The Bellwether Revivals (43 page)

‘Told you he wasn’t here,’ Marcus said.

With this, Iris turned on her crutches and headed for the stairs. ‘I need a cigarette.’

‘We’ll take care of things up here, don’t worry,’ Yin said. ‘Why don’t you girls go sweep up what’s left of the clavi?’

‘Okay,’ Jane said, her voice faltering, ‘okay, yeah. Let’s go, Iggy.’

Iris lingered on the top step, looking back at Oscar. She held her hand to her breastbone the way she’d done back at Madigan Hall, her eyes teary and reddening. He knew she wasn’t thinking of the blackbirds in her room any more, but of the blackbird squirming from her brother’s hands when she was eight years old. He gave a solemn nod and she carried on down the stairs with Jane’s help.

‘Alright,’ Yin said. ‘Let’s do it.’

The birds were still frantic inside the bedroom. Squawking and screeching, they flapped and scurried away, landing on top of the shelves and the wardrobe, beyond reach. ‘Calm down, little things!’ Marcus called out, stooping to open the curtains. ‘We’re here to help you!’

Oscar opened the windows as wide as he could. An urgent breeze came sweeping into the room, but the birds didn’t seem to sense the world outside. They didn’t go racing towards the windows, just cawed and jumped and side-stepped, clacking their claws on the wood, pecking everything with their bright yellow beaks.

‘What now?’ Yin said.

‘It’ll be light soon. They’ll go for the windows then.’

The three of them went out to the landing. Oscar sat down with his back against the door.

‘Shit,’ Yin said, his short laugh hollowed by the cove of the ceiling, ‘you sounded so confident about them flying right out. I thought you did this kind of thing all the time.’ He guffawed nervously. ‘We’re gonna have to call pest control.’

‘Don’t laugh,’ Marcus said. ‘Don’t either of you laugh.’ He stood clicking his knuckles. He had a stern, concentrated look about him. ‘Edie’s gone too far this time. I’m not sure he’s thinking straight.’ Marcus directed his words to the floor. ‘We all know the pranks he used to pull back at school, but this—I’ve never seen him do anything like this. I just don’t understand what’s got into him. I mean, that clavichord was one of his favourite things in the world. It cost him a fortune just to ship it over. I don’t understand why he’d trash it unless something was seriously wrong. And I don’t see why he’d speed off like he did tonight, either, just because some old man who he hardly even knew is dead. It doesn’t add up.’

‘That’s because you’ve only got half a story,’ Oscar said. ‘It makes sense when you know the rest of it.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Yin said.

‘Yeah,’ Marcus said, ‘what do you mean,
half a story
?’

Oscar looked at them, blinking. There was something about their faces—about the tightness of Yin’s eyes and the slackness of Marcus’s mouth—that made him feel the need to tell them. They needed to understand who Eden really was. They had seen the blackbirds of the present, but they didn’t know about the blackbirds of the past. And, yes, they might deny the truth once they heard it, but they were his friends—he was sure they were his friends—and they deserved to know.

He told them everything: from Iris’s childhood stories, to her broken legs, to NPD and Crest’s book, right up to Andrea’s phone call. He didn’t try to spare their feelings or dance around the issue, and he did his best to answer their questions and to calm them when they got angry. It took a long time to get through it all. And by the time he was done, it was light outside and the cawing of the blackbirds had weakened in the room behind his back.

There were small death notices for Herbert Crest in the
Guardian
, the
Independent
, and the
Daily Telegraph
. Each paper ran a tiny
paragraph about him, devoting fewer column inches to the achievements of a man’s entire life than to news of a skimpy dress some actress had worn to some London film premiere. But when Oscar went to the homepage of
The New York Times
that afternoon, he found a link to a full obituary.

When Oscar arrived at Golders Green Crematorium, pushing Dr Paulsen down the aisle in his wheelchair, the service was already underway. Turgid organ music was playing—one strained, macabre note after the other—and he couldn’t help but think of
Herbert Crest looking down and smiling at the desperate irony of it. The room was only a quarter full. Andrea was sitting on a pew in the front row, and she turned to see him wheeling the old man along the carpet. He parked Dr Paulsen at the front of the chapel, where scarlet drapes hung and a bouquet of white lilies stood in a tall black vase. Crest’s coffin was laid out on the brick altar, polished to an impossible shine, waiting to be disappeared.

Andrea gave the eulogy. She’d been crying and the chapel lights caught the tracks of her tears as she moved her lips. ‘Herbert didn’t want a religious service,’ she finished by saying, ‘so instead of a Bible passage, I thought I’d leave you with a few of his own words. In his book
Unpopular Mechanics
he wrote: “My father used to say it’s better to mean something to no one than mean nothing to someone. That’s a maxim I’ve always tried to live by.” I think that gives you a good idea of the man Herbert was.’ With that, she stepped down from the pulpit and took her seat. A Nat King Cole song began to play on the speaker system, and the coffin was lowered into a pit of hidden flames.

Outside the crematorium, Oscar introduced Dr Paulsen to Andrea. She stooped to shake the old man’s hand, though he didn’t seem to notice her or understand what he was doing outside. ‘So you’re the one, are you?’ she said, winking. ‘You’re the old fool who broke his heart. Don’t worry, he forgave you, I know he did.’ Paulsen peered blankly across the road. Andrea stood up.

‘Herbert would’ve been touched by your speech,’ Oscar told her.

She smiled wanly, and lit up a cigarette. ‘So where are your friends, hm? The kids from the big house.’

‘They didn’t think it was right to come. Most of them hardly knew him.
I
hardly knew him.’

‘Nah, you knew him alright. He liked you a lot.’

‘I wish I could’ve got to know him better.’

‘Yeah. But you saw the best of him. I think you reminded him a little of how he used to be.’

The way she said it—so breathy, so earnest—made him uncomfortable for lying to her about where the others were. ‘The kids from the big house’—that was how he used to think about them, too, but now he saw them only as his friends, people he had to cover for when called upon. They’d all had good excuses for not coming: Iris couldn’t make it all the way to London with her leg as bad as it was; Marcus and Yin both had exams on Friday and couldn’t afford to give up the study time; and Jane was so worried about Eden that she couldn’t handle the solemnity of a funeral service. But they were all just excuses, not reasons.

‘Sorry there’s no wake—he didn’t want one,’ Andrea said. She told him she was shipping Crest’s ashes to America by Fed-Ex. ‘His cousin’s going to scatter them in the family plot, next to where they buried his sister. It’s how he wanted it.’

‘That’s nice,’ Oscar said, and the words seemed stupid the moment they came out of his mouth.

They said their goodbyes and he started to wheel Dr Paulsen back towards the car park, but Andrea grabbed his arm. ‘Hey, hold on,’ she said, then gestured at the old man with her head, lowering her voice. ‘He ever talk about what happened?—between him and Herbert, I mean?’

Oscar looked down at Paulsen, at his veiny hands drooping over the armrests. ‘I heard it was something about a boat. That’s all I know.’

‘Yeah,’ Andrea said, grinning at the sky. ‘I never found out either.’

There hadn’t been so much as a whisper from Eden in twelve days—not even a simple text message to say he was okay—and on 10th May, when her parents called again from the Auvergne to check up on her, Iris finally decided to tell them he was missing.

Lying beside her on the bed in the too-big guestroom, Oscar listened as she explained to them why this wasn’t just one of her brother’s usual jaunts to Prague or Heidelberg or Florence, the
kind of impromptu trip they were all used to him taking. For a long while, she struggled to get across the gravity of the situation, arguing first with her mother, then with her father, about the importance of cutting their trip short. ‘No, no—it’s different this time,’ she kept saying. ‘I wouldn’t have bothered you with it if I thought—no, okay, but listen—’ It was only when she reminded them that Eden’s first exam was on the 26th and that she didn’t think he was likely to come back for it that the conversation took a sudden, serious turn. Her father’s voice grew thicker in the earpiece, and Oscar could hear his every sputtering word.

‘Alright, good, so you’ll come home?’ she said. ‘Okay. Monday then. Good.’ It was finally decided. She hung up, flushed and exhausted.

It was late on Tuesday evening when Oscar noticed the sound of a car engine outside his flat. He peered down from the window to see Theo Bellwether emerging from the driver’s side of his Alfa Romeo. There was something about the shape of his body in the dusk; he liked to wear a camelhair overcoat at night, even on warm summer evenings, and its padded shoulders made him look thin and tapered, just like his son. The buzzer went off, and the voice on the intercom was thin and ghostly. ‘Hello? Can you hear me? It’s Theo Bellwether. Can we talk?’

Oscar let him inside. ‘I’m sorry, it’s a bit messy in here. I’ve been at work all day and haven’t had time to—’

‘Relax, Oscar. I’m not your landlady. I couldn’t care less about a few unwashed dishes.’ Theo removed his coat. He was not an especially tall man, close up, but he held himself in an upright way: two arms held behind his back, shoulder blades pulled tightly together, as if by strings hidden underneath his clothes. ‘You mind?’ He motioned towards the couch, and sat down before Oscar could answer. With a weary twist of his fingers, he loosened his tie, crossing his legs. ‘Don’t bother putting the kettle on, I’ve had three cups of tea already—you’re my last stop of the evening.’

‘I had a feeling you’d be coming to see me.’ Oscar wasn’t sure
what to expect from Theo now that he was here. He felt under-prepared. It didn’t seem as if Theo was especially upset: he seemed neither angry nor melancholy, only composed, like a man who knew the cards he’d been dealt and exactly how he was going to play them.

‘Funny. The others told me the same thing.’ Theo recrossed his legs. ‘Suppose I’ll give the same speech I gave to them.’ Standing over him now, Oscar could see Theo’s white hair was thinning, and the skin beneath it was dry and spotted. ‘Look, sit down, would you?’ Theo said. ‘I don’t like talking at different eye-levels.’

Oscar sat on the edge of his bed, leaning forwards. ‘I suppose Iris told you everything, or you wouldn’t be here.’

Theo peered at the floor and twisted his beard. Then he gave a little dry cough. ‘She showed me the videos.’

‘You’re not as upset as I thought you’d be.’

‘Well—’ Theo looked at him blankly. ‘The way you’ve all been keeping me in the dark about this, quite frankly I’m furious about the whole bloody fiasco, but my being furious isn’t going to solve anything, is it? So that will have to wait for another time. Right now I’d appreciate it if you’d just sit still and listen to me and not interrupt me until I’m finished. I have a lot to say to you.’ He gave another cough. ‘It’s important that you know I’m not coming here as a sort of defence counsel, but as a father—that’s first and foremost. I saw the videos, and I’ll be honest, they frightened the life out of me. To see my own son behaving that way, well, you don’t need me to tell you how I feel about that. The thing is, though, I’ve
always
been frightened by Eden. Not by his behaviour—that’s only just become a cause for concern—I mean frightened by how much he knows. He’s always been such an intelligent boy, far more talented than I was at his age. I could master a lancet, but I couldn’t pluck a decent note on the violin if the fate of the nations rested on it, and I certainly didn’t have as many friends as he seems to have, not close friends, people who genuinely liked my company, you know?’ Theo blinked at last.
‘But we’re alike in so many other ways. All of his brashness and exuberance—he gets that from me. All that arrogant self-assurance and stubbornness he has, how he likes to make you think he’s so complex and interesting, like everybody’s either too stupid or too insignificant to understand him—that’s exactly what I was like at his age. I’ve made a lot of enemies that way.’ Pausing, Theo glanced towards the ceiling, at the wiry strands of cobwebs stretching from the cornices to the lampshade, as if he wanted to reach out and sweep them all away. ‘So you see, I understand Eden more than he thinks. And yes, okay, I go easy on him sometimes, I admit it; maybe I let him get away with too much, but it’s only because I understand that side of him. My father couldn’t empathise with that side of me, and I always promised myself I’d be lenient with my own kids. Once you have children of your own, your whole perspective on life changes. You try to right the wrongs your own parents made but you only end up doing new wrongs, making new problems. That’s just how life is … But the important thing I want you to grasp here—and I hope the others grasp this now too—is how long it took for me to understand myself. Do you follow? It took me a very long time to get any kind of self-awareness. Just seemed to click itself on one day like a light switch. Really, it took meeting Ruth and having children of my own for me to lose that arrogance, that sense of self-importance. I’m sure they’d diagnose me with all kinds of things these days, disorders and whatnot. Do you see what I’m getting at here? I don’t want you to think I’m being arrogant when I say this to you now, but I know my son better than anyone, Oscar. More than some two-bit psychologist who spent—what?—a few hours with him. No, please, don’t interrupt me, okay? You’ll have your turn to speak. I’m telling you something now, so, please just listen … I know exactly how my boy’s mind works because it works the same way mine used to work. Just like I told Iris yesterday, and just like I just told Marcus and Jane and Yin tonight: I’m not worried about Eden. Not in the long-term, because I know that one
day he’s going to reach that level of self-awareness I’ve been telling you about. The only thing that concerns me is the here and now, do you understand? I am his father, and it’s my responsibility to look after his best interests. Until Eden reaches that point where he truly understands himself, I have to protect him from himself. Are you listening to what I’m telling you?’