Her agony rang in his ear. Before he even knew it, she’d rolled away from him, onto her side. She was clutching at her thigh and beating the pillow with the base of her fist, shouting: ‘My leg! My leg! My leg!’ He could see the blood on his sheets and a husk of bone protruding from the skin above her kneecap, and for a moment, all he could do was stare down at her, tense and frightened. Then he heard her small voice pleading for his help.