Adam nods absently; he is used to Roddy’s languid rudenesses. Of course, he is thinking, there would be no line or boundary at which the river stops being the river and the estuary starts being the estuary: they would flow into each other, necessarily, back and forth, according to the onward rush of the river and the more or less pressure of the alternating tides. Yet there
must be some area of demarcation, surely, however broad or amorphous. He ponders the problem and, having pondered, comes to the conclusion that it is not a matter of the river being one thing and the estuary another; all that separates them, really, and it is not a real separation at all, is his having put the question in the first place. For the question is premised on two, manmade, terms—river, estuary—whereas in fact there is but one body of water, commingling here at the whim of unceasing flow on one side and of changing tides on the other; any separation is a separation made only by the action of his asking. This is strange.
“Does your father speak at all?” Roddy enquires. “I mean, can he?” There is a tinge of umbrage to his tone. The world keeps putting hindrances in his way, of which Adam Godley’s sudden collapse is the most recent and, for the moment, most serious example.
“Oh, no,” Adam says. “He’s in a coma.” Roddy nods. “But of course,” Adam continues, “no one can say how deep the coma is. He may be aware at some level, and able to think, and hear, for all we know. La says she’s convinced he’s conscious but just can’t communicate—she says he opens his eyes, though no one else has seen him do it. You might talk to him. He always did like having a talk with you.”
Roddy glances at him sharply, suspecting irony.
A further thought has struck Adam. Salt—what about salt? The river is fresh water but the sea is saline. That is a definite distinction. He does not know why he did not think of it at once, especially since—thanks to the discovery of cold fusion, the science of it founded, to the surprise of all, on his father’s notorious Brahma equations—the greater part of the world’s energy
nowadays is derived from brine. And there is motion, too. All very well to speak of whim, but when the river’s outgoing flow meets the tide’s incoming flood there are two forces in opposition, and two forces mean two separate things doing the forcing. Then after all it is not merely a matter of man—in this case Adam himself—proposing, but of fact disposing. River here, estuary there, not two names only but two discrete entities. Yet where do they merge, exactly? He sighs. He is back to where he started.
Now they turn off the straight road and leave behind the river and its wastes of water and climb into the low hills that were once a part of Arden demesne. As this little elevation is steadily gained Adam’s spirits lift too. The going on this road is bumpy and the station-wagon yaws and rumbles and they hear the salt water sloshing in the tank under their seats. The hill to the left is a hedgeless upward sweep of close-cropped sward capped by a small stand of larches. Sheep are placidly grazing the hillside. A pied horse kicks up its hoofs as they pass by, gallops friskily a little way, stops and turns its head and looks back at them boldly, showing them its behind and flicking its tail from side to side. Rooks wheel in sunlight above the little wood. O Arcady! how I pine for thy brooks and glades.
“I have a great fondness for your father,” Roddy says. Adam has to make an effort not to smile—Roddy has a way of saying things as if they had been written down on prompt-cards and practised many times—but before he can reply Roddy speaks again, quickly, in a muted yet vexedly accusing tone. “I know what you think of me.”
“Do you?” Adam, surprised, says. “I’m not sure I know myself what I think of you, or of anyone else, for that matter.”
Adam waits, but Roddy, it appears, has nothing more to add. He sits with his head thrust forward, looking steadily out through the windscreen with a faint, pursed smile, of satisfaction, even of triumph, it might be, as if there had been a hash in need of settling and he had settled it with gratifying finality and dispatch. Adam has the unsettling sensation of having been engaged in a far more extensive, far more rancorous exchange, involving him but carried on somehow without his full participation.
I am admiring the gorse blossom: it is truly glorious, a froth of buttery gold over the hillsides and along the hedgerows. Aye, this world we gave them appears a pretty place, on occasion.
“Is this all your father’s land?” Roddy asks.
“No, no. There’s only the house and the acre or two it stands on, and the wood behind. The rest was sold off long before our time.” Roddy nods. He peers out at the passing spectacle of green and gold and wrinkles his brow as if faintly deploring all he sees. Adam glances down sideways at Roddy’s tan slip-ons. His white linen jacket is folded on his knees as neatly as a parcel. “Everyone is glad you’ve come, you know.” Roddy does not respond to this, but holds himself aloof, pretending he has not heard or is too preoccupied to pay heed. Adam presses on. “It’s strange, the house, since Pa got sick. We feel we’re all”—he sadly smiles—“mourners-in-waiting.”
Roddy turns his head quickly to look at him. “Is he going to die?” He sounds incredulous.
They round a bend and the house comes into view. Really it is, Adam sees, not for the first time, an impossible sort of folly, square and mad-looking, with its yellow-painted walls and pale-blue shutters and that winged tin figure—ahem!—atop the single
turret. Viewed from this perspective the entire structure seems to lean slightly to one side, drunkenly. Two palm trees, dusty and dejected, stand one each before either pillar of the gate—palms, in this climate, and here, in the heart of the country!—brought from afar, perhaps on the SS
Esmerelda
, by a Blount forebear of missionary or, more likely, buccaneering bent. When he was a boy Adam used to play with their shed fronds, pretending they were scimitars, duelling two-handed with himself. As he turns the car from the road on to the drive the crunching sound the wheels make in the grit-filled ruts brings back for an instant a confusion of lost, sunstruck summers. Rex has heard their approach and in the distance sets up a deep-throated barking, each bark followed by a measured pause, as he waits in vain for echo or response. They wallow on soft tyres to the end of the avenue of limes and make a half turn around the no longer functioning fountain—a blank-eyed boy on a rampant dolphin, last year’s dead leaves choking the dry basin—and pull up short on the gravel outside the front door and sit unmoving for a moment in the sudden, startled silence.
“Look, Roddy,” Adam says, and pauses. Roddy has taken out the flat silver case and is judiciously selecting a cigarette, as if they were not all perfectly alike. “I want to ask something of you. I want to ask you to be nice to my sister.”
Roddy stops with the cigarette half-way to his lips and lifts his eyes and looks straight ahead. The sloping glass of the windscreen with the sun on it is greyly hazed and all beyond is indistinct. “Nice?” he says, seeming to dangle the word aloft by one corner.
Adam’s bare elbow is hot where it rests in the car’s open window.
Five ducks in a skein fly over fast, their wings making a whirring sound—
hurry-hurry-hurry
—and from far off, out on the slobland, there comes, insequentially with the seemingly fleeing ducks, the miniature muffled thud of an out-of-season shotgun-blast. The front door’s blue paint is peeling; gnarled wisteria wreathes the lintel.
“Yes,” Adam says shortly, and puffs out his cheeks and lets them deflate again. “Nice. It’s not so much to ask, is it? Think of it as a gesture to Pa. Because he is dying, you know.”
Roddy, lighting his cigarette, seems about to laugh—at what?—when the front door opens and Rex shoots out, barking again. He dashes menacingly towards the station-wagon with stiff, arthritic gait, not so much running as bounding up and down from back legs to fore like a rocking-horse set jerkily in motion. When he sees Adam his bark breaks and he snaps his jaws shut and looks embarrassed. Adam gets out and Roddy on his side opens his door but holds it close and hangs back behind it until he judges the dog has done capering and the gravel-dust has begun to disperse. The harsh dry salt reek from the car’s exhaust spreads thinly in the dusty air. Petra has appeared in the doorway, in baggy corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved blue shirt buttoned at the wrists, and stands with her left arm pressed stiffly against the peeling frame and frowning hard at a point on the ground half-way between her and the station-wagon, from behind the door of which now Roddy emerges, with his bag held protectively in front of him and his linen jacket folded over his arm, still keeping an eye on the dog, and advances towards her, queasily smiling.
. . .
Ursula in the Sky Room has heard Rex’s barking and the sound of tyres on the gravel but goes on clipping her husband’s fingernails. They do not really need to be clipped but she is doing it anyway, to be doing something. The curtains are still closed and the room is dark and she has switched on the reading lamp on the bedside table and angled it to light her task. She does not know why she keeps the curtains pulled against the summer day, or why, indeed, she set a reading lamp beside the bed. She cannot tell if her husband registers light or lack of it in those rare moments when he opens his eyes; she cannot be sure that he registers anything, but she makes herself believe that he does. His hands are cold as water, soft, and clammy. The nails are flattish and finely striated, and the skin beneath them is milky blue and the half-moons at their bases are a ghostly shade of grey. She started off with scissors but they were too fiddly and made her flesh crawl, and so she is using the clippers, which are easier though still it is a shivery business. She has never cut anyone’s fingernails before, except her own, and she would not cut even those if there were someone who would do it for her. When Adam and Petra were small she was too squeamish to do theirs and left the job to their father or to his mother. She seems to remember that Granny Godley used to trim young Adam’s nails with her teeth when he was a baby. Can that have been? Surely not—surely she is imagining it? Yet in her mind she clearly sees the old woman, lanky and white-skinned like her son, leaning over the cradle and baring her long, yellowish horse-teeth, exactly like the witch in a fairy-tale.
She knows it is not so yet she has the unnerving feeling that her husband, even though his eyes are closed, is watching her from the gloom outside the yellow circle of lamplight in which
she leans, watching her along the blanket from under his eyelashes. It is how she often caught him looking at her, askance, smiling to himself, silently amused, especially in their early days together. She might have been his daughter rather than his wife, and even yet there are times when she feels like his child. She is sure this is a terrible notion, and would never confide it to anyone.
Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if the top part of his head had been taken off and carved and trimmed and jammed down into the scooped-out jaws of a stranger. She almost wept, but he went on eating his toast as if nothing had happened. He had bought a cut-throat razor with an ivory handle, an antique thing from the last century; he showed it to her in its black velvet box lined with scarlet satin. She could not look at it without a shiver. He liked to show off his skill with it, and would leave the bathroom door open so she could admire the deft way he wielded the dangerous, gleaming thing, holding it at an elegant angle between fingertips and thumb, his little finger fastidiously crooked, and sweeping the blade raspingly through the snow-like foam. Harsh light above the bath and the steely shine of the mirror and one dark, humorously cocked eye glancing at her sideways from the glass. Where is it now, she wonders, that razor? In a week or two he got tired of using it and let his beard grow back.
Disturbing things, these little horny flanges at the ends of
everyone’s fingers and toes that never stop growing, even after death, or so she has heard said. What are they, were they, for? Killing, skinning, rending? Too weak and brittle for that. Perhaps they were stronger, long ago; perhaps they were claws. She thinks she read somewhere that they were originally tufts or pads of hair that became fused and hardened, in the same way that thorns on roses are supposed really to be leaves that over aeons coiled themselves tighter and tighter until they were sharp as needles. Yet it all seems highly improbable. She knows so little, and even the things she does know she doubts. Adam would be able to tell her about fingernails and how they came to be as they are. He would look it up for her. He liked looking things up. He would throw himself back on his chair, frowning deeply, his lips pursed as if to whistle, then sprint off to the bookshelves and return a minute later with a big book open on his hands, hurrying along as if on tiptoe, stooped and swift, reading even as he went.
Her mind has not allowed her yet to grasp the full extent of the calamity that has befallen them, not only Adam and she but the rest of the family, too. There is a saving numbness around her heart, she can almost feel it, like a film of insulating air between the walls of the beating muscle and the soft red pulp inside the rib-cage where it is suspended. For all that the doctors tell her, she will not, she simply will not be persuaded that he is entirely beyond consciousness and not merely asleep in some special, profound sense, and she keeps waiting for him to sit up and clear his throat and start asking for things, his clothes, food, a glass of wine, in that deceptively diffident manner he affects when he is at his most furious, looking aside and frowning, pretending to be thinking of something else. No, he is not unconscious,
she is sure of it, only more deeply sunk than ever before in one of his impenetrable reveries. He always had the ability to withdraw from his surroundings, for days on end, wrapping himself up in himself and shutting out everything and everyone. When she sits here alone with him like this, in this peculiar daytime darkness, she seems to hear, or at least to feel, a distant low unwavering hum, which she is convinced is the sound of his mind still at work. When that sound ceases she will accept that he is gone, and not until then.