Staring at the Sun (2 page)

1

You ask me what life is? It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known.

—
CHEKHOV TO OLGA KNIPPER
, 20 April 1904

O
THER PEOPLE ASSUMED
it must be a strain, looking back over ninety years. Tunnel vision, they guessed; straw vision. It wasn’t like that. Sometimes the past was shot with a hand-held camera; sometimes it reared monumentally inside a proscenium arch with moulded plaster swags and floppy curtains; sometimes it eased along, a love story from the silent era, pleasing, out of focus and wholly implausible. And sometimes there was only a succession of stills to be borrowed from the memory.

The Incident with Uncle Leslie—the very first Incident of her life—came in a series of magic lantern slides. A sepia morality; the lovable villain even had a moustache. She had been seven at the time; it was Christmas; Uncle Leslie was her favourite uncle. Slide 1 showed him bending down from his enormous height to hand over a present. Hyacinths, he whispered, giving her a biscuit-coloured pot surmounted by a mitre of brown paper. Put them in the airing cupboard and wait until the spring. She wanted to see them now. Oh, they wouldn’t be up yet. How could he be sure? Later, in secret, Leslie unscrewed a corner of the brown-paper wrapping and let her peer in. Surprise! They
were
up already. Four slim ochre points, about half an inch long. Uncle Leslie emitted the reluctant chuckle of an adult suddenly impressed by a child’s greater knowledge. Still, he explained, this was all the more reason why she shouldn’t look at them again until the spring; any more light could cause them to outgrow their strength.

She put the hyacinths in the airing cupboard and waited for progress. She thought about them frequently and wondered what a
hyacinth looked like. Time for Slide 2. In late January she went to the bathroom with a torch, turned off the light, took down the pot, unscrewed a tiny viewing hole, aimed the torch and quickly looked inside. The four promising tips were still there, still half an inch long. At least the light she had let in at Christmas hadn’t harmed them.

In late February she looked again; but obviously the growing season hadn’t started yet. Three weeks later Uncle Leslie called by on his way to play golf. Over lunch he turned to her conspiratorially and asked, “Well, little Jeanie, are the hyacinths hyacinth Christmas?”

“You told me not to look.”

“So I did. So I did.”

She looked again at the end of March, then—Slides 5 to 10—on the second, fifth, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh of April. On the twelfth her mother agreed to a closer examination of the pot. They laid yesterday’s
Daily Express
on the kitchen table and carefully unwrapped the brown paper. The four ochre sprouts had not advanced at all. Mrs. Serjeant looked uneasy.

“I think we’d better throw them out, Jean.” Adults were always throwing things out. That was clearly one of the big differences. Children liked keeping things.

“Maybe the roots are growing.” Jean started easing away at the peaty earth packed tight against the tips.

“I shouldn’t do that,” said Mother. But it was too late. One after the other, Jean dug out four upturned wooden golf tees.

Strangely, the Incident didn’t make her lose faith in Uncle Leslie. Instead, she lost faith in hyacinths.

Looking back, Jean assumed that she must have had friends as a child; but she couldn’t recall that special confidante with the wonky grin, or the playground game with skipping rope and acorns, or the secret messages passed along ink-stained desks at a village school with a daunting stone inscription above its door. Perhaps she had had all these things; perhaps not. In retrospect, Uncle Leslie had been friends enough. He had crinkly hair which he kept well Brylcreemed,
and a dark blue blazer with a regimental badge on the breast pocket. He knew how to make wineglasses from the silver paper round chocolate bars, and whenever he went to the golf club he always called it “popping down the Old Green Heaven.” Uncle Leslie was the sort of man she would marry.

Shortly after the hyacinth Incident, he began taking her down the Old Green Heaven. When they arrived he would sit her on a mildewed bench near the car park and instruct her with mock severity to guard his clubs.

“Just going to wash behind the old earpieces.”

Twenty minutes later they would set off towards the first tee, Uncle Leslie carrying his clubs and smelling of beer, Jean with the sand iron over her shoulder. This was a good-luck ploy devised by Leslie: as long as Jeanie was carrying the sand iron in readiness, the lightning would be diverted and he would be kept out of the bunker.

“Don’t let the club head drop,” he would say, “or there’ll be more sand flying than on a windy day in the Gobi desert.” And she would shoulder the club correctly, like a rifle. Once, feeling tired at the uphill fifteenth, she had trailed it behind her off the tee, and Uncle Leslie’s second shot squirted straight into a bunker fifteen yards away.

“Now look what you’ve done,” he said; though he seemed almost as pleased as he was cross. “Have to buy me one at the nineteenth for that.”

Uncle Leslie often talked to her in a funny code she pretended to understand. Everyone knew there were only eighteen holes on a golf course and that she didn’t have any money, but she nodded as if she were always buying people one—one what?—at the nineteenth. When she grew up, someone would explain the code to her; though in the meantime she felt quite happy not knowing. And there were bits she understood already. If the ball swerved disobediently off into the woods, Leslie would sometimes mutter, “One for the hyacinths”—the only reference he ever made to his Christmas present.

But mostly his remarks were beyond her. They marched purposefully
down the fairway, he with his bagful of quietly clanking hickory, she sloping arms with the sand iron. Jean was not allowed to speak: Uncle Leslie had explained that chatter put him off thinking about his next shot. He, on the other hand, was permitted to talk; and as they strode towards that distant white glint which sometimes turned out to be a sweet paper, he would occasionally stop, bend down and whisper to her the secrets of his mind. At the fifth he told her that tomatoes were the cause of cancer, and that the sun would never set on the Empire; at the tenth she learned that bombers were the future, and that old Musso might be an Eytie but he knew which way the paper folded. Once they had stopped on the short twelfth (an unprecedented act on a par three) while Leslie gravely explained, “Besides, your Jew doesn’t really
enjoy
golf.”

Then they had continued towards the bunker on the left of the green, with Jean repeating to herself this suddenly awarded truth.

She liked going down the Old Green Heaven; you never knew quite what would happen. Once, after Uncle Leslie had washed behind his ears more thoroughly than usual, he had crackled off into the deep rough alongside the fourth. She was made to turn her back, but couldn’t avoid hearing a prolonged splashing noise of remarkable volume and implications. She had peered under a raised elbow (it didn’t count as looking) and seen steam rising amid the waist-high bracken.

Next there was Leslie’s trick. Between the ninth green and the tenth tee, surrounded by newly planted silver birches, was a little wooden hut like a nesting-box for monster birds. Here, if the wind was in the right direction, Uncle Leslie would sometimes do his trick. From the breast pocket of his tweed jacket with the leather elbows he would take a cigarette, lay it on his knee, pass his hands over it like a magician, put it in his mouth, give Jeanie a slow wink, and strike a match. She would sit beside him trying to hold her breath, trying not to be a shufflebottom. Huffers and puffers spoiled tricks, Uncle Leslie had said, and so did shufflebottoms.

After a minute or two she would ease her glance sideways,
taking care not to move suddenly. The cigarette had an inch of ash on it, and Uncle Leslie was taking another puff. At the next glance, his head was tipped slightly back, and half the cigarette consisted of ash. From this point on, Uncle Leslie wouldn’t look at her; instead, he would concentrate very carefully, slowly leaning back a little more with each puff he took. Finally, his head would be at right angles to his spine, with the cigarette, now pure ash apart from the last half inch where Leslie was holding it, rising vertically towards the roof of the giant bird-box. The trick had worked.

Then he would reach out his left hand and touch her upper arm; she would get up quietly, trying not to breathe in case she huffed and puffed the ash down Leslie’s jacket with the leather elbows, and go ahead to the tenth tee. A couple of minutes later Leslie would rejoin her, smiling a little. She never asked how he did his trick; perhaps she thought he wouldn’t tell her.

And then there was the screaming. This always happened in the same place, a field behind the triangle of damp, smelly beeches which pushed their way in to the dogleg fourteenth. On each occasion, Uncle Leslie had sliced his drive so badly that they had to search the least visited part of the wood, where the trunks had moss on them and the beechnuts were thicker on the ground. The first time, they had found themselves by a stile, which was slimy to the touch though the weather had been dry for days. They climbed the stile and began hunting in the first few yards of sloping meadowland. After some rather aimless kicking and club scuffling, Leslie had bent down and said, “Why don’t we have a good old scream?”

She smiled back at him. Having a good old scream was clearly something people did on these occasions. After all, it was very annoying not to be able to find the ball. Leslie explained further. “When you’re all screamed out you have to fall down. That’s the rules.”

Then they had put their heads back and screamed at the sky: Uncle Leslie deep and throaty, like a train coming out of a tunnel; Jean high and wavering, uncertain how long her breath would last. You kept your eyes open—that seemed to be an unstated rule—and
stared hard up at the sky, daring it to answer your challenge. Then you took your second breath and screamed again, more confidently, more insistently. Then again, and in the pause for each fresh breath Leslie’s train noises swelled and roared; and then exhaustion arrived suddenly, and you had no scream left, and you fell to the ground. She would have fallen anyway, even if it hadn’t been in the rules; fatigue raced through her body like a tidal bore.

There was a thump as Uncle Leslie flopped down a few yards away, and they stared their parallel, heaving stares up at the quiet sky. Halfway to heaven, a few small clouds shifted gently as if reluctantly tethered; but perhaps even this movement was given them only by the panting of the two supine figures. It was clearly in the rules that you could pant as hard as you liked.

After a while, she heard Leslie cough.

“Well,” he said, “I think I’ll allow myself a free drop.” And they trailed back across the slimy stile, through the crackly beechnuts to the angle of the fourteenth, where Uncle Leslie, after looking around for spies, calmly thumbed a tee into the fairway, popped a gleaming new ball on top, and struck a brassie some two hundred yards to the green. This despite being all screamed out, thought Jean.

They went screaming only when Leslie sliced his ball very badly off the tee, which seemed to happen when the course was empty. And they didn’t do it too often, because after the first occasion Jean got the whooping cough. Getting the whooping cough hadn’t qualified as an Incident, but Uncle Leslie’s whip-round had. Or rather, the result of Uncle Leslie’s whip-round.

She was in bed on the fourth day of her illness, occasionally giving the throaty cry of some exotic bird lost in a foreign sky, when he dropped in. He sat on her bed in his blazer with the badge, smelling a bit as if he’d been washing behind his ears, and instead of asking how she felt, murmured, “You didn’t tell them about the screaming?”

Of course she hadn’t.

“Only you see, it’s a secret, after all. Rather a good secret, it seems to me.”

Jean nodded. It was a remarkably good secret. But perhaps the screaming had caused the whooping cough. Her mother was always telling her to guard against overexcitement. Maybe she had overexcited her throat by screaming, and it had started whooping as a result. Uncle Leslie behaved as if he suspected things might be his fault. As she gave her panicking bird call, he looked a little shifty.

Two days later Mrs. Serjeant put Jean’s winter underwear on the edge of the bed, then a thick dress, her winter coat, a scarf and a blanket. She seemed displeased but resigned.

“Come on. Uncle Leslie’s had a whip-round.” Uncle Leslie’s whip-round, Jean discovered, included a taxi. Her first taxi. On the way to the aerodrome she took care not to appear overexcited. At Hendon her mother stayed in the car. Jean took her father’s hand, while he explained to her that the wooden parts of a De Havilland were made of spruce. Spruce was a very hard wood, he said, almost as hard as the metal parts of the aeroplane, so she was not to worry. She had not been worrying.

Sixty-minute sightseeing tour of London; departures on the hour. Among the dozen passengers were two more children wrapped up like parcels although it was only August; perhaps their uncles had had whip-rounds as well. Her father sat across the aisle and stopped her when she tried to lean past him and look out: the point of the flight, he explained, was medical, not educational. He spent the whole trip gazing at the back of the wicker seat in front of him and holding on to his kneecaps. He seemed as if he might get overexcited at any minute. When the De Havilland banked, Jean could see, beyond its chubby engines and the crisscross of the struts, something that might be Tower Bridge. She turned to her father.