Be Near Me (32 page)

'Body of Christ,' he said.

'Amen.'

I saw a moment's confusion darken his face. It contained an old appeal for calm and for silence. 'David,' he said. I put
out my hands and received the communion wafer into them and simply nodded. The sound froze between us, and I lifted the wafer and put it in my coat pocket.

'David. You mustn't.'

I turned without looking again at the Bishop. I walked past the pews and the turning heads of the faithful and stopped for a second at the doors of the chapel, out of habit, crossing myself with water.

The Marcellists knew more than the Bombastics. In their youth they knew about the fading quality of everything: the radicals believed only in idealism and the glorious emancipations of the future, until the struggle for those too became a romantic thing of the past. The Church gave me every reason to expect a bridge between the two, it gave me hope. Our journey will sustain many falsehoods to avoid that one truth: we wanted love, and without it only the broad universe would do, with its solid, perfumed dark.

Snow came floating in from the sea as I drove for the last time up the coastal road from Ayr. It wouldn't lie, the snow, but it jigged in the atmosphere and turned cartwheels out there before landing and vanishing on the windscreen. I knew the children of Ayrshire would be glad to see the flakes and the whiteness that morning and find themselves indoors, peering out to a painted dream of Christmas Day. I left my bags in the boot of the car and parked at the edge of the housing estate, walking over the bridge and down past the primary school. The gate to the school was padlocked, and beyond the gate the classroom windows were covered in drawings of snowflakes and reindeers and jagged trees. Perhaps there's nothing so empty as an empty playground; on the grey gravel of the yard, the slushy water, like thoughts, collected in pools, and by the entrance doors a heap of crisp packets and dead leaves stood beside a brush propped against the wall. Standing there, reaching into my coat pocket, I found two silver buttons like the ones you get on jeans, the remnants of nights gone by, those nights at the Blue Bell factory with Mark and Lisa.

Mr Poole took a while to answer the door. He came with a burning cigarette in his hand. Only when I had stepped through the door did I notice how well turned-out he looked: a crisp white shirt beneath his crimson face; a scent of toothpaste and Old Spice. He took my coat and looked at me as if social rituals were a kind of embarrassment.

'You're a good timekeeper.'

'Oh, yes,' I said. 'I set off early to enjoy the weather.'

'It would put years on you, so it would,' he said.

The sitting room was a small tribute to Mrs Poole. It was filled with lamps and Aztec-style cushions, framed prints of bulbs and plants. On top of the television there were framed photographs of people I had seen only once, at Mrs Poole's funeral, and the coffee table, which took up most of the floor-space, was a neat little archive of wooden boxes, knitting needles and remote controls. On a ledge under the table I saw a couple of books: an Italian dictionary and
French Provincial Cooking.
Next to the window, a small Christmas tree was hung with baubles covered in glitter. It had lights too, and they flashed in sequence, as if each light was passing its happy message to the next, a community of celebration. The television was on when I came in: a news
programme about American troops celebrating Christmas in Iraq.

'Anne used to say,' said Mr Poole, 'that the half of them don't have a clue why they're over there.'

I mused for a second and watched the pictures.

'It's all religion, isn't it?' he said. 'Not that I'm against religion. But those young fellas could be out there for years.'

'I hope not,' I said, handing him a bottle.

'You shouldn't have bothered,' he said. 'This'll be the good stuff, eh?'

'It's not bad,' I said. 'It's just right for today.'

It was actually the best I had mustered that year, the favourite tipple of my old friend Edward Hippisley-Cox, the famous 'nectar' much coveted by all those fellows, a bottle of Château d'Yquem 1986. 'I don't usually drink white,' said Mr Poole. 'But I'm drinking this one. Let's push the boat out. That's a good botde of wine, so it is.'

It felt strange being there, in Mrs Poole's domain. I had wondered what it would be like. She had spoken about it as if the place represented a world beyond any world that I could know. Mr Poole had his Christmas cards on a string across the wall, just, I imagined, as his wife would have done, and the house felt permeated with a commitment to her ideas, a feeling that came from Mr Poole himself that day, as if he was determined to do better by Mrs Poole now that she was gone. He handed me a glass. I clinked with him and noted that the wine tasted unimaginably good.

'You're quite right,' I said. 'Maybe those boys should be home with their families.'

'It's all just fear, intit?' he said. 'We're frightened of them and they're frightened of us and it's all just a mess.'

'This is tremendously good, isn't it?' I said, looking at the liquid in the glass, the deep allure of a foreign sun.

'Magic,' said Mr Poole. He turned off the television. 'Now that's what you call a glass of wine.'

After that, he set up the kitchen table at the back of the sitting room and we ate a chicken with boiled potatoes. He poured himself a pint of Guinness and topped it up thereafter, telling me about the work he did and the early days of his life with Anne and the fact that they never got round to having children. He paused only for a second when he spoke this untruth and I straightened up, ready to speak. But something passed away in his eyes and he licked his Guinness moustache and there seemed no point in bringing him round to sadness.

He brought out a bottle of whisky and said, quite suddenly, that he wished he could have some of the years back, just to give their life together another try, with another chance to make everything good.

'We all want that, Mr Poole,' I said. 'I believe we want it from the moment we know how to want things.'

'Maybe so, Father. Maybe so.'

'Just give it time.'

'My mother died of cancer,' he said.

'I know that. Mrs Poole mentioned it once.'

The room twinkled not only with fairy lights but with unsaid things. 'It's back to the single life,' said Mr Poole. He stopped to look at the silent television as if it was a person.

'Or maybe I've always been living the single life. Maybe everybody does. You have.'

I was about to say something else as a way of saying nothing, but then I thought better of it and placed my knife and fork on the plate. 'I thought I was supposed to be the king of the double life.'

'That's only the newspapers talking,' he said, seeming to draw all the oxygen out of his glass as he drank from it. He looked around. 'It will just be me here now, and that's the hardest part.'

'It will just take time,' I said.

'That's right,' he said, but his eyes were vacant. He smiled at me and his smile rose for a second above the troubles of the past year, above the yearnings and deposits of life. The house was quiet. I saw his lip tremble and his eyes fill up as he lifted his glass again.

'Merry Christmas,' he said.

'And to you.'

Later on, he shook an old newspaper and read out an item about a mountain of fridges rusting in a part of Ireland. 'Anne thought we were using up the world,' he said.

'That would be a shame.'

'You mean shameful?'

'That too.'

'You like reading the newspaper?' I said.

'Once you get past the rubbish,' he said, 'you can find interesting things. The sport's good. I like to see how the teams are doing.'

'My father was fond of the paper,' I said. 'He read the
Morecambe and Lancaster Citizen
.' By that time he had moved onto the sofa and the drink was beginning to gnaw a little at his words and his gestures.

'Everybody has their own thing,' he said. 'I always liked this settee.'

One's life is full of rooms, and that one will always remain to me as a cell of passing warmth, the dust already settling, the memory of the man's wife now an animating feature in the continuing life of the house and the feelings of the man who still made his home there.

'Where will you go now?' said Mr Poole.

'Oh,' I said, 'there are places where I've been happy. It might be time to go and find them again.'

'That's good.'

'It's time to move on. I'm sorry to say I've been a very mediocre caretaker of my own faith.'

He looked up and the rims of his eyes were pink, and I could see from his talk that he was keen to move on himself. 'Yes, well,' he said, 'this hasn't been a bad wee meal at all.'

'Perfect,' I said.

Parfait.

When I was ready to leave, Mr Poole was looking through a tattered address book for people to call. I took the plates through to the kitchen and washed them and put them on the drying rack. As I cleared the table he would tell me things about the people in the book, who they were, how they lived, what they had meant to him and Anne. After a while, when the bin bags were all tied and the kitchen was
sparkling clean, I could hear him talking to a person in what I understood to be Australia. 'Never mind,' he said. 'It's not every day, is it? It's not every day.'

He just swayed a little on the sofa and gave me a military salute when I went in to say goodbye. His glass was full and the address book was open beside him, the pages a mass of names and numbers. As I walked away I imagined he would have a long, happy night ahead of him, speaking with the near and distant people who mobbed the book. I put on my coat and heard his animated talk in the next room.

'Goodbye, Jack,' I said.

I stood on the doorstep and instantly felt the bite of the cold on my cheeks and was glad of my coat and scarf. The evening was clear and I could see from the doorstep the lamps of the bowling green and the old abbey tower floodlit against the darkness. For a moment, a flutter of nerves took hold of me as I went to step into the road, and I looked down at the bushes and saw a fieldmouse, its small eyes very still and its nose twitching at the scent of me. The mouse didn't move and I thought of the fields that were here before the houses came, before the abbey came. Bending down, I thought I saw the spires of Oxford at the centre of its beady eyes, but too quickly it darted into the bushes and was gone.

I walked up the hill and past the playground. It was difficult to think of the small feet that tramped and jumped there, the children one day walking out of the school gate for the last time into a world where adult cares would engulf them, while the school continued behind them under the same weather. There would always be something of myself left behind in those yards, in the cold high windows and the
puddles of winter rain. I once knew a boy who ran at the edge of Lancashire fields. I knew him walking through graveyards with his handsome father. That comical child thought of dragonflies and the noble dead; he climbed on an elephant and waved to a crowd of wonderful strangers. I knew him very well. His hands grew to rub ice from the windows of college rooms. He kissed there, dreamed there, and knew the luck of living and the long sad terror of saying goodbye.

I knew this man who walked to the town's railway bridge and looked down to where the people lived in their houses. He was different from many people but never so different from himself. On reaching the top of the bridge he was happy to observe he was nothing much, just another person looking for faith in the cold night air. A goods train came and he watched its iron trucks go by, until there was only the cloud of his breath and the small red lights at the back of the train, the lights getting smaller and then flaring just once as it vanished into the trees.