I Could Love You (23 page)

23

Carrie sits as still as she can in the chair by the window, and talks as the old man paints. She hasn’t decided yet whether he’s a weirdo or a saddo but when you think about it, what does it matter? It’s different. She’s never been painted before.

‘What will you do with the picture when it’s finished?’

‘I don’t really know,’ he says. He never stops painting when he talks. His eyes keep on moving back and forth between her and the canvas. This has a freeing effect on Carrie, as if whatever she says to him will have no consequences. ‘Maybe I’ll put it in my show. I don’t know. When you paint a picture you don’t think about what will happen to it. You think about painting it.’

‘What show?’

‘I’m having a show in the barn here. The Thursday before Christmas.’

‘That’s this Thursday.’

‘Is it? Then I’d better buck up.’

But he keeps on working in the same careful way, mixing little squeezes of paint, stabbing at the canvas, bright eyes behind the gleam of spectacles jumping back and forth.

‘Can I come to your show?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

She didn’t expect that. Probably he thinks she’s too young, or too stupid.

‘Come the day before. I’ll give you a private view.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘No, you must. I’d like you to.’

She feels restless.

‘Do you have a toilet?’

‘Only a thunderbox out in the yard.’

‘A thunderbox?’

‘No flush. No sewer.’

‘What! So where does everything go?’

‘Into a hole in the ground.’

She pulls a face, decides she can wait till she’s home. But she doesn’t want to go home yet.

‘Really when you think about it,’ he says, ‘everything goes into a hole in the ground. Including us.’

This strikes Carrie as both true and important.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘I mean, why do anything?’

‘There’s a question.’

Carrie warms to the theme.

‘I mean, what’s the point? You’re supposed to work hard and do well and stuff, but what difference does it make? So what if you get good A-levels? So what if you go to uni? They try to tell you you’ve got all this choice but really everyone ends up just the same. It’s like at school, they make this big deal over uniform, you get to the sixth form and you’re allowed to wear trousers, and you know what makes me laugh? People really care about it. They do that to you. They make you feel like you’re more important because you can wear trousers.’

‘Don’t you like school?’

‘It’s okay. It’s the same as everywhere else.’

He pauses in his painting, points his brush at her over his easel.

‘You sound like a very disappointed young woman.’

‘Maybe I am. What’s to get excited about?’

‘Aren’t you a bit young to be disappointed by life?’

‘Why? Does it get better?’

He laughs at that.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It gets worse.’

‘There you are, then.’

She realizes she likes him. No adult has ever admitted it to her before. It gets worse. There’s an odd consolation in that. It’s the fake passion she can’t stand. People squealing with joy like game show hosts and everyone throwing their arms round each other and saying ‘Omigod!’

‘I’m the emperor of disappointment,’ he says. ‘I’ve been disappointed since 1966. That’s over forty years of disappointment.’

‘But at least you’ve got a talent,’ she says. ‘You can paint people who look like people.’

‘The greater the talent, the greater the disappointment.’

‘So why not pack it in?’

‘Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Because underneath this almighty shit heap of disappointment that is my life there hides a tiny seed of hope. That’s what keeps prodding me on, making me think maybe my luck will change, maybe they’ll wake up from their trance and say, How foolish! What can we have been thinking? We’ve been worshipping trash! But of course, they never do. So that little seed of hope is really my worst tormentor. If it wasn’t for that, who knows? Maybe I could have lived a contented life as a taxi driver.’

Carrie understands only part of this, but the part she understands she agrees with strongly.

‘It’s no good thinking it’ll get better,’ she says. ‘It gets worse.’

‘It gets worse,’ he agrees.

‘You know how they tell you to keep on trying, try, try and try again, all those stories of people who never gave up and ended up these big successes? Well, I say, give up now. Fuck everything. Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘With you all the way,’ he says. ‘Fuck everything.’

‘At least that way nothing can ever let you down again. I mean, if you’ve already given up, you can’t fail, can you? Tell that to your dad and he doesn’t get it. He has all these expectations of you, and I’m like, Please, Dad, just get off my back. And Mum’s worse, always giving me these little boosty chats that are supposed to encourage me, like, Darling you look so pretty in your blue dress, why not wear that? But who says I want to look pretty anyway? What if I look like a cow? So what?’

The older man is entirely undisturbed by all this, and keeps painting away. His attention to her is both total and indifferent. Talking like this puts Carrie in an excellent mood.

‘It’s different when you say I’m beautiful,’ she says. ‘You don’t make it sound like it’s some kind of competition.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not a competition. It’s a gift, like talent. I’m not beautiful, but I have talent. And for that reason I’ve never been happy and I never will.’

‘Me too,’ says Carrie contentedly.

She looks round the little room in which she’s sitting. There’s a deep old fireplace, but the fire hasn’t been lit so far today. Canvases stand in stacks, face to the walls. Newspaper on the floor, maybe to catch drips of paint, maybe because the old man is just too lazy to pick it up. A table covered in books, plates that have been eaten off, glasses that have held beer or whisky. Candles in saucers of melted wax.

‘You could make this room really pretty if you tried,’ she says.

‘I’m not staying long.’

‘You know something? I used to call this my house. We’d come on walks, and everyone would say, There it is. There’s Carrie’s house. It was all falling down and stuff, and I had this dream that I’d buy it really cheaply and do it up and live here.’

‘You still could.’

‘Oh, it was only a game. I never came inside. I imagined how it would be, and where I’d have my bedroom, and where I’d put the kitchen, and how I’d make the garden have a place with a swing seat under the trees, and how I’d paint the front door this blue colour, do you know the flowers called morning glories? I was going to paint the front door morning glory blue.’

Suddenly she wants to cry. How stupid is that?

‘Hold that! Don’t move!’

He’s painting at furious speed. She gazes at him, tears pricking at her eyes, thinking: he’s amazing. He doesn’t want to make me into anything. He just wants me to be the way I am.

This has never happened to Carrie before. People want you to be something you aren’t, so you pretend. Wear these clothes, put on this make-up, smile this smile, talk in this voice. This old man doesn’t want her to be anything, and he says she’s beautiful.

Now she’s crying. She’s crying because she wants so much to be beautiful.

He stops work when the light starts to fail. She wants to see what he’s painted so far but he says no, wait till he’s finished. She can’t tell if he’s pleased with his picture or not but now she knows she wants him to be pleased.

He asks her to help him move an armchair. He wants to drag it out of the house and into the barn where he’s hanging his pictures for his show. It turns out to be quite a struggle, because the doorways are narrow and he’s not strong at all. Carrie does most of the pulling and heaving herself.

‘Why do you want an armchair in your show? Won’t it get in the way?’

‘It’s part of the show.’

‘What, for people to sit on and look at the pictures?’

‘Something like that.’

By the time Carrie leaves it’s dusk in the sunken lane. She turns and looks back at the cottage and sees the glow of a candle in one window.

That’s okay, she says to herself. You can live in my house for now.

24

The noble Henry Willis organ is sighing and murmuring, its reverberant notes floating out into the great space of the chapel; rising past the rose window of trumpeting angels to the high carved roof. A student at the keyboard, perhaps. Someone too respectful to unleash the mighty roar that so offended the preacher Charles Spurgeon. ‘The only sound of praise God cares to hear is the human voice,’ Spurgeon thundered in his much-admired human voice, and was hissed by the congregation for his pains. That must have been a famous day.

Roddy Dalgliesh sits at the end of a pew at the back of the Union Chapel, which is just a few streets from his home. He’s taken to dropping in here, not for the services or the concerts, but for the quietness. He needs space to think, and the Union Chapel is a grand space.

For prayer too, perhaps. Roddy is reluctant to call what passes through his mind by the name of prayer because he has no clear notion of a recipient of his prayer. He has left unbelief behind, but has not yet arrived at belief. This is what is so hard to explain to others. He is embarked on a great adventure.

Keep thyself as a stranger and a pilgrim upon the earth.

Roddy finds these words profoundly moving. They move him emotionally, but also physically, too. They make him want to move. They make him want to disburden himself and pass as lightly as a bird or a cloud over the landscape. He wants to cut all ties, to shed all responsibilities, to float free. Impossible, of course. But when the longing struck him, when he stopped, literally, in his tracks – he was walking down Ludgate Hill at the time, heading for the tube station – he knew that something he had been resisting for most of his life could be resisted no more. This life is not all there is. This world is not all there is.

Not an intellectual capitulation. There’s no theory to it. Just a sudden acceptance. His response, standing there on Ludgate Hill as the home-going crowds brushed past his motionless figure, was to say to himself: Of course. Once he had let go of his petty insistence that there be answers, which is after all no more than one of the many forms of vanity – for why should he, or anyone, understand such immense mysteries? – once he had humbled himself, it became easy to surrender. The act of surrender an act of trust, like falling into water. Like falling in love.

Just stop fighting. Just release the controls. Just let go.

From that moment on, everything changed for Roddy. Everything is still changing. Here in the Union Chapel where Dr Henry Allon preached to Gladstone and Asquith, in this great octagonal space designed so that ‘every person could see and hear the preacher without conscious effort’, as Dr Allon demanded of the architect, here Roddy can let his eager mind roam free, chasing the chords of the mighty organ.

So much now looks so different. The injustices of the world, great and small; the apparent futility of human activity; the anxieties that grate on us and make us fretful even in the midst of security and plenty; all can now take their place in an utterly changed landscape. Down in the valley the mist seems to have no end, but from the mountaintop it’s no more than a puddle in the land. There is more, more, so much more. Maybe heaven. Maybe eternity. Maybe God.

These are all human approximations, attempts with the limited tools at our command to name and categorize what can’t be named and categorized. So why argue about it? Every culture finds its own forms, its own rituals, with which to grasp what is beyond our grasp and imagine what is beyond our imagining. All that matters in the end is humility of the intellect. Do not presume to know.

Once you know that you don’t know, everything changes. The absurdity of so much of our lives ceases to be a puzzle. Of course we’re ridiculous. Of course we make fools of ourselves. Why wouldn’t we? We are fools. We know so little. But not any the less loveable for all that.

Roddy is filled with a joyful compassion. Once this would have been called the milk of human kindness; now only a term used for comic effect. How can he speak of this to Diana? She’ll think he’s turned into a simpleton. The tone of speech of the modern educated person is narrow in its range: critical, ironical, not to be deceived. No room for wonder. Little room for joy. All the thoughts that are now sweeping through him have a low status in Diana’s world. They’re fables for peasants and children. The opium of the masses. She has no language with which to take seriously the presence of God.

Soon now he will have to leave this place and return home, where Diana waits for his much-delayed explanation. She supposes he is currently out for a reflective walk. He has not told her of his habit of dropping in to the Union Chapel.

One of the stained-glass windows features Dr Henry Allon himself, who was minister here for forty-eight years, to the day of his death. Did Dr Henry Allon ever come to a stop on Ludgate Hill and feel himself lifted up as if by the wings of angels?

Angels, now. I have gone simple-minded.

By two wings a man is lifted up from things earthly, namely by Simplicity and Purity.

That’s Thomas à Kempis, one of the devotional writers Roddy has begun to read. But he keeps the book hidden at home.

‘We’re going to have this out now, Roddy,’ says Diana. ‘It’s gone on long enough. If you’re having a breakdown I need to know.’

They’re sitting facing each other in the kitchen of their Islington house, later that evening. Roddy reaches across and takes her hand in his. This is how he’s resolved to proceed. First, make true contact.

Diana, not understanding this, is merely irritated.

‘Stop pawing me. What did you say to Laura? She says you’re having a philosophical crisis. I’ve no idea what that means.’

Roddy has planned his next step, too. He won’t tell Diana the way he told Laura, inching his way bit by bit towards the awkward truth. He’s not been talking to Diana because he knows talking will be no use. He still thinks so. Therefore his task is not to explain but to inform. No lead-in is possible, no softening up. Just tell it as it is.