Be Near Me (14 page)

'Nothing chemical,' she said.

'Just a little to get them going.'

'No,' she said. 'I'd sooner stop the garden than begin using harmful stuff out here.'

'I'm going to shove in some pesticide when you're not looking,' I said.

'You dare.'

'So what about nutrients for the back wall, then?' I said.

'These bushes are costing a fortune and they don't look promising.'

'Put a banana peel in the soil,' she said. 'And better manure. We can take a trip out to the farms and get it free.' She would often put her hands at the base of her spine, as if to prop herself up.

'Maybe you shouldn't bend down so much, Mrs Poole,' I said. 'Just until you're feeling better.'

The days seemed to pass along with a certain idle grace. I hadn't seen as much of Mark and Lisa, and it was all quiet morning Masses, Benedictions at Nazareth House, concerts, christenings and diocesan meetings at the Bishop's house in Ayr. I must have been lulled by it all, for I paid too little attention to the changes in Mrs Poole; week by week, she lost touch with that old sense of herself, turning slowly away from the garden, from French and her former enthusiasms.

'What's the story?' she said on one of her Fridays.

'Well,' I said, 'I've sacked the organist.'

'That's a sure sign of age,' she said. 'You're now going around sacking people. It'll be me next.'

'Don't be like that,' I said. 'Though his Philistine views were similar to your own when it came to the organ music of Thomas Tallis.'

'Dark stuff,' said Mrs Poole. 'Wailing music for those who have trouble putting a smile on their faces.'

'What's smiling got to do with it?'

'You might well ask,' she said. 'But we'll be enjoying no lessons in the matter from Thomas bloody Tallis.'

I could see it was going to be one of those days when Mrs Poole felt less than her best and blamed everybody.

'Now what am I doing with this rhubarb?' she said.

'Stewed,' I said. 'I thought we agreed on Monday. It's in the
Fruit Book.'

'Strictly speaking, as you might say,' she said, 'it's not actually a fruit.'

'It's a pre-fruit,' I said.

'Semi-fruit,' she said. 'It says here: "The Greeks called this medicinal rhubarb
rha barbaron,
because it reached them via foreigners, barbarians, down the river we call the Volga and they called the Rha." The leaves were toxic.'

'That's not the English kind,' I said. 'We only use the young pink stalks.'

'Who's "we"?' Mrs Poole said. 'Would that be the royal a ›o> we ?

'Oh, shush,' I said.

Mrs Poole began laying pieces into a pan and squeezing an orange over them and a sprinkling of sugar. I opened the kitchen door and breathed in something of the garden bushes, took a trowel from the windowsill and turned some soil in the border. Back inside, Mrs Poole was placing the pan on a large flame. 'Even the English kind has medicinal qualities,' I said. 'You should eat lots of it. Do you no end of good.'

'I don't think rhubarb's the remedy,' she said, without looking up.

'Maybe it's the bitterness,' I said. 'We always think bitterness is good for us. Wouldn't you say?'

'I don't know anything about it,' she said, folding the dish cloths over the oven handle.

'It's true,' I said, 'that rhubarb contains a lot of oxalic acid, and that can adversely affect the absorption of calcium and iron. You ought to watch out for that.'

Mrs Poole walked into the sitting room with a small silence gathering in her wake. I knew I had a tendency sometimes to get things wrong with people, saying too much, placing myself too centrally in other people's worries about themselves, as if the worry might naturally take second place to my superintendence of it. Mrs Poole had a way of making a room obey her weather like nobody else. 'Would you come through here, Father?' she said. And when I went into the room she was standing beside the piano biting her nails. 'I know you're trying to be helpful,' she said. 'I know you're trying to be kind. But you must stop talking to me about remedies and cures. It's offensive.'

'I don't know what you mean,' I said.

'Yes, you do. In some way it makes it easier for you, doesn't it? It makes it easier to make light of what's happening and pretend I've got some ... some stupid ailment. That's just the sort of person you are, Father David. You think manners and conversation can get us round anything at all. But the truth is...'

'Mrs Poole...'

'The truth, Father David, is that I have cancer. Not just one but two kinds. That's that. The truth is you will have to pay me off soon because I am not going to ... And God knows what will come next.' Her voice was even stronger perhaps than she had meant; its force engulfed the calm of the sitting room.

'I understand,' I said.

'It is not your job to
understand
,' she said. 'It is not your job to make things smaller than they are.'

'I'm sorry if I have seemed to do that.'

'You do it every time I see you,' she said. 'And I expect more than that from you. I expect you to help me prepare.'

Standing there listening to Mrs Poole, I remembered a speech she had made, a speech about death that had come to seem like a premonition of her illness. She was happier in those first months of my ministry, relieved almost to be spending time with someone who was ready to be amused by her and find her interesting. We were out in the garden and she was knocking frost off some useless-looking bulbs.

'People don't listen,' she had said. 'Or they don't remember. And you do both, Father David, at least some of the time, so I'm telling you something important. If you're around here I want you to make sure I get a green funeral. I don't want a wooden coffin and I don't want a headstone. Do you hear me? I want to be part of an ecosystem. Do you know about that? There are places where they put you down in a cardboard box and plant a tree. That's it. That's all I want and I need you to make sure it happens. Do you hear?'

'Where is this place?'

'I've got it all written down,' she said. 'It's near Kelso. I put the information in a tin where the insurance policies are kept. The cupboard in my kitchen, above the kettle. A woodland burial it's called. I couldn't suffer to have anything else done around this town.'

'Happy subject for a cold afternoon,' I said.

'Never mind. You take care of it. It's the best thing you can do now if you care about the environment. Plant bodies.'

She had stuck a bulb into the soil. 'It's all the rage,' she said, smiling. 'Some people get buried under vineyards.'

'I've never heard of that.'

'Aye,' she said. 'It's a good one, isn't it? Live a bad life, become a good vintage.' We laughed as I leaned into the path to lift the secateurs. Mrs Poole's efficiency seemed easily to stretch from the matter of patting down the soil around the cheap bulbs to contemplating her own death. 'Some people go for a thing called Eternal Reefs,' she said.

'What's that?'

'It's mainly in America. In Florida. You know what they're like over there in America. They make a block out of your ashes and attach them to a live coral reef. See what I mean? They make you part of the sea after you die.'

'That's extraordinary.'

'Aye,' she said. 'The waves coming over ye. But it wouldn't work here. Can you imagine it in Ayrshire? That sludge boat out of Glasgow's only just stopped running every day. Do you know it was carrying 3,000 tons of sewage out there and dropping it just south of Garroch Head?'

'Really?'

'Since 1914! Every day!'

'And they would just drop the sewage out there?'

'Certainly,' she said. 'Two boats as well. Every day out there dumping the sewage. The European Union put a stop to that environmental disaster. But you wouldn't want to be a bit of coral on the west coast, that's for sure.'

'I don't suppose.'

'No,' she said. 'It's the woodland burial for me. Promise me you'll see to it if you're around here when my time's up.'

'I don't think that's at all likely, Mrs Poole. But, of course, I promise.'

I was reminded of this during our talk in the sitting room, her dark-circled eyes serious and unrelenting, each rimmed with sudden antipathy and staring at me from her position on the piano stool. 'I know you are afraid of death, Father,' she said. 'That must be a wee bit unusual in a man of the cloth. You fear death. You don't have any feeling for risk at all, and that's your problem.'

She took out a tissue and wiped her nose.

'It's because you haven't lived enough, Father. You haven't risked anything in life.'

I sat down on the sofa.

'That is not right, Mrs Poole. I have risked many things. A great many things. The person sitting here is the sum of their failures.'

'There's no need to be so dramatic,' she said. 'You're such an actor when you don't have to be.'

'Forgive me,' I said. 'I just want to help you.'

'Well, if you want to help me then
help
me.'

She got up and went round the room dusting shelves and plumping cushions. 'You have changed,' she said. 'You don't sit and read now like you did when I first knew you. I found that quite nice, to see a man reading a book and improving himself. Jack would never do that. He's not a stupid man, but he's like a lot of people round here: he couldn't be at peace with himself for the length of time it takes to read a book. He's not got the patience. It's all gab, gab, gab with these people—they never stop—and it's silence that embarrasses them, not stupidity or anything like that. Jack can talk. He rings everybody up when he's got a drink in him. He'll phone Irene. I tell her just to put the phone down on him but she's a nice person, my sister.'

'But you don't phone?'

'Not much, no. I don't have the words for them. But Jack does. It's part of the old charm. He'll phone Australia and all sorts. Cousins he hasn't seen for years. I wouldn't know what to say to them.'

'We have our talks in here.'

'That's different,' she said. 'This has been a thoughtful house. But you have changed, Father. You don't prepare for your Masses any more. You don't listen to the parishioners. The people in the geriatric ward at Ravenspark say they haven't seen you for four weeks.'

She turned to look at me.

'You've been such a ... such an inspiring person, Father David. Just in the way you lived. The way you appreciated things.'

'I've not gone anywhere, Mrs Poole.'

'Maybe you have,' she said. 'I was just upstairs. What's that hair gel doing on the bathroom shelf?'

I wanted to sleep but I couldn't. I stood at the bedroom window at two in the morning. My mother often found her characters at such times, peering into the dark to see those children of history, Mary, Queen of Scots in a scarlet pinafore, playing on the floor as her French mother wrote letters in the upper apartments of Stirling Castle. Mary, the daughter of debate, would raise her arms to her mother, and the lady of Guise would bend from her desk to lift the child and wipe the tears from her eyes. My mother's nights were empty of sleep but filled with beautiful craft.

The fog was low on the ground, full of yellow lamplight, and it moved like an Old Testament menace through the streets of Dalgarnock, clouding the houses of the sleeping town. Late in his life, Chopin came to Scotland and played at the Merchants' Hall in Glasgow, more than half empty that day, though a miracle occurred to lift his spirits: Princess Czartoryski, his former pupil, came from London to make something light and grand of the Scottish rain. Chopin wrote a letter from Scotland that strikes me now as having the texture of my own memory. I found the words written on the flyleaf of my Penguin Ovid.

'One day,' he wrote, 'after I had played to them and some of the Scottish ladies had sung their songs, they brought out a kind of accordion and she began playing on it the most dreadful tunes with the utmost gravity. Those who know some of my works say to me in French: please play me your Second Sigh.' (The English edition of the Two Nocturnes Opus 37 was entitled
Les Soupirs,
'The Sighs'.) 'I love your bells,' Chopin reports them as saying. 'And every comment ends with the words
leik water,
which means my music flows like water. And they all look down at their hands while playing the wrong notes with feeling.'

I was thinking of Chopin that night and looking into the lights when my phone began to buzz on the windowsill like an angry bluebottle. It was a text from Mark. 'Finished work. Whassup?'

'You should go home,' I texted back.

Him: 'Get lost. It's Saturday night.'

Me: 'Sunday morning.'

Him: 'Whatever. Me panelled. Going for a walk. Meet me at the Lugar tunnel in 25 if you want.'

The lane was wet and the night cold. I opened my umbrella, turned my collar up and walked past the library and the bowling green, where tall trees sheltered the well-tended grass. Mark was already there when I arrived; the dark included him. I made him out by the orange glow of his cigarette. The Lugar tunnel connected the old parish with the housing estate, and Mark lorded it there that night in dead silence, like a border guard at the edge of some mystifying country. He smelled of petrol and spearmint gum, and the ground beneath us crunched with broken glass. 'Welcome to Provoland,' he said.

'The what?'

'The Provos. The Provisionals.'

'Don't be ridiculous, Mark,' I said, breaking a piece of glass with the point of my umbrella. 'You've never been to Ireland. What has the IRA got to do with you?'

'My blood's been to Ireland,' he said. 'It started across the water, so don't go all English on me. You have to watch yourself around here with all these Orange bastards.'

'This is Scotland,' I said. 'Haven't you got enough problems without importing fresh ones from Northern Ireland?'

'Get a grip,' he said. 'You're a visitor here.'

'The town's not that bad.'

'Cop on,' he said. 'Five of the pubs up there are Ulster Volunteer pubs. I know your head's in the fucken clouds, Father, that's where it's supposed to be. But what kind of place do you think this is? Do you actually know where you're living? Are you blind or what?'