The Point (29 page)
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The Story of the Pelican
The mother pelican loves her baby birds so much she strokes them with her beak and claws but she gets a bit carried away, actually she’s quite violent and next thing they’re dead. So the father comes home and he’s pretty unhappy to see the little birds perished so he rips open his own breast with his beak. Then his blood runs out and all over the baby birds and they come back to life.
Except that St Jerome reckons that it is not the mother that kills the babies but a serpent who comes into the nest and bites them, though it is still the father that brings them back from the dead.
It is pretty obvious that this is a Christian story. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) when he wrote his book
The Divine
Comedy
called Jesus ‘our pelican’ because he shed his blood to save humankind. ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast.’
In another version of the fable the pelican rips open its breast to feed its kids with its heart’s blood. Probably because people didn’t look very carefully at the real bird and see that it was actually getting food out of the pouch in its great big beak, not out of its chest. The true legend is that the young are dead, killed, and that their father bathes them in his blood and brings them back to life.
This was accompanied by a picture, looking as if it came out of a medieval bestiary, a wonderful affair of vermilion and gold and turquoise, for all the world like a small masterpiece of the illuminator’s art. Except of course that it could move. The pelican, a melancholy and most beautifully linear bird, tears at his breast. Quite soon, the blood begins to drip, and then to flow, until it bathes the corpses of the baby birds. Finally the blood suffuses the screen, and seconds before the image is completely obscured by it the little ones stretch and sit up and open their beaks beseechingly.
I was charmed by this scene, and watched it enact itself several times. I was most grateful to have the fable to add to my collection of St Jerome lore, which though considerable did not include this little gem, and I stored it away in the appropriate file. I knew the story of the bird ripping its breast to feed its young, but not the version that it is actually resurrecting them. And certainly if you have to make a choice it is more comfortable to think of them being killed by a serpent than an over-loving mother. I am with St Jerome on that.
The willow sculpture was putting out leaves. Clovis walked past it in the late afternoon, going close up in this deserted time of day so he could see how it was going. The damage the boys with their bat had done to it was hardly evident, a slight unevenness at the side when you looked for it. The pattern was leafing up; he wondered how much it would be obscured by the new growth. Or whether the bones would still be quite clear. Maybe somebody would come along and trim it back. He wondered if that couple who created it made regular calls to keep their sculptures in good shape, or did they train somebody local to do it. At the moment it was very beautiful. He stood and gazed at it, the deft intricate repeating pattern of the basic structure and then the leaves putting forth, being all these things, deft, intricate, repetitive, but in their own wayward habit.
He bought fish and chips for dinner and walked back picking chips out of a hole in the wrapping while they were hot. He’d got enough for Gwyneth to have some and bought a cask of red wine as well, the usual four litres. Gwyneth wasn’t anywhere about. He ate his share, savouring the saltiness of the food that made drinking the wine after it such a pleasure, and then since Gwyneth still hadn’t come, and after all why should she, quite likely there was food from Joe for her to feed on, he finished her portion too, and then felt full so he had some more of the wine because wine is the best way to cut salty greasy food that threatens to bloat in the belly. He thought about Gwyneth because of her not being there, thought, of course it isn’t surprising that I should miss her a bit. He thought of her brown hair and the blonde tidemark that was retreating. You could measure the time she had been here by that tidemark, the number of centimetres her hair had grown, the space between it and the centre parting. He began to think of a time when she wouldn’t be here, which he had resolved not to do, what might happen was not something to be given head room. Ideas, words, the lake, these were things to be considered, but not the chance offerings of fate, the idle games-like events he had no power to influence, these were not to be thought of. He drank some more of the wine. Jerome was wrong, it wasn’t crap; it wasn’t very good but it was an excellent thing to drink.
Gwyneth’s hair reminded him of Lindi. He wondered if she was still blonde. Of course. Empires would come and go, and husbands, but she would remain blonde. There would be no poignant tidemark as in Gwyneth’s hair. Though he could not forget the thin line of dull roots, that anti-halo he’d suddenly observed, the moment of disillusion. He took some more mouthfuls of the red. Come to think of it, it wasn’t that long since he’d seen her. His present life seemed to stretch far back into the past. The same with his children, he’d been supposing them growing older, getting to the stage where they had not just stopped growing up but were decaying into time-marked survivors, but of course that wouldn’t be the case. The grandchildren, they might be different, difference comes so suddenly to the very young, but his own children could hardly have changed. He should not be imagining them as other than they were when he last saw them. Did he miss them? His heart felt sore in his body; red wine is soothing to sore hearts as to tight bellies. He was not sure whether he was more sad at missing them or at the fact that they did not seem to miss him. Or care whether he was alive or dead. Did they even know? He supposed they knew where he was, and that he still was, from the record of automatic teller withdrawals on his account, the paltry sums he took out to keep himself going, in fish and chips and this wine, and the nearly new trainers from Mancare, quite likely they were dead man’s shoes and this pleased him as once it would have spooked him. There was thriftiness, and something inherited, some story of another life, in these nicely fitting shoes, but you could never know what. Maybe he should be for once extravagant, buy some good bottles of wine like those Gwyneth had so much enjoyed at The Point. This red was perfectly all right normally, but perhaps a little party? Just the two of them and good wine for a change. That fellow Jerome wondered how he could cope with the cask crap; you should try it, old boy, he addressed him, raising his polystyrene cup in a toast to absent friends. It’s not really too bad. The polystyrene cup had its uses, you could put it down, it could be a bore having to hold a stemless glass, and make sure the absence of stem did not cut your fingers.
There was a light in the ferry terminal which made it slightly more cheerful than it might have been, or perhaps it was less, the feebleness of the harsh fluorescent tube bringing out the cheerlessness of the place on a dark winter night. And even though he sat hunched in a corner with his feet up on the seat the wind got under the wall where it did not meet the ground and funnelled up and around in sneaky cold ways. The wine was pretty cold too but it still warmed. Once the cup fell over, he thought it might have blown over in one of the eddying currents of wind, or maybe he hadn’t put it down carefully enough. It didn’t have much in it, fortunately, which was probably why it had blown over, he filled it quite full so it would be safer, being heavier, and held it carefully in his hands, as though it might warm him which it never could, even if the contents were hot, not through the squeaking impervious polystyrene whose whole point was to be heatproof. But still he cupped it in his hands and felt the comfort of it which came from the gesture itself but also the fact that it had wine in it and he was drinking it.
Jerome of course had no children. You could wonder about the choices involved, if it was accident, being a Franciscan and then not having a wife, or if he had never wanted any. Clovis felt as an ache in his chest how much he had wanted children. Now he had them, and realised that childless he could never have imagined what pain they could cause, present or absent. He remembered his father saying,
Sharper than a serpent’s child is a thankless tooth
, and how it seemed a perfectly proper thing to say, it was years before he realised his old man had reversed the words. A serpent’s tooth it was, a thankless child. Four of them. He remembered the excitement of their births. He hadn’t actually been there because there was a problem, they’d all had to be caesareans, and he was rather sorry about that, he’d have liked to see a child born, his son come into the world, but anyway he’d celebrated. Champagne, days of it. The corks had popped their little cries of joy for weeks, months even. Two sons and then with delight a daughter. Two daughters. He couldn’t with the red wine in his mouth remember what drinking champagne felt like. Though he could suddenly smell the sweet stuffiness of Lindi’s room at the hospital filled with flowers. A bower of flowers. He heard her say a number of times, in that slightly fretful way she had, Such a chore, all I did in hospital was arrange my flowers. He remembered he’d felt invincible. Four children. Beautiful. Strong. This was him in the world, these four children, he was safe. Some core of him, some essential part, was safe forever in these children and their children’s children.
Now he had, how many, he hadn’t counted for a while, he put the cup down so he could with his fingers, marking off their names so that they were themselves and not a score, it must be seven grandchildren, and he didn’t feel safe any more. He knew he wasn’t. Nobody is. He wondered if they knew it. He thought he should go back and tell them. It was very important not to think you were safe because you weren’t, it was dangerous to think you were and he could help them to see that they weren’t. Thinking you were safe was when the worst things happened but when you didn’t think you were, well then terrible things happened but it was all right because you knew you weren’t safe. But the wine cup was, he picked it up and drank some and held on to it, it was important that the cup be safe, but fortunately not all that difficult if you just paid a little attention. He put a bit more wine in just to be on the safe side. And the thing about knowing you weren’t safe was that you knew you were probably going to need saving sooner or later, and that was something to make you humble which people in his family did not actually know much about. Humility was not a virtue in Lindi’s book or one to instil in her children, and of course then he hadn’t helped.
On the other hand maybe his children had thought their father was safe and it had been a dreadful shock to them when it turned out he wasn’t, and maybe that shock was why they had behaved as they had, they had to save themselves and their families, they believed they could do that, and that the thing was, they couldn’t save him too. But they had saved him in a way, they just hadn’t saved him for them. They’d bundled him up and put him away like some old coat in a cupboard, not quite throwing it away but not caring what happens to it either, whether the moth gets in or the roof leaks on it. Moths. Leaking cupboards. How had he got there? A derelict house: better to have none, you needn’t worry about the roof leaking, there wasn’t one. He gave a snort of laughter. That was a Barnaby kind of joke, Barnaby his eldest grandchild would like that joke. It was getting really cold. His fingers could hardly manage to press the button on the cask. The wine trickled out slowly. Soon be time to stop and go to his sleeping place, he’d need the warm vent for his icy fingers though the rest of him was good and warm thanks to the wine, in fact he would take the cup as it was and finish it there. The lake could manage without him, it was still and barely lapping. Hibernating in the cold: do lakes hibernate? No, better not do that, better empty the cup, wouldn’t do to spill it, walking in the dark it is easy for a sober person to stumble, the terrain being a bit rough near the edge of the library. An empty cup would be safer.
Of course he wasn’t that father any more, the fallen powerful man saved but not kept. The man with several houses and a blonde thin wife and a cellar full of fine wines white and red and bubbled, wines for all occasions, you can’t drink just anything any time, though of course you can if you put your mind to it or circumstances concentrate the mind for you. The man with a wardrobe of suits and paintings on the walls and a gardener to cosset his plants. A great many friends always happy to eat his food and drink his wine. A suite of offices in a heritage-listed building decorated with leased masterpieces of modern art. Decorated: of course they were a message too, very elegant messages of power. Colleagues, partners, juniors, personal assistants, technological advisers, researchers, young people keen to get on, a tea lady they liked to call her who made excellent coffee and competitive little boardroom lunches all the while looking like somebody out of one of the classier television soaps. No, he had no longer to pay attention to any of those things. He was a man with a lake that asked nothing of him except that he look at it and find words for it, and now the wind had blown away the clouds, a quite remarkably starry sky above him. He tipped his head back to look. There was such a spreading sparkle and buzz of light that he couldn’t even see the velvety blackness he knew was behind it. The stars fizzed and dazzled and collided. What a show. Had anyone ever been offered a show like that before? He smiled, and was grateful.