Sweetie pie, you said one day, on the summit of Carnedd Dafydd, promise me one thing...
And I did, as I promised mum to be careful with men and never go to India, because that’s where it all started she said, all the bad luck and the separation. Was she using a mother’s intuition, or merely being unreasonable? Parents, after all, are testing grounds for irrationality and unpredictability – with Large Hadron Colliders below the shallow surface of their outward calm, where the atoms of childhood innocence are smashed together to reveal their true constituents. Even Barbie dolls have a god particle, seemingly.
Daddy, you wanted one last favour from your sweetie pie. So I promised to take you to the top of Carnedd Dafydd, when it was all over, and scatter you to the four winds.
Go to the top and look round Wales for me, sweetie pie, take me to the place I love the best, you’d say.
As for mum, she’s made no request at all. It’s up to me what I do with her afterwards. I have to guess, and that’s what I’ve done. Sitting in my cell I’ve had plenty of time to think about such things, and one day I decided (wrongly, probably) that she’d want to spend the rest of her ever-diminishing existence under the ground, out of sight if not entirely out of mind.
Daddy died a couple of months back. They let me out for the day, supervised, so that I could go to the funeral – it was just a small do, no fuss despite his international reputation. He didn’t have many friends left by then, not many still alive anyway, as his Guardian obituary pointed out (it made no mention of me, thank God). I suppose it’s a wonder he lived so long, considering what I did to him. They wouldn’t let me go up Carnedd Dafydd to scatter his ashes. They sent them to me by courier, here in Scotland (one of those progressive open prisons for women). I’ve got them in my boring little room in a plastic jar. It’s matt grey, which is quite appropriate really, because black would be over the top, don’t you think? His ashes make a shushing sound when I shake the container, like the noise of maracas. They call it an urn, but it’s just a plastic jar really, a bit like one of those old sweet jars. My favourites were rhubarb and custard, just like daddy. I can taste them now…
I haven’t opened the lid yet, I couldn’t bear to look inside. Mum wanted nothing to do with his remains. She said I’d killed him off anyway. She never came to see me, but she sent me letters on cheap, lined notepaper. He’d died of a broken heart, she said. She can be mean, my mum. She said he’d died because he couldn’t tell his stories to me any longer, and he’d faded away because there was no-one to listen to him after I’d gone. She wrote to me in her prim and proper writing: If you hadn’t been so selfish and got yourself two husbands none of this would have happened. He didn’t know what to do with his life. And the shame of it all.
She said that to me, and other things too. Why so cruel?
So, every night I watch the light fade on your ashes, Daddy, thinking about the day when I can leave prison and go up Carnedd Dafydd. If I’m lucky the mountains will fade into the distance in shades of purple and indigo, looking like a huge rack of triangular toast, uneaten, left on an abandoned tableland, going blue with mould. I’ll scatter you into the wind and I will think of you, the way you were when we were together, making a roll call of the mountains as they faded away towards the heart of Wales. But I’ve an admission, Daddy – I’m going to cheat a bit. Because one day you explained to me, on that mountain, why you’d chosen indigo for my bedroom. The name comes from the River Indus, you said, in India, your second favourite place on Earth. Or it could have been your favourite, since you didn’t like to choose between two loves, in the way I refused to choose between you and mum.
So when I get out of here I’m going to sneak off to India, where my mum said I was never to go, not ever, no. And I will take half of you with me, to the banks of the Indus. That way, Daddy, you will get – in death – what you never got in life: India at your feet, for evermore.
And for one whole day at least you’ll receive something you never got before. My complete and undivided love. Every little bit of it, not just half. Jam, pastry and all – for you and you alone, a whole sweetie pie.
opaque
IT happened on a bright spring morning not so long ago that I observed an elderly man leaving a house in the mercantile quarter of this city. I was on business and I had lost my way, since I am not well acquainted with that area – it was out of bounds to us when we were children, though I am uncertain why. I do remember, however, my mother admonishing me tearfully one afternoon when she caught me prowling among those well-proportioned Georgian houses, with their uniform black doors, brass door-knockers, polished nameplates, and sharp palings, which always remind me of crocodiles closing in for the kill. I am told the houses have long cool gardens at the rear, very private, having many different types of trees which begin their yearly cavalcade with the magnolias and flowering cherries, troupes of ballerinas twirling in pink.
I watched the man as he made his way, gingerly, down a set of newly washed slate steps, onto the street, clutching the railings with one hand and a walking stick with the other. Although it was warm he wore a heavy black astrakhan coat and a homburg hat. Our paths met and I had time to study his face, which was sallow and rather melancholy. It occurred to me that he might have been ill recently, for he seemed frail and preoccupied with his footwork. I surmised that he might have been handsome when young, since he still had a striking face, with a strong nose and clear dark eyes, perhaps those of an Armenian or an Eastern European Jew. I did not know his name, but I did possess a titbit of information about him, which was intriguing: my elder brother had remarked to me once, as we walked towards him on the esplanade, in his astrakhan coat, that this man might have been our mother’s lover many years previously; furthermore, that I myself had been planned and conceived as an antidote to the near-dissolution of our parents’ marriage consequent to the affair, which had been brief but intense. Or so my brother informed me. Looking at him now, with his crooked legs and his deflated body, I thought of the act of love; I imagined my mother’s mounting excitement, an episode of passionate but guilty pleasure, and then the pain and heartbreak caused by this little man, now a remnant of his sex. He paused to look at me as I passed, and I had time to register a determined mouth, slightly downturned, and two half-moons of darkness beneath his eyes. There was no escaping an aura of sadness around him, of physical defeat and inner fatigue. I passed by, nodding courteously and mouthing a rather old-fashioned Good day to you sir as if I had strayed into an Austen novel.
By one of those strange quirks I came across him yet again later that afternoon. Having not seen him once since my early twenties, probably, I was to encounter him twice in a single day. Following our initial meeting I left him to totter down his slate steps, reminding me of an injured crab crawling from below a rock to meet the tide. I walked briskly – and as elegantly as I could – along the whole length of the Promenade des Anglaise, as was my custom, saluting everyone I knew, and taking in the sea air. Our main entertainment was the passage of a yacht from the horizon, slowly along the flat calm sea, into the harbour, where it disgorged an affluent Greek and his entourage. Either covertly or directly, all eyes were fixed on his party as they gathered in a circle of dazzling white around the magnate, conversing fluidly in their incomprehensible language; everyone watched as his harem – for so I took them to be – swept regally up the quay, some ten yards to his rear, having waved aside the gig waiting to ferry them to the resort’s premiere hotel.
I rested on one of the long green seats stationed along the promenade, watching the crew unloading their craft before anchoring it out in the bay. It was a lively and noisy scene, with matelots shouting raucously to unseen crewmen below deck, underneath a makeshift halo of screeching, wheeling gulls. So engrossed was I in the scene that I failed entirely to notice a stooped figure passing through the melee of boys in front of me: the first I saw of his astrakhan coat was a black shimmer which appeared in the corner of my left eye. I looked round and cau
ght him staring at me; again, I raised my hat and bid him good day. After a peremptory nod in my direction he sat down at the opposite end of the bench. We both contemplated the scene in silence, he immersed in his thoughts and I in mine. I composed a vignette in which, through a keyhole, I saw him dancing with my mother clasped to his chest, in a Victorian drawing room, the Blue Danube waltz wavering on a wind-up gramophone; all I could see in the gathering dusk of my daydream was a silvery gleam in my mother’s eyes, a moist sheen on her parted lips, and the silhouette of her dark hair cascading onto her bared shoulders, or so I imagined her, since I had never seen her with her hair down.
I was awakened abruptly from my reverie by a loud cry. It seemed to come from a woman, close by, who was staring in our direction. Almost immediately her male companion, much taller than her, with remarkably long white hair falling onto his shoulders, exclaimed loudly and pointed towards our seat. As they hurried towards us, with the tall stranger almost dragging his companion along, tugging her arm, I searched my memory with increasing desperation, since I could not for the life of me remember either of them. I stuttered to my feet and prepared to make small talk, in the hope that their names would come to me eventually.
But it was not I whom they greeted now, with great warmth. It was the old man whom they fell upon, she grasping his shoulders from behind and kissing his cheek, her companion falling on one knee before him and clutching his hands, all the while saying Eugene! over and over again. The woman was the more excited, saying phrases such as:
– It’s you again my old friend, at last!
– How marvellous to see you again!
But the old man was just as confused as I; he remained seated, and hardly acknowledged their salutations, since he too failed to recognise them.
I watched the yacht riding at anchor in the bay, appearing to move in the water but chained to the sea-bed; and I smelt the air around me, the stirring scents of spring, which awakened in me a strong desire to move on to another place, to see new sights. In the meantime, as this desire for change overwhelmed my senses, I listened to the conversation between the old man and his new-found friends.
– Surely you remember us?
– No, I’m afraid not.
– But you are Eugene?
– Yes, my name is indeed Eugene.
– And you were a gardener once?
– Yes, I have been a gardener all my life.
– But you have retired now, surely?
– No, I still tend my plants every day!
And so on, until the old man became irritated by all the attention he was receiving. He stopped answering the fusillade of questions fired at him, and sat resolutely with his hands resting on his stick in front of him, as if he were about to pull a lever which would open the ground beneath these silly people buzzing around him. Realising the effect they were having on him, the woman put a finger to her lips, urging her companion to be quiet, and then sat by his side with one hand curled around the collar of his coat and the other folded over his hands, which were shaking by now and making his walking stick tremble. She steadied his hands and soothed him. After a while he appeared to relax in her embrace, and his eyes closed. Then she told him a story, and I listened to her voice which was clear and melodious, the voice perhaps of a singer or an actress. She soothed me also, I believe, for I too closed my eyes and listened to her, while registering the sounds and scents around me – childish merriment, dogs yelping, gulls calling, and the smell of women passing: eau de cologne and the newer French perfumes; occasional jasmine wafts, and the bitter smells of the awakening earth, all mingling on the cool, sharp breezes of spring.
It appeared that Eugene had visited this couple many years ago, when they were first married. He had been recommended to them, and he had turned up on their wedding day; everyone had laughed at him as he stood on the lawn, cap in hand, unshaven and unkempt, incongruous in his black peasant’s boots. A ripple of mirth had sounded among the guests, seated in white pavilions under yellow swags and bunting; the string quartet had stopped playing while he was ushered from the scene, into the servants’ quarters. This was the story she told him, but he had no recollection of it.
The woman’s companion sat down also, and relaxed by my side, pushing his legs out in front of him and resting his head on the bench, his hat balanced over his eyes to shade them from the sun. It appeared that Eugene had returned to their garden later that month, after the honeymoon. He had been hired to design and plant a beautiful and extraordinary garden to celebrate the marriage and to harbour the couple in their retirement; in the same way as their wedding ring avowed the eternity of their love, the garden would signal the eternal nature of their intentions. And so Eugene had designed a garden for them, and planted it with lovely and unusual plants which appeared in rotation to match the seasons and provided forever a soothing and inspiring haven in which they could walk together, talk together, and rest together.
Eugene was some sort of rustic Capability Brown, evidently.
Now, as he sat in a huddle, held gently by this ravishing example of womanhood, he asked for a detailed description of the garden. She outlined its main characteristics, and as he listened he unfurled slowly, drawing himself upright.
This garden, it was in the English quarter?
Indeed it was.
At such-and-such a house, with a Cedar of Lebanon in the far corner?
Yes, that was the place.
Did this happen in the year of the president’s inauguration?
Yes, he was perfectly correct, because they had delayed the wedding so that it did not clash with the civic event.
Eugene became animated, almost excited, his gnarled fingers pointing at imaginary borders and flower beds in front of him as he described the trees and plants he had installed. He wanted to know which had survived. At this juncture the lady sprang to her feet and said: But you have no idea how glad we are to have found you. We have been searching for you, both of us, and our servants, all over the town. We had given you up for lost, almost! We are having a celebration! As a mark of our own daughter’s impending wedding we have commissioned a statue and a plaque to be erected in our garden and we want you to be there! Will you come? Please say yes, it would be so wonderful if you could come, you would make us both so very happy!
I listened to all this while pretending not to hear any of the conversation, but as I looked round now at the group my eyes met those of the woman’s companion, who had removed the hat from his face and was now regarding me with… I’m not entirely sure… distaste perhaps, or cynicism. Was it suspicion I saw in his eyes? Meanwhile, his wife, or so I took her to be, continued: Do please come Eugene, do please say yes. We have such a wonderful surprise for you. My dear Eugene, the statue is of you! I have made it myself, with my own hands!
I was startled by her speech, and must have expressed myself in some way, because they all looked round at me now, even Eugene. I was immediately struck by the looks in their eyes. There was little doubt that the man sitting next to me, with his mane of white hair, looked distinctly discomfited. The woman appeared excited, and her eyes gleamed with emotion; they were lustrous and moist. Eugene’s eyes, I couldn’t help noticing, were fixed expressively on the woman, and he too appeared to be moved by the proceedings. I apologised for eavesdropping, while also expressing wonderment concerning everything my ears had just heard. I had been deeply moved by their conversation, I admitted. I was touched that they had found Eugene after so many years, and I hoped he would visit the garden he had created all that time ago. Appeased by my apology, and pleased that their story had been so entertaining, they invited me also to the unveiling of the statue. I accepted readily, since I had my own motive for seeing Eugene in stone or bronze, or whatever her medium – since he had forgotten the garden until this pair had so unexpectedly thrust themselves back in his life, I wanted to see his reaction when he saw his creation again. I might also be granted an opportunity to broach a subject close to my heart, vis-à-vis
my own mother, and Eugene’s ‘friendship’ with her all those years ago.
A date and time was appointed for our meeting in the garden.
I was standing in front of the house, hesitantly, on a warm but showery morning, when a phaeton came into view at the end of the street. In no time at all it had stopped by my side, and since it was Eugene who sat in it – as I somehow expected – I opened the door and helped him onto the pavement. In a trice the door of the house had opened to us and we were whisked as quickly as Eugene’s legs would allow into a large waiting room where we were welcomed by the lady and offered refreshments etc, which we both declined, listening instead to the animated introduction delivered by our hostess. It was clear from the contents of the house that we had entered the residence of one of the old patrician families of the city, possibly an equestrian dynasty, since there were portraits of fine stallions and mares everywhere on the walls. We were not the sole guests, evidently, for soon the house and garden were full of prosperous traders and merchants accompanied by their wives. After a discreet interval we were ushered into the garden and encouraged to group around a perpendicular object of about six feet in height, on a plinth and covered by a plum-coloured cloth held in place by a golden cord with tassels at both ends. Our hostess led Eugene to a solitary chair below the plinth and pressed him onto a plum-coloured cushion. By now she was magnificently attired in a light blue gown offset by a single-strand pearl necklace, though I am no expert in these matters, merely informing you that the stones had a milky opacity.