‘How is he? I don’t have a car. The train took an age.’
‘We tried to call you.’
‘Oh God!’
‘No, no! To say that he’s made a marvellous recovery! You’d already left – you needn’t have come.’
William wanted to agree with the nurse wholeheartedly but bit back his bluntness.
‘I wish I visited more,’ he lied.
‘Cornwall is a long way away – a different country,’ the nurse said kindly, ‘and your father’s memory is poor. Very poor.’
William found his father pretty much where he had left him; just another figure in a long line of dementia, all slumped in chairs gazing listlessly out of the window deep into their pasts or at absolutely nothing. Mr Coombes was so motionless that, as William approached, his stomach wondered if his father were dead. He stood beside the old man’s chair silently, waiting for a blink, a rise and fall of the chest, a twitch of a skeletal finger. William held his breath while his heart racketed. The air was singed with the sharp, acrid smell of urine and decay. And yet William was not prepared for his father to be dead, not ready for him to die.
Breathe!
An empty chair was close to hand so he retrieved it while his father’s neighbour nodded and winked at him and chewed his tongue. He drew up the chair as noisily as he could but his father’s mouth remained agape, his eyes fixed and unseeing. Gingerly, William proffered his hand and let it rest lightly on top of the old man’s. It was not the hand of a dead man for, though cool and papery, a whisper of warmth wound its way through. Slowly, the old man turned towards him. He stared at him intently but William was not sure whether he saw him for there was no light in the eyes, no life behind them. The aperture of his mouth remained fixed. William smiled at him as widely as he could.
‘Hullo!’ he said cheerily.
Mr Coombes began a nod but had not the strength to lift his head to conclude it. His chin neared his chest, his gaze now resting near a drawing-pin by the skirting-board. William felt a stab of unwelcome tears, whose provenance he could not fathom. He sat a while longer, sharing in silence with his father the complexities of the bent drawing-pin.
He could have gone. It would have been easy; just jump to his feet, kiss the man cursorily and walk away. The nurses wouldn’t judge. Mr Coombes wouldn’t register. But William stayed for two hours, moving his thumb rhythmically over the tired landscape of his father’s hand. He no longer noticed any smell. He felt most strongly that, inside the waning body, behind the gormless face, in spite of the drooling and wheezing, a brain and a soul were shouting but were unable to make themselves intelligible, let alone heard. Eyes that no longer saw, but had seen. And what they had seen had left an indelible imprint of sadness.
William worked voraciously. He was haunted by his father’s loaded gawping. The man he had presumed to be catatonic, moronic even, he now believed to be otherwise. Behind the dull exterior, the wrinkled and puckered skin lying uselessly over brittle bones, a tiny light refused to go out. But it could not venture past the rancid, cavernous mouth to let itself be heard.
‘I’ll speak for him,’ William said, sitting bolt upright in bed in the early hours.
‘Life behind the seemingly lifeless,’ he told Barbara as he rushed to the studio at the first hint of morning.
‘Sound in the silent,’ he mulled as he kneaded a batch of very cold raku clay.
‘Emotion in the inanimate,’ he whispered as he contemplated his memory and the raw material in front of him.
The project consumed him. He left Peregrine’s Gully only once a week to cycle to St Ives and load his panniers with non-perishable goods. He excused himself in advance to Mac, whose delight that he was working once more with such verve far outweighed any disappointment that visits would be forfeited. William let the telephone go unanswered. He ignored Barbara and ate only when he remembered. Slowly the forms took shape. He slabbed and coiled great slumbering pebble shapes, each almost entirely enclosed but for a single small opening. These were round and dark and placed unexpectedly off centre, or at the side, or even towards the base of the form. The holes contradicted the fabric of the shapes. While he glazed the exteriors in the palest of crackles, the openings gave way into utter darkness. Though the forms were so obviously hollow, the holes heralded an interior that was opaque and thick. The pebbles lay peaceful and uniform from most viewpoints until disrupted entirely by the holes. Mouths open. Still and silent. But shouting out pain and panic. And secrets that could not be heard.