The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (17 page)

My father.

I think of my father.

Both of them, in fact.

I think of Patrick August sitting silently across from me by the fireside, peeling the whole skin off an apple, one twist of the fruit at a time.

I think of Rory Hulne, an old man with a great swelling in his left leg, who in one not so special life in 1952 sent a letter informing me that he was holidaying on Holy Island; would I join him? I was a professor of mathematics, married to a doctor of English literature, Elizabeth. Lizzy wanted children and berated herself for the fact that we seemed unable to have them. I loved Lizzy as a loyal companion and a kind soul, and stayed with her until her death in 1973 from a series of strokes which left her largely paralysed down the left-hand side, and did not seek her out in future lives.

I am on Holy Island, the letter said. May you join me?

“Who is this Mr Hulne?” asked Lizzy.

“He was the master of the house where I grew up.”

“Were you close?”

“No. Not in this life.”

“Why in God’s name does he want to see you now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you go?”

“Maybe. He will be dying by now.”

“Harry,” she chided, “that’s an awful thing to say.”

It was seven hours by train to Alnmouth, the train pausing at Newcastle to let the black-faced driver take his deserved break on the green wooden benches of the red-brick station. When he pulled his cap off, there was a line of soot across his forehead, stopping at the headband, and two owl-circles around his eyes when he lowered his goggles. A child waved at me excitedly from its mother’s lap on the opposite platform. I waved back. The infant kept waving for the fifteen minutes we were in the station, and, wearily, I felt obliged to return the gesture. By the time we left, my arm ached, as did my smile, and the feeling that this journey was a terrible mistake grew on me. I flicked through the newspaper on my lap, but had read it some few lives ago and grew irritated by its naïve coverage of events yet unfolding. The crossword in the back frustrated me–I had answered nearly every clue three lives ago, when I attempted this same crossword during a break from the Europe desk at the Foreign Office, and three lives ago I had been stumped by the very same clue which now I could not penetrate: “Hark–a twist in the road, I perceive”, eight letters and, I was infuriated to find, as impossible now as it had been those centuries before. Maybe, for one life only, I could be the man who wrote to the newspapers to complain.

The tide was in, Holy Island cut off from the mainland, the causeway visible only as a few sticks protruding above the surface of the water. I paid an old man with a rowing boat full of crab cages and no crabs for a ride across the water. He said nothing the entire length of the journey, and rowed with a rhythm so steady you could have set a pacemaker by it. As he rowed, the fog rose up across the water, smothering land and sea, obscuring the black remains of the castle that crowned the island’s hill. By the time we reached the shore, the fog had cut visibility down to a few white
cottages peering out from the edge of the hill, through which the mournful call of the thick-fleeced lost sheep wailed. The island was yet to discover its role as a tourist temple, selling almost-home-made jam and practically-hand-made candles, but had a reputation as a place where people went to be alone, to forget and, yes, even to die beneath the old Celtic crosses. It wasn’t hard to find my father–the strangers in town were all well noted. I was directed to a room above a small-doored cottage owned by a Mrs Mason, a cheerful, rose-faced woman who could crack a chicken’s neck between thumb and forefinger and who didn’t believe in this new-fangled NHS business, not when there were gooseberries in the garden and rosehip cordial in the kitchen cupboard.

“You be here for Mr Hulne?” she asked brightly. “I’ll bring up some tea.”

Up a staircase designed to decapitate anyone higher than seven years old, through a wooden door with a black iron latch on it was a room with a small orange fire burning against the wall and a series of poorly painted images showing still waters bedecked with lilac flowers. There was a small single-person bed and a rocking chair by the fire. In the rocking chair, more blanket than man, was Rory Edmond Hulne, and he was, right on schedule, dying. From the yellow tinge at the end of his flaking nails to the protruding weakly throbbing veins on his chicken-neck, he was a man for whom little more could be provided than palliative care and a little emotional redemption. It took very little to assess which one I was.

I perched on the end of the bed, put my bag down on the floor and, as his eyes flickered open against the gum that weighed his lashes down, I said, “Hello, Mr Hulne.”

When had I seen him last? A warm May in 1925 of this life, when I had, as I always did, finally mustered enough self-awareness and recollection to regain my former self and composure, and had written in my firmest hand to the Cronus Club, requesting extraction from the tedium of childhood. Charity Hazelmere, that great matron of the Club, had replied at once, informing Patrick and Harriet that a generous scholar was offering to pay for the
education and board of deprived youths, and my name had been put forward for a position. A figure had been named, and I had absolved my foster-parents of all guilt at my departure by exclaiming gleefully how exciting the prospect would be, and how I had longed for a chance to better myself, and would write home often, though they could both of them barely read. They had packed my one bag of tatty clothes and put me in the back of my foster-father’s cart to take me to the station, and Rory Hulne had come out of his house to watch me go, and stood in the door, and said nothing. In some lives, as we went through this ritual, he would come to shake my hand and tell me to be a brave young man; not this time, though quite what it was in my behaviour that so altered his, life to life, I can never say.

That had been nearly thirty years ago. On the few occasions I returned north, to spend Christmas silently with Patrick or to attend Harriet’s funeral–that constant fixture of my childhood–my father had not been there. Away on business, or taking the waters, or up in town, or other such emptinesses of occupation. Yet now, here he sat, dying before my eyes, alone in a cottage on an island, no signs of wealth or power about him, a frail old man by a fire.

“Who are you?” he murmured, voice grown as thin as his frame. “What do you want?”

“It’s Harry, sir,” I replied, the deference of youth intruding despite myself. “Harry August.”

“Harry? I wrote you a letter.”

“That’s why I came.”

“Didn’t think you would.”

“Well… I did.”

Hundreds of years of living, and why could this man still reduce me to empty platitudes, make me feel a child again, hiding from the glare of a master?

“Are you well, Harry?” he asked, as the silence grew too thin and high between us. “Are you rich?”

“I do all right,” I replied carefully. “I teach mathematics.”

“Mathematics? Why?”

“I enjoy it. The subject is… engaging, and the antics of the students are always curious.”

“You have… children?”

“No. I don’t.”

He grunted, a sound which conveyed to me almost satisfaction. A wrist flicked towards the fire, a command to put another log on. I did, crouching down by the brazier and poking it with the end of a stick before tossing that too into the flames. When I straightened up, he was staring right at me with a face that would one day be my own, and though his body was fading, his mind was still very much alive. He grabbed my arm as I moved back to the bed, holding me in place, staring up urgently into my eyes.

“Do you have money?” he demanded softly. “Are you rich?”

“I told you, Mr Hulne, I teach—”

“I heard you were rich. My sisters… the house…” A flicker of pain passed over his face, his hand falling from my wrist as if it suddenly lacked the strength to hold on. “Soon there’ll be nothing left.”

I sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. “Do you need… a loan, Mr Hulne?” I spoke very slowly, to keep my rising anger out of my voice. Had I been summoned after twenty-seven years to serve as a walking bank to a man who wouldn’t even acknowledge me his heir?

“The Depression…” he grunted. “The war… the new government, the land, the times… Constance is dead, Victoria dead, Alexandra has to work in a shop–a shop of all things. Clement will inherit the title, but he’s drinking it all–all of it, all gone. We sold half the land to pay the debt on the mortgage, not even the mortgage itself! They’ll take the house and fill it with union men,” he spat the words, “with middle-class bankers and their spawn, with lawyers or accountants. They’ll auction it all off, all of it, and there’ll be nothing left. All gone. All for nothing.”

I had to force my body into stillness, felt the twitch in my knee, wanted to fold my arms, cross my legs, as if the very muscles in my being had to express their rising hostility.

“Is there something you want to say to me, Mr Hulne?”

“You always liked Alexandra, didn’t you?” he said. “She was nice to you when you were a child, yes?”

“She was kind,” I admitted. “In more ways than I suspect I saw.”

“Clement is a disgusting little creature,” he added bitterly. “Do you know he’s had three wives? He wants to sell it all and move to California.”

“Mr Hulne,” I repeated, harder now, “I don’t see what it is you expect me to do about this.”

His eyes flickered upwards, and there was liquid brimming on the bottom of the gummy eyelids. As so often is the case with men who refuse to cry, the awareness of his own tears seemed to cause them to rise even faster, shame mixing with grief, and even as they began to dribble down his face he clung to the side of the chair, refusing to acknowledge their presence on his skin. “You can’t let it die,” he whimpered. “It’s your past too, Harry–the house, the lands. You understand, don’t you? You want to keep them alive too.”

“As the poet says–the times they are a-changing,” I replied firmly. “Or perhaps he hasn’t said it yet, but time will cure that absence. I am sorry for your situation, Mr Hulne. I regret that Alexandra is in difficulty; she was always kind. But Clement was a bully, even as a child, and the house was a monster of stone-praised vanity and quiet tragedy. Constance was a tyrant, more focused on perceptions than truth; Victoria was a drug addict; Lydia was an innocent who you tormented beyond—”

“How dare you!” His body jerked as if he would rise from the chair and hit me, but he didn’t have the strength to do it, so stayed put, shaking all over, the tears fading now against the rising flush in his cheeks. “How dare you? How dare you speak of them like… like you knew, like you…? You were a child, you left us! You left us and never looked back. How dare—”

“Tell me,” I cut in. His voice was angrier, but mine was more powerful. “When you raped my mother, did she scream?”

He could have gone either way. The rage was there in him, ready to plough straight through my words, but instead, it seems, they ploughed through him, knocking him back against his seat
and pinning him there like a butterfly. I made sure he stayed put, adding, “I met a woman called Prudence Crannich once, who delivered a baby in the women’s washroom of Berwick-upon-Tweed station, on New Year’s Day. The mother died, but I tracked down her family and listened to her mother–my grandmother–tell the story of Lisa Leadmill, who went down south to find her fortune and who met her death in the arms of strangers. Cold is an enemy in trauma care–it slows down clotting, making it easier for patients to bleed out. Perhaps, if I’d been born in summer, my mother would have lived. Of course no one but you and Lisa will ever know if you truly raped her, but she was a young lonely woman in the house of an angry, potentially violent master who believed that his wife had betrayed him and was himself quite probably psychologically damaged from his time at the front. I imagine you caught her by the arm and kissed her, loud and rough, so that your wife would know you had done it. I imagine she was terrified, not understanding her role as a pawn in your marriage. You tell her that her position is becoming untenable; she begs you not to do it. You say that it’ll make things easier for everyone, that if she screams the household will know and she’ll be sent out without pay or references, branded a whore–better to be docile, better to be quiet… I suppose you could tell yourself that it wasn’t rape, if she didn’t scream. Did she scream when you pushed her down? Did she scream?”

His knuckles were yellow-white where they gripped the chair, his body still shaking now but not, I felt, with rage.

“There was a time,” I went on, calmer now, “when I wanted to know you. I wrote you a letter once, telling you about the horrors I’d seen, the sins I’d committed, the pain I was in. I needed a stranger who cared, someone who was obliged by the bond of blood between us to understand but not judge. I thought perhaps you could still be my father. You replied as one soldier to another, but I realise now I’ve never really been a son to you. An heir, perhaps, a bastard heir, a sign of shame, a reminder of your failings, a retribution in human form, but never really a son. I don’t think you’ve ever really had it in you to be what a father should.”

I picked up my bag, getting to my feet and turning to the door. “I thought for a moment,” I continued, “that you might be about to propose that I, as your blood, inherited Hulne House. I wondered if you believed that I might feel a fondness for the place, a desire to preserve it, that Clement lacks. Or if, with my humble origins, I might be so awed by the gift that I would somehow turn it into a monument to you and your name. As it is, I feel I should tell you that, were you to give me the house now and all its lands, and the home where I grew up under Patrick and Harriet’s care, I would raze it all to the ground, to the very lowest foundation stone, and transform it into… a pleasure centre for bankers and their children, or a casino for the quirky, or maybe I’d just leave the land barren, and let the earth reclaim its own.”

I turned to leave him.

As I got to the door he called after me, “Harry! You can’t… It’s your past, Harry. It’s your past.”