The Point (28 page)

Are you offering me a metaphor?

Good grief, would I do that?

There’s silence. Several ducks potter along the edge of the lake, then launch themselves on the water, wakes furrowing behind them.

They say that blind people develop preternaturally sensitive powers of hearing, says Jerome.

Either that, or they just pay attention.

I think it is literally improved hearing.

This book I read talked about people who’ve been blind all their lives getting their sight back after an operation and killing themselves because they couldn’t stand how messy the world is. They were overwhelmed by all the stuff there was to see. They hadn’t conceived of it being so awful.

Seems drastic. What about counselling?

Seeing isn’t natural, apparently. We learn to do it. I know that tree there is closer than the library because I’ve learned to see it like that. If I’d been blind all my life I wouldn’t know to see it like that, where what fitted. It would be horribly confusing.

Thank goodness I have. Learned to see. And I bless my spectacles. The work of God, not the devil.

Do you believe in God?

I’m a former Franciscan.

Is that a yes or a no?

Jerome laughs. Yes indeed. Is it. What about you?

Clovis is quiet for a while. I’m still looking at the world, he says.

The world through shortened sight.

The world in my eyes. My mind.

He gets up and walks over to the nearest tree of the double row that lines the lake edge, and pulls a twig of it close to his eyes. Look, he says, buds beginning to swell. I can see them perfectly. When the spring comes they will be great bunches of blossom.

Manchurian pears, says Jerome.
Pyrus ussuriensis.
The goblet-shaped ones.

Adam naming the plants in the Garden of Eden.

He could choose. I’ve had to learn.

Other people’s choices. One could choose one’s own names for them, if there was no other way.

Why? I like knowing the names that they have. They are, they exist, their names are them.

If there was no other way, says Clovis.

But there is.

For you, perhaps.

They are silent again.

All naming is arbitrary, says Clovis. I sometimes think that is why people have children. For the fun of naming them.

Weird and wicked fun, it often seems. A ghastly joke.

It’s power. However ghastly. Parents name their children, the children have to wear it.

Or try to live up to it.

Clovis looks at him. Jerome, the great exegete.

And Clovis the king of France. Handsome names, but responsibilities.

I’ve always thought so. One can be more or less lucky in one’s parents.

In more ways than one.

Gwyneth’s a pretty name. Unusual these days.

I could get you some spectacles, says Jerome. It would be my pleasure.

No thank you.

Or … I’ll tell you what. Try these, they’re my spare pair, they might just work, we’re both short-sighted. Might be better than nothing.

I don’t think so. Please. Don’t worry about me. I’m happy.

Jerome purses his lips. Happy, he says.

What about you?

I think that I have moments of bliss. Quite a lot, perhaps. But whether I am happy … Are we meant to be happy?

Why not, if we want to be.

Once I would have thought it more important to be good.

Shouldn’t goodness be happiness?

Well of course it should. But is it? He stares out across the water.

It’s the colour of cogwheels, says Clovis, that bluish cold steel.

Jerome turns. I think getting things right is happiness. Making things work.

Just anything?

Important things, I suppose, good things. What about you? What brings you to this?

It’s Clovis who stares across the water. You are a rich man, he says. You were a Franciscan, now you are a rich man.

It’s not about being rich …

I was a rich man. Now I’m poor.

What are you saying? Same career path, different directions?

Clovis laughs. You mention bliss. I think
content
is a word I like.

You give nothing away. You are saying, I have nothing, so I have nothing to give, or to lose.

Clovis watches the lake. Entirely useless, you mean.

That’s not true, says Jerome. And in fact my words weren’t either, you do give certain things, words mainly. Ideas. You give one to think.

You’re playing with words, says Clovis. You could say I give, but I do not give away because I keep what I give.

Can I come again, asks Jerome. Have another chat?

To be sure, says Clovis. Feel free.

27

Jerome

I got into the habit of dropping in to see Clovis from time to time. Well, I say habit, it is amazing how quickly some things come to seem habits. A few times, anyway. I’d take a bottle of wine, some decent red, he’d fetch his glasses, two rather smudged and puddled stemless goblets. After the first time I took out a clean handkerchief and polished them. A good idea, said Clovis, in his placid way, neither the laundry nor the dishwashing is of a high standard in this establishment. On the other hand, he said, it is at least glasses, better than it once was, discarded polystyrene coffee cups recycled. Once the girl Gwyneth was there and he and she shared a glass, but I think generally she didn’t come near when she saw me. We drank modestly, there would always be some left over in the bottle. He would taste the wine in a considering manner, I got the impression he knew his wines, but he didn’t say much, he would look at me and show his pleasure in his face. His way of widening his eyes, and his expression settling into calm.

I tried to get him to talk about himself. Why? I was not entirely sure. Did I have a sense that he had something to teach me? Not really. His path, his trajectory perhaps, it was his. It could not be mine, we could not run parallel, so I believed, though we could intersect. I think I had a sense that the scale of things was different, after the visit of Clovis and Gwyneth to the restaurant. That there was a different context to things. But vaguely I felt this, and I wanted to know more precisely, how, what it meant, what his context, what his scale was. You see I was ambitious in those days,
knowing
was what I wanted, everything. Everything.

I tried wine as a way into him. I said it must pain him to drink cask crap when evidently he had a palate for a decent vintage. Oh, he replied, staring out across that lake of his, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter
. He made me think about that phrase. How often we say it and don’t mean it, we say it to comfort people, to shrug off pain, or anger, to pretend that we don’t care. When Clovis said
it doesn’t
matter
you somehow believed him, that it was truly of no significance.

It’s easy to drink it, he said. It’s easy to drink too much. Maybe you keep having another glass to see if it will get any better. It doesn’t of course. But after a while you don’t notice.

I said he seemed like a man who’d known good wine in his time. Oh yes, he said. More than he deserved probably, and he’d done it and it was done but still there for the recalling and that was okay. I asked him had he been in business, and he said he supposed so, a professional business, and I said, You mean you were a businessman by profession, and he said, Rather a professional man by business, and I thought, he is just teasing me.

One day I felt irritated and I decided, I shall be blunt. Ask a tough question, come out with it. So I said: Did you embezzle? Because it seemed to me that there was some disgrace in his being there, he wasn’t just a drop-out, a layabout, there had been some disaster which was quite likely financial, and this was his way of taking the shame. Embezzle, he repeated, in his considering way. Yes, I suppose that is the word. Not by intention, but yes, in fact. That’s all he’d say, staring at the water, it was grey and choppy that day I remember, with the waves in regular points that looked like waves in a painting, one of those painstaking repetitive depictions of the kind you get in Chinese scrolls. I wondered how he saw them. His eyes were creased up, as usual, when he gazed like that, the corners crinkled with deep lines fanning out from them. I mentioned the spectacles, that I would happily get him some, but he said he was content as he was, and anyway if he did decide he wanted some he could go off and get them, he was not without resources.

I wanted him to ask me about my work. I wanted to say to him, I am devising a complete program for all knowledge, but he did not ask, and I was not able to blurt it out, suddenly, it is a delicate thing one’s life work and must be prepared for, mutually, and he gave no help. I had the sense of offering games he refused to play, and yet for me they were no games. He unsettled me.

I mentioned Gwyneth, but he said he knew very little about her. Somehow, he said, in this context, and he gestured vaguely at the lawn, the library, the lake, somehow curiosity seems improper. You have to just be, and let people be.

I took this as a rebuke, and did not press him. I poured more wine in our glasses. He held his up to the light, and murmured: Doesn’t the Bible say something about looking not on the wine when it is red? He took a mouthful. I think it is the best thing there is, he said. It’s possible to let slip most desires, but wine, I can think of nothing more harmless, or useful.

That was the closest I came to him at that time. This little opening of himself, to say that he so liked drinking wine. I said, Wine that maketh glad the heart of man.

Oh yes, he said. That’s a good one. And I replied, cynically I suppose, but my history has led me there, Well, you can find quotations in the Bible for and against most things, you know. He said, So, we can choose.

A pelican came cruising in and landed with a heavy skidding thump in the water just in front of us. Look, he said, don’t pelicans remind you of those Catalina flying-boats they had in the Second World War? I said I didn’t know much about them. He told me there were dumps of them – well, two or three, anyway – in the bush round the lake where he grew up, he could play in them, all the instruments were there, the dials and the controls, of course nothing worked. He got a book out of the library so he could find out about them. It seemed dreadful, those huge intricate things, just rotting away in the bush. But what a plaything for kids.

The pelican sailed about for a bit then took off even more clumsily than it had landed, its wings beating furiously, its frantic feet seeming to run across the water, until it heaved itself airborne, and then could cruise in the air with its own weighty grace. Catalina flying-boats, said Clovis again. Dumpy clumsy things, but then they flew. And isn’t it the case that flight is always graceful.

What did I want of Clovis? Maybe I wanted to understand why he was a happy man. Though he denied this. Contentment was as much as he allowed himself. And maybe, he reckoned, that was no more than time passing without disaster. Bliss made him nervous. Is it ever in the present, he asked, or is it always recollected.

I wanted to say, When I am with Flora it is bliss. But it’s not the kind of thing you say. And anyway, was it.

Clovis said, And maybe even remembered bliss is ambiguous, a product of all sorts of things, nostalgia, loss, present misery. I think that bliss is not for me. It sits too closely with anguish.

Thinking of him squinting across his lake, it suddenly occurs to me as I write this down in this gloomy bushfire summer: maybe he was seeing glory. As I did, when I was a child, before anybody diagnosed my dreadfully short sight. I thought then that the shifting shimmering dazzling nearly featureless light I saw was angels, that they were always with me. Until I got my spectacles, and saw clearly. There were no angels, no tremulous dazzling unknowable glory, but I gladly traded that for the real, the sharp outlines of things. Maybe Clovis had rediscovered glory. Abstract, undemanding, simply there. No wonder he didn’t want to give it up. But I knew I couldn’t afford to live in such a fool’s paradise. I needed to see.

That night I got the first of the series of curious emails that perhaps I ought to have seen as a warning of disaster, but only with hindsight is that at all clear. Ah, if hindsight were instant, how we could save ourselves from error. It came on the private mail, which I always check before sitting down to my own work; the business ones I generally leave to the lads. At first I thought it was from Clovis, and I was furious that he could have so tricked me. There I was, thinking he was a genuine vagabond, genuinely a free spirit, and he had access to emails, he was as wired to the world of technology as I. How he must be laughing at me, at our plodding conversations concerning contentment and bliss, at my simpleminded equations of vagabondage with happiness. Not that the message announced itself as coming from him, it was some quite anonymous nickname from a public mail address, and when later I tried to communicate with it my missives bounced back. But well before this I had decided that the whole pelican thing was simply the idlest of coincidences. After all, life is full of such odd connections. It is art that needs to be rational. When I look back over the events that brought me to this plain little room, the randomness of them, the malicious randomness I sometimes think, I realise that in a work of fiction one could not get away with such scraping and grinding of events against one another. Readers would say, Aw, come on, do you expect us to believe that?