“Perhaps if you were in the position of these people, facing death, you might give in too. Don’t belittle them—”
Something in her eyes made him stop.
She began collecting the scattered pieces, placing them in the wrong positions. “But I am a resident here,” she said. “Another game?”
They played all day, but Maitland gave little attention to the games. During the hours that followed he found himself intrigued by the young woman, who introduced herself as Caroline. He opened up, talked about himself for the first time in years. He wanted to turn the conversation around, to ask Caroline about herself, her life before the hospice but mainly her life since the diagnosis. Most of all Maitland wanted to know how she could remain so overtly optimistic with the knowledge of what was to come.
But she parried his questions and kept the conversation trivial, and Maitland was happy to join her in the exchange of banalities he would have found intolerable at any other time.
Over the next few weeks Maitland and Caroline sought each other’s company as often as possible. They went on long walks around the island, and spoke guardedly of their respective pasts. Maitland was attracted to Caroline because of her courage, her optimism and disregard for the proximity of her death; she perhaps was attracted to Maitland for what she saw as similar qualities. It hurt him to deceive her – he often wanted to tell her that you could not fear death if you had never really lived – but as time went by he became too attached to her to tell her the truth.
Their liaison stopped short of physical intimacy, however, and it was as if this was a tacit agreement between them. For his part, Maitland could hardly conceive that intimacy might be possible, much less how he might react emotionally to something he was yet to experience. Perhaps fear prevented him acceding to the desires of his body, as if to consummate what he felt for Caroline would bring home to him the fact of how much he had come to delight in life of late, and consequently how much he had to lose.
As for Caroline... They talked all day, and often into the early hours, but never about their relationship. Maitland was still in ignorance as to her almost blind, at times even childish optimism.
~
For days now the wind and the freezing rain had promised worse to come, and then one quiet night, with only two weeks to go before Maitland died, snow fell.
In the morning he awoke to find a pearly radiance filling the room. He dressed and drew aside the curtains and was dazzled by the brilliance of the white mantle.
He pulled on extra clothes with the enthusiasm of a child and met Caroline in the hall. They embraced, restricted by the bulkiness of their padding, and hurried outside hand in hand.
For as far as the eye could see, snow had covered the land with a perfect record of passage. They were the first residents abroad this morning, and they set off together away from the mansion. At one point, Maitland looked back at the building – its hard angles softened and upholstered in a thick, dazzling fleece – and he saw their footprints following them to their present position. He looked ahead at the virgin expanse of snow, and he shivered with what he told himself was nothing more than a sudden chill.
They walked through the woods and came out on the far side of the headland. They stood side by side and stared out across the shipping lanes, at the scimitar-shape of a tanker on the distant grey horizon. Then they moved towards the small pavilion where they often spent the afternoons, talking and staring out to sea.
As they made their way towards the open entrance of the small, stone building, Caroline pulled away from him, then bent double and screamed into her mittens. Maitland looked from her to the pavilion, and saw with revulsion that during the night a resident had chosen this place in which to die.
They returned to the mansion and for the rest of the day and all through the night they remained in bed and made love. This set the pattern for the following week. They would take a brisk morning walk and then seek the refuge of bed and the bliss of each other’s body, as if making up for the weeks of wasted opportunity. Caroline said nothing about the obvious fear the sight of the corpse had instilled in her – instead it was as if she were trying to exorcise from her mind the fact of her death with the positive catharsis of sex.
Maitland, at last, found what he knew to be love, and he passed through the fear of the inevitable with the knowledge that he might never have found happiness were it not for the fact of his terminal illness. His only regret was that he had not found such happiness earlier.
~
One week later he felt himself going.
On the morning of the first day he felt too drowsy to accompany Caroline on their ritual stroll through the snow. He made the effort, though, but something about his lethargy as they walked side by side communicated itself to Caroline, and she was silent.
In the afternoon they went to bed, but Maitland fell asleep beside her within seconds. In the morning he felt vaguely ill, nauseous. He tried to hide this from Caroline, but it was impossible. She dressed him and assisted him downstairs to the library, where they played chess. Often Maitland slipped into sleep, and he would awake with a start to see Caroline crying quietly to herself at the far end of the room.
On the morning of his last day, Maitland awoke before Caroline and forced himself out of bed. He dressed with difficulty, then kissed Caroline on the cheek and slipped quietly from the room so as not to wake her.
He walked through the woods to the pavilion overlooking the sea. Already he was tired, as if the short walk had exhausted him, and he hoped he would be asleep when it happened.
Caroline joined him not long after, as he guessed, and secretly hoped, she would. “You should go back,” he told her, but he knew it was a token protest. “You still have months to live...”
She ignored him; he sensed that she wanted to speak, to say something, but could not bring herself to do so without tears.
Later, for the first time, she mentioned the Syndrome.
“Years ago we wouldn’t have known we were ill,” she whispered, her breath visible in the air. “We would have...
gone
, suddenly, without all these months of—” And Maitland realised, then, that she was crying. “Why?” she said at last. “Why did they have to tell us?”
Maitland held her, shocked at her sudden capitulation. “Modern medicine,” he said. “They can diagnose it now. They know when it’s going to happen. Given that knowledge, they have to inform the sufferer. Otherwise we could go at any time, anywhere, endangering others besides ourselves. There are many more of us now. The Syndrome has reached almost epidemic proportions.” He drew her to him affectionately. “I thought you were doing rather well,” he said, and recalled that first Sunday weeks ago when he had wondered briefly if her vivacity had been nothing but an act.
“I was so scared, the only way I could stay sane was to pretend I wasn’t affected. Being seen as unafraid by others gave me strength, confidence. Can you understand that? Then I met you and found someone who wasn’t afraid...”
Maitland stifled a cry of despair. He convinced himself he could detect, in the frozen morning air, the odour of the resident who had died here before him. He felt grief constrict his chest, fill his throat and render him speechless.
Caroline laughed. “Do you know... do you know what they call us? The Islanders? Everyone else out there? They call us the ‘Disciples of Apollo’—”
They held each other as the snow began to fall.
Then Maitland ignited and consumed her in his flame, uniting them forever in a mutual, carbonised embrace.
The House
Charles Tudor looked up from his typewriter and blinked. It was a second before he came to his senses and realised the source of the interruption: the phone was ringing in the hall. He pushed his chair back and stood slowly. The summons could only be from two or three people – his agent, his editor, or some pre-pubescent girl in the marketing department at his publishers, Greenwood and Worley.
He moved into the hall and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Charles, Edward here. How are you this fine spring morning?”
He blinked. “Spring?”
“It’s the first of April, Charles.”
“And you’ve called to play an April Fool’s trick, hm?”
“That’s the Tudor I know!” his agent roared. “Droll as ever. No, no April Fool’s trick this year. I was wondering—”
Tudor forestalled him. “The answer’s no, Edward.”
“You don’t even know what I’m about to ask.”
“I can guess. You’d like me to take part in some wretched publicity event.” The third book in the
Tides of Time
series was due to launch in a couple of weeks and he would be expected to publicise the title.
“For Nigel,” Edward wheedled. “You don’t know how he’s bent over backwards to push the series. It’s the least you could do.”
“Fuck off.”
Edward laughed.
“What?” Tudor snapped.
“You invest that vulgar phrase with such Shakespearian gravitas, Charles.” His agent paused. “You do realise you’re getting a reputation as something of a recluse?”
Tudor sighed. Is it any wonder, he thought.
Edward went on, “To be honest, it would be a great favour to me as well as to Nigel. And to your readers.”
He hadn’t been up to London for years, and it would keep the drones at G&W smiling...
“You have a massive fan base out there,” Edward said, “all eager to meet the creator of the
Tides of Time
books.”
He relented. “One event, Charles. One. No more.”
His agent chuckled with relief. “That’s all we ask. A signing at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, in a couple of weeks.”
“I’ll need a drink to get me through the bloody thing.”
“I’ll have the best French red on hand during the signing, and afterwards I’ll take you to lunch.”
“The Ivy?”
“Done,” Edward said. “Everyone at Greenwood and Worley will be so excited.”
“Fuck off.”
~
He returned to his study and finished the paragraph, which brought the scene to a close.
He sat back and looked across the room, to where he knew he would see himself, long and grey, in the mirror propped between the bookshelves. He was sixty-five, he realised with a reaction little short of amazement. Where had all the years gone?
He remembered a long, hard walk he had done in his twenties, back from the pub to this very house, long before he’d married Emmeline. Three miles through horizontal sleet, frozen to the marrow. He’d looked ahead and told himself that it would soon be over; soon he would be sitting before the blazing fire, looking back at the labour of the walk... An hour later he had done just that, and had known that his life would follow this pattern, too. One day he would be contemplating his existence from the vantage point of old age, and the long cold walk would seem to have passed in an instant.
The idea had terrified him then, and it was easy to recapture that youthful terror now; though, paradoxically, the terror was temporized by the passage of the treacherous years themselves. The terror had transmuted to bemused acceptance.
The view through the French windows was little changed in forty years. The lawn stretched to the fulsome willow, and squirrels frolicked, twitching, back and forth. He saw Emmeline run naked from her studio, taken by some impulse of her manic phase to disport herself amid nature... He smiled to himself and blinked and she was gone, a vision of utter beauty alive now only in his memories. The image of her was replaced by other, later ones, which he tried to banish.
He pulled his gaze from the lawn and regarded the bookshelf beside the mirror. Seventy books bearing the by-line of Charles Tudor filled the four shelves, all of them for children. His first three books, reading editions of his early plays, he had long ago taken out into the garden and burnt along with a trunk of Emmeline’s clothes. He told himself that the ranked titles did not make him bitter, did not denote a lifetime of wasted effort that would have been better spent writing serious plays.
But that would have been impossible, he told himself.
He sighed and brought his flattened palms down, once, on the arms of the chair, then stood.
Lunchtime.
~
Tudor had hated the stultifying routine of book-signings in his early years as a children’s writer, the embarrassment of events attended only by his editor, agent, three sheepish shop staff and a couple of kids disappointed that their favourite writer should turn out to be so...
boring
. Now he abhorred signings because they were so bloody popular.
The children’s section of the store teemed with what seemed like a hundred noisy ten-year olds, shepherded by harassed staff who themselves seemed not that much older.
He sat behind a low desk and scrawled his distinctive looping signature, personalising the title page to the shy, hesitant Ellas and Bens and Joes who filed past, so many unlined faces with all their lives to live. He could see, in their eyes, something like shock that their favourite author should prove to be so old.
He was half a bottle of pinot noir to the good, his glass topped up from time to time by Charles in grinning attendance. Earlier Nigel, his editor, had pumped his hand, “You don’t know how much I
appreciate
this, Charles...” before rushing off to a ‘prior engagement’.
One hour later the last of the children had left and he was busy signing the remaining stock. A young thing in a Waterstone’s tee-shirt danced up, thanked him, and announced they’d shifted over two hundred units.
Tudor exchanged a glance with Edward.
He was about to suggest they bugger off to the Ivy – he wanted to discuss his next project with Edward – when a woman in her fifties approached the desk, clutching a slim volume to her chest. She had evidently been waiting for the children to depart, and then for him to finish signing the stock, before she bothered him.
She wore her five decades with elegance and grace; she was small and trim, with whitening hair and the pale oval face of an emeritus ballerina. He smiled at her, and thought that something about her face was familiar; he wondered if he’d met her once, years ago.
Even her hesitation, as she proffered the book to sign on the title page, was becoming.
He saw with a shock that it was his third play,
The House
.
His hand shaking, he took the book.
“I hope you don’t mind...” the woman said.
He gathered himself. “No... Not at all. To...?”
“To Caroline,” she smiled.
He passed back the slim play-script. “First time I’ve seen the thing in years...” And hopefully the last. Even the sight of it, in its uniform binding, brought back the terror.
“I hope you don’t mind, Mr Tudor... I’m a journalist, and I was wondering if you might consent to an interview.”
He was tempted to tell her the truth, that he didn’t do interviews, that he had nothing he wanted to say about anything. But something about the woman’s smile, her grace, her becoming trepidation, made him relent.
He said, “I don’t see why not. But right now I have a meeting with my agent. I don’t know... I rarely come up to London. Perhaps, if you wouldn’t mind the journey to Suffolk?”
She beamed, and the gesture irradiated her face with something very much like youth. Ridiculously, Tudor felt his pulse quicken.
“That would be wonderful.”
He passed his card. “If you give me a ring, we could arrange a date.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you again, Mr Tudor.” And clutching the play-script, she hurried away.
On their way to the Ivy, Edward gave Tudor a lecherous nudge. “You old dog, Charles.”
“You know what I’m about to say.”
Edward laughed.
He spent the next hour over lunch wondering why the woman had asked him to sign, of all his many titles,
The House
.
~
He finished writing for the day, poured himself a glass of wine, and stepped through the French windows.
He walked across the lawn towards the willow, the late afternoon sun warm on his back. A squirrel scuttled off at his approach. At the hem of the willow he turned and looked back at the house.
It had been in the family for almost a hundred and fifty years, an early Victorian mansion with ten bedrooms, a small ballroom, library, billiard room and a dozen others to which he had never ascribed a function. He had grown up here, and the house had easily accommodated his family and that of his Uncle. Their respective families had grown and fled the nest over the years, until the late sixties when, on his father’s death, the house had been left to him. His first thought had been to sell it, despite the many happy memories he associated with the commodious building. Then he had met Emmeline and she had fallen in love with the place, and after that there had been no way he could sell the house.
They had moved in, closed down all the rooms not needed, and lived in the west wing.
The room adjacent to his study, which had been the billiard room, Emmeline turned into her studio; it was south facing and airy, the perfect place, she said, in which to paint.
He stared across the lawn to the studio’s long windows, still draped with the sheets he had placed there the day after his wife’s death.
He heard a sound behind him – he was sure it was a burst of laughter – and turned.
He thought he saw a sliver of naked flesh between the swaying fronds of the willow, but knew that he was mistaken. He felt tears spring to his eyes.
One morning shortly after their wedding day, Emmeline had come to him with her camera and demanded he photograph her in the garden. She had dragged him from his study and across the lawn, and beside the willow she had pulled off her dress and stretched out on the grass.
Don’t just stand there, Charles! Photograph me.
Are you sure? he had asked.
Don’t be so bloody wet! I’ll develop them myself.
She had rolled onto her back and opened her legs, fingering herself shockingly.
He wondered if it was then, in those brief minutes beside the willow, that he first discerned the seeds of his wife’s later illness. Perhaps, as he had told himself many times over the years in an attempt to absolve himself from any responsibility, she had been ill even then.
He closed his eyes and saw her again, lying on her back, her long dark hair smeared across the grass like spilled ink.
He hurried back to the house.
~
The bell chimed, loud in the silence of the old house.
Tudor hurried across the hallway. He had made an effort, spruced himself up, even bought a new shirt and jacket. He was old enough not to be nervous at the imminent meeting, nor even apprehensive; but he chastised himself for looking ahead, to a time beyond the meeting when he might come to know Caroline a little more. He was old enough to know better, he told himself.
She was smaller than he recalled, or perhaps it was because she was dwarfed by the dimensions of the gaping porch. She wore a belted fawn mackintosh and a pale blue velvet beret, and her smile was as beautiful as he remembered.
“I hope the journey here was uneventful?”
“Entirely. You live in a beautiful part of the world.”
“I couldn’t live anywhere else.”
“The perfect environment in which to create.”
He smiled. That was just what Emmeline had said.
“Something like that,” he said.
He took her through to the library, where he had built a fire against the cooling afternoon. He offered her a drink; she said she’d love a coffee. He made two mugs and gave her a short tour of the west wing.
The conversation flowed: he wondered if the interview had in fact begun, or if the easy exchange of information was just that, communication between two like-minded souls.
Stop it, he told himself; you must be fifteen years her senior.
He gave her the history of the house, and she was attentive; then she turned the conversation towards him, asking questions about his life and work.
They were in what had been the conservatory which, in his parents’ day, had resembled some transplanted section of the Amazon rainforest. Now it was empty, a vast tiled area invaded by shafts of late April sunlight. They stood gazing out across the lawn to the willow.
He managed to skate over the early years of his writing life, the five years from the age of twenty when he had written his three plays. He told himself that, as a journalist, she would be principally interested in his children’s books, which were after all what had made him popular, if not famous.
Then he wondered if her interest in the children’s books was spurious: was she really here to find out why, so abruptly, he had stopped writing plays?
If so, she ignored the plays and asked about his children’s output, and he told himself that he was being paranoid.
They left the conservatory and he found himself pausing before the door to the studio.
He reached out, amazing himself, and turned the door knob. He was to spend sleepless hours, that night, attempting to analyse his motives for doing what he did then.
He wondered if he was trying to lay the ghost... though he knew that it could not be that easy.
“And this is where my wife worked,” he said. “She was the artist Emmeline—”
“Emmeline Courtenay,” Caroline finished. “Yes, I know of her work.”
He hesitated on the threshold of the room, almost felled by a slew of unbidden recollections. “I haven’t been in here for years...”
He stopped. She stepped into the room before him, tactfully pretending she hadn’t heard the catch in his voice.
He moved to the window and pulled down the sheets. “Emmeline never bothered with curtains,” he said. “All that mattered was light.”
Now, light flooded the room, dazzling after the imposed twilight of nearly forty years.