The Island Walkers (53 page)

46

THE NIGHT WAS FULL
of sounds that drifted through the open windows above the table where Archie Mann sat working — music, voices, the
clanking of the conveyor belts across the river — all made small and enticing by distance.

Again he clinked the lip of the Glenfiddich bottle to the little earthenware cup. He was drunk, he realized, pleasantly and thoroughly drunk. I could sneak up on them, he thought with an amused grunt. He imagined his surprised students discovering him in the bushes, with his binoculars hanging from his neck. They could hardly fire me at this stage in the game.

He put down the cup, looked for a few moments at the small, age-browned snapshot lying on his desk blotter, and uncapped his fountain pen.

Dear Esther
,

The photo you sent — well, to be frank, it was a shock. Only I think it was taken in Regent’s Park, that time you and Walter came down for a play at the Old Vic — remember? I think you took it. The four of us had a picnic beforehand on the lawn, just to the east of the zoo. August 1935. Those are Nash’s terraces in the distance. Jeremy and me still enjoying our golden age, all five or six months of it. But the photo’s a revelation. I mean, every picture ever taken of us shows something new, don’t you think? If you look closely enough? I think I look positively sheep-eyed, rather pathetically devoted, no wonder he left me! Jeremy looks rather more intense than usual, staring at the camera as if determined to impress it. He had more vanity than I was ever willing to give him credit for. Walter — that way he had of carrying himself — real noblesse in that man of yours, though here he looks a little weary, as if secretly fed up with the rest of us. Do you think he was ever fed up? Not with you, my dear, but with Jeremy and me. We were rather déclassé compared to him, I mean in every sense. But it’s heartbreaking to see us on the very summit of our youth and happiness, don’t you think? God, what life is!

Glenfiddich thoughts. I’m sitting at my long desk with the windows open, pleasantly sloshed and listening to a group of my students make merry at a house near here. I wish I was eighteen again. There’s a boy here reminds me so much of Jeremy, not in looks so much (he’s fairer, to Jeremy’s dark, and not quite so handsome), but he has the same look of anticipation, eager for something the rest of us can’t quite see. I’m a sucker for that, makes me want to protect him. He’s a gifted student, maybe the best I’ve had, and with my encouragement is going on to university next year. His family’s working class, one of the rising type. I think his mother is actually middle class (English, a war bride), while his father works as a mechanic of some sort in the mill. The whole family has this — bearing. There’s something superior about them, not snobbish, but dignified and open. I had the boy here in my lair, just last week, showing him some books. My hands were shaking. I was that close to kissing him. One kiss — and there goes my pension, or at least a thirty-five-year reputation as an honourable man. I mean, I don’t think he’d have welcomed it. Lately he’s been snared by a poor little rich girl with vamp eyes. But then I’m jealous. And drinking good Scotch. Anyway, they’re doing it, I’m sure. You see what a pathetic old lech I’ve become. Only I don’t want her to sabotage him. His last essay not up to snuff — I worry she’s undermining him
.

But Jeremy. I remember you said, one time after he’d left me, that it was probably a good thing, for me if not for him: Jeremy too self-absorbed and, likely, you said, “to pull me down with him.” But why couldn’t I have pulled him up? People do pull other people up, don’t they? Or do they get pulled down a little too, no matter what? Of course all this is irrelevant, really, because the fact is, in the end, he didn’t want me. I still don’t understand what happened, I mean what his real thoughts were. I don’t know if there was someone else, I mean some special someone else. He was so damnably opaque, and I let him be, out of some misguided notion of kindness. I never pressed him. I wished I had, now. We talked so much, and in the end we talked about everything except why he was drawing away. That last summer in London, in the borrowed flat on St. Marks Crescent, we were getting along so beautifully. Then one day (I don’t believe I’ve told you this, forgive me if I have) I was pulling on my clothes, hurrying to get to work, and I look up and see Jeremy looking at me from the bed. Jeremy of the wide shoulders and far-seeing eyes — and his face had gone cold. I went cold. It was as if he’d seen me, some fatal flaw of mine, for the first time. I’d always thought I was lucky beyond deserving to have him — he was better-looking, smarter, the target of a thousand other boys, etc., etc. But I’d almost got used to him being there. And then this look. I believe I lost him right then. In a look. And I still don’t know what it was about. But I can tell you this, there are moods — Glenfiddich moods — when I feel that look was the central event of my life. That it’s the biggest thing that’s happened to me. In some way it’s happening still
.

Enough of this. Did I tell you I’m writing an essay about our founder, Abraham Shade? The man has got under my skin. I’m living in his house, of course, and maybe it’s just old age, but I seem to feel him around here, more and more. A poet-farmer, a personality, but what moves me most about him was his affection for the valley. From his first arrival, he was struck by the beauty of the place — as I was, you know — and for the rest of his life he was concerned about it, wanting to make sure the public buildings were put in the right places, not wanting to obscure any views. I think there may have been some nostalgia in this — wanting to preserve something of his original, pristine discovery. From my yard I can see the hill, across the valley, where he sat on horseback one fine day in 1822 and looked down on the forks for the first time. He knew in a flash (this isn’t speculation, I have his diaries) he had to make a town here. To my mind (a most unhistorical notion) he’s still there, on the crest of the hill, holding the town in his gaze; and it’s this, somehow, that allows the town to go on existing
.

As I say, Glenfiddich moods. I feel sometimes as if thirty-five years have gone by in the time it takes me to put down one exam paper and take up another. But we make do, don’t we? We rub on. I think your Walter was the best man I ever knew. He was older and wiser and funnier than the rest of us and I loved him as I love you. Forgive your old friend his rambling. I will definitely come to Cambridge this summer. Archie
.

He left the house and moved behind it, out of the light. The party sounds had stopped. Distantly, across the river, the conveyor belts went on with their fretful clanking. The moon stood almost at the high midpoint of the sky. For a long minute he looked up at it. Then he drifted to the south side of the house, and gazed down the valley towards Lookout Hill, where it commanded the deep centre of town. On the hill’s crest, not quite visible in the mass of trees and houses, the lone horseman waited. What was time? He was supposed to be an historian, but Archie Mann felt he had no idea what time was, really. It certainly wasn’t what got measured by watches and clocks.
That
time was a tidy illusion, made for businessmen. Real time was something else, wild and unknowable. Just now it seemed that time had only been born that instant, everything was fresh with the impetus of new beginnings: the infant skull of the moon riding over his shoulder; the wild blue light in the valley; the dank earth-smell of the river; the lights twinkling downstream. He moved on a little farther, into a deeper darkness. Across the valley, the horseman watched, motionless above his dream.

47

THE DARK-GREEN EDSEL
brought Alf to a halt. There was no mistaking those protruding, rust-eaten headlights, the drift of papers on the dash. The main street, split lengthwise by sun and shadow, had grown vivid.

“Alf!” That torn-cardboard voice. Doyle, dressed in a sports shirt flecked with tiny red dots and shapeless grey trousers, was coming down the post-office steps. One massive hand — a badger’s paw — extended.

Alf, incongruously, felt he was being congratulated. He knows I’ve been fired, he thought.

“You got a few minutes?”

He felt he had nothing to lose. It was one of the advantages of being unemployed. At first you sensed everybody’s eyes on you. Then you realized you were invisible.

He followed the organizer into the Vimy House, past the empty desk where the same asbestos-coloured cat slept, up three flights of stairs following a trail of filthy mismatched carpets to Doyle’s room. Alf took the chair by the open window that looked down on the empty street. Somewhere nearby, pigeons cobbled the air with their watery murmurs. Wheezing from the climb, Doyle sat heavily on the edge of the bed and immediately began rolling a cigarette. His tongue swept the edge of the paper. “Trying to quit,” he growled. “They say you smoke less if you have to make your own. Drink?” he said, nodding at a bottle of rye on the bedside table. The amber liquid contained a light of its own. Alf looked at it for a moment. His social reactions had slowed.

“No thanks. I wouldn’t mind a fag though.”

“I thought that was one fault you didn’t have.”

“I have them all now,” Alf said.

Doyle chuckled darkly as he handed the cigarette across. He tossed Alf his lighter and silently rolled another cigarette for himself. Alf smoked and looked into the blaze of the street, worried. He knew he hadn’t been brought here to make small talk, and he feared the exposure of even a small part of what he had kept to himself.

After a while, Doyle said, “I hear you had some bad luck.”

Alf shrugged. “Nothing worth talking about.” He could feel Doyle waiting, on the low bed across the room. He could feel the powerful draw of Doyle’s silence, tugging on his secrets. He resisted, settling himself, a man in a hole. And still Doyle went on waiting, perfectly comfortable, it seemed.

Doyle said, “They treated you badly.”

Again Alf shrugged, feigning nonchalance. But he saw in his mind’s eye Kit Ford sitting smugly behind his desk, on the day the foreman had taken him off the Richardsons.

“Tell me.”

Alf studied the glowing tip of his cigarette, reluctant to offer a single syllable. Silence was the one province he still ruled. And now another man was asking in.

But Doyle would not be put off. He sat on, like a statue, like a man whose chief occupation and talent is waiting. He could wait ten years, calmly smoking, his small eyes glinting in his rough face, his big hand going slowly up and down with his cigarette.

“Kit Ford,” Alf said to the rug at his feet. “You might have heard of him.”

“Oh yes,” Doyle said, with a tone that suggested he had both heard and disapproved. Alf experienced a slight opening inside himself: an access of hope, like a glimpse of distant water. He licked his lips and began, very slowly, to tell Doyle about Ford’s arrival in the mill, and the events that had followed. Occasionally he had to stop, to catch his breath, which curiously kept failing him.

Doyle’s gaze stayed fixed on him, through a scrim of smoke. When Alf told the story of his fight with Ford, the organizer heaved with amusement. For the first time since the day of the fight, Alf
experienced a certain pleasure and even pride in what he’d done. Margaret had made him feel ashamed of fighting Ford. But Doyle asked him questions about their scrap, clearly relishing it. And when Alf told Doyle about being fired, the organizer shook his head and muttered, “Bastard,” and it was as if he was pouring water into the mouth of a thirst-stricken man.

When he finished, they were again silent. Alf looked into the street. Far below, several schoolgirls were walking along with skipping ropes bunched in their hands. Their chiming voices seemed far away, a dream in the bright sunlight. And in a few seconds all the relief he had felt in telling his story soured into remorse, a sense that he had given some critical part of himself away. He was exhausted. It had all meant nothing.