Observatory Mansions (21 page)

We never heard from her again.

The Porter cleared up Twenty’s flat. It was damp from holes in the ceiling where the rain came through and it was also putrid; there were morsels of food rescued from bins decaying all over the floor, there were bones and dogs’ hairs, dried blood, urine and shit. Poor Porter, he scrubbed it clean.

The Time of Silence
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Shortly after the Time of Memories had expired, taking Peter Bugg and Twenty with it, we entered the Time of Silence. Eventually even memories run out, even they have an end. No memory goes on for ever, to do so it would have to be connected with the present. And no one can remember the present. The present is the killer of memories. Father lived there, in the present, in that no-memory place. After so many memories had been related a feeling of dissatisfaction invaded us. We looked at each other, at those fellow residents who had told us their memories, and we thought – Is that all? Is that all that you are? Is that you? Ah, well if that’s you, if that’s all there is to you, then you’re not so remarkable any more. I know your story now, there’s nothing else for me to know and quite suddenly I don’t know what to say to you. In truth, I find you a little dull, you shouldn’t have told me everything, you should have kept something back to keep my interest alive. But now that I know everything about you I suddenly find myself unable to talk to you any more. I prefer to keep silent.

The Time of Silence, being a time of silence, had little to report about itself. Very little happened … except silence. No one spoke. We kept our silence to ourselves, fed it, slept with it, quietly breathed it in. Occasionally, though, it would happen that we passed one of our fellow residents, on the
stairs perhaps or in the entrance hall, in the park or on the street. In these instances we would walk on silently, as if we had not seen the person, or, perhaps, we would nod at each other. But no words would come out. We could not speak, our tongues were anchored by a terrible paralysis. Our lips would open only for food or drink but at other times remained quite rigid.

I went to work as usual and achieved both inner and outer stillness. On my days off I visited the park. And on one of these visits to the park, the bathroom scalesman spoke to me, breaking for a few seconds the silence, before the pressure of that Time closed up his lips again. The girl, said the scalesman, and I presumed he meant Anna Tap, is getting thinner. That was all. I thought little of it.

Miss Tap continued to visit Saint Lucy, to pray to her in preparation for her day, and often on my return from work I would find her cigarette ends thrown casually along the pavements. These I continued to collect. The Porter was to be seen walking with Miss Tap, though in their afternoon perambulations they obeyed the Time of Silence. Indeed it seemed to me now that the Porter was spending a great deal of time with Anna Tap and though they barely spoke to each other there seemed a kind of warmth in their nods and smiles. The Porter seemed a happier porter then, he hissed and he tidied less.

Miss Tap took up Peter Bugg’s chores: she shopped for Claire Higg and she changed my father. The Porter gave her a key to flat six – no doubt making another duplicate for himself first. I left a note for Miss Tap:

1. Do not enter my mother’s room.

2. Do not enter Francis’s bedroom.

On one of these visits of hers to flat six, she wandered into Mother’s bedroom and when I returned from work I found a photograph of myself as a child holding in my hands a pair
of pet mice. My hands on that photograph were white. I had painted them white. The mice lived and died before I wore gloves and after I began wearing gloves I sought out all the photographs ever taken of me and painted my photographed hands white. Under the picture, which Miss Tap had taken from my mother’s room and placed on the dining-room table, was a note which said, simply:

Why?

That same day, when I returned the photograph to its rightful position, my mother extraordinarily broke the barrier of silence, broke out of her memory days for a fraction of time:

Francis?

Mother!

Francis, I don’t want that girl in here. Keep her out.

Then she shut herself up again. I left a note in the same place where the why note had been left (that note I kept and stored). I wrote:

On no account enter my mother’s room again.

And afterwards there were no other notes from Miss Tap when I returned home from work. Silence was back again. The only noises we heard, other than the movements of our solitary bodies, were those from the television set on the third floor. But this instrument of noise is designed to keep us silent.

Weeks passed. We watched our clocks. Unlike the Time of Memory, the Time of Silence kept perfect time, we always knew what the month was, what the hour was and usually the minute too. The Time of Silence lasted one month, three days and fourteen hours. It was broken suddenly one day from a most unpredictable corner. I was at work, silent and stationary on my plinth. A coin dropped in my box. I opened
my eyes to find Anna Tap in front of me holding a sheet of paper on which was written:

Your father has begun to speak.

I left work early that day.

Father’s first words
.

Of course, I could not at first believe Miss Tap’s note, but then, after much thinking, I considered it only too possible that it was now, rather than at any other time, that Father had begun to speak. He was tricked surely by the Time of Silence. Only during the Time of Silence could Father drop his guard enough, relax his brain sufficiently for it to be entered by a thought. The thought, presumably abandoned after the Time of Memories, must have somehow worked its way up one of father’s nostrils and into the brain. Father was at peace during any time of silence and subsequently at his most vulnerable, A thought was in his brain, flying along all those corridors and its movements had opened his mouth.

Father did not, when I returned early from work, with Miss Tap, call me by my name. He did not look at me at all. Miss Tap had told me on our journey home, breaking that silence between us for ever, that all my father had said was – Plough. Over and over again. She imagined that he was referring to former agricultural days, when Observatory Mansions was called Tearsham Park. She was wrong. It was, however, a good sign. I sat in front of Father. He was smiling. He was speaking, or rather muttering. For the first few days all we heard from him were timid words, scarcely audible. They were words though, sure enough. Father was talking again. He whispered that first day:

Plough. The Plough the. Plough. The … the …

Hello, Father.

The Plough.

It’s Francis.

Plough. Plough.

And there’s also Orion, Father.

Orion, yes, Orion. How are you?

Well, Father.

How are you, Orion? Orion, the Plough …

The Pleiades.

The Pleiades!

Andromeda.

The Great Bear, Ursa Major!

Sagittarius.

Cassiopeia!

Perseus.

Sirius, Dog Star. Oh, goody, goody.

My Father was recalling the names of the stars or of constellations of stars. And in recalling them I fancied he saw himself back in his observatory. The Observatory Nights, or the Time of Father’s Greatest Happiness, were spent by my father in total seclusion from the rest of humanity on a great contemplation of the universe. My father, many years before the observatory existed, had confused stillness with wisdom. He had not then learnt his incredible inner stillness that later I was to become so indebted to.

When Father was a child he was given a microscope for his birthday and so began his brave analysis of life.

Tiny Father and the microscope adventure
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The arrival of this gift coincided with Father’s absence from outdoors. In those days he would be found in the nursery crouched on top of his toy, staring with one fascinated eye at a hair or the insides of a squashed ant, or at yeast, or water fleas. Father’s world was minuscule then. And so were
Father’s thoughts. Father’s thoughts were so tiny that they were hardly thoughts at all, they were half thoughts or quarter thoughts. And all these fractions of thoughts were concerned only with reducing all that he saw around him to its tiniest element, to a single cell. Whenever he saw his father or mother, my grandfather or grandmother, he would wrinkle his brow and reduce his parents to the remembered dimensions and colours of a single blood cell, only then would my father relax. He stored in his mind a small visual dictionary of things tiny, things invisible to the unaided human eye. His mind would dissect everything until there was no further to go. There lurked Father, under the gaze of a mighty x 1000 lens. He lived there, that was the only place he could function. Father was turning dangerously into the tiniest molecule. He shied away from people, finding their vastness petrifying. If he happened to accidentally look out of a window he was terrorized by the expanse of the horizon. A mouse, he thought, was capable not of eating him, but breathing him in. A common housefly might step on him with one of its wiry feet and squash him quite to death. It was a perilous life for Father when Father confused an orbicular blood cell for a planet.

My father through his magnifying glass
.

My grandparents at first believed Father’s obsession with his microscope was due to a passion for science. For a while they even encouraged his long afternoons up in the nursery lost inside cells of mesophyll or epithelium. When it came to his next birthday he was given a chemistry set. My father never opened the chemistry set. He remained in the nursery, hunched in a corner quivering and mumbling. If moved, my father’s whole body would shake, tears would spit from his eyes, his face would be frozen in an expression of unappeasable fear. Finally my grandfather came up with an idea that
was one of the two moments of genius in his otherwise entirely prosperous and completely banal existence. A magnifying glass. Grandfather gave Father a magnifying glass. Father looked through the magnifying glass and immediately grew. Now Father was still small but large enough to abandon many of his fears. He was no longer a molecule, he was now about the size of a matchstick. Mice he still feared, and flies, too, but as long as there were no animals or insects around him he was perfectly calm and was even known to make occasional timid conversation. My grandfather, shortly before his death, had his second brilliant idea. One night, while Father was sleeping, he crept into the nursery and borrowed Father’s magnifying glass. He replaced its round lens with a piece of ordinary glass and then returned it.

Then Father entered the next stage of his analysis of life. Father was now human size, six foot one to be exact. He was still known to approach objects and stare at them through his magnifying glass and I believe its circular frame helped him to concentrate.

Observatory Nights
.

The Observatory Nights belonged to by far the greatest and most expensive of all Father’s ventures to analyse life. They did not come about during one night in particular, they took many months of planning and when they finally arrived they were to change Father for ever (and later to give us a title for our new home – which was really our old home under a different name). Father had found a pair of field binoculars and, from the comfort of his library armchair (red, leather), he used to sit with them in front of his eyes and watch the world outside approach him – trees far away would suddenly rush their great trunks forwards. During that time Father used to imagine himself the size of trees. He would walk around Tearsham Park in great, sombre strides. One evening
in his study, Father was so deep in his consideration of some copper beeches that he studied them through his binoculars until it grew dark. Father strained his eyes but the images of the trees had faded. He approached the window, still looking through his binoculars, when he caught in their eyes the night sky. He saw the moon, he saw stars. That was enough for Father, that’s how it started. Father suddenly grew so large that he couldn’t fit in the library, or in Tearsham Park, or in our country – Father was suddenly as big as the world. In an instant his phenomenal brain had transformed him into a planet. Father, condescending to bring himself momentarily down to our size, purchased a telescope. From that small, unremarkable telescope the idea of the observatory was born. Soon, at the expense of the Orme coffers, Father had the dome on the roof converted. The green copper cover was pulled off, a metal frame was carefully hoisted up, glass segments were added, one with a hinge so it could be opened and his newly acquired and extraordinarily powerful telescope could peek out.

My father in relation to the universe
.

Father spent his days studying astronomical charts and playing with models of the planets. Getting to know his neighbours, he called it. He became friends with all the stars, called them by their names, would hop from planet to star all night long, breaking away only when the sun came out to ruin his enjoyment. Father knew the universe.

However, struggling though he was with himself, he was unable, that first night of his vocal return to us, to manage anything but the names of the stars. He tried, unsuccessfully, to get out of his chair but the chair was unwilling to release him. We hoisted him up, Miss Tap and I, and walked him carefully around the largest room in flat six. But soon we sat him down, exhausted. He closed his eyes and his thoughts
immediately drifted up into the cosmos. As I watched Father’s eyes close I realized what it was that had brought him back to us. His eyes usually so absent had suddenly focused on the magnified eyes of Anna Tap. Concave lenses brought Father to life. My father was ever the lover of a lens.

A family reunion
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