Mefisto (2 page)

My mother took me for walks, first in a pram, then tottering ahead of her on a sort of reins, then dawdling farther and farther behind her along the hedgerows. Sometimes we went as far as Ashburn and wandered through the unkempt grounds. She showed me the cottage where she was born, behind the stables. Ashburn would be for her always an idyll. The life of the big house, at the far fringes of which she had hovered longingly, she remembered as a languorous mime to the music of tick-tocking tennis balls across green lawns and the far-off bleat of the huntsman’s horn on frosty mornings, a scene small and distant, yet perfectly, preciously detailed, atinkle with tiny laughter, like a picture glimpsed of eighteenth-century aristocrats at play in a dappled glade. In the midst of this pretty pastoral stood the cottage, where the frog king Jack Kay had reigned. Here her memories were more precise, of whitewash, and rats in the thatch, the tin bath in front of the fire on Saturday nights, a speckled hen standing on one leg in a patch of sun in the kitchen doorway. And the endless squabbles, of course, the shouting, the boxed ears. Now the stables were falling, the forge where Jack Kay had worked was silent. One day, on an overgrown path, under a huge tree, we met Miss Kitty, the last of the Ashburns of Ashburn Park, a distracted and not very clean maiden lady with a great beaked nose and tangled hair, who talked to us calmly enough for a bit, then turned abruptly and ordered us off the estate, waving her arms and shouting.

There were other spectacles, other frights. I have only a single recollection of Grandfather Swan, a big effigy sitting up in bed laughing in the little house in Queen Street. It was Easter morning, and I was five years old. The sick-room smelled of pipe tobacco and piss. There was a window open beside the bed. The sunlight outside glittered after a recent shower. Grandfather Swan had been shaving, the bowl and cut-throat and bit of looking-glass were still beside him, and there was a fleck of fresh blood on the collar of his nightshirt. His hands trembled, apart from that he seemed quite hale. But he was dying. I was conscious of the solemnity of the occasion. Hard fingers prodded me between the shoulder-blades, and I stepped forward, gazing in awe at the old man’s taut white brow and big moustache, the agate nails, the swept-back spikes of iron-grey hair that made it seem as if some force were dragging the head away and up, to the window, to the shining roofs, to the spring sky itself, pale blue and chill like his eyes. He must have talked to me, but I remember only his laugh, not so much a sound as something that surrounded him, like an aura, and not at all benign. For a long time death was to seem a sort of disembodied, sinister merriment sitting in wait for me in that fetid little room.

And yet, I wonder. Is this really a picture of Grandfather Swan, or did I in my imagination that Easter morn wishfully substitute another, tougher old man for this one who was doomed? I mean Jack Kay. The laugh, the alarming fingernails, the wirebrush moustache stained yellow in the middle, all these are his, surely? Jack Kay. To me he was always eighty. He wore his years like a badge of tenacity, grimly, with a kind of truculence. But let me have done with him. He lived at Ashburn, and worked the forge. He was an intermittent drunkard. He married Martha somebody, I forget the name, a scullery maid at the big house. They had children. They were unhappy.

Or at least Martha was. I do not see her clearly. She and Granny Swan died about the same time. They blur into each other, two put-upon old women, somehow not quite life-sized, dropsical, dressed in black, always unwell, always complaining. Their voices are a faint, background murmur, like the twittering of mice behind a wainscot. They must have had some effect, must have contributed a gene or two, yet there remains almost nothing of them. In the matter of heredity they were no match for their menfolk. All the same, there is a memory, which, though neither woman is really in it, is their inspiration. One of those windy damp days of early autumn, with a sky of low, dove-grey cloud, the shining pavements plastered with leaves, and an empty dustbin rolling on its side in the middle of the road. Someone had told me my granny was dead. The news, far from being sad, was strangely exhilarating, and there on that street suddenly I was filled with a snug excitement, which I could not explain, but which was somehow to do with life, with the future. I was not thinking of the living woman, she had been of scant significance to me. In death, however, she had become one with those secret touchstones the thought of which comforted and mysteriously sustained me: small lost animals, the picturesque poor, warnings of gales at sea, the naked feet of Franciscans.

I don’t know which of the two women it was that had died. Let the image of that silvery light on that rainy road be a memorial, however paltry, to them both.

My father in these early memories is a remote, enigmatic and yet peculiarly vivid figure. He worked as a tallyman for a grain merchant. He smelled of chaff, dust, jute, all dry things. He had asthma, and a bad leg. His silences, into which a remark about the weather or a threat of death would drop alike without trace, were a force in our house, like a dull drumming that has gone on for so long it has ceased to be heard but is still vaguely, disturbingly felt. His presence, diffident and fleeting, lent a mysterious weight to the most trivial occasion. He took me to the Fort mountain one day on the bar of his bicycle. It was September, clear and still. The heather was in bloom. We sat on a ditch eating sandwiches, and drinking tepid milk out of lemonade bottles that my mother had filled for us and corked with twists of paper. The sanatorium was high up behind us, hidden among pines except for the steep-pitched roof and a tall cluster of chimneys, closed, silent, alluring. I toyed dreamily with the thought of myself reclining in a timeless swoon on the veranda up there, swaddled in blankets, with the dazzling white building at my back and the sun slowly falling down the sky in front of me, and a wireless somewhere quietly playing danceband music. My father wore a flat cap and a heavy, square-cut overcoat, a size too big for him, that smelled of mothballs. He pointed out a hawk wheeling in the zenith.

– Take the eye out of you, he said, one of them lads.

He was a short man, with long arms and bowed legs. His head was small, which made his trunk seem weightier than it was. With those limbs, that sharp face, the close-set dark eyes, he had something of those stunted little warriors, the dark-haired ones, Pict or Firbolg, I don’t know, who stalk the far borders of history. I can see him, in pelts and pointed shoon, limping at twilight through the bracken. A small man, whom the vengeful gods have overlooked. A survivor.

Sometimes I catch myself dreaming that dream in which childhood is an endless festival, with bands of blond children sweeping through the streets in sunlight, laughing. I can almost see the tunics, the sandalled feet, the white-robed elders watching indulgently from the olive tree’s shade. Something must have fed this Attic fantasy, a game of tag, perhaps, on a Sunday evening in summer, the houses open to the tender air, and mothers on the doorsteps, talking, and someone’s sister, in her first lipstick, leaning at gaze out of an upstairs window.

The town was twelve thousand souls, three churches and a Methodist hall, a narrow main street, a disused anthracite mine, a river and a silted harbour. Fragments of the past stuck up through the present, rocks in the stream of time: a Viking burial mound, a Norman tower, a stump of immemorial wall like a broken molar. History was rich there. Giraldus Cambrensis knew that shore. The Templars had kept a hospice on the Spike peninsula. The region had played its part in more than one failed uprising. By now the splendour had faded. There was too, I almost forgot, the great war against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had watched the final rout: a priest punching in the belly a skinny young man in a mac, the crowd shouting, the bundles of
The Watchtower
flying in the air. And there was a celebrated murder, never solved, an old woman battered to death one dark night in her sweetshop down a lane. It was the stuff of nightmares, the body behind the counter, the bottled sweets, the blood.

A picture of the town hangs in my mind, like one of those priceless yet not much prized medieval miniatures, its provenance uncertain, its symbols no longer quite explicable, the translucency of its faded colours lending it a quaint, accidental charm. Can it really all be so long ago, so different, or is this antique tawny patina only the varnish which memory applies even to a recent past? It’s true, there is a lacquered quality to the light of those remembered days. The grey of a wet afternoon in winter would be the aptest shade, yet I think of a grocer’s brass scales standing in a beam of dusty sunlight, a bit of smooth blue china – they were called chaynies – found in the garden and kept for years, and there blooms before my inward gaze the glow of pale gold wings in a pellucid, Limbourg-blue sky.

Along with the tower and the broken wall there were the human antiquities, the maimed and the mad, the hunchbacks, the frantic old crones in their bonnets and black coats, and the mongols, with their little eyes and bad feet and sweet smiles, gambolling at the heels of touchingly middle-aged mothers. They were all of them a sort of brotherhood, in which I was a mere acolyte. It had its high priests too. There was the little man who came one summer to stay with relatives on the other side of our square. He wore blue suits and shiny shoes, pearl cufflinks, a ruby ring. He had a large handsome head and a barrel chest. His hair was a masterpiece, black and smooth as shellac, as if a gramophone record had been moulded to his skull. He rode an outsize tricycle. Astride this machine he held court under the trees of the square, surrounded by a mesmerized crowd of children, his arms folded and one gleaming toecap touching the ground with balletic delicacy. He was in a way the ideal adult, bejewelled, primped and pomaded, magisterially self-possessed, and just four feet tall. His manners were exquisite. Such tact! In his presence I felt hardly different from ordinary children.

I went to the convent school. Corridors painted a light shade of sick, tall windows with sash cords taut as a noose, and nuns, a species of large black raptor, swooping through the classrooms, their rosaries clacking like jesses. I feared my classmates, and despised them too. I can see them still, their gargoyle faces, the kiss curls, the snot. My name for some reason they found funny. They would bring their brothers or their big sisters to confront me in the playground.

– There he is, ask him.

– You, what’s your name?

– Nobody.

– Come on, say it!

And they would get me by the scruff.

– Gabriel … ow! … Gabriel Swan.

It sent them into fits, it never failed.

In my class there was another pair of, yes, of identical twins, listless little fellows with pale eyes and knobbly, defenceless knees. I was fascinated. They were so calm, so unconcerned, as if being alike were a trick they had mastered long ago, and thought nothing of any more. They could have had such a time, playing pranks, switching places, fooling everybody. That was what fascinated me, the thought of being able to escape effortlessly, as if by magic, into another name, another self – that, and the ease too with which they could assert their separate identities, simply by walking away from each other. Apart, each twin was himself. Only together were they a freak.

But I, I had something always beside me. It was not a presence, but a momentous absence. From it there was no escape. A connecting cord remained, which parturition and even death had not broken, along which by subtle tugs and thrums I sensed what was not there. No living double could have been so tenacious as this dead one. Emptiness weighed on me. It seemed to me I was not all my own, that I was being shared. If I fell, say, and cut my knee, I would be aware immediately of an echo, a kind of chime, as of a wine-glass shattering somewhere out of sight, and I would feel a soft shock like that when the dreamer on the brink of blackness puts a foot on a step which is not there. Perhaps the pain was lessened – how would I have known?

Sometimes this sense of being burdened, of being somehow imposed upon, gave way to a vague and seemingly objectless yearning. One wet afternoon, at the home of a friend of my mother’s who was a midwife, I got my hands on a manual of obstetrics which I pored over hotly for five tingling minutes, quaking in excitement and fear at all this amazing new knowledge. It was not, however, the gynaecological surprises that held me, slack-jawed and softly panting, as if I had stumbled on the most entrancing erotica, but that section of glossy, rubensesque colour plates depicting some of mother nature’s more lavish mistakes, the scrambled blastomeres, the androgynes welded at hip or breast, the bicipitous monsters with tiny webbed hands and cloven spines, all those queer, inseverable things among which I and my phantom brother might have been one more.

It seems out of all this somehow that my gift for numbers grew. From the beginning, I suppose, I was obsessed with the mystery of the unit, and everything else followed. Even yet I cannot see a one and a zero juxtaposed without feeling deep within me the vibration of a dark, answering note. Before I could talk I had been able to count, laying out my building blocks in ranked squares, screaming if anyone dared to disturb them. I remember a toy abacus that I treasured for years, with multicoloured wooden beads, and a wooden frame, and little carved feet for it to stand on. My party piece was to add up large numbers instantly in my head, frowning, a hand to my brow, my eyes downcast. It was not the manipulation of things that pleased me, the mere facility, but the sense of order I felt, of harmony, of symmetry and completeness.

ST STEPHEN
’
S SCHOOL
stood on a hill in the middle of the town, a tall, narrow, red-brick building with a black slate roof and a tin weathercock. I think of damp flagstones and the crash of boots, rain in the yard, and the smell of drains, and something else, a sense of enclosure, of faces averted from the world in holy fright. On my first day there I sat with the other new boys in solemn silence while a red-haired master reached into an immensely deep pocket and brought out lovingly a leather strap.