Reading by Lightning (28 page)

After he had gone back to school, a letter came for me from George. No one in the family was at all curious: he was my cousin (and he was, after all, George). And they were right not to suspect, because it was not a love letter, not even really a letter but a list entitled
One Hundred and One Challenges to the Hebraic-Christian Creation Myth.
There were only nine points, but the list ended abruptly at the bottom of the page, to show that George could have kept going. The points were all about the age of the universe and its size, the vestigial vertebrae in the tails of birds, that sort of thing. This was the last one:

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics: everything is sliding towards meaninglessness, randomness, silence and stillness, and this trend is impossible to resist. (Of course, this law can be used to refute evolution as well.)

Standing in the hall with George's letter in my hand I was distracted by the sight of my face in the mirror. Leaning forward to examine a tiny swelling in the middle of my chin, I had a momentary, dizzying glimpse of dark eons of time like the pages of a big book and myself a tiny dot somewhere near the end. My mind slid towards this prospect and then slid away again, slid back to the pimple on my chin and the smell of chips frying in the kitchen, to my garter belt riding annoyingly halfway down my belly, my new hair clip gleaming in the hall mirror. This is not to say I believed the world was created in a week in October 4004 BC. Rather, I accepted without thought that it came into being on June 18, 1920, the day I pried open the door of a cave and launched myself into it.

George was a collector of facts, theories, curiosities (both natural and man-made), blueprints, artifacts, small ironies, words. No find took precedence over any other — he disdained the organizing principle. He was a joyful, generous, insane collector, endlessly curious and undiscriminating. He pored over Jenny's box of matchbook covers and David's list of steam-engine numbers with the same avid interest he showed in his own crowded shelves.

Did he
like
me, or was I just that most rare and precious of all resources, an admiring audience? I studied him for evidence of
need.
His voice was a bit shrill in a group, and he had a habit of telling people about thirty percent more on any subject than they wished to know. You could see him monitoring this, trying to find more amusing ways to talk. You could see him offering his eccentricity up to his friends as a joke, pleased with his success when they laughed at him.

But it did seem he had a special regard for me. He seemed to consider me his collaborator. It was my spectacular ignorance that qualified me — I was a savant of the ingenuous question. Everything I said seemed to advance his thinking. I called this love. I have no idea what he called it.

Not that England was the ideal romantic staging ground. England was mildew and the black smell of the Dettol you used to beat it back. It was fog and chilblains and mushy peas and a certain shade of greenish-yellow enamel paint in every room. Signs nailed over public lavatories explaining proper technique with the flushing chain. It was all about marshalling resources for the coming storm. My Aunt Lucy joined the Women's Voluntary Service and spent hours of every day sewing cotton bags with drawstrings that soldiers could use to keep their things together and tidy while they lay wounded in the hospital. Her friend Nettie Nesbitt came over one day and saw the bags. Nettie Nesbitt was a seamstress, she made her living sewing. I know you mean well, love, she said to Aunt Lucy, but with all respect, these won't do. She was inspecting the bags, tossing the ones with poorly executed corners into a pile. Aunt Lucy seemed to see the logic in this and set to work picking the seams out while Nettie Nesbitt sewed them up again, biting loose threads off with her big, crumbling teeth. Day and night they sat in the parlour, where pink roses climbed up a brown wallpaper, working on those bags,
planning
for a time when lads would need something to keep their boots in, after their legs were blown off. I found it strangely cold-blooded. And dangerous, the way everyone was intent on imagining themselves into a war.

From Durham George sent me sketches of the Norman cathedral. From Charmouth he sent me sketches of the fossils he was finding, his room at Mrs. Slater's lodging house, Cornish Ellen who served their tea. He wrote to me almost every week, and he wrote to Russell Bates. One of his letters had this PS:
Russell says hello!
He never would tell me how he got the address. Likely he just remembered it, he'd put it into one of the overstuffed drawers of that brain of his. I was responsible
for bringing them together and I could only assume I was at the heart of their correspondence. And I don't put this all down to conceit. They had a code name for me. It was
Phoebe,
a rustic maiden in Shakespeare.

The fact remains that I had the confidence to write to George but not to Russell Bates. I modelled my letters after George's. I wrote out the passage that drew me to Richard III
(Sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up).
I wrote him little vignettes and even sketches of the people at school, my literature master, who chewed on the sleeve of his robe when seized by thought, the clever Rutledge sisters. Everything I wrote alluded to a significant moment in my life: what I felt when Mr. Ballard read out of
Middlemarch: Miss Brooks had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress,
looking directly at me as he read it (although of course he had seen me only in my uniform). Or how I felt sitting alone in the study hall when the Rutledge sisters came in, how I counted three beats so that I would produce a smile at precisely the right moment, the way they walked right on past without glancing at me.

I was at Ward Street Grammar School for two years before the war started, and I arrange those years in my mind by George's visits home, by his three visits. Christmas of 1937 he didn't come home: he accepted an invitation to the Derbyshire estate of a classmate Aunt Lucy described as countrified. Either I was of no importance whatsoever to him, or I was so important that he was too shy to come home. It was spring before I saw him again.

April 1938

For three months in the spring our ages lined up: George was 19, Lois was 18, I was 17, Madeleine was 16.

Madeleine and I were still in school when George's term ended. He came home for a week before he went off to Dorset.
He was taller and thinner than I remembered and (I suppose it must be said) not quite as handsome, not really handsome at all. His hands were shockingly chapped and so were his lips. The inside of his shirt collar was a waxy yellow. We went to the pictures the first night with his old gang, and I could not connect the George in my mind to this gangly boy throwing a laugh back over his shoulder. But I knew that would not stop me. Something in me had decided on him, and I was not going to be put off by details.

The next day, Sunday, we went out walking on our own. He wore his tramping outfit, tweed knee britches and long socks. He talked the whole time about Charmouth. He'd brought me a belemnite. It was a fossil, a smooth cylinder pointed at one end, like an oversized bullet. It was a warm chestnut brown.

They used to find them all over, he said, just lying on the ground. People called them thunderbolts. They thought they marked the spot where lightning entered the earth. People kept belemnites in their houses to protect themselves from lightning.

Because lightning never strikes twice? I asked.

So they hoped, said George. I slipped the belemnite into my pocket and fingered its polished length as we walked.

By the end of that walk, George was slouching beside me talking in my ear. In spite of his height his natural posture seemed to be with his chin almost on my shoulder. After tea I went to his room and sat on his bed and we talked some more.

You two have become such pals, said Aunt Lucy when I came downstairs. She didn't look directly at me.

I had no intention of kissing George again: any overture had to come from him. But when three days of that precious week had gone by without him so much as taking my hand, I took his while we walked. Then I stopped walking and leaned
against a tree and looked up at him through my lashes, and finally he had no choice but to bend and kiss me, something we accomplished with greater skill than we had shown previously. No one had taught me this sort of behaviour, except possibly Bette Davis. And then we walked home, past the piano factory and the crockery works with broken crockery embedded in the front pavement, past dripping hedges — our conversation stopped in its tracks, awkwardness settling onto our shoulders with the evening mist.

At tea the next night Aunt Lucy said, I think we should put our two schoolgirls together. Lois is working all hours, it's hard for her to share. Let's move Lily while we have George here to help carry things.

So I became Madeleine's roommate, and so I realized that Aunt Lucy knew. I bent my guilty face over my trunk and dragged it down the hall to the girls' room, and Lois carried her clothes on hangers over her arm to the spare room. Madeleine was pleased and Lois was thrilled, but I wanted to go to Aunt Lucy and cry,
I'm sorry, I'll behave, I'll behave.

Christmas 1938

The whiff of gunpowder rising from paper crackers.

Aunt Lucy saying, I thought we might have a goose this year, but when I saw the price of them . . .

Polished green holly lying on the mantel on its thorny points.

Nettie Nesbitt sitting herself down at the table and holding the blade of a silver knife up like a mirror to check her lipstick.

Me in a new ivory blouse with my hair twisted into a French roll. Uncle Stanley bending over to wind up the gramophone and taking me by the waist as “The Blue Danube” started up, leading me deftly across the parlour towards George and then right on by, saying into my ear, You stay away from that lad.
That lad's nowt but a brain on a stick. You'll waltz like a washing-machine agitator if you let him teach you.

A long hike with George, who stopped on the edge of an open field near Rochdale to set his compass on a rock. You won't see compasses like this much longer, he said. They're busy putting compasses into cigarette lighters and tunic buttons. The thought of war makes inventors very happy.

I've never really grasped the point of a compass, I said.

Well, no, you wouldn't have, would you. It's behind the crystal.

I grabbed his hand, I tried to twist his arm behind his back. We walked along the edge of a plowed field that tipped slowly into a gully, where trees stood with their trunks in mist, as though they grew out of air.

Changeling,
I said in bed that night. I keep wanting to call George a changeling. But I guess that's the opposite of what he is. In a way a foundling is the opposite of a changeling.

Why do you keep going on about it? cried Madeleine. You talked about it last night at tea. How do you think that makes Mother feel? He's just our brother. She rolled furiously over in her bed.

I'm sorry, I said. You're right, it was really stupid. I am sorry.

I rolled over myself, pressing my hot face into the pillow. I was too tired to sleep. We'd walked so long that day that when I closed my eyes I saw stubble dusted with snow. I saw the poplar bush we went into, a bush just like home, although the slender trunks were green with the moss that covered everything like thin green paint.

When Madeleine's breath deepened I sat up in bed, propped on my pillow. At home there was real snow, and on the kitchen table the picked-over carcass of a hen from the chicken coop, killed and plucked and cleaned the day before, and instead of me at the table, my brother's new girlfriend: Betty Stalling with her white-blonde hair. I looked sleepily at the dark shapes
on my bedside table: my gifts. Books, and a hairbrush like Lois's lying loosely in gilt paper. Maybe they'd have had gifts at home as well, they got a crop off in the fall. Maybe my dad would be wearing a warm new flannel shirt. They'd have been to church. There was so much snow — maybe they took the cutter. When I was little I always longed to ride in the cutter. I could see them in it, Mother and Dad in the back, sitting with a quilt over their laps, my mother holding her hat on with a mittened hand. Betty and Phillip in front. All their faces are calm, expectant. Phillip has the reins and they dash across the field, leaving two clean lines carved behind them. It's King and Dolly pulling the cutter. The sky is filled with snow, big ornate flakes hanging motionless in the air, and on the clouds above them Jesus levitates, wearing a frock coat like Isaac Barr.

May 1939

I had been in England almost three years and I had never been to Blackpool, so in the spring of 1939 Aunt Lucy took Madeleine, Jenny and me to Blackpool for our term holiday, and George, whose term had just ended, came out to meet us, bringing his friend Monty, the one Uncle Stanley called his Bolshie mate.

The spring of 1939. Of course, now when you hear that phrase it has a particular meaning, and even at the time it did not feel like an ordinary spring. In March we heard on the wireless that Hitler had annexed Czechoslovakia, and then in April the Lords debated conscription in the house, and in the end they voted to conscript twenty-year-olds. Within a week there was a poster in the post office:
WE NEED THE 1919s.
As far as anyone knew, George was born on January 4, 1919 (that's what they'd always put down as his birthday), so it felt like hard luck. Although if George had a birth certificate, no one knew where it was. Aunt Lucy cried when she heard the news.
What chance does he have if they take him right at the beginning? she said.