She was woken by the ring of the telephone. She looked at the alarm clock to see it was still ridiculously early, but she answered it nevertheless. She supposed it would be Dexter but she heard her mother’s bright, alert voice.
‘This is ridiculously early,’ Kelly said.
‘I wanted to get you before you started work.’
‘You’ve certainly done that, by several hours.’
‘Besides, I couldn’t wait any longer to hear more about Dexter. You’re a sly boots.’
Kelly groaned theatrically. She should have known.
‘He seemed very nice,’ her mother said.
‘Oh sure. He drinks, he gets into fights, he’s what every woman dreams of.’
‘But you’re not every woman, as you so often tell me, and he does have charm.’
‘Yes,’ Kelly admitted grudgingly, ‘he does sometimes have charm.’
‘Spending all day together cooped up in your car, it must get quite intimate.’
‘Oh come on, Mother.’
‘I just want you to know,’ and now her mother sounded grimly, achingly sincere, ‘that I really hope it works out for you this time.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘I know I’ve made mistakes, Kelly, and I know I haven’t always been there for you the way I should have been, but I always did my best, Kelly, and I always wanted the best for you.’
‘Oh please, Mother, what is it? Have you been at the Bailey’s again, or have you read some new self-help book?’ Her mother was not deterred.
‘I realize you don’t know this man very well, but that doesn’t matter. I could tell there was something between you, call it chemistry if you like. I looked at the two of you sitting at my kitchen table and it made me very happy.’
Kelly stopped protesting. This was so crazy, so inappropriate that there was nothing to do but let it run its course.
‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ her mother said. ‘In some strange way he reminds me of your father.’
Two hours later Kelly was in her car, driving Dexter swiftly along the Al2. Today’s musical appreciation class involved listening to The Magic Flute.
‘You know,’ said Kelly, ‘sometimes I think my taste for ruins is as great as my taste for buildings. You can put it all down to my father, of course.’
Kelly drove effortlessly and casually, and felt no further need to talk. There had been a time when her taste for ruins had extended to men. She’d had a string of ruined boyfriends: drinkers, drug takers, petty criminals, major neurotics, the inadequate, the occasionally mad. She had believed that somewhere in the ruined architecture of their being she could make out the blueprint of a standing edifice. She had wanted to believe that with a little help from her these ruins could be refurbished and made whole.
That summer, before she met Dexter, was the first time she’d seriously begun to shed these notions. She had concluded that people were essentially unimprovable. A little bit of redecoration and smartening up might just about be possible, but not much more. If men weren’t constructed properly in the first place, or if the foundations were unstable then there was no hope of bodging together a decent, serviceable structure. In consequence it had been a very lonely summer. She’d still had the same need for warmth, companionship and love that she’d always had, but she’d started to feel that it might be easier and much less painful to be lonely than to be involved with some wreck who would without doubt come tumbling down around her ears.
Whether her father had been the pattern for her attraction to ruined men she couldn’t be sure. Certainly he was in need of restoration work but that didn’t necessarily mean he was a wreck. And certainly she’d had a child’s desire to look after him, to be mother to the man, but she was no longer sure how much he’d needed her. She’d realized early on that as a father he was a mixed blessing, but from what she could tell at the time, and from what she’d learned about him subsequently, she didn’t think he was actually self-destructive. Drink and drugs and madness weren’t a problem for him, although women and children, she thought, occasionally had been.
She didn’t really believe that his fascination with ruins was some metaphor for his own emotional or psychic wreckage. If anything she thought he might have found ruins a consolation. Yes, he wanted to create architecture but he must have known that, even if he’d succeeded, it would only have been a temporary manifestation of his talent. Sooner or later his buildings, like all others, however great or successful or admired, would begin to decay. They would be subject to the tyrannies of imperfect materials and changing taste and fashion. They might have been refitted or recycled, had new facades and extensions added, or they might simply have been abandoned. At last they would fall down or be bulldozed. If her father was a failure, she reasoned, then so was everyone else who had ever set one stone on top of another. Failure was inherent in the enterprise. She found this a consolation, though she wasn’t sure her father ever had.
The sea at Monkwich was a dark, impenetrable medium, not because of its depth or dangers but because of sand that hung suspended in the water, turning it to a thick, brown broth, reducing visibility to inches. Somewhere in the depths were the crumbled, shuffled remains of a lost village. Since Roman times the sea had been biting off slices of the land, a yard or so each year, pulling the ground from under the houses, the inns, the farms, the churches. Divers went out from time to time, came back with lumps of church stone, sections of crosses smoothed by wave action, and they reported on all the World War Two debris down there still: shrapnel, unexploded bombs, the broken wings of bombers, all tangled in with the mess of domestic dwellings.
Kelly pulled the car into the broad, empty Monkwich car park. On summer afternoons this place would be jammed, but the kids had gone back to school, the holiday cottages were emptying and only a few stragglers and locals came to the beach. The snack kiosk was still open, but trade had slowed and it too would soon be closing for the winter.
They were there to see what remained of a medieval Franciscan monastery. Kelly had warned Dexter that the ruins weren’t big enough or special enough to constitute a full day’s entertainment, but Dexter wanted to see them, declaring a taste for both monasteries and ruins, so Kelly had taken him at his word.
The monastery ruins were a little way from the car park, in what was now a field at the cliff edge. Once it would have been a good mile from the sea. There was a perimeter wall that had originally marked out the monastery grounds but now it constituted the boundaries of the field, stone ramparts of unnecessary strength and substance.
There wasn’t much left of the old monastery, barely enough to give a sense of how it had been. It consisted of little more than two parallel walls. The first wall was high and substantial and pierced by two tiers of Norman arches, and these had been heavily restored. While some small areas of the masonry looked truly ancient, with more mortar than stone in places, other sections had been recently rebuilt using modern bricks and modern building methods. The overall effect of the rebuilding was not so much unsympathetic as inauthentic, like a castle made of Lego. Parallel to this first wall was another, much lower, more solid, without arches or windows, obviously much later than medieval. It was built of old, irregular red bricks stacked together; orderly yet rough. Dexter thought it was worth a photograph. He muttered something about texture and colour, as though he needed to justify himself.
They circled the ruins, Dexter rather more slowly than Kelly. They both wanted to find the place inspiring and evocative, but the old stones refused to collude with this simple desire. They remained inert and inarticulate.
As ruins go, it’s a so-so ruin, I know,’ said Kelly.
‘I don’t suppose they sell souvenir models of this,’ he said.
‘No, but there’s a museum in the village, and they sell little plaster churches, models of the ones that fell in the sea.’
Dexter was cheered, as though the day hadn’t been entirely wasted. Kelly found herself irritated by this taste for souvenirs. Carrying away an artefact seemed more important to him than having the experience.
Dexter glanced up at the gloomy sky and seemed depressed. The day had started softly grey, but while Kelly and Dexter walked round the monastery ruins the sky had darkened and thickened, and was now threatening rain.
They walked through the field and on to a footpath from which they could reach the cliff edge. There was a thin tangle of saplings and bushes, a vain attempt to stop the land seeping away, and then there was the edge itself, a powdery, layered, red sandstone face that fell away sharply, fifty feet or more, down to a narrow band of beach below. Along the water’s edge there were a few fishermen, each one alone with his thoughts and a heap of fishing tackle, and in some cases with an angular, black one-man tent.
Kelly read the signposts planted in the top of the cliff. They asserted the dangers of climbing up or down the face, warned about the fragility of the rock, but a small, stocky boy, about ten years old, in jogging pants and a black and white football shirt, was disobeying instructions and had climbed from the beach most of the way up the crumbling slope. Kelly looked down on him and churlishly thought he deserved all he got, though she suspected he wouldn’t get what he deserved.
‘I blame the parents,’ she said archly.
And then it started to rain, one of those English showers that is hard, brief and drenching. There was nowhere to go for shelter and no point trying to run back to the car, since the rain would probably have stopped before they got anywhere near it and Dexter was naturally in no condition to run. It was one of those things that just had to be endured.
The small boy was now almost at the top of the cliff face and ready to scramble over the edge, but he was having difficulty and starting to look scared and miserable. The rain was soaking his shirt and the soft earth of the cliff face was turning to slush around him. He looked over his shoulder and glanced down at the beach a long way below. Suddenly he seemed to panic, to tremble, and he desperately needed to be back on firm ground. He twisted round, adopted a bizarre, stiff, upright posture, and tried to run down the sheer face as if he thought it was no steeper than a sand dune. He lost his footing almost immediately. His arms flurried and he just managed to fall backwards on to his bottom. The back of his head hit the cliff face and his hands reached behind him, scrabbling at the loose surface, which crumbled in his hands. His body became rigid and he started to slide slowly downwards, but as he descended a slab of the red earth cracked away and came with him. Rubble billowed around him like a wave, threatening to submerge and drown him in the miniature avalanche.
There was a slow-motion drift and fall as the boy descended perhaps two-thirds of the face. And then it was all over. He stopped sliding. He was firmly, ignominiously stuck, some ten feet up from the beach, his legs tangled in debris and sand. He was paralysed, too scared to move, and he began to howl.
Kelly and Dexter looked at each other and found themselves laughing out of embarrassment and relief. The boy was obviously going to be all right, and yet he was still in need of help. It seemed they should do something, though it was unclear what, given that they were at the top of the cliff and the boy was nearly at the bottom.
Almost immediately they saw one of the fishermen sweep into action. He ran along the beach shouting loudly and incomprehensibly, then made a brief, positive ascent to where the boy was stuck, and effortlessly yanked him out. His actions were fierce but loving, the actions of a father gripped simultaneously by anger, guilt and relief. He scooped the boy up and carried him away as though he were weightless.
Dexter and Kelly watched in silence. It was truly over now. There was nothing more to be done. ‘Why isn’t the little bugger at school?’ Kelly wondered aloud. They peered down the cliff face at the place where the avalanche had started, the place from which the slab of earth had first fallen away, and Kelly saw something thin, white and brittle jutting out of the surface. Dexter saw it too, but was slower to make sense of the complex geometry of the thin bones revealed there.
‘Is that really what I think it is?’ he said.
‘That depends on what you think it is.’
‘It looks like a hand, a human hand. I mean a skeleton’s hand.’
Silently Kelly confirmed that he was absolutely right.
‘But how come?’ Dexter asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’re standing on the edge of what used to be the monastery graveyard,’ said Kelly. ‘It stretched all the way from here to the sea. Then the elements took chunks out of the land, ate up all the graves too, washed them down with sea water. This hand belonged to some straggler who was buried at the innermost edge of the graveyard, in a grave that the sea didn’t take away.’
‘It’s creepy,’ said Dexter.
‘It’s just a hand,’ Kelly replied.
‘Shouldn’t we do something about it?’
‘Like what?’ said Kelly. ‘Pop down and collect it as a souvenir?’
‘No. But shouldn’t we tell somebody?’
‘Who would you tell? The police? Do you think they have a standard procedure for dealing with this sort of thing?’
‘So we do nothing?’
‘We’ll do something. We’ll go and get a cup of coffee before the kiosk closes.’
Dexter shuddered grandly. Kelly found it surprising. She hadn’t imagined he’d be so easily spooked. The rain had stopped by the time they got to the kiosk. They were served two cups of coffee that each came with a head of swirling, undissolved granules. They wiped off a couple of plastic chairs and sat down at a wet metal table. Dexter got out his hip flask and poured whisky into his coffee. ‘You want some?’ he asked. ‘I’m not trying to spike your drink.’ Kelly shook her head and watched as Dexter poured her share into his own cup. Then he said calmly and flatly, ‘So tell me how your father died.’
The question was so plain, so apparently without tact or premeditation, that it disarmed her for a moment. She didn’t know quite how to answer, yet she was perfectly prepared to. She looked at Dexter to see whether his question came out of interest and concern or just out of morbid curiosity. She persuaded herself that it might be the latter.
She said, ‘There’s an etching by Fuseli called Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Ancient Rome. It shows a figure, the artist, presumably male but actually strangely sexless, sitting down, holding his head in his hands. Behind him there are two giant fragments of the ruined statue of Constantine: one hand and one foot, each as big as the artist himself. There’s something quite comical about the foot, like those Monty Python cartoons where a gigantic foot appears out of the clouds and squashes whatever’s under it. But this particular foot of Constantine is earthbound ó in fact, it’s resting on a big plinth, but it still looks a bit silly. The hand doesn’t look silly at all.
‘They used that etching as the basis for the poster for an exhibition my father was involved with. The hand and the foot are as in Fuseli’s original, but instead of a grieving male artist it has a great-looking, wild punkish girl staring at the ruins and laughing.
‘My father loved ruins. He wrote about them a lot and he was invited to curate this exhibition. It was going to be held in a very hip London art gallery in Hackney, part of it indoors with photographs, plans, slide presentations and architectural models, and, outside, in the park, a handful of contemporary artists were commissioned to create modern, or I dare say post-modern, ruins.
‘I’ve seen all the notes for the exhibition and I think it could have been amazing. There would have been stuff about Piranesi, about Babylon, about the Appian Way, about air raids. But there’d also have been sections on the architecture of derelict gardens, deconsecrated graveyards, haunted houses in the movies. And perhaps the outdoor section would have been best of all. There would have been a ruined city built out of children’s building blocks, something based on the ruins of Pompeii, and the centrepiece was to be a re-creation of the exhibition poster.
‘It could have been a great exhibition but it never quite happened. It was one of my father’s unrealized projects, although I don’t see that there was anything inherently unrealizable about this one. In this case it wasn’t lack of money or vision or support that caused the project to be aborted. It was my father’s death.’
She stopped and looked at Dexter again to see how interested he was. He was sipping his coffee and he didn’t look as rapt as she wanted him to be, although by now it made no difference. She was unstoppable.
‘The hand of death fell on my father,’ Kelly said. ‘Or, to be more precise, a concrete cast of the hand of Constantine as depicted in Fuseli’s etching fell on him. It happened while the hand was being unloaded from the back of a lorry.
‘My father had no need, no right, to be involved in the unloading but he was a very impatient man. It had been a real job getting the replica made, and on the day it was due to be delivered the lorry bringing it was hours late. The driver and his mate got lost coming through London. Then, when they eventually arrived at the gallery, they insisted on taking their tea break. My father had a big shouting match with the driver but apparently he got the worst of it since the guys went off and left him to it. But they didn’t take the lorry with them.
‘My father was furious and he ordered the wimpy assistants from the art gallery to help him unload this huge, incredibly heavy casting. They didn’t know what they were doing any more than my father did. They messed about with ropes and pulleys but it didn’t do much good. The concrete hand got caught on the tailgate of the lorry, and when, like an idiot, my father went underneath to try to free it, the assistants lost control of the ropes altogether and the hand slipped and fell and came crashing down on top of him. They say he was killed more or less instantly.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Dexter. ‘I’m sorry.’
Kelly supposed it was as good a response as any, but she didn’t react to it.
‘Quite a bit was written about the incident,’ she said. ‘It made most of the papers. Everybody threatened to sue everybody else but in the end nobody did anything much. The only practical action anyone took was to abandon the exhibition. It was said to have been done as a mark of respect, though I don’t see what was so respectful about wasting all the hard work my father had put in. More likely there were people in the organization who didn’t like my father, who wanted the exhibition to fail, and who were only too pleased to find a reason to abandon it.
‘It was a stupid and unnecessary way to die, but I suppose the bizarre nature of it added to my father’s mystique and dubious cult status. I guess all death’s absurd when you get right down to it, and I think that dying with dignity is probably a contradiction in terms, but even so, being crushed by a concrete hand is a more absurd way to go than most. It’s pretty hard to take seriously.’
She fell silent. Dexter was nodding gently as though some bothersome mystery had now been solved.
‘Look at it this way,’ said Dexter. ‘It would have been even more absurd if your father had been crushed by the foot.’
‘You think I haven’t thought of that?’
She had, many times. She knew there were other much more silly, much more inconsequential ways to die, but how did that make any difference?
‘I think my father believed that ruins have some sort of moral purpose, that they can teach us a lesson. But I think it’s a lesson everybody already knows. The lesson is that nothing lasts: that you love somebody and they leave you; that you love somebody and they let you down; that you love somebody and they die. I think these things are worth knowing, although I think a person might know them without having to contemplate the ruins of antiquity.’
She felt she was about to cry. ‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I’m too old for this. Come on, let’s buy you a souvenir.’
In the museum there were fragments dredged up from the sea bed, pieces of gravestones and carved saints’ heads, and in a glass case there was a scale model of the village as it had been before the sea ate it away. Dotted lines cut across the papier mâché land indicating the progress of the advancing sea edge. Dexter was pleased to find the plaster models of the churches that had fallen into the sea. He bought a St Nicholas, a simple, round-towered parish church, painted an improbable tan colour with a blue slate roof. He seemed well satisfied.
When they were outside he said, ‘You’re wrong, you know, when you said you should have got over your father’s death by now. There’s no should or shouldn’t. And maybe you wouldn’t even want to get over it.’
‘Maybe.’
With great hesitation and some tenderness Dexter reached out a hand and patted Kelly on the shoulder. It was soft and asexual, and well intentioned, but Kelly pulled away instinctively.
‘Is it time for that drink yet?’ Dexter asked.
‘Nearly,’ said Kelly, ‘but not quite.’