The Heart Broke In (28 page)

‘Which you’re not going to do.’

‘My dear, it is my property.’

Matthew came in and bent to embrace his father.

‘I was asking Lettie if I could hold my new grandson,’ said Harry.

Matthew looked at his wife. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said.

Lettie put Gideon into the old man’s trembling arms. She didn’t let go, but allowed herself be pulled closer to her father-in-law, so that once Harry had the baby cradled against his chest and was looking down into his face, she still cupped Gideon’s tiny head and touched his feet. The child was eyes and a glimpse of movement through a coral of adult fingers. Caressed, manhandled and confused, Gideon began to scream, and Lettie took him and shuffled away, bouncing him and murmuring.

‘It was hard to get her to come,’ said Matthew.

‘We were getting on quite well,’ said Harry.

Come two o’clock everyone was gathered in except for Lewis. Bec volunteered to round him up and she was directed to the attic.

As she put her feet on the upper rungs of the ladder and raised her body through the hatch she smelled chemicals and heard the purr of an extractor fan. Lewis, in a shirt and tie, stood behind a workbench arrayed with flasks and trays. He’d rolled up his sleeves and was examining a photograph through a magnifying glass. There was a pile of prints in front of him and more scattered over a green baize easel propped up at a shallow angle. The skylights had been blacked out and the workbench was lit by a single cone of harsh light from the ceiling. In the shadows at the edges of the room Bec could see a box camera on a tripod and shelves of identical red-bound volumes.

‘Time,’ said Lewis. He lowered the magnifying glass, put
the print down and looked at Bec. ‘Time to eat, that’s what you came to tell me.’

Bec stepped off the ladder and came up to the workbench with her hands in her pockets. ‘Your lab smells different from mine,’ she said.

The print Lewis had been studying, she saw, was a colour photograph of his own face, with every line, hair, wrinkle and pore detailed in high contrast.

‘From this morning,’ he said. He riffled through the pile of prints and pulled one out. ‘From a week ago. Look.’ He pointed to a line in his cheek. ‘D’you see how it’s got deeper, just in a week?’

Bec studied the two photographs carefully, but couldn’t see a difference.

‘Look at it through this,’ said Lewis, handing her the magnifying glass.

‘Oh yes,’ said Bec, who still couldn’t tell the lines apart. ‘I see now. That’s remarkable.’ She looked over her shoulder and saw that the red volumes had dates stamped on their spines in gold.

‘May I?’ she asked. She took out one of the books, marked April–June 1997, and flipped through pages of photographs of Lewis’s face taken at the same distance from the lens, in the same light. The skin flickered and stretched as the weeks went by but she couldn’t see him age.

‘How far back does it go?’ she said.

‘About fifty years,’ said Lewis. ‘One photograph a day. I’m going to write a paper but I want to work on it for a bit longer.’ He lifted his jacket off the back of a chair and put it on.

‘You look smart,’ said Bec.

Lewis took the album from her hands and leafed through it. ‘It doesn’t go only one way,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He showed her two consecutive pages. ‘You can see that from Tuesday to Wednesday I actually got younger.’

‘Mmm,’ said Bec. She couldn’t see it.

‘The overall direction’s the same,’ said Lewis. He banged the book shut, looked embarrassed, then seemed to rally and bent his head closer to Bec. ‘I wanted to see it. I could’ve taken pictures of trees growing, but it’s not the same.’

‘Or your children,’ said Bec.

‘That wouldn’t have been fair,’ said Lewis gravely. ‘It’s hard enough to deal with the difference between the self you know and the self others see. I don’t want to show Alex or Dougie their third self, the self time sees. Time, and no one else.’

He looked at Bec from under his eyebrows. He resembled Harry for a moment. ‘Alex is more like his mother, you know.’

‘Is he? He has his worlds.’

‘Harry put as much into bringing him up as I did.’

‘You spent more time with Dougie?’

‘I spent more time in the surgery,’ said Lewis. ‘I spent more time in the attic.’

The thought of eating made Harry nauseous. A sip of wine burned its way through him. He could tell that Lewis was longing for the social ordeal to end and to be able to climb the ladder back to his studio. Once Lewis had opened his presents and cards, thanking them and parrying their smiles with his glass, Harry made a toast to his brother, but his heart wasn’t in it. He lost his way and ended in a mumble. The silences lengthened. The children bent over their food, and when Harry, Bec or Alex tried to speak to them, they looked at their parents. Lettie would shake her head; Matthew would whisper in his wife’s ear and nod, and the children would respond with embarrassed words.

Rose’s nose wrinkled the moment the
pièce de résistance
, a roast sucking pig, began its portage from oven to table. Her great-uncle attacked the animal with the carving knife, breaking the crisped skin with a sound like cracking ice, and she pushed her chair back and turned her body to the side. When Lewis tried to put meat on her plate she shook her head and held up her hands and said that she wasn’t allowed to eat pork.

‘Yes you are,’ said Peter, with his mouth full.

‘We seem to have a doctrinal difference here,’ said Harry.

‘Rose, you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to,’ said Matthew in a hard voice.

‘It’s not about wanting,’ said Rose. ‘It’s about how you’re all going to hell and I’m not.’

Leah disgorged a lump of half-chewed pork. ‘I don’t want to go to hell,’ she said, and began to weep silently.

‘Oh my goodness,’ said Maureen. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It’s in the Bible,’ said Rose confidently.

‘You don’t know Scripture better than your father,’ said Lettie.

‘I can read as well as he can,’ said Rose.

‘Touché!’ said Harry.

‘We’ll talk about this later,’ said Matthew to his daughter. ‘Jesus says we can eat whatever we like.’

‘That’s not what it says in the Old Testament. You can’t pick and choose.’

‘Am I going to hell, Mum?’ said Leah. ‘I ate pork.’

‘Of course not, darling,’ said Lettie. ‘Christ gave us a new dispensation.’

‘I’m not going to hell,’ said Peter, stuffing his mouth with pork and gnashing in his sister’s face.

She recoiled. ‘You are,’ she said. ‘You’re going to burn in eternity in hell fire, and every day demons are going to cut you up and eat you slowly, and the next day you’ll be whole and it’ll start again, for ever and ever.’

Leah wailed and ran round the table into her mother’s arms.

‘You’ve got a good old schism going here,’ said Harry.

‘Keep to your own realm, Dad,’ said Matthew.

Lettie said: ‘Why do you want your son’s family to be unhappy?’

‘I’m merely observing,’ said Harry. ‘It’s fascinating.’

‘He who gives no love gets no love, and ends up alone,’ said Lettie.

One by one they became aware that behind Leah’s soft weeping another sound, similar but stronger, sniffing and sobbing, was building. Something extraordinary was happening to Bec’s face; her eyes were squeezed together and swollen and her mouth was turned downwards like a mask in a Greek tragedy. It had happened so quickly; her whole face seemed to shine with tears. As the table fell silent, the noise from Bec grew louder. Her shoulders shook and she began sucking in great lungfuls of air and pushing them out with roars of anguish that drained the blood from the children’s faces and froze the others to their places.

Alex helped Bec to her feet and took her to their room. She wept for an hour, sitting on the bed and squeezing her knees to her chest, then lying down, curled in a foetal position, as the sound of anguish ebbed. Alex held her but in the beginning she was hard, rigid; it was as if she didn’t feel him. As her weeping became quieter she softened and finally pressed herself against him.

‘It’s dying,’ she said.

‘It’s alive in labs all over the world. You did that.’

‘It’s dying in me.’

Alex tried to pull his arm, which had gone to sleep, out from under her, and she said, ‘Was I crushing you?’

Shaking his arm to restore the circulation Alex assured her that he’d still be able to use it and Bec made a small sound, perhaps the last sob, perhaps a laugh.

‘Holding on to the woman to stop her being washed away,’ she said.

‘It seemed like a freak wave.’

‘Came from nowhere!’ said Bec, eerily conversational, and Alex had the sense that they really had been on the deck of a ship, and that he’d clutched his lover to stop the water snatching her and taking her under, and that now they were all right.

Bec sat up on the bed with her legs crossed, looking down at her fingers, picking with extreme concentration at the skin below the cuticles, as if there were stray threads of skin that refused to be pulled off. ‘Now you know how I was when my Dad died.’

Alex watched her picking. Her face was covered by hanging hair. ‘Was it really about that?’ he said.

Bec looked up and it seemed to Alex that she was appraising him from far away.

‘I thought I was going to be brave,’ said Bec.

‘You have been,’ said Alex. ‘You took the risk to show you could live with those parasites, and it didn’t work out. It’s no shame.’

‘That’s not bravery,’ said Bec. ‘Bravery’s where you get intimate with the mechanistic side of life without giving up on the idea that it doesn’t have to be eat or starve, kill or die, fuck or fail.’

‘Are we talking about parasites or people?’

‘Both.’

‘Ah,’ said Alex humbly, conscious that it reflected badly on him to be surprised that Bec should harbour such thoughts.

‘Does it never frighten you?’ she asked.

‘A machine that can conceive of mercy isn’t a machine.’

‘It frightens me. So, that was the bravery. Sharing space with merciless little lives and accepting them. Now it’s finished.’

‘You’re still full of bacteria.’

Bec smiled and sniffed and caressed his cheek. ‘You say the most thoughtful things.’

Alex said: ‘There’s only one kind of life you could share space with who’d learn from you what mercy is.’

Much later, while Alex was in the shower, she took her sheet of contraceptives, popped the pills out of the foil and arranged them in a line along the bottom of the window frame, spacing them evenly.

Alex came out of the bathroom with a towel round his waist, cold air chilling the water drops on his chest. Bec was standing by the open window with her arms folded. She watched him while he picked up the empty square of foil, examined it and dropped it on the floor. He kneeled down, hooked his forefinger into his thumb, and flicked one of the pills into the darkness. Bec kneeled next to him and they worked their way along towards each other, flicking the pills away until there were none left.

A cry came from below.

‘Ayah, that stung,’ said Dougie. ‘What’s that you’re flicking?’ A cigarette brightened and they heard him blowing out smoke.

‘Contraceptive pills,’ said Bec.

‘That’s not how you’re supposed to use them.’

Harry was in the hospice for a few weeks and came home to the care of Judith. Alex was often there and Matthew came when he could. He took days off to drive down from Lancashire.

Harry lost the desire to eat. He subsisted on peeled orange segments, lukewarm soup and weak tea. Judith would wash him and help him go to the bathroom; sometimes Alex and Matthew would do it. His pee turned black and his shit white. His yellowing skin itched maddeningly. The whites of his eyes looked like pale egg yolks. He was on morphine; it was never enough.

They read to him, and while they read, Gerasim curled up and slept on a blanket by the door. Harry preferred Conan Doyle and Stevenson. He listened to Louis Prima and Nat Gonella. If Matthew didn’t press him too hard, he’d talk about his childhood in Derby, and about Matthew’s mother. ‘She said she was depressed,’ he said, ‘but she was just shy.’ Dougie came, and Bec, and Rose wearing an English headscarf. She told him that she’d read his book about evolution, and that he was wrong, which would have made him laugh if he could. She left him with a kiss on the forehead and a fist-sized earthenware pot holding a plant that was, she said, about to sprout a red chilli pepper.

Harry had his bed moved closer to the window. Each morning he would peer into the tiny cluster of glossy green leaves in the pot. He poked with his shrivelled fingertips at the point where the leaves met the stalk. One day Judith came in to find Harry sitting up in bed, his eyes filmed by tears, unable to speak. He pointed to the plant. An orange nib of chilli had broken out of its bud.

There were times when he was sure he was about to die, and people gathered, and he didn’t. He heard them murmur ‘false alarm’ in the hall outside. He found the strength to open the drawer holding the key to his bedroom door and put it in the breast pocket of his pyjamas. He got Judith to fetch a particular bottle of wine from the cellar, pack it in a box with a note he dictated to her, wrap it and mark it
For Bec
. The chilli on the windowsill reddened and swelled.

One Friday evening, with Matthew due to arrive, Judith went to make tea, leaving Harry alone. He raised the covers and swung his feet onto the floor. His limbs were useless now; if he stood up he felt his bones would collapse in a neat heap. Also, it hurt. And yet he would try. He braced himself with his hands on the edge of the bed and with an effort pushed himself into the standing position. He stood there, trying to lock his knees straight. Perhaps some forward momentum would help. He tried to drag one foot forward without lifting it and fell on the floor.
Ow
. He moved towards the door, propelling himself with the sides of his legs pushing and his hands dragging. His head and his body felt peculiar, as if they were expanding and contracting. He wasn’t sure he would make it back to bed.

He reached the door, his pyjama trousers halfway down his thighs, horrible pains streaking through him, and got the key
out of his pocket on the fourth try. He put it between his lips and clawed at the door panels to get himself in a kneeling position. He took the key out of his mouth and put it in the lock. His first attempts to turn it failed. When he got both hands onto it, he managed to turn it and heard it lock. He sank down onto his bony behind with his back against the door.

Judith returned and tried to get in. A tedious conversation followed, where he could hear her calling his name, but she couldn’t hear him telling her that every time she rattled the door, it was as if nails were being driven into his back. He heard her on the phone; she moved away. He drifted off into a dream where his body was the banner of an army, tied at the wrist and ankle to a tall pole, that fluttered in a strong wind as the host marched up a winding road towards a far-off city.

He was woken by knocking and the voices of Matthew and Alex on the other side of the door, calling his name and discussing whether they should break it down. ‘Don’t,’ he said, but only the faintest croak came from his throat. It seemed to him that he was about to stop being. It was certainly getting hard to keep his head in place. It was at this moment that he’d imagined himself feeling remorse for the way he’d treated his son, who’d shown him nothing but kindness, patience and tolerance since Lewis’s birthday, and wishing he’d shown more love in return; regretting that he hadn’t left the house to him and his children.

Any other’s knowledge of his bravery in facing death alone meant that he was not alone, and made him less brave. This was the only true courage, Harry thought, to face death alone and not to cry out, not to whimper or flinch, to affirm his
humanity by accepting that from one moment to the next he would go from something to nothing.

But he heard Gerasim scratching at the door. It was as if existence was burrowing its way towards him, as if life was clawing its way through the wood, bursting through the sagging flesh around his ribs to reclaim its place inside him, as if his dog were leading a busy, trumpeting, cartwheeling column of all he remembered and all he had loved. And it came back to him that a life witnessed only by yourself is not a life at all, and that even if the only touch of love you ever receive is the mother’s first hand on you when you are born, it is still worth all the trouble of the universe. Harry tried to move, but it was too late. He couldn’t open the door. He died, not frightened but preoccupied, busy in the act of trying to change his mind.