Fearful Symmetry (20 page)

PART 3

AND SO THY THOUGHTS, WHEN THOU ART GONE,
LOVE ITSELF SHALL SLUMBER ON.

CHAPTER
24

T
HREE WEEKS TO
the day after Adele’s funeral the last of the leaves came down in the Circus. Then, instead of flurrying winds that would have sent them rattling prettily round the railings, and crisp sunshine to illuminate the residents’ smart paintwork, rain came. It mired the ground under the plane trees and soaked the leaves in the gutters, so that people walking on the mulched pavements found their shoes claggy as if with wads of brown papier-mâché. The circle of wet, sulking house fronts looked out, one to another, with the suspicious disenchantment of hosed-down dogs.

Jim stared up at the weather from his basement kitchen window, beyond the still empty pot with its waterlogged compost, and tried to meet another day which had already looked him up and down with indifference. He had done all the necessary things. The shattered window and door of the workshop had been reinstated. The remains of the cooker had been taken away for examination and as soon as the room had dried out sufficiently he had had the walls replastered and repainted. He had bought some second-hand metal shelving and a work table from the classified section of the
Chronicle
. A surveyor came round and told him he was lucky that the structure of the building was still sound. Jim knew he should think himself lucky.

It was a relief, of course, to learn that Helene had been coaxed out of her bedroom. He had walked past the closed curtains of her windows in the days following Adele’s death and imagined them to be preserving a houseful of dark hatred for him. He supposed he was pleased to hear the opera was going ahead with, if anything, increased energy and commitment. But while Poppy had been round several times to try to reassure him that Helene was ‘desperate’ for his return to the group, he still had not heard as much, indeed anything, from Helene herself. And he would not accept that Helene wanted him back until that happened. Had he not made a big enough effort already? He still had some pride.

It seemed to him, walking home one day and hearing from Helene’s drawing room the strains (in every sense) of Valerie’s voice being coaxed up to a top G, that the shock of Adele’s accident had propelled the others forward and further into their own concerns while he, to his own surprise, had halted in his tracks. It was not at all what he had expected to feel. Instead of looking forward, after a decent interval of course, to the proper wooing of an unencumbered Helene who might really need him now, he had been brought to a standstill by his own guilt. He found himself unable to resume the pattern of work that he had been used to before Adele. She had always arrived on the dot of nine o’clock, compelling him to settle her to her work and leave on the dot of ten past in order to get down to the shop and have half an hour’s cleaning of the stock, ready for opening at ten. Without the spur of Adele’s punctuality he was getting later and later opening up and lazier about the state of the stuff on the shelves. If somebody wanted a thing, should a little dust matter?

He must just get used to being alone again, just as he had got used to it after Audrey left him for Ronald Sweeting in 1968. But being left by his childless wife of seven years had felt, after the initial shock, like an unlooked-for luxury that was unexpectedly and suddenly his, like a raffle prize; it had made him realise that he already had spent much too long in her unsustaining company. That was not the same as what he now felt himself to be, which was lonely as well as guilty, for what he had done struck him now for the first time as wrong. And it made him lonely, even while he was trying to chat up punters, to think of the workshop at the back of the flat now sitting empty all day. He missed Adele’s progress with the chandeliers, but he also missed knowing that she was there, as if her very presence warmed the place in his absence and left behind a sweet atmosphere of industry. Whether it was that or his guilt at what he had done that sometimes caused him to break down without warning, he didn’t know.

CHAPTER
25

S
ARA CONTINUED TO
suffer in the twenty-four hours following Herve’s exit from her house. The sight of him suddenly in a state of weeping collapse on her sofa kept looming at her from the back of her mind, and she began to dwell almost obsessively on her contribution to his unhappiness. She began to believe that she might even have created it, and she tried to numb herself by practising unnecessarily for hours, although nothing could induce her to practise anything by Herve. Even after a marathon of Elgar and Dvo
ák on the Monday she was again the next morning taken by surprise, as if hit from behind, by great swamping waves of remorse. People were meant to be ‘filled’ with remorse, weren’t they? Yet she felt somehow washed over and emptied by it, her wellbeing and self-worth leached away, leaving her with only an aching space in which reverberated, like an echo, the sense of her own hypocrisy. For it was surely hypocritical to be simultaneously capable of milking a piece of music dry of every last drop of emotion, and yet be deaf and blind to the real feelings of someone whose sufferings she could have allayed or even prevented. Life was falling short of Art in a big way, and although she did not elevate her misery quite to the height of philosophical discomfort, she was aware of the discrepancy and knew herself to be wanting. And on top of it all, like salt and vinegar sprinkled on ice cream, the continuing absence of Andrew was imparting an inappropriate and increasingly bitter flavour to this day, as it had done to every other.

She rang Helene, who thanked her for the letter of condolence she had written weeks ago. Sara had not attempted to say in it that she understood how Helene must feel but had said simply and truthfully that she was thinking of her. But Helene was claiming in a brave voice that she had appreciated it very much and also that as she was making an effort to get ‘back into circulation’, was Sara free for lunch?

‘Well, yes, I am. I was hoping I could see you. As a matter of fact I want to ask for your help with something. Someone, rather. Herve. I’ll explain.’

As Sara turned from Bennett Street into the Circus the sun came out. She was early, and now paused on the pavement. Benches were sparse in the Circus, but she could see that one of the few set out at the edge of the plane trees had room for one more person on it, so she made her way over and sat down. The two people beside her—surely tourists, Japanese or Korean—took no notice of her whatsoever. It was chilly for sitting about on benches, and Sara was glad that she had put on a long coat made of hairy, burnt orange mohair. It had a wide shawl collar and no buttons, and she drew it round herself tightly. The tourists were in jeans and wearing only the lightest of short, bum-freezing jackets, but they seemed impervious to the damp cold, so absorbed were they by the architectural wonder around them.

Sara, looking round, considered it less a wonder than a peculiarity, this circle of houses with no focal point. Once you entered the Circus by any of the three roads that broke the circle at equal distances, the implied equilateral triangle within a circle, you found yourself in an exquisitely claustrophobic trap. The circle appeared to close around you because the architect, having chosen a fine site on a hillside from which you might have looked down over the city in one direction and out to the Royal Crescent in another, had then contrived matters so that, once inside, you saw nothing. Instead of four roads entering the Circus and criss-crossing round a central feature, so that you were offered, from whichever road you entered on, a view through the Circus and out across the other side, he gave only three roads at equal intervals. Once in, you had to search for a way out. The two tourists, without any apparent communication having taken place between them, rose as one from the bench and walked on with little steps around the inner pavement of the Circus, still gazing. Sara watched them go, then resumed her study of the three segments of houses which looked out upon nothing but one another.

Even in the autumn sunshine which so flattered the stone, the house fronts seemed reserved, almost bad-tempered. Perhaps it was the excessively deep basement areas which gave the set-back houses a distrustful, moated air. By turning her head and searching along with her eyes she made out Helene’s house, number 31. Its drawing room window was identical to all the others, and yet how unique they were, the lives that had been lived behind it. She had a sudden recollection of the rehearsal when she had stepped in for Andrew. Adele had been sitting in the window seat, engrossed in her snowflake drawing, while the others in the room had chatted and clinked coffee cups politely, the ordered behaviour of ordered people in an ordered world. Two days later Adele had died. That had been just over a month ago. From where had the invasion come? Sara’s eyes involuntarily moved seven doors along and found Jim’s basement. It was as innocuous as the rest, any evidence of an explosion, had there ever been any here at the front, having been removed. It was as if a wound had suddenly erupted in a perfect skin, rendering the face so intolerably hideous that emergency cosmetic surgery had immediately been carried out. Beauty had been swiftly restored and the Circus could now offer its smooth façade for the visitors once more. Meanwhile, a girl was dead. And Andrew spoke of acceptance.

It was still a little early to go knocking at Helene’s door, and she could hardly appear with her eyes full of tears in any case. Sara gave herself a shake and turned her attention to the doors. They were all painted white, probably in obedience to some bye-law. They were plain, bearing no architraves or embellishments. Sara imagined that this could be because of some stinginess at the building stage rather than a deliberate decision about the design, but the result was that the doors presented themselves as the purely functional means of ingress and egress; the very antithesis of welcome. Even the immediately noticeable decoration of the façade was in its way uninviting. The Doric frieze of carved masonic figures, objects and natural forms which ran all around, just above the tall ground-floor windows, spoke of a private iconography whose purpose was to obfuscate, not symbolise. They made the uninitiated feel exactly that: uninitiated. Unenlightened, left out. The obscure birds, fruits and faces, to say nothing of the gesturing hands, sickles, protractors, hammers and musical instruments, spoke of meaningless, indiscriminate exclusion, like some petty playground game in which she was not allowed to join. She felt a sudden urge to stamp her foot and flounce away, because she didn’t want to play by anybody’s silly masonic rules anyway.

The thought of Adele haunted her. Perhaps being autistic was a bit like this, sitting in the Circus and trying to make sense of it. You are inside a circle which you cannot see a way out of. But the circle appears to make sense to other people, like those two absorbed visitors. It doesn’t make them panic at all, but if you let yourself be, you would be frightened. Sometimes you are, so to stop yourself being frightened you blank out the confusing messages that you can’t see the point of and then it is as if you see, hear, smell, or touch nothing that connects up with feeling or understanding. Then people think you are stupid. The two Japanese tourists were over on the far side now, still engrossed, now consulting a book. Sara looked from them up at the façade, in the direction in which one of them was pointing. On one level, of course, you see what they see, you see the same things. Sara took in again the curious carvings on the frieze: birds, animals, instruments. Of course she understood in one way: as objects they were all familiar enough. But while you could know what things were, they needn’t mean the same to you as they appeared to mean to others, they needn’t mean anything at all. And you might not come close to understanding what it was they meant to others. And they would certainly have difficulty understanding what things meant to you. Sara thought of Adele in the walled garden at Iford, her absorption in the symmetry of the paths and plants. Adele and her perfect patterns, her lists, her way of doing things, the things that had frightened her: had anybody understood? Perhaps, if you’re autistic, what you are most aware of is that for some reason—no, for
no
reason you can pinpoint—you’re excluded from the club where people know what things mean. You’re not a member. And to top it all, you can’t usually make them understand why you can’t join. It’s impossible to explain that it’s because you just don’t know the club rules and don’t seem able to learn them.

Sara got up and walked round to Helene’s house. Now judging the Circus to be the place she would least like to live in the whole of Bath, she was thinking that whatever one might make of Helene, she did not seem a Circus type. The Circus seemed to forbid the rumpled untidiness of even mildly problematical lives, let alone one stained by real tragedy. Helene was too unreserved, and much too genuine in her warmth. This architecture discouraged warmth and prejudiced Sara against its owners, too. Apart from Helene and Jim, Sara did not know any other Circus dwellers, but she had an impression, from the frequent fusses reported in the
Bath Chronicle
, that the Circus Residents’ Association worked tirelessly to make it one of the least welcoming spaces in the city. Fancy buying a house in one of the most looked-at places in Europe, whose windows directly face the windows of your neighbours, and clamouring for privacy. And instead of being grateful that from their very doorsteps they could look out at the six most magnificent trees in Bath, some of them complained about the ‘historically inaccurate’ grove of superb planes in the grassy centre, as well as the tour buses and the crowds. She wondered if many of them cared as much about their neighbours as they did about crumpled packets on the pavements.

Even less did Helene fit her idea of Circus resident when, a moment later, Sara saw her emerge from her door and make her way over the drawbridge across the basement area to the pavement, in order to welcome her in.

‘I thought it was you, sitting out there in the cold! You should have come straight over!’

It was a fabulous performance, but Sara noticed the deep sallowness in Helene’s face, and the sag that no determined smile could disguise. In a matter of weeks her eyes had taken the filmy look of someone much older. Sara was ushered in, divested of her coat (‘how utterly gorgeous!’), led to a chair in the drawing room and given sherry. The room was warm and had the smell of well-maintained houses when the central heating first goes on, a mixture of hot paint and new carpets. It was entirely tasteful and rather restful in its predictability. The walls were painted white, the carpet was a deep rose and the furniture, much of it real, some of it reproduction Regency, was dark and slim-legged. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece was still stopped with its hands at exactly six o’clock. Only the baby grand piano, a well-used Broadwood with a loading of framed photographs, seemed to belong to a more personal history. Helene sat opposite in her wing chair and her hilarity subsided. She really could not keep it up for long.

Sara said, ‘I was fine, really. I was having a good look at the Circus. It’s curious, isn’t it? So apparently logical, so open. But when you look, it’s closed and secretive at the same time. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’

Helene nodded. To Sara’s dismay, the topic was not as neutral as she had thought.

‘Adele loved it. The symmetry of it, of course, that satisfied her in some way. She would stare at it for hours. I
mean
hours. She was less fond of the trees. For myself, it’s the trees that make it bearable. Thrusting upwards, leafy, reaching for the sky, defying control.’ She sighed and sipped at her sherry. From anyone else it would have sounded ridiculous, but from Helene, because she meant it, it seemed like a perfectly moderate remark.

Hoping it was safe to say so, Sara said, ‘I remember Adele in the garden at Iford Manor that night. She couldn’t take her eyes off the garden, and the peacock. She was fascinated.’

‘Obsessed,’ Helene corrected her. ‘One of her obsessions. Autistic people get these obsessions, odd things sometimes, things you couldn’t imagine. And then their routines, that’s another thing you have to accept.’ She sighed again.

‘It must be so difficult.’

There was a silence. Should Sara have said ‘must have been’, since they had been talking about a life that was over? No. Both were correct. For Helene it was still difficult and was always going to be, only now the difficulties were different. Sara reached across impulsively and touched Helene’s arm.

‘Oh, Helene, I’m so, so sorry . . .’

‘I know, dear, I know,’ Helene said, more in the manner of the comforter than the comforted. ‘You are so good. People are so good. But let’s go down, shall we? I thought we’d have lunch downstairs. Much nicer.’

In the dining area of the L-shaped kitchen Helene had laid out a lunch of cold meats, salad and bread. Soup had already been tipped into a saucepan and a bottle of red wine opened.

‘I’m afraid it’s all terribly simple,’ she said apologetically, not realising how the reduction in her gushing, however tragically brought about, was making her much easier to like.