The Scattering (13 page)

In the sanctuary a hare squatted tensely behind a rock. She knew it was a hare by its legs and ears and long hay-brown body. (They had come to know the different species of birds, rodents, plants and flowers; had become alert to bird cries.) The hare halted, watching something intently beyond the rock, and she was reminded of him. Ever since the service she'd noticed how certain things, for no particular reason, brought him to her mind. The pink and red pansies in the flowerbed outside Kensal Green crematorium; the grey-haired stranger's face on the Edgware Road; words in books and newspapers her eye would randomly fall upon. (‘A characteristic of grieving' somebody had called it, this revelation in quotidian things; though far from bringing her comfort she found the experience disturbing.) Now, it seemed, even the sanctuary reflected him, as if he, with his magnanimous life force, had returned to nature and was down there influencing its flow, whipping up arcane schemes and intrigues like Prospero.

The hare moved on under the hedge towards Ramsey's field. She wanted to warn it, to tap the window and shout:
don't go in there, you'll get yourself killed
.

She went into the kitchen. All those jars of vitamin pills and miracle cures: dried seaweeds and mushrooms, B17 (a banned vitamin she'd had to buy on the black market), sealed packs of bark from some obscure tree. Cupboards of pills, rows of cancer cookbooks. All that hope and promise of hope: over, over, over. She plunged the books into a black rubbish bag, then gathered the glass jars of beans and pulses – anything that could still be eaten – onto the island. He had built it in November: a solid pine work board atop grille-fronted beech cupboards. Driven, when he shouldn't have, to B&Q in Newry for the materials and built it himself; a place for her to prepare his coffee enemas, his organic juices, his vitamin cocktails. November. That's when the pain had come back. That awful pain that she could not truthfully imagine having in her own body. For someone in such a fragile remission, he had done far too much.

She checked the sell-by dates. Dad might be able to use some of these, she thought, then packed the jars of rice and pulses into the green cloth Superquinn bags.

He'd come to love her father, had been responsible for her and her father's truce. (Their move here had brought them into daily contact with him, a familiarity that, over time, had caused her to forget a little her father's faults; in particular, his drinking.) The old man had been quiet lately up in the house; on his best behaviour. She had decided to stay there with him rather than here, as she didn't want to be alone.

Eventually she must go into the bedroom: she needed clothes. When they had left in January, she had not wanted to make a fuss about how long they'd be gone; they'd flown to London with two suitcases, one each, containing no light clothes. But his pain was such, she thought, that he must have known the trip would be for longer. And if so, what was he thinking as he left this house – did he sense he would not be back? Had he come here to die, she wondered? Had that been the point of it all, the hurried relocation, the mad search for a rural idyll? Perhaps he did have such a presentiment; their conversations in the last year had been oddly elliptical, and she had not probed his fears should such talk spoil their fight, for it was always
their
fight. And so she insisted they take little: a few warm clothes, shoes. That way he would be bolstered into thinking:
this new pain is a small thing, a glitch, and look, she is not preparing for the worst, she believes in me and my ability to conquer this, and soon we will be home
. She hoped that in his mind it had gone something like that.

She went into the utility room and opened the door to the back garden. The high grass almost obscured the garden furniture. All the plants were overgrown and dry. Some had died. She'd have to get the gardens seen to before the estate agent came to view the house; maybe her father would do it if he'd time.

As she walked down the steps she noticed, on the ground, wrapping around the corner of the house, a trail of yellow rose petals. She turned and looked up at the rose bushes grown tall in her absence. A bird or animal must have caused the petals to fall in this long curve, she thought.

The trail led towards her own fence, to a small bone with ants marching around it. Pink flesh hung off the marrow. Perhaps it was a hawk or one of the kites, or a ferret that had ruffled the bushes and set down there to eat. She turned around to the trail before her, long and gold, and was suddenly struck.
Oh no, no. Not now, not now
. The tears, the heaving chest, the throb in the heart. There was no reason rose petals should have had this effect on her. There was nothing about roses that recalled him.

But she had just glimpsed him. In this lemon-coloured trail, laid, perhaps, to say good morning, how are you today, I am free, I am happy, I am indeed
in the next room
. She took a deep breath, returned inside and walked resolutely towards the bedroom.

She entered quickly, looking over at the bed (he was not there, sleeping or reading). She saw head and leg indents, where, she remembered, he had gone for a nap before they had left the house all those months ago. She went to pull up the blind. As light poured into the room, she caught a glint of light refracting off the golden Buddha on the dressing table. From the window she could see the side of the sanctuary, the Cooley hills, Ramsey's tall trees crowned with crows' nests, the rocky tufts of Ramsey's field. Sometimes from this window they had watched men with long guns roam in and out of that field looking for grouse or rabbits. And sometimes, during the day, young hawks would be trained with string around bits of meat. The two fields looked so similar. An uneven gorse hedge with lots of gaps seemed to be the only divide between life in one, and death in the other. (Just how this ramshackle wildlife sanctuary had ended up beside fields where men would come to hunt, members of gun clubs, was an eternal source of conversation for the visitors who came to stay with them.) How they wished they could have erected warning signs for the animals that might wander in the wrong direction.

She turned to the Buddha, touched its golden head. He had never practised. He claimed to have forgotten, too, the rules of his two birth religions (Catholicism and Islam) so, instead, followed a simple bespoke ceremony. He laid out rosary beads on a white linen cloth, placed a black and white photograph of his father (sitting on a prayer mat in Cairo) against a miniature of the Little Child of Prague given to him by his mother, and lit candles. Certainly he spoke to something or someone when he came in here and sat by the dressing table. She never thought to ask him what, or whom, exactly. She knew only that she would find him in deep commune with it, or them, and that he would cry with his eyes closed, rocking back and forth then reach out and touch the statue or beads or photo as if reaching for a life raft.

Someone had been in. There were two thin drinking glasses filled with mayflowers on either side of the statue, and a tea-light that had burned out. She touched the buds and put her fingers to her nose: a pineapple smell. Immediately there they were, on cue, the burning tears. She blinked, forced them back. It must have been Mrs Ramsey. She had asked her to check the place, given her keys. Perhaps Mrs Ramsey had (through the window) seen him sitting here, and known completely what he was doing hunched over the statue, clutching at the beads and the photo of his father. It was the one part of their fight she had not shared; she did not know how
to pray, nor what it was that one prayed to (the Humanist service had been her idea). Mrs Ramsey must know, or else she would not have left the flowers, now wilted, their heads almost bald. She collected them up, threw them in the black plastic bag she'd brought in with her, carried the bag into the hall.

She managed to fill three bags with out-of-date cosmetics, food products, wastepaper from the office, junk mail. She packed a crate with things she could recycle: newspapers, tins, bottles (a reminder of her heavy consumption of wine that winter). She would bring the bags and crate to the recycling centre in town. She lined up the green bags filled with pulses and rice and vitamin pills to give to her father. She was convinced now that she would put the house up for sale and return to London. It would be impossible to remain and carry on a life here. He was not here. He was not anywhere. Not in the bedroom sleeping or praying; not in the office drawing; not in the living room staring out at the grouse and peacocks; not in the garage imagining its conversion into a room with a spa. He had vanished. Truly, he had passed away. Into that sweet jar-shaped canister of ashes held in the office at the crematorium (waiting for her to make up her mind – to scatter or to keep). And she'd better stop this looking, this being-revealed-to business, because it was only a step away from stopping strangers on the street, to see if he had gone there, into the body of another man.

She picked up her handbag and rummaged inside for the keys to her car. She clutched at the cold bundle, placed them down on the long iroko shelf in the hallway (the brown-black colour of his Mediterranean eyes) and dropped the bag. She could not stop looking. If she had seen him in the rose petals then he must be here. He would come to her. She needed a place to lie down. Her legs felt weak. Weightless and frail, she drifted from side to side along the hall, aimlessly brushing up against the walls, mindlessly touching the edges of paintings – the Patrick Caulfield, the Paolozzis. She knew where she would end up: in the pit of tears that would tear at her ribs and rip her throat. She opened the bedroom door, glided towards her side of the bed, slipped under the duvet and the folded-down throw, and turned to cradle the indents.

An hour must have passed this way. When she woke she recalled she had not seen his face (as in a dream), or had any memory of him, but had been overcome by, bombarded with – colours: blacks and blues, deep greens and golds. She'd been tossed from one shade to the next, had emitted fluctuating levels of cries, until, at rest, jaded and empty, she landed on
yellow
, and here she breathed easy, stroking his pillow, rhythmically, till her mind cleared, whereupon she fell into a deep sleep.

A voice came from outside, by the window. She was sure she could be seen curled up on the dishevelled, tear-soaked bed like a child. She went onto her knees and looked out and saw that Mrs Ramsey had begun her retreat towards Cotter's Lane. She jumped up, ran out of the room and opened the front door.

‘Mrs Ramsey, Julia, Julia – I'm in, it's me. I'm home.' Mrs Ramsey turned and walked towards her with her head bowed.

‘I'm sorry love, I'm so sorry.' Mrs Ramsey reached out and hugged her, then rubbed her arms vigorously up and down, passing into her skin from hard warty hands motherliness, and a heartfelt sympathy. Then, with tears in her eyes, she asked if there was anything she could do.

‘No. Not for the moment.'

Mrs Ramsey said nothing when she told her Chalfont was to be sold, that she could no longer see herself living in the place now her husband was gone. Mrs Ramsey seemed to understand.

‘Thank you for the mayflowers.'

‘Oh, that was your father. I saw him pick them along the Lane. He's awfully put out. He wanted to go over but the journey would have been too much for him, you know that.'

She closed the door. She looked in the hall mirror, at her face, lined and black-streaked, at the slate-coloured weariness around her eyes. Fixing her fuzzy hair, she remembered she had not pulled down the blinds. Inside the bedroom she straightened the duvet, folded down the throw, removed the damp pillow. She would place the pillow on her bed tonight; it still had his smell, clean and powdery, of the woods after a night's rain, and there were a few grey hairs still clinging. She pulled down the blind and closed the door, brought the pillow to the pile of things in the hall, ready to be loaded into the Jeep. She went into the office, pulled down the blinds, brushed her hand along the row of tall, dusty books on modern architecture as she exited, and closed the door.

She stared out at the sanctuary; it rustled in parts and she thought she saw the hare, but couldn't make it out amongst the rocks and deadwood. She had become out of step with the movements of the place. Once, they were attuned to the darting of a grouse here, a rabbit there. The animals were so quick, so adept at camouflaging themselves (except for the flagrant prowling of the white ferret who would steal in without caring who or what observed him), that only a kind of hawk-eyed seeing could follow their progress through all that scrub. After months of such looking even the nightlit grass would become penetrable.

She knew if she stared long enough the green undulating veil would lift, and she would see that wild world once more. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow she would come back to this house whose name he had not wanted to change, sit in this room with a cup of tea, and look out at the fields. Or, if not tomorrow then the next day, whenever she was ready to look steadily into things, for she was not able to do so now. She thought of her father, and wondered what he'd like to eat for lunch. There would be things to do for him; she would need to go to the shops. Today, if he let her, she would treat him to a meal in a restaurant in town. The day was fine. It would be really lovely, she thought, to walk.

Blood

Fred Plunkett walked around her in his mind like an invisible wolf. She was thin and gazelle-like, had a creamy retrousse nose, and wore a brash perfume that tingled the back of his throat. There was also an arrogance to her, as if she were accustomed to other people's submission and was rattled now by having to explain herself.