Observatory Mansions (28 page)

Tearsham Park
.

Father, in his observatory: Today when I came up here, I saw that they had taken my telescope away.

Father, descending the stairs: The rooms of Tearsham Park are bare. There are only two beds left in the house. All else is gone. They’ve gutted my house. All my family’s collections are out on the single strip of grassland left.

Father, sitting on a bench in Tearsham Park Gardens: All around are my family’s objects. I look about me. There is my telescope! There are oil paintings too:
the portraits of my ancestors!
They are crying! There is porcelain and pottery. There are mahogany chests and rosewood tables. There are books by the metre: the complete chronicles (lacking but one volume) of the Orme family. There are mirrors and tapestries. There are my mother’s dolls and my father’s shotguns. The marquetry tables and the dressers, the kitchen pots and saucepans, garden furniture, the sundial. Even my clothes are here.
There are my pyjamas!

Everything here has a little tag tied on to it. They each say lot and then a number. Over there stands a man behind a desk. He has a wooden hammer. He calls out numbers. People nod at him. There are people everywhere. People and objects. The people are buying the objects.

I see my field binoculars on a table with the number 386 by it, I pick them up. When nobody is looking I slip them into my coat. Surely I cannot be arrested for stealing my own binoculars.

I sit in one of the red leather armchairs that have been pulled from the library. I rip its tag off. I cover the chair’s arms with my coat and jacket, so that no one can see it, so that no one will buy it.

It can’t all be true, I think, surely it’s not true. The man with the hammer keeps calling out, selling history. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I hum to myself so I won’t hear.

Lot 1945   An exceedingly grand pair of twenty-two-inch bronze vases.

Lot 1956   A family portrait in oils of a Cavalier, impeccably framed.

Lot 2432   A mahogany kneehole leather-top writing table with nine drawers and extra slope.

Lot 2978   A handsome set of ivory chessmen in a carved ebony box and two chessboards.

Lot 3671   A blue and white breakfast service, one hundred and four pieces.

Lot 4648   A patent steam bath with gas apparatus.

Lot 6043   Two paraffin lamps, an earthenware foot warmer, pair of lamp scissors and brushes.

Lot 6743   A very valuable astronomical clock by Pratt.

Lot 7021   A fine telescope fashioned by H. Muncie, six foot with five inch diameter.

Lot 7347   1. Lalandes’s catalogue of stars and total solar eclipses.
2. Philps’s Practical astronomy.

Lot 7986   A fine morocco-bound edition of
The World of Comets
by Guillemin.

Finally, they reach the last item:

Lot 8029 Eight cacti and one camellia.

The people begin to leave. Oh, what a long time they take about leaving, finally only hurried by the disappearing sun. I am suddenly aware of my wife leaning over me, she says: We were out of money, Francis, we have had to sell everything, the banks demanded it. We have just enough money for a few rooms somewhere. We shan’t be going so very far. I’ve sorted everything out. We will start afresh, Francis, we will begin again.

But I don’t want to begin again.

Everything is sold except for the red leather armchair I am sitting in and the field binoculars that I have hidden in my coat. Someone has bought my pyjamas.
What am I going to wear tonight?

I am left alone sitting on my armchair in what remains of the parkland. The people have left their rubbish on the grass. My son comes up to me and says: Mother is dancing naked around the house.

Observatory Mansions
.

Mother, standing outside Observatory Mansions: I am holding the hand of my husband. This is a very sacred moment. Before us, raised from the ground on two metal posts, is a large marble sign, at the moment covered by a sheet. I look at my husband. My husband does not understand. I triumphantly pull the sheet away and I see …

Tearsham Park becomes Observatory Mansions
.

Father, walking out of the entrance hall: My wife is very excited, she is dragging me outside our empty house. Before us, raised from the ground on two metal posts, is some sort
of sign that has been inexplicably planted outside the main door. My wife is looking at me. I do not understand. My wife pulls away the sheet covering it and I see …

OBSERVATORY MANSIONS
Spacious Apartments of Quality Design

My mother and father
.

Standing before the polluted exterior of Observatory Mansions my old parents stared, together for once, at the name of our home badly chiselled on fake marble, chipped and very dirty. After they had looked at the sign, they looked at each other. Finally they spoke, raising their voices above the circling traffic:

You!

You?

Francis?

Alice?

Is that really you, Francis?

Alice? Alice!

I thought you were dead.

I lost sight of you.

My wife!

My husband!

Where have you been?

Observatory Mansions, flat six. First floor.

I didn’t know where to look for you.

And you, where have you been?

Inside Tearsham Park, of course.

No, Francis, that building doesn’t exist any more.

Where’s it gone, Alice?

It’s dead, Francis.

There was a long pause.

Is it really dead?

Quite dead, Francis.

I was born there, you know.

We must move on.

Another long pause. Father was trying to understand, trying to link up facts in his head.

Someone’s taken the telescope from the observatory.

Don’t worry, no one’s touched the stars.

I am glad.

There was another long pause, though my mother’s last sentence cheered my father a little he still looked worried. He was mumbling to himself. At last he spoke again.

Alice?

Yes, Francis.

Alice? Alice!
ALICE!

Sssh, Francis, what’s the matter?

Alice. Alice, if I haven’t been in Tearsham Park where have I been?

I seem to remember now that you were in the room next door to me. You were so quiet, I thought you were dead.

Yet another pause. My father looked for a long time at the shape of the exterior of Observatory Mansions. In puzzlement he read the graffiti –
And even you can find love
and, later on,
Enjoy the taste –
but when he stared at the columns of the entrance portico his face changed, and when he next spoke he seemed to hint at some knowledge which had before evaded him:

I have been very ill, haven’t I?

You’re well now, Francis.

I feel a little cold.

Then let’s step in, Francis.

Is it cold, Alice?

No, Francis, it’s summer. It’s hot in the summer.

Oh good, it’s just I can’t feel the temperature any more.

My mother slowly, carefully, gently took my father back up the stairs of Observatory Mansions, pausing every second or third step, into flat six. She took him into the largest room and sat him down in a capacious red leather armchair.

Have a little sleep, Francis. You’ll feel better.

Just a little nap, Alice. It’s been rather a tiring journey.

Father closed his eyes.

V
SAINT LUCY’S DAY

Demolition experts
.

One autumn day the demolition experts returned to us. My mother saw them through the park fencing, they were making notes in their files. When Mother came back from her walk (after having eaten her supper, visited her friend Claire Higg, watched some television with Claire Higg, returned to her own flat, dressed in her night attire) she said, with a yawn: I saw the demolition experts back again. Anna Tap, who was in flat six with us, asked who they were. We answered that we didn’t really know, that they never really seemed to do anything except make notes in their files every half year or so. They were quite peaceful people, these demolition experts, we had decided. But Anna Tap said:

Has it never occurred to you to ask them what they are doing here?

No. It had not.

Father remembered – 1
.

We buried Father in the Orme chapel of Tearsham Church. The priest came and unlocked the chapel gate. Some days before, I had seen Mother up earlier than was usual for her and well dressed, walking out of Observatory Mansions clutching some silver: candlesticks, cutlery and a salver. These were from Tearsham Park, I remembered them from when I was a child. How was it that they hadn’t been sold in the
auction? Where had they been kept all these years? I went into Mother’s bedroom, her bed was stripped and her mattress had been ripped open – Mother had used that most well known of hiding places to keep the silver away from me: she had lain on top of it for such a long time, in a place she knew I wouldn’t consider looking. With the money from the silver, with all that was left of Tearsham Park, Mother bought a much more beautiful box for Father than the one they had put Peter Bugg in.

When we entered the Orme chapel I was frightened that the priest might have the wrong tomb lid lifted, that the tunnel passageway would suddenly be revealed, that my exhibition would be discovered. But the priest selected the right tomb for Father, which was also where his parents and grandparents were kept. There were other stone boxes of course, with all the other dead Ormes inside them, all containing quality goods.

Mother, Anna Tap and I were present. No one, save the priest, spoke. Mother was wearing black again. Claire Higg had decided to stay at home, the journey to the church was too long for her, she said, I really am too busy. She was forgiven, she had never met Father, to her he was a preposterous fiction.

As they pulled off the lid from the great, lead-lined stone bin to dispose of dead Father, I understood that God collects us all. As they lowered Father into the darkness, I realized that there is absolutely no other option, we have to die with God, we are all offered up to him in the end. Whether good or bad, whether hell or heaven bound, or just left there to rot, our heavy, lifeless bodies are pushed under the sign of the cross. It’s just another type of skip. God, refuse collector.

Father remembered – 2
.

For weeks after Father died I kept seeing him from behind, walking along the city streets. But when I approached him – shouting,
Father! Father! –
it was not Father who turned around but some unfamiliar old man.

I talked of Father. I talked of nothing else. My father and the stars. My father between blood cells. My father as tall as trees. My mother at the same time spoke nothing of Father, she talked only of the days of the week and of shifts in the weather, she watched television with Claire Higg; she busied her days with non-father-thinking devices.

I took the red leather armchair from the largest room in flat six. I heaved it down the stairs. I dragged it outside on to the concrete enclosure. I bought a can of petrol, poured it over the chair and set light to it. The chair moaned and crackled and flattened itself out until no one could sit in it ever again.

Father remembered – 3
.

For some time Father’s false teeth remained submerged in a glass of water on the kitchen table in flat six. We sometimes caught each other looking at those teeth, Anna Tap, Mother and I. When we ate we found it hard not to look at them, smiling at us in their glass of water. They robbed us of our appetites.

In the end, at night whilst everyone else slept, I took them away (lot 994).

Father remembered – 4
.

Without Father there, the world was suddenly unconfident; it could not understand what to do without Father’s inner strength to guide it. The world became brittle. After Father
died we moved with caution, we felt it inconceivable that life would be allowed to carry on as if nothing had happened, we expected phenomena of nature – eclipses, hurricanes, earthquakes. We felt cheated when they didn’t come. We wanted the world to mark Father’s death with catastrophe. We were sure that something would match the sorrow of our bleeding hearts: the sun was bound to come tumbling down today or tomorrow. But nothing happened.

Soon we realized what it was that Father’s death meant to us: it meant that death was possible. Once we had realized that we started shivering and we walked stooped over with short strides. Only
Father’s
death had taught us this, had taught us such profound sadness and anger and fear. All the deaths that had gone before, even way back to the first dead man, were only try-outs, dry runs for Father’s death. They seemed somehow effortless. Who cried for those dead people, after all?