Crow had interrupted his thought. ‘He’s going to ask us to define emptiness,’ he said, and everyone laughed.
On the mantelpiece of the fireplace in Cole’s bedroom Xas found a silver canister full of wax matches. He struck one and held its flame to the dry scales of a pine cone. It caught, and the fire trickled up through the kindling. Xas waited till the cones were fully alight then put his hands in the flame. It was too hot, and it hurt him. But it made no difference to his skin, only streaked it with soot. He heard the springs in the bed complain as Cole sat up.
As he was laving his hands in the fire, Xas realised that he’d done this before. He had coaxed a fire back to life by stirring its embers and rearranging its logs. He’d crouched at the grate in a room above the Cuverie in Château Vully, his wings screening the rest of the room from what little heat there was to be had from the dying fire, chilling the man standing behind him. The man—Sobran—who’d got out of his warm bed on a snowy night because an angel had knocked at his window.
It was on that night that Xas finally took Sobran in his arms meaning also to take the man as his lover. Xas remembered putting his hands into the fire, making practical arrangements to revive it, then making his decision. Remembering, it occurred to the angel that that was perhaps the only occasion in his life where he’d chosen. Deliberated, then made a choice. ‘This disaster is my future,’ he’d said, and then lay down over the man. Responding to an offer wasn’t a choice. Coming back when called wasn’t either. The gardener who broke new ground was choosing; but to hoe and harvest and keep on was not a matter of choice.
For a moment, as he crouched at Cole’s hearth, bathing his hands in flame, Xas wondered what after all he’d done with his life—as if he had a life, and was a person.
He removed his hands from the fire. He shook them to cool them. He turned to Cole, who lay back down, no longer fearful or shrinking, but languorous.
Xas climbed into bed with and lay over the man. It was a commemorative act. He cupped the back of Cole’s head with his hot, sooty hands. He kissed Cole, whose mouth was sour and teeth velvety.
Xas told Cole that he must visit Flora.
Cole shook his head. ‘I don’t like to be looked at,’ he said.
‘Since when?’ said Xas, ‘When you broke the long-distance flight record everyone was looking at you.’
Cole nodded. He looked perplexed. ‘That’s right. And it didn’t trouble me straight off, then. Though I did have qualms. I tried to land beyond the crowd. I landed as far beyond them as I was able while still being on the airstrip. Then they all rushed toward me. The men were tossing their hats. It was night and hats were going up like black bubbles, as if the air was dark champagne. I had to grin and bear all the attention, and the yelling. The crowd made a sound so loud that my good ear just decided to quit and not let anything in. It was the same during the tickertape parade. That was like a silent film—the tape coming down slowly like dry snow. I was sitting up on the trunk of a car with the Mayor of New York and he kept chattering to me. I couldn’t hear a thing he said, I had to keep looking away from the crowd to read his lips. It was a grand occasion though, and it’s strange to think how I went from that to…’ Cole trailed off. He began to weep.
Xas brushed at the tears with his thumbs, kissed one damp temple, and then the other. ‘It’s a short walk to my car,’ he said. ‘The hallway is empty and so is the lobby. It’s past midnight. Someone has watered the lawns and they smell good. The aspidistra are all out along the drive. My car is at the gate. The city is as quiet as Easter Sunday. I can have you back before the sun comes up. Get out of bed and come with me now.’
Cole did get up, and Xas put him in the shower and washed him. He dressed Cole, clipped his toenails, and pushed his bony feet into a pair of loafers. Then they went out.
Cole sat with Flora and hid his fear. He was mild and gentle. And when they eventually left her sleeping and walked out together, Xas took Cole’s hand and said, ‘Thank you,’ and ‘I love you, Con.’
‘You say “I love you”, but I hear, “Good dog, good dog”.’
‘Still,’ said Xas.
‘I shouldn’t have to do those things,’ Cole said.
Xas opened the passenger’s door for Cole then climbed into the car himself and started the engine. Cole said, ‘I won’t forget you made me do that.’
He was silent for the rest of the drive. But when Xas had delivered him home, and they reached the foetid and lightless hermitage of his bedroom, Cole made an effort to meet Xas’s eyes. He said, ‘She’s very sick.’
‘Yes.’
Then, ‘Can you save her?’
Xas called Avril, who visited again, brought more gifts, and sat with Flora. She held Alison and remarked admiringly on how she’d grown. When she left, Avril told Xas he should have called her right after Flora had seen the specialist.
She asked Xas to walk her out to the road where her chauffeur was waiting in her car. She introduced them. She said, ‘This is Robert. When Flora has to go into hospital, you call me and, if I’m working, I’ll send Robert to collect Alison. I’m sure that, between us, me and my girl Betsy can take care of the baby.’ Betsy was her maid.
Avril gestured at Robert, who got back in the car and closed the door. Avril took Xas’s hand. ‘Alison is Conrad Crow’s daughter, isn’t she? I can see now that she has his eyes.’
Xas didn’t respond.
Avril said, ‘None of us was sure.’ She waited, then added, ‘That’s all right, you don’t have to tell me.’ She squeezed his hand, kissed him on the cheek, and blotted her eyes with the knuckles of her gloved hands, skilfully, so that her mascara was barely smudged.
Xas opened the car door for her, said, ‘I will call. Thank you.’
Flora was sitting in the cane chair, which Xas had carried outside and put in the shade by the back steps. He had pegged out diapers, and was now picking beans. Alison was lying on the lawn, on a rug, grasping her own feet and singing to herself. The day was so lovely that, to Flora, it seemed possible to leave only if it was impossible to stay. She tried to imagine leaving. She imagined that her body was asking her to leave.
She wasn’t in any great pain, the kind of pain she’d known for years, the kind that was a goad, and issued commands like, ‘Move! Do something!’ The pain that would sometimes, as if whimsically, instruct her to stay still, for stillness was like movement too, was something she had to do.
Dying wasn’t like that. It seem to Flora that the only way to go was not to be able to stay.
Flora raised her eyes to measure the sky. She knew she was only trying to imagine dying. And she knew that her failure of imagination didn’t mean she’d live. She thought, ‘Perhaps the one who leaves isn’t even an “I” any more, the “I” who can measure the sky.’
She looked back at the garden. Xas was brushing the dirt from fingerling carrots. He had given Alison a wooden clothes peg. Alison had the peg in one fist and was staring at it with cross-eyed intensity. The garden was still there for Flora, whether or not she was able to fix her attention on it. Maybe—she thought—to imagine leaving she’d first have to imagine that the garden wasn’t there. She tried to do that, subtracted the garden beds, the busy angel, the baby, the small wilderness of the waste lot, the distant mountains. That left only herself, in a kitchen chair, Flora McLeod, using her imagination and failing to imagine being gone.
When Xas held Alison on his knees, facing away from him, he could look at the back of her head and see that it had just as much personality as her face. She was face down in her character already, and it had closed over her head. The fingerprint pattern of the hair on her crown was her biography. It said she was delivered, it said she consented to breathe, and to suckle, apparently bewildered by her mother’s breast, this first surface. It said she learned how to send herself to sleep, comforted by her father or mother’s breathing. It said she slobbered in pain with colic and was walked up and down the house on her father’s shoulder. It said she le
arned how to talk to the wind in the cornflowers, how to sleep outdoors. It said she’d learned to manage to get food into her, and show she liked it by smiling at her father from under a froth of mashed carrot. It said she was given toys she first flung helplessly from her. It said what she’d do, given time. Her turned head said, ‘I’m by myself’ and ‘I might just take off any moment now.’
Flora wasn’t sleeping well. When she fell asleep she’d jerk awake, her arms and legs jumping up off the bed. Xas knew this was a symptom. He called the specialist who said there was nothing that could be done about it, short of sedating her, and, ‘It’s not time for that yet, is it?’
Xas heard the specialist’s ‘is it?’ and knew he was being asked to make a decision. He couldn’t think what to say.
Eventually the specialist broke the silence: ‘It would mean admitting her. That’s the decision I’m asking you to make.’
Xas said, ‘I think she’s more comfortable at home.’
‘Can you manage?’
‘Yes,’ said Xas.
Xas sat in the chair in the corner of Flora’s room to feed Alison her morning bottle.
Flora was in bed, propped up on pillows. O’Brien was asleep beside her, curled in a tight ball, his ribs plainly visible whenever he inhaled.
Flora said, ‘When did that chair lose its leaves?’
Xas looked over his shoulder at the cushion behind him. It was covered in floral fabric, faded by its many recent washes. The cover had shrunk, so that the cushion was fat and distorted. ‘I’m afraid the pattern has faded. I had to boil the covers, back when Alison was small and I was sterilising everything.’
Alison was still small at six months, but was doing everything that could be expected of a six month old, according to the book produced by the Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor.
Flora said, ‘I seem to remember the leaves on the floor.’
‘The cushions?’ Xas was puzzled.
‘The leaves.’
‘There was a pot plant there,’ Xas said. ‘Someone moved it.’ Xas frowned at Flora. Her eyes were distinguishable only as slits in swollen flesh. She’d lost most of her eyelashes. The puffiness was like a mask. It disguised her expression. Xas stared at her, and supposed her mind was wandering.
‘It was the chair,’ Flora said, dogged. ‘It had leaves. You did it.’ Then, ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’
‘You know I will. And I promise that Alison will too.’
Flora nodded. She rested her head back on her piled pillows and gazed at the ceiling.
Alison had drained the bottle. Xas carried her to the bed and sat beside Flora, set Alison on his knee and began to jiggle her gently to dislodge wind.
‘Don’t do that,’ Flora complained.
Xas stopped jiggling and rubbed the baby between her shoulderblades instead.
Flora said, ‘I don’t need Alison to admire me—’
‘But I’ll show her your films,’ Xas promised, eager.
Flora waved an impatient hand at him. ‘Never mind that. Alison is going to see this differently from everyone else, but you mustn’t let her think she lost me because of what I did. She is what I did.’
‘The movies are what you did too,’ Xas said.
Flora heaved a sigh. She looked exhausted. There was a film of sweat on her face. ‘Stop changing the subject. Why did I choose to have this baby?’
‘You loved Crow,’ Xas said.
Flora stared at him and waited.
‘You loved me,’ Xas said.
Flora nodded. ‘Yes, I do love you. And I love Connie. But, listen. You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you? And after you spoke to him you changed. You became quiet. Quiet and deliberate.’
‘I only spoke to him on the phone.’
Flora looked pained and impatient. ‘No,’ she said, ‘Not Connie. Your brother.’
Xas didn’t know what to say.
‘You told me he’d found you. That time when Millie thought you’d been bitten by a snake. He came back again, didn’t he? I mean after he’d written his notes.’
‘Yes. I spoke to him. He spoke to me.’
‘I thought so.’ Flora closed her eyes. ‘What did he offer you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But he will one day.’
Alison managed a burp. Xas wiped the baby’s chin with her bib. He stared at Flora. Her head lay in the socket of her pillow. Her face was lifeless, and closed.
‘Flora?’
Her eyelids stirred, as if she were dreaming. She said, ‘When she’s grown I want Alison to see that I didn’t make a stupid decision. It wasn’t all about Connie. It wasn’t all love.’
‘But it was,’ Xas said, wounded, puzzled, plaintive.
‘Not all. I didn’t hear anyone say, “Build an Ark”, but I have built one. “A shady bed in the whirlwind of mysteries.”’ She fell silent. Several minutes went by and Xas supposed she had finally fallen asleep. He waited for one of the things that always woke her now: a myoclonic jerk, her restless legs. Then she said, ‘She’s beautiful, anyway. Time always runs forward, but the reasons for things sometimes go back. She’s beautiful, and that’s why I had her.’
After that conversation Xas didn’t get any sense out of Flora—only responses. She wanted the toilet. She didn’t want another sip of water. ‘Take that baby out of here if she is going to cry.’ ‘Where’s O’Brien?’ ‘Could I have another pillow under my legs?’
To his relief she wasn’t ever as incoherent as she had been about the ‘leaves’ of the chair.
And then one morning there was blood in the toilet bowl. Flora couldn’t answer his question but, by the smell, he guessed it was from her bowels. He cleaned her up and changed her nightgown and carried her back to bed. He restored her to her nest of pillows. For the last week she’d slept, when she’d been able to, propped up. It helped her to breathe, particularly in the early hours of the morning, when breathing was a real struggle for her.
Xas sat down on the edge of Flora’s bed and stroked her earlobe till she looked at him. He said he thought he should take her to hospital.
‘It’s too early,’ she said, and he didn’t know whether she meant it was too soon or thought they shouldn’t bother anyone until a more reasonable hour. Then she said that she didn’t like hospitals.
‘Perhaps I should call Avril to take Alison.’
‘Let her sleep,’ Flora said, and Xas couldn’t tell whether she meant Alison or Avril. He decided he would phone Avril. Then he’d wake Alison and bring her in to her mother. He got up from the bed. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
Flora was holding his hand. She let it go, then when he began to move away she reared up and snatched at him. ‘Where’s O’Brien?’ she gasped.
Alison was fast asleep in her cot, so Xas went out to find the cat for Flora.
Xas first checked under the rosemary bush, then walked to the top of the nearest rise, where the track to Flora’s back gate branched from the main path. The sun wasn’t up yet. There was just enough light to colour the closed poppies, and the tangles of bramble, and club-like flowers of the bulrushes.
Xas called. He walked away from the gate, calling. Minutes went by, then tens of minutes. He knew he should go back, should call Avril, shouldn’t leave Flora alone. He looked over his shoulder. The neighbours’ houses were quiet, windows still sealed by blinds or curtains. The only light showing was at their own kitchen window. He saw this, as he always had, as a sign that Flora was home. It was as if he’d been out late, at a jazz club, or with Cole, and had come home to find that Flora was up and might call out to him, so that he could go in and give her the news—what he’d heard, who he’d seen.
Xas walked on. He continued to call. He listened—heard nothing much—as if everything on the wasteland had fallen silent to make sure his voice was heard.
Xas sank down then, he sat on his heels. He dropped his head and said, in his own tongue, to God, to Whom he had feigned deafness for nine years, ‘Father
, let me find this cat.’ He prayed, and then lifted his head and waited. God was there—always there—as unconcerned and unhurried as the morning.
Xas waited. Then he gave up waiting. He turned back to the house and made for its homely light. At the gate he did stop once more to look back. And there was O’Brien, coming over the crest of the low dune.
The cat trudged, slowly. Xas could see mud and leaf litter clinging to his draggled belly. As soon as he saw Xas, O’Brien flopped down.
The cat had walked—had come back—as far as he was able. Xas knew that O’Brien had been walking for as long as he’d been calling, and for as long as he’d prayed. God might have heard and understood his prayer, but O’Brien had come himself, out of the trust of his own tired heart, from love and from graciousness.
Xas went to the cat and scooped him up. He carried O’Brien indoors and put him down beside Flora. He placed Flora’s hand on the panting cat and, his hand covering her own, they smoothed O’Brien’s matted fur.
At what she thought were intervals of only a few minutes, Flora made an effort to open her eyes. She was waiting for the sun to come into the room. For the sun to come, and another night to be over. O’Brien was pressed against her leg, purring so fiercely that his exhalations shook the bed.
Xas brought the baby in. Alison’s warm, wispy head brushed Flora’s cheek. Then the baby gripped Flora’s hair and gave it a tug. Flora felt Xas extract Alison’s fingers. The bed moved as he sat down, the baby on his lap. Alison had her bottle, she was slapping it as she drank, the formula making a musical splashing.
Flora opened her eyes. No sun yet. She closed them again.
Xas said something.
The air in the room was as cold and wet as fog, thicker than air, hard to manage. Flora remembered being in the lit capsule of a streetcar on a very foggy night, the mist fuming through the seams of its doors. She had been talking to someone that night about how to make sense of a story, and the difference between the audience watching a character do something—say, a woman burning her gloves—and another character observing the same thing, unseen themselves, say a man in the room the woman has come into. Was it Connie she’d been talking to? They’d often talked about things like that. Often, all of them, Connie, Carol, Wylie, Con on occasion too, and different cameramen, Pete, Jimmy Chan, and Cole’s editor, the woman who’d taught her how to cut film.