The Night Following Read online

  I heard her thump up the stairs, and I hid behind the settee while she rampaged around grabbing everything that she recognized as his. Then she clumped back down, and I had taken up my position at the window again just as she flung first the radio and the sweet jars, followed by all the rest of the stuff, including the Christmas presents, straight through the front windows of the shop. My uncle stood swaying in the road as objects and spears of glass crash-landed around him. She managed to throw the things quite a distance but she didn’t manage to hit him, perhaps because she was drunk.

  As was he. He didn’t walk out any more than she threw him. In the end he could only stagger away, whimpering excuses back at her, his feet kicking up more snow. It took him a few minutes to collect what he could in his arms and navigate his way up Station Road towards the alley and the footbridge over the railway, and after he had gone, all that remained besides the marks of the brawl-the dropped belongings, the broken glass, and the wrecked parcels-were the ragged, despoiling traces of his zigzag progress up the street, a hundred slips and skids and falls imprinted on the snow. That’s my memory of it.

  I watched all this standing in my pyjamas on the settee, peering over the back of it through the window with my chin resting on my crossed arms, the coal fire dying and the room dark behind me. I watched until long after he was gone and the silence told me that my mother must have got herself as far as her bedroom and passed out. She would be still in her clothes, grunting softly and curled up across the bed; I pictured her with the eiderdown up around her ears against the draughts. I knew that if the noise had woken her up, my grandmother would simply have turned over in bed, smiled into the dark, and gone back to sleep. I felt like the last person left. I knew I ought to be in bed and because I wasn’t I was deservedly guilty and forsaken, responsible both for the mess out on the street and for my own solitude. I had already let go of any idea that Santa Claus would be coming now-how could he come near a household like ours?-but I scanned the crossroads and the tops of buildings, clinging to a hope for some kind of timely, redemptive magic; I prayed for some power to appear and make everything all right. Then I started to cry.

  Snow came. There was no wind so it floated out of the sky like weightless, frozen rags of wispy white cloth. Some of the school Nativity play propaganda must still have been fresh in my mind; if ever a place was crying out for Peace on Earth Goodwill To All Men it was here, so I wiped my nose on my sleeve and trusted that someone-if not Santa, then the Baby Jesus or Mary and Joseph or the shepherds, maybe the whole holy caboodle-was watching me from up in the sky, ripping up white tissue paper and dropping the shreds down to cover up the chaos. The amassing snow covered the scars of our disgrace like bandages. The disintegrating red paper and pink ribbons, the dark bulks of my great-uncle’s abandoned things, the glinting javelins of glass lost their edges and grew round and safe. The snow went on falling until the tracks of his exit were swabbed away and I could tell myself that he may not have gone because there was no sign that he had ever been. All the bright broken relics, now vanished under a wrapping of whiteness, began to seem as dreamy as a memory that I held of him reaching out, just once, and stroking my hair.

  As I watched the snow, my loneliness began to feel like safety. Nobody could see me, so I must be invisible. And nobody knew what I had seen so I could make that invisible, too. Not by forgetting, but by keeping it for myself, mine to rehearse in my mind until familiarity rendered its violence innocuous, I would make it disappear. The shock of the fight and my uncle’s desertion would lap its way over and over through my memory until in time its last waves spent themselves and died in the corners and my mother and uncle as they had appeared to me this night would recede, pulling shadows around themselves, the sounds of their departure faint and ghostly, merely sighs and whispers and a faraway door closing.

  And I understood suddenly that I would be able to pretend, and forever if need be, that this night was simply another night separating any two days: neither holy nor enchanted, nor the night my poor uncle left, nor even, necessarily, Christmas Bloody Eve. Another night and then another would come, and another, and each time my memory of this one would lose a little sharpness, and each new night would be its own reliable little spell of quiet between dangers. For a brief time before I fell asleep on the settee, that was nearly enough, to know the glaring colours of our strife were obliterated and to hold in my mind a picture of the street transformed under the black sky and the dense, cleansing whiteness of the snow.

  No, there’s no similarity at all, none to speak of. Jeremy went quietly. And I was very little then, and frightened.

  27 Cardigan Avenue

  Dear Ruth

  Time passes. We’re almost into June. I suppose it’s warmed up a bit but by no stretch of the imagination could it be mistaken for warm à la Madeira, which is where we’d be now.

  Apologies for silence. Been busy. Getting myself organized you’ll be pleased to hear! You’re not hearing, of course, but Carole says I shouldn’t dwell on that if writing these letters is to be at all useful.

  So the upturn in the weather put me in the mood for leafing through the cruise and Australia paperwork. I turned up the brochure and itinerary and that inspired me to check what date we’re at today. I lose track of the days, sleep through them when I can. I get more done at night, without the interruptions.

  Which is why I know we’d be in Madeira, jewel of the Mediterranean. You always wanted to go.

  You were keen to see the mimosa for which Madeira is famed throughout the world. So here’s some photos of it from the brochure, sorry they’re a bit ragged, I couldn’t put my hand on the scissors so I tore them out. Butterflies, too, according to the literature, a feature of the place, some species thought to be unique to the island.

  I was looking forward more to the bird spotting, I admit-I had them in the luggage, binoculars, reliable field guide of Mediterranean species, and RSPB spotters’ notebook. My motto-never leave home without a notebook! Does that sound familiar or does that sound familiar!?

  This notebook still blank, needless to say.

  Was walking around most of the night with it in my hands, plus remains of cruise brochure. It’s ruined now, but I won’t need it again.

  Also found this to go with photos. Came across the tape so I’m sticking it all in.

  MADEIRA: JEWEL OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

  Two carefree days of sampling the delights of seafaring life aboard the Belle Aurore Atlantis and then “Land Ho!” What a wonderful land is your first port of call-Madeira, beautiful isle of pure blue skies, warm seas, and floral abundance.

  From your very first step on the soil of Madeira the delighted visitor understands why it is known as the Garden Island, as the place is simply awash with colour.

  Day 1: Stroll at your leisure through the large and colourful flower markets that are one of the most arresting features of Funchal, Madeira’s capital. Relax over lunch at one of the quaint bodegas, and while you’re at it, why not sample some of the famous Madeira wine? In the afternoon, rendezvous dockside to travel by luxury air-conditioned coach to Camacha to marvel at the local wicker furniture weavers at work, and then on to the island’s blissful Botanical Gardens for a breathtaking display of subtropical plants and flowers, most strikingly the luscious golden yellow of the famous mimosa groves.

  Day 2: Morning free for shopping in the famous lace- and tapestry-making quarter. After a lunch of traditional Mediterranean fare using the finest local ingredients, we again rendezvous dockside to travel by luxury air-conditioned coach to the enchanting fishing village of Camara de Lobos, where Churchill went to paint. Continue on to the celebrated Levada walks, part of the island’s ancient irrigation system, before returning to Funchal for a sumptuous afternoon tea at the worldfamous Reid’s Hotel.

  Can you imagine it? I can’t

  Arthur

  PS Am unearthing all kinds of things. Seems to me you got a bit carried away with that writing group of yours. Poetry that do
esn’t rhyme and stories that don’t begin or end properly. OK as a hobby I suppose, but the more I try to sort through it all the more there is. I’m tripping over loose pages, folders in every cupboard and drawer I open. I can’t make head nor tail. There’s reams of it.

  PPS Whenever did you find the time? There’s REAMS…

  Jeremy telephoned. He said, reading sturdily from a list, that he would be grateful if I would forward his mail using the labels specially printed with his new address that he would send me in a day or two. He proposed to close our bank account but would pay, into my personal account in monthly instalments, more than enough money for my purposes. His call had awakened me and when I tried to speak, my mouth felt slow and unchaste and slutty. I struggled to say something that would not sound off-balance and degraded. He told me he had already arranged that the garage bill for the Renault’s service would be sent direct to him, and again my words faltered, snagging in the net of his enunciated, suffocating reasonableness. In the moment’s pause, maybe a beat of tenderness passed between us. Then he said if I couldn’t be bothered to stick simple address labels on a few envelopes he would drop by for his letters instead.

  Out of pride I feigned a little cooperation, but really I was thinking of all the things Jeremy and I had done for so long, ostensibly for the other’s sake. What expenditure, what a squandering of spirit, this “working at” our marriage; what a thin and childish pact it was in the first place. If we had ever aspired to a state of marital grace, we had long ago settled instead for efficiency; long after I was weary to extinction at my presence seeming still to be in some way required, I had continued to turn in performances connected with laundry, cleaning, and food. Jeremy had continued to oversee cars, money and gardening. We had both pretended to be living together in more than the physical sense, wearing for each other the face we supposed the other ought to see because perhaps, behind it, we were guarding a truer, less resolute version of our selves that we feared the other would attack if they knew about it. With slippery expertise we had concealed first the doubt, and then the noiseless, tearing disappointment that life wasn’t fuller and brighter than this. Jeremy went on to mention his passport, I think in relation to the coming summer and “grabbing a fortnight somewhere,” but my attention had wandered by then. I was wondering when it was, exactly, that we’d started to show each other more tact than kindness.

  Since I was awake and it was after four o’clock in the afternoon, I went to my studio-just the smallest bedroom with bare floorboards, an uncurtained window, and a basin in the corner-and tried to think about painting. Illustrated books were open all over the place, reminding me that I had been working on another series of butterfly studies.

  Butterflies. I flipped over a few pages trying to remember what I had once found so captivating. I came across notes in my own writing. There were (I read) many species of butterfly-Lepidoptera-whose wing patterns mimicked the appearance of other things in the world. I had begun a list. I counted them on my fingers, right hand first, jammed in my dressing gown pocket, tightening each finger in turn, pressing the end of each nail into my palm just enough to get the nip of the edge on flesh. Some butterflies’ wings looked like the golden eyes of a certain poisonous lizard. There was one with the blue-green Argus eyes of peacock feathers. Another had wings like a flamenco dancer’s pair of fans; another, curling, dead autumn leaves. One resembled the veneer of polished walnut, its wings like little cabinet doors. Then there were some that looked like tropical flowers, one in particular, its wings spattered to resemble the lure of dewdrops marking a pathway down a darkening velvet cave into the deeps of an orchid. Or was it the other way round (I had put a question mark after that one). Was it the orchid that had evolved to look like the butterfly’s wings? Whichever was imitating the other, they both looked like something else; here in my writing was another question mark and the word “vagina,” followed by two more question marks. I smiled, seeing how I had used the medical word and surrounded it with those perplexed, small, tidy curls of inquiry.

  But I no longer wanted to know anything about butterflies. A few days ago I would have said I was fascinated by their sheer variety, the opulence of their colours and patterns, and the “challenge” I felt, as a mere amateur, to “do justice” to such delicacy and brilliance. I would also have said, for I had acquired a few real mounted specimens, pinned and fraying above inked Latin names in display boxes with flakes of broken wing in the corners, that I found something poignant and sacrificial in their labelled entrapment. I picked up one of the boxes from the worktable and looked at it: Chrysiridia ripheus-the Madagascar Moth. Not strictly speaking a butterfly at all, but looking like one, its wings open to show a gorgeous twinned miniature sunset. But now I was fascinated not by its classification nor its beauty nor the precise manner of its death. What seemed amazing was the simple cessation of its hair-thin little life, the dry and painless arrest of all the faultless microscopic connections that had joined one beat of its wings, one sweep of its antennae, to the next. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was the single wanton instant of its final coming to stillness that was spread out on display under glass, that one pure extinguishing moment perpetuated by every pair of eyes that gazed at it in the hundred and more years after the creature would anyway be dead.

  I thought of the woman no less reduced to a specimen on a mortuary slab, her body pinned open and exposed to the rummaging of a pathologist’s latexed hands. Such an obscene curiosity, which could be satisfied by encrypting the end of her life in a series of data entered by a laboratory assistant on a clipboard. But the true, inexcusable obscenity was not the physical progress from being alive to lifelessness, nor the recording of it-it was the manner of her death. I alone was responsible for that. I swept the boxes of butterflies to the floor, where all the papery coloured wings fragmented among the splinters of glass and wood. There was nothing poignant about them. They were disgusting.

  It was dark when I went out. The night was grey and vapoury, rain misting the darkness. I knew I wouldn’t see the moon so I walked fast out of the ring of the cul-de-sac, flexed both hands in my coat pockets, and began to run, head down, fixing my attention on the silver reflection of my body dancing off the shining road. Weather is louder at night. The drumroll of raindrops brought cold, pungent spirals of scent up from gardens and pavements. I fisted my hands and pushed them down against the inside of my pockets, squeezed my arms against my sides, and ran on. Walking and running, sometimes stopping for breath, I continued without thinking of where I was going except that I knew I was avoiding anywhere lit.

  I turned away from the direction of the town and followed the road until it intersected with two lanes leading into the countryside. Soon I was about two miles from my house, on the edge of woodland that I had only ever driven past. I turned off the lane and crackled and stumbled my way through the bracken. I was grunting and wheezing; in the dark I felt like an animal, but one out of its proper place and unfamiliar with wet roots and ditches and low-hanging branches, and I felt both alone and surrounded, my presence both unsensed and sensed. I was raising enough racket to empty the woods; I liked the idea that from their places among the trees and bracken they might be watching, the badgers and foxes, the voles and hedgehogs. I slowed and stopped, my body aching, my face itching under the heat of the sweat I had worked up. Silence, but for my breathing and the seep and trickle of the rain, drifted through the wood. There was no movement but fronds of bracken swinging back from the trail I had broken behind me and the waft of damp air touching my hair and cooling my skin, the only smells my sweat and the rainy green sap.

  Now I could see a white cloudy smudge of moon shining through the trees and white darts of rain spitting out of the sky. From far away came an animal cry, a rising screech of distress that it was impossible to imagine might not be human. It was late and lonely enough for me to let out an answering howl if I wanted to, but I had started to shiver and could not utter a sound. Besides, what answer could I give
, and to what? Probably it was a fox. But the call was a kind of refrain; it held no note of urgency and might not even have been real. Perhaps it was the cry of a phantom; it sounded, through the dark, like a wail as old as myth or lamentation, or of suffering itself. It might be not a fox but a ravening beast from a fable, crying out and limping the night lanes with sorrow in its yellow eyes, for it must be by night that creatures from the oldest stories of all are summoned up and stalk the earth, wishing to be remembered. I raised my head and felt the rain pour down on me. Further into the darkness I went, crashing through the wood, branches scratching my face.

  Dear Ruth

  I’m making a big pile of things for chucking, it’s gone on there. Remains of brochure, I mean. Best to get the rubbish all together in one place and do a big blitz and I’m not using the dining room for anything else. Surprising how it mounts up.

  Pressure cooker still AWOL.

  Later on

  Had second thoughts-I took cruise brochure back off the pile and sat there looking at it again, all those photos. Looked for a long time till it was too dark to see.

  Wednesday

  Am looking at it again now. Mimosa’s odd-looking, little cocoons of bright yellow cotton, not like any other flower. I never did like yellow but I shouldn’t have forgotten you did. I should have thought of yellow for the flowers instead of going with white.