13
Moonlight Sonata
It was a long time since anyone had looked after Maureen. She stayed for three more days in the cave-like truck that was filled with dream-catchers and Buddha statues and chakra stones and rose lamps, and smelled of incense. Kate made meals and washed her clothes, and when Maureen looked out of the window, she saw her comfortable slacks flapping on the washing line beside Maple’s little clothes. She watched the girl riding on her bicycle or playing with her mother with her rainbow hair. Sometimes she watched the other women, stopping to talk to one another outside, or sharing a coffee. Occasionally Maple curled up next to Maureen with one of her books, and Maureen would manage to hold her neck upright enough to read to her. The outside world was contained by that one window, sometimes dawn-pale, sometimes cloudy, sometimes hidden by the curtain. She slept in a way she had never slept before, deep and free, looking at the clock and no longer knowing if it was morning or evening, but closing her eyes and sleeping again. She phoned Harold often and he told her the things he was doing with Rex, which were the same things they always did—playing drafts and watching for birds. She asked if they were remembering to eat properly, and he told her, yes, they were doing splendidly, they had finished a goulash and a stew, but they still had a pie left, and a soup. The thing he wanted most, he kept saying, was for her to get better.
“I’m glad you’re with Kate,” he told her on the third day. “I knew you’d like her. Of all the people I walked with she was my favorite. Did I ever tell you that?”
“Well,” said Maureen, “maybe you did. But I like hearing it again.”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“But you’ll be home soon.”
“Tomorrow, I hope.”
“Guess what?”
“I don’t know.”
“We saw a black redstart.”
“That’s a bird, is it?”
“Yes, Maw. It’s like you. It’s a beauty.”
That night, Maureen opened her eyes and knew she had been woken by the slight noise of a door. The curtains were open and the room was lit by the moon, as bright as daylight, but everything luminous and slightly blue.
There he was, watching her from the wing-back chair. He had placed her clothes on the floor, carefully, though, so as not to crumple them.
“David,” she whispered.
“Hello,” he said.
He was sitting the way he used to, legs sprawled, like a tall person inside a body that had grown too small. He was wearing his old greatcoat with the wide lapels that were pinned all over with badges, and his favorite black boots. His hair was long and thick and brown, just as it had been before he shaved his head. He looked the way he always looked, which meant that he was a little disheveled and roughed up around the edges, but there was a sharpness to his eyes. He wasn’t high or drunk or anything. He was holding a winter bouquet of twigs that looked like witch hazel and scarlet dogwood, along with some fern and ivy berries and crimson haws. His fingernails were green.
“Is it really you? Is it really my son?”
“It’s me.”
“I began to think I would never see you again.”
“Well,” he said. Two or three times he shrugged in a bashful way. “Here I am.”
He was quiet for a while, just watching her with those beautiful dark eyes, and she remained in stillness too, not wanting to do anything that would break the moment. She wondered if the winter twigs might be for her or just something he happened to be carrying.
“Are you all right?” she said at last.
“I’m all right.”
“Is that a mad thing to say?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There was a time I used to talk to you. I talked to you all the time. I talked more to you than anyone else and that’s the truth.” She was speaking softly, rapidly, afraid the words would dry up if she didn’t get them out. “I told you everything. About what I was doing and what I was thinking and you listened. You were so patient with me. I know I’m not being clear. I wish I could explain it to you. Maybe I don’t need to.”
He nodded. Then he looked down at the bouquet and touched a seed head of old man’s beard, which was soft and white, like a wispy ball of thread.
“In the end I stopped. I stopped talking to you. Did it hurt you that I stopped? Should I have kept talking? Would you have liked that?”
“It’s okay.”
“I know. I know. I’m asking too many questions. It’s just seeing you again. There’s so much I want to say.”
He lodged the bouquet beneath his arm and reached for a cigarette from his pocket. He lit it with a match, and the smoke turned from gray to blue as it hit a shaft of moon from the window. He said, “Did something happen to your neck?”
“Oh. It’s nothing.”
“It looks like it hurts.”
“I’m taking pills. I sleep a lot. I’m a bit drugged up.”
He smiled and gave a long pull on his cigarette, squinting slightly as he exhaled.
“There is a woman here. She’s looking after me. I thought I didn’t like her but I was wrong. Kate is a good woman. So I’m fine, honestly. I’m just stuck for a few days. Holed up. Isn’t that what people say?”
She was afraid that if she stopped talking, he would disappear. God help her, already he seemed less present.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what people would say. I was never very good at all that.”
“David?” she said. “If I stayed here longer, would you stay too?”
He smiled again, but this time as if she was asking something too painful to answer, and then rubbed his eyes with his knuckle. She remembered how as a child he would rub them while he did his homework until his face flamed and his knees would twitch, and how she would worry that learning the way he did, ferociously like that, and wanting to excel, was a kind of punishment. And she remembered then how she had wanted the same when she was young. How she had wanted to be more than the place she came from. They were the same, the two of them. David had only taken up the thing that she started.
“I wish I’d got you a dog.”
“A dog?”
“Yes. But I was frightened. Of dogs, I mean. The farmer let his dogs chase me when I was small. But you always wanted a dog.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You went on and on about a dog.”
“Ha,” he said. “Did I?”
“Don’t you remember the dog we gave you for Christmas?”
“What dog?”
“Oh, it was a hideous thing that went woof. You kept it in the box.”
He laughed again and now she laughed too, and it was so good to be laughing again with David. They had always understood each other.
She said, “I saw Queenie’s Garden. Did you?”
“Why would I have seen her garden?”
“I don’t know. I’m coming to the conclusion I know very little. I’m a silly old woman. That’s all I know.” She thought of the emptiness that was still inside her, even after all these years. Now that she was with him at last, she did not know how she could bear to give him up. “Oh, David. I can’t move on. I’m sorry. I’m thinking of myself. I don’t want a life without you. Don’t leave me again. Stay.”
He flinched as if she had struck him. She had said too much. Yet again her mouth had gone and said completely and utterly the wrong thing. Her damn mouth. And this time it wasn’t to a stranger, it was to her own son.
David slid off the chair and put down his bouquet and sat hunched on the floor, with his chin against his knees. She had thought the bouquet must have been tied together with string but it wasn’t, and now the twigs and flowers had fallen apart. It didn’t look like a proper bouquet any more but instead a bunch of winter things he might have snapped off in passing because he liked the look of them. Or maybe he hadn’t even given it a thought. Maybe his hands had just snapped off the twigs for something to do.
He began to cry but very quietly into his arms, rocking himself, as though he didn’t want her to know what he was doing.
Maureen got off the bed and sank on her knees beside him and lifted her arm around his shoulders, pulling him close until he leaned the full force of his weight against hers. Her shoulder gave a twist but that was nothing. You can twist yourself right inside out, she thought, but I will stay put. His hair was soft on her cheek and smelled of the shampoo he had used as a teenager; a slightly medical smell. He had seen an advert for it on the television and gone on and on at her to buy it. It was years since she’d smelled it or even thought of it, yet now it felt the most real thing in her life, more real even than the floor she was kneeling on or the moonlight at the window. She wanted to get the smell right inside her so that she would never forget it. She thought of the many things she wanted to say. I missed so much. How could I have let you go? She wanted to be able to buy him that shampoo he loved and ask in the mornings how he had slept, and cook him an egg the way he liked it, sunny side up, and understand what he had meant as a boy when he’d said he wanted to be the world’s guest.
But none of this did she say because he got there first. He asked if she could just listen. He had things he needed to tell her because he knew they were in his way but they were such terrible things. He kept saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Almost every other word was an apology.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. You can tell me, son. I’m here. Of course I’ll listen. You tell me whatever you want to say. Tell me everything. I’m not going anywhere.”
He told her he used to steal money from her purse all the time, and he was so sorry about that. He wished he had not got into drinking and the pills but it was only because he had believed for a while he could be something special, and he needed to quieten the voice in his head that was saying he was no one. He said he remembered running into the sea at Bantham Beach when he was a boy and he didn’t know why he had kept running, except that he thought he could swim, and he was sorry for that, and he was sorry, too, for the day he’d graduated when he’d kept them waiting two hours in the hot sun so they missed the whole ceremony.
And Maureen said, “I know, I know. It’s okay, son. It’s okay. But, oh, my lord, you are not no one. Do you hear me?”
He told her the truth was that he hadn’t actually finished his course at Cambridge, he had been sent down, so the whole graduation thing was a lie, and he was a shit because she had bought a dress and Harold had bought a jacket, and they were so proud of him. He had watched them, he said, from a distance, and now he felt sick to think what that must have been like for them, waiting in their best clothes.
“I know,” she said. “It’s okay. And, anyway, that was one terrible dress I wore that day. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Really. I looked like a boiled shrimp. I would have stood me up.”
He said he wished he had never shaved his head because he knew how much that pained her. He said did she remember the hat he loved with a feather in it, and she laughed and said, “Oh, yes, son. Yes, I remember that hat. That was such a fine hat. So dandy. You were a peacock in that hat. It’s okay, son. I know, I know. It’s okay.”
There was so much more he wanted to tell her. He couldn’t unburden himself fast enough. She had barely taken hold of one thing, and he was handing her another, yet everything he said chimed with something that was buried inside her. He said how much he loved his first pair of shoes when he was three (“I know, I know”), and did she remember the bonsai tree he tried to grow, and she said, yes, as she held him. “It’s okay, son. I know, I know. It’s okay.”
She drew him closer. When they were standing, she barely used to reach his shoulders, but she spread herself wide around him. I would become the size of the world for this boy, she thought. Then she brushed back his hair and lifted his face toward hers, but already it was lapsing away, his dark eyes more blurred and even his shoulders a little thinner. “You are someone,” she said. “Do you hear? Goodness me, you are someone.”
She stayed at his side, listening and holding him, though she could no longer make out the words, and later she heard the first birdsong and found she was lying in the bed. The truck was empty. The curtains were drawn. She was wearing her nightdress. David was not sitting in the wing-back chair and she was not beside him and there was no winter bouquet. There was no sign whatsoever that he had been there, not even a smell of shampoo or sprinkling of cigarette ash. Her clothes were folded on the arm of the chair, just as she’d left them.
She lay on the bed, as the sun came up and filled the truck with winter light, and the birds kept calling, Tchink tchink, Haw haw haw! Tsee tsee! Good morning! Good morning!