Taking Lives (12 page)

‘What do you mean, what “the English” say? You’re English.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘You can’t just detach yourself.’

‘I know.’

‘So when are you coming back?’

‘I can’t tell.’

‘Surely they can tell you -‘

‘Nobody tells me. I have a job to do. It’s that simple.’

I put down the phone. I had things to do: a memorandum to revise about what we might buy from some truck tycoon’s collection just passing through Sotheby’s, a few sharp calls to maintenance about a suspect piece of glass in the roof above our prized solander boxes of Raphaels and Leonardos, a personnel matter - a promotion of one grade - that would probably take longer than any of the above. And there was the constant nagging issue of visibility: the Museum’s and therefore mine. Our department had so far failed to produce a thick, shiny gift book, and scholarly monographs were no longer enough. The Museum press needed product.

Anna would call back. I’d call back. She might be able to leave things hanging this way, to be continued, but I never could. I can stop trying to reason.

She called back within a half-hour.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Some doctor called from Portugal. His English wasn’t good. But I think there’s news about your father. It wasn’t a good line.’

I hacked at some odd lamb on the plane to Lisbon, drank a small plastic bottle of red Bairrada wine. I have to tell you: all sense of rush and purpose simply stopped. I just felt cold. The white cloudscapes mocked me: a baroque, sentimental sky that ought to have had fat, pink cherubs lollipopping about.

For this news about my father was disconcertingly vague, filtered through the doctor’s English and Anna’s understanding of it. I didn’t know the doctor’s threshold of panic, but I did know my father would never see a doctor without some alarming reason; anything else was ‘wasting the doctor’s time’. So the news could require great feeling from me - grief, compassion, horror - or nothing more than exasperation at a false alarm. If it was a false alarm, my father would blame me for coming. I couldn’t be ready, either way.

I couldn’t lose him.

I’d always been able to judge myself against my father, tell who I was by not being my father, and now the measure and the history might be going out of my life.

Everything started all over again, strapped in a plane seat at 35,000 feet, in the vague place and time above clouds.

I stopped for coffee on the motorway north, somewhere the espresso was parcelled out from a chrome and white samovar and the sandwiches were date-stamped. Foreignness began to register, first on the ears - the high, rushing pitch of a man’s sentence, the way a thought rose at the end to peck at the air. Then there were the municipal buses, shipping cargoes of ancient widows from town to town; a folklore group in black hats and red scarves; a man holding his mobile phone nervously in his hands, always aware of it, aware of it not ringing; everyone else, phone to ear; and the drivers tailgating as though travel were a social business, in tiny white cars with no speed to speak of, but every electronic and assisted and automatic thing there is. Portugal, as my father liked to say, is overrun by the Portuguese.

There was the grey shine of olive trees, vines thrusting and clambering, roses boiling out of lawns; and villages called Inferno, and Chaos and Valley of Darkness, choices you could make off the modern moral path of the motorway.

I chose the turning to Fatima, and stopped after a few miles in what was now my father’s town. It looked like the other places I’d passed: the shop with the gas bottles lined up outside, the church which was a box freshly whitened, houses thrown up against each other with a fountain, some ice-cream signs, some trees, some old onlookers standing awkwardly still. There was a black circle of ash at a crossroads, remains of an old bonfire; that was odd.

For a moment I thought this little town was as I remembered it, but then I realized I remembered nothing at all. I had seen pictures, read letters, heard my father assemble our home town like a model kit for Christmas - always under stars on a clear night - but I had never stood there before.

I called into the shop, which had one side selling coffee and drinks. I introduced myself: the son of Jose Costa.

The man behind the bar said, ‘I’ll send Miguel to fetch him.’

‘I’ll walk there,’ I said.

‘He’d rather come here,’ the barman said, with authority. ‘You don’t know the way. He does.’

I know what I expected: warmth, perhaps, men smiling, women kissing me, being put at a table with a glass of aguardente, being accepted back as another missing piece of the village. It didn’t happen. I was baffled like a grandchild out visiting whose grandparents go on playing cards.

One old man, with a face so smooth it could have been pumiced, asked if I was ‘o historiador’, the historian. So that was what Father said I was: a scholar, or maybe a teller of old, audited tales. He said there was a feast in three nights time and that I must come. I would be staying with my father, naturally.

I wondered about the ‘naturally’. It was odd to be known, but not to be wanted.

Miguel came back on his bicycle, a very quiet ten-year-old, and said Senhor Costa was coming. I went to the door of the bar and looked both ways, but all along the tight street of houses I could see nobody coming.

A bus passed, filling the whole street. Nobody breathed for a moment.

‘Uma bica,’ I said. I did remember the word for a good, small coffee.

I thought people passed and commented on the fact that I was waiting in a bar for my father, instead of going to his house. But, of course, they would comment on any stranger.

A half-hour passed. I had nothing to read, and nothing to think.

Another ten minutes. Miguel was whistling briskly. A tractor went by with a trailer behind it, and an old skull of a man, legs splayed, working the tractor with a grimly concentrated look. I thought of Grandpa on a slow-mo Harley. I thought of death on a slow rig.

Another five. By now, the end-of-day drinkers had come into the bar for a copo - a glass of wine - or a beer. They gave me space, and they huddled companionably. I began to be infuriated with my father, to wonder why nobody would simply show me his house, why he was taking so long. He didn’t want to seem sick, I knew. He never did.

I asked Miguel if he could tell my father one more time that I was waiting. Or perhaps he could show me how to find the house.

‘I’ll go,’ Miguel said.

He came back very quickly this time, and he would not speak to me. Instead, he stood reporting to the barman. I picked out words in clusters: ‘now, now, now’ and ‘white, white’.

I went over to Miguel and I said, ‘Tell me. Tell me this time.’

‘Your father,’ the barman said. ‘You’d better go. He’s not well.’

‘He’s alone?’

‘I should think so.’

This time, the barman gave me directions: two kilometres along the Fatima road, down a track to Casal Novo, a house with a huge stone chimney and a garden. I couldn’t miss the garden because it was full of things.

Miguel said he would come to guide me.

‘There,’ he said.

I wish I could have missed it: a beige bunker on a flat base, like a huge box in the maize fields. A staircase jutted up to the first floor; it had its own pineapple finials. The huge chimney split the house with large, dull stones lined in white mortar. The roof ended in eyebrow tiles and a pair of terracotta doves, swooping as boastfully as eagles. As for the garden, it was certainly full of things: a fountain of more madly piled pineapples, assorted lions all from the same mould with dark sleep lines, a manneken pis off to the side, like a rough page from a plasterworks catalogue with a few bright roses for decoration.

I stared. I remembered plain white walls in Stockwell.

‘He’s here,’ Miguel said, and jumped out of the car.

My father must have heard the car because he came to the front door and opened it.

I shouted: ‘Dad.’

I could see he was holding himself upright, arms tight against the door frame. He was being a good soldier. But he couldn’t smile.

‘Dad, I’m coming up.’

He seemed to watch me running up the steps but with no expression in his eyes. Then he couldn’t hold himself any more. He fell softly. His bones went in every direction under his skin. His face was a greenish white I’d only ever read about before.

I took him up in my arms. I don’t think I ever did that before, but I knew he would be very light under his dark suit. I held him and asked Miguel where the nearest phone was.

An old woman in black, working among the maize, saw me on the steps and she began a high, almost animal cry, an endless shriek.

I asked him all the questions you’re supposed to ask after a heart attack: about pains in the arm, pains in the chest. He shook his head.

I carried him to the car. There was nothing much to him. I strapped him into the back seat. Miguel said it was twelve kilometres to the hospital. My father said, ‘Eleven.’

The old woman cried on, a signal to the whole valley.

At the little hospital in the next town, my father was laid out on a trolley and taken away. I tried to follow, but a male nurse stopped me.

‘I have to look after him,’ I said.

‘He’s dead. Didn’t you know?’

A policeman came up to me. He wasn’t in uniform, but he wore his authority fitted tight.

I remember how I strained for a moment to be entirely practical. If my father was dead, there was a funeral to arrange, and I didn’t know how to do it here. There must be a hospital office that could help me handle such things. Then I would need death certificates, dozens of them, probably. There would be people to notify. But who would I notify? I had already told my mother that my father had gone away. I could tell Anna, at least, if only I could find a phone.

I folded on the ground, the power to stand gone, then the power to speak. I had time, in the middle of airless, drowned breathing, to think how ashamed my father might have been to see me like this:

Miguel was still there. He put his hand on my head as though I was a dog, a gesture of odd comfort.

I thought of how my father made me separate from this country he never let me know, how we lost each other years before he told me the house in Stockwell was sold.

I was an orphan of long standing. So I told myself: I should know what to do.

I spent a half-hour with the priest who extolled the virtues of heaven like a salesman of swamp lots, and then an effortful hour with four aunts I had never known before - who were worn out with rigorous wailing, and now wanted to welcome me, make sure I was one of the kind that comes back to Portugal and fits again, but found I wasn’t, that I was even unsure of the language. I could see it shocked them when I said my father’s name, making Jose sound like Spanish, with a breathy H at the front instead of a solid J. Still, they launched into arias of births, heart murmurs, burnt houses, new marriages, and I could barely pick out enough nouns to understand the subject. The names were all strange.

At nine, the undertaker came; at least, I thought he was the undertaker. He was a sly man, paws up to his face. He led me through the village to a garage by a furniture store on the outskirts.

My father lay in a coffin on a trestle. ‘Usually,’ the undertaker was saying, ‘he would be in his own house, but there was nobody in the house and we thought, in the circumstances, it would be better -‘

He levered up the tinfoil he’d put over the face. The face was a shock, the jaw bound in place with a cloth round the skull, and netting over that. Now there was no more will to hold the face together, I’d never seen my father seem so at ease.

The undertaker gave me a blanket.

I knelt by the coffin, between cold concrete walls, with the faint smells of oil and onions and something like formaldehyde. But the body was not embalmed. It had been cracked into shape, tied there, and the nets were to keep off the flies.

I tried to say ‘goodbye’, tried to say the word out loud. I couldn’t; this still body was such a plain reminder that my father was not there to hear me. For a moment, I had a sense of how loudly emptiness can roar at you: like everything you hear with fingers in your ears.

I stood up, found the undertaker waiting just to the side of the door.

‘You don’t want to stay?’ he said. It was obviously an issue, a duty he was not prepared to explain.

I said, ‘No.’ I tried to give him back the blanket.

‘Usually,’ he said, ‘there would be others to join you. I have some wine if you want to wait.’

I knew then I had no choice. I covered my shoulders with the blanket, and I sat waiting by the open garage door, with my father trussed and netted on a trestle just beyond. A few people passed busily.

I wondered why nobody wanted to remember my father in the place where he always thought he belonged.

I watched the flies turning in the white light of the street lamp, bright like fireflies. After a while, the undertaker put his portable TV on the window sill across the alleyway, flickers of blue light in the dusk, so I could watch some dance show while I waited.

There are a number of hotel forms in the police file. Hart tried Lisbon first, but evidently he did not fit; perhaps nobody noticed him as he wanted. He spent two days in the hills around Sintra; plenty of exiles there, growing sour in pretty gardens, but he didn’t settle. He went south to the Algarve, and I can understand why he found no comfortable, sociable place along the concrete facade of the beach.

To judge from the gap between the hotel forms, he quit the coast and drove north in a day. He came to medieval streets in the centre of the country, a university town on a hill, and put himself in some shiny old-new hotel with imitation pools in a dummy atrium and an old manor house at the front. Coimbra, he obviously decided, would be a credible destination for a runaway academic.

If he tried to find an apartment, and I suppose he did, he’d have been out of luck. Apartments to rent hardly exist, except for the long term. He had an alibi for six months, but nowhere to put it.