Authors: Emma Darwin
“Cheiron?” I ask, because I can’t remember, and Mark’s looking blank too.
“The centaur who brought up Jason,” says Gareth, taking some more bits and pieces from the shelf. “His foster father, you could say. Silly reason, really. Nothing to do with typography. But still…Mark, what do you think of this?”
The sun’s come out, cautiously but enough to warm the air in the workshop. The oily, peppery smell of printing ink rises, and I remember going into the workshop to find Uncle Gareth that Saturday morning because I needed the dates of Marlborough’s battles and he always knew that kind of thing. I could hear before I opened the door that the big Vandercook press was running, with the apprentice of the time hovering over it. Uncle Gareth was watching it the way Aunt Elaine would watch a goldfinch swinging on a teasel: absorbed but still, only his head moving a fraction to and fro in time with the press as it lolloped out the memorial reprint of the Eric Ravilious
Alphabet
.
A is for Aeroplane
danced out with
H is for Hedgehog
, and all the others, fur and clouds and telegraph wires as clear and delicate as ever, pair after pair in their work-and-tumble order, all the way to
W is for Warship
and
V is for Vole
.
I was sixteen.
Uncle Gareth looked around and saw me, and I asked my question.
“Blenheim 1704, Ramillies 1706, Oudenarde 1708, Malplaquet 1709,” he said.
I scribbled them down. “Thanks.”
“History homework?” he asked, going over to the Arab press and treadling it. There was a crunch, it stopped, and he sighed.
“Yes. Miss Beaufort’s very hot on dates. Is it not working?”
“No. It’s jammed, but I can’t see how. I’m going to have to take it apart, I fear.”
“Do you want me to have a look? I mean, not taking it apart.”
“Well, if you can reach to fish out whatever it is with your nice little hands, I’d be very grateful,” he said, going to the sink in the corner to wash off the machine grease and ink. “It’s such a nuisance getting everything properly aligned again and we can’t really spare the working time. I’d ask Mark to do it, but he’s gone out.”
As if even the work knew its place in the scheme of things, the Vandercook finished, and in the quiet I could hear the hens clucking, the scrape-scrunch of Uncle Robert’s spade in the vegetable patch, and much farther away a train whistle: the twelve thirty-seven down from London probably, with Lionel and Sally on it.
“I could look after lunch,” I said, “or now. It’s only salad and stuff, so Aunt Elaine won’t mind, if you tell her it’s urgent. I won’t do anything drastic to it, just see if I can fiddle out whatever it is.”
So when the boy’d dealt with the finished work on the Vandercook and pulled on his jacket and left—his half-day Saturday too—lighting a cigarette as he went, Uncle Gareth took off his apron and gave it to me. “But be careful, now. Make sure you immobilize it; we don’t want any lost fingers.” Then he tidied up the few odds and ends that the morning’s work had left behind and took himself off to lunch in the house.
It must have been May or June. I know it was warm and there was no breeze to swirl dust in and mar fresh ink or disturb paper. I propped open the workshop door and went back to the Arab press. If I worked it slowly enough and found the sticking point…
I was sucking a blood-blister and swearing under my breath when a shadow filled the doorway. “You all right?” said Mark.
“Pinched my finger,” I said, standing up from where I’d been crouching while I poked among the levers and springs of the press.
“D’you want me to look?” he said.
I held out the finger, and he inspected it as carefully as Uncle Robert would have: a fat, little dark-purplish lump that, as always, hurt much more than seemed reasonable. “If you press it really hard you’ll stop some of the bleeding, and then it won’t be so swollen,” he said, patting my hand and giving it back. “Pity we—you—haven’t got a refrigerator. Ice’d do the trick. What were you trying to do?”
“The Arab’s jammed,” I said. “There’s a screw that’s fallen into the spring, down below the ink plate. I can see it and I thought I could get it out. It’s either that or take it apart. But it’s got itself wedged in.”
He stripped off his jacket and went to hang it over the compositor’s chair. Then he crouched and peered into the innards of the press. “Hard to see in the shadow.” He tried to reach in, but the gap was too narrow.
“Maybe if I had something thin, like a skewer,” I said. “I’ll go and get one.”
“Okay. I’ll take it apart if need be. If you can’t get it out. Don’t drag Mr. Pryor away from his dinner.”
But when I got back with a selection of Grandmama’s knitting needles and her injunction to
try
not to bend or scratch them still ringing in my ears, he wasn’t in the workshop. “Got one,” I called, but he didn’t appear. Then I caught sight of the shift of his shadow against the slight light from the storeroom window and heard a
soft thud, as if he’d put a stack of books on a shelf.
Beowulf
must have come back from the binder, I thought.
The Arab stood in the shadow between two of the windows, and Mark was right, you couldn’t really see what you were doing. I stood up with ink on my hands and the sun on my back: what I needed was the inspection lamp from the storeroom.
When I went in, Mark was leaning against one of the uprights with his back to the door. It was only after I’d gone past him and reached up to lift the lamp from its nail that I saw he had his hands over his face because he was crying.
I froze. I’d never seen a man I knew—family—really crying.
For a moment I thought he’d rather I left him, but the storeroom was so small I couldn’t slip away and pretend I hadn’t seen.
I put a hand up to his shoulder. “Mark?”
He reached out and pulled me toward him as blindly as I used to reach for Smokey Bear if I half-woke in the middle of a nightmare. His arm was hard, pressing me into him as if something that was inside me could help. I was so much shorter than him that his collarbone ground against my cheekbone. His breathing was heavy and uneven, as if he was trying to get control of it. I could smell tweed and Uncle Gareth’s cigarettes and his own sweat, and something that I knew even then was maleness. My shoulder was pressed into his side, my chest against his ribs and my stomach against the bone of his hip.
I waited for embarrassment to grow inside me, but it didn’t. I wanted to stay like that forever.
Suddenly he let go. “Sorry.”
I looked up at him. A piece of his hair had fallen forward onto his forehead: it was gold in the greeny, tree-filtered light from the window. “Are you all right?” I asked, and heard it for the foolish
question it was. But I felt nothing except some strange lightness where the embarrassment should have been.
“I went to see my dad,” he said.
“Oh.” What was the right thing to say?
“You know…you know he’s out?”
“Um—yes.”
“Looks like I’ll be asking your grandmama if I can go on lodging here.”
I knew that was all he could bear to say. I looked at him, at the bones of his face in the leafy light and at his eyes that were narrowed and turned aside from me. I wanted to put my hand up to his face where his own hands had been, to warm where the tears had turned cold on his cheeks.
Then he turned his gaze back to mine, blue and empty, as if he was willing me not to say a word. And against his blank look I knew what had happened to me as clearly as if someone like God had spoken aloud: from today, if Mark hurt I’d hurt, if he laughed I’d laugh, and I’d only be happy again when he was happy too.
After a moment he said, in a nearly ordinary voice, “Did you get a skewer? Give you a hand, if you like. If you need it.”
The giddiness subsided, of course, over days and weeks of hiding it. But all that summer I hoped: a hope made up of lurches of joy at a word, a glance, a smile of Mark’s, and many more plunges into tears. But nothing answered my hope, and slowly hopelessness began to thicken until even the good days—the days I could be near him—were grayed, because joy brought with it a smothering dust of despair.
Eventually it wasn’t new, just part of me as the way my hair, which refused to be sleek, was part of me, or my right ankle, which I kept twisting at netball, or that my parents were dead and I’d
never known anything about my mother. I didn’t make up stories about her, though, the way they say orphans do. It was as if the stories Aunt Elaine told me about my father were enough.
Now Mark and Gareth have come back from the business end of the workshop and are sitting down again.
“So what brought you here?” I ask Mark, and my voice sounds loud and awkward from having too much behind it.
“A friend who works at the National Trust—an ex-colleague—said Lionel rang his department. He knew I’d worked here. Said you were selling the house.”
“Not just the house,” I say, knowing I’m sounding brutal and deciding I don’t care. “The whole lot. Gareth and I were sorting a few things out when you arrived.”
“The whole thing? The workshop and everything?” I can’t read Mark’s tone, except that he’s shaken.
He looks from me to Gareth, who nods, and only then says, “Yes. I can’t manage the house, and apparently we can’t sell that on its own.”
“Where will you go?”
“A flat…something like that.”
“And the Press?” asks Mark, almost with a snap.
“I’m afraid it’s…it’s the end. I’m too old to start up again.”
“What about Izzy?”
“She’s living in Highgate, cataloging the archive. She’s got her own life,” says Gareth.
Mark says nothing for a moment, but not from ease: it’s as if he’s thinking too much and holding it back. Then he says to me, very gently, “And you?”
“Oh, I’m going back to Sydney,” I say. “I’m trying to persuade Gareth to come out for a visit when everything’s sorted out.”
“When does it go on the market?”
“It’s going to auction, I don’t know the details. Lionel’s organizing it all.”
“Not for a while, I guess. Takes time to publicize,” says Mark coolly. “Not every day a fourteenth-century chantry ruin with attached Arts and Crafts country house comes on the market.” After all, why should he be feeling anything? It was all a very long time ago, as Grandmama used to say when I asked about her brother who died in the Great War.
“Izzy’s found a buyer for the archive,” I say. “She’s been cataloging it and so on. The university library in San Diego. So that’ll be safe.”
“That’s all right, then,” says Mark. “Good to know she’s looking after things.”
For a moment I think he’s commending her success in finding a buyer. And then I remember how he looked at Izzy in the old days, and I know that’s not it at all. He’s worried about her. He cares that she’s still involved with the Chantry world.
I always knew that he noticed her a different way from how he played football with Lionel or asked Uncle Gareth’s advice or gave Aunt Elaine a hand with lighting the fire under the washhouse copper. But after that day in the storeroom, my eyes were suddenly sharpened. Something inside me read what he felt inside him: I recognized—what? Desire? Love? I don’t know now, and I didn’t then. I just knew it in him as I knew it in myself, by the way his head turned when he heard her voice; the way he remembered what she’d said about Bewick or Eric Gill from one week to the next; the way he watched as she picked up an engraving block and ran her fingers over it, feeling the end of the grain with the pad of her thumb. And I wondered if he lay awake as I did, night after night, hope and hopelessness between them banishing sleep.
Gareth’s asking Mark what he’s doing now.
“When…When I left…I took that maintenance job in Preston.” He’s heard what Gareth really asked, I realize, and is answering it. “There were all sorts of takeovers and things, and I ended up running the maintenance department for Leyland Trucks. They paid for me to do courses and so on. Then it was all nationalized—got very bureaucratic. Ducked out and went with Voluntary Ser vice Overseas to Rhodesia, it was then. Building schools and clinics.” Yes, his fair skin has the old, rubbed-gold look of long, and long-gone, sun. “Came back in 1975. Took a while to persuade the Trust that I knew about more than breeze blocks stuck together with river mud and whitewash”—he flickers a smile at me—“but I did in the end. I was managing a mill in Northumberland when the redundancies were offered. Now I’m taking some time to look around me.” He looks at his watch. “I must go. Una, have you got a car here? Can I give you a lift?”
How assured he is. When did that happen? Was it running things in Africa, or was it working his way up through the corporate idealism and unspoken snobberies that—perhaps unfairly—I assume he encountered at the Trust. Now he has a social ease to go with the physical ease he always had, the way he moved that used to make my heart turn over.
And then he says, “May—Gareth—may I come and see you again?” and he isn’t assured at all.
“Of course,” says Uncle Gareth, with plenty of warmth in his voice. “The phone number hasn’t changed, if you want to check I’ll be in. Or just turn up.”
Why would I think that Uncle Gareth might be chilly? I
wonder, but can’t pursue the thought because Mark’s asking me again if I came by car.
“No, by train. But I’m going back to Limehouse. Is that not out of your way?”
Mark’s car is a big old estate, with a crate of tools and site boots and a hard hat in the back. We drive out of the gateway, and the tick-tock of the indicator as he turns left down Sparrow’s Lane seems impossibly loud in the silence that’s left between us since Gareth bade us both good-bye. Everything seems more so, as if some dense, damp fog that was between me and the physical world is thinning and drifting away. Not just the sound of the indicator cutting across the ebb and flow of the engine noise. When we stop at the lights, the crimson jumper of the little boy on a bike doing wheelies flares against the gray of buildings, and two old ladies gossiping are suddenly a pattern of blue-gray hair and navy coats, their faces lines and shapes. Under my thighs the car seat is thick and squashy with age and the cloth is roughly soft where I’m gripping it. The car smells of dried mud and newspapers. Inches away the bulk of Mark’s shoulder is parallel to mine, warm, I can almost imagine, and moving easily as he changes gear. His hands haven’t changed. I know every neat-cut nail, every curve and swell and hollow.