The Ecliptic (9 page)

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure he won’t miss lunch.’

‘Well, if you see him, tell him I was looking for him.’

‘Happy to,’ said Mac, slotting her glasses back into place.

The boy gave a lethargic two-fingered wave, as though consenting to a yea-vote at the end of a tedious meeting. ‘Bye then,’ he said, and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

The weather had been so severe that we had not paid a visit to the mansion roof all winter, knowing the frost and snow would make it perilous. But I could see no other way of
consoling MacKinney that afternoon. I insisted that she follow me up the attic stairs, into the rafters, where a bolted hatchway opened to a ledge just wide enough for two or three people to stand
on. She was doubtful about the conditions still, but I promised her that we would be safe. ‘It’s a little wet, that’s all,’ I said, climbing out onto the shingle.
‘There’s plenty of grip.

Mac lumbered out of the hatch and patted the cobwebs from her knees. She took one glimpse of the view and exhaled. She was soothed by it, I thought—restored. For a long moment she stayed
quiet, her eyes absorbing the scenery.

There was a brilliant, flooding sunshine. On all sides, ferries were traversing the inky water in slow motion, oblivious to everything except their course between the islands. Most of the
snow-scabbed houses and apartment blocks of Heybeliada stood dormant, just a few curls of smoke from a few stubby chimneys far away. At the Naval Academy, the parade ground was vacant of marching
cadets, and the restaurants on the promenade had nobody to serve. We could see the clock tower of the Greek Orthodox church from where we were, too, and the outlines of horses in the paddock across
the bay; the old theological school, high on its northern summit, was framed by a narrow arc of sunlight that seemed to angle from the clouds like a projector beam. I expected this would remind
MacKinney of how privileged we were to be at Portmantle, hovering above the world, subtracted from it. It usually did us good to remember that the clockwork of the world never stopped, that history
was already forgetting us. But MacKinney crossed her arms and said, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.’

I moved closer to the parapet, looking down at the moss-grown shelf over the portico, the thawing gardens and studio lodgings. It was difficult to judge MacKinney’s mood. We had eased one
another through gloomy spells so often it had become a kind of running joke between us: ‘Will you help me dig a tunnel?’ I would ask her sometimes; or if I caught her doodling on a
napkin, she might say, ‘Planning our escape.’ Now she seemed to be stricken with something more than her usual disquiet—a deeper hurt I could not reach—and she was resistant
to the normal platitudes. I wondered if it might all be related to the boy somehow. ‘There isn’t a person here who isn’t tired of it, Mac. We have to keep going. Work through
it.’

‘You think I’ve been sitting on my hands all this time?’

‘No. That isn’t what I said.’

‘I’ve tried everything. Nothing fits, nothing feels right. I can’t even put down a simple stage direction without questioning myself. Sooner or later, I’m going to have
to surrender. It’s clear I don’t have another play in me. Whatever talent I might have had once—it’s long gone.’

‘Just write what you believe.’

‘
What?
Is that serious advice?’

‘I don’t know what else to say.’

Ardak came out from the portico beneath us, carrying his ladders back to the outhouse. As he walked, the rungs cast beautiful zoetrope shadows on the sunlit lawns and, for a moment, I lost track
of where I was.

‘Knell—are you even listening?’

I turned to find Mac squinting at me. ‘Of course.’

The intermittent shine had got me thinking of the squeezebox in the dusty space beneath my mother’s bed, the lolloping weight of the instrument in my hands, how the lamplight used to
shimmer on the metal when I took it out.

‘So you really don’t mind? I’ve lost all my objectivity on it now, but I think it’s the only thing worth developing.’

‘What is?’

‘The scene I’ve just been telling you about. The monologue. Jesus, Knell, you were nodding along while I was talking. Did you not hear
anything
?’

I apologised, and this seemed to placate her. If I had known how much of the conversation had skipped by me, I would have confessed to it. ‘Sorry. It might not have been such a good idea
to come up here on an empty stomach.’ I felt totally disoriented.

‘Let’s go down then,’ Mac said. ‘We’ll get some
salep
and go to my room. You can read it there. It won’t take long.’

Once I was back through the hatch, I felt better. There was a pleasant sawdust smell about the attic and a satisfying closeness to the walls. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to ask Q to read
it, or one of the other writers? I don’t know if it’s right, involving me like this. We ought to keeps things as they are.’

Mac put her arm around me. ‘Quickman will only bring a certain—how to put this—
intellectualism
to his readings, which isn’t what I need right now. I’m
looking for a simple emotional response. And I wouldn’t trust those short-termers with a single word of mine.’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’re the perfect audience for
this—you understand where I’m coming from. I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.’

We stopped outside the mess hall, where Gülcan kept an urn of
salep
constantly warming throughout the day. It was the provost’s favourite drink and we had come to share his
fondness for it as a winter tonic. Mac filled two cups and we carried them along the corridor to her room, passing the thresholds of other guests, some of whom I could hear working at typewriters.
It seemed to me that Mac’s corridor was forever rattling with these factory noises—the bright clamour of thoughts being machined—and I had always believed it was a heartening
sound until that day. ‘Listen to them,’ she said, ‘typing up. They’ll be out of here soon.’

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

‘For them maybe.’

MacKinney’s room was deliberately spartan: a single bed made up with hospital corners, a bureau with the tidiest stack of manuscript pages, an oak wardrobe as solid and imposing as a
casket. We were not discouraged from bringing in photographs of loved ones, but if any of us possessed them they were not put on display—I suspected Mac had pictures of her daughters hidden
somewhere and spent her evenings tenderly thumbing their faces in private.

On the ottoman by her window was the tan leather suitcase I had seen her carry into Portmantle many seasons ago; she kept it with its lid open and its belly packed with hardbacks, preciously
arranged, all of them page-marked with strips of ribbon. What belongings she had were organised like this, aligned to some private schema. Only her camping stove and coffee pot—special items
she had requested from the provost—bore the scars of regular use; they were so blackened and spilled-on that she kept them tucked behind the door, covered by a tea towel.

She put down her
salep
on the bureau and slid out the top drawer, carrying the whole thing to her bed. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, rifling through, ‘it’s
probably best if you don’t read it while I’m standing here in front of you. That will just be agony for both of us.’ The foolscap pages wilted in her hands as she held them out to
me. ‘It’s my only copy. I’d tell you to be careful with it, but I’m quite sure it’s headed for the fireplace in the end.’

The papers were a little greasy. Flicking through them, I saw that each page bore Mac’s careful handwriting—an upright style that never broke the borders of the rulings, whose
letters crouched like tall birds herded into crates. At least a quarter of the text was neatly struck through with black pen, and Mac had redacted most of her own notes in the margins. ‘Just,
you know—tell me if there’s anything there,’ she said.

‘I will.’

‘Think you could get back to me by dinnertime?’

‘What’s the rush?’

‘I told you, I don’t know how long I have.’

There had been such wistfulness about the way MacKinney had been talking on the roof that I had mistaken her meaning. I thought that she had been trying to vent her frustrations about Portmantle
again, weighing her regrets against her achievements. But I understood now, from the urgency in her voice, from the way she was tap-tapping her foot on the floorboards, that it was something else.
She was leaving us—and not by choice. ‘Did something happen? Are they trying to kick you out?’

‘Shssh. Close the door.’

I pulled it shut. The
salep
taste in my mouth began to sour. Without the echo of the corridor, the room had a very cloistered feeling. It seemed there was no one else alive in the world
but the two of us.

Mac said, ‘I don’t know anything about your sponsor. Tell me about her.’

‘What?’

‘
Tell me about her.
’

‘Him,’ I said.

‘Really? A man?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I can’t say why, but I expected better of you.’

‘Well, I didn’t exactly choose.’

‘Is he older than you?’

‘Yes.’

‘By how much?’

‘A good ten years or so.’

‘That’s a shame. You better hope he gets plenty of exercise.’

‘Oh, he was never much of a sportsman, I don’t think.’ Then I finally grasped her point. ‘Is there something the matter with your sponsor?’

‘Not any more there isn’t.’ She gave a long exhalation—less of a sigh than a test of her lungs. ‘But you can’t smoke fifty a day and expect to live forever,
can you?’ Lifting the drawer from the bed, she went to slip it back into the bureau, wobbling it home. ‘Seventy-three years old. Not bad in the scheme of things.’

‘God, Mac. I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s OK. I just wish I could’ve been there for her.’ She went extremely quiet. ‘I’d still be working in my uncle’s bakery if it weren’t for
her, you know. Boiling bagels for a few shillings an hour. She took me out of that. Always believed in me.’

‘And never stopped,’ I said.

‘I don’t know. I always thought she’d be the first person to read my play when it was done, and now she’s dead. It feels as though I’ve let her down.’

‘I’m sure she’d tell you that was nonsense.’

‘Well, I’ve got precisely nothing to show for all the time I’ve spent here. That tells its own story.’ Mac combed through her hair with her nails, gathering it at the
side. ‘Fact is, I don’t know how much longer they’ll let me stay. Her lawyers have been sending letters to the trustee board, asking what the cheques are for. Can you believe
that? Miserable vultures.’

‘How long have you known about this?’ I said.

‘Days. I wasn’t supposed to say anything until the provost gets back. That’s where he’s gone—to speak to the trustees—but I don’t like my chances.
They’re going to boot me out, I know it.’

‘It won’t come to that.’

‘There’s always some procedure to follow. You know what the provost’s like—he’s a bureaucrat to the core. If there’s a precedent, he’ll find
it.’

‘God, Mac. I don’t know what to say.’

She pointed to the sheaf of papers in my hands, smiling. ‘You don’t need to say anything. Just read for me. Tell me there’s a sentence worth keeping in that lot or I’m
better off away from here.’

There were short-termers in the library—five of them, reading in silence—and all but one of their heads lifted as I came in, bothered by the intrusion. Only the Spanish poet, who was
sitting cross-legged on the sofa with an encyclopaedia, failed to look in my direction, though he gave a grunting cough as I left.

It proved difficult to find any space in the mansion that was not already possessed: there was another group of short-termers in the lobby, conversing timidly in French, and they turned their
backs when I approached, lowering their voices; Gülcan was folding bedsheets in the portico; Ardak was chopping wood by the front steps and tossing the shards into a barrow. Even the sky
seemed busy with the flow of birds and the tangled streams of aeroplanes.

And so I headed to my studio with Mac’s pages, feeling duty-bound to find potential in them. There was a good reason why the four of us did not share our work with anyone. We had given too
many seasons of our lives to Portmantle, invested too much in the pursuit of clarity to ever doubt we would accomplish it, or to wonder if all the solitude and sacrifice would have meaning in the
end. We were comfortable in the vacuum we had created, and told ourselves that other people’s validation of our efforts was nothing but a crutch. That was why we had come to Portmantle, after
all, to rid ourselves of external influence and opinion—to be originals. And so we declined to attend the readings and performances that the provost arranged for departing guests, and took no
notice of the workshops and get-togethers that sprung up like crabgrass every summer amongst the residents. Of course, we were curious about each other’s projects, and knew just enough to
satisfy this interest—Pettifer had his cathedral designs; Quickman his epic novel;