The Possession of Mr Cave (2 page)

From his early school reports it was clear that your brother
was not going to be a high achiever in an academic sense.
There were none of the 'outstandings' or 'exceptionals' that
always rained down on you, never a 'pleasure to teach' or a
'joyous addition to the classroom'.

Reuben had no interest in books in the way you had. For
him, reading never rose above the level of a necessary chore.
He enjoyed my night-time stories of Dick Turpin and all those
other old rogues, as you both did, but once he had heard one
story he wanted to hear it again and again, whereas you always
craved tales you had never known before.

I see him now, at the window, his finger making patterns
in the condensation. 'A quiet boy.' 'Easily led.'

Money, in this blind century, has become the measure of
love. A crude outsider would tell me I exercised more care for
you because, from the age of eleven, I paid for your schooling.

Yet what could I do? I could only pay for one of you –
should you have both suffered for the sake of equality? Was
it my fault the Mount was a girls' school? Would it have been
better to send Reuben, who had never shown any interest in
his education? No, St John's was the obvious choice for him.

Yet, of course, I must admit this was not the only extravagance
I afforded you. After all, you wanted to ride, so I paid
for a horse and for it to be at livery. You wanted to play music,
and I paid for you to have violin and then cello lessons at the
college. You wanted a cat, specifically a coffee-cream Birman,
and I bought you Higgins.

Yet you were actively interested in these things. They weren't
acquired out of any fatherly overindulgence, or if they were I
would gladly have shown the same indulgence to your brother
if he had only requested such presents. Where were Reuben's
interests? I never had any idea. He wanted a bicycle and the
one I bought wasn't good enough. He wanted all this technological
claptrap that he knew I wouldn't allow before he
asked. No, we must never forget it, your brother was not easy.
Even in my grief I could not ignore this. Indeed, my grief
required me to remember it very well, for I already knew how
sentimentality can flood in and drown memories, leaving the
true person beyond recall.

I wanted to remember him as he was. I wanted to remember
his incessant screams through the night as a baby, his later
tantrums, his insatiable appetite for jellied sweets. I wanted to
remember how cross he got when you used to read from the
same picture book together. I wanted to remember the rows he
had with you, even the one where he tore up your sheet music.

I wanted to remember the way he used to sit and watch television,
with his hand covering the birthmark on his face. I
wanted to remember the cigarette incident, the shoplifting incident,
the smashed vase incident. I wanted to remember the early
Sunday mornings when you would both go with me to an
antiques fair, and he would grumble all the way down the A1.

Yet the memories of him were always hard to relive and
restore. When I thought of him a thought of you would swiftly
arrive in its place. When I tried to picture you as babies, as
your mother last saw you, I wouldn't be able to see his screaming
face. There was always just you, lying placid by his side, lost
in your innocent unworded dreams. A dream yourself.

Now, that first day I opened the shop after his funeral. Your
first day back at the Mount. I kept myself busy polishing the
ewers and tureens and all the other pieces of silverware. All
day I was there in my white cotton gloves, filling the shop
with the smell of polish, my curved reflection staring back
with manic eyes.

Customers came in and I scared them out of spending their
money. I made mistakes. I gave people the wrong change. I
dropped a Davenport jug. I was feeling dreadful.

'Come on, Terence, pull your socks up,' said Cynthia, helping
out behind the counter. 'You've got my granddaughter to feed.'

I know I used to grumble to you about how she scared
away the customers with her witch's nails and wardrobe and
forthright manner, but really she was a great help.

She tried to get things back, for your sake. For all our sakes.
Not just helping with the shop but arranging things. I remember
that first fortnight, how she bombarded us with events. They
were something to hold on to, ledges in the cliff-face, and the
calendar became full of them. Her writing took over July,
August, September, bursting out of date boxes with its capital
letters and excessive punctuation. Bryony's Cello Lesson!
Harrogate Antiques Fair!! Knaresborough Horse Show!!!!
Then there was her special meal she was already planning
for no specified purpose. 'I'm inviting my old am dram friends,'
she said. 'We're going to the Box Tree. It's got a Michelin star,
apparently, and just had a refurbishment. You have to book
months in advance, so if I want it for August I'm going to
have to arrange it now. Do you both want to come?'

You were on the sofa, in your jodhpurs, ready to go to the
stables. 'Yes, I'll come,' you said, much to my relief.

'Yes, Cynthia, of course,' I said, realising how important it
seemed to her. 'I'd love to be there.'

'Very good,' she said. 'I'll write it on the calendar.'

You said little in the car, en route to the stables. I remember
leaving you there, and feeling what I had felt at the funeral.
That strange sensation of departing myself, a leaking out of
my soul, complete with the darkening sense of vision. And
then on my return, of course, I saw him. Denny. It was getting
dark and so, when I turned towards the paddock and saw
this sweating figure in running clothes, shining pale in the
car headlights, I thought it might be a hallucination. I blinked
him away but he was still there, staring straight at me.

I got out and told him to leave. He walked away, giving
me a look of steely resolution, before continuing his run.
Then I called to you, do you remember? And we had that
row as we walked Turpin back to his stable. Apparently you
had no idea what he was doing there. Apparently you hated
him just as much as I did. Apparently he'd never been to
gawp at you before.

You were perfectly convincing, and I was perfectly
convinced, even if I had the sense that I had been woken
up to something. There was so much that was precious in
my life that I had been leaving open and undefended. 'I'm
sorry, Petal,' I said. 'I shouldn't have raised my voice.' And
you nodded and watched the houses slide past, perhaps
wishing you were behind their square, golden windows,
happily lost in another girl's Tuesday night.

I remember trying to sort out your brother's belongings. I
sat there, on his bed, and felt the foreignness of the room.
Posters of films I had never heard of. Unfathomable technology
I didn't even realise he owned. Magazines covered
with women who didn't look like women, women who looked
so inhuman they might have been designed by an Italian
sports car manufacturer.

I went through his school bag and found a letter he never
gave me. It was from his headmaster, informing me that he
had missed two of Mr Weeks' history lessons. The letter dated
from March, before Mr Weeks had lost his job. I remembered
him from the time he had come into the shop with
his wife and his son George, to buy the pine mule chest. A
tall yeti of a man who could have been quite a bully in the
classroom, I imagined.

It was strange, being in his room. Reuben's presence was so
real, contained as it was in all those objects, those possessions
that reminded me how little I had understood him. With
Cynthia's help we eventually packed a lot of stuff away in the
attic. You helped with some of it, didn't you?

Though the thing I really need to tell you concerns his
bicycle. As you know, I popped an advertisement in the
window, offering it for twenty-five pounds. Within a day a
woman had called and arranged to come in and buy it for
her son. A Scottish lady with a long face that reminded me
rather of the aboriginal statues on Easter Island.

I was retrieving the bicycle from the shed when the darkness
crowded around me and I again felt that peculiar sensation
at the back of my brain. Only this time it was stronger. It
was as though someone was turning a dial in my mind,
sliding it across frequencies, trying to find a different station.
The feeling was at its most intense as I patted the saddle
and let the Scottish lady wheel the bicycle away from me. I
stood there for a while, in this kind of vague trance, watching
her roll it down the street. I stayed there until the bicycle
disappeared, and the sensation stopped, leaving my mind
restored to its comforting mode of sadness.

*

As your former hero Pablo Casals once put it, to be a musician
is to recognise the soul that lives in objects. A soul
that may be made most visible by a Steinway or a Stradivari,
or may be most well expressed by a Bach or a Mozart, but
that is always there, in every thing of substance.

Of course, I am not a musician. I sell antiques, but the
same knowledge applies. You sit all day in a shop, with
the old clocks and the tables and the chairs, the plates and the
bureaus, and you feel just like them. Just another object that
has lived through events it could not change, crafted and transformed,
forced to sit and wait in a kind of limbo, its fate as
unknown as all the others'.

A customer came in one afternoon – a bullish man of
the Yorkshire mould. The sort of chap within whom arrogance
and ignorance compete for top billing. He grumbled
his way around from price tag to price tag, telling Cynthia
and myself that he'd be very surprised if we'd get this much
for an art nouveau figurine, or that much for a reading
table.

'Oh,' said Cynthia. 'But it's rosewood.'

'Makes no difference,' the man said.

'And it's early Georgian.'

'Early Mesopotamian wouldn't justify that price.'

By that point, I'd had enough.

'There are two types of customer for antiques,' I told him.
'There are those who appreciate an object's soul, and understand
that, truly, even the smallest items – the sauce ladles,
the thimbles, the silver barrel nutmeg graters – can only ever
be undervalued. These I would call the true aficionados, the
people who appreciate all the lives that have grated with, or
worn, or poured, or sat at, or cried near, or dreamed upon,
or cried against, or fallen in love in the same room as such
things. These are the people who like to frequent an establishment
such as Cave Antiques.'

He stood there, mirroring Cynthia's widening mouth and
eyes, as unlikely to interrupt as the figure in his hand. The
Girl with a Tambourine, decorated in green and pink enamels.
I had bought it originally as part of a pair. The other one had
dropped and smashed when I had collided with the chest on
my way to reach Reuben, the night he died.

I continued: 'Whereas the other type, the type I might
just see before me now, is the customer who sees an object
as the sum of the materials with which it has been made.
The customer who does not understand or acknowledge the
hands that went into its making, or the centuries-long affection
which various and long-dead owners have bestowed upon
said item. No, these people are ignorant of such matters.
They don't care for them. They see numbers where they
should see beauty. They look at the face of a brass dial clock
and see only the time.'

The man stood there, almost as bemused as myself by
this outburst. 'I was going to buy this for my wife's birthday,'
he said, placing the art nouveau figure back where it came
from. 'But with service like this I think I'll take my custom
elsewhere.'

After he left I had Cynthia to deal with. 'Terence, what on
earth has got into you?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'I just didn't like the way he was talking
to you.'

'Good God, Terence. I'm old and ugly enough to look after
myself. We just lost a sale there.'

'I know, I'm sorry. It wasn't about him. I'm sorry.'

She sighed. 'You know what you need, don't you?'

I shook my head.

'You need to get away. You and Bryony. A holiday. I could
look after the shop for a week.'

A holiday. Even the word seemed preposterous. A dancing
jester at a wake, handing out picture postcards. It prompted
a fleeting blink of a memory. Heading south on a French
motorway with you and Reuben asleep in the back, your bodies
curved towards each other like closed brackets.

'No, Cynthia, I don't think so,' I said, but all afternoon the
idea grew and grew.

Maybe it wasn't so preposterous after all. Maybe this was
our opportunity to restore things. To pick up all the broken
pieces and put things back the way they once were. Yes, this
was the chance to heal our fractured souls.

Ever since the funeral I had been aware of slight changes to
your behaviour.

Instead of the sombre strains of Pablo Casals, or your own
cello, I would hear a different kind of music coming from
your room. A violent and ugly kind of noise that I would ask
you to turn down almost every evening.

You rarely practised your cello, now. You still went to
your lesson at the music college every week, but when I
asked how it went I'd get shrugs or small hums in return.
A friend I had never heard about – Imogen – suddenly
became someone you had to call every evening. Your
bedroom door would always be closed and I would sometimes
stand there behind it, trying to work out if you were
on your bed or at your computer. I noticed, once, when
you stepped out, that you'd taken your poster of Pablo Casals
down from the wall. The old cello maestro who had always
been such an inspiration.

It seemed incredible. I thought that man was your idol.

You had adored his interpretation of Bach's cello suites. You
had even ordered that old footage from the library. Pablo, aged
ninety-four, conducting a special concert at the United Nations.
The tiny old man, his time-creased face reflecting perfectly
the strain and emotion of the orchestral movements until there
seemed to be no difference between them, the man and the
music, so that each refrain heard in that grand hall seemed to
be a direct leaking of his soul.

You had devoured his memoirs, and told me to read them
too. The story I remember now was when he and a few
companions walked up Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco.
Pablo was in his eighties, and had felt very weak and tired
that morning, but to the bemusement of his friends had
insisted that he still wanted to climb the mountain. They
agreed to go with him but then, during the descent, disaster
struck. Do you remember that story?

A large boulder had become dislodged further up the mountainside
and was now hurtling towards them. The boulder missed
all of his companions but, having seen it, Pablo froze. As it
shot past, the giant rock managed to hit and smash Pablo's left
hand, his fingering hand. His friends looked with horror at the
mangled, blood-soaked fingers, but Pablo showed no sign of
pain or fear. In fact, he was overwhelmed with a kind of relief,
and thanked God he would never have to play the cello again.

'A gift can also be a curse,' wrote the man who had felt
enslaved by his art since he was a child. The man who had
anxiety attacks before every single performance.

This last fact that had always comforted you when playing
in public. And so it made no sense, with the annual York
Drama and Music Festival not too far away, that you would
want to take down his poster. A trivial issue, I suppose, but
one I viewed as symptomatic of a broader change.

Maybe I should have been firmer with you then.

Perhaps I shouldn't have let you shut yourself away. At the
time, though, I imagined this was your way of grieving. In
tribute to the life of your brother you were shrouding yourself
in the same mystery.

What I didn't realise was that this retreat would continue,
that you would slip further and further away from me until
the point at which I couldn't call you back.

As I flicked through the travel section of the newspaper I saw
it – a weak black-and-white photograph of the Colosseum.
'Price includes flights and six-night stay in the Hotel Raphael.'

The city of faith and antiquity and perspective, the place
people go to mourn and accept the transient nature of human
life, where old temples and frescoes outlive us all. Such was
my thinking.

Oh, pity the folly of a desperate mind!

Do you remember that sunny evening we walked to Cynthia's
and I had to stop halfway down Winchelsea Avenue? You
asked me what the matter was and I told you I didn't know,
that I just felt a bit dizzy. It was the feeling I had experienced
at the church, and when selling Reuben's bicycle. A
darkening of vision accompanied by a kind of tingling towards
the rear of my skull. Similar, I suppose, to pins and needles,
only this felt warmer, as though tiny fires were raging through
the dark spaces of my mind, generating sparks that wriggled
and danced before losing their glow. And these fires were
burning those parts of me that knew when and where I was,
leaving me for a moment deprived of all identity.

I turned to see the house I had passed, number 17, and it
looked as depressing as all the others on the street. I told
myself to keep my head. It was only a dose of the shudders,
I reasoned. A result of frayed nerves and poor sleep, nothing
more. Although if you ever wondered why we never walked
that way again, you have the reason.

By the time we reached Cynthia's bungalow I was feeling much
better, and quite hungry. Although of course one can never
be quite hungry enough for one of Cynthia's curries.

'It's an authentic Goan recipe,' she said, as it slopped onto
our plates. 'I printed it out from the computer. It was meant
to be mild but I'm worried I might have overdone it a little
with the chilli.'

'Oh, I'm sure it's fine,' I told her, as I tried to avert my eyes
from the charcoal sketch of a nude on the table. We must
have arrived before she had time to frame it. A study of creased
female flesh from one of her life-drawing classes.

'Mmm, it's lovely,' you said, enjoying your first mouthful.
You actually sounded like you meant it.

Cynthia smiled at you, and seemed for a moment mildly
entranced. 'Oh good. Good. Not too hot?'

'No,' you said, although within five minutes you were in
the kitchen topping up your glass of water.

'I've thought about what you said,' I told Cynthia, in a
hushed tone, as you ran the tap. 'And I think you might be
right. I'm going to book a holiday.'

'Good, Terence. Good. Have you told Bryony?'

'No,' I said. 'I'm going to keep it a surprise.'

'Well, maybe you should consult her first.'

I shook my head. 'She's always loved surp—'

You were back, drinking from your glass, feeling our admiring
eyes upon your neck. Two old ducks in awe of a swan.

Somehow, we made it through the curry. A feat of endurance
on all our parts I imagine, and Cynthia tried to humour us
with some of her old am dram stories. 'It was on the opening
night of
The Glass Menagerie
. . . Ray was in his toga . . . I was
sitting in the green room . . . It was the third act . . . There I
was, queen of the fairies . . . And someone broke wind in the
audience . . . Oh, our faces!'

And then she went quiet, keeping her dark lips in position
even after her smile had died. For quite a while she
stared into some indeterminate space between us, as the
sadness shone in her eyes.

'It was less than a year ago, wasn't it?' she said, after a
while. 'When Reuben did his work experience at the theatre?'

I tried to think. Yes. It must have been. You had spent a
week at the music college, arranged weeks in advance, while
Reuben was still unsorted right up to the last moment. If it
wasn't for Cynthia having a word with David wotsit then he'd
have been in all sorts of trouble at school.

'Yes,' you said. 'It was a year ago.'

Your grandmother gave a sad laugh. 'Poor boy. Having to
do it the week of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Stuck outside looking after a donkey every day!'

'Yes,' I said. 'Yes.'

'Did you ever see it?' Cynthia asked me. 'You weren't there,
were you? When he was struggling to push that bloody creature
on the stage?'

'No,' I said. 'No. I had a meeting, I think. A dealer. I
can't remember.'

You smiled a distant smile. 'I was there.'

'Yes,' Cynthia nodded. 'Yes, you were. You were.' She saw
you looking at her unframed sketch and waited for the silence
to run its course. 'Now, I must tell you what happened at
life drawing . . .'

Two days before the end of your term we sat upstairs, eating
breakfast together. You were in the same uniform you had
been in the previous morning, your hair in an identical style,
yet as you sat there eating your limp cornflakes I couldn't help
but notice that you looked transformed.

'Dad? What's up? You're creeping me out.'

I couldn't speak. I couldn't tell you that I was made numb,
made petrified by your sudden beauty.

Of course, you had always been a pleasure on the eye. I
had never been able to ignore the way strangers had shied
away from Reuben's frowning, birthmarked face to focus on
yours. Nor had I been surprised when Mrs Weeks had wanted
to paint your portrait. Yet rather than a source of pride, that
morning I must confess your face triggered a startling fear.

Someone had overfilled the cup. You were never meant to
look quite this way. Oh certainly, your mother had been a
gorgeous creature in her youth, yet her beauty was an acquired
taste. Like Bow porcelain. Or art nouveau. When I first met
her she required a certain Byronic imagination to render her
wholly perfect. Those slight, asymmetric flaws were part of
her charm.

What troubled me was the obvious nature of your loveliness.
In that tiny last skip from girlhood to womanhood, in
that most subtle overnight alteration, you had bloomed from
a limber elf-child into a Juliet, a Dido, a Venus. My fear was
about the impact this beauty would have on the male population.
After all, boys don't acquire such taste. It is there from
the start, formed in the bliss of their womb-warmed dreams,
their sole incentive for being born.

I knew that this spelt trouble. I knew that you would soon
be inspiring the wrong kind of attention. Boys would buzz
around you and I feared you would enjoy that buzz, welcome
it, walk like a novice beekeeper straight into it, unaware of
any potential sting.

'Dad. Stop staring. It's impolite.'

Tell me, how do you respond? 'My daughter, my darling
Petal, you must never leave the house again.'

No.

'Your eyes,' I said. 'Have you done something to them? Are
you wearing make-up?'

'A bit.'

'For school?'

'You can wear make-up to school now, Dad. It's not 1932.

It's not a nunnery.'

'Green eyeshadow?'

'It's two days before the holidays. Nobody cares.'

I knew I shouldn't have been overly concerned. After all,
there were only girls at school. But what about afterwards?
What about your walk home? You must surely have crossed
paths with the lowly specimens from St John's. In my mind
I saw you laughing. In my mind I saw an anonymous boy's
anonymous arm around your shoulder, steering you down a
leafy, houseless path. And then the vision became less anonymous.
It became him. It became that boy, Denny.

'I will drive you to school. And I'll pick you up.'

'Dad, why? You haven't driven me to school since I was
twelve. It's only up the road.'

'I worry about you, that's all. Please, let me drive you.

And let me pick you up. Cynthia will be here to look after
the shop. Please.'

I squeezed so much into that final 'please' that a flash of
your old self returned. You probably realised I was thinking
about Reuben, that I was feeling guilty for letting him slip
beyond my radar so many times.

You shrugged. 'Do whatever you like.'

In the car I told you about Rome.

'Rome?' You said it as though it were the name of a former
friend who had let you down.

'I booked it last week.'

'Why didn't you tell me?' I could feel the blast of your stare,
even as I kept my eyes on the road.

'Well, I thought it would be a rather jolly surprise.'

'I'm meant to be going out with Imogen next Monday.'

'Going out?'

'I mean, going around. To see her.'

'Well, can't it wait? I'm sure she'll still be visible the following
Monday.'

'When do we come back?'

'On the thirtieth, so the world won't end. And anyway, you
always told me you wanted to go to Rome. You've wanted to
sit on the Spanish Steps since you were ten. Since
Roman
Holiday
. Or have you changed?'

You scowled. 'What does that mean?'

'It means: have you changed?'

'Since I was ten?'

'No. Since . . . never mind.'

Two boys crossed at the lights, nudging and staring, making
wild simian noises at the sight of you. You scrunched your nose
in disgust but I detected the smile. Embarrassed, flattered.

'You still want to see the Sistine Chapel, don't you?'

You shrugged. 'I suppose.'

'And Petal, I couldn't help noticing, why have you taken
the poster down from your room?'

'What poster?'

'The Pablo Casals poster. I thought he was your hero.'

Another shrug. 'It gives me the creeps.'

'What?'

'At night. I feel like he's looking at me. I feel his eyes staring
at me.'

It felt like blasphemy. Those harmless eyes of that former
ambassador for peace, those eyes that had to be closed every
time he played to a public audience. My anger was tempered
by a guilty memory of me standing in your doorway, watching
you sleep.

'Well, I don't see why you couldn't have put it on the opposite
wall,' I said.

'What's the big deal?' Your voice was fading now, the anger
at a dull pitch, as though a part of you was already beyond
the school gates, inside the day you had to live.

'There's no "big deal." Anyway, I think Rome will be the
perfect tonic, for both of us. Don't you?'

You never answered. I pulled up by a lamp post, you stepped
out of the car and I fought to let you go, for you to leave that
sanctuary and get sucked in, like a weak molecule, towards
that swarm of girls making their way to the school entrance.

'Bye, Bryony. Be careful.'

And then I stayed there a second longer, gripping the steering
wheel as though it was the last solid thing in the world, and
found the courage needed to ignore the black flies and Reuben's
whisper in my ear – 'Look, Dad, I'm getting stronger' – and
drive home.