The Light of Evening (28 page)

ing drunk, throwing stones up to the window, shouting to my grandfather to get up and come down and hand over the five hundred pounds that had been guaranteed prior to the wedding, years before. She detailed my grandfather in his nightshirt, trembling, begging for time, also afraid and incapable of tackling my father, being as he was by then an old man, infirm, and my father belting the table with his stick, repeating his demands and putting the fear of God into them. My grandfather went to the three hiding places where their nest egg was stowed, one out of doors in the stable, for fear of the law, parting with their entire savings, so dear to them, dear as their blood. You had not known of it and the shame that overcame you was heartbreaking. You stood, then you staggered, your voice breaking, and you said, “As God is my judge, I never knew of it.”

In the subsequent dismay, tears, wailing, and hand-wringing, my grandmother swearing that she would sooner have cut her tongue out than have told it. Being of a good nature, albeit contrary, she limped off and fetched her black cloth pouch, then thrust it into your hand, said, “Take it, take it.”

We slept, you and I, on chairs by the fire and at daylight set out with the money and the new potatoes, their stalks still on them as my aunt swore that the leaves also had flavor and to add them to the pot for the makings of a broth.

Lacedaemon’s lovely halls were not so temptingly depicted as Rusheen in the months as my mother kept inveigling us for the annual visit. It was the summer I had not wanted to go.

Quentin was the cause.

Months of teetering joy when he would come from the Highlands to my house in London, the anticipation of his arrival so intense that often I would have to go out for a walk and leave my front door on the latch in order for him to allow himself in. He carried very few belongings, a smart leather bag in which there were a few spare shirts and a best pair of shoes with clumps of

paper tissue that his wife had put in. His wife packed for him. His journeys were ostensibly about work. Yes, he would be there in my house, by the fire, as if he lived there, so at home in it, the spill of his hair, a violet evening light, the lamps not yet lit, and Quentin both shy and amorous. During those months, there had been several scenes at home, tears, threats, the ransacking of pockets, possibly reconciliations, though he was gallant enough to spare me those. He did mention a fancy-dress ball that he and his wife had gone to, fearing perhaps that I might have read about it in a magazine. It was a grand event in a castle. His wife went as Norma and he chose to be Sinbad the Sailor because that was the only costume that remained for hire. Yes, scenes at home, visits from cousins, parents, parents-in-law, all pleading with him to see sense. Weeks of agonizing silence and then a postcard
—
“Suddenly I meet your face”
—
our romance resumed and he would be back with his crushed leather bag, his hair spilling over his face, reconciliation, the bounty of kisses.

But in the end the imperatives of home and hearth won out.

Yet I clung.

He had mentioned wanting to bring me to Holland, to a museum, to stand before a favorite painting of his. It was of a swan with wings splayed out, protecting her nest of seven eggs against a marauding swimming dog. So strongly did I believe in our destiny that I made the journey alone to Holland and felt with all my being that he would be there in that museum staring at that swan and her unhatched young, sensing I had come in and turning he would weep with joy. I had no difficulty in finding the painting, it found me, stopped me in my tracks, the girth and fury of the swan’s wings, the hungry dog, but no Quentin.

At the start of the summer holiday, my children and I broke the journey in Dublin and there I did a shaming thing; I had the manager of the hotel where we were staying phone Quentin’s house and ask to speak to him. It was a hotel where he and I had spent a clandestine night in a four-poster bed and where a

man, ghost or intruder I know not, appeared in our room wearing a stockingette nightcap and matching drawers, like a sprite in a fairy tale, and my lover who had mounted me saying quite insouciantly, “I think you’re in the wrong room, old boy,” and the man giving a leering and loathsome laugh.

I knew that by asking the proprietor of the hotel to ring him that Quentin would twig the call had come indirectly from me. His wife answered the phone, called out the proprietor’s name, which she also knew, because of having visited the hotel to check the register after she found out that we stayed there. It seems she replied with peals of laughter and said, “Sorry, darling, but my husband is over his little fling.”

Then it was home. I would go from room to room, sit on beds fiddling with the chenille roses on the bedspreads, dipping my hands into the china holy water fonts that had long since dried up and then out of doors, anywhere, to escape the questioning of my mother’s cobalt-blue eyes. Out there under some tree or some clump of trees I would re-imagine it, Quentin unnerved by the telephone call, possibly some tart exchange between them, and his wife’s bitter laughter.

My mother, observing my moods and the barely withheld tears, decided to go into action. It was suppertime. I was staring down at a plump pork chop, glistening in its bed of gravy, and at a potato that she had gone to the trouble of peeling for me in order to encourage me to eat. She called my son away from the table and into the room that smelled of apples, because of her storing them there each autumn. He returned somewhat quashed. He was silent and a little cold with me. Under the table I squeezed his knee to assure him of something, of anything, but he ignored it. Prior to bed he told me what had occurred. My mother had sat him down, then sat opposite him and asked him was he aware of how upset his mother was and how it had infected the whole holiday. He said nothing. Then there came from her the damning question: “Is she at fault?” Was I at fault.

When he told me I said that we would have to leave there and then and he remonstrated, spoke of how awkward it would be and how hurtful, and in the end we arrived at a sort of compromise, which is to say we walked to the village where I knocked on the hall door of a public house and was admitted by a widow whom I slightly knew. She led us into a parlor where we would not be seen by the local clientele in the bar. In a heightened and incensed state I could barely speak to her, could barely register her offer of wine and of cake, hearing only the same sentence
—
Is
she at fault?
—
hearing it and biting my nails down to the quick.

Back at home, I lay awake conspiring how I would gouge out my mother’s blue eyes, leaving nothing but cavities. Then I remembered that we had stowed a doll, a large pasty china doll, in the well above the wardrobe and dragging a chair I climbed to get it, to do damage to it, feeling the bulge that was its stomach, the chipped excrescences that were its nipples, the metal wires that moved its hands, assaulting it, in short visiting upon it the punishments that I wished to visit on her.

My children had gone to a boarding school in the country. The house was ghostly, with nothing but their belongings, clothes they had grown out of, and a broken guitar. Every second Sunday I would visit them and they could see by my eyes that I was losing my marbles. I was. Asking for no particular reason why Shakespeare left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne Hathaway. Errant nonsense flying out of my mouth, such as the poor drunken Marquesa asking her little maid Pepita to fetch her a bowl of snow for her temples. A woman friend came with me. I would bring them hampers, cooked chickens, jellied hams, sherry, and port, all in a big basket covered with tempting red paper, and thrust it into their arms for their midnight binge, the woman trotting out the excuse that we had to go because we had an urgent appointment in London. But they knew. “Is Mumsies going away forever?” my elder son asked and made a to-do

about the farewell, waving a handkerchief in order to hide his true grief.

That was when I took in the defrocked monk to be a companion. He’d been in a commune but got kicked out, claiming that others were jealous of him because he made himself so useful, not only in the kitchen but also doing repairs and maintenance throughout the building. I met him in a park. He looked famished in his khaki-colored robe and tattered sandals.

I can still hear him out in the hall the day he had to leave, the groaning and gnashing, waiting for the taxi that I had ordered, crying, then retching, then an avalanche of prayer, in the hope that I would come out and say, “You can stay,” the reprieve that a condemned man or woman hopes for, up to the very last moments. Things had gone swimmingly at the beginning. He was spic and span, wore a clean white tunic every day and a loose khaki robe, the flapping of his worn sandals so reassuring on the stairs. He would count his blessings, say if he had not met me he would have been a mendicant, left to wander the world with his begging bowl. I’d offered him a room in return for which he would cook, do the shopping, and yet have enough time to get on with his sketches, his sketches all identical, harmless hazy foregrounds with flecks of gold doing their sturdiest to shimmer through. Still, my house was filled with a semblance of cheer, him pottering about, going off with his rush basket every morning, traveling far and wide for bargains, scouring bazaars for the special herbs and spices for the special dishes that he cooked. Tempting smells wafting out from the kitchen, the evening ritual, the laid table, candlelight, and conversation in which he talked of his departed wife and the subsequent sorrow that led him to join an order of lay monks.

It must have been something as simple as a pair of green jade earrings, danglers. I had sent a wrong signal. On the landing where we usually bade goodnight formally before retiring, he clasped me, a strenuous clasp, and declared his feelings. Next morning he shook, his complexion, which was the fawn brown

of a walnut shell, had become a stark white overnight and his sighs were momentous. When he put the cups and necessities down for breakfast, he made such a rumpus. Later he knelt, wanted me to know he was sorry, but that he had not held anyone since his beloved wife passed away fifteen years previous, or had not believed it possible to fall in love again, but in love he was. It was pitiable. It was awful. It was ridiculous. He began to do a million unnecessary things for me, such as leave flowers or scraps of paper with endearing mottoes, lit incense sticks all over the place, and were I to be returning of an evening and it happened to be raining, he rushed out with a massive golf umbrella that he had procured somewhere.

At night he would spend hours bathing, either to purge himself of his desires or to capture my attention. I hated the gurgling of the water in my ancient doddery pipes, hated the thought of him lolling there, willing me to show some compassion. And on each morrow he would use every little excuse as he put down a plate or a vessel to almost touch me, though of course never actually touching me. It got to be that I could not stomach the meals that he prepared. That hurt him. I had to feign sickness and then indeed did fall sick, nauseous. I would take a few oatcakes to my bedroom and mull over the dreaded procedure of asking him to leave.

Talking of my bedroom, I would find him at all hours outside the door, in the lotus position, praying for a return to our harmonious ways.

The morning I asked him to go, he took it like a man, bowed, said how lovely it had been to have known shelter for those hospitable months, and I was grateful to him for accepting the money, the Maundy money that I gave him.

It was only when the actual moment of departure came that he broke down. As I waited for him to leave, cooped up in the kitchen, the chair to the door lest he burst in, I prayed that the taxi I had ordered would be in time. The doorbell was rung and

re-rung and I knew that obviously he was incapable of answering it. I almost had to walk over him as he lay face-down on the hall floor. The hour had come, the hour that for him ritually constituted the moment of death. He had found love and a haven or thought he had found love and a haven and the removing of it did him in.

The taxi driver and myself got him standing, had to help him into the back seat with his few belongings, his cloth bag, his praying mat, and a calendar with the picture of a laughing girl with a red bindi on her forehead. His farewell gaze from the back window best forgotten.

It was a Lady So-and-So that informed me of his death. She had found my name, my telephone number, and a photograph of me in his belongings marked “Secrets.” He had been her and Sir Anthony’s cook for just over three weeks and had acquitted himself very well. She said that she knew I would feel wretched at hearing of the sad news. It seems it was a Sunday and being let off duty from them he had gone out of the city to have a little picnic by himself, somewhere in the country. He had got off at some isolated railway station, delphiniums, hollyhocks, and so forth, it being the month of June. He betook himself up a steep hill to have his picnic and commune with nature. Either, as she and Sir Anthony both surmised, he fell asleep, then rolled down the hill and lost his balance, or else he was walking down and missed his foothold, but the upshot was that he was rolled all the way onto the tracks and was made mince of by the wheels of an oncoming speeding train. The last line of her letter shook me, knowing what I knew, knowing my criminality. “Poor thing,” she wrote, “he would not eat, he was weighed down by some great sorrow, had he eaten he might have been stronger and withstood the fall.”

The doctor farther north beat all. A large house, a large sitting room, dining room, kitchen, magazines, a bowl of fruit by way