The Museum of Doubt (7 page)

Adam looked at Cate’s dad, focusing on the bridge of his nose. I love you, he said.

I’m not sure I like you, said Cate’s dad.

Adam folded his arms and looked down into the cake. Cate put her hand on her dad’s.

They walked home late after watching a film. Cate was quiet.

It’s true, said Adam. You do never see it in the foreign phrase books. Tell us the way to the bus station, give us five kilos of sun-dried tomatoes, escort my bags to the dental office, and I love you.

It’s something you know already before you go, and you never learn anything else, said Cate.

What I don’t understand is why the TV people never come round and make films about him. You’d think they were waiting for him to die.

They walked side by side through the raw smoky night of small infinite streets and turnings, pattering with the footsteps of the fearful, the drunk and the doubting.

What does dryk mean? said Adam after they had walked for half an hour without saying anything.

It means cancer, said Cate.

It was prostate cancer, advanced, and they would have to operate. There was a high chance Cate’s dad would die. She went to see him most days. Sometimes she stopped overnight. Adam went about once a week. He moved a chair into the kitchen and took a book but he couldn’t concentrate with the uninterrupted flow of Mercian coming from the next room. He tried sitting on the toilet with the door closed but he could still hear them. There was no doubt. Cate was eloquent in Mercian. English was for the moving of objects and the taking of decisions, for plain reason, the turning on and off of a tap. Mercian was a waterfall, interrupted by laughter. He began taking a cassette player with him and with the earphones clamped on his head and music playing he was free for a time.

At home he would open the Mercian book after tea, with a pen and a ruled notepad on the desk in the bedroom. He began by staring out at his reflection in the window that looked out on the darkness of January, a planet Adam half in darkness, half
in lamplight. He went to get a coffee and started watching the news. He came back, sat down and looked through the close print. It was not as old as it seemed. It was a reprint of a book published in 1868. On the inside front cover was a stamp in faded crimson ink saying Property of the War Office, Reprinted 1916 By Order, and at the back, after the summit of Mercian language skills demanded fifty years previously, a squire’s speech at a prize-giving for agricultural labourers, was a pamphlet-thick addendum with Serving King and Country written in English and Mercian, followed by lists of vocabulary and phrases. The officers are your friends. They are on your side. Machine gun. Phosphorous shell. Mustard gas. Come on lads, up and at them! Let’s smash the Hun/Johnny Turk/Johnny X! Fix bayonets! This man has trench foot. This man has gangrene. This man is a hero. This man is a deserter. This man is a coward. You will be decorated for this. You will be court-martialled for this. Stretcher party. Dear Mrs X, I regret to tell you that your son was killed in action near X yesterday. He died doing his duty for King and country. He was a brave soldier.

He turned back to the beginning and read the introduction. Sundry gentlemen and men of affairs have turned to me in indignation over the truculence of their Mercian servants and day labourers. Their refusal to understand the simplest instructions in English. Pernicious influence of religious tracts in their own language. Ideas above their station. My answer is invariably the same: in the simplicity of their hearts and souls, they are as much God’s children as you or I. If you are to claim mastery over them, must you not demonstrate your superiority by learning their tongue, just as they have demonstrated their ignorance by failing to learn ours? Cannot all pretend to the erudition of a Milton or a Pope. Many may feel reluctant to turn once again to the syntax and parsing of their youth for an aim so
much less elevated than the enjoyment of Virgil. Yet Mercian is not a difficult language. Anglo-Saxon roots. Baltic influences. Celtic strands. Pleasing rustic airs. Young children will recite their epics with unaffected simplicity. With no more than an hour’s application each day, six months will be sufficient for reasonable profiency. The Reverend G. R. Wiley.

One day the sound Cate’s shoes made when she threw them down and they hit the skirting board was harder, and the padding of her stocking feet to the kitchen, and her shoulders in a white blouse against the black of the window, her back to him when he came in.

He’s going into hospital tomorrow, she said.

For the operation.

I don’t think there’s going to be an operation.

Why’s he going into hospital?

I don’t know. She turned round and took the tissue away from her soaking face. She looked into his eyes and sniffed. She looked down at the ground and said something to him in Mercian.

What does that mean? he said.

It means how’s it going, she said. You should know that by now.

It’s not that kind of book. They start you off with 200 different sentences starting I am a.

What are you? she said.

I am a haberdasher. Sorry, that’s the only one I can remember.

She smiled and sniffed and put out her hand to stroke his chest. It’s two months now you’ve been studying that book, she said.

I know.

I thought you wanted to speak it.

I do, but your dad. Unless I speak it like a native he doesn’t want to know.

Just for him? It wasn’t him who bought the book for you.

But when you thought you spoke the same language and then you have to start again, and one of you is super eloquent and the other one can hardly put a sentence together.

How d’you know I’m super eloquent if you don’t understand what I’m saying?

I can tell.

What does it sound like?

It sounds like the sounds the wind makes things make, or a river, or heavy rain on the street.

And what does it sound like when I’m speaking English?

Like words. Like hospitals, and bus timetables, and cups of tea, and a bit short this week, and anything good on.

You’re being sentimental. It won’t seem that way if you learn more. You talk about just the same things in Mercian as in English.

Then why am I bothering to learn it?

Why are you?

Because I don’t think it is just the same.

She liked that. She had to kiss him.

The two of them went into hospital with Cate’s dad next day. He was in a lot of pain. The hospital smelled of pain, or of the notice of pain, the smell of disinfectant and pharmaceuticals and sterilised rubber that took on just the form of what it was trying to hide. The doctors were guessing. They couldn’t bring themselves to say so, but they wanted the three of them to know they were guessing. There was body language of not having a clue and being gutted about it but that was the way it was with the human body, it was so complicated it was amazing anyone ever got beyond the cell-splitting stage. Towards the end of the day they said they were going to have to operate. Cate and Adam went in to see him together and sat down beside him on the same side of the
bed. He looked at them, purged of all surprise. Cate held his hand and Adam put his hand round Cate’s waist and the other on Cate’s dad’s thigh for a moment, then took it away. After the Mercian for machine gun and brown lung it didn’t seem strange that Cate’s dad had been surprised before. Waking up in your bed at home in your own flat in the morning, that was surprising. Cancer was the hand that ended the surprise. The whip. He was a brave soldier.

Cate’s dad was dying. He was ready for it like someone who’d been waiting too long in too many offices for his name to be called. Not jumping up in relief and running to the woman behind the window any more but fed up with processes of any name or colour and wanting them all to be over and just to sleep. He was whispering to Cate in Mercian. He saw his hand tighten on hers. She turned round and looked at Adam.

What’s he saying? said Adam.

He’s talking about my mum. He says he sees her.

Sees her.

He says it hurts a lot.

Tell him he’s going to be fine.

Why?

I can’t think what else to say.

You tell him.

What, in Mercian?

He does speak English, remember.

Mr Finzy, said Adam, leaning forward, you’ll be fine.

Cate’s dad closed his eyes, turned his head towards Cate and whispered in Mercian again. The doctors came and took him away. He died the next day, after surgery, without coming round.

They were in a small room in the hospital set aside for hearing that people had died. Adam tried to hide his anger in the crying
of Cate and the holding of her. She’d folded into his arms so quickly, as imagined and laid down: she hadn’t noticed. But she had.

You’re angry, she said.

No, of course not.

He wasn’t trying to hurt you.

I know.

You used to tell us you wanted us to speak Mercian while you were there. So we did.

I’m not angry. Honest.

Don’t be angry.

I’m not. But he could have told me to look after you.

Was that what you wanted him to say?

No.

You mustn’t think he didn’t like you.

He could have said something. I don’t know, goodbye.

After you’d told him he was going to be fine?

He could have told me to look after the dog. Adam was angrier now. Cate’s dad hadn’t mentioned him to her in Mercian either.

Do you know how to say goodbye? said Cate.

Yes.

What is it?

Adam couldn’t remember.

What’ve you been doing with that book open on your desk all this time?

Y tess ley.

That’s not enough.

I thought it was.

You know what I mean.

He got up the next morning and stood naked at the table. Rain spat across the window and wind shook the glass. He
closed the Mercian book and put it up on the shelf, on top of an album of Picasso paintings someone had given them for a wedding present. He turned round. Cate was sitting up in bed looking at him.

You learned it when you were growing up, said Adam. It was easier. You didn’t have to study it. You just picked it up. It takes so much time. It’s not as if you’ve ever sat down to learn French or German. He waited for Cate to say something but she only looked at him. There has to be a reason. A reward. It’s not as if once I’d learned to speak Mercian I’d be able to do anything with it. I won’t be able to go somewhere and be understood. Your dad said so himself.

Am I not a reward? said Cate.

But there’s only one of you.

If you learned it there’d be two, and we’d have children. How many more do you need? How many women do you love?

Adam sat down on the bed with his back to her. She poked him sharply in the side. How many women do you love?

Just you.

But you don’t love me enough to learn to speak my language? You wouldn’t do that for me?

It’s not a small thing.

Would you only do small things for me? And love me? What would you do for me?

Adam turned round. You said my language, he said. You said my language.

It is my language. I’ve got two of them.

I’m in love with the one that speaks English.

Cate lay down, pulled the quilt over her and turned away from him. Don’t tell me you love me in Mercian any more, she said.

He did say it to her again, two or three times, in the couple of
days before the funeral. He said it to comfort her but it made both of them sick to hear it. Y tess ley had been his effort and his promise of a great labour, and meant love in itself to both of them and in the promise of what he’d do, and now it was only a sign of his still being there, like a lighthouse without rocks.

Don’t, she said, I told you. Tell me in English if you mean it.

The TV people did come to the funeral, they filmed Cate reading in Mercian from the Lay of Kenelm. Walking out of the chapel with his arm round Cate Adam lifted his eyes from his shoes sinking into the gravel to see the legs of the woman walking by herself in front of them. The legs in black tights were slender and moved in short, light steps. Above that was a short black coat and a black wide-brimmed hat. When they had arranged themselves at the graveside Adam was facing her, the same age as Cate but not a friend he’d ever met, and not a relative that he could think of, with her long North African face, black eyes and dark lips. He spoke to her at the buffet afterwards and was reminded how Cate’s dad’s sister had married an Ethiopian and gone to live in Addis Ababa and had a daughter before she died. The daughter was called Naomi.

Do you speak Mercian? said Adam.

I can count up to ten, said Naomi. My mum died when I was young.

Her eyes were fixed on him. He felt the blood surge through him and his skin prickled.

I’ve been trying to learn it, he said. But the only phrase I can remember is y tess ley.

She asked him what it meant.

It means I love you, he said.

She smiled and put her fingers over her mouth. He grinned and looked away. He was looking at Cate and he was grinning
after her dad had just been put in a hole in the ground and buried in earth for ever.

He went over to her and she wasn’t speaking to him. They shook the hands of the guests together while they left. Naomi smiled at them both and neither of them smiled back. She said she was at university in Leicester and they should come over. They nodded and she left.

I see what you mean now about an incentive, said Cate.

What?

Don’t be a bigger prick than you are.

If you’re talking about Naomi, we were just talking.

I know, but seeing how you were talking it’s all become much clearer. It’s too much for you to learn it just for me, your time’s too precious, your mind’s too precious, but if you knew every time you went somewhere there’d be someone like Naomi to speak Mercian with, it’d be worth your while.

She doesn’t speak Mercian.

Jesus, it’s not the fucking point, is it?

Cate was cold and down for a week and for longer than that Adam would think about Leicester University and went into a bookshop to read a few pages of a book about Ethiopia. But he got a decent job in a print plant and was surprised that Cate didn’t show the missing of her father more. One time the guilt got to him and he took the book down again and left it on the table where she’d see it. But she only asked him how he was getting on, and he knew she knew he wasn’t getting on, he wanted her to know he hadn’t forgotten, and that was as far as it went.