Reading by Lightning (27 page)

It was breakfast when Aunt Lucy told me about this, after George and Monty had gone off on a ramble. She'd been making scones and she'd ground to a halt once she launched into the story of George. She reached for the teapot and poured herself the half-cup stewing in the bottom.

That'll be cold, I said, getting up. I'll put the kettle on.

I was that stuck on the little flamer that your Uncle Stanley didn't have much say in the matter, she said again. Not that he doesn't care for him like a son, she added vaguely. He cares for George like his own son, does your Uncle Stanley.

Do you know why the vicar brought him to
you
? I asked.

She stood up then and turned the dough out onto the table. Oh, it's a small parish. Everyone knew I wanted a baby, I was crazy about babies. And they couldn't keep him, the vicar's wife was sick. She had a growth. Aunt Lucy touched her floury fingers to her left breast. She died before the year was out.

I let a little minute pass. Then I asked, Did George always know?

If I'd had my way, he wouldn't know to this day! Aunt Lucy said. She patted the dough into a huge disc. But Stanley was all for telling him, and one day when he was taking him back to St. Michael's he did tell him. And then he come in the door
that night and says,
Well, I've told him.
I was that vexed with your uncle, I was fit to be tied! And I couldn't see the poor lad then till he come home at half-holiday, and I thought that was hard. But by the time he come home he was just playing the fool like always. You know the way our George is.

She reached a glass down from the shelf and began to press it into the dough. Maybe it's for the better. It's a miracle he hadn't heard it before from someone in the town, there are always those who love to tattle.

In literature we read “Pied Beauty.”
Glory be to God for dappled things
—. It was a list of all patchy and freckled and variegated things: the hide of a cow, a mottled sky. I pulled a sheet out of my notebook and began to copy the poem, raising an absorbed face now and then to where Mr. Ballard Ballard paced at the side of the room with an unlit cigarette in his fingers, droning on and on about Gerard Manley Hopkins's attitude to the Catholic Church.
Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,
I wrote,
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings.
I would take it to George. It was a category for Conrad Gesner:
On Dappled Things.

Then the class was over and I slipped the page into my notebook and moved with the crowd to the refectory. I didn't wait for Madeleine, I was too hungry. I squeezed into the middle of a long table, pulled out my sandwich and began to eat, and then to gag on a piece of paper in my sandwich. I pulled it furtively out of my mouth and scraped the liver sausage off with a bread crust. The paper was transparent with grease, but I could make out two pencil images: a robed woman (a
figurehead,
it looked like, from a ship) and a clock reading four o'clock. Then I understood: it was not a figurehead at all, but the statue that stood up on the ridgepole of the Public Library on Union Street, tipping ever so slightly towards
the street.
Don't go,
something inside me said, but I knew I would go. Madeleine was not in the corridor after class, but Jenny was. Will you stop in and tell Aunt Lucy I have to work at the library? I asked. I won't be home for tea.

I set off walking. I could see him when I was still a long way down the street: he was perched on the stone balustrade of the library. His long legs dangled over the edge, as though he were sitting on a bridge looking down into water. I made as though to walk right on past, and he jumped down, staggering a bit, and caught up to me, clamping his hand on the back of my neck and turning me around, steering me back in the direction I had come. We walked half a block up Union Street like that and then he dropped his hand and we walked along quickly and in step, keeping pace for a ways with the trolley car hauling itself up the street, dodging an old woman holding an open umbrella up against the blue sky, dodging a boy on a bicycle.

I was waiting for him to slow down, to turn towards me, to say something in his reedy voice. All I could manage was, Fancy running into you like this, and he smiled one of his sardonic smiles, one that said,
Clever,
and we walked faster and faster. Then we were in the shop district on King Street and I was walking on the inside, nearest the shops. I could see myself in the windows striding along in my blue uniform, my satchel slung over one shoulder, and I was stirred by the glamour of the scene, my long hair lifted by the wind, both of us as tall and slim as we ought to be for such a picture, our figures against the moving automobiles and the ornate doorways on the other side of King Street. And still he didn't talk, and the desire to provoke him rose up in me and what I did when we were almost to the top of the street was whip around a corner into a narrow passageway and press myself against the stone wall. He turned back around to find me — he was almost off-balance — and I reached for him with my free hand. I could
feel how thin his waist was, almost nothing to hang on to (I can still picture his startled look as well), and that's when I stretched myself up to his face and kissed him.

I can't say whether he kissed me back or not. I don't know how he reacted after the kiss, because then there was no looking at each other at all. We broke apart and started walking again the way we had come, down King Street and up to the Mumps Bridge, where we stopped and watched the traffic on the motorway beneath and he reached down and picked up a handful of cinders and drizzled them over the railing. Then I pressed myself between him and the railing and turned my face up to his and we kissed again, longer this time, long enough for me to be aware of a figure brushing past us on the sidewalk and the honking of horns on the bridge. Then we turned in the direction of home, and I told myself that I would remember the Mumps Bridge all my life, and thought with excitement about the person brushing past us, imagining how it must have looked to him. We walked more slowly now, along the motorway at first and then up Manchester Street, past the Gardener's Arms, where the sign creaked in the wind as we walked under it, past the Ling Far Chinese Restaurant with its smell of frying shrimp, past the Working Men's Hall. Maybe he had in mind to take me somewhere or show me something (he must have done when he dug my lunch out of the icebox and planted a note in the liver sausage), but I'd showed him what his real plan was. If his silence on our way out was aloof, his silence now was stunned, bashful, gob-smacked.

I'll go in ahead. You wait a while, I said when we were at St. Peter's Church, which was about a five-minute walk from home. I stole a glance at him. He seemed about to say something, his expression was troubled, but before he could, I broke away from him and hurried up the street, just glancing back once to see that he had turned up Clegg Street to walk home
the long way. I ran in alone and climbed the stairs and put my book satchel and hat in my room, and then I came down to the kitchen, full of exhilaration, and started peering into crocks and cupboards to find myself some tea.

Tomatoes, I said to Madeleine, who was sitting in the kitchen. How do we get tomatoes at this time of year?

They're hothouse tomatoes, said Madeleine. She had her books spread out on the table. Mother was feeling rich. She pressed the tip of a pencil against her chin. What was Otto von Bismarck's tactic for the unification of Germany? she asked.

George would be the one to ask, I said. Where is George, anyway? I added, bold as brass. I wasn't half as clever as I thought, because if someone had seen us together all I was doing was creating suspicion. But by the time George came down to the kitchen, just as I was slicing a tomato, you would never have dreamt that we had clapped eyes on each other that day. There was no holding my eyes just a second too long, no quick sideways smiles. Lois wandered in and attacked him about the mess in his bedroom, and to provoke her he told her about a debate held at the university on whether women have souls. Then he went off to play chess with Monty. In my bag was the sheet with “Pied Beauty” on it, terribly crumpled. After I crawled into bed it took me a long time to shake the last few hours, a long time to get back to the Mumps Bridge, the traffic rushing by us, and the sensation of his thin, cold lips.

For all Madeleine's talk about Imogene, George had no experience with girls. This was my impression then and time has borne me out. His only acknowledgement of what had happened was to take me further into the labyrinthine passages of his mind, which in real terms meant allowing me to visit him in the shed. There in the bleak light of a late October
afternoon he sat on the stool, inking the lettering onto a diagram of Celtic adze heads, and I examined more of the charts and posters pinned along the wall.

I saw a chart that I took at first for a family tree, expecting to see my own name and those of my cousins on it, but the tiny figure at the top was labelled
Homo sapiens,
and interestingly, a sloth rather than an ape was man's most immediate ancestor. Beside it hung a poster of shells, of their designs and patterns.
E conchis omni,
a large legend read.

It was the motto Erasmus Darwin had painted on the door of his coach, said George.

I looked at him uncertainly. As a general rule I did not dwell on my lack of Latin.

Charles Darwin's grandfather, he said.

I've never heard of him.

I worshipped him for a while, said George. When I was in Fourth Form. I read everything about him and by him. He wrote his science in rhyming verse. In couplets.
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves, was born and nursed in ocean's pearly caves.
That sort of thing. People think evolution came from Charles Darwin, but his grandfather was there long before him. He knew that it happened, he just didn't know how.

George was my cousin, which let me into the shed where the skull grinned on the window ledge, and he was not my cousin, which let me drop my hand carelessly to his shoulder when he sat on a stool at the workbench and run the back of my fingers along his neck. I don't believe in that sort of thing, I said. In Genesis it says that God created the earth in six days.

You're a Methodist, he said, ignoring my hand.

No, I said.

Quaker, he said.

I don't even know what that is.

What then?

We're just Christians.

Well, you must be low church. Evangelical. You accept the Bible as a scientific text?

I guessed I did. I toyed with the bristly hair at the nape of his neck.

Well, the fossil record presents you with a bit of a problem. There is a theory that God planted fossils in the rocks when he created the world. In 4004 BC. October 22, was it? I've seen a Bible with the date in the margin. They figured it out from calculating the genealogies. Back in the sixteenth century.

I said I was glad they'd found a use for the genealogies.

You should read
One Hundred and One Obscenities in the Bible,
George said. It's a book a chap at school showed me. Onan spilling his seed and that sort of thing. It was Bernard Lowe's. He left it in the refectory and it was pinched, otherwise I would borrow it and send it to you.

Then his voice went up a tone. Maybe it's not the thing, in any case, he said, moving out of my reach.

Think how unhinged he was by my touch on the back of his neck, to say something like that!