‌Take Notice

‌Adam Thorpe

Not that he would ever know what might happen, to him or to anyone else; one of the more extraordinary features of being human is that, while knowing the future exists, you remain entirely ignorant of its manifestations. Animals are luckier, Gus reflected: they bathe in a permanent present.

He had his great garden, and he was continually amazed each spring – indeed, these days in any season out of the deepest darks of winter – by the earth’s profligacy, throwing up growth as soon as his gardener, the loyal but stiffening Cliff, had dug it to bare sod. This smothered Gus’s loneliness. In the beginning his children, having frittered away their years after university, would return every so often, staying sometimes two or three months in the ‘country pile’ until boredom saw them off again, whither he knew not. His perceived return to political respectability had foundered long ago, and the ache of disappointment had never really left him.

He missed Sarah, his wife, more than ever; she had drowned in Crete so many years ago now that he had to pause before calculating the number. He had brought her body back to England in the hold of a government jet, at night, into a blaze of flashbulbs that caught him looking too official. At least, that was the complaint. Perhaps that was the start of it all: his rage at fate.

England.

Once he had believed in such a concept, a vague medley of flags and fields and Shakespeare’s verse. Now, despite its present, almost sacred potency (‘her commons of earth-song/not yet consumed’ in the words of the current fashionable verse-maker, Naresh Thomson), the idea left him cold. It was a withered cold thing in his hand, a dried-out mandragora upon which long ago he had supped and which now left nothing but the echo of its shriek; a sad uprooted object on a shelf, like a private memento that means nothing to anyone except to the person who found it on some special, far-off day. A dead touchstone, a husk.

Language was left to him, of course, a delight in language, but Gus found himself even now drawn to its worst exemplars – old airport thrillers from the days when airports were open to the public, stories of green-eyed phantoms hiding behind embossed drops of blood and gore. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes or the complete edition of P.G. Wodehouse acted as a light-hearted corrective to this regrettable tendency. As for the great classics, they collected dust and spiders’ threads in his grandfather’s library, where the smell of real books and real paper was a perfume as potent as honeysuckle.

At times he had imagined burning the lot and going over to the other side – starting afresh in a simple caravan in Wales or France or Ireland, or turning the peaty soil on some Hebridean croft with the battering ocean as accompaniment beyond a stony hill. But the days passed into weeks and the weeks slid easily into months, and so on until, with some degree of shock, he realized that he had spent over a decade doing nothing of any significance or worth – not even lending anything more substantial than considerable quantities of cash after the Great Flood. Not even making amends.

His children no longer needed him. One of his daughters was dead, another had run off with a yurt-maker to America, a third was now rich and miserable in Staffordshire, wife to a bore who had made a fortune from portable dams and whose sole idea of fun was to sail yachts into rocks and spend millions (or so it seemed) on repairs. The dead daughter had been his favourite, but she had declined into drugs and sexual deviancy with such apparent relish that he had no longer recognized her in the last years, and her dying was ghastly and protracted. He had felt no love for her by the time she succumbed: not for the person succumbing, at any rate. He scarcely wept either at the funeral or in the lonely days afterwards, when the hospital visits no longer took him away from the house and its hungry grounds.

Gus would stare at early photographs of Persephone and wonder where the little dark-haired girl had gone, slipping off her father’s knee into oblivion. Separated as she was from the bony white-faced spectre he had buried, he could almost believe she might return. In his nightmares this is exactly what he would see, and on awakening would wonder why it was not a pleasant dream, why instead it had brought out the sweat on his brow and upper lip so heavily that he could taste salt on his tongue.

The dew of fear, he thought, and of some obscure longing for remission.

He looked back on his life and found that at each point of potential there was a small dark stain like a crushed fly when movement of any significance had been deprived him – he could not explain it better to himself. He had started his autobiography, a sober account of his years in politics, his period of apparent power and influence, some twenty years ago, but it had fizzled out into a dull, apologetic tract concerning issues and small dramas no one save the academics now remembered, and it sat as a wad of unfulfilled notes in a cupboard in the study. There was only one thing the general populace ever remembered about him, and in a form of narrative that lacked nuance. Reality is all nuance, he would say, to no one in particular. To the sky, which he sometimes felt was his only true domain: its epic puffs of mountains and castles.

By becoming a recluse, he was aware that he was depriving himself of those elements that might distract him from his increasingly inward journey, and on reading that the spiral was the essential building block of all matter, the primary pattern in its paradigmatic return and advance – each return completing an advance and beginning another – he felt himself on a course that resembled a whirlpool and might finish in the black hole of madness, where everything was … what? What it should not be, of course, while appearing eminently sensible.

He was having tea on the lower lawn – Mrs Cutler having brought out the tray with her usual moan and long retired into the shadowy blackness of the house, the candle lamps not yet lit – when he saw a man dressed all in white cycling towards him between the croquet hoops, swerving unsteadily to avoid one of the cracked wooden balls that had been a smooth bright yellow in Gus’s far-off boyhood.

It never occurred to Gus that his life might be in danger; the threat of assassination was long past, in his opinion. The youngish man, removing his bicycle clips, introduced himself as a friend of Persephone’s in her final, difficult years. He had once been handsome but the face was now ravaged by misuse, the eyes particularly suffering: their pale blue appeared albino, as if accustomed to darkness. Gus had initially suspected he was after ration cards – meat, electricity, whatever – or had some counterfeit versions to sell: the country was overrun by the latter since the latest edict, which reduced an average use of the national grid to about a day a week. People smelt unwashed, Mrs Cutler said.

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Thank you.’ The man seemed surprised. He had a famished look; he was either genuinely hungry or one of those reluctant, state-rewarded vegans.

A scowling Mrs Cutler brought out the best biscuits and one of her wobblier jam sponge cakes, which the man gobbled happily (merely famished, then). The indirect communication with Persephone was both upsetting and comforting to Gus – the gruff manner of the stranger, who gave his name as ‘Aidan, Aidan Eldraw’, giving it an air of sincerity. Although the head supervisor for a nearby community’s composting network, he was clearly down on his luck, his looseness of limb almost clumsy. Despite his denials, it occurred to Gus that this may well have been a boyfriend, someone who had played an active part in his daughter’s decline.

The ensuing confidences were insinuating and vague, Aidan Eldraw apparently bent on some form of blackmail.

‘Persephone’s upbringing was weird, wasn’t it?’

‘Was it?’

‘Nannies, a father often absent, scandals.’

‘Scandals?’

‘Pre-Revolt. Women. She often mentioned the women in your life.’

‘She never got over the death of her mother.’

‘I said to her: you can’t expect your dad to be pure as the driven.’

Gus was relieved when the man rose to go. They walked together to the gate, sweating in the April heat, the bicycle ticking as it was wheeled over the warm lawn. So far, nothing had been said of the real purpose of the visit, although Gus was increasingly troubled by the man’s tone as they approached the iron whorls of the entrance, beyond which the postman’s horse was delivering great clots of dung on the rutted, camomile-tufted drive.

‘Thank you for the tea. You’ll be hearing from me again.’

‘Will I? I rather hope not.’

When the letters came a few weeks later, signed ‘A.E.’, Gus was not that surprised. The overt claims of incest and neglect brought the stranger’s face into abrupt close-up, as if Persephone had been replaced by some furious demon of revenge. The old man searched back in his past, found nothing that might have been misconstrued except by a damaged hysteric, wrote back to threaten the apparent blackmailer with the police – knowing in the process that he was risking his neck, his reputation, everything.

On an impulse he bought an old racing car, a 1968 Lotus that had reputedly won many races all over the world, and he began to enter it for club meetings. He hired a waggon-team to transport it, found a white-haired mechanic twenty miles away willing and able to accompany him or to drop by if problems occurred while he was spinning about the grounds, and began to discover in himself, in his mid-seventies, a youthful capacity for exhilaration and danger. At Silverstone one weekend he swirled off and lightly broke his leg. He drove the car round and round the garden on the gravel drive as soon as he was recovered, and went to bed with the smell of Castrol and burnt rubber in his clothes and soiled skin.

An article about his hobby appeared in a reputable Sunday newspaper, accompanied by absurdly glossy photographs of himself with the red car positioned in front of the house. The result (as he understood it) was that the house was burgled of most of its valuables, and the shed in which the Lotus was sheltered was set alight, destroying everything within it; despite the licences for meetings of historical interest, petrol-driven vehicles were legitimate targets these days. The police were only interested in the burglary, although trusty Cliff berated them from behind his rake. They laughingly threatened to search his gardening hut for illegal chemicals and went away, pursued by imprecations.

The loss of the car struck Gus as in some way symptomatic, and he saw his life as irredeemably blighted and the rest of humanity as bent on violence and envious revenge. He was not at all surprised when, one morning in the greenhouse – to which he had retired with a book from an abruptly chilly day in January – the white-clad Aidan Eldraw appeared like a wraith on the threshold beyond the orchids and ferns. He looked healthier than on the first visit two years previously, and Gus had the unpleasant sensation of being sucked of his blood as the man talked. He had no bicycle this time: he had walked ten miles, hitched a lift from a slow solar waggon for the last five.

‘None of my recent letters have been answered,’ he said. He was sitting on an iron chair once painted cream and now freckled and blistered by rust, yet appeared not to be aware of the danger to the starchy freshness of his clothes. ‘So I’m forced to come to you again in person to hear the truth.’

‘Did you burn my car and rob my house?’ asked Gus. The stranger – Gus still thought of him as a stranger, though his face was frighteningly familiar from bad dreams – smiled and shook his head.

‘You must have so many enemies,’ he said. ‘Since the Revolt.’

‘Most of them are misinformed, as you know.’

‘The clampdown was on your watch.’

‘Yes. The lightning conductor, they called me. I took the blame during the trials. But there is nothing I can do about my enemies. It was a long time ago. The future is what counts and everything is now apparently in hand. We’ve passed the peak, did you know that?’

‘Everyone knows that,’ the man scoffed. His brow was not shiny, nor his upper lip. On the contrary, he had the pinched look of someone still chilled. Yet the greenhouse was unpleasantly hot and humid, beading its moisture on every surface, on petal and leaf and stem, on paper and on human skin.

‘They say the effects won’t be immediately felt, even on the glaciers. Which seems contradictory’ Gus went on, folding his wrinkled hands on his book. ‘One never knows who or what to believe.’ He paused, slapped at a mosquito whining in his ear as if punishing himself. ‘I’ve thought hard about your allegations. I’ve searched my memory for the slightest justification for their outrageous content and found none.’ The words came easily and calmly from his mouth.

Aidan Eldraw shifted in his iron chair. His smile was bloodless, his stare without highlights – as if the very eyeballs were dry.

‘I don’t happen to believe you,’ he said. ‘I happen to believe Persephone.’

Gus registered the craquelure on the iron tracery of the greenhouse, built so long ago that even his grandfather remembered it as a boy. The oldest panes of glass were blown by hand and ruffled the scene outside as he moved his head. Small bubbles of air rested in them, like air in ice. The world might melt, he thought, or catch fire and be blown away in ashes, great drifts of ash. Whatever they say.

He closed his eyes and thought of his car, of its leather seats and the oily interior of the engine, of the speed it would go and the cheery innocence it provoked in all those who laid eyes on it, of the track rushing under his wheels and the scenery blurring into an abstraction of dim colour, of his old heart pounding under the racing overalls.

He opened his lids again and said to the man, ‘If you don’t go away I will call the police.’

‘Prime Minister, you know perfectly well that the dead can’t be arrested.’

‘I am no longer the prime minister, I am seventy-nine and retired for decades. And you are not a ghost. I, if anything, am the ghost.’

The man stood up: the rusty chair had left stains like old spots of blood on the cream suit. ‘Poor Persephone,’ he said. ‘You’ll never know what you did to her, will you? One day long ago, on a road leaving Nairobi, as I was heading for Mombasa, I saw a sign. It said, TAKE NOTICE: WHEN THIS SIGN IS UNDER WATER, THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE. Please think about this sign, Prime Minister. Think about it very hard.’

The man who claimed to have known Persephone never came back; at times Gus would wonder if the creature had ever existed. The blisters of rust on the old seat had broken, that was for sure, and Gus had not sat there for years. Delusion was a distinct possibility, although the visitant’s Kenyan connection seemed plausible enough.

If you could go on seeing the sign, then all was not lost. He smiled at this, often. Was that what the man had meant? Or something quite other?

When he was dying, on a tropic day in early spring, and stumbling in his visions along a green downland track, he was surprised to find the sign underwater, and quite invisible, and the way forward gone for good save the odd tell-tale ripple over the drowned hedgerows. A moment of clarity ensued. He wished to say sorry. But he could not speak.

Mrs Cutler scowled and the nurse wiped his brow. He asked to be raised up against the pillows and gesticulated for a pen, for paper, for ink – not the pallid soya ink on his desk but the old deep-smelling violet ink that he had sealed in a bottle decades before, in a cupboard drawer. But the liquid had dried up to no more than a stain around the inside, like a trick bottle he had once bought in a toy shop when he was a boy and had long since lost.

He held the little vessel loosely in his hands, studying it intently as if it held some divine secret, thinking – through a haze of weariness and pain – of all the words he might have written, of all that he might have regained.

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Go Light

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Gary Snyder