If he could find the energy, he thought, he would tease her about Stephen Golightly next time she visited. Then his heart suddenly sagged as he remembered that she would be
off to Salzburg soon. It would not be for long, but at the thought of her being so far away a little more spirit leaked out of him. To the list of afflictions contributing to his general wretchedness he could now add a slight loss of balance, disturbing dreams and cramps in the extremities, all of which he had been given to understand were terrifically good things to have. These were signs that his body was responding to the naturopathic regime and ridding itself of toxins. It had also, he had pointed out weakly, rid itself of lunch today. He had been terribly sick, but not so terribly that he had failed to notice that the vegetable cobbler had looked much the same when it had reappeared as it had the first time. He wanted to grumble and moan and say evil, cynical things about naturopathy. He wanted Sara.
He turned back to his clay, pulled off a piece, whacked it around a bit and rolled it into a sausage. Prodding it around and sharpening one end, he saw that he had accidentally made a fairly passable vagina.
‘Oh, how sweet!’ croaked a voice nearby. Bunny, turning her attention from a mound of clay with one ear, was pointing at James’s effort with a forefinger like a mud-encrusted twig and peering at him with screwed-up eyes. James smashed his clay into a flat heap.
‘Oh, you’ve spoiled it,’ she cried. ‘You’ve spoiled your little horse collar. Didn’t you like it?’
‘No.’
‘Hilary says we need to accept our early efforts for what they are,’ Warwick offered, from the other side of Bunny’s table. ‘Don’t you, Hilary?’ He was turning his head from side to side and rubbing his neck, seizing the moment when Bunny’s attention had wandered to drop his pose. ‘That’s exactly what I did. My early efforts were
total rubbish. That’s what I told our Yorkshire lass, didn’t I, Hilary? Total rubbish, never had any talent. Quite happy to let others get on with it. Quite happy to pose.’ He smiled foolishly at Bunny. ‘Bunny’s forging ahead now with my head, aren’t you? So glad to see you so much better, my dear. Quite your old self again.’
‘Oh, quite,’ Bunny conceded. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’ As long as she said she was, perhaps she would be. She was better, certainly, if not quite better. It was extraordinary, when one had learned how to listen, just what one’s body could tell one. ‘I
did
feel off, I can tell you. Poor Pet and Hugh are in high dudgeon of course. Do you know, the silly things cancelled their
gîte?
Why they did on my account I don’t know, when I’m the last to ask …’ She looked at Warwick. ‘Actually I do know,’ she said, in a louder voice. ‘Between you and me and these four walls,’ she seemed quite comfortable about including everyone else currently within the walls, ‘it’s all about M-O-N-E-Y. They can’t wait for me to go because they think they’re getting it all. Ha! And they think I don’t realise.’ Warwick coughed. Bunny pursed up her lips with satisfaction and looked back at James’s clay. ‘Are you going to make a horse with that? Hilary, look! I think James is making a horse.’
Hilary had been washing clay tools over at the sink. She made her way across the room.
‘I’m not making a horse,’ James said. ‘Of course I’m not. But I don’t really know what else to do. I don’t know where to start.’
Hilary sat down on a stool opposite and gazed solidly at James. She preferred patients not to be artists of any sort themselves. They tended to have ideas, which could, as she liked to put it, cloud their responses. ‘Remember what we
said,’ she began in her sensible voice, ‘remember what we said about needing to forget what we already know. Don’t think about what you know. It can cloud your responses. You don’t need to know a thing.’
Behind her, Warwick was casting heavenward glances.
‘We need to bypass, in a sense, what we know, and try to get on to a little side road of what
we feel
, physically and emotionally. Feeling is just another way of knowing, if you think about it. Only I don’t want you to think about it. You’re trying to get in touch. You’re trying to tune in. That’s where you found it hard, isn’t it, Warwick?’
She turned just in time to see Warwick roll his eyes and draw a finger across his throat. ‘Oh ignore him,’ she said good-naturedly. ‘Yes,
thank
you, Warwick.’ She turned back, smiling. She found herself smiling more, now. People like Warwick, who once had made her job frustrating, now made her smile, because no frustration could touch her underneath her armour of happiness. She was safe from fools like Warwick. She folded her hands over her stomach. ‘Now, James, just ignore Warwick. He’s just trying to get a rise. I’ll set Ivan on you, I will, you’re an old cynic, aren’t you?’
‘Oi! Less of the “old”, young lady!’
‘Warwick! Don’t move! Look at me. I’m trying to get your ear,’ Bunny ordered.
‘Now,’ Hilary said gently to James, ‘how the body f
eels
is the issue. Once you have rediscovered how the body is feeling, the mind can help it recover.’ She beamed. ‘Try visualisation. Try to visualise your problem, in the part of your body that is unwell. Visualise in clay. Shape your health problem in clay, in any way you feel is right. Just let go.’
‘You want me to sit here making clay ulcers all afternoon?’
Hilary would not be defeated. ‘What I want is not the issue, James. It’s what you want that counts. I’m going to leave you to try visualising, so if you’re happy to get on, I think Jane needs some help.’
She rose and went to attend to the unhappy Jane who, alone in a corner of the studio, was silently wrapping coathangers together. Warwick broke the silence that followed by saying, ‘Ulcers, hmmm. Had ’em myself. Four. Japanese rations. Painful. Lost a lot of weight.’
James was grateful for the sympathy but hoped Warwick was not going to elaborate.
‘You can tell that was a long time ago,’ Bunny said without irony. ‘Have you lost any, by the way?’ She scanned his torso with crooked black eyes. ‘It doesn’t look like it. And Dr Golightly’s diets always work. You must be cheating.’
‘You’ve seen what I eat, Bunny dear. Practically the same as you.’
‘You don’t eat your bread.’
‘I do. I just don’t eat it with meals. I keep it and eat it later.’ Warwick coughed.
‘I shall mention to Dr Golightly next time I see him that you’re not losing weight,’ Bunny said, loudly. ‘He likes to know.’
‘Oh, don’t bother, please,’ Warwick said. ‘No need.’
Bunny had risen laboriously to her feet to refill the beaker of water that was keeping the clay damp. Something through the window drew her attention. ‘Oh, look! There he is now, coming back from the car park! Let’s catch him now. I’m sure if I wave—’
‘Bunny, stop! Sit down! Please, sit
down.’
Warwick’s voice was unusually fierce.
Bunny did so. ‘But—’
He sighed. ‘I’m having a bit of trouble, if you must know, getting into the swing of this diet.’ Warwick’s voice had dropped to a whisper, and his guilty eyes included James, perhaps in the hope that he would judge him more leniently than the iron-willed Bunny. ‘Find the damned bread hard to take dry. Reminds me of the bad old days under the Japs, if you must know. So I’ve got myself a little supply. Just a little, you know, little picnic box, keep it in my room. Bit of butter makes all the difference.’
‘You’ve been spreading the bread with butter? Ivan’s lovely bread?
Butter?’
Bunny’s scandalised voice made it sound as if Warwick had eviscerated his own mother and spread the bread with the proceeds. ‘Hilary, did you hear that? Warwick’s been spreading his bread with butter!’
‘Good man, Warwick,’ James said. ‘Good man.’
Hilary turned. ‘Oh
Warwick
,’ she sighed. ‘What are we to do with you?’
Warwick looked ashamed. ‘Oh come on, you understand surely, a Yorkshire lass like you, brought up on best booter, eh? I mean, I’m happy to cooperate and all that. Quite see the importance. It’s only a scrape, to help it down.’
‘But really
—butter!’
Bunny said. She looked rather pale.
‘Wouldn’t like Dr G to know, rather not discuss it. Couldn’t tell him a lie, such a nice fellow. So let it lie, eh, Bunny?’
Warwick coughed stiffly to indicate that no reply was necessary and resumed his pose. Bunny shrugged in James’s direction and took up her modelling tool again. And as she lifted it in her trembling hand to cut into the clay, she looked at it a little longingly, rather as if it were a butter knife.
L
EECH HALF WOKE
and stretched, feeling the sting of early morning cold on his bare feet as they pushed down out of the covers and dangled beyond the end of the folding bed. He was too long for beds and he did not really remember a time when he had not been, so the day’s first sensation on his feet, which brought always the wearying thought that the hut was cold, was in order. He kept his face submerged in the jumper he used as a pillow but then came the second, the same chill stealing over his head. He turned and lay staring up, just in case today the jumper might warm rather than merely scratch the back of his skull a little and although it did not, he stayed there, his eyes searching the wooden ribs of the hut roof for anything unsettling, anything not as yesterday, as far as he could remember yesterday. His blocked nose was clearing now, with the softly rushing, itchy sensation that he had grown used to. He sniffed, and the mixed smells of dust and earth and salty feet gave him further reassurance that nothing had changed. So, secure in his mind that nothing had happened in the night that would call for any rearrangement of his expectations, quite sure that the hut was again freezing and that this day was so far consistent with others, Leech got out of bed.
Yet the day was different, or was going to be. Leech stepped on shaking legs out of the hut into the first light. Too early to say when the dawn clouds would shift, but today’s happenings in the sky would go beyond mere weather. This day would be different. But when Leech tried to find words for the difference none came to him save those which he had heard others say:
momentous, epoch-making, historic, unique
and which, being other people’s, remained just words. This day would also be, he remembered hearing, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, an idea which filled him with foreboding. Leech had had many of those. Once in a lifetime came horribly often, he found. For how long is a lifetime? Only as long as memory made it. It should be a long, unbroken tunnel between the very first thing he ever remembered—sunlight sparkling on the hairs on the sleeping dog’s back that he saw from high up in someone’s arms that day—and right now, today, the view of the hut roof when he opened his eyes on this August morning in 1999, aged thirty-one. But in Leech’s tunnel there had been many rockfalls. His tunnel was a series of small dark chambers without doors, in every one of which a short lifetime had been lived.
Leech’s lifetimes came by in turn and ended again once or twice a week, each lasting a few days at most. Once lived, the memory of them would remain close by for a time and then develop a tendency to stray, returning grudgingly, then not at all. His most loyal memory was his lifetime as a child. It remained somewhere not far off and lit by a weak, kindly beam, like the recollection of a story once read under the bedclothes about another boy a bit like him. Other lifetimes left no trace at all. He bore scars on his body from wounds he supposed he had suffered,
and sometimes deduced from the state of his fingernails and hair, which continued to grow in what felt, impossibly, like his absence, that his life must somehow be passing. He wore clothes which looked familiar, as if he had seen them once on a long-dead relative who, he almost saved himself from realising, was himself. Only his love for Ivan joined up the days and gave him a part of his life that he could feel was truly his.
Still barefoot, he strolled round to the water butt on the side of the hut. It was almost full because it had rained for most of July, although Leech was not up to that degree of reflection on weather so long ago lived through. He scooped up a handful of water and drank it, and with another handful loosened some of the grime on his face, and used both hands to smear it into fresh streaks. Then he weighed his scrotum inattentively in one cupped hand, peed into the hedge, scratched his armpits and finger-combed his hair, yawning. He returned to the hut, put on his shoes, pulled on his jumper and came out again, dragging a blanket with him and pulling it round his shoulders.
Birds were starting to sing, and Leech could now see the torn silver lace of night-spun cobwebs stretching across between the rows of vegetables, down to the high boundary hedge. Leech waited. Then, not knowing if what he sensed were a movement from the ground or a sound upon the air, he began to run, stripping and tearing the threads of spider silk hanging between the vegetable rows. He reached the bottom of the garden just as the scream of the first train tore the curtain of the morning in two. He stopped, gazed upwards and watched open-mouthed as the silver and yellow train ripped past, unzipping the seam between hedge top and sky.
It passed. Leech yawned again, rearranged his blanket round his shoulders and turned back down towards the shed. Skirting past the ranks of undisturbed beans, peas and lettuces, still trussed with the silver wire of the spiders, he tramped across the empty half acre of rye field until he reached the gap between the fruit cages where he could see the back of the house. There was nothing to see except the patch of poor grass, Hilary’s whirligig for drying the flowered bed linen, a few herbs among the concrete slabs by the back door, and the outside tap. The curtains were closed. Good. Leech crouched down between the blackcurrants and the raspberries, picked a few and ate them. Then he sat down, wrapped his blanket round him, and waited. Ivan and Hilary were safe and sound, he could feel it. Safe and sound. Leech’s eyes took in their curtained bedroom window above the dining room and scanned across to the smaller window whose curtains were not drawn. Nobody else, then. No B&B guests last night. Leech sighed with pleasure, fished in his clothing for his stuff, rolled a cigarette and lit it. He didn’t like the B&B guests much. Ivan never said
come on down to the house after
when there were B&B guests around. There had been a nice one once whom he remembered for some particular reason, though the reason itself eluded him. She was nice. Very small she was, tiny. You could lift her like she was a doll or something. He did remember that.