By Light Alone (7 page)

He said: ‘Yes.’

‘You understand that I cannot stay in this place,’ said Marie.

‘Place,’ said George.

‘You understand that
one
of us has to stay. And you understand that it won’t be me.’

George thought about saying
but actually I don’t understand that
. The problem, though, wasn’t at the level of comprehension. What was the problem? I suppose the problem was habit. A relationship may become habituated to the dynamic of one party being more decisive and the other less – to one individual taking predominant control and the other cheerfully acquiescing. In such circumstances, whilst the play may be a sustaining and refreshing aspect of life, the intrusion of reality upon the playacting will be all the more unsettling. In other words, George’s lack of understanding did not have to do with the content of his wife’s communication so much as with the tectonic grumble of the ground shunting beneath his stance. He had always been the one comfortable with the fiction that she was in charge. Evidence that circumstances had overwhelmed her – evidence, in other words, of her very overwhelmability – constituted a sort of anti-Copernican revolution. For the rich, few things are as disabling as
uncertainty
.

‘And I
can’t
get her to understand and she needs to understand.’

‘It is unpossible,’ said Rana, speaking to the carpet.

‘What is it that she must understand?’ asked George.

‘That she is to come back to the States with me.’

‘Oh,’ said George, ingenuously. ‘We’ll easily find somebody native in NY. We can use the agency Dench recommended.’

The quality of Marie’s silence quietened him. She sat there, cross-legged on the bed, holding her mug of coffee in front of her. She raised it up like a chalice and tipped it over. The oval of blackness in its mouth elongated and broke over the lip. One, two, three seconds of micturating sound-effect. Then Marie swung the mug (still half-full) to the side to fall to the carpet.

George and Rana were looking intently at her now. Even Ezra seemed to sense that something significant was happening. He stopped on all fours, mid-crawl, and looked up to his mother.

‘Are you suggesting,’ said Marie, in a level voice, ‘that I tend Ezra myself, the whole journey, from here to home?’

Silence. Mossy-edged, flanked by dark green shadows. Sunlight on the pond. A single fin slicing the water like a paper-knife.

Silence.

George opened his mouth to speak without knowing what he was going to say. And indeed, when the words came, they came from somewhere other than his conscious mind. Possibly from somewhere quite other than him, at all. ‘Nothing about your life is
you must,
my love,’ he said. ‘Nobody can say that.’

She eyed him. She was, presumably, trying to determine whether he was being sarcastic or not. But, then again; wasn’t this a simple statement of the truth of things? Wasn’t this a nutshell definition of what it means to be rich? She kept her eyeline on him, and said nothing, and nodded, once.

‘I will, I will,’ said George. His eye was momentarily snagged by the view through the window. The view was of unscarred ground. Bleached sheets; the snowfreeze. White.

Silence was never far away. Silence was always there. It falls, as snow falls, and covers us all. George summoned his willpower and put a footprint in it.

‘I’ll
call
the agency,’ he said, pulling out his Fwn. As he did so he felt something shift in his breast, like a tide hauling itself over and round. Some grand, hidden, gravitational reorientation of the world focused on his heart. ‘Better, better than that, I’ll call the agency we got what’s-her-name from. You remember, the Ecuadorian girl. I’ll call them, and I – will – have them fly a new carer over
here
—’ as he typed the search into the Fwn-screen with his thumb, laboriously, one character at a time. ‘It’s an hour and a half to Tabriz. She can be here early afternoon, and—’ and the more he spoke, the more a momentum gathered in his speaking, ‘—of course assuming she passes muster, assuming you like her, my dear, you, she and Ez can be on an evening flight back home before the sun sets.’ And in the spurious assertion of action, the logic of connection between this human being and this other human being altered. Marriage is a very old manuscript, and there are always gaps in the text. Two people may choose to be linked when what there is between them is
something
; and that something may be practical or sexual or habitual, a shared sense of humour, a shared disinclination to holiday alone. What
effe
r. Whatehva. Choice is intoxicating enough at the best of times, and it fair makes the head spin when it tangles with such a linkage. But more potent than something is
nothing
, for that dissolves choice as salt dissolves a slug. And this is what George now understood, or rather (at any rate) what he now had some inkling of. Their marriage had once been a voluntary contract, but now they were joined by something much stronger than the will of either of them. Prison is a perdition, and perdition means something lost. That he and Marie, having previously been lightly connected by various
somethings
, were now, abruptly, terrifyingly welded much more solidly together by an absence, the
nothing
where their daughter had been.

8

That evening George saw wife and son off at the flitter park. Ezra was in the care of a new young woman called Janet Devault, and Marie stared past George and past the hotel and stared into the distance with unthawed eyes. Then the flitter did its salmon-leap thing and shrank away in the sky, heading east.

George stayed for a while, unsure what to do with himself. He scanned the sky. The sun like a neon coin. The moon its own ghost. As he made his way back to the hotel, he became conscious for the first time of a weird, dark dignity in himself. Of course he was sad his daughter had been taken – for ransom, of course, whatever the police captain lady said. It must be that. He
was
sad. How could he not be sad? But it was not a demeaning sadness. This thought occurred to him as he walked. For circumstances had gifted him with a type of tragic dignity. It was entirely new to him, this hollow grandeur. He liked it. He imagined the hotel staff looking at him with a new respect. It was sad, but sadly serious. It was a painful absence in his life naturally; but it was an absence like a zero added to a number: it turned him from inconsequential 1 to notable 10. He was conscious of that unnerving tingle, like an itch inside the web of his nerves. It felt like the great wall was about to crumble, the dam was about to give way, and just behind the barrier was something huge, and important, and sublime, balanced on the threshold of flooding down into the cosmos.

But even the most transcendent sensations of tragic dignity don’t excuse us from the need to fill our hours with something. For lack of anything better to do, George went to the Fitzgerald Bar and started drinking. His new friends did not abandon him: Peter and Ysabella both found him there, and Ergaste too – even Emma put in a brief appearance, drank a single pomegranate-vodka and went off to bed, squeezing George’s shoulder as she passed him. ‘They’ll find her,’ Peter kept saying. Iteration robbed the words of weight. ‘They’ll find her, old man. Don’t worry. They’ll find her.’ George pondered that to say a word once is communicative, and to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing. Utterance was strange like that. Was there something corroding his sense of dark eminence, his new tragic significance? Was something eating away at it from the inside? He knew what that was, intuitively. It was the true misery of the situation. But he didn’t want to experience
that
. This dignified centre-of-attention role-playing was much more agreeable. Keep
that
at arm’s length. The more Peter said ‘they’ll find her, boyo’ and ‘they’ll find her’ the more the fear was actualized that
he would never see his Leah again
. That sentiment was not the stuff of dignified tragedy. That sentiment was demeaning, red-eyed, wailing, snotty, unbearable loss of everything, and tears flowing, and choking, and intolerable, intolerable. ‘They’ll find her,’ said Peter.

Peter was a little drunk.

George kept drinking, but the booze all vanished into some inner void. It went into his inner cavities without so much as touching the sides. He sat straight up and stiffly. Misery-as-dignity, to keep a lid on his panicking soul.

After a while they all went through to the Jazz Bar. A musician typed frantically at his piano keyboard. Tinkle tinkle tonk. This chappie wore a look of almost unhinged concentration on his face, the point of his tongue visible in the corner of his lips. George couldn’t decide whether or not he liked the
fiddliness
of it all. The open whale-mouth of the piano lid emitted filigree, unpredictable structures of sound. So big a mouth deserved a grander song. Ergaste was drinking Cognac. Peter and Ysabella both had glasses of Afghani fruit beer. Lights shimmered in waves across the ceiling, the fabric of the room imitating – what? – the pelt of a deep-sea squid. Two tables along a pokemon card game was in progress. Barks and whistles of surprise or pleasure erupted at irregular intervals from the players.

George levered his right shoe off, and pushed his bare toes through the pile of the carpet. It was soft as sand. The pattern was one of those fat-pixel Persian carpet sorts: stepped triangles, blocky swirls, like images from the very dawn of the computer age.

‘Put your shoe on, man,’ boomed Ergaste, indulgently.

George tucked his foot back in his shoe. He muttered the word ‘never’. He did this as though trying it for size on his tongue. ‘Never.’ Sour. ‘Never never never.’ It was a pulse. ‘Never never never.’ Say it enough and it flipped about: vernev, ver-nev, ver-nev. Repetition really did drain the word of all its bitterness. Here was the very cornerstone of magic.

His wine tasted of jam.

‘I
don’t
blame Marie for pushing off,’ said Ergaste. ‘Traumatic environment for her.’ He fiddled a c:snuff dispenser up a nostril large as an eye-socket, and sniffed.

‘You’re bearing up, George. More power to you, though,’ said Peter, in his horrid Canadian voice, with its whining, ski-jump inflection. I could take this wine glass, George thought. I could take the glass and crenellate its rim to jags with my teeth, and I could grind it into your eye. But of course he did no such thing. Of course he smiled wearily and mumbled his thank yous. ‘No seriously,’ said Peter. ‘I know it’s not easy. But you’re doing the right thing. By staying behind, I mean. Something as important as this, you don’t want to leave it to underlings.’

The blood would leap out of the wound in a cascade of fire-red droplets.

‘Quite,’ agreed Ysabelle. She was acting rather weirdly; spending a period of time in intense scrutiny of George’s face – an unnervingly close attentiveness – and then spending a longer period in embarrassed looking-away and a refusal to meet his eye.

Pull himself together. He sat up in his seat, or tried to.

‘It’s awfully good of you all,’ George said, in a crumpled voice. Away in the corner the card-players began a three-part braying laughter-fugue. What could possibly be so horribly hilarious? No sane human being could be provoked to laughter of such profanity. And George had the sudden comprehension that nobody here was sane, that they were all mad, and the world itself mad to the core. It was one of those crystalline insights that come to us, suddenly, all of a bundle, when we are adolescent; but which, of course, become less and less frequent the older we get. But here’s the thing: an absence is a harder thing to hold in one’s head than a presence. Leah was less to him than this mouthful of gluey red wine, because the latter was inside his mouth right now; the fluid washing between his teeth and staining his striated tongue Persian-carpet-colours. The wine was actually there. Leah was – notionally – somewhere else. And feeling this disparity, on some level – although, to give him credit, without being fully consciously aware of it – George was prompted to stress the magnitude of his loss. Talk it up from its nothingness. Put a figure on it.

‘Ten years,’ he said, to the others. ‘Ten years is a long time. Little Leah, my,’ and he had to rummage mentally for an appropriate word, ‘princess, for ten years. It’s an investment of
time
, ten years.’

‘Mmm,’ grunted Ergaste, from his belly.
Investment
was vocabulary he understood.

‘I mean an investment of the heart,’ George clarified, although, of course, he didn’t. ‘Ah! My lovely Leah! She had—’ and, still, moved by impulses of which he was consciously unaware, he proceeded to itemize his daughter as a physical being. ‘The brown eyes. Such lovely
dark
brown hair – she wanted to grow it long, though Marie wouldn’t let her.’ With an unpleasant jolt in his breast, he realized that he was talking about her in the past tense. There is a horror barely concealed in the past tense. We all feel it. We treat that tense with wary respect, it and its myriad complicated grammatical variants. That tense is where all the misery of the universe is cached.