Staring At The Light Read online

  ‘A consultant,’ William murmured. ‘He reminds me of mine, at dental school.’

  ‘What is a consultant, William?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, tucking her arm through the crook of his own. ‘I can tell you a story about that.’

  ‘How was the darling Isabella?’

  ‘Fine. I did not succumb to any temptation to torture her. In case you wondered.’

  They strolled arm in arm. She adapted her pace to his long-legged stride; he slowed down. The lights of the park glowed yellow. There was frost in the air. ‘I have an aunt’, she said, ‘who says she won’t go to a dentist before hell freezes over, because she thinks dentists are torturers at heart. Perfectly placed to be sadists for hire. She has the theory that if half the martyrs to the Catholic faith had been faced with a professional dentist-torturer they would have denied God soonest. She thinks you could all have alternative careers. Hirelings to the secret services of brutal dictators. And there you were, contemplating torture, exactly proving her point.’

  A jogger dressed in red huffed into view and swerved to avoid them. A puff of his breath lingered in the air.

  William laughed, took her seriously. He took most things seriously. ‘Does she mean someone like me would have been useful in the Inquisition, depending on which side you were on? What a ghoulish imagination she has. A dentist would not be a natural for the job of torturer. We’re descended from barbers, for God’s sake. We wouldn’t be natural for it because we like to mend things; that’s what we’re here for. Second nature, professional pride, call it what you like. You can’t destroy without wanting to mend. The dentist would be useless, tell her. He’d be looking at what he could mend after the event. He’d be putting on a show, you know, lots of blood and stuff, but everything capable of restitution. The mouth’s good for that. Has this extraordinary capacity to heal.’

  Another jogger, this time in sinister black, overtook them silently from behind on winged feet, padding towards nowhere.

  ‘So exactly what would you do? Tell me and I’ll tell her. She used to tell me dreadful tales of decapitated saints to make my skin crawl. I could get my own back.’

  ‘Oh, same things I’ve thought of doing to Isabella and never would. Open the gums, stitch them back. Drill where it did least damage. Let the burr catch inside the cheek. It would all mend. I could drill a hole—’

  ‘I think I’d prefer the story about the consultant. I like stories better than facts.’

  He grinned, tucked her arm more closely against his own. The lights of Knightsbridge loomed ahead like a fairy palace.

  ‘The consultant … Well, once upon a time there was a town where they had a problem with cats. The feline population had grown out of control, largely due to the sexual activity of one great big bold tomcat with great energy and irresistible appeal to the female of the species.’

  ‘A serial seducer.’

  ‘Possibly. Anyway, the parish councillors hunted down the tomcat, emasculated it rather than killing it and let it go. The cat population dropped dramatically and everyone congratulated themselves. Then, suddenly, it went up, ten times worse than before, kittens everywhere, stopping the traffic. None of the kittens looked like the old tom. The councillors met and decided, nevertheless, that they hadn’t done the job properly with the old devil tomcat, so off they went to hunt it again.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They found it, finally. In the graveyard, sitting on a tombstone, surrounded by other, younger tomcats, telling them what to do. Now that, dear Sarah, is a consultant.’

  She laughed, and felt warm, let him carry her with the tide of people towards the other side.

  I’m a consultant, she thought, the cat on a gravestone, trying to conduct the offstage orchestra, with no skills at all. Trying to give something from an old, cold heart. Trying to act on faith, without quite knowing what I should believe, with not much time before Christmas.

  Trying not to fail anyone.

  I think I shall go and try on that red dress after all.

  PART TWO

  6

  It was always a mistake to base anything on a lie. Pauline knew this better than most. If lies were necessary, and oh, yes, they are, it was always better to construct the thing so that it was as close as possible to the truth, leaving the least scope for embellishment. A lie was a living thing, demanding growth: it could develop like a vine with tendrils to throttle itself; it could be a little creature growing into a monster. Like the kitten they were watching, it could trip over its own legs.

  Pauline sat with Julie in the convent kitchen, a place of utilitarian warmth and ugliness. Like the rest of the building, a devotion to cleanliness outstripped aesthetic consideration without any sign of contest between the two. The radiators against the walls kept up a steady rhythm of protest: a moaning, keening sound that reminded Pauline for all the world of a high wind through an ill-fitting window and gave the impression that they were secluded on a mountain-top – which, in one fanciful sense, they were – without a view. The only thing that was beautiful as well as dangerous was the kitten that played at their feet.

  Named Felicity, without anyone having the skill or inclination to ascertain its sex, the kitten gambolled on the lino tiles with no better sense than an eye for movement and a suicidal instinct towards warmth. There was an industrial-sized gas cooker, which excited curiosity and a turn of unsteady speed in the animal: it seemed to want nothing more than to get inside the lower oven designed for other things than the cooking of cats. Barred from this compulsion by an old firescreen, which Julie had found, the kitten had crawled up the inside of Pauline’s leg, beginning at the ankle, mounting via cotton stocking and habit, to be rescued via a hole in the capacious pocket at the hip. Pauline had held it by the scruff of the neck, shaken it and stuffed it in the opposite pocket, which did not have a hole. ‘And now’, she announced, as they bared their teeth at one another, ‘I’m going to sit on you.’

  That, too, was a lie. In a different degree from the lie of pleading poverty, which had led to the second-rate service of the central heating, which had led to the noise. Or from the lie that had got her into the kitchen and Sister Imelda out of it, credited not only to Imelda’s influenza but also to Pauline’s as yet undetected enthusiasm for cooking. Or from the original lie that they were, all twenty-five of them, so democratic that they should all take turns at the stove, since all women can cook, a resolution which, for a while, had brought about results so unspeakable that there had been a universal weight-gain attributable to desperate reachings for bread and chocolate. After that there was bland food, prepared with meticulous lack of imagination by five of them in turn, until the arrival of Julie and her subsequent gravitation after a fortnight from sickbed to kitchen; but then she, too, had arrived on the tide of a lie.

  The radiators moaned like a theme for Wuthering Heights, and the kitten played with a ball of wool. There were members of this community who could knit for England. All of them were retired from active life; some of them were poorly. They liked nothing better than outings to Westminster Cathedral. It was no place for a girl who was scarcely out of her third decade.

  It had been a lie to introduce Julie to the sisters as some kind of refugee, recuperating from the ailment of a violent family but bankrolled by an uncle who paid for her keep, just as it had been a lie to present her with the impeccable credentials of a believer. The poor child did not quite know how to behave at mass, although she had learned, and her earlier fumblings with genuflections had been put down to a certain stiffness in the limbs. The fact that she could cook made up for many of the lies surrounding her. The sisters were incessantly curious, as inquisitive as sparrows and readier than hawks to dissect the origins of their guest and gossip about it to their many outside contacts, but discretion was maintained by that strange, instinctive consensus they were able to reach without discussion. The way to the suspicious heart was through the stomach. So much for spirituality, Pauline thought. The kitten pounced on the w
ool. Julie was scooping out the insides of baked potatoes, a staple of the convent diet. Never before had they been served with crisp skins and a filling flavoured with cheese and chives.

  ‘Why on earth, child, do you love that man?’ Pauline demanded.

  There was an eloquent shrug. ‘B-b-because I do, I suppose. D-d-does there have to be a reason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I shall have to think of one, won’t I, then?’ She laughed. Post-laughter, the stutter improved.

  ‘“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways—”’ Pauline quoted.

  ‘Oh, the ways,’ Julie interrupted. ‘The ways depend upon the means. I can love him here by praying for him. Or pretending to pray,’ she added, with an apologetic nod. ‘That doesn’t have much to do with the reasons, though, does it? Here, Kitty, don’t be such a fool. Drink the milk – it’s good for you.’ She pushed a saucer across the floor towards the kitten, who ignored it in favour of the wool ball, which Pauline threw for it again and again.

  ‘There’s a good reason for loving a kitten,’ she said drily. ‘It’s a piece of perfection. Beautiful without making any effort. No-one could say that about your husband.’

  Julie seemed to consider that. The radiators whined. Never once had Julie whined. Not a single hint of it. In fact, she seemed in some perverse way to consider herself lucky.

  ‘Loving the kitten has nothing to d-d-d-do with its looks,’ Julie protested. ‘I love that thing because it came from the gutter, like me. Rescued, wasn’t it?’

  Pauline was not about to dispel that myth. The kitten had been all that was left to the aged convent cat, deceased in the aftermath of a misguided pregnancy. After a dozen confinements. it should have known better. Pauline thought she would never understand the female sex.

  ‘I can’t tell you the reasons for loving Cannon,’ Julie went on, ‘because I don’t rightly know. Because he rescued me from what I might have been. And because I could actually make a difference to him.’ Her hands paused about her work for a second. Her constant industry added to her popularity. ‘Can you imagine it? A man who would let you love him. Gives you a life, and says, “It’s all yours now, tell me what to do.”’ She was cutting the chives, the knife slicing neatly and quietly. ‘A man who’ll let you reinvent your life and his. Wants to marry you the week after you’ve met, so sure is he. Abandons all his ties to be with you. Oh, no, Sister, you don’t let go of a man like that.’

  Pauline paused to wonder if her niece Sarah had ever found a man like that. If she had, she was perfectly capable of throwing him back into the gutter.

  ‘My man Cannon was an unwritten page,’ Julie said, ‘all talent and nerves and energy and fear, and I don’t know what. And if I was abused as a child, which I was, mind, I’d got nothing on him. He was his brother’s creature, in every sense. Oh, he had money, if he asked, but he didn’t know the value of anything. How could he? He’d been kept in darkness. A man of thirty, as ignorant as a child. You think I’m an innocent, Sister, but I’m the worldly one. The stronger one. Or at least’, she added sadly, ‘I was. I’m not so strong now.’

  She picked up the kitten, tickled its ears and put it down. When it grew up, it was likely to be a very ugly cat indeed.

  ‘He hardly knew the difference between right and wrong. A moral vacuum. All that misplaced talent. The oddest mix I ever saw, tearing himself to bits. I wasn’t a good person, I was sliding into nothing. He makes me something. I made him want to live. We’d disintegrate without each other. I need him, he needs me. Although …’ she hesitated ‘… he needs a child as well as me. He needs a child because it’s the only way he can really begin again.’ She laughed unsteadily. Her stutter had quite gone. ‘So it isn’t just my life in the balance, it’s his. I’m sorry, Sister. You and your niece seem to have taken responsibility for both of us. I hope you don’t enjoy power.’

  ‘No,’ said Pauline insincerely. ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Nor I,’ Julie said. ‘But I had it and I have it still, although how it ever makes a person proud I can’t imagine. It makes me weak with the thought of it, the need of him, the gift he gives me, the amount he needs me.’

  ‘You could despise a man for need like that,’ Pauline said carefully, smothering her words as she bent to pick up the kitten, which squirmed in her lap and covered the black cloth of her habit with fine white hairs. She could swear it had a squint. She stroked the cat because she wanted to hug Julie. Julie had turned her attention now to the making of pastry and, despite her general indifference to food, Pauline found herself curious about the next meal, as well as the items Julie might ask her to fetch from the shops next time. She would miss this industrious mind.

  ‘Despise him? Oh, no. Oh, yes, perhaps if he was weak in himself, but he isn’t. Oh, Lord, how c-c-c-ccan I explain it?’ A level of agitation brought back the stutter. ‘I know … I want you to know, but you can’t, can you?’ She paused. ‘Th-th-th-think of what it would be like, Sister, if you met someone lost to the devil and they saw your God, saw another life, a p-p-perfectly marvellous life on the other side of the clouds, and they rushed, rushed to embrace it. Full of joy. And they were determined to embrace it, and you’d been the one who’d made them want it, and then – and then out came the claws to drag them back, beat their bones and make them bow to the devil again, all for someone else’s vanity. Wouldn’t that break your heart? Oh, tell me it would. Tell me it would matter. Tell me you wouldn’t rather go to hell yourself first.’

  Pauline nodded.

  ‘A g-g-good man, I mean. It would have to be a good man. A good man corrupted, not a bad man or a lazy one. One with a talent to give to your God. Have you seen his paintings?’

  ‘No.’

  She was lifting the flour, rubbing the fat between her fingers with gentle ferocity.

  ‘Sarah has. Perhaps that’s why she never needed explanations. My husband sees things no-one else can.’ The bowl bounced against the surface of the table. The kitten slept. ‘Am I making sense to you?’ Julie demanded.

  ‘Yes.’ There was a vision, for a moment, of Sarah, her niece, embracing not her style of life, which she would not wish upon anyone, but the power of her faith. Sarah with belief; what a leader she could be. Julie’s analogies made profound and perfect sense. They were inspired. The child had a chance. And there was she thinking that any woman who waited on a man, as well as waited for him in the face of patent unreliability, must be a fool. The bowl thumped. The whining of the radiators rose to a shriller whine. Yeeeeeh, followed by uuuuuhmmm.

  ‘I would want to die if I lost a soul in torment,’ Pauline said, inadequately. Julie kneaded the mix. The soon-to-be-ugly cat slept. The kitchen was warm. She had made Julie angry, and she felt perversely pleased about that.

  ‘And, of course, there’s another thing in this love business. That p-p-peculiar thing. Wanting to fuck him all the time. All the time. Wake up to it, go to sleep to it. All the time. Him, too. Like wanting to feed. All the time. Being hungry to get him inside me, him and his babies. All the time.’

  Pauline nodded, without any meeting of the eyes. She wanted to pretend she was not shocked, but she was. It seemed slightly out of context somehow. ‘Cannon’s brother,’ she began tentatively, willing to take advantage, test Sarah’s version of things and change the subject, ‘what’s wrong with him?’

  ‘I’m guessing,’ Julie said. ‘Guessing on what I’m told, but it has to be true because Cannon doesn’t know how to invent things. You won’t like it.’

  ‘There’s a lot about men I don’t like,’ Pauline said severely, ‘which does not mean I have to be spared it.’

  ‘They grew up with bombs,’ Julie said, ‘the pair of them. Daddy an amateur terrorist in the Belfast back-streets. An opportunist in a senseless war, making his sons the same. They grew up learning to destroy things and the dad making money out of building them again. They were children who threw stones at anything and anyone, and not a breath of religion in them; it had nothin
g to do with that. Escaped off over here in their teens to make good and get out of it.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I try to picture it. Little Cannon, throwing stones at the bomb-disposal man who might save his street from falling down. Then his dad would build it up. What chance of a moral code in that? And the trouble is, it must have been fun. You can see that, can’t you? Running, chasing, hiding, breaking things, blowing things up … all fun when you’re a kid. And noise, all that lovely noise.’

  ‘But it might leave you with a great big lump of hatred,’ Pauline interrupted. ‘No enemies, just hate, sloshing round inside you, nowhere to go …’ She realized she was holding the kitten down rather too hard. It squirmed.

  Julie shook her head. ‘Unless you have an alternating love of harmony and, by some miracle, Cannon does. Thank God for the teacher at school who made him want to paint. The only class he went to. They played truant for the rest.’

  Pauline wondered briefly what it would be like to want to push the kitten inside the bottom oven, close the door, listen to it scrabble and scream to get out as the heat rose, confining it to hell. She shook herself. Her fingers teased the softness of the stumpy little tail protectively.

  ‘I can’t believe in a soul incapable of redemption. I cannot believe that.’

  Silence.

  ‘You stole from him, didn’t you? It can’t simply be pride. You must have done something extra. Did you?’ More silence. ‘Did you? What did you steal?’

  Julie was putting the pastry in the fridge, moving awkwardly, the answer a shake of the head. She was embarrassed, tight-lipped.

  ‘What does he look like?’

  Julie grabbed the sleeping kitten from Pauline’s lap and held it against her own face. Her hair had been cropped like theirs; now it grew. Her eyes were wet. ‘I don’t know. How would I know? I’ve never seen his face. Only a glimpse of his mouth. He had the fat man put a pillow-case over my head so I could breathe but he couldn’t see me. Then he … Then they hit me.’ She raised a stubborn face shiny with tears. ‘I don’t know him, but I know it was him. Noone knows him except Cannon.’