Staring at the Sun (19 page)

Mrs. Brooks, with whom Leslie had lodged for almost five years, was a thin, vague woman who for no accountable reason always shouted. It was nothing to do with deafness, as Uncle Leslie had once proved by secretly turning on her radio very softly and watching her reaction; simply a habit which had remained uncorrected for so long that nobody knew its origin, or much cared.

“HE’S VERY POORLY,” she bellowed into the road as she opened the door to Gregory. “I CAN’T SEE HIM GETTING ANY BETTER,” she roared to the ground and first floors of her establishment as she wrestled Gregory’s coat from him. Fortunately, Uncle Leslie’s room was on the top floor: a large attic whose tendency to overheat in summer and whose proximity to the gurgling water tanks gave him more than enough leverage when it came to the occasional negotiations about the putative rent.

With shooing motions Gregory had kept Mrs. Brooks down on the ground floor. Now he knocked quietly on the attic door and went in. He’d never visited Leslie in his digs before, and on entering immediately felt a strange nostalgia: of course, he thought, this is where all my Christmas presents came from. The place resembled a low-turnover charity shop: there was a rack of clothes manifestly not intended for the same person; three Hoovers, with spares for a fourth; a cut-glass flower vase with a yellowish scum mark halfway up; a scatter of paperbacks with the top right-hand corner cut off and prices in shillings and pence; a very early Electrolux shaver, nacreous pink in its box, and so old-fashioned in design that it
looked like something else, perhaps a sexual appliance of unpopular function; a stack of unmatching dinner plates; several suitcases whose combined capacity far exceeded the contents of the room; and a standard lamp which was switched on even at eleven o’clock on a spring morning.

“Dear Boy,” murmured Leslie, somehow capitalizing the “Boy” and making Gregory feel it was a term awarded only to the most grown-up people. “Dear Boy.”

Gregory ignored the plaited-rope linen box with the stoved-in top which appeared to serve as a chair and sat on his uncle’s bed. He didn’t know what to say on these occasions—he assumed it must be one of “these occasions”; but it didn’t matter, since Leslie, even when silent for minutes at a time, was always somehow in charge. Mrs. Brooks was on his mind.

“Did she tell you how I made her let me die here?”

Gregory knew better than to come-come his uncle. “No.”

“Told her I’d blab to the Income Tax if she didn’t let me.”

“Leslie, you old villain.” Gregory felt it was the kindest compliment he could pay; Leslie took it as intended, and laid a finger along the side of his nose. He seemed too weak to be able to tap it.

“Silly old thing even had to pretend she was my long-lost sister-in-law or something. Only way the hospital would release me. ‘That’s right,’ I said to her, ‘you claim the body.’ They didn’t like that at the hospital. Have a pill, meboy.” He gestured towards the line of plastic cylinders by his bedside. Gregory shook his head. “Can’t say I blame you, lad. Don’t care for them myself.”

They sat in silence for a while, Leslie with his eyes closed. His hair was as black as it had ever been—perhaps he had some cut-price potion in his sponge bag, Gregory thought—but his eyebrows were pure white and his moustache half-and-half. His skin had yellowed and fallen away from the bones of his face; yet even in repose there was something about his expression that could charm. He looked like the sort of fairground barker who invites you in to see the Bearded Lady. You go in, and you know the lady’s beard is simply
glued on, and he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know, but it is somehow impossible to hold this against him. “Don’t miss the Bearded Lady,” you find yourself announcing as you stumble out past the hesitating crowd. “Finest Bearded Lady south of Hadrian’s Wall.”

Occasionally, Leslie would say something, his eyes trying to open as his mouth did. He didn’t mention his death again, and Gregory assumed the matter was now closed. He talked a little of Jean, at one point confiding to Gregory, “She used to be a real screamer, your mum,” before closing his eyes again.

Gregory wondered what he meant. Perhaps “screamer” was someone who was “fast,” as they used to call it. But that hardly seemed right for his mother. It must be some piece of prewar slang. He’d look it up if he remembered.

After a while he wanted to tell Leslie how fond he had always been of him, and how much he had enjoyed those wartime years Jean disapproved of. But this seemed tactless, somehow, almost cruel. Instead, he murmured, “Do you remember those stereoscopic cards you gave me? I was thinking about them only the other day.”

“The what?”

“Those cards. Sort of colour transparencies, only two of them side by side. Then you put them in a viewer and held it up to the light and saw pictures of African game parks or the Grand Canyon. Only … only you never gave me the viewer.” Try as he might, Gregory couldn’t keep a note of complaint out of his voice, even though he felt no such emotion inside.

“Huh,” said Leslie, his eyes firmly shut. “Huh.” Was he reflecting on his own meanness or his nephew’s ingratitude? Slowly, the eyes opened and directed themselves past Gregory’s shoulder. “If you look over there you’ll probably find the other bit.”

“No. No, Uncle, really. I … I don’t really want the other bit.”

One eye stayed open briefly, surveyed him, judged him too daft for words and closed itself. A couple of minutes later, Leslie said, “Take the shaver instead.”

“What?”

“I said take the shaver instead.” Gregory looked across to the top of the chest of drawers. The Electrolux gleamed pinkly at him.

“Thanks very much.” It was, he realized, the perfect present.

“Because if you don’t she’ll only take it to do her legs with.”

Gregory chuckled, and a faint smile tweaked his lips. He gazed at his uncle’s fairground face. Finally, without opening his eyes, Leslie pronounced the last words Gregory heard him say.

“This isn’t about the Common Market, you know.”

Indeed not. Gregory rose, placed his hand flat against his uncle’s shoulder, gave him the softest shake that was possible, collected the shaver from the chest of drawers, hid it in a pocket in case Mrs. Brooks thought he had stolen it (which is precisely what she did think when she discovered it was missing) and left.

After Leslie’s death, Gregory helped Mrs. Brooks clean out the attic.

“BETTER SEND IT ALL TO OXFAM,” she shouted, just to alert the second and third floors of her establishment. When they moved the bed, Gregory trod on something that crunched sharply. It was a small bag of fish and chips, thrown there months before and long desiccated of their oil. Gregory picked it up and looked around for the wastepaper basket. There wasn’t one. All this junk, he thought, and nowhere to throw it.

At his office, while he bargained with those who sought money in exchange for their demise, Gregory thought back over Uncle Leslie’s life and death. He had been not just touched, but impressed by Leslie’s behaviour on that last visit. He had mentioned his impending death as soon as Gregory arrived, had wrapped it up in a joke, and then talked about other things. He hadn’t made it into a farewell, though that was certainly what it was; he hadn’t given way to self-pity or encouraged tears in his visitor. All of which made Leslie’s death less upsetting than it might have been. Gregory supposed that Leslie had been, for want of a better word, brave.

It seemed to make a point, this death. Leslie, who had run away from the war, who had fiddled and scrounged, who might
have been called a spiv even by Jean if he hadn’t been a member of the family, had died with courage, even grace. Or was that too neat, too much of a morality? After all, they weren’t certain Leslie had actually run away from the war—that was only what Jean’s father said; Leslie himself referred to the time as “when I was Stateside.” They didn’t know either that his bartering system of life wasn’t forced on him by penury; and Gregory didn’t really know how Leslie had died, how the end had been. Perhaps the pills took away all his pain; in which case, could you be said to be brave? Well, yes, in that you had to face the knowledge of your own death. But perhaps they had pills to take away that knowledge, to purge and sweeten it. Gregory expected that they did.

So what was a good death? Was it possible to have a good death anymore; or was it in any case an illusion to believe that there had been good deaths—brave, stoical, consoling, affectionate deaths—in the past? Was “a good death” one of those phrases which didn’t, in fact, have anything to which they referred; was it like naming an animal that didn’t exist—a winged crocodile, say? Or perhaps a good death was simply this: the best death you could manage in the circumstances, regardless of medical help. Or again, more simply still: a good death was any death not swamped by agony, fear and protest. By that count—indeed, by almost any count—Uncle Leslie had had a good death.

Jean remembered China. Perhaps this was why she hadn’t felt as much of a stranger there as she had expected: because being in China was like living with a man. Men juggled with goldfish and expected you to be impressed. Men gave you fur coats made out of dogs. Men invented the plastic bonsai. Men gave you very small address books which they thought would meet your needs. Men were in places very primitive: they rode to market with pigs roped across the back wheels of their bicycles. Most of all there was the way men talked to you. In Asian times. The temple was repented. We grow ladies. Here is the sobbing centre. They talked at you through a megaphone even though you stood only a couple of yards away.
And when the batteries failed, they still preferred to shout down the instrument at you rather than adopt the frail equality of the voice. Or else they talked at you from the other side of a curving wall, and as you craned your neck you could barely detach their voice from dozens of others. And when you asked them the simplest questions—“Do you want to go to Shanghai?”—they would not answer. They pretended there was something wrong with the question. That is not a real question. Why do you ask such a thing? There is no answer because there is no question. Here is the sobbing centre. Put your finger on the knot and help me rope the pig. The temple was repented. In Asian times. Do not forget we live in Asian times; we have always lived in Asian times.

3

Immortality is no learned question.

—KIERKEGAARD

H
HOW DO YOU TELL
a good life from a bad life, a wasted life? Jean remembered the forewoman at the jade factory in China who was asked how you could tell good jade from bad jade. Through an interpreter, and through a megaphone that didn’t work, came the reply, “You look at it and by looking you tell its qualities.” Nowadays, this answer no longer seemed so evasive.

Jean had often wondered what it would be like to grow old. When she had been in her fifties, and still feeling in her thirties, she heard a talk on the radio by a gerontologist. “Put cotton wool in your ears,” he had said, “and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant ageing.”

It was a good test, but it naturally contained a flaw. You never did age instantly; you never did have a sharp memory for comparison. Nor, when she looked back over the last forty of her hundred years, did it seem to be initially, or even mainly, a matter of sensory deprivation. You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk as far as you used to, it was that other people didn’t expect you to; and if they didn’t, then it needed vain obstinacy to persist.

At sixty she had still felt like a young woman; at eighty, she felt like a middle-aged woman who had something a bit wrong with her; at nearly a hundred she no longer bothered to think whether or not she felt younger than she was—there didn’t seem any point. She was relieved not to be bedbound, as she might have been in
earlier times; but mostly she took the medical advances of her lifetime for granted. She lived increasingly inside her head, and was content to be there. Memories, there were far too many memories; they raced across her sky like Irish weather. Her feet, with each succeeding year, seemed a little farther away from her hands; she dropped things, stumbled a little, was fearful; but mostly what she noticed was the smirking paradox of old age: how everything seemed to take longer than it used to, but how, despite this, time seemed to go faster.

At eighty-seven, Jean had taken up smoking. Cigarettes had been finally pronounced risk-free, and after dinner she would light one, close her eyes, and suck on some tangy memory from the previous century. Her favourite brand was Numbers, a cigarette which when first introduced had been divided by dotted lines into eighteen mean smoking units. These MSUs were numbered one to eighteen—a benevolent ploy by the manufacturer which was designed to help people know how much of their cigarette they had smoked. After a couple of years, though, in a summer when subjects for computer-lobby had been hard to find, a row took place (one which, in the manufacturers’ eyes, got way out of hand) over whether it was paternalistic and oppressive to number Numbers. Finally, after an 8 percent nationwide canvass and a few unpleasant incidents (the marketing director’s car had been painted with dotted lines and divided into eighteen sections from bonnet to boot), the manufacturers agreed to produce unnumbered Numbers.